The Reverend Dr Thomas Arnold, the reforming headmaster of Rugby School, transformed ideas about education in nineteenth-century England. His influence was felt well beyond the public schools where young men from the upper and upper middle classes were trained to administer the country and, if necessary, the world. Arnold aimed to produce Christians, gentlemen and scholars, in that order of precedence. If his name is still familiar today, it is partly because it is preserved in two very different books that remain in print and are still read. Arnold, who died in 1842, was a Victorian for the last five years of his life, and he was given a sharp, dismissive chapter in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, first published in 1918, a forceful, mocking expression of the early twentieth century revolt against the Victorians and their order of things. For Strachey, the admired Dr Arnold was a posturing hypocrite who had no sense of the true values that sustain civilization.

The other work in which he appears is Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857). This enduringly popular book launched the genre of the school story which has been so influential in English literary culture. Hughes was writing out of his own experiences at Rugby, and in the latter part of his novel he presents a schoolboy's eye-view of 'The Doctor,' who appears as remote and firm but benign, a mildly god-like figure. Some passages reflect the way in which Rugby was regarded as providing an ideal preparation for running the Empire. At the end of the novel Tom Brown's chum Harry East has left school and gone out to India as an officer. The civilizing influence of Mrs Arnold in her drawing room is fondly recalled: “Aye, many is the brave heart now doing its work and bearing its load in country curacies, London chambers, under the Indian sun, and in Australian towns and clearings, which looks back with fond and grateful memory to that School-house drawing room, and dates much of its highest and best training to the lessons learnt there.” In the final pages of Tom Brown's Schooldays Dr Arnold is perceived as an emperor, wisely ruling the school: “'What a sight it is,' broke in the master, 'the Doctor as a ruler. Perhaps ours is the only little corner of the British Empire which is thoroughly wisely and strongly ruled just now. I'm more and more thankful every day of my life that I came here to be under him.'”

Dr Arnold never travelled in the Empire, but he was very interested in it, particularly in the Australasian colonies. He bought some land in New Zealand, and in 1839 he wrote to Sir Thomas Pasley, “I have often thought of New Zealand, and if they would make you Governor and me Bishop, I would go out, I think tomorrow, not to return after so many years, but to live and die there, if there was any prospect of rearing any hopeful form of society.” Arnold made no such move, but two of his sons did. His eldest and most famous son, Matthew, poet, critic, school inspector, and social commentator, showed no particular interest in the British Empire, and his travels were restricted to what was later to be called the First World: professional visits to schools in France and Germany, vacations in Switzerland, lecture tours in North America. But his second son, Thomas the Younger, always known as Tom, travelled further. Tom finished a brilliant undergraduate career at Oxford by taking a First in Classics, which was a better degree than his brother had achieved. He went to work as a preciswriter in the Colonial Office in London, and was commended for making sense of a complicated set of land claims in New Zealand. But his interest in that remote territory went further than shuffling papers; he had a passionate desire to visit it and perhaps settle there, continuing his father's interest in the Antipodean colonies. His concept of New Zealand was vague and intensely romantic, and he saw it as a potentially ideal world, a congenial territory where a community could be established that would be finer and purer than anything in contemporary England. In fact the country was chaotic and lawless, where traders and settlers and missionaries had conflicting interests, and the Maoris were resisting white rule. Crooks and opportunists abounded, but everyone was theoretically a 'free settler.' Unlike the Australian colonies, New Zealand was never a penal settlement. In 1840 the British government reluctantly made it a colony and took it over from the New Zealand Company.

Tom Arnold's close friend Arthur Hugh Clough drew on him for aspects of the idealistic radical Philip Hewson in his long narrative poem 'The Bothie of Tober Na Vuolich.' At the end of the poem Philip has married a Highland girl and set off for New Zealand. Tom had not yet married when he left England in 1847 but his departure for New Zealand is much as Clough describes it; the list of objects and impedimenta that Philip takes with him is

drawn from Tom's experience. Clough had been with him in London just before his departure and seen his cabin in the ship where he would make the several-month voyage. Tom's reasons for emigrating were idealistic and utopian, but he had a plausible reason for going: to farm the 200 acres of land that Dr Arnold had bought near present-day Wellington. When he got there he found the land was unpromising, heavily overgrown and difficult of access, and Tom found he had neither the temperament nor the skills to make a farmer. But he made a start on clearing it, with the help of a local settler from England and his sons, together with a Maori and a Tahitian. He described in a letter the Maoris' dwellings, but he does not seem to have had much contact with the indigenous population. It did not take him long to realize that, like his father, his real vocation was for teaching. He set up a school at Nelson in South Island and was struggling to make it succeed when he received a welcome invitation from the governor of the neighbouring colony of Van Diemen's Land, as Tasmania was still known at that time.

The news that a son of Dr Arnold with a first-class Oxford degree was in that part of the world and trying to run a school was inevitably of interest to people concerned with education. There was a local Rugby network available to help him; the governor, Sir William Denison, had as ADC Charles Stanley, the younger brother of Arthur Stanley, Dr Arnold's pupil and biographer and Tom's tutor at Oxford. Charles Stanley had known Tom in earlier years and he recommended him to the governor as a suitable person to fill the vacant position of director of education and inspector of schools in the colony. The governor was duly impressed and invited Tom to come to Van Diemen's Land and, in effect, see if he wanted the post. This was deliverance for Tom, who was finding little future for himself in New Zealand, even though he liked the country. In a letter to his mother he proclaimed God's goodness and the power of the Arnold name. At the beginning of 1850 Tom arrived in Van Diemen's Land, over a thousand miles to the west, to take up his new position. It was a colony with a more developed social structure than New Zealand, and it was to provide him with a wife and family, and a career that he found, for the most, interesting and rewarding. But unlike New Zealand, Van Diemen's Land had originated as a convict settlement, and the practice of transportation

was still going on when Tom arrived. It was increasingly opposed both in Britain and in Australia, but Van Diemen's Land was the last colony to abolish it, to some extent because the governor was strongly in favour of it. One of the most notorious and colourful of the transported convicts was the artist, poisoner and forger, Thomas Wainewright. There had not been enough evidence to convict him of murder, but he was condemned to transportation for forgery. Once in Van Diemen's Land he was free to live as he chose, but not to return to the United Kingdom. He opened a studio and painted Julia Sorell, a local beauty whom Tom Arnold met soon after his arrival and after a whirlwind courtship married in June 1850.

Arnold disliked the practice of transportation, as much as anything because the convicts tended to resume their criminal careers once they arrived and were at large in the colony. It was abolished after a few more years. Arnold did a good job in reorganizing the school system in the colony, and was prepared to stand his ground against the reactionary governor, who had ideas of his own about education. Despite their differences, he admired Sir William Denison as a man of action and a forceful character, in contrast to his own gentle and rather vacillating temperament. In his letters he refers unfavourably to transportation, but does not mention the greater scandal that marked the settlement of Van Diemen's Land, the genocidal extermination of the aboriginal population, though that process was complete by the time Arnold arrived; it features prominently in Matthew Kneale's novel, English Passengers (2000). In Arnold's autobiography, Passages in a Wandering Life, published not long before he died in 1900, he writes with feeling about the destruction of the native people, though he blames the atrocity entirely on the convicts, whereas the free settlers were as much to blame. He describes seeing two aboriginal children in a school he inspected, who had been placed there by the authorities in a late attempt at rehabilitation.

Bernard Bergonzi is emeritus professor of English at Warwick University, UK. This article was first submitted to the now defunct literary journal Six Seasons Review.