Tom Brown’s School Days

CONTENTS

Title Page

History of Collins

Life & Times

Part 1

Chapter 1: The Brown Family

Chapter 2: The “Veast.”

Chapter 3: Sundry Wars and Alliances

Chapter 4: The Stage Coach

Chapter 5: Rugby and Football

Chapter 6: After the Match

Chapter 7: Settling to the Collar

Chapter 8: The War of Independence

Chapter 9: A Chapter of Accidents

Part 2

Chapter 1: How the Tide Turned

Chapter 2: The New Boy

Chapter 3: Arthur Makes a Friend

Chapter 4: The Bird-Fanciers

Chapter 5: The Fight:

Chapter 6: Fever in the School

Chapter 7: Harry East’s Dilemmas and Deliverances

Chapter 8: Tom Brown’s Last Match

Chapter 9: Finis

Footnotes

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

Copyright

About the Publisher

History of Collins

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

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.

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.

CHAPTER 1

The Brown Family

“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 small their work for England has been by the side of that of the Browns.

These latter, indeed, have, until the present generation, rarely been sung by poet, or chronicled by sage. They have wanted their sacer vates, having been too solid to rise to the top by themselves, and not having been largely gifted with the talent of catching hold of, and holding on tight to, whatever good things happened to be going—the foundation of the fortunes of so many noble families. But the world goes on its way, and the wheel turns, and the wrongs of the Browns, like other wrongs, seem in a fair way to get righted. And this present writer, having for many years of his life been a devout Brown-worshipper, and, moreover, having the honour of being nearly connected with an eminently respectable branch of the great Brown family, is anxious, so far as in him lies, to help the wheel over, and throw his stone on to the pile.

However, gentle reader, or simple reader, whichever you may be, lest you should be led to waste your precious time upon these pages, I make so bold as at once to tell you the sort of folk you’ll have to meet and put up with, if you and I are to jog on comfortably together. You shall hear at once what sort of folk the Browns are—at least my branch of them; and then, if you don’t like the sort, why, cut the concern at once, and let you and I cry quits before either of us can grumble at the other.

In the first place, the Browns are a fighting family. One may question their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight there can be no question. Wherever hard knocks of any kind, visible or invisible, are going; there the Brown who is nearest must shove in his carcass. And these carcasses, for the most part, answer very well to the characteristic propensity: they are a squareheaded and snake-necked generation, broad in the shoulder, deep in the chest, and thin in the flank, carrying no lumber. Then for clanship, they are as bad as Highlanders; it is amazing the belief they have in one another. With them there is nothing like the Browns, to the third and fourth generation. “Blood is thicker than water,” is one of their pet sayings. They can’t be happy unless they are always meeting one another. Never were such people for family gatherings; which, were you a stranger, or sensitive, you might think had better not have been gathered together. For during the whole time of their being together they luxuriate in telling one another their minds on whatever subject turns up; and their minds are wonderfully antagonistic, and all their opinions are downright beliefs. Till you’ve been among them some time and understand them, you can’t think but that they are quarrelling. Not a bit of it. They love and respect one another ten times the more after a good set family arguing bout, and go back, one to his curacy, another to his chambers, and another to his regiment, freshened for work, and more than ever convinced that the Browns are the height of company.

This family training, too, combined with their turn for combativeness, makes them eminently quixotic. They can’t let anything alone which they think going wrong. They must speak their mind about it, annoying all easy-going folk, and spend their time and money in having a tinker at it, however hopeless the job. It is an impossibility to a Brown to leave the most disreputable lame dog on the other side of a stile. Most other folk get tired of such work. The old Browns, with red faces, white whiskers, and bald heads, go on believing and fighting to a green old age. They have always a crotchet going, till the old man with the scythe reaps and garners them away for troublesome old boys as they are.

And the most provoking thing is, that no failures knock them up, or make them hold their hands, or think you, or me, or other sane people in the right. Failures slide off them like July rain off a duck’s back feathers. Jem and his whole family turn out bad, and cheat them one week, and the next they are doing the same thing for Jack; and when he goes to the treadmill, and his wife and children to the workhouse, they will be on the lookout for Bill to take his place.

