Tom Brown at Rugby

A small boy is sent to Rugby under Dr Arnold, is roasted before a fire by a bully, learns cricket and Latin and what a school is for. Thomas Hughes had been there himself and wrote it for his own son; it invented the English school story and, with it, a good deal of the Victorian idea of manliness. The fight chapter comes with a long defence of fighting, which is the most honest thing in the book. Forty years of schoolroom and family life, from Wilkie to Frith, give the plates a Victorian childhood to match Hughes's own.