44 pages • 1 hour read
James HiltonGoodbye, Mr. Chips
Fiction | Novella | YA | Published in 1934A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
In 1900, Chips briefly moves into the role of Acting Head of Brookfield when Meldrum, Wetherby’s successor, dies. Soon, however, the governors appoint Ralston, a young, ambitious man with a more prestigious academic background, mostly to the relief of Chips, who sees himself as too “mild” for the “ferocious” role that now seems expected of the Headmaster. In the years that follow, a gallery of events, great and small, become enshrined in Chips’s memory, including the sudden death of King Edward VII in 1910, and a railway strike near Brookfield, when he shocks many by introducing some of his students to a striker. (Katherine, he thinks, would have approved.)
Brookfield, Chips believes, has an age-old role to play in the dignity and steadiness of England, for whom the new century bodes unprecedented losses, dangers, and hardships. Through the Edwardian years and beyond, he sees some of these reversals play out, including strikes, unemployment, civic unrest, and crises in India and Ireland. In 1912, danger strikes close to home when a “quiet, nervous” student of his almost loses his father in the sinking of the Titanic. However, this is just the beginning of the hardship Chips will witness. Just a few years later, Chips will find himself consoling that father (one of many) over his son’s death in the Great War.
Chapter 11 Summary
Mr. Chips thinks back to when he was 60 and the younger headmaster, the ambitious, “ruthless” Ralston, put pressure on him to retire. Ralston’s energy and efficiency have raised the school’s profile and doubled its endowment, but Chips has never liked him. Thinking his age, seniority, and loyalty to Brookfield would protect him, Chips never gave Ralston much thought until the younger man tells Chips bluntly that if he refuses to retire, things will get “difficult” for him. Met with firm resistance, Ralston dismisses Chips’s teaching as “slack” and “old-fashioned” and insults him personally as “slovenly” in his habits and dress and insubordinate in his manner. Chief among his offenses is his refusal to teach the “new style” of Latin pronunciation. In response, Chips uses a pun to mock the gracelessness of the new style, which he says will simply throw his students out of step with the common usage, but Ralston accuses him of living in the past, saying ominously that “the times are changing” (43). He suggests that Chips’s teaching style, and perhaps even the “dead” languages of Greek and Latin themselves, will be obsolete in the new century. Chips does not voice his own angry thoughts, including that Ralston has been turning Brookfield into a soulless “factory” consecrated to “machines” and the almighty dollar. The genteel heyday of the landed gentry may be on the way out, he thinks, but Ralston has taken no egalitarian steps to replace it, such as by bringing more underprivileged boys to Brookfield. Instead, he snobbishly curries favor with the nouveau riche, many of them “awful fellows,” to sell Brookfield to them as a “coming school” with both feet firmly in the machine age. Chips feels that the modern age gives short shrift to such vital things as a “sense of proportion” and reflects ruefully that he himself has gotten into trouble for insensitive witticisms he made during class, such as joking about the “ancestry” of a boy named Isaacstein (44). Chips ends the interview by absolutely refusing to retire.
In the present, Chips now feels a little sorry for Ralston, who was hopelessly out of his depth in his symbolic assault on Brookfield tradition, which turned out to be tougher and more formidable than even Chips realized. As it happens, a student waiting by the door overhears their entire conversation, and soon most of the staff, community, and old-boy network have thrown their support behind Chips and against the widely disliked Ralston. Moreover, Sir John Rivers, the chairman of the Board of Governors and a former student of Chips’s, snubs Ralston on his next visit and tells Chips that he has the full support of the governors, who sincerely hope that he stays on at Brookfield until he is 100. Hearing this, Chips breaks down.
Chapter 12 Summary
Chips stays on at Brookfield, and in 1911, Ralston leaves for one of the “greater” schools. His replacement, though also a science man and even younger than Ralston, recognizes Chips as a Brookfield “institution” and gives him no trouble. However, a long spell of bronchitis that makes Chips miss most of the 1913 winter term convinces him to retire that summer at the age of 65. He arranges to take a room just across the street in the house of Mrs. Wickett, Brookfield’s former linen maid, to remain in the orbit of the school. In July, Chips is given a formal farewell at the end-of-term dinner and makes a wistful speech whose jokes, anecdotes, and humorous Latin quotes meet with peals of laughter. After the Captain of the School praises him, Chips suggests that exaggeration runs in the boy’s family and jokes that he once had to “thrash” his father for “exaggerating” or changing a grade Chips had given him. His youthful audience relishes it as a “typical Chips remark” (48). To “prolonged cheers,” Chips concludes by telling them that he remembers all his students; he may not recognize them when they visit as adults, but their faces, as they are now, will always glow in his memory.
In August 1913, Chips goes to a German spa for a cure and lodges with a friend, Herr Staefel, the German master of Brookfield. Returning to Brookfield in a renewed state of health, he almost regrets his retirement but finds plenty to do: hosting the new boys for tea, writing articles for the school magazine, editing the Brookfield Directory, acting as president of the Old Boys’ Club, and reading newspapers and mystery novels. At the end-of-term dinner in 1914, amid rumors of war and other turmoil, Herr Staefel tells Chips that he doubts the “Balkan business” will come to anything.
