Tom Brown's Schooldays

Tom Brown's Schooldays, first published in 1857, is a novel by Thomas Hughes, set at a public school, Rugby School for Boys, in the 1830s when Hughes himself had been a student there.

Language

Much of the language and sentence construction are the very epitome of mid-Victorian obfuscation. It is singularly dense and impenetrable, with complex and interweaving sub-clauses, and is rife with what now appear to be condescending references to 'Gentle readers' etc. The characters sometimes sound like real boys, but sometimes reach heights of eloquence that would do credit to a successful preacher. This, however, went with the territory in much of the writing of the time, and it took writers of the calibre of Dickens and Hardy to break these self-inflicted linguistic shackles, to demonstrate that, as le Corbusier was to later put it, 'Less is more'. In this respect, therefore, it should be considered that Tom Brown's Schooldays is representative and indicative of a much broader style of writing.

Related Topics:
Dickens - Hardy - Le Corbusier

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~