The small market town of Uppingham is situated about 100 miles north of London, in the East Midlands of England. In 1875 it was unusual – although not unique – in having right at its geographical heart one of the new private, residential boarding boys’ schools which were springing up all over England in the wake of new-found Victorian economic prosperity.

Uppingham School consisted of just over 300 boarding pupils, aged about 13 to 18, together with a wider community of teaching and other staff and their families, who lived in a dozen or so boarding (residential) houses spread around its streets. It had an increasingly strong national reputation, and drew its pupils from newly-affluent middle-class families all over the country.

The rise of these fee-paying schools created a complex set of relationships between the schools themselves and their local communities, as the schools tended to become increasingly separated from their historical origins – as Chapter 1 will show. Uppingham's town's traders had seen what had once been their local free school become less accessible – and ultimately unaffordable – to most of them as their children reached school age. This had caused underlying tensions between the leaders of school and town which would explode when their community was struck by epidemic disease.

The typhoid outbreak of 1875–7 which ravaged Uppingham School has long been recognized as a signficant event by historians of education. Although it aroused widespread interest at the time, it has attracted little detailed historical attention since the death of its central character, headmaster Edward Thring, a decade later.

After three outbreaks of typhoid within nine months in 1875–6, and despite the school having carried out expensive improvements, Thring became convinced that the town authorities would never start a programme of major sanitary upgrading or install a mains water supply unless he forced their hand.