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The night before Tom Brown starts school at Rugby he and his father, Squire Brown, stay at the Peacock Inn in Islington. While Tom sleeps upstairs, the Squire smokes a cheroot in the snug, musing on how to advise his son about life at school: "Shall I tell him to mind his work, and say he's sent to school to make himself a good scholar? Well but he isn't sent to school for that - at any rate, not for that mainly. I don't care a straw for Greek particles or the digamma; no more does his mother [...] If he'll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman and a gentleman and a Christian, that's all I want." (Sanders (ed.) 1989: 73-4). For the Squire, the classical curriculum is not an end in itself. He stresses instead morals, manners, religious observance, and patriotism as the desirable outcomes of a public school education. Tom will indeed 'turn out' from Rugby having demonstrated that he has all these virtues. But, though he will be a 'truth-telling Englishman', he will not be a scholar. Yet it is scholarship in public school stories that I examine in this article, for, though Tom Brown does not become a 'good scholar', "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and other novels like it take care to emphasize the importance of good scholarship, particularly scholarship in Latin and Greek, in forming good character. |
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