Chapter 13 Summary
Toward the beginning of the War, Chips maintains his optimism, opining to his boys that it should all be over by Christmas. Not knowing what lies ahead, the school reels to the news of the first old boy killed in action in September 1914. Chips, always cognizant of the ironies of history, reflects that 100 years earlier, boys from his school were fighting against the French, not with them. Blades, the Head of School House, who has eagerly enlisted, laughs uncomprehendingly at Chips’s point about the arbitrary folly of war. In 1915, as the war escalates, soldiers use the Brookfield playing fields for training, most of the younger teachers have enlisted, and every Sunday night at the Chapel, the headmaster Chatteris reads aloud the names of Old Brookfeldians killed in action. Chips, who still remembers all their faces, is always deeply moved.
In July 1916, with the catastrophic Battle of the Somme in the news, Chatteris tells Chips about his diabetes and his difficulties in managing the shorthanded school. Most of the masters are in the war, the substitutes are largely out of their depth, and Chatteris, too proud to make his medical ineligibility public, has been widely censured for not joining up. Feeling Brookfield desperately needs a boost in morale, he asks Chips to return as a part-time teacher, if only for the stability and calmness that his great popularity would bring to the troubled school. With a “holy joy,” Chips agrees.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
This section illustrates the extent of Katherine’s impact on Chips’s worldview and highlights The Long-Lasting Effects of Pivotal Relationships. Once indifferent to the world outside of Brookfield, Chips is drawn out of his monastic shell by the younger but more worldly Katherine, who widens his “outlook” into a deeper appreciation of England itself and the role that Brookfield might play in its continuing evolution. To this end, Chips grows increasingly concerned with the decency, dignity, and “sense of proportion” that he thinks Brookfield represents and how these can help anchor England through the vicissitudes of the new century (44). The school’s traditional values, he believes, can help progress rather than hold it back; thus, he introduces some of his students to a striking railroad worker, reminding them of their life-and-death reliance on the working class and its aspirations.
Though Chips is increasingly open to engaging with the external world, his conflict with Ralston reveals that Chips still prioritizes an insular, upper-class vision of England and public school education. When the headmaster Meldrum dies, Chips sees his vision of Brookfield’s role in the world imperiled along with his job. The new head Ralston, a smugly ruthless young man with big ideas but a narrow vision, presses for Chips’s retirement on the grounds that he has stubbornly refused to change with the times, such as by teaching the new style of pronouncing Latin. He notes triumphantly that none of Chips’s students has managed to pass the “Lower Certificate” for Latin. Chips believes that these certificates and standardized tests are immaterial for Brookfield students since the school’s true mission is to build character, not a mastery of specialized knowledge that they are unlikely to use in later life. This was indeed the traditional role of British public schools for most of their existence: less a foundry of detailed, practical knowledge than of a certain gentlemanly “ethos” (or, in Chips’s words, “a sense of proportion”) that would supposedly keep the upper classes, and thus England’s statesmanship, on an even keel (44). “Dead” languages like Latin and ancient Greek, the cornerstone of a public-school education, served mostly as in-club jargon within these lofty spheres. In a sense, then, Chips is right that the new pronunciation (which pronounces Julius Caesar’s famous words “veni vidi vici” as “wenny weedy weeky”) might raise more eyebrows than open doors. Ralston, however, is correct that, in this “modern” new century, Brookfield’s students might be ill-served by an impractical, traditionalist education geared largely toward the outer forms and status tokens of upper-class privilege. In some ways, Chips prioritizes Brookfield as a “feeding stream” to the British establishment over his students’ individual needs. Chips’s “legendary” sense of humor corroborates his commitment to institutionalism and the status quo; in this section, his humor is revealed to be often insensitive, as when he teases a student in class for his Jewish name and heritage and scoffs at the child’s family for complaining.
Ralston and Chips’s conflict introduces competing visions of a post-aristocratic future: For Ralston, modernizing Brookfield entails abandoning its conservative, patrician values while staying true to its historic emphasis on wealth, while Chips, influenced by Katherine, seeks to welcome boys who lack financial privilege but share the school’s traditional ethos. Most of Chips’s scorn for Ralston centers on his wealth snobbery, particularly Ralston’s deference to the nouveau riche, who Chips believes largely lacks the decency and nobleness of the landed gentry. To Chips, Brookfield’s character-based ethos transcends wealth of any kind, even if only the wealthy can typically afford to go there. An ideally “modern” headmaster, he thinks, would be wooing poorer families as a way of widening and democratizing Brookfield’s reach, not turning the school into a crassly materialistic rich boys’ club. In preparing his will years later, Chips, true to his ideals, leaves most of his money to establish a scholarship fund for Brookfield.
In the end, Chips wins: Word of his conflict with Ralston gets out, and he becomes a cause célèbre for Ralston’s many enemies, most of whom dislike him more for his personality than for his ideals. Chips is depicted as a more lovable figure than Ralston, and so his gentle, if antiquated, vision triumphs. The “tough” traditionalism of Brookfield withstands, for now, the assaults of modernity. In the war years, with Ralston gone, Chips becomes so esteemed that the new headmaster begs him out of retirement so he can hold the school together by sheer force of his personality and “lovableness.” Though his students might not pass their certificates, Chips has become the face of Brookfield itself.
