I pulled Thomas Hughes' name from the Small Works List in the traditional fashion. I finished my quick interaction with Isaac Newton knowing that I would not be able to read Newton's Principia and then below that chief interaction there is a titanic body of work for which I would not have the lifetime of energy needed to apprehend it, I decided to read some background material, a quick interaction with the principle text, and I read one contained essay that my professor friend who is familiar with physics told me to read. The next name was a slightly more contemporary British author, Thomas Hughes. Knowing nothing of this human being, I set about to find something important about them. As is often times the case, there is one chief work that they are known for and set about tracking down a copy of this book.
It sometimes is the case itself that I may not know anything about the author but the work that they are famous for is familiar to me. Like Isaac Newton, it is sometimes the case that I know the name of the person and perhaps a chief accomplishment but not a work that they are known for. Then like Lady Hyegyong or Guaman Poma, the name, the personage, the work are totally obscure for me, and this is the case for Thomas Hughes. It sounds like a name one might know, like a person you met at a party once a long time ago, but not sure where from or whether you liked them or not.
The work that leapt out of the research was Tom Brown's Schooldays which appeared to be a literary work written primary for school age children in the 1840s. I was not enthused by this idea. Thomas Hughes seems to have been an influential character at his time. Hughes had a particular fascination with America which is common for a certain type of British person. Two of my favorite Scottish friends are fascinated by America. This text though has nothing to do with America at all. Tom Brown's Schooldays focuses on the upbringing of one Tom Brown who is a middle to upper class young person who begins his youth playing the rough games on the streets with his neighborhood peers, but then is shuffled off to boarding school, the Rugby School, pretty quickly. He is a smaller boy with a sensitive disposition and has to make a name for himself in the rough ways of boarding school boys with wit and athleticism. At this moment in British history, it appears that cricket and rugby are the two primary ways you are able to rise to acclaim among your school aged boy classmates and peers. Tom Brown is not particularly skilled in these ways, not naturally gifted, but clever and ferocious it seems and that is enough to give him a little daylight as someone not to be picked on.
There is a famous antagonist from this book that in some very brief appraisal of research on the topic jumps off the page as well, there is the indomitable Flashman to contend with. The Flashman is an older boy quite gifted athletically who is also sort of a nasty player. He is the sort of kid that you are perhaps glad to have him on your team because he might be quite a difficult character to play against. At some point in the middle of the text, Tom Brown and another boy have had enough of the Flashman's antics and decide to schedule a fight.
A slight break here: apparently at this time in British society, at least in the boarding school sort of level of things, fights happened in a semi-formal sense. There are the two who seem fated to encounter one another, the fighters, then there is an older child who acts as sort of a referee for the match. There are breaks where the fighters are allowed to regroup, and then there are aids to the fight who are advocated for you not to be taken advantage of. Everything here is happening with consent of the fighters and there is a teacher or someone who is sort of tactic sponsor of the event. They don't watch but when they deem to have had enough with it they may be waiting near by to break the whole thing up. This is utterly fascinating to me. It all seems to be sort of the rules to a proto-boxing sort of sport.
Okay back to the action, Tom Brown squares off against the Flashman, but the older kid/referee deems it not a fair fight and so Tom Brown is allowed to selected a co-combatant to take on the bully. The fight gets off to a sloppy start, and the Flashman gets the best of both of the smaller kids quickly. At one point, the Flashman is strangling one of them. The tides turn and now it seems like it may end in a draw, but Tom Brown and his tag team partner decided silently to rush the Flashman and knock him over with their combined force. The ruse works, the Flashman is toppled but in the toppling, the Flashman knocks his head against a ledge of wall. When the Flashman falls, the thud occurs, while reading this book, I gasped out loud. When I saw that I was fully engrossed in this moment, I was all the way in. The Flashman is injured badly but makes a full recovery. Tom Brown went from unlikely victor, to perhaps a grave villain, to a reluctant hero all in the span of a few moments, and this is the moment for which this book is remembered. This is the genius of this text.
Later in the novel, Tom Brown mentors on an even smaller, more sensitive student named George Arthur. This is another special part of this experience that is unlike the nature of our educational system anymore. The doctor, or the headmaster, perceives something in Tom Brown that needs correcting. After the fight and the fleeting success at sports, it seems that Brown is taking a turn from the sensitive undersized young person to that of something of an overconfident jerk. The doctor sees this trend developing and puts Arthur in Tom's way so that it challenges Tom to broaden instead of narrow down his scope on life. Arthur something of a sort of fairy child, not long for this world, and presents a set of challenges for Brown to address. Arthur does eventually die young, after Brown and he leave the school and Brown mourns his death as the sort of final turn towards maturity as a young professional class gentleman.
I didn't cry at this ending as it felt fated, and this last turn though important to the story didn't delight me quite as much as the fight with the Flashman. There is quite a lot in this text that very deeply jargon and slang of the time that I did not quite understand, and no context was given. There are a few moments that I am not entirely sure what was meant to be happening. First, I do not right now understand the rules of the games, Rugby and Cricket. I am closer to understanding Rugby. I have almost no frame of reference for Cricket. For a different project, I tried to learn the rules of cricket. I took a full course from Youtube University, but I still could not fully apprehend cricket. Rugby I feel like I understand intuitively, but the finer points escape me. There are several moments in the text that knowing the scoring system and general strategy of the game is important. There is another moment in the text where Tom Brown and a friend get in trouble from what seems to be a game warden about fishing in a pond that they were not supposed to. The warden tells the doctor/headmaster and Brown is reprimanded for it. Another time, Brown is out too late for a sort of confusing reason as well and again is reprimanded for that as well. Many times Brown's reactions to being punished seem far short of the level of empathy expected of young boys and it is the task of the text to develop this sense of empathy in the character. While of this seems proper and just in a work of Children's literature, the place where Hughes ends the story does not seem to be the fullness of empathy I think appropriate which is sort of a strange short coming of the book itself.
Somewhere in the literature surrounding this book, I ran across the idea that Tom Brown's Schooldays influenced the Harry Potter tradition of books, books set in British boarding schools tradition of books. I am not sure how much to make of this. I have no knowledge of the Harry Potter universe other than what I may have gleaned from pop culture, but I don't see a bunch of similarities but I also do not know enough to say so. One possible intersection is the motif that, although the school is the setting of the novel, not much actual class time happens in the main story of the novel. There is more sports, fights, dorm time, and adventures than any sort of classroom scene or direct learning experience.
I enjoyed this book immensely, and was glad to have interacted with it. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of intersecting with this text and so its longevity might be in the works that it influenced rather than any one person's experience and love for it. I am constantly searching for the through lines of how these works speak to one another and so far Thomas Hughes feels like a node off on its own.
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