Another "Old School" Classic.......More Darj. Dist. Nostalgia!

St. Paul's and Kunchenjunga (1870s)!

Chapel and steps to the Quad

A conservative English boarding school is the setting for this glimpse into a boy's life during the Victorian era. Tom Brown arrives at Rugby School and encounters the tyrannical hazing of the school bullies in an institution where discipline has been nearly replaced by anarchy. While a stern new headmaster attempts to bring order, Tom and his friends stage their own revolution against the bullies, employing tricks, fisticuffs and ingenious practical jokes such as nailing the ringleader's furniture to the ceiling!

Tom Brown's Schooldays was first published in 1857. The story is set at Rugby School, a public school for boys, in the 1830s. Hughes attended Rugby from 1834 to 1842.The novel was originally published as being "by an Old Boy of Rugby", and much of it is based on the author's experiences. The fictional Tom's life also resembles the author's in that the culminating event of his school career was a cricket match.
Tom Brown was tremendously influential on the genre of British school novels, which began in the 19th century, and is one of the few still in print. A sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, was published in 1861 but is not as well known.

Tom Brown is energetic, stubborn, kind-hearted, and athletic more than intellectual. He acts according to his feelings and the unwritten rules of the boys around him more than adults' rules. The early chapters of the novel deal with his childhood at his home in the Vale of White Horse. Much of the scene setting in the first chapter is deeply revealing of Victorian England’s attitudes towards society and class, and contains an interesting comparison of so-called Saxon and Norman influences on England.

On his arrival at Rugby, the eleven-year-old Tom Brown is looked after by a more experienced classmate, Harry “Scud” East. Soon after, Tom and East become the targets of a bully named Flashman. The intensity of the bullying increases and, after refusing to hand over a sweepstakes ticket for the favourite in a horse race, Tom is deliberately burned in front of a fire. Tom and East eventually defeat Flashman with the help of a kind (though comical) older boy. In their triumph they become unruly.

In the second half of the book, Dr. Thomas Arnold, the historical Rector of the school at the time, gives Tom the care of a new boy named George Arthur, frail, pious, academically brilliant, gauche, and sensitive. A fight that Tom gets into to protect Arthur, and Arthur’s nearly dying of fever, are described in loving detail. Tom and Arthur help each other and their friends develop into young gentlemen who say their nightly prayers, do not cheat on homework, and are on the cricket team. An epilogue shows Tom’s return to Rugby and its chapel when he hears of Dr. Arnold’s death.

The novel is essentially didactic, and was not primarily written by its author as an entertainment.

As Hughes said: Several persons, for whose judgment I have the highest respect, while saying very kind things about this book, have added, that the great fault of it is ‘too much preaching’; but they hope I shall amend in this matter should I ever write again. Now this I most distinctly decline to do. Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching! When a man comes to my time of life and has his bread to make, and very little time to spare, is it likely that he will spend almost the whole of his yearly vacation in writing a story just to amuse people? I think not. At any rate, I wouldn’t do so myself.

“It was not the cold, clear voice of one giving advice and warning from serene heights to those who were struggling and sinning below, but the warm, living voice of one who was fighting for us and by our sides, and calling on us to help him and ourselves and one another. And so, wearily and little by little, but surely and steadily on the whole, was brought home to the young boy, for the first time, the meaning of his life — that it was no fool's or sluggard's paradise into which he had wandered by chance, but a battlefield ordained from of old, where there are no spectators, but the youngest must take his side, and the stakes are life and death. And he who roused this consciousness in them showed them at the same time, by every word he spoke in the pulpit, and by his whole daily life, how that battle was to be fought, and stood there before them their fellow-soldier and the captain of their band — the true sort of captain, too, for a boy's army — one who had no misgivings, and gave no uncertain word of command, and, let who would yield or make truce, would fight the fight out (so every boy felt) to the last gasp and the last drop of blood. . . . . . this thoroughness and undaunted courage which, more than anything else, won his way to the hearts of the great mass of those on whom he left his mark, and made them believe first in him and then in his Master”.