School Days, Golden School Days

IN PRODUCING AN ADAPTATION of Tom Brown's School Days the British Broadcasting Corporation faced a problem a bit different from the ones it dealt with succesfully in its series on the wives of Henry VIII, which appeared in this country last summer. It was possible to reconstruct the lives of the wives from a variety of sources; Tom Brown's School Days is a fairly well-known book, and any television serial that borrows its title invites a fairly stiff comparison.

In TV's version, Tom Brown's schooldays are briefer and follow a clear-cut development. Tom goes off to school and after a series of squabbles, battles and fights, some humiliating and some victorious, he vanquishes his oppressor, the prototypical cad, Flashman. Flashman, the school bully, was the subject of a Howard Hughes-like book of biography a few years ago, and he has endured at least as well as has Tom Brown himself as a model Victorian social leper.

Tom's conflict with Flashman stems from an altercation between Flashman, Sr. and young Tom before Tom ever set foot on Rugby soil, Flashman, Jr. is an evil, scheming individual, but he is his father's running dog, following orders and not just a rotten school bully. And much of the skirmishing between Flashman and Tom takes place outside of Rugby, involving outside allies that Flashman drags in to bedevil Tom. Rugby school plays a much smaller role in the TV serial than it did in Thomas Hughes's nineteenth century novel. The school is only an arena; it is not Tom's selfcontained universe.

Child-acting is always a hard thing to really condemn or praise, but as Tom Brown, Anthony Murphy manages the very difficult task of not jarring any preconceived notions about what Tom should be like that someone who's read the book might bring to the program. He and Simon Turner, who plays Tom's chum, Ned East, are both remarkably unmannered and seem very comfortable in their roles.

Richard Morant, as Gerald Flashman, is an ideal smirking cruel dandy, and Iain Cuthbertson, as the headmaster Doctor Arnold, presents an acceptable outward resemblance to the pious Victorian reformer. But in attempting to portray Arnold at all on television, problems arise that Hughes never faced in his novel. On a TV screen there is no way to show the headmaster as he appeared to a 12-year-old boy. So taking refuge in a stereotype is pardonable, even if the stereotype is something of a distortion.

Tom Brown's School Days is a bizarre little period piece for a number of reasons. It is a schoolboy novel, and its focus is entirely on games, character-development, and athletic prowess. The TV serial's modest adventures into sex are nonexistent in Hughes's novel. But the virtues the novel is meant to inculcate are a bit different from the ones implicit in most modern children's fiction.

There isn't, for example, the same emphasis on winning. A sports story today would not likely end with the hero QB getting sacked in the Super Bowl or a pitcher who got shelled off the mound in the World Series. But Tom Brown, Captain of the School in the final cricket match of the book, manages to lose the game. But without things like pro contracts, playing games without winning made more sense.

HUGHES WASN'T A LITERARY MAN, and he lacked the Victorian preoccupation with searching that better writers possessed. But his almost innocent and completely straightforward pride in things like the British Empire is very revealing of one part of the Victorian attitude. And the book's final and complete commitment to the combination of gentlemanly Christianity as a mirror for rulers--even on a level meant for a nine year-old--is a far cry from much that this century, including the BBC's Tom Brown's School Days is quite willing to represent.

The book is a little mine of information on the rising English middle class. Whatever else the public school was, it was a method of producing a ruling middle class, and Tom Brown's school days are obviously a preliminary to a commission in the army, a three year stint at Oxbridge, or a spot secure in the Church of England hierarchy. And whatever the rest of Thomas Hughes's sentiments, that struck him as being the right way for things to be.