Goodbye, Mr. Chips

The story was originally issued in 1933, as a supplement to the British Weekly, an evangelical newspaper. It came to prominence when it was reprinted as the lead piece of the April 1934 issue of The Atlantic. The success of the Atlantic Monthly publication prompted a book deal between the author and the US publisher Little, Brown and Company, who published the story in book form for the first time in June 1934. Published during The Great Depression, Little, Brown cautiously released a small first print run. Public demand for more was immediate and Little, Brown went into an almost immediate reprinting the same month. Public demand remained strong, and Little, Brown continued to reprint the book in cautious lots for many months, with at least two reprintings per month.

The first British edition went to press in October 1934. The publishers were Hodder & Stoughton, who had observed the success of the book in the United States, and they released a much larger first print run. It sold 15,000 copies on the day of publication,[1] and they quickly found themselves going into reprints as the reading public's demand for the book proved insatiable. With the huge success of this book, James Hilton became a best-selling author.[2]

The novella tells the story of a beloved school teacher, Mr Chipping, and his long tenure at Brookfield School, a fictional minor British boys' public boarding school located in the fictional village of Brookfield in the Fenlands. Mr Chips, as the boys call him, is conventional in his beliefs and exercises firm discipline in the classroom. His views broaden, and his pedagogical manner loosens after he marries Katherine, a young woman whom he meets on holiday in the Lake District. Katherine charms the Brookfield teachers and headmaster and quickly wins the favour of Brookfield's pupils. Their marriage is brief. She dies in childbirth and he never remarries or has another romantic interest.

One of the poignant and bittersweet themes of the book is that Chipping so outlasts all of his peers that his brief marriage fades into myth and few people know him as anything other than a confirmed and lonely bachelor. Despite Chipping's mediocre credentials and his view that classic Greek and Latin (his academic subjects) are dead languages, he is an effective teacher who becomes highly regarded by students and the school's governors—he has become a well-worn institution. In his later years, he develops an arch sense of humour that pleases everyone. However, he also becomes somewhat of an anachronism, with an antiquated pronunciation (ironic, perhaps for a teacher of classical languages) and is pitied for his isolation. On his deathbed, he talks of the fulfillment he felt as a teacher of boys. In many ways, the novella can be read as a meditation on the meaning of an unspectacular life, quietly lived.

Although the book is unabashedly sentimental, it depicts the sweeping social changes that Chips experiences throughout his life: he begins his tenure at Brookfield in September 1870, at the age of 22, as the Franco-Prussian War is breaking out; he dies in November 1933, at the age of 85. To a modern reader, the fact that this is shortly after Adolf Hitler's rise to power frames the story significantly but with added poignancy. Neither the author nor the readers of those early editions were aware of the devastation that Hitler would bring to Europe in a few years.

The setting for Goodbye, Mr. Chips is probably based on The Leys School, Cambridge, where James Hilton was a pupil (1915–18). Hilton is reported to have said that the inspiration for the protagonist, Mr. Chips, came from many sources, including his father, who was the headmaster of Chapel End School. Mr. Chips is also likely to have been based on W. H. Balgarnie, a master at The Leys (1900–30), who was in charge of the Leys Fortnightly (in which Hilton's first short stories and essays were published). Over the years, old boys wrote to Geoffery Houghton, a master at The Leys and a historian of the school, confirming the links between Chipping and Balgarnie, who eventually died at Porthmadog at the age of 82.[3] Balgarnie had been linked with the school for 51 years and spent his last years in modest lodgings nearby. Like Mr. Chips, Balgarnie was a strict disciplinarian, but would also invite boys to visit him for tea and biscuits.[4]

Hilton wrote upon Balgarnie's death that "Balgarnie was, I suppose, the chief model for my story. When I read so many other stories about public school life, I am struck by the fact that I suffered no such purgatory as their authors apparently did, and much of this miracle was due to Balgarnie."[4] The mutton chop side whiskers of one of the masters at The Leys earned him the nickname "Chops", a likely inspiration for Mr Chips' name.[4]

In Hilton's final novel, Time and Time Again (1953), protagonist Charles Anderson bears clear biographical similarities to Hilton himself. Early in the novel, Anderson briefly reminisces about attending Brookfield and knowing "Chips".

• 1934 in literature

• Goodbye, Mr. Chips at Faded Page (Canada)