Tom Brown's School Days , first published in 1857, was far from the first book about life at school - Sarah Fielding's The Governess or The Little Female Academy from 1749 is often cited as the earliest example. It has, however, been one of the most influential. The original version is long and long-winded and probably very infrequently read by children today, although it remains in print as an Oxford World's Classic and there was a TV film made as recently as 2005. Much of its interest to modern readers lies in its depiction of life at Rugby, one of England's best known public schools. The author, Thomas Hughes, had attended the school in the 1830s. He claimed that the book was not strictly speeaking autobiographical but there is no doubt that he drew on his own memories in his depiction of day to day life (Richards, 1988).
Food in Tom’s early life
It actually takes about a quarter of the book before Tom gets to Rugby School. Before that, we see a little of life in his village ‘at the foot of the White Horse Range ’(p.31). There is a feast day, where every house has a feast cake, ‘very solid and full of large raisins’ with a bottle of ginger or raisin wine. Other festive items can be purchased at a stall run by Angel Heavens, which sells cakes decorated in gold: ‘There was more gold on Angel’s cakes than there is ginger in those of this degenerate age’ (p.35). The lengthiest description of food in the whole book is the breakfast that Tom has in an inn on his first journey to Rugby – from a huge selection of hot meats, eggs, toast and muffins, Tom chooses to eat kidney and pigeon pie ‘till his little skin is as tight as a drum’ (p.87). He drinks coffee rather than tea because ‘coffee is a treat to him, tea is not’ (p.87). At this time, tea was far from a luxury good, and was widely drunk in even the poorest households. Why Hughes wanted to include all these details isn’t really clear: perhaps he was trying to show that Tom had a good life before some of his tougher times at Rugby. Maybe he just hadn’t yet hit his stride and found his focus.
School meals at Rugby
Rugby clearly provided the boys with food at set meals – there are references to breakfasts, dinners and suppers. There are sadly no specific details about the breakfasts. We do have a description of Tom’s dinner on his first day. This is a mid-day meal, eaten at a quarter past one. The boys are provided with a large joint – no accompaniments are specified. Some of them bring in their own ‘pickles and sauce bottles’ (p.105) to make it more interesting. Supper on this day is at seven o'clock, and the food is bread and cheese.. On one other occasion, we learn that the boys are eating beef and pickles. It all seems very carbohydrate and protein heavy by modern standards - but we don't know what vegetables were also being eaten. We do learn at one point that the boys eat some fruit after a sports match. These school meals seem to be rather unregulated and chaotic affairs with the table headed by a senior pupil who spends his time reading a book. The supper descends into a rather raucous singing party.
Extra Food at Rugby
The boys have their own money and often choose to spend it on pretty substantial items of extra food, for example for a mid-afternoon ‘tea’. There is a shop which the boys view as their ‘tuck shop’ run by Sally Harrowell, who was a real person (Richards, 1988). Sally offers the boys ‘tick’ or credit when they are running short of funds. She is well known for selling baked potatoes. The boys supplement these with sausages from another shop and toast these in their rooms. There is a system of ‘fagging’ in place, where younger boys have to carry out tasks for the older ones; these might include cooking food such as this.
Drinking
The modern reader might find the amount of beer the boys drink quite surprising. There are jugs of it on the table at meals. This was not unusual in this period. This is confirmed by memoirs, such as that of William Hill Tucker ‘An Old Colleger’ who was at Eton in the early nineteenth century (1892). Despite an intriguing mention of ‘cocktails’ on one occasion, Tom’s Head of House (the older pupil) warns them away from other alcoholic drink: ‘You get plenty of good beer here and that’s enough for you; and drinking isn’t fine or manly, whatever some of you may think of it.’(p.137). The temperance movement was very strong at the time Hughes was writing the book, and this may be some concession to this.
In later boarding school stories, many of which drew inspiration from Tom Brown’s School Days, food is often an important element of the story and a vital emotional barometer (Leotescu, 2022). Horrible food represents a generally horrible experience; good times are represented by treats from home and the midnight feast. This is not really what Hughes is doing here. Almost all of the descriptions of food come early in the book, when we are learning how Rugby works as a school; as the novel progresses, the author seems to lose interest in the theme. Perhaps this is all the more reason for us to trust this as a reasonably accurate description. This rambunctious food culture, where the boys had so much freedom to make their own choices, does seem to equate to the lived reality of this privileged group of young nineteenth-century men.
References
An Old Colleger (1892) Eton of Old, or Eighty Years Since, 1811-1821, London: Griffith Farran and Company.
Hughes, T. (1857) Tom Brown's School Days, 3rd edn, Cambridge: MacMillan.
Leotescu, G. (2022) 'The School Story as a Literary Genre', International Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Science, vol 1, no. 4, pp. 228-235
Richards, J. (1988) Happiest Days: The Public School in English Fiction, Manchester: Manchester University Press
Picture Credit
Illustration from "Tom Brown's School Days" (1869). Available at Wikimedia Commons at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chapter_1_-_Tom_Brown%27s_School_Days_(1869).jpg
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