By Thomas Hughes

(1822-96)

With Illustrations by Sydney P. Hall

New York: John W. Lovell Company

PUBLISHING HISTORY

First serialized ending in circa 1861 in MacMillan's Magazine (mentioned by the author in his preface, and Chapter 28 contains the author's footnote indicating that at least part of this chapter was not written earlier than 1859)

First published in 3 volume book form 1861 by Cambridge, London (British Library)

2nd edition published 1861 by MacMillan & Co., Cambridge & London (British Library)

Published 1861 by Ticknor & Fields, Boston (Library of Congress)

May have been serialized by Ticknor & Fields in 1859 (parts offered on Amazon.com by an antique bookseller)

Published 1863 by Ticknor & Fields, Boston (Library of Congress)

Published 1865 by MacMillan & Co. (British Library)

Published 1870 by Harper Bros., New York (British Library)

Published 1871 by Harper Bros., New York (Library of Congress & British Library)

Published 1879 by unknown, New York (Library of Congress)

Published 1881 by MacMillan & Co., New York (Library of Congress)

French translation published 1881 in Paris with added name Girardin, Jules Marie Alfred who is possibly the translator(?) (British Library)

Published circa 1888-92 by John W. Lovell, New York (Ebook transcriber's scanned copy)

Published 1888 by Porter & Coates, Philadelphia (Ebook transcriber's proofreading copy)

Published 1889 by MacMillan, London & New York (Library of Congress)

Published 1890 by Lovell, Coryell & Co., New York (Library of Congress)

Published 1905 in two volumes with Tom Brown's School Days (British Library)

Published 1914 by T. Nelson & Sons (British Library)

Published 1920 by S.W. Partridge & Co., London (British Library)

Published 2004 as part of a five volume set entitled Victorian Novels of Oxbridge Life, Christopher Stray editor, Thoemmes, Bristol (British Library)

(Transcriber's Notes: Notice the author's name does not appear on the title page or on the cover, and in fact it is only given as T. Hughes at the end of his preface and nowhere else. Sydney Hall, 1842-1922, did portraits, newspaper and magazine illustrations, but oddly enough there are none to be found in the Lovell produced book, though the Porter & Coates edition has one unattributed woodcut)

Printed and Bound by Donohue & Henneberry, Chicago

(Transcriber's Note: Donahue & Henneberry were in business 1871-99 doing book binding and printing for the cheap book trade at various addresses in Chicago's business district known as the Loop, mostly on Dearborn Street.)

TOM BROWN AT OXFORD

By Thomas Hughes

Author of “Tom Brown's School Days”

Transcriber's Note:

A Short Summary, With Some Explanations of Concepts Presented by Hughes, but Not Well Defined by Him, Being Apparently Well Understood in His Day, but With Which Modern Readers May be Unfamiliar.

This is the sequel to Hughes' more successful novel Tom Brown's School Days, which told about Tom at the Rugby School from the age of 11 to 16. Now Tom is at Oxford University for a three year program of study, in which he attends class lectures and does independent reading with a tutor. A student in residence at Oxford is said to be “up” or have “come up”, and one who leaves is said to have gone “down”.

The author weaves a picture of life at Oxford University in the 1840s, where he himself was at that time, at Oriel College, where he excelled in sports rather than academics. The University is made up of a number of separate colleges, and the students form friendships within and develop a loyalty to their own college. Tom's college, St. Ambrose, is fictional. The study programs available to the students are intended to prepare them for the legal, ecclesiastical, medical and educational professions. Students who do poorly might be expected to enter the diplomatic corps or the army or navy, though a son of the aristocracy might be thrust into a minor church role. To enter into business or manufacturing engineering or the research sciences would require an inheritance or family connection.

Latin was still taught because the best literature available to them was still the ancient Greek and Roman poets and philosophers, and the legal and medical professions still used it extensively, though the ecclesiastical and educational fields had largely abandoned it.

Tom finds that there is a social barrier between the wealthy students and the students that are there on the equivalent of a modern academic scholarship, or have to work as a graduate student tutor to earn their stipend. There were no sports scholarships at this time, though the author hints vaguely at one point that someday the idea could be explored.

There were no female students at this time. Tom becomes involved with a local barmaid. The barmaid being of a different social class than Tom, this relationship causes problems for both of them, and it is important for the modern reader to realize that such social distinctions were very real and inflexible in those days. The working class referred to the educated class as their “betters”, meaning better educated and entitled to better respect, regardless of whether it was earned or deserved.

