Books with title TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS 1862

"Tom Brown is an early, well-drawn character in what was to become a familiar genre in English fiction: a chronicle of life at an English boys' boarding school. In the novel, Tom, a student at Rugby School in the time of Thomas Arnold's headmastership, is harassed by the school bully, Flashman, but overcomes his trials. During his school career, Tom does very well academically and on the playing fields." -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

"Tom Brown's School Days" by Thomas Hughes. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

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.

One of the classics of English children's literature, and one of the earliest books written specifically for boys, this novel's steady popularity has given it an influence well beyond the upper middle-class world that it describes. It tells a story central to an understanding of Victorian life, but its freshness helps to distinguish it from the narrow schoolboy adventures that it later inspired.

Lively and mischievous, idle and brave, Tom Brown is both the typical boy of his time and the perennial hero celebrated by authors as diverse as Henry Fielding (in Tom Jones) and Alec Waugh (in The Loom of Youth). The book describes Tom's time at Rugby School from his first football match, through his troubled adolescence when he is savagely bullied by the unspeakable Flashman, to his departure for a wider world as a confident young man. This classic tale of a boy's schooldays under the benevolent eye of the renowned Dr Arnold still retains the appeal for which it was acclaimed on its first publication in 1857. In its less well-known sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, we follow our hero to St Ambrose's College, and, in sharing his undergraduate experiences, gain a vivid impression of university life in the mid nineteenth century.