ABSTRACT
The idea that adolescence is the time when a child begins to change into a politically literate citizen can be found in very different types of Victorian literature. Disraeli’s Coningsby and Hughes’s Tom Brown books, for example, seem worlds apart in tone and focus. Nonetheless, both are set in the context of the political movements of the 1830s and 1840s and there are parallels between the two. These parallels become particularly clear when the sequel to Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), is taken into account. Like Coningsby, Tom abandons his forefathers’ traditional Toryism to search for a new approach to English social problems and eventually finds a vocation as a reformer. Both Tom and Coningsby attend public school and have intense, almost romantic, friendships with boys from a more liberal background (Millbank in Coningsby and George Arthur in Tom Brown). Tom and Coningsby both come from landed families (although Tom’s father is a squire not an aristocrat) and Arthur and Millbank are from industrial towns. Coningsby saves Millbank from drowning and Tom defends Arthur from bullying. In return, Arthur and Millbank help Tom and Coningsby to establish new attitudes towards social problems. At times, Hughes even repeats Disraeli’s comments on adolescence and education. For example, Disraeli, describing the friendship between Coningsby and Millbank, says that ‘the influence of the individual is nowhere so sensible as at school’.1 Hughes, echoing him, remarks that, ‘In no place in the world has individual character more weight than at a public school’.2
