Thomas Hughes

Thomas Hughes (1822–1896) was an English lawyer, reformer and author. Educated at Rugby under Thomas Arnold and at Oxford, he became a barrister and joined F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley in the Christian Socialist movement, helping to found the Working Men's College in London and supporting cooperatives and trade unions. Tom Brown's School Days (1857), drawn from his own schooldays, was an immediate success, and a sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, followed. He sat in Parliament as a Liberal and in 1880 founded Rugby, Tennessee, a cooperative colony for the younger sons of English families, which soon failed. He later became a county court judge.