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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Week Five: Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857)

1. The School Story
1.1 Girls' schools: The Governess (1749); Charles and Mary Lamb, Mrs Leicester's School (1809).
1.2 Elementary schools: Goody Two Shoes (1765); Dorothy Kilner, The Village School (1795).
1.3 'Boys' school tales in Britain began with Maria Edgeworth's The Barring Out (1796) and Harriet Martineau's The Crofton Boys (1841), the first really important boarding-school story, heralding the genre's potential, and its later familiar ingredients: cricket, prefects, fagging, beatings, and a strict code of honour. ... the vitalising key texts were Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) and Frederick Farrar's Eric or, Little by Little (1857)' (Watson, ed, Children's Books in English, p.630).

Drawing on their own experience [Hughes and Farrar] developed the idea of the public school ethos, spiritual values and principled behaviour in a self-contained world, separated from the female domain of home and fostering instead muscular Christianity and the values of loyalty and self-sacrifice. (p.630)

1.4 Hughes was imitated, but most boys' school stories tend to attack ethos of Tom Brown's Schooldays: Talbot Baines Reed, Fifth Form at St. Dominic's (serialised in Boy's Own Paper,1882); F. Anstey, Vice Versa (1882); Kipling, Stalky and Co (1899); P.G. Woodhouse, Mike: a Public School Story (1909); Charles Hamilton's Greyfriars stories (Billy Bunter) (in Magnet,1908).
1.5 Girls' boarding school stories: Sarah Doudney, Monkesbury College (1876); L.T. Meade, A World of Girls (1886) and The Beresford Prize (1890); Angela Brazil, The Fortunes of Philippa (1906) 'established the definable, infectious jolly tone of the genre in Britain' (Children's Books in English); Elinor Brent-Dyer, The Chalet School series in 58 vols (1925-1970); Enid Blyton, Malory Towers (1946-51).
1.6 Boarding school stories in decline since WW2, replaced by novels reflecting modern school life: Geoffrey Trease, No Boats on Bannermere (1949) (grammar school); C. Day Lewis, The Otterbury Incident (1948); Judy Blume, Blubber (1974); Mildred Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry (1976) (black adolescents in US inner city school); K.M. Peyton, Seventeenth Summer (1970) and A Midsummer Night's Death (1978); Gillian Cross, Save our School (1981); Grange Hill (1978-, various authors; TV series and novels), etc.
1.7 N.B. George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman (1969): 'It is perhaps significant that [Tom's] story should have stimulated such antipathy in the twentieth century and that the one participant in his destiny who has been vigorously resurrected should be Harry Flashman' (Andrew Sanders, ed, Tom Brown's Schooldays (Oxford World's Classics, 1989), pp.xxiv-xxv).
1.8 Harry Potter series (1997-).

2. For children's reviews of huge number of school stories on cool-reads website, click here (no reviews of Tom Brown's Schooldays).

3. Generic conventions: (i) removal of child hero/heroine from parents into social environment largely run by children; (ii) hero not a scholar, but redeeming qualities/gifts; (iii) hero good at sports; (iv) hero gets into scrapes – potential to be expelled; (v) hero has best friends who are different from him/her - eg, successful scholars; (vi) hero has enemies in school who he/she struggles against; (vii) hero struggles for ethical values; (viii) headmaster/mistress is benign at a distance; (ix) hero develops special relationship with headmaster/mistress, but not specially favoured; (x) hero undergoes rites of passage – experiences/struggles allow maturation from rowdy boy/girl towards mature adulthood (often attains responsible position in school).

4. Thomas Hughes (1822-1896): 1834, enters Rugby School; 1841, captain of school cricket XI; 1842, enters Oxford; 1848, called to the Bar and becomes associated with Christian Socialist Movement; 1850, instrumental in establishing Society for Promoting Working Men's Associations; 1851, 'Encourages the growth of the co-operative movement in northern England'; 1854, proposes establishment of the Working Men's College; 1856, begins Tom Brown's Schooldays; 1872-83, Principal of the Working Men's College; 1879, publishes The Manliness of Christ (Sanders, p.xxviii).

5. Sanders, Introduction to Tom Brown's Schooldays (Oxford): 'Tom is a moral norm, "the commonest type of English boy" with an explicitly common name' (p.ix).

5.1 'The story shows us both the semi-formal beginnings of the kind of organized sports that nineteenth-century England was eventually to export to the rest of the world and a further glimpse of [Thomas] Arnold's system of a moral hierarchy in which responsibility is allowed to reside with those worthy of implementing it' (p.xii).

5.2 'Hughes was writing Tom Brown's Schooldays aware that the British constitution would have to come to terms with the inevitable advance of popular democracy and with the extension of the franchise to working men. He was increasingly aware, too, of the ramifications of revolutions on the continent of Europe' (p.xxi); 'If Rugby is, as the "young master" believes it to be, "the only little corner of the British Empire which is thoroughly, wisely, and strongly ruled" [p.355], it is the kind of model that Hughes trusted could be built upon elsewhere. ... Arnold ... has given Tom in particular a healthy respect for democratic rights' (p.xix).

