THOMAS HUGHES  1822 - 1896  (G4, W4, Va, Vb, Vc)

Acknowledgements

Hughes: woodburytype by Lock and Whitfield, a photographic studio established in London in 1856, c1880 – National Portrait Gallery, London. Arnold: detail, after the English portrait painter Thomas Phillips (1770-1845) – Oriel College, University of Oxford, England. School: early postcard, date and artist unknown. Matthew: detail, by the English painter George Frederick Watts (1817-1904) – National Portrait Gallery, London. Chapel: lithograph from Memorials of Rugby by the English artist Sir Charles Walter Radclyffe (1817-1903), contained in The Great Public Schools’ Series by H.C. Bradbury, published in London, 1900. Oxford: date and artist unknown.

xxxxxThe English writer Thomas Hughes attended Rugby School in Warwickshire from 1834 to 1842, and then studied at Oriel College, Oxford for the next three years before going on to study law. His school and university days gave him the material for two novels, Tom Brown’s School Days, published in 1857, and Tom Brown at Oxford in 1861. The first was by far the more successful, and had gone through some 50 editions by the 1890s. It was, first and foremost, a glowing tribute to the work of Thomas Arnold, who was headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1842.

xxxxxHughes was born at Uffington, Berkshire, and, after his stays at Rugby and Oxford, became a barrister in 1848. A man of liberal views and strong religious conviction, he joined the Christian Socialists and then in 1854 became a founder member of the Working Men’s College, serving as principal of this college from 1872 to 1883. He became a Liberal Member of Parliament from 1865 to 1874, and five years later visited the United States with the idea of setting up a cooperative settlement in Rugby, Tennessee, but the venture failed and he lost money as a result. On his return he was made a county court judge in 1882. He wrote two other works of note, religious tracts entitled  A Layman’s Faith, published in 1868, and The Manliness of Christ in 1879.  

xxxxxTom Brown’s School Days, a semi-autobiographical work and the first story to be centred exclusively around the ups and downs of life in a boarding school, is concerned in the main with the struggle of Tom and his friends, East and Arthur, against the big bully Flashman and his hangers-on. As one would expect it has its share of boyish high spirits and competitive games, and good triumphs over evil in the end. But there is more to the story than that. Throughout the novel Hughes lays emphasis upon the merits of an all-round education - a training for life in fact - which, instituted by Thomas Arnold and based on Christian principles, instilled in its pupils the need for physical courage, uprightness, and a profound sense of loyalty to both school and country. In so doing, Hughes created the public-school ethic in England, provided a prototype of its product, and made Thomas Arnold a household name.

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xxxxxMatthew Arnold (1822-1888), one of the foremost poets and social and literary critics of the Victorian era, was born in Laleham, Middlesex. After graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1844, he spent a short time as an assistant master at Rugby - the school his father, Thomas Arnold, had made so famous - before being appointed a school inspector in 1851, a post he held for 35 years. In the early part of his literary career he gained a reputation as an eloquent albeit pessimistic poet, but from the 1860s he turned from verse to prose, establishing himself as an outstanding literary critic, and roundly attacking the march of industry and materialism as the cause of the decline in the country’s moral standards and cultural values.  

xxxxxAs a school inspector he studied teaching methods on the continent, and put forward a series of reforms to improve teaching at universities as well as in schools. He was anxious to introduce a national system of education in order to ensure that schools and teacher-training establishments throughout the country maintained standards set by the government. And he went some way towards advocating a national curriculum as a means of fostering the country’s cultural heritage. It says much for his contribution to education that his annual reports were widely read, and that two of his reports, describing more advanced systems of education he had inspected on the continent, were published as books.

xxxxxArnold began his career as a poet in 1843 when he won a prize for a poem on Oliver Cromwell while at Oxford. Later, on the strength of two volumes of verse published in 1853 and 1855 (and the backing of his godfather John Keble), he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford in 1857, and he remained in this appointment for ten years. Much of his poetry is full of self-inflicted despair, an eloquent and moving expression of nagging regret for the passing of a settled, predictable age, or a series of nostalgic soliloquies longing for the freshness and promise of his own lost youth. Such pessimistic thoughts, harboured deep within himself, brought “a melancholy into all our day”. His richly composed poems The Scholar Gipsy of 1853 and Dover Beach of 1867 are often cited as examples of his anxious, abiding concern over a Victorian England which, in his view (like those of his contemporaries Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin), was in moral and cultural decline. Other works included poems with a pastoral theme, like The Forsaken Merman of 1849, powerful epics in their own right, like Sohrab and Rustum of 1853, and meditative pieces such as Rugby Chapel of 1867 (illustrated above) and Westminster Abbey of 1882.