There were no dormitories and self-serve cafeterias as with modern colleges, instead meals were served in a dining hall by scouts, and each student gets what are called “rooms”, consisting of a bedroom and a sitting room for study and entertaining. “Scouts” are a kind of servant attached to one student or a small number of students. They run errands, bring meals from the kitchen, and take care of clothing. A bootblack called the “boots” takes care of footwear. A charwoman called the “char” cleaned the rooms.

If a student wished to study without interruption, he would close the oak door to his rooms, which was called “sporting his oak”, the signal not to disturb.

The term “the eleven” refers to the cricket team, and “prize-men” refers to students who win prizes for scholarship. “Hunting Pinks” are red riding jackets, and “hunters” are horses especially suited to steeplechase or fox hunting type riding.

The Boating Club and Boat Racing is the popular sport of crew rowing or sculling, where each college appoints a crew of eight strong scull pullers or oarsmen and one small coxswain or steersman to pilot a long narrow boat called a skiff or shell. The coxswain calls the strokes and is generally the coach and commander of the crew. Unlike in a canoe, the pullers face backwards, and the one nearest the coxswain is called the “stroke oar”, because all the other oars watch him and match his stroke. The racing takes place on the river which runs through Oxford, and since because of the oars the river is too narrow for normal passing as in most other kinds of racing, the race is sometimes with just two boats, one ahead of the other. If the prow of the second boat touches the stern of the first boat, the second boat is considered the winner and advances in ranking. If the first boat rows the length of the course without being bumped, it is considered the winner and maintains its ranking. Sometimes the winning crewmen put their little coxswain in the boat and parade him

through the streets of the town. At the end of the season the honor of “Head of the River” belongs to the boat that has not been defeated and is presumably the fastest, whereas the slowest boat, Tail End Charlie, has been defeated by all the other colleges. For another description of boating on the Thames in the nineteenth century, see the humorous travel-log “Three Men in a Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog” by Jerome K. Jerome, written in 1889, which also mentions the dangers of the lasher at the Sandford Lock.

Students were required to wear the traditional student's gown and mortarboard cap to classes. Professors wore floppy caps and similar gowns with indications of their rank on the sleeves, Doctor, Master or Batchelor. This garb dates from the Middle Ages, but is now only seen at Graduation Day and special university occasions, and the gown has survived in some church choirs. A professor was also called a don, and graduate assistants were called fellows or servitors.

The “tufts” or students from the nobility or titled families were a privileged set, paid double fees and were not required to do much of anything academically. Gentlemen-commoners were from the untitled but wealthy families and also paid double fees. A few students from poorer social classes were accepted if they had good references. “Town and Gown” refers to the animosity between the local permanent residents of the town and the rowdy students, occasionally descending into actual fist fights. To be “gated” was to be confined to college and to be “rusticated” was to be suspended from college.

A “wine” is the nineteenth century equivalent of a student's beer and pizza party, though it seems to have been paid for entirely out of the pocket of the host. It is also a form of student networking, wherein they build relationships useful for their future business, professional or social life. German university students joined a Kadet Korps, which was somewhat like a combination of a modern day fraternity and Officer's Training Corps, but no such equivalent seems to have been at Oxford. Instead there was an academic set called the “reading men” which buckled down to the books, and a set of “fast men” who lived the dissipated high life of drinking, gambling, women and riding fast horses. The fast set, though they were gentleman commoners and not titled nobility, usually were from wealthy families, and often ran up large bills with the local tradesmen, called “going tick”, which could go unpaid for quite a long time.

In Chapter 14 the author mentions Big Ben, but this is not the clock tower bell in London, which at the time of writing had not yet been rung; instead this is Benjamin Caunt, the bare-knuckle boxer who defeated William Thompson in 75 rounds to become Heavyweight Champion of England in 1838. The bell may possibly have been named after him.

It should be remembered that at the time this story was written, the dangers of tobacco smoke were mostly unknown, and cigars, cheroots and pipes were quite commonly used, though the cigarette had not come into use yet. Tobacco, often called weed, was only discouraged during physical training, thus at one point in Chapter 15 Tom recommends smoking to Hardy for an almost therapeutic purpose.

