An 1840s lithograph, Burne-Jones attended Birmingham's King Edward VI grammar school from 1844

Here were the beginnings of the intensely literary turn of
mind that was to prove such a stumbling block for twentieth-
century critics; and it was developed dramatically when he
entered the local grammar school, King Edward's (fig. 42), in
1844. Like the Society of Arts, the school was situated in New
Street. It was also another symbol of Birmingham's aggran-
dizement, having recently been rebuilt in the Gothic Revival
style to designs by Charles Barry and A. W. N. Pugin which
anticipate their new Houses of Parliament by several years.
Destined at this stage for business or engineering, Burne-
Jones was placed on the "commercial" side, which trained boys
for such careers; but by 1849 he had risen to be head of this
department, and his father, persuaded by his schoolmaster,
allowed him to transfer to the "classical" side with a view to
going to university. By nature precocious, he had encountered
the school at a particularly exciting time, when the headmaster,
James Prince Lee, a brilliant classical scholar who had
taught under Thomas Arnold at Rugby, was setting the
highest academic standards. In fact, Burne-Jones had little
personal contact with Lee, who left Birmingham in 1847 to
become Bishop of Manchester, but he was undoubtedly stim-
ulated by the feats of scholarship performed by Lee's closest
pupils, among whom were E. W. Benson, a future Archbishop
of Canterbury, and other luminaries of the Victorian Church.