Thomas Hughes

Thomas Hughes was born on 20 October 1822 at Uffington in Berkshire (now in Oxfordshire), the second son of John Hughes. He had six brothers and a sister, Jane, who became Britain's first female civil servant. After prep school at Twyford, near Winchester, he went in 1834 to Rugby School under its headmaster Thomas Arnold. He excelled at sport rather than scholarship, and at Oriel College, Oxford, he played cricket for the university at Lord's.

He was called to the bar in 1848, the year he joined the Christian socialism movement led by Frederick Maurice, and in 1882 he became a county court judge. In 1854 he helped found the Working Men's College in London, later serving as its principal. He sat in Parliament as a Liberal from 1865 to 1874, helped improve the legal position of co-operatives, and in 1880 founded Rugby, Tennessee, a settlement in America designed as an experiment in utopian living.

Hughes wrote Tom Brown's School Days while living at Wimbledon, and it was published in April 1857. His brother George, also educated at Rugby, was the model for Tom Brown, and both brothers had great respect for Thomas Arnold. A sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, followed in 1861. He also wrote The Scouring of the White Horse (1859), a novel about the village festival for cleaning the Uffington White Horse.

Hughes died of heart failure at Brighton on 22 March 1896, aged 73. A statue of him by Thomas Brock stands outside Rugby School Library.

Sources: wikipedia.org