The classic bildungsroman of the English public school, written to adulate Dr Thomas Arnold, the famous reforming headteacher of Rugby School, the personification of muscular Christianity.Tom Brown, the privileged son of landed gentry, grows up playing with the village children in the local countryside. Later, at Rugby School, he and his chums, especially Harry 'Scud' East, make a name for themselves standing up to the bully Flashman. He is regarded as the epitome of incipient manliness: “Our hero... had nothing whatever remarkable about him except excess of boyishness; by which I mean animal life in its fullest measure, good nature and honest impulses, hatred of injustice and meanness, and thoughtlessness enough to sink a three-decker.” (Ch 1.7) But he has to be rescued from himself being expelled by being given the responsibility of mentoring sickly goody-two-shoes George Arthur.
Tom reaches Rugby during the reign of William IV (1830 - 1837); In one scene, East reads an “early number of ‘Pickwick’” (Ch 1.8) He leaves school in the second year of the reign of Queen Victoria. So there is a decided whiff of regency rakes and morals during the schooling. The boys (gentlemen in training) are allowed to roam the countryside, skinny-dipping and catching fish in the river, climbing trees to steal eggs and hatchlings to be cooked by their servants. There are stage coach rides and a bare knuckle fight. It’s very reminiscent of the early works of Dickens such as the Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby.
I wasn't impressed by the characterisations. George Arthur and Tom are no more than representations of their stereotypes: goodness and manliness respectively. If Tom does change from a scapegrace to a mentor it is because of his innate sense of moral justice which insists that a strong lad like him looks after the weaker. Flashman, although writ larger than life and consequently rather more fun, is a caricature of the cowardly bully. 'Scud' East is the only character with an interesting character arc. Tom's friend and mentor from the early days, he remains a rascally scamp when Tom finds responsibility which rather ruptures their relationship but enables him to act as the voice of worldly reason when Tom himself decides to become holier than thou. Harry East says of himself that he “was like a prophet’s donkey, who was obliged to struggle on after the donkey-man who went after the prophet ... He had none of the pleasure of starting the new crotchets, and he didn't half understand them, but had to take the kicks and carry the luggage as if he had all the fun.” (Ch 2.7)
Although the pacing of the plot begins to follow the classical four-part structure with Tom arriving at the school just after the 25% mark, and standing up to Flashman at the 50% turning point, from then on the major points are Tom beginning to mentor George Arthur (60%) and GA almost dying of a fever (83%). Furthermore, the story gets off to a slow start with the first three chapters more or less irrelevant to the main story. And somehow the memorable incidents, such as the fag strike, Tom's roasting and the death of Thompson, are slipped over while much more narrative time is given to the football match, the cricket match, and the long discussions about Christianity.
An early critic suggested there was too much preaching. There is! The author rarely misses the chance to address the reader: this is not so much a novel as propaganda promoting the English gentleman whose duty it is to colonise the lands of savages and civilize them whether they need it (or want it) or not. The idea that the British Empire was built on an education that seemed to consist solely of the translation of Greek and Latin classics into English is farcical, and the spectacles through which the author views England and her colonies are tinted so heavily with rose that he is blind to the multiple abuses, both of the English working classes and the oppressed peoples abroad.
In the early parts there are one or two suggestions that Thomas Hughes recognised that there were tensions and divisions in society:
- “Class amusements [by which are meant amusements which attract only one class, as opposed to, for example, cricket, where everyone competes from gentleman to farm labourers], be they for dukes or plough-boys, always become nuisances and curses to a country.” (Ch 1.2)
- “Something to try the muscles of men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them rejoice in their strength. In all the new-fangled comprehensive plans which I see, this is all left out; and the consequence is, that your great Mechanics’ Institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your Christian Young Men's Societies in religious Pharisaism.” (Ch 1.2)
- “Lords’ hand and ears and feet are just as ugly as other folks’ when they are children ... Tight boots and gloves, and doing nothing with them, I allow make a difference by the time they are twenty.” (Ch 1.3)
But his solution is to maintain the status quo. For Tom there are two classes: “lout or gentleman”. (Ch 2.6). And when a farmer catches Tom and his friends poaching the matter is arbitrated by sixth-formers who high-handedly dismiss the evidence of the farmer and arrange monetary compensation. Nothing must be allowed to upset the social order, even though the sixth-former recognises the unfairness inherent in it: “There's nothing so mischievous as these school distinctions, which jumble up right and wrong and justify things in us for which poor boys would be sent to prison.” (Ch 2.4) This is a time when a peasant caught poaching on a gentleman’s estate might be transported.
Hughes also recognises that in a poorly-run boys' school, as his own novel shows that Rugby was even for a time under the rule of Dr Arnold, there is the potential for wickedness to flourish.
