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.
This sense of the world gone wrong is largely why Hughes was driven to philanthropic work in his later life. Upon his death, his daughter Mary continued his good work. She took over an old public house in the East End of London and established a refuge for the destitute on the city streets. Its name was a delightful pun: ‘Dew Drop Inn: For Education a Joy’. The Victorians tended to believe that people made their own luck in life and therefore had little patience or compassion for anyone who found themselves on the bottom rung of the ladder. Reformists could see that the problem was more systemic than that. In the countryside people might find itinerant work and get by; in the city they were superfluous to requirements and left on the street along with the horse dung and refuse. It is certainly tempting to wonder what Hughes might have made of our modern-day inner cities.
“I’m the Poet of White Horse Vale, sir,
With liberal notions under my cap.”
—Ballad
The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle, within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now matriculating at the universities. Notwithstanding the well-merited but late fame which has now fallen upon them, any one at all acquainted with the family must feel that much has yet to be written and said before the British nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness it owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever the fleets and armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of the Browns have done yeomen’s work. With the yew bow and cloth-yard shaft at Cressy and Agincourt—with the brown bill and pike under the brave Lord Willoughby—with culverin and demi-culverin against Spaniards and Dutchmen—with hand-grenade and sabre, and musket and bayonet, under Rodney and St. Vincent, Wolfe and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they have carried their lives in their hands, getting hard knocks and hard work in plenty—which was on the whole what they looked for, and the best thing for them—and little praise or pudding, which indeed they, and most of us, are better without. Talbots and Stanleys, St. Maurs, and such-like folk, have led armies and made laws time out of mind; but those noble families would be somewhat astounded—if the accounts ever came to be fairly taken—to find how
