Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes

(Book Review)

I encountered this rather obscure classic as a result of my interest in the Flashman series.

After my friend had originally recommended the Flashman series to me, the first thing I did was to go to wikipedia to read about it.

There I learned that the character of Flashman originally came from an 1857 novel called "Tom Brown's Schooldays."

(Ah wikipedia, what would we do without it? If I had read the Flashman series 10 years earlier, I would probably have just been confused about where the character came from. Now all the information is right at my fingertips. Already it's becoming hard to remember what life was like before wikipedia.)

Being the thorough reader that I am, I decided that if I was going to embark on the Flashman series, I would start with the source material first.
And so I did. And I got about 50 pages into "Tom Brown's Schooldays", before I got impatient with the slow pace of the book, and decided to jump right into the actual Flashman series itself. And while I read through the first few Flashman books, I simultaneously slowly chipped away at "Tom Brown's Schooldays."

I'm a slow reader as always, so it took me a few months to plod through this book. In the meantime, I finished off 3 books in the Flashman series:
Flashman,
Royal Flash,
and Flash for Freedom (see previous post).

I don't know how many other Flashman readers actual take the trouble to wade through the original source material. But I can observe that it was much easier to get ahold of the Flashman books than "Tom Brown's Schooldays." All of the local bookstores in my city had at least some of the Flashman books stocked (some had the whole series). "Tom Brown's Schooldays" was nowhere to be found in any of the bookstores I visited, and the only copy I was able to find was an old 1967 copy tucked away in the corner of the University library. So I can only conjecture that, at least as far as Melbourne goes, most people just plunge directly into the meat of the Flashman series.
(It's possible this book is more famous in it's home country of Britain. It was just made into a TV movie as recently as 2005 (IMBD). Or I don't know--maybe it's famous everywhere, and it's just my ignorance. If anyone else out there has heard of this book before, let me know.)

George MacDonald Fraser, however, does constantly reference back to this book in his Flashman series, however, starting with the very first chapter in which Flashman complains of his portrayal by Thomas Hughes (while admitting it was accurate for the most part). And many of the characters from this book make appearances throughout the Flashman series.
For example Doctor Arnold and Harry "Scud" East appear in the first chapter of "Flashman." Speedicut appears in the beginning of "Royal Flash." References are made to Young Brooke and Scud East in "Flash for Freedom." And Scud East is a major character in "Flashman at the Charge," (which I'm currently reading now). So I imagine anyone who hasn't waded through this book first will miss a lot of the references in the Flashman series.

Even if the Flashman books are a lot more fun than this one.

"Tom Brown's Schooldays" isn't a terrible book, but it's a book from a different time, with a different sort of pacing, and a different sort of prose style.

I'm sure you've noticed, as I do whenever I read a Victorian era book, that some of these classics have aged better than others. Some of them read like they could have been written yesterday. And some of them are written with a more antiquated style. This book is one of the latter.

Still, if you're willing to put in the effort of engaging the book, there's a lot to be gained from it.

As with any old book, the main value of it is in being able to get a glimpse of what life was like before you were born. What did schoolboys do in the days before television, video games, and the internet? How did they entertain themselves? What sort of mischief did they get up to, and what sort of values were instilled in them? What was boarding school like in England in the 19th century?

Of course a work of fiction from a single writer can't be counted on to represent faithfully all the complexities of life as it is or was.

But in this case one has reason to think that most of the book is true to life. The book is based on the same school that Thomas Hughes himself went to as a boy. And takes place around the same time that Thomas Hughes himself was a student there. And real life figures, such as Doctor Thomas Arnold (W), the headmaster of the school at the time, are incorporated into the story. And although Tom Brown and his friends are fictional characters, many of the incidents in this book are probably based off of real life.

Much of the book has a realistic feel to it, and details the kind of mischief that it's easy to imagine real boys getting into. (Although every generation likes to imagine that they were the first to discover rebellion, it is always interesting to read older books and discover that even the respectable Victorian gentleman started out as young boys causing mischief 150 years ago.)

The book is written with a heavy moralizing tone, but it's not exactly the strict schoolmarm type of "never speak unless spoken to and stay out of trouble," type morality. It's more of the British bulldog old fashioned morals of the schoolyard: Never pick on boys smaller than you, but don't be afraid to stand up to bullies even if they are bigger than you. Never shirk from a fight if challenged. Always throw yourself fully into sports without worrying about getting injured. A certain amount of mischief is natural for a young boy, but never lie or be dishonest about it when caught. Et cetera.

Harry Flashman is the villain of this book, and represents the antithesis of everything our young heroes stand for. He mercilessly bullies younger boys when he thinks he can get away with it, but "toadies" to all the older boys. He takes great pleasure in inflicting pain on others, but shrinks away from a fight as soon as someone stands up to him.
Although Flashman is only in a small portion of the book (he doesn't make much of an appearance until the book is a quarter finished, and he gets kicked out of rugby school before the book is halfway through) his character, and the younger boys struggle against him, dominates the part of the book that he is in.

One can certainly see in this short section all the bad qualities which George MacDonald Fraser would later make a series out of.
(It was a stroke of comic genius for Fraser to take the character of Flashman and decide to explore what kind of man he would turn out to be.)

Parts of the morality bit, or at least the preachy way in which a lot of it is conveyed, maybe a bit tiresome for the modern reader. But it was readable as far as it went. The real problem with this book is when the characters find religion.

I'm over the stage of my life where I have much patience for religious morality. But even then, if the religious preaching had been well written I would have had less of a problem with it. However the religious change these characters undergo feels very forced, and not natural to the story at all. And near the end there are some passages when these schoolboys are sitting around discussing the Bible, and it felt so unnatural. I couldn't believe these were even the same characters I had been following.
It was one of those scenes that was so bad that you almost feel embarrased for the author as you read it.

P.G. Wodehouse has written a satirical essay on this sudden change of tone called "The Tom Brown Question" (available on-line--link here) in which he suggests that only the first half of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" was written by Thomas Hughes, and the second half was written by a moralizing committee. And I can definitely see where Wodehouse is coming from.

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