Rating: WARTY!
I was disappointed in this. It's like listening to an old relative drone on about an ancient past in which you as the listener have no interest whatsoever. Fortunately your;e not stuck with this until you can politely leave! This should not be thought of as a novel though. It's really much more a memoir of the author's time at a public school in Rugby in the 1830's, and while I am quite convinced he had fond memories of his time there, he imbues the reader with none of it - not if the reader is anything like me, anyway.
Note that public in Britain means private - it was technically open to the public, but in fact required a hefty fee. Rugby has the distinction, when it was originally founded in 1567, of actually being a free public school, but when the 'great' schools of Britain were set in stone in the late 1860's, they started to become renowned for being upper class and elitist. Rugby school is also where the actual game of rugby football was codified in the 1840's. In Tom Brown's era, running with the ball first became a thing. None of this history is told in Hughes's book because most of it wasn't in place in his time.
The first few chapters have nothing to do with school, but instead detail life before he went to Rugby. This part was tedious and I was ready to give up on the entire book, but the time finally came for him to go to school so I stayed with it, and I made it about halfway through the book before I truly tired of it and really began resenting spending so much time on it.
Tom becomes fast friends with Harry East and has run-ins with the resident school bully named Flashman. He plays "foot-ball" and the author inadvertently reveals to us the origin of the term willy-nilly, which was about the only thing I found interesting in the whole book! There are tales of fagging (not what you think!), and other trivia, and that's really about it. I'm not kidding.
I mean it's useful if you want to get the inside story on the minutiae of a school kid's life from that period, but I found no other value in it, and even the utility of that information is soiled by how much crap you have to read through to find anything you might be able to use in your own writing. For me the conclusion was that it wasn't worth it. It's set in roughly the same period as Oliver Twist, so there is some possible interest in the contrast between the lives of these two fictional boys, but even so it's not really worth reading either of them.
Fortunately, that's not why I read it. I read it out of genuine interest in what all the fuss was about in this book and now I can say it's a waste of time. Another 'classic' I've read that's fallen far short of its reputation. I cannot commend this as a worthy read. You'll have much more fun watching an episode of Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns called Tomkinson's Schooldays which is a loose parody of this book and was the pilot episode for the Ripping Yarns series.
