Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature by Kershner R. B.;

Author:Kershner, R. B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1989-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Tom Brown’s School-Days

Within this dubious context, the first major school story, Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), appeared as exceptional in several regards. Like his friend Charles Kingsley, Hughes was a Christian Socialist, and unlike him admired Dr. Thomas Arnold, the former headmaster at Rugby, to the point of adulation.19 Tom Brown, published fifteen years after Arnold’s death, is in part a tribute to “The Doctor,” in part a surprisingly realistic story set in a real school, and in part an embryonic Bildungsroman featuring “the English schoolboy as he is popularly supposed to be, tough, gregarious, reckless, a creature of outdoor tastes, intensely loyal to the community to which he belongs.”20 He also appears as a creature of suppressed but profound religious and moral instinct who is nonetheless easily led astray, and whose salvation during these formative years is a chancy matter.

Traditionally enough, Hughes establishes Tom’s rural childhood home in the Vale of White Horse as a place of rather combative innocence, full of mischief-making but without the potential for real moral damage; ironically, Hughes observes that the son of Squire Brown “got more harm from his equals in his first fortnight at a private school . . . than he had from his village friends from the day he left Charity’s apronstrings.”21 Although Hughes is at pains to present Rugby as a greatly superior alternative to the dubious “private schools” of the time, much the same could in fact be said of that institution. As the boy is leaving home, Tom’s father warns him, “You’ll see a great many cruel blackguard things done,”22 an opinion that understates the case. At least by modern standards, and sometimes even by the standards of Britain in 1857, the reader must be taken aback by the organized and random bullying, the wholesale exploitation of the smaller by the larger boys, the organized cheating on examinations, and the recreational destruction of property and livestock belonging to neighboring farmers.

Although he offers occasional apologies for these events, and even assures the reader that some of the abuses have since been corrected, Hughes clearly regards this schoolboy world as natural, even bracing in its moral climate. As soon becomes clear, Rugby is a spiritually Darwinist world where the innocent are exposed to temptation and vice in order that they may overcome them, and where they are unjustly attacked in order that they may learn to demonstrate their manhood. In this system education itself is curiously irrelevant: “the object of all schools,” Hughes comments, “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.”23 The true testing ground of boys is sports, particularly football, in this seed-bed of Muscular Christianity, and to a lesser extent social interaction within the community of boys. The boys’ personal relationships to the masters, like their academic accomplishments, are also curiously irrelevant; one

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