Tom Brown Part II

Tom Brown’s Schooldays was the first “school novel”, which spawned a genre of serious and entertaining literature for boys and girls, about school life.  Thomas Hughes -like his character Tom - had been to Rugby and admired Dr Arnold, who had reformed the school...
 He had raised educational standards and broadened the curriculum which had been initially mostly based on studying the classics. Being a very morally minded man, he had also tried to make the boarding schools where the upper and middle class males received their education more moral and worthy places....  There was an emphasis on games, but also on learning about team work and about using one’s social position to guide and improve the lives of others.

 The prefect system gave a lot of responsibility to older boys, who were supposed to mentor and even to punish their juniors. They would learn to guide and lead others as they would have to do in their adult roles as landowners, military officers, lawyers, judges, politicians, and generally as leaders of men.

Hughes admitted that the novel was rather “preachy”; he had written it when one of his sons was due to go to school and he wanted to advise and warn him about the dangers of school life and its good points.  

 PG Wodehouse, who started his writing career with school stories, said that the first half of “Tom Brown” was an excellent novel about boys... But the second half was too heavily moralistic and too determined to preach a lesson….