Other editions of book Tom Brown's Schooldays

The story of young Tom Brown's seemingly hideous years spent at rugby school and his spirited and astonishingly stalwart response to the institutionalised bullying prevalent at the 'Great' British public schools became exactly the campaigning tool its author hoped it would. The regimes at these schools had been largely unchallenged, with the assumption being that the education and training received were the best. The revelations in Hughes' book of the beatings and the burnings uncovered a system which had been all but hidden. Hughes had been a schoolboy at rugby school in the 1830s when the school was run by the educational reformer Dr. Thomas Arnold. Dr. Arnold's idealism transferred itself wholesale to the young Hughes, and the good doctor appears towards the end of Tom Brown's Schooldays as the young master, bearing the light of possible redemption.

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. The book includes an introduction and notes by Andrew Sanders.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

First published in 1857, Thomas Hughes' novel Tom Brown's Schooldays has remained popular well into modern times. Hughes was a Rugby alumnus, and dedicated the novel to the widow of his old headmaster, Dr. Thomas Arnold. While the story has entertained generations of mostly young readers, and inspired an entire genre of British boarding school novels, perhaps the character best known to modern readers is the bully Flashman. An important, though ultimately minor character in the first part of Tom Brown's Schooldays, he would later be appropriated as the protagonist of a highly popular series of novels by British author George MacDonald Fraser.Hughes' novel takes Tom Brown from childhood as the son of the local squire, to his early days at a private boarding school (terminated by an epidemic at the school), and then right through his years at Rugby, a real school that is today best known to those outside Britain for the modified form of soccer that originated there and bears the school's name. Rugby (the game) and cricket both figure prominently in the story. The final chapter, which takes place in 1842, is mostly a tribute to Arnold, who had died in that year.Our edition has been carefully edited and formatted for the Kindle reading device, and includes a linked table of contents along with a number of new notes to clarify some references that have become obscure with the passing years.