Born, at Uffington, Berks, 20 Oct. 1823. At school at Twyford, 1830–33; at Rugby, 1833–41; Matric. Oriel Coll., Oxford, 2 Dec. 1841; B.A., 1845. Student of Lincoln’s Inn, 21 Jan. 1845; removed to Inner Temple, 18 Jan. 1848; called to Bar there, 28 Jan. 1848. Married Anne Frances Ford, 17 Aug. 1847. F.S.A., 22 March 1849; resigned 1854. M.P. for Lambeth, 1865–68; for Frome, 1868–74. Q.C., 23 June 1869. Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, 31 May 1870. Visit to U.S.A., 1870. Founded Colony of Rugby, Tennessee, 1880. Judge of County Court Circuit No. 9, July 1882. Died, at Brighton, 22 March 1896. Works: “History of the Working Tailors’ Association, 34, Great Castle Street” (under initial: H.) [1850]; “A Lecture on the Slop System,” 1852; “Tom Brown’s School Days” (anon.), 1857; “The Scouring of the White Horse” (anon.), 1859 [1858]; “Account of the Lock-out of Engineers,” 1860; “Tom Brown at Oxford,” 1861; “Religio Laici,” 1861 (another edn., called “A Layman’s Faith,” 1868); “The Cause of Freedom,” 1863; “Alfred the Great,” 1869; “Memoir of a Brother,” 2nd edn., 1873; “Lecture on the History and Objects of Co-operation,” 1878; “The Old Church: What shall we do with it?” 1878; “The Manliness of Christ,” 1879; “Rugby, Tennessee,” 1881; “A Memoir of Daniel Macmillan,” 1882; “Address … on the occasion of … a testimonial, etc.,” 1885; “James Fraser, second Bishop of Manchester,” 1887; “Co-operative Production” [1887]; “David Livingstone,” 1889; “Vacation Rambles” (from “Spectator”), 1895. He edited: Whitmore’s “Gilbert Marlowe,” 1859; Lowell’s “Biglow Papers,” 1859; the Comte de Paris’ “Trade Unions of England,” 1869; Philpot’s “Guide Book to the Canadian Dominion,” 1871; Maurice’s “The Friendship of Books,” 1874; Kingsley’s “Alton Locke,” 1876; “A Manual for Co-operators” (with E. V. Neale), 1881; “Gone to Texas,” 1884; Lowell’s “Poetical Works,” 1891; Marriott’s “Charles Kingsley,” 1892.

Personal

  Hughes is an excellent fellow, very plain, unsophisticated and jolly, of course full of talent. He is not a professional author, but a working barrister. His wife is a pretty and pleasing person, and they live in a pretty cottage near Wimbledon Common.

  If it is proved that Hughes must lose his reputation at the Bar by taking the course which helped to win Jeffrey and Brougham much of theirs, do not let him enter upon it. If the Review interferes in the least with his practice, he must hold to his first vows and break the latter. But I think, and shall continue to think, that he is almost an ideal editor, because he is an honest free man, tied to no notions and theories about books, able to judge what is worthy to go forth whether he agrees with it or not; one who will fearlessly admonish a contributor, and never dictate or be squeamish. He will of course not review the current literature. Many can be got to do that. He will speak what he knows and nothing else. He says he wishes to preach, and he ought to have a pulpit if one can be found for him.

  He is universally esteemed for the nobleness of his nature, for his robust intellect, and his liberal culture. His own manly traits are fully evident in the tone of his delightful books.

  It would be hard to find a finer type of English character than Thomas Hughes. His faults were only those of temperament and intellect. He was hasty; he was oversanguine. He might let fly a hard word; he was incapable of harbouring an evil thought or feeling. He was often taken in by rogues; with anything savouring to him of dishonesty he never made terms. No one who had any genuineness in him could know him without loving him. And to how many, who never saw the man in the flesh, has he made himself beloved through his books? Surely there were never any written through which the author revealed himself so utterly, without anything of conscious self-portraiture.

  In the House of Commons the line he took was definitely that of a reformer, and especially of a friend of the working classes; a trades union bill he introduced was read a second time on 7 July 1869, but made no further progress. He was not a very successful speaker, and, though greatly liked and respected, he would not have been able to reach the front rank in politics. When Gladstone went over to home rule for Ireland, Hughes’s opposition to that policy was touched with indignation, and he became a vehement liberal unionist. In 1869 he was chairman of the first co-operative congress, and spoke against the tendency to shelve “productive” co-operation, which he never ceased to denounce.

