In America, a public school is a school for the people, where free instruction is given to all alike; but the English public school is another thing. It is a school for gentlemen’s sons, where tuition fees are far from small, and “extras” mount up on the yearly bills.
Rugby had become a very celebrated school when the great Dr. Arnold was Head-Master. Up to that time it was neither so well known nor so popular as Eton, but Dr. Arnold had governed it so vigorously that his hand was felt long after his untimely death, which occurred just four years before Charles was ready to enter the school. The Head-Master at that time was, strangely enough, named Tait, spelt a little differently from the Richmond schoolmaster. Dr. Tait, who afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury, was a most capable man, who governed the school for two of the three years that our Boy was a pupil. The last year, Dr. Goulburn was Head-Master.
Charles found Rugby a great change from the quiet of Richmond. He went up in February of 1846, the beginning of the second term, when football was in full swing. The teams practiced on the broad open campus known as “Big-side,” and a “new boy” could only look on and applaud the great creatures who led the game. Rugby was swarming with boys—three hundred at least—from small fourteen-year-olders of the lowest “form,” or class, to those of eighteen or twenty of the fifth and sixth, the highest forms. They treated little Dodgson in their big, burly, schoolboy fashion, hazed him to their hearts’ content when he first entered, shrugging their shoulders good-naturedly over his love of study, in preference to the great games of cricket and football.
To have a fair glimpse of our Boy’s life at this period, some little idea of Rugby and its surroundings might serve as a guide. Those who visit the school to-day, with its pile of modern, convenient, and ugly architecture, have no conception of what it was over sixty years ago, and even in 1846 it bore no resemblance to the original school founded by one Lawrence Sheriffe, “citizen and grocer of London” during the reign of Henry VIII. To begin with, it is situated in Shakespeare’s own country, Warwickshire on the Avon River, and that in itself was enough to rouse the interest of any musing, bookish boy like Charles Dodgson.
From “Tom Brown’s School Days,” that ever popular book by Thomas Hughes, we may perhaps understand the feelings of the “new boy” just passing through the big, imposing school gates, with the oriel window above, and entering historic Rugby.
What first struck his view was the great school field or “close” as they called it, with its famous elms, and next, “the long line of gray buildings, beginning with the chapel and ending with the schoolhouse, the residence of the Head-Master where the great flag was lazily waving from the highest round tower.”
As we follow Tom Brown through his first day, we can imagine our Boy’s sensations when he found himself in this howling wilderness of boys. The eye of a boy is as keen as that of a girl regarding dress, and before Tom Brown was allowed to enter Rugby gates he was taken into the town and provided with a cat-skin cap, at seven and sixpence.
“‘You see,’ said his friend as they strolled up toward the school gates, in explanation of his conduct, ‘a great deal depends on how a fellow cuts up at first. If he’s got nothing odd about him and answers straightforward, and holds his head up, he gets on.’”
Having passed the gates, Tom was taken first to the matron’s room, to deliver up his trunk key, then on a tour of inspection through the schoolhouse hall which opened into the quadrangle. This was “a great room, thirty feet long and eighteen high or thereabouts, with two great tables running the whole length, and two large fireplaces at the side with blazing fires in them.”
This hall led into long dark passages with a fire at the end of each, and this was the hallway upon which the studies opened.