In Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes established a long-lasting model for stories about the education of the young. The novel is highly autobiographical, demonstrating how much Hughes enjoyed and benefited from his years attending Rugby, made famous by the great educator and historian Thomas Arnold. Mainly due to Arnold, Rugby became the epitome of education—both of an intellectual and a spiritual and emotional type—for middle-class parents. The school promised a thorough program of training that included a religious and sports emphasis, as well as an academic one. Tom Brown’s boarding school does the same, and even features Arnold as Tom’s tutor. Hughes’s association with thesis novel writers including Charles Kingsley in their campaigns supporting education of the working-class male and Christian socialism also is reflected in the novel’s themes.

The novel introduces a character approach that would be repeated in such “hale and hearty” tales, shaping a protagonist accompanied by friends who represent foils in personality; one is shy, idealistic to a fault, and mannered, while the other is outspoken, practical, and physically adept. Tom’s friends deserving of such description are the gentle Arthur and the irreverent East. Each helps Tom in various ways. For instance, Arthur is ever ready with words of wisdom and encouragement, while East helps Tom defend weaker boys at the school against bullies, stressing the importance of equality and charging readers to protect those not as strong as they. Termed muscular Christianity, Tom’s practice of leadership, spirituality, and sportsmanship was deemed more important than mere academics. The tone is decidedly didactic and idealistic, as an intrusive narrator calls to England’s youth, “O young England! young England! . . . why don’t you know more of your own birthplace,” attaching a patriotic bent to the tale.

Burdened with stereotypes of women as weak and passive, detected in reductive phrases such as “the little governess” and in scenes where girls are commanded to kiss boys as rewards for their astounding physical performances, frequent authorial intervention, too many “plucky” feats by the title character, and the use of war terminology applied to boys’ activities, the novel may offend more sophisticated modern readers. However, those same elements offer excellent examples of what popular reading audiences craved in the mid-19th century—the promise of a bright future for boys properly trained.

Still, the book offers opportunities for universal identification when bullies with unlikely names such as Flashman and Slogger meet satisfying consequences for their actions, rugby victories are celebrated, and the boys mourn the death of one of their own. Hughes wrote a sequel titled Tom Brown at Oxford (1861) that did not prove nearly as successful as his first published work.

Bibliography
Mack, Edward Clarence. Thomas Hughes: The Life of the Author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. London: Benn, 1952.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 19th century education, british boarding school novel, character foils in fiction, christian socialism in literature, coming-of-age novel, didactic literature, educational reform in literature, flashman character origin, gender stereotypes in victorian fiction, hale and hearty stories, idealism in victorian novels, literature and patriotism, mid-19th century british fiction, moral education in literature, muscular christianity, om brown's school days, popular victorian novels, rugby and sportsmanship in fiction, rugby school fiction, school bullying in fiction, spiritual development in novels, thomas arnold rugby school, thomas hughes, Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, tom brown at oxford sequel, victorian boys fiction, Victorian Literature, victorian social values, victorian youth literature