Before Tom Brown: the Origins of the School Story

Ask somebody if they know a good school story, they’re likely to say Harry Potter. Probe a bit further and they might recall Tom Brown’s Schooldays, published in 1857, above all if they’re Flashman fans. Ask again and they might speak of Thomas Hughes’s memories of Rugby, its famous headmaster Thomas Arnold and his belief that education made boys moral and self-reliant. They might even compare Dean Farrar’s gloomier Eric, or, Little by Little (1858), and throw in Talbot Baines Reed, Bunter, Angela Brazil, Malory Towers, and Jennings. A long tradition, then.

Yet going back further into children’s literature will take you into expert territory where scholars, cultural historians and bibliographers roam. Robert Kirkpatrick takes the reader there in his book Before Tom Brown, drawing on wide knowledge of school stories, and carrying it lightly in this timely and useful study. Back in fact to ancient times, gathering evidence from descriptions of school life and from dialogues between teachers and pupils (both boys and girls). The approach is to pick out how school life and education are represented in fiction, and what happened when it was – moral improvement, punishment, and satire.

Much of it is a lens for us to examine what society between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries thought education was for and how it worked. He suggests that school stories really became a genre in the eighteenth century with The Governess (1749) by Sarah Fielding and works like it where there was as much interest in characters interaction as in educational dialogues and moral precepts. The eclectic choice of Erasmus and Defoe, Rousseau and John Newbery and many more, enables Kirkpatrick to show how writers sought to entertain as well as educate.

He lets generous quotations speak for themselves, and guides the reader through a wealth of sources (the books themselves and the books about the books). Themes like rivalry and bullying, honesty and indolence emerge here long before Tom Brown, and as we know have not gone away with Harry Potter. Before Tom Brown reminds us that children’s classics have contexts that are richer than we thought, and we appreciate their origins and traditions more fully in knowing it.