Tom Brown's School Days

Tom Brown, the son of a country squire, is sent to Rugby School as a boy, where he finds a world of its own: wild games of football, fights, boyish loyalties and the terror of the bully Flashman, who roasts him in front of a fire. Under the eye of the great headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold, Tom grows from a careless, rough young rebel into a responsible young man, above all after he is asked to look after a gentle, sickly new boy, George Arthur.

Thomas Hughes (1822–1896) had been a pupil at Rugby under Arnold, and he published the novel in 1857. It created the school story as a genre and shaped the ideal of the English public school for a century; its villain Flashman was later turned into the roguish hero of George MacDonald Fraser's comic novels. Compare Little Men.