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With Tom Brown's School Days (1857), one of the first novels expressly written for boys, Thomas Hughes created both the genre of the public-school novel and the schoolboy-hero. He established the conventions followed by all subsequent public-school novels, and his protagonist, Tom Brown, became a model for the heroes of subsequent school and sports stories, both in Britain and the United States, and even for the heroes of popular adult novels of the time. At the same time, Hughes's portrayal of life at Rugby under the leadership of its headmaster, Dr. Thomas Arnold, defined the public-school experience for the novel's readers. In fact, as Isabel Quigley has written in The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story (1982), Tom Brown's School Days "came to be regarded as fact" and became "a blue-print for the public schools." Not only did this story for boys influence the development of the British educational system, but, with its emphasis on manliness and athleticism, it also had a profound impact on British society as the United Kingdom moved into an era of increasing militarism and imperialism.
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