5.3 'Tom's boyhood in the Vale of the White Horse is passed in an idealized rural England in which squire and tenant, parson and peasant, live and work co-operatively' (p.xx).
5.4 Thomas Arnold: 'I might ... wish that my children might be well-versed in physical science, but in due subordination to the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. ... Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy, and then we should see our way a little more clearly without falling into Judaism, or Toryism, or Jacobinism, or any other ism whatever' (quoted by Sanders, pp.xviii-xix); cf Matthew Arnold.
5.5 'The object of all schools is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys, but to make them good English boys, good future citizens; and by far the most important part of that work must be done, or not done, out of school hours' (Tom Brown's Schooldays, p.63).

6. Modern responses: 'Jeeze louise, after taking more than three weeks to mull over the first hundered [sic] pages of this at times hard going but brilliant book i finished the following two hundered in about a day and a half as i found it truly "can't put it down" style reading' (Amazon); 'I first tried to read this when I was 12 and found it very heavy going. Several attempts later, I managed it all the way through and was very glad I did' (Amazon); 'Ignore the first chapter which is one of the worst written book openings ever. The rest of the book describes in incredibly sentimental terms a young boy's education at Rugby. The boy's adventures are compelling not least to have an idea of what an English Public school was in the early 1800s. The best part however, concerns the fabulous character that Thomas Hughes created in the bully Flashman' (Amazon).

7. Chapter I: 'The Brown Family': early chapters about childhood, but are they for children? first paragraph (pp.1-2); 'the great army of Browns ... empire's stability' (p.5); literal/metaphorical fights and battles throughout text; place/English countryside (p.5); English Christian nationalism; Alfred the Great (p.10).

7.1 Reader/addressee? 'gentle reader, or simple reader' (p.3); 'those that don't care for England in detail may skip the chapter' (p.6); 'O young England!' (p.6); 'Now, in my time...' (p.7); 'And now, my boys, you whom I want to get for readers, have you had enough?' (p.15); 'I sometimes think that you boys of this generation are a deal tenderer fellows than we used to be' (p.75).

7.2 Central character/image of childhood: 'He was a hearty strong boy ...' (p.17).

8. Chapter II: 'The Veast': 'at the age of four [Tom] began to struggle against the yoke and authority of his nurse' (p.22); 'war of independence' (p.23); old Benjy as 'Tom's dry nurse' (p.26); egalitarian 'cricket and hunting' (p.29); fishing, riding, traditional country games, heroes; 'veast' as country tradition that crosses class boundaries; manly sports – 'Only I have just got this to say...' (p.41); 'beer and skittles' (p.42); 'Too much over-civilization, and the deceitfulness of riches' (p.43).

9. Chapter III: 'Sundry Wars and Alliances': Tom's friendships with village boys (p.52); imagining playing at Swiss Family Robinson (p.53); 'now he had conquered another step in life ...' (p.57); cricket, football, wrestling; Rousseauean childhood in the Vale; childhood's setting = countryside/past; public/private schools: errors of the private school: 'constant supervision out of school' (p.62); 'encouraging tale-telling, which ... sapped all the foundations of school morality' (p.63).

10. Chapter IV: 'The Stage-Coach': next stage of Tom's journey (series of rites of passage); 'To condense the Squire's meditation...' (pp.73-74); coachman's stories of schoolboys' exploits: '"What fun!" said Tom, who could scarcely contain his pride at this exploit of his future schoolfellows. "'Taint such good fun though, sir, for the folk as meets the coach, nor for we who has to go back with it next day"' (p.83); 'What struck Tom's youthful imagination most was the desperate and lawless character of most of the stories. Was the guard hoaxing him? He couldn't help hoping that they were true. It's very odd how almost all English boys love danger' (pp.85-6).

11. Chapter V: 'Rugby and Football': 'Tom, notwithstanding [East's] bumptiousness, felt friends with him at once, and began sucking in all his ways and prejudices, as fast as he could understand them' (p.91).

12. Narrative technique: switches between past and present tense – 'have we not endured nobly this morning, and is this not a worthy reward for much endurance?' (p.78); effect?
12.1 Narrative tone (e.g., of passage quoted in point 11)?
12.2 Implied reader?
12.3 The role and implications of epigraphs to chapters and frequent allusions (e.g., p.21)?

13. Illustrations? (eg, p.25); 'This ed. reprints the illustrations drawn for the 1869 edition by the artist Arthur Hughes' (publication details page); see 'A Note on the Illustrated Edition' (pp.379-80): muscular Christianity?

See 'School Stories', Children's Literature Review: Excerpts from Reviews, Criticism, and Commentary on Books for Children and Young People, volume 128 (2008), pp.111-173.

Donald E. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. chapter 5.

Seminar

Focus on the account of the Rugby football match in chapter V, from '"Hold the punt-about!"' to the end of the chapter (Oxford World's Classics edition, pp.102-13).

1. What are the key metaphors and allusions that are used to describe the match? What are the implications and effects of these metaphors and allusions?

2. How does each boy's style of play or contribution to the game reveal his character? (e.g., Old Brooke, East, Flashman and Tom)

3. How is it that the school house side beats the school, even though they are heavily outnumbered?

4. What are the effects of the narrator's use of tense and tone?

5. What are the implications of the fact that the match occurs on Tom's first day at school?

6. How do you interpret the illustration ('Tom's First Exploit at Football') on page 112?

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