[3] Thomas was educated at Lord Weymouth's Grammar School, Warminster, at Winchester, and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

His force of character and religious zeal enabled him to make it a model for other public schools and exercise a strong influence on the education system of England.

He wrote that "rather than have physical science the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament.

"[5][6] Arnold developed the praepostor (prefect) system, in which sixth-form students were given powers over every part of the school (managed by himself) and kept order in the establishment.

The 1857 novel by Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days, portrays a generation of boys "who feared the Doctor with all our hearts, and very little besides in heaven or earth; who thought more of our sets in the School than of the Church of Christ, and put the traditions of Rugby and the public opinion of boys in our daily life above the laws of God.

"[7] Arnold was no great enthusiast for sport, which was permitted only as an alternative to poaching or fighting with local boys and did not become part of Rugby's curriculum until 1850.

However, this did not prevent Baron de Coubertin from considering him the father of the organized sport he admired when he visited English public schools, including Rugby in 1886.

The character-forming influence of sport, with which Coubertin was so impressed, is more likely to have originated in the novel Tom Brown's School Days than exclusively in the ideas of Arnold himself.

[14][15] When William Delafield Arnold died in 1859 leaving four orphans, the Forsters adopted them as their own, adding their name to the children's surname.

Thomas the Younger's daughter Mary Augusta Arnold, became a well-known novelist under her married name, Mrs. Humphry Ward.

Both McCrum and Copley seek to restore some lustre to the Arnold legacy, which had been under attack since Strachey's sardonic appraisal.

A. C. Benson once observed of Arnold, "A man who could burst into tears at his own dinner-table on hearing a comparison made between St. Paul and St. John to the detriment of the latter, and beg that the subject might never be mentioned again in his presence, could never have been an easy companion.