Thomas Hughes was born in Uffington is what is now Oxfordshire, England. His father was a writer and the squire of Uffington and his mother was the offspring of three generations of its vicars. He was educated at one of England’s foremost Public Schools, Rugby at the time when the great educational reformer Dr Thomas Arnold was headmaster. His time under Arnold’s tutelage and influence affected him greatly, not only in terms of his most famous work ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’, but in his development into a lifelong campaigner for reform.