London hospitals, and 12,000l. to the Royal Society of London, the Académie des Sciences of Paris, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and the Société Internationale des Electriciens, for the foundation of scholarships and prizes to be awarded for work in physical science.
He married Anna, daughter of Dr. Thomas Chadbourne.
In person he was fair, and rather below the middle height; he 'was simple in his tastes,' 'a most genial companion,' and possessed 'an inexhaustible fund of information' (Cooke). Portraits appeared in 'Electrician,' xliv. 457, and the 'Electrical Review,' xlvi. 185, 186.
[Royal Soc. Cat. of Scientific Papers; Hughes's Papers in Comptes Rendus, Proc. Royal Soc. London, Telegr. Eng. Journ. &c.; obituary notices by Cooke, Journ. Inst. Electr. Eng. xxix. 951, and by Munro, Electr. Review, xlvi. 185; Rosenberger, Geschichte der Physik passim; Wiedemann, Elektricität passim; Prescott's Electricity and the Electric Telegraph, 7th edit, ii. 603 et seq.; Preece and Sivewright's Telegraphy passim; Preece and Stubbs's Telephone passim; Gerard's Electricité, vol. ii. passim; Lodge's Signalling through Space, 3rd edit. p. 88 et seq.; Fahie's Hist. of Wireless Telegraphy, p. 289; Electrician, Electrical Review, and Electrical Engineer passim; private information.]
HUGHES, THOMAS (1822–1896), the author of 'Tom Brown's School Days,' was born at Uffington, a country parish near Faringdon in Berkshire, on 20 Oct. 1822. His father was John Hughes (1790–1857) [q. v.] His brother George Edward (1821–1872), who is the subject of Tom Hughes's 'Memoir of a Brother,' was thirteen months Tom's senior; he was educated at Rugby and Oriel College, Oxford, stroked the Oxford crew of 1843, entered Lincoln's Inn in 1848, and practised in the ecclesiastical courts; he was a member of the Pen and Pencil Club, a skilful player on the violoncello, and died at Hoylake, Cheshire, on 2 May 1872.
Tom spent almost all his years up to early manhood in the closest companionship with this elder brother. They went together in the autumn of 1830 to a private school at Twyford, near Winchester, where they had Charles Blachford Mansfield [q. v.] as their schoolfellow. Tom Hughes describes this school as being before its time in the cultivation of athletic exercises, for success in which prizes were regularly given. In February 1834 the two brothers were sent to Rugby, Tom being then eleven years old. Their father had been at Oriel with Dr. Arnold, and though he had no sympathy with his politics he admired his character and abilities, and he sent his sons to Rugby to be under Arnold.
The Rugby of that time is described in 'Tom Brown's School Days.' It has been almost inevitable that readers should see Hughes himself in Tom Brown. But in the preface to 'Tom Brown at Oxford' he complains of this identification. 'I must take this my first and last chance of saying that he is not I, either as boy or man. … When I first resolved to write the book I tried to realise to myself what the commonest type of English boy of the upper middle class was, so far as my experience went; and to that type I have throughout adhered, trying simply to give a good specimen of the genus. I certainly have placed him in the country scenes which I know best myself, for the simple reason that I knew them better than any others, and therefore was less likely to blunder in writing about them.' Readers are bound to respect this protest. But the sentiments and doings ascribed to Tom Brown were by Hughes's account those of the kind of boy that Hughes was. Tom Hughes did not become much of a scholar; in academical attainments he was below his brother George, both at school and at college. But he rose high enough in the school to come into that close contact with Dr. Arnold which never failed to draw boys of any thoughtfulness into reverence for him. Tom stayed a year at Rugby behind his brother George, and in the middle of the year he played for Rugby at Lord's in the annual match against a Marylebone club eleven. Then in the spring of 1842, having matriculated on 2 Dec. 1841, he followed his brother to Oxford and Oriel, carrying with him at least a great cricketing reputation, for he played in the June of his first year in the Oxford and Cambridge match at Lord's. The two brothers had rooms on the same staircase, and the genuine though unobtrusive seriousness of Tom's character was no doubt fostered by his intimacy with George. But neither of them seems to have been at all affected by the religious movement of their Oxford days. They associated with their distinguished schoolfellows, Matthew Arnold, Clough, Walrond, and others. Tom Hughes records that in the year before he took his degree he made a tour with a pupil in the north of England and Scotland (Memoir of a Brother, p. 88). He did this by the special request of the pupil's father, who was a neighbour and friend of the Hughes family. Hughes says that he frequented commercial hotels, and heard the corn-law question vigorously discussed, and
