Britten composed this quartet when he was 17 and a student at the Royal College of Music. Interestingly, his official teacher at the college, John Ireland (whom Britten disliked) gave the quartet high praise, while Britten's long-time private teacher and mentor, Frank Bridge, criticized the quartet on the grounds that the part writing was too much like vocal counterpoint. Britten's response was that if this were so, it was a result of his having become a member of the college's madrigal choir.

It was a notable tendency of Britten's to be extra-sensitive to criticism and turn his back on compositions which had either received harsh criticism or had painful "birth pains" in bringing to first performance. Whether Bridge's criticism was painful or not, Britten list this fine work out of his official canon, shelving it for some forty years during which it received no official performances (although he had heard it read through by a professional quartet). Thus, a rather later quartet in the same key received the official designation String Quartet no 1.

Even so, this composition is entirely worthy of being included in Britten's "adult" catalogue. If the melodies are somewhat less clear and simple in outline, and the counterpoint somewhat more involved and "learned" than we are used to in Britten, these are, after all, traits which also appear in the first ten or a dozen official opus numbers of works Britten accepted. The quartet is quite a good one, and should be included in any cycle of the composer's chamber music.

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