"Tom Brown's Schooldays" by Thomas Hughes

 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

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

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.

"Behind the Scenes at the Museum" by Kate Atkinson

 

A wide-ranging family saga, alternating family history with the bildungsroman of a girl growing up above a pet shop in "one of the ancient streets that cower beneath the looming dominance of York Minster" (Ch 1).

The main thrust of the novel is narrated by Ruby in the present tense and describes her childhood (it starts at the moment of her conception in what is presumably a deliberate reference to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, an author cited two pages later) into adulthood within a dysfunctional family consisting of father George who has repeated affairs, mother Bunty who is eternally fed-up and particularly dislikes Ruby, clever but disaffected eldest sister Patricia, and permanently angry and violent elder sister Gillian. The extensions of the family - uncles and aunts and cousins and in-laws - are equally eccentric. 

And so we embark on a roller-coaster ride from tragedy to comedy and back again. Ruby, as a little girl and the youngest of the family, never quite understands what's going on, particularly about the family secret that is dripped into the narrative. She's always one step behind and wondering why (she wonders about so many things, for example: "Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears ...?  Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?"; Ch 9)

There are moments of hilarity. My favourites were the Scottish holiday from hell featuring two couples and an adultery, and a nightmarish wedding on the day that England won the FIFA Men's World Cup.

The main narrative is interleaved with what are called footnotes (although they range from a page or two to chapter length) told in the omniscient past tense. These are episodes in the family history. If you encounter Tristram Shandy at the start, I guess you must expect digression. I presume this added material is designed to show that even the behaviours of Ruby's family have genetic roots: the common themes seem to be adultery, disappearance and death and the fundamental uselessness of most of the menfolk. However, I found these excursions distracted me from the main narrative.

They weren't necessary. Ruby is a delightful character with a strong voice and an always-entertaining family. In the end I wasn't sure if I had finished a comic novel or a family saga (back to Sterne) but I was certain that I had enjoyed myself.

Selected quotes:

• "Given free choice from the catalogue offered by the empire of dreams on her first night as my mother, Bunty has chosen dustbins." (Ch 1)
• "Bunty feels there's something indulgent about parks, something wasteful - holes in existence filled with nothing but air and light and birds." (Ch 1)
• "Bunty's attitude to pain, or indeed, emotion of any kind,is to behave as if it sprang from a personality disorder." (Ch 1)
• "She likes the word 'acquaintance'. It sounds posh and doesn't have all the time-consuming consequences of friendship." (Ch 1)
• "Her eyebrows have risen so far they seem to be hovering above her head." (Ch 6)
• "Monsieur Armand mumbled something to the effect that she would only be able to sell her body if her lips were sewn together." (Fn 9)
• "Patricia ... is sitting by the bedside with a kind of stunned look on her face as if the last thing she was expecting from a death-bed was death itself." (Ch 13)
• "Sandra has put on a lot of weight in the intervening years and is throwing most of it about." (Ch 13)

The book won the 1995 Whitbread Debut Novel Award

January 2025; 382 pages

• Originally published by Doubleday in 1995
• My Black Swan paperback was issued in 1996

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Only here, only now" by Tom Newlands

A girl grows up in the squalor of an impoverished town, surrounded by drug addicts and petty criminals. Is there any hope that she can escape?

Cora Mowat is a feisty 14-year-old lassie with ADHD, growing up with her wheelchair-bound mother in 1994 Muircross, an impoverished (and fictional) town in Fife, Scotland, a place she describes in chapter one thus: “It was a manky wee hellhole set out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of the chicken nugget, surrounded by pylons and filled with moonhowlers and old folk and seagulls the size of ironing boards that shat over everything. Chaos and fighting and shite in your fringe, that was Muircross. ... The town looked like a handful of grey gravel chucked up the coast.” (Ch 1)

Right from the start you can hear Cora's distinctive voice and enjoy her unique and eloquent observations of her world. She is a damsel in distress, surrounded by peril. The dangers include getting pregnant, male violence, falling foul of alcohol abuse or drug addiction or a gangster boyfriend, being bullied for being different, getting sucked into a life of petty crime, or just giving up hope. Her only chance seems to be her mum's shoplifting boyfriend.

