Tom Brown's School Days - References in Other Works

References in Other Works

• The character of Flashman was adopted by the British writer George MacDonald Fraser as the narrator and hero (or anti-hero) of his popular series of "Flashman" historical novels. In the Flashman novel Flashman in the Great Game, the main character reads Tom Brown's School Days (achieving a remarkable degree of abstraction as Flashman, a fictional character, is portrayed reading a real book about himself). The novel's real popularity causes the fictional Flashman some fictional social troubles. The Flashman novels also include some other characters from the novel, for example: George Speedicut and Tom Brown himself (in the book Flashman's Lady). Flashman also encounters the character of "Scud" East twice, first in Flashman at the Charge, when both he and East are prisoners of war during the Crimean War, and again in Flashman in the Great Game at the Siege of Cawnpore during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. East is mortally wounded during the massacre and dies in Flashman's arms. However, in Tom Brown in Oxford, "Scud" East survived India (after suffering two bullet wounds, a broken arm and a gash in his side) and emigrates to New Zealand (see chapters XXI "The Intercepted Letter-Bag" and XLVIII "The Wedding-Day").
  • In a second-order reference, one of Sandy Mitchell's Warhammer 40000 novels about Commissar Ciaphas Cain, a character largely based on Flashman, includes Commissar Tomas Beije, an old schoolmate of Cain, as a secondary character. Beije displays much of Brown's piety but, unlike Brown, is also petty, jealous, bitter and distrustful.
• Tomkinson's Schooldays, the pilot episode for the TV series Ripping Yarns, is a parody of the novel.
• "The Tom Brown Question" in P. G. Wodehouse's Tales of St. Austin's (1903) has a schoolboy expressing the opinion that the second part, featuring Arthur, was written by an improving committee and not by the vigorous hand of Thomas Hughes. The argument is well developed.
• Terry Pratchett has confirmed that the section of his novel Pyramids set at the Assassin's Guild School is a parody of Tom Brown's School Days.