The School Book he owned at Rugby when the same age as his creation Tom Brown. annotated with Thomas Hughes own drawings redolant of the life & times of both Thomas Hughes and Tom Brown.

This is the actual school book owned by Thomas Hughes who wrote the autobiographical work "Tom Brown's Schooldays" about his days at Rugby. The book is "Aristotles De Rhetorica" and was published in 1833, the same year that Thomas Hughes went to Rugby. At the top of the title page it is signed "Thos Hughes Rugby". What is more interesting is that this book contains interleaving blank pages for translation. The first few pages contain the diligent translation efforts of Hughes. However Hughes was no great scholar despite the personal tutoring he received on his Aristotle from Dr Arnold and subsequent pages contain the sketches & doodlings of Hughes. There are about thirty drawings all told in the book by Hughes. There are boxers, as one would expect, because in Tom Browns schooldays Hughes wrote about the current boxing matches and he became a good amateur boxer himself. There are carriage drivers, horses (reminiscent of the white Horse an influence on Hughes from his native Berkshire) and hunting. There are also characters including an in idle smoking youth, Flashman perhaps. Most interesting is a little doodle entitled "Donnington Priory", which is where in fact Thomas Hughes lived as a boy. One can imagine the homesick boy doodling in his schoolbook as Dr Arnold quoted at length on Aristotle's philosophy. To me this book represents a piece of the English Speaking worlds cultural history. It is Tom Brown's own book. It is our only insight into Hughes as a boy and a newly discovered glimpse into a lost world. It is Hughes as a boy who was to become an important populariser of the English public school and the English way of life. In his later life he became a socialist and founded his own town "Rugby" in the USA. Tom Brown's Schooldays is probably the most important & popular boys school story ever and this book represents the real Tom Brown. …