Books with author Hughes Thomas 1822-1896

Tom Brown's School Days By Thomas Hughes - Tom Brown is an energetic, kind-hearted, and athletic boy. The novel tells of his life in mid-19th Century England at Rugby Public School. He acts according to his feelings and the unwritten rules of the boys around him more than adults' rules. He is harassed by the school bully, Flashman, Tom's principal enemy.

Tom Brown’s Schooldays, first published in 1857, is perhaps the most celebrated (though not the first) example of the school story. Thomas Hughes wrote it for his eight-year-old son and wanted it to be interesting and ‘written in a right spirit’, in contrast to earlier, more didactic school stories such as Harriet Martineau’s The Crofton Boys (1841). The book is set in the 1830s and Tom, a country squire’s son, is sent to Rugby School. Tom is initially anxious to fit in and good at sport, but also mischievous, and reckless. The book is famous for the accounts of the bully Flashman, who roasts Tom and his friend Harry East in front of a fire, and the pious George Arthur who gradually introduces the civilising influence of religion into Tom’s dormitory. Rugby’s famous headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold appears as ‘the Doctor’.Although Hughes meant his hero to be representative of ‘everyman’ rather than being a self-portrait, there are clear parallels with his life, and his portrayal of the Rugby School, which he attended, is realistic. Hughes, a barrister and later a judge, wrote a sequel, but it did not approach the popularity of Tom Brown’s Schooldays which has never been out of print.

PrefaceThis Memoir was written for, and at the request of, the near relatives, and intimate friends, of the home-loving country gentleman, whose unlooked-for death had made them all mourners indeed. Had it been meant originally for publication, it would have taken a very different form. In compiling it, my whole thoughts were fixed on my own sons and nephews, and not on the public. It tells of a life with which indeed the public has no concern in one sense; for my brother, with all his ability and power of different kinds, was one of the humblest and most retiring of men; who just did his own duty, and held his own tongue, without the slightest effort or wish for fame or notoriety of any kind. In another sense, however, I do see that it has a meaning and interest for Englishmen in general, and have therefore consented to its publication in the usual way, though not without a sense of discomfort and annoyance at having the veil even partially lifted from the intimacies of a private family circle. For, in a noisy and confused time like ours, it does seem to me that most of us have need to be reminded of, and will be the better for bearing in mind, the reserve of strength and power which lies quietly at the nation’s call, outside the whirl and din of public and fashionable life, and entirely ignored in the columns of the daily press. The subject of this memoir was only a good specimen of thousands of Englishmen of high culture, high courage, high principle, who are living their own quiet lives in every corner of the kingdom, from John o’ Groat’s to the Land’s-End, bringing up their families in the love of God and their neighbour, and keeping the atmosphere around them clean, and pure and strong, by their example,—men who would come to the front, and might be relied on, in any serious national crisis.

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