Tom Brown, 1857–61

  I have often been minded to write to you about “Tom Brown,” so here goes. I have puffed it everywhere I went, but I soon found how true the adage is that good wine needs no bush, for every one had read it already, and from every one, from the fine lady on the throne, to the red-coat on his cock-horse, and the school-boy on his forrum (as our Irish brethren call it), I have but one word, and that is, that it is the jolliest book they ever read. Among a knot of red-coats at the cover-side, some very fast fellow said, “If I had such a book in my boyhood, I should have been a better man now!” and more than one capped his sentiment frankly. Now isn’t it a comfort to your old bones to have written such a book, and a comfort to see that fellows are in a humour to take it in?

  Just behind me is the portrait of some fine oaks painted for me by an artist friend of mine. He wanted a human figure as a standard of size, and so put me in as I lay in the shade reading. So long as the canvas lasts I shall lie there with the book in my hand, and the book is “Tom Brown.” A man cannot read a book out of doors that he does not love. Q. E. D.

  Though his one remarkable book can scarcely be called a novel, the name of Mr. Thomas Hughes, now Judge Hughes, whose “Tom Brown” was the beginning of that interest of the general public in public schools which has never flagged since then, and which made the remarkable reign of Dr. Arnold at Rugby, and his ideal of the English Schoolboy better known than the more legitimate medium of biography and descriptive history could ever have made it. “Tom Brown at Oxford” was not equally successful, but the introduction of the ideal young man of Victorian romance, the fine athlete, moderately good scholar, and honest, frank, muscular, and humble-minded gentleman, of whom we have seen so many specimens, is due to Judge Hughes more than to any other. If circumstances have occurred since to make us a little tired of that good fellow, and disposed to think his patronage of the poorer classes somewhat artificial, it is not Judge Hughes’ fault.

  All peoples who can read English, and some who cannot, have fallen under the spell of “Tom Brown’s School Days,”—generally in those plastic years of the early teens when the deepest and most lasting impressions may result from such winning sermons as Judge Hughes cunningly worked into that classic. Robinson Crusoe and “Tom Brown” are our boy epics. Critics who can be suspected of no envy have found that Mr. Hughes’ masterpiece was “thin,” that its humor was false, that its style was naught, that the standards of boy-excellence were beefy and unfeeling; but after forty years, the story of Rugby life still furnishes the one pre-eminent example of the schoolboy in fiction. It has even been translated into French—how the pupils of a lycée can understand it, much less like it, is a mystery; and if any final evidence is needed of its triumphant and irresistible veracity, one need only add that the English boys of the rival public schools admit its sovereignty.

  On one such occasion the talk fell on children’s books, and Hughes said that he had often thought that good might be done by a real novel for boys—not didactic, like “Sandford and Merton”—written in a right spirit, but distinctly aiming at being interesting. I agreed with him. He then went on to say that he had tried his hand on the thing, but did not know whether it was worth publishing. Sometimes he thought it was, and sometimes that it wasn’t. Would I mind looking at what he had written? I said that I should be very glad; and either that night or the next, I forget now which, he put into my hands a portion of “Tom Brown.” I read it, I own, with amazement. God forgive me, but, notwithstanding his tract, his various articles in the “Christian Socialist” and “Journal of Association,” his “Lecture on the Slop System,” I had in nowise realized his literary power. I found, now, that I was reading a work of absorbing interest, which would place its writer on the front rank in contemporary literature. As I handed it back to him, I said, “Tom, this must be published.” He left it, within the next day or two, with Alexander Macmillan, who, after writing to me on the subject, gave him a favorable answer…. “Tom Brown’s School Days” came out in April, 1857. No author’s name was on the title-page; it had to fight its way by its own merits. To these some of the critics were simply blind, treating the volume as a mere child’s book. But in three months a second edition had to be issued (July), a third two months later (September), others in the following and next following months, making five in nine months; and the number of editions since then is almost beyond reckoning.

  This book is Hughes’s chief title to distinction. His object in writing it was to do good. He had no literary ambition, and no friend of his had ever thought of him as an author. “Tom Brown’s School Days” is a piece of life, simply and modestly presented, with a rare humour playing all over it, and penetrated by the best sort of English religious feeling. And the life was that which is peculiarly delightful to the whole English-speaking race—that of rural sport and the public school. The picture was none the less welcome, and is none the less interesting now, because there was a good deal that was beginning to pass away in the life that it depicts. The book was written expressly for boys, and it would be difficult to measure the good influence which it has exerted upon innumerable boys by its power to enter into their ways and prejudices, and to appeal to their better instincts; but it has commended itself to readers of all ages, classes, and characters. The author was naturally induced to go on writing, and his subsequent books, such as “The Scouring of the White Horse” (1859) and “Tom Brown at Oxford” (1861) are not without the qualities of which the “School Days” had given evidence; but it was the conjunction of the subject and the author’s gifts that made the first book unique.