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THOMAS HUGHES (1822-1896)

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Originally appearing in Volume V13, Page 861 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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THOMAS HUGHES (1822-1896)  ,
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English lawyer and author, second son of John Hughes of Donnington Priory, editor of The Boscobel Tracts (1830), was born at Uffington, Berks, on the loth of
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October 1822 . In
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February 1834 he went to
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Rugby School, to be under Dr Arnold, a contemporary of his
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father at Oriel . He rose steadily to the
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sixth form, where he came into contact with the headmaster whom he afterwards idealized; but he excelled rather in sports than in scholarship, and his school career culminated in a cricket match at Lord's . In 1842 he proceeded to Oriel, Oxford, and graduated B.A. in 1845 . He was called to the bar in 1848, became Q.C. in 1869, a bencher in 1870, and was appointed to a county court judgeship in the Chester
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district in
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July 1882 . While at Lincoln's
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Inn he came under the dominating influence of his
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life, that of Frederick Denison Maurice . In 1848 he joined the Christian Socialists, under Maurice's banner, among his closest allies being Charles Kingsley . In
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January 18J4 he was one of the
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original promoters of the Working Men's College in
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Great
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Ormond Street, and whether he was speaking on sanitation, sparring or singing his favourite ditty of " Little Billee," his
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work there continued one of his chief interests to the end of his life . After Maurice's
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death he held the principalship of the college . His Manliness of Christ (1879) grew out of a Bible class which he held there . Hughes had been influenced mentally by Arnold, Carlyle, Thackeray, Lowell and Maurice, and had
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developed into a liberal churchman, extremely religious,with strong socialistic leanings; but the substratum was still and ever the manly country
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squire of old-fashioned, sport-loving England . In Parliament, where he sat for
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Lambeth (1865-1868), and for
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Frome (1868-1874), he reproduced some of the traits of Colonel Newcome .

Hughes was an energetic supporter of the claims of the working classes, and introduced a trades

union
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Bill which, however, only reached its second
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reading . Of Mr Gladstone's home
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rule policy he was an uncompromising opponent . Thrice he visited
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America and received a warm welcome, less as a propagandist of social reform than as a friend of Lowell and of the North, and an author . In 1879, in a sanguine humour worthy of Mark Tapley, he planned a co-operative settlement, " Rugby," in
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Tennessee, over which he lost
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money . In 1848 Hughes had married Frances, niece of Richard Ford, of
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Spanish Handbook fame . They settled in 1853 at
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Wimbledon, and there was written his famous story, Tom Brown's School-Days, " by an Old Boy" (dedicated to Mrs Arnold of Fox Howe), which came out in
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April 1857 . It is probably impossible to depict the schoolboy in his natural state and in a realistic manner; it is extremely difficult to portray him at all in such a way as to
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interest the adult . Yet this last has certainly been achieved twice in English literature—by Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby, and by Hughes in Tom Brown . In both cases interest is concentrated upon the master, in the first a demon, in the second a demigod . Tom Brown did a great
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deal to fix the English concept of what a public school should be . Hughes also wrote The Scouring of the White Horse (1859), Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Religio laici (1868), Life of
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Alfred the Great (1869) and the Memoir of a
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Brother . The brother was George Hughes, who was in the main the original " Tom Brown," just as Dean Stanley was in the main the original of " Arthur." Hughes died at
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Brighton, on 22nd March 1896 .

He was English of the English, a typical broad-churchman, full of "

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muscular
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Christianity," straightforward and unsuspicious to a fault, yet attaching a somewhat exorbitant value to " earnestness "—a favourite expression of Doctor Arnold . (T .

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