- “It is the leading boys for the time being who give the tone to all the rest, and make the School either a noble institution for the training of Christian Englishmen, or a place where a young boy will get more evil than he would if he were turned out to make his way in London streets.” (Ch 1.8)
- “The youth ... was one of the miserable little pretty white-handed curly-headed boys, pitted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who wrote their verses for them, taught them to drink and use bad language, and did all they could do to spoil the everything in this world and the next.” (Ch 2.2) This passage attracts a footnote suggesting that although the author has attracted criticism because "there were many noble friendships between big and little boys” he won’t strike the passage and “many boys will know why it is left in”. One presumes he’s hinting at homosexuality.
Save for its very domestic setting, this reads like many other uplifting boys' adventure stories of the empire, tales of manly derring-do such as King Solomon's Mines by Rider Haggard, Beau Geste by P C Wren and The Coral Island by R M Ballantyne. They're entertaining reads with clearly established goodies and baddies but they are rarely complex or challenging. It would be nice to think that Lord of the Flies (deliberately written by William Golding as an antidote to The Coral Island) would have finally ended the genre; certainly its exploration of what would happen if a bunch of boys were left to their own devices has a very different ending to that experienced by Tom Brown. But there are still innumerable best-selling novels whose goodies are too good to be true and whose villains are too bad to be believable. There were a number of references which I didn’t know and had to look up:
- In chapter 1.1, the author refers to the present generation having a lack of “sacer vates”, Latin for ‘sacred poets’ who would sing paeans of praise.
- In chapter 1.8, a boy is mocked for translating “triste lupus” as “the sorrowful wolf”. Embarrassingly, Google Translate offers ‘sad wolf’. In fact the line comes from one of the Eclogues of Vergil; the full line is “Triste lupus stabulis, maturis frugibus imbres, arboribus venti, nobis Amaryllidos irae”. The word ‘triste’ is used as a noun rather than an adjective, to mean ‘a grief’ rather than ‘sorrowful’. So the translation should be something more like: "Grief {is caused by} the wolf to the {sheep}fold, the rain to the ripe crop, the gales to the trees, and the anger of Amaryllis to us.”
- A “cornopean” (Ch 2.8) is a now obsolete lage valved trumpet.
- In chapter 1.1, the author describes the White Horse carved on Uffington Hill as having been made under King Alfred’s orders, following his victory at the Battle of Ashdown. But he then says the white horse has been overlooking its Vale for “these thousand years”. But the book was written in 1857 and the Battle of Ashdown was in 871 so the thousand years lacks fourteen. The fault, given that Hughes suffered the same education as Tom Brown, seemingly without mathematics, is excusable.
- In his fever, George ‘Geordy’ Arthur has a vision which he later compares to “the living creatures and the wheels in Ezekiel” (Ch 2.6), a strange passage in the Old Testament which some Ufologists believe is an early report of an encounter with a flying saucer.
Selected quotes:
- “The last ghost, who had frightened the old women, male and female, of the parish out of their senses ... turned out to be the blacksmith's apprentice, disguised in drink and a white sheet.” (Ch 1.2)
- “Though there was a good deal of drinking and low vice in the booths of an evening, it was pretty well confined to those who would have been doing the like, ‘veast or no veast’.” (Ch 1.2)
- “Life ... was no fool’s or sluggard’s paradise into which he had wandered by chance, but a battle-field ordained from of old, where there are no spectators, but the youngest must take his side, and the stakes are life and death.” (Ch 1.7)
- “What would life be without fighting? ... From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honest business of every son of.” (Ch 2.5)
- “On the Saturday Thompson died, in the bright afternoon, while the cricket-match was going on as usual on the big-side ground.” (Ch 2.6)
October 2025; 307 pages
First published in 1857
My Penguin Popular Classics paperback edition was issued in 1994
On a personal note
Some of the practices in this public school of the 1830s were still extant during my public school education of the 1970s. In my first two years, I was a fag (which meant I acted as servant for the senior boys, making their bed in the morning and lighting their fire, perhaps making them tea or toast or tidying their room) and the practice of shouting ‘fag’ (although the cry in my school was ‘boy-up’) in a corridor and giving the task for the last one only started to be phased out in my last year, after the boarding houses were connected by telephone. Sport was also prominent: I was required to take some form of physical exercise such as playing in a football or cricket match, or doing a cross-country run, or playing fives (but the rather more sophisticated Eton version of the game) six days out of seven. Chapel was compulsory, at first every day and later on Sundays. We too did ‘construe’. Fortunately, we did learn rather more than just Latin and manliness.
The photo at the top shows me at one of the notable buildings at my alma mater.
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