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.
Themes
Death and Loss
Goodbye Mr. Chips, whose action consists largely of the wistful memories of an elderly man in his last days, bears many similarities to a ghost story. Mr. Chips’s thoughts and the ancient environs of the boys’ school where he has lived for over 60 years are haunted by specters of the past, which for Chips have a vividness that both consoles and troubles him. Chips’s “days and nights [are] equally full of dreaming” (4). The age-old bells of Brookfield school, particularly “call-over” (roll call), evoke for him the harmonious voices of schoolchildren reciting their names, many of them killed in World War I. Though each school term brought dozens of new faces into his classrooms, he does not forget the ones that have gone and even retains many of the details of their deaths, such as Collingwood, who was killed in Egypt, and Dunster, who drowned at Jutland. Chips has a deep affinity for things lost or on the cusp of vanishing, like the “dead” languages and ancient lore he teaches. One of the tragedies of his life is the knowledge that, upon his death, the history of Brookfield and its generations of students will largely be lost forever. At times, he ponders writing a book of his memories, but the sheer scale of the project seems to defeat him.
Chips’s most crushing loss, the “horrifying nightmare” of his wife’s death in childbirth, briefly makes him wish for his own death. However, he soon centers himself again through a dedicated act of memory—his usual response to loss—preserving the knowledge of Katherine’s love within him and trying to remain the gentler, wittier person he became under her loving influence. An especially painful aspect of the war years is that the generation of boys who knew Katherine during her brief time at Brookfield is the one that suffers the most losses in World War I, such as the young private who remembers her vividly from the soccer match she organized before he is killed at Passchendaele. An added horror of these young deaths is that they take with them the memories of things that were most precious to Chips, erasing them from the world’s memory. This tragedy is foreshadowed by the blank letters he receives as an April Fool’s prank on the day of his wife’s death. Later, he becomes president of the Old Boys’ Club, helping to keep these memories alive. Finally, on his deathbed, he hosts a final reunion of sorts, as the “choruses” of boys’ names, living and dead, echo once more in his head, and he entreats their phantoms to gather around for “a last word and a joke” (72). Always modest, Chips has had few expectations that his boys, going on to their busy lives, would remember much of what he has taught them, and many of his jokes reflect this. However, as Chips told Katherine, he did his “best” to pass on the flame, however flickering. As the headmaster Cartwright says upon his passing, Chips’s sheer “lovableness” will never be forgotten.
The Long-Lasting Effects of Pivotal Relationships
In Chips and Katherine’s whirlwind romance, Goodbye Mr. Chips suggests how a loving relationship, however short-lived or late in life, can alter the trajectory of a life and personality. By age 48, Mr. Chips, a teacher for 26 years, has settled into his comfortable but lonely personality and career. Strict and respectable but uninspiring in his teaching, he sees himself as a partial failure, having fallen short of his youthful ambition to be “loved” at Brookfield as much as honored and obeyed. Additionally, after years of rote teaching at Brookfield, he has succumbed to the “dry rot” of his profession, teaching by habit rather than by inspiration. As for romantic relationships, Chips, always uneasy in women’s presence, has long ago given up any such hopes, especially since the politically active “New Woman,” much pilloried in his conservative newspapers, fills him with “horror.” Chips sees these Ibsen-reading women, about whom he actually knows very little, as an affront to his way of life and to his ideal of women themselves, whom he sees as “weak, timid” creatures to be kept well at arm’s length.
During a trip to the Lake District, however, Chips finds himself at the mercy of one of these women: Katherine Bridges, a politically “radical” young woman who rescues him from an injurious fall just when he had misguidedly been trying to save her from one. Over the following week, she makes unchaperoned trips on a bicycle to check up on his health, which shocks him. Most surprising to them both is their growing attraction, though she is bold and liberal, and he is 23 years older and, in her view, hopelessly behind the times. Chips finds that, though athletic, strong-willed, and self-reliant, Katherine is still alluringly feminine; to her, Chips’s stodgy manner and politics are humanized by his simple kindness, charm, and gentle humor. In their arguments, Chips often bows to her progressive way of thinking—not fully altering his convictions but softening them enough to meet her more than halfway. For instance, he responds to her pleas to be more lenient with his students, and, against all his former instincts, he backs her proposal that Brookfield defy class barriers to play the South London boys at soccer. Not least, his personality itself changes, as Katherine’s gentleness and love awaken a humor and warmth that have long lain dormant, making him at last loved by his students.
Chips’s two years with Katherine are the most pivotal of his life, for she gives him the happiness and confidence to cultivate his best self as well as the open-mindedness to question his assumptions and to look more deeply into his fellow humans. It is this “new” self—the tender, pun-making Chips—that becomes legendary at Brookfield. Even after Katherine’s early death, Chips keeps her gentleness alive in his heart, becoming, under her undying influence, a beloved teacher rather than the stern, prosaic one he had been before.
The Power of Humility
The unassuming protagonist of Goodbye Mr. Chips has never thought of himself as supremely gifted. The elite faculties of Eton or Rugby, he knows, are well out of his reach, and at even a “second rank” school like Brookfield, he knows he has little hope of revolutionizing the teaching of Latin or Greek. He can only do his “best,” he tells his fiancée at age 48, which for Chips has been mostly been to work well, be conscientious, and give “service, satisfaction, confidence, everything except inspiration” (22). A consequence of this humility is that, despite his general conservatism and aversion to change, he remains open to rethinking his ideas and prejudices: Unlike the arrogant new headmaster Ralston, who arrives “glittering with Firsts” (36), Chips is willing to admit that he could be mistaken about any number of things. First and foremost, he finds he was wrong about the “New Woman,” who, in the buoyant, sensible Katherine Bridges, is far from the repellant creature he had imagined. Energized by her love and humane influences, Chips undergoes a partial transformation: Still humble about his intellectual gifts, he does not inflict his new energy on others in the form of disconcerting changes (as does Ralston with his “restored” Latin) but instead instills a new warmth and humor in his pedagogy, inspiring his students with love rather than with innovations or the sternness of yore.
Not bound up in his intellectual ideals, ambitions, or ego, Chips keeps his focus steadfastly on his students and their modest needs. He knows that Ralston’s new Latin would only confuse them in later life: “Making boys say ‘Kickero’ at school when— umph—for the rest of their lives they'll say ‘Cicero;—if they ever—umph—say it at all’” (42). Few, if any, of his students will go on to become Latin scholars; Chips knows his role as a classics teacher is the minor one of giving most of them, at best, the ability to recognize an ancient quote or to speak one aloud on rare occasions. This knowledge of the classics, he feels, will give them some pleasure as well as a connection to the foundational knowledge of the past. His interest in his pupils’ pleasure has evolved into one of his chief concerns, resulting in the witty puns he coins to help them remember difficult Latin terms. As much entertainer as teacher, Chips is deeply proud of the laughter and love he has inspired in generations of pupils.
After retiring at 65, Chips, instead of following other ambitions, remains at Brookfield, taking a room just across the street. This humble space allows him, between cups of tea and his mystery novels, to meet incoming students and host old ones. His proximity and unbroken familiarity with the school also situate him to return as a substitute and then as acting Head throughout the war. During a terrifying air raid, his unflappability and humor provide great solace for his students and take their place in Brookfield lore. In the end, Chips has no regrets: If, unlike others of his generation, he has scaled no new mountains or branches of knowledge, he has become a legend in his modest way, enshrining Brookfield in the memories of thousands of boys.
