Rupert Brooke grew up in an age when, to an extent, the Victorian order held. Loosening but resolute class structures and respect if not devotion to the monarchy still influenced the lives of people living and dying in Great Britain, holding together a system that sometimes buckled but refused to fracture completely. In Europe, as in Britain, the old system was far from harmonious: localised wars in the Balkans, the pressures and exploitations of empires, and the blusterings of the Great Powers did from time to time threaten the collective peace. Closer to home, labour unrest, Irish nationalists, and suffragettes ensured that political violence remained familiar to Brooke and the polity.

This was also a period when, particularly for the secure middle classes, decorous, considered social progress and reform seemed possible – and indeed preferable – to fractured and violent alternatives. The Brookes were a solidly middle-class, conservatively progressive, educated family, having sent their sons to Cambridge for two generations. In the eighteenth century, they had risen from tenant farmers to established gentlemen: Rupert's grandfather Richard England became Rector of Bath Abbey and Chairman of the School Board, a pillar of provincial Victorian society. Brooke's father, William Parker, was the second of five children. Dependable and studious, small of stature, he excelled at Latin and Greek, winning the school prize for these subjects at Haileybury, followed by a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. He ended up moving to King's College, which had previously only accepted students from Eton, quietly and without fanfare making college history.

His ambition was to be a schoolteacher. He moved directly from Cambridge to Fettes College in Edinburgh, where he became acquainted with the sister of a colleague, Ruth Mary Cotterill, who was serving as matron at neighbouring Glencourse. She also came from a family with ties to the Anglican Church; her uncle was bishop of Grahamstown. In other ways the pair suited one another: ‘He could safely get on with his routine of Latin and Greek while she managed the business of life’.1 They were married in December 1879 at St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh, and set off in January 1880 for Rugby, where William had been offered a position as tutor with the promise of a promotion to the post of Housemaster as soon as one opened up.