In Chapter 17 the author imagines a flying machine, though at the time of writing only balloons had ever carried men aloft. He imagines it something like a carriage equipped to carry passengers, with the most comfortable carriage type C-springs, steam powered, and faster than the latest trains, which at that time went 40 miles per hour, the fastest speed that anyone had ever achieved.

The author mentions Tractarians and Germanizers. The Tractarians were a group of Oxford dons who, in the 1840s, wrote a series of tracts, aimed at proposing some changes to the theological system of the Anglican Church. Germanizers proposed some changes more along the lines of the Lutheran theology, and these controversies occupied the Anglican theologians of the time. The author did not expand on these subjects, nor even indicate his support or opposition to them, as it was not necessary for the story.

At this time, as in many other times, the evangelical Christians were in the forefront of movements to help poor and downtrodden people, but other elements were attempting to become involved, promoting their own methods and beliefs. Karl Marx was not known in England, and the Russian Revolution was still in the distant future, but a few radical left-wing idealists know as Chartists and Swings were beginning to be heard on campus, and Tom gets briefly involved with them, speaking up for the poor, but realizes their destructive ideas cannot be reconciled with proper Christian behavior, thus voicing some of the author's views on social reforms. The author later in life got involved with a communal living experiment.

Some words and expressions are used differently today than they were used in the nineteenth century. For example, when Tom says “There must always be some blackguards,” he means “Regrettably there will always be blackguards,” not “We ought to have some blackguards”. Katie and Tom discuss “profane” poetry, in the sense of being secular and not sacred or religious. Mary weighs “8 stone”, which is 112 pounds or 50 kilograms, and “famously” is used in the sense of being well done, not in the incorrect modern use of being well known. A “twelve-horse screw” is the propeller of a steam launch. To “give someone a character” is to speak or write about their moral character, either favorably or slanderously.

The book which I scanned using Optical Character Recognition was printed in the 1888-92 period by John W. Lovell of 150 Worth St. New York. Lovell has been described as a book pirate who tried to form a monopoly in the cheap uncopyrighted book trade. The US copyright laws were rather weak in the nineteenth century, and Charles Dickens was particularly hurt by pirates. There was even a book war, with rival publishers of the same book undercutting each other on price. Proof reading was done with another copy of the book published in 1888 by Porter & Coates of Philadelphia, which is in poorer condition with water damage, and would not scan well, but has fewer typesetting errors.

Nineteenth century punctuation made much more use of commas, hyphens and semicolons, and these have been retained as much as possible. British spellings of words such as colour, neighbour, odour, and flavour are retained, though in some cases the American publisher seems to have made his own corrections as he saw fit, and some words such as “connection” have retained the nineteenth century spelling “connexion”, but where a word was obviously spelled wrong by the typesetter, I have corrected it. The author used a few Greek words, which do not scan, and I have entered those manually using Symbol font for the rtf file, but substituted normal characters for the plain txt file and indicated [Greek text] where appropriate. The English pound symbol cannot be expressed in ASCII, so 25 pounds is rendered as 25L. Words printed in italics for emphasis are here rendered with underscores for the ASCII file.

Robert E. Reilly, PE, BSIE, BSME

Chicago, 2008

INITIUM

Tom Brown at Oxford

Thomas Hughes (1822-96)

Author's Dedication

To the Rev. F. D. Maurice, in memory of fourteen years' fellow work, and in testimony of ever increasing affection and gratitude this volume is dedicated by

The Author.

PREFACE

Prefaces written to explain the objects and meaning of a book, or to make any appeal, ad miseracordiam or other, in its favor, are, in my opinion, nuisances. Any book worth reading will explain its own objects and meaning, and the more it is criticized and turned inside out, the better for it and its author. Of all books, too, it seems to me that novels require prefaces least—at any rate, on their first appearance. Notwithstanding which belief, I must ask readers for three minutes' patience before they make trial of this book.

The natural pleasure which I felt at the unlooked for popularity of the first part of the present story, was much lessened by the pertinacity with which many persons, acquaintance as well as strangers, would insist (both in public and in private) on identifying the hero and the author. On the appearance of the first few numbers of the present continuation in Macmillan's Magazine, the same thing occurred, and, in fact, reached such a pitch, as to lead me to make some changes to the story. Sensitiveness on such a point may seem folly, but if the readers had felt the sort of loathing and disgust which one feels at the notion of painting a favorable likeness of oneself in a work of fiction, they would not wonder at it. So, now that this book is finished and Tom Brown, so far as I am concerned, is done with for ever, I must take this, my first and last chance of saying, that he is not I, either as boy or man—in fact, not to beat about the bush, is a much braver, and nobler, and purer fellow than I ever was.