xxxxxArnold produced his classical tragedy Merope in 1858, but by the time his New Poems appeared in 1867 - which included Thyrsis and Dover Beach - he had turned to the writing of critical pieces, beginning with his Essays in Criticism in 1865. Over the next twenty years he gained a fearsome reputation for his attack upon the upper and middle classes of Victorian society, taking them to task for their poor taste, lack of good manners, and their abandonment of cultural values. He gave full vent to such feelings in his collection of essays entitled Culture and Anarchy, published in 1869. Literature and Dogma, his major work in religious criticism, was produced in 1873, and it was during the 1870s that he set out his unorthodox views on Christianity in works such as St. Paul and Protestantism, God and the Bible, and the Last Essays on Church and Religion.

xxxxxIncidentally, Arnold was an undergraduate at Oxford in 1843 when the influential churchman John Henry Newman, leader of the Oxford Movement, resigned as vicar of St. Mary’s to join the Roman Catholic Church. He greatly admired Newman as a man of integrity and culture, and that is partly why he retained such a great affection for the “City of Dreaming Spires” (his own description) throughout his life.

xxxxxThomas Arnold was born in East Cowes, on the Isle of Wight in 1795. He attended Winchester School and then studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was ordained a deacon in the Church of England in 1818, and then a priest in 1828, the year in which he became the headmaster of Rugby School. Over the next fourteen years he introduced a series of reforms which made this school a model for public schools throughout the country.

xxxxxArnold’s immediate aim was to widen the curriculum - then largely classical - in order to provide an education more useful to everyday needs. He introduced modern history and modern languages in addition to mathematics, philosophy and poetry. And he was anxious to provide character training and leadership qualities. With this in mind he introduced a prefect system in which the senior boys not only maintained discipline amongst the junior students, but were also responsible, in part at least, for their welfare. His character building programme was firmly based on Christian principles. He encouraged fair play and team spirit in all competitive sport, came down heavily on cheating, bullying and the like, and instilled in his boys a thirst for knowledge and a pride in their school, nation and Church. Emphasis was also placed upon service to Queen and country, notably in the expanding territories within the British Empire.

xxxxxThese reforms, seen at work in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days, brought marked improvement, and Rugby became a model for existing public schools as well as for those established at a later date. Indeed, within a few years the English public school came to be seen as the breeding ground for young gentlemen of quality, the nation’s future leaders.

xxxxxArnold’s achievements at Rugby earned him the chair of modern history at Oxford in 1841, but he died the following year. Among his works were five volumes of sermons, a three-volume History of Rome, and his Oxford Lectures on Modern History. He was the father of the poet and critic Matthew Arnold.

xxxxxIncidentally, a sketch of Thomas Arnold is given in Eminent Victorians of 1918, the work of the English biographer and critic Lytton Strachey (1880-1932). Irreverent in style, this work includes three other leading figures from the Victorian era: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, and General Gordon. ……

……   According to some accounts, the game of rugby originated in 1823 when, during a football game at Rugby School, one of the boys, William Webb Ellis, instead of kicking the ball, picked it up and ran with it! (A granite plaque on the “Doctor’s Wall” commemorates the occasion.) Although against the rules, the idea proved popular. This new version of football was not accepted by the Football Association when it was established in 1863, but in 1871 the Rugby Football Union was formed and this organised the game’s rules. The game quickly caught on in Britain, the Commonwealth, and other countries, and an international organisation was set up in 1934. Today the World Rugby Cup is named after him. ……

xxxxx……  Rugby School, a fee paying school, (and incongruously known in England as a “public school”), was founded for boys in 1567 by Lawrence Sheriff (c1510-1567), a local merchant.

xxxxxItxwas in 1857 that the Scottish author Robert Michael Ballantyne (1825-1894), a writer of schoolboy adventure stories, published his best known work The Coral Island. As a young man he spent six years working for the Hudson Bay Company, and on his return to Scotland in 1847 began his writing career with Life in the Wilds of North America. He then went on to produce a series of adventure stories - over 80 in total - to inspire the young reader. These included The Young Fur Trader, The Lighthouse, Deep Down, The Settler and the Savage, The Lonely Island, and The Life of a Ship. He travelled all over the world to gain first-hand knowledge of his subject matter and, in the spirit of the public school, he strove in his work to inculcate in his young reader the qualities of good leadership and “cool, cautious self-possession”.