Back to School 1: Tom Brown's School Days

Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) wasn’t the first school fiction novel – that honour goes to a Sarah Fielding, sister of Henry Fielding, who published The Governess, or The Little Female Academy over a hundred years earlier. But, as is so often the case, it’s the man who takes the credit.

In this episode, Sophie and Jonty look at how Thomas Hughes’ nostalgic celebration of Rugby School in the 1830s super-charged school fiction as a genre for a century to come. Billy Bunter, Molesworth, St Trinian’s and even Hogwarts owe a large debt to Hughes’ novel.

The book tells the story of the eponymous Tom Brown, who goes to Rugby where he excels at rugger and cricket, is bullied by the dastardly Flashman, suffers various torments such as being ‘tossed in a blanket’ and ‘roasted over a fire’, gets the hot for his best friend’s mother and finally discovers evangelical Christianity through the inspiration of his headmaster, Thomas Arnold.

Perhaps what is most striking about Tom Brown’s School Days is that it is both familiar - because of the way it continues to influence school fiction today - but deeply, deeply alien. As Thomas Hughes makes clear, the point of England’s so-called public schools in the 19th Century wasn’t to give boys a rounded education but to prepare them for administration of the British Empire. Tom Brown learns a bit of Greek and Latin, but most of all to fight, boss people about, and quote without questioning propaganda about the benefits of colonialism to a subjugated people.

Thomas Hughes never quite got over the high-point of his Rugby years, but his enthusiasm makes even the most devout alumnus look half-hearted. In 1880, he founded a Utopian community in Tennessee called… you guessed it… Rugby, complete with croquet court and a ‘university’ named after Rugby’s legendary headmaster Thomas Arnold. Needless to say, the community failed in its intentions, although Rugby, Tennessee still exists.

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