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Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a novella about the life of a schoolteacher, Mr. Chipping, written by the English writer James Hilton and first published by Hodder & Stoughton on October 1934. It has been adapted into two cinema films and two television presentations.
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 classic languages) and is pitied for his isolation. At this 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 was 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]


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