Thomas Hughes Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Thomas Hughes

In Tom Brown's School Days (1857), Thomas Hughes celebrated one school and founded another. This extremely popular novel brought to the attention of a large audience the great work Thomas Arnold had achieved in reforming Rugby and, more generally, the education of the future leaders of the English nation and the British Empire. It also created a significant new subgenre of English fiction: as John R. Reed has written in his definitive Old School Ties: The Public Schools in British Literature (1964), Tom Brown's School Days "established permanently the traditional characters, topics, and situations of the public school novel," which has survived for a century and a quarter, even while undergoing some profound changes. Curiously, however, Hughes's first novel, which was at least as important in forming public attitudes as it was in shaping a particular fictional form, was not the work of a professional storyteller. Not quite thirty-five years old when Tom Brown's School Days was published anonymously, Hughes brought out two more novels in rather rapid order, The Scouring of the White Horse (1859) and Tom Brown at Oxford (1859-1861), and then went on to devote the remaining three and a half decades of his busy life to other pursuits.

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