Tom Brown’s School Days

Tom Brown’s School Days
Thomas Smart Hughes

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.Thomas Hughes’ novel about the mischievous but kind-hearted schoolboy Tom Brown inspired other school novels, including Frank Richards’ Billy Bunter stories and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The novel begins at Tom’s childhood home in the Vale of the White Horse, where he spends his days out in the fields with his pony. This early idyllic setting it set up as a contrast to the stresses that Tom undergoes later at Rugby boarding school when he encounters the bully Flashman. Tom is helped through his struggles by his friends Harry ‘Scud’ East and the frail but brilliant George Arthur, whom Tom protects, and who ultimately helps Tom develop into a young gentleman ready for Oxford university.

TOM BROWN’S SCHOOL DAYS

Thomas Hughes

CONTENTS

Title Page (#u6d8b1e05-d617-51ad-adf3-fee43b78453f)

History of Collins (#u0bc840c2-99f0-53c5-ba60-7b958790db43)

Life & Times (#uaa7baaf9-63ad-52de-93a8-76978fb45aaa)

Part 1 (#u4b32701b-923e-523e-987e-d9f626922e43)

Chapter 1: The Brown Family (#u3f84c4bf-3667-59f7-ba35-144278511079)

Chapter 2: The “Veast.” (#u842128a3-bf06-5dda-9fd0-3589b6cfde09)

Chapter 3: Sundry Wars and Alliances (#ud67c1e5b-6162-5b2b-8b4b-9ec7ae9fbf44)

Chapter 4: The Stage Coach (#ud55bf175-1783-5b9c-ab7b-d9017b83e7f6)

Chapter 5: Rugby and Football (#u6332f42e-896c-5cff-878b-c14689be73a8)

Chapter 6: After the Match (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7: Settling to the Collar (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8: The War of Independence (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9: A Chapter of Accidents (#litres_trial_promo)

Part 2 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 1: How the Tide Turned (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 2: The New Boy (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 3: Arthur Makes a Friend (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 4: The Bird-Fanciers (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 5: The Fight: (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 6: Fever in the School (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7: Harry East’s Dilemmas and Deliverances (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8: Tom Brown’s Last Match (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9: Finis (#litres_trial_promo)

Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

History of Collins (#ulink_26d85344-8215-56b8-8dbe-25f4a48afde8)

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times (#ulink_f83d9fd9-a006-5c28-a7fe-3d7a0d49d948)

In essence, Tom Brown’s School Days is a classic tale of good triumphing over evil. This may explain its enduring appeal, as the same theme has been played out in a great many stories since its publication in 1857. That isn’t to say that the author, Thomas Hughes, was the first to employ this allegory – writers have long been fascinated by the contrast between what makes people kind and unkind. Despite our efforts to attain high ethical and moral standards, we are still animals underneath, with the ability to be selfish and cruel. This realization leads us to question the extent to which nature and nurture play their respective parts in shaping our personality. On the face of it, it would seem that people are what they are, but psychology tells us there are many factors involved in determining the outcome. We are all, therefore, capable of a range of behaviours. The lynchpin is our relative ability to empathize and sympathize with others, as this is what determines our treatment of them.

Take away the allegory and Tom Brown’s School Days is a semi-autobiographical novel about life at Rugby school in the early Victorian period. Hughes was a Rugby ‘old boy’ and penned a lesser-known sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), which seems to imply that he was aiming for a certain readership. In fact, Hughes was not particularly elitist in his views and was an active social reformer and Christian socialist. These days he is labelled among the do-gooders of Victorian society, who saw it as their moral duty to right the wrongs that typified the hierarchical culture of Britain at that time. As well as standing for the rights of the common man, Hughes also felt very passionate about outlawing opium, which had become the drug of choice. Opium addiction was becoming a widespread problem in urban areas and was strongly associated with a general slide in moral virtues. Opium dens, public houses, and brothels went hand in hand with inner-city life and formed the complete antithesis of the values the Victorians championed.

We now expect cities to have their seedier sides, because we understand that areas with high population densities tend to generate moral decay, but in those days, due to the advent of the Industrial Revolution, it was new and shocking. The engines that powered the British Empire had dark and dirty interiors that most tried to ignore, but a few, like Hughes, tried to spring clean.

Tom Brown’s School Days was a way of connecting with the layperson. It’s as if Hughes is saying, ‘I know I had a privileged upbringing, but I too have suffered along the way.’ The book made Hughes more human, enabling ordinary people to relate to him. This was important because Hughes was also a politician, for the Liberal Party. His first seat was Lambeth, a suburb of London, and his second was the Somerset town of Frome.

The suffering alluded to was school bullying. It was an accepted part of private schooling, because it was seen as a way of toughening children up – a rite of passage towards adulthood. In Tom Brown’s School Days the villain of the piece is an older pupil named Flashman. He terrorizes Tom purely for amusement, though the tables are eventually turned. The book goes on to document Tom’s development from boy to man, with Hughes clearly using Tom as a conduit to express his opinions about the qualities that one should aspire to. When accused of using the novel as a virtual pulpit, Hughes readily admitted that he intended the book to be a vehicle for preaching to Victorian society. As it also happened to be a well-written yarn, he accomplished his mission. The book was successful and has remained in print ever since.

One of the reasons for its continued readability is that the story is fundamentally timeless. Although it has a period setting, the themes continue to appeal because we all share similar experiences as we develop from child to adult. We are all randomly thrown together with other children at school and have to learn to make our way through it by suffering the slings and arrows of misfortune and the bandages and sticking plasters of good fortune.

Tom Brown’s School Days has also had a strong influence over other writers over the years. Other stories that use the boarding school formula include Stalky & Co, Goodbye, Mr Chips, Billy Bunter, St Trinian’s and Harry Potter. It’s a convenient formula for the author as boarding schools provide a microcosm environment – a closed community where the boundaries are easily defined and the cast can be populated with stereotypical characters. For similar reasons, the formula is also appealing to the reader. The boarding school world is self-contained and easy to apprehend.

Of course, this brings into question whether life in real boarding schools is anything like that in fictitious ones. It seems fair to say that Tom Brown’s School Days is likely to be among the more realistic. The author is, after all, writing from first-hand experience.

Another significant element of the novel is its androcentrism. Rugby is a school for boys, its staff members are male, and the author is male: it is reasonable to say that the book is somewhat masculine in outlook. Hughes likely had a Victorian take on the female sex and tended to think of them as a collective consciousness. From a purely practical point of view, he had comparatively less contact with women, which no doubt made it easier to write male characters, knowing they were based on real people. He may have been chauvinistic, but he certainly was not misogynistic.

Hughes was happily married to Frances in 1848 and they produced nine children – four daughters and five sons. Hughes himself was the second of eight children and had strong family values. His father was a storyteller and writer of essays, which undoubtedly influenced his own desire to write.

In addition to his Tom Brown books, Hughes wrote on a variety of other subjects. Most of his writing is non-fiction, but he did write a third novel, The Scouring of the White Horse (1859), which has a Hardy-esque feel to it, although it is set in Oxfordshire rather than Wessex. It is about old England and traditions that go back to time immemorial. As the Industrial Revolution transformed Britain, it prompted some writers to hark back to an earlier epoch – partly imagined, partly true – when moral and ethical decay was seemingly less evident, because people were too busy subsisting in the countryside to allow themselves to live in the urban gutter.