`Tom Brown'
By RICHARD USBORNE WHAT a thoroughly unpleasant book Tom Brown's Schooldays is! It nestles under the gooseberry bush of being a 'classic.' and is, I suspect, hardly ever re-read by grown-ups. So it escapes the criticism it deserves. I read it first at the age of eight, nearly forty years ago. 1 read it again, for the second time, last week. It has produced in me a bout of depression, which has turned into a strong dislike of Thomas Hughes and anger at his book. Obviously, too, I am angry at myself.
1 had, for a purpose, been studying the early 1902-08 pre- Mike school stories of P. G. Wodehouse, and this took me to the British Museum Reading Room, and a pile of old bound volumes of the Captain. There were public 'school stories in every issue, by Wodehouse or some other of the then experts. But, in flipping through volume after volume, 1 was at first surprised, and later disturbed, to see how often the illustrations showed two boys fighting—with bare fists and in bad blood, not in the boxing ring. And at least once in every volume, I should say, there would be a picture of the end of such a schoolboy fight: one boy putting on his coat again and the other knocked out, lying on the grass of the playing field, or floor of a dormitory. Why, I wondered, this fist-fighting tradition in school stories? Was fighting, in fact, frequent in schools then? Did it happen much in my schooldays? Or in Wodehouse's at Dulwich? And where did this strange idea. much put about, and probably believed, by manly writers like Kipling and John Buchan, come from, that the best basis for a lifelong friendship between men was a furious fist-fight in the early stages of the acquaintance? I went home and re-read Tom Brown's Schooldays.
Dickens? Yes. Thackeray? Yes. But I accuse Hughes and his Torn Brown of being the main villains. I cannot prove my charge, but I make it. And I suspect that, in other ways as well, Tom Brown has, over the last hundred years nearly, influenced not only later writers of school stories, but also schoolmasters, parents, and boys who read it just before going to boarding- school for the first time. And the influence in all cases has been for the bad. It is quite a load of anger to bear against a book written by a good man, as instruction for his own eight- year-old son who was just going to his first school. Thomas Hughes was a good man. I think. He was a fool, I know. Tom Brown is a fairly sickening book. Apart from its Dickensian start, it is generally being painful, or mawkish, or snobbish. Hughes said later that he wrote the book in order to preach and do good. A similar claim was made by Dean Farrar for his even more mawkish, if less seminal, Eric or Little by Little. I discovered that the Bishop of Calcutta to whom Farrar dedicated Eric was the G. E. Cotton who had been Hughes's model for that do-gooder clergyman master. Do you remember the weird behaviour and conversation, of that Kingsman in the cricketing chapter at the end of Torn Brown? The cricket match itself is weird enough. The bilge talked on the boundary by this mystery man of God (who drank his tea from the saucer) makes the chapter nearly idiotic. was freely expressed that I would take to school like a duck to water. I was sad and rather frightened. And then my father, chuckling and indulgent, gave me a copy of Torn Brown's Schooldays. He said it was a great book. I read it, and my secret fears doubled. I saw myself being roasted, and bullied, and caned, and made to sing songs standing on a table, and being laughed at for saying my prayers, and being lifted insensible off a rugger ball at the bottom of a collapsed scrum of a hundred boys. And now I saw why my father had had a gym instructor in twice a week from Leamington to teach me boxing. I would have to fight.
Tom Brown's Rugby is, for me, equated with my prep school, not my public school. We were a peaceable bunch of kids at my prep school. But there were two fights with blood- shed when I was there. The first was when a tough egg picked on a dim, scholarly type who was more or less a joke to his friends, and accused him of having stolen, or lost, his (the tough egg's) copy of Teddy Lester. The fight, in the lavatories courtyard, was long, messy and extremely inexpert; and the tough egg, against the form-book of schoolboy fiction, was winning easily when a cry of 'Cave !' broke up the crowd, and the tight in the middle of it.
The second fight was between two friends and comvals, in Fifth Form Room itself. The bigger of the two decided that the smaller had been taking up too much of the bench all the term, and started a push-me-pull-you match that soon came to lost tempers and blows in, as the story-book cliché has it, 'a hastily improvised ring.' The bigger boy won. I am thank- ful to say. He was myself. I am ashamed of the episode now; but not so silly as to wish that I had lost. In Tom Brown, you may recall, Holmes had thrashed the bully. and years later the bully sought out Holmes and thanked him for 'the kindest thing ever done to him,' a turning point in his career. Well, well.
What has Torn Brown, the book, got to do with these two fights at my prep school? This. I maintain that both the tough egg and I started our fights, or let them develop at the first possible opportunity, because we found ourselves near the end of our time there without ever having been in a fight. Our fathers, and Torn Brown, and all the books in the school library that Torn Brown had spawned, had told us that fighting was part of school life for all manly boys, and obscurely we had need, therefore, to show ourselves to be manly. 'Fighting with fists is the natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels.' wrote Hughes in that nauseating last page of the chapter 'The Fight.' (This last page starts, 'And now. boys all, three words before we quit the subject . . .' and ends, after three hundred. . . don't give in while you can stand and see.') I say that fist-fighting is not natural at all, but that Hughes, more than any other man, is culpable for the bristling fallacies in the phrase 'the noble art of self-defence.'
Perhaps my main fury against Tom Brown currently is that it is so easy to forget. I said at the start that my father, chuckling and indulgent, had given me a copy of Torn Brown a few weeks before I left home for school for the first time. My father, a mild, friendly man, had certainly forgotten his last reading of the book. And, in due time, I forgot mine, too. Eight years ago, my son was being got ready to go to prep school . . . the same prep school that I had been to, and my father. Chuckling and indulgent (I now recall with disgust). I gave the boy a copy of Torn Brown.
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