Almost every boys' school story in the English language owes something to Thomas Hughes' novel "Tom Brown's Schooldays".
Tom Brown’s Schooldays was written by Thomas Hughes in the 1850s, and is one of the first British school stories for boys. It is set at Rugby, the famous public school, which Hughes attended in the previous decade, and many of the characters are allegedly based on people he knew at school. Certainly the headmaster, Dr. Arnold, was a historical figure and a well-known educational reformer.
Tom Brown’s Schooldays relates the career of its eponymous hero at Rugby, from his first arrival to the last match he played. In the intervening time, Tom and his friends East and Arthur have various adventures, many centring around their opposition to the school bully Flashman. Flashman, a coward, braggart, bully and drunkard, sums up many of the things which Hughes felt were wrong about public schools. His rise to power, and eventual expulsion, seem to carry more weight than a reader would expect from the character of an individual schoolboy.
Tom Brown had a huge influence on the school stories which were to come after it, particularly the way Rugby is presented as a coherent and complete world, with its own traditions, prejudices, unwritten rules, “public opinion” and system of government. The novel is far more explicitly Christian than most of its descendants, however, and the historical Dr. Arnold was a major figure in the development of the Victorian idea of “muscular Christianity”, with its emphasis on manliness, sporting spirit and the Christian life as a fight. Tom’s career follows a pattern of sin and redemption, and he is ashamed when the new boy kneels down to pray in the dormitory, since Tom has been afraid to do so in front of his peers.
The novel’s language is also shot through with Biblical references: Old Brooke plunges through the game of football “like Job’s war-horse”, and Tom and East are compared to “a kind of young Ishmaelites” when they are out of favour amongst the prefects. Although Biblical references were far more common in Nineteenth century English writing than today, such references show that Hughes linking the boys’ lives to a larger spiritual and historical pattern.
After the huge success of Tom Brown’s Schooldays¸ Thomas Hughes wrote a sequel, the lesser-known Tom Brown at Oxford, following the hero’s later career. This book, however, didn’t have the same influence on the Varsity novel as the original Tom Brown had on the British school story. Tom Brown also produced another kind of sequel when George MacDonald Fraser wrote a series of novels entitled The Flashman Papers, following the career of the school bully after he was expelled from Rugby. Though mostly a cheerfully amoral account of a dastardly adventurer in the Nineteenth century, the Flashman novels devote some attention to picking apart the pious and often hypocritical ways in which the ideology of “muscular Christianity” was put into practice over the British Empire.