When I first resolved to write the book, I tried to realize to myself what the commonest type of English boy of the upper middle class was, so far as my experience went; and to that type I have throughout adhered, trying simply to give a good specimen of the genus. I certainly have placed him in the country, and scenes which I know best myself, for the simple reason, that I knew them better than any others, and therefore was less likely to blunder in writing about them.

As to the name, which has been, perhaps, the chief “cause of offense,” in this matter, the simple facts are, that I chose the name “Brown,” because it stood first in the trio of “Brown, Jones, and Robinson,” which had become a sort of synonym for the middle classes of Great Britain. It happens that my own name and that of Brown have no single letter in common. As to the Christian name of “Tom,” having chosen Brown, I could hardly help taking it as the prefix. The two names have gone together in England for two hundred years, and the joint name has not enjoyed much of a reputation for respectability. This suited me exactly. I wanted the commonest name I could get, and did not want any name which had the least heroic, or aristocratic, or even respectable savor about it. Therefore I had a natural leaning to the combination which I found ready to my hand. Moreover, I believed “Tom” to be a more specially English name than John, the only other as to which I felt the least doubt. Whether it be that Thomas a Beckett was for so long the favorite English saint, or

from whatever other cause, it certainly seems to be the fact, that the name “Thomas,” is much commoner in England than in any other country. The words, “tom-fool,”

“tom-boy,” etc., though, perhaps not complimentary to the “Tom's” of England, certainly show how large a family they must have been. These reasons decided me to keep the Christian name which had been always associated with “Brown”; and I own that the fact that it happened to be my own, never occurred to me as an objection, till the mischief was done, past recall.

I have only, then, to say, that neither is the hero a portrait of myself, nor is there any other portrait in either of the books, except in the case of Dr. Arnold, where the true name is given. My deep feeling of gratitude to him, and reverence for his memory, emboldened me to risk the attempt at a portrait in his case, so far as the character was necessary for the work. With these remarks, I leave this volume in the hands of readers.

T. Hughes

Lincoln's Inn,

October, 1861

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER I—ST. AMBROSE'S COLLEGE

CHAPTER II—A ROW ON THE RIVER

CHAPTER III—A BREAKFAST AT DRYSDALE'S

CHAPTER IV—THE ST. AMBROSE BOAT CLUB: ITS MINISTERY AND THEIR BUDGET.

CHAPTER V—HARDY, THE SERVITOR

CHAPTER VI—HOW DRYSDALE AND BLAKE WENT FISHING

CHAPTER VII—AN EXPLOSION

CHAPTER VIII—HARDY'S HISTORY

CHAPTER IX—“A BROWN BAIT.”

CHAPTER X—SUMMER TERM

CHAPTER XI—MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY

CHAPTER XII—THE CAPTAIN'S NOTIONS

CHAPTER XIII—THE FIRST BUMP

CHAPTER XIV—A CHANGE IN THE CREW, AND WHAT CAME OF IT

CHAPTER XV—A STORM BREWS AND BREAKS

CHAPTER XVI—THE STORM RAGES

CHAPTER XVII—NEW GROUND

CHAPTER XVIII—ENGLEBOURNE VILLAGE

CHAPTER XIX—A PROMISE OF FAIRER WEATHER

CHAPTER XX—THE RECONCILIATION

CHAPTER XXI—CAPTAIN HARDY ENTERTAINED BY ST. AMBROSE.

CHAPTER XXII—DEPARTURES EXPECTED AND UNEXPECTED

CHAPTER XXIII—THE ENGLEBOURN CONSTABLE

CHAPTER XXIV—THE SCHOOLS.

CHAPTER XXV—COMMEMORATION

CHAPTER XXVI—THE LONG WALK IN CHRISTCHURCH MEADOWS

CHAPTER XXVII—LECTURING A LIONESS

CHAPTER XXVIII—THE END OF THE FRESHMAN'S YEAR

CHAPTER XXIX—THE LONG VACATION LETTER-BAG.