However, it is time for us to get from the general to the particular; so, leaving the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take to be the chief cause of that empire’s stability; let us at once fix our attention upon the small nest of Browns in which our hero was hatched, and which dwelt in that portion of the royal county of Berks which is called the Vale of White Horse.

Most of you have probably travelled down the Great Western Railway as far as Swindon. Those of you who did so with their eyes open have been aware, soon after leaving the Didcot station, of a fine range of chalk hills running parallel with the railway on the left-hand side as you go down, and distant some two or three miles, more or less, from the line. The highest point in the range is the White Horse Hill, which you come in front of just before you stop at the Shrivenham station. If you love English scenery, and have a few hours to spare, you can’t do better, the next time you pass, than stop at the Farringdon Road or Shrivenham station, and make your way to that highest point. And those who care for the vague old stories that haunt country-sides all about England, will not, if they are wise, be content with only a few hours’ stay; for, glorious as the view is, the neighbourhood is yet more interesting for its relics of bygone times. I only know two English neighbourhoods thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is enough of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life. I believe this to be the case almost throughout the country, but each has a special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of and going to introduce you to very particularly, for on this subject I must be prosy; so those that don’t care for England in detail may skip the chapter.

O young England! young England! you who are born into these racing railroad times, when there’s a Great Exhibition, or some monster sight, every year, and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground for three pound ten in a five-weeks’ holiday, why don’t you know more of your own birthplaces? You’re all in the ends of the earth, it seems to me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar, for midsummer holidays, long vacations, or what not—going round Ireland, with a return ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copies of Tennyson on the tops of Swiss mountains; or pulling down the Danube in Oxford racing boats. And when you get home for a quiet fortnight, you turn the steam off, and lie on your backs in the paternal garden, surrounded by the last batch of books from Mudie’s library, and half bored to death. Well, well! I know it has its good side. You all patter French more or less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and cities, no doubt, and have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high art, and all that; have seen the pictures of Dresden and the Louvre, and know the taste of sour krout. All I say is, you don’t know your own lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be choke-full of science, not one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis, which grow in the next wood, or on the down three miles off, or what the bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends, the stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood, where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid by the parson, they’re gone out of date altogether.

Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach, which put us down at the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had been driven off by the family coachman, singing “Dulce Domum” at the top of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round. We had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home. And so we got to know all the country folk and their ways and songs and stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills, again and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys; and you’re young cosmopolites, belonging to all countries and no countries. No doubt it’s all right; I dare say it is. This is the day of large views, and glorious humanity, and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn’t gone out in the Vale of White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn’t carried away Alfred’s Hill to make an embankment.

But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said, the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large, rich pastures bounded by ox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow timber, with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where abideth poor Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself for miles and miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the old Berkshire. Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know how he and the stanch little pack who dash after him—heads high and sterns low, with a breast-high scent—can consume the ground at such times. There being little ploughland, and few woods, the Vale is only an average sporting country, except for hunting. The villages are straggling, queer, old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down without the least regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners, by the sides of shadowy lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden. They are built chiefly of good gray stone, and thatched; though I see that within the last year or two the red-brick cottages are multiplying, for the Vale is beginning to manufacture largely both bricks and tiles. There are lots of waste ground by the side of the roads in every village, amounting often to village greens, where feed the pigs and ganders of the people; and these roads are old-fashioned, homely roads, very dirty and badly made, and hardly endurable in winter, but still pleasant jog-trot roads running through the great pasture-lands, dotted here and there with little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kine are feeding, with no fence on either side of them, and a gate at the end of each field, which makes you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and gives you a chance of looking about you every quarter of a mile.

One of the moralists whom we sat under in our youth—was it the great Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins—says, “We are born in a vale, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation.” These consequences I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who weren’t born in a vale. I don’t mean a flat country; but a vale—that is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view if you choose to turn towards him—that’s the essence of a vale. There he is for ever in the distance, your friend and companion. You never lose him as you do in hilly districts.