There's plenty of action in the plot ranging from a hilarious date with a Goth boyfriend whose car is attacked by burgers and shakes outside a fast food restaurant to the terrifying fate of the lad trapped in a phonebox with an ignited box of fireworks. Conflict abounds. There's menace and there's tragedy, there's dancing and there's death. She seems drawn to the damaged and the bullied, like the rollerblading girl at school whom nobody likes. And when she has a chance, Cora is an expert in self-sabotage. All the time I was hoping and praying she'd make it and fearing and expecting she wouldn't. This kept me turning the pages all the way to the end.

Cora is a fabulous character, a first person narrator growing up before our eyes. The peripheral characters are mostly complex and interesting. The stereotype, I suppose, is that kids from these backgrounds grow up damaged and there were certainly some who descended into personal hells. But of course poor people are normal people and despite their circumstances they could be kind and generous, and clever and thoughtful, and honest and decent. These characters are visceral and real. 

One of the characters is Cora's environment. Poverty abounds. Jacket potatoes with oven chips is a healthy meal, noodles in a chicken flavoured sauce is commoner fare. Gunner's signature dish is spaghetti with a sauce made from a can of chicken soup, milk and water with scrunched up crisps toasted under the grill for a topping. When she is given a decent pair of trainers she knows they must have been stolen. Everything in her world has a price and mostly it is too expensive for her. And the streets are litter-strewn, the community facilities are vandalised, and the seaside is a rubbish dump. 

The theme is hope despite this background of post-industrial urban decay. These characters might be weeds in a wilderness but most of them are struggling towards the light. 

This is realism in the tradition of Zola: his Germinal is set among the downtrodden and impoverished inhabitants of a coal mining village. The closest recent novel with which it bears comparison is, I think,  Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. 

Selected quotes:

• “Round here you lived in your town and then you died in your town.” (Ch 1)
• “He was a gangly-looking thing, head like a conker, hair shaved off, nose like a witch from a crap cartoon. just the one eye.” (Ch 2)
• “Round here the options for lassies like me were school or a wean, shelf-stacking or shoplifting, gin on the Shreddies or tongue in the socket.” (Ch 4)
• “Auntie Janine used to say that even wasps wouldn't land on my mam's cooking.” (Ch 4)
• “The smudgy blue evening sky made me feel so calm.” (Ch 7)
• “Most of all I hated the future - anything could happen there.” (Ch 8)
• “All adults ever did was tell you bad news or lies or make you eat things at a certain speed.” (Ch 12)
• “He laughed. ‘Been to the zoo once and think you're a tiger.’” (Ch 15)
• “Music was predictable and it gave me a wee bit control over my surroundings. You could rewind and replay.” (Ch 26)
• “It's like your bones have been crying out for light since the day you were born. Then heroin pulls you inside out.” (Ch 27)
• “Imagine you're a sexy wee delicate plant breaking through the first time. You could be growing anywhere in the world, and you twiddle your petally head round for a look and realise you're stuck for life growing in a crack in the tarmac in Whiteinch. Peeping out of the bit where the wires off a phone box go underground.” (Ch 30)
• “Kira had been right, there does come a point where you have to accept who you are and start living.” (Ch 33)
• “You feel useless through almost every second of school and now you're going out into the adult world with the tomato sauce moustache praying that people won't see the wee fraud you are. Some days you can't remember what’s in your own pockets, you can't hold a conversation without interrupting or humming Wet Wet Wet songs to yourself and you've never once been on time. Now the future you want depends on people thinking you're normal.” (Ch 33) Imposter syndrome before an interview!
• “Shame was just a cheap badly fitting neon ski jacket with a broken zip that you had to go around wearing forever, making you a flat-chested hunchback, reminding you of the past.” (Ch 36)

August 2024; 392 pages

A brilliant bildungsroman with a post-industrial decay realism setting.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God