Tom Brown's Schooldays
Thomas Hughes, Andrew Sanders
Paperback
(Oxford University Press, Nov. 9, 1989)
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.