In February 1834 he went to Rugby School, which was then under the celebrated Thomas Arnold, a contemporary of his father at Oriel College, Oxford.

[4][11] The context for the end of his political career was the unpopularity with Hughes's Frome constituents of his support for the Elementary Education Act 1870.

[8] The issue of legal obstacles to the operation of labour unions was topical, and in 1867 Hughes was made a member of a Royal Commission set up to consider the matter.

[14] The outcome of this commission was that Harrison, Hughes and Lord Lichfield produced a minority report (1869), recommending that all the legal restrictions should be dropped.

[15] During the invasion scare of 1859, Hughes raised the 19th (Bloomsbury) Middlesex Rifle Volunteer Corps from among the students of the Working Men's College, and commanded it with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel until 1869, when he became the unit's first Honorary Colonel.

Hughes estimated that it was the poorest in London, Rifle Volunteer Corps at the time being predominantly middle class.

[19] In 1880, he acquired the ownership of Franklin W. Smith's Plateau City and founded a settlement in America—Rugby, Tennessee—which was designed as an experiment in utopian living for the younger sons of the English gentry.

It followed closely on the failed colony Buckthorn (existing about 1872 to 1879), established by another Englishman, Charles Lempriere, in western Virginia; this settlement had supposedly been suggested by Hughes.

While living at Wimbledon, Hughes wrote his famous story Tom Brown's School Days, which was published in April 1857.

He is associated with the novelists of the "muscular school", a loose classification but centred on the fiction of the Crimean War period.

Hughes also wrote The Scouring of the White Horse (1859), Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Religio Laici (1868), Life of Alfred the Great (1869) and the Memoir of a Brother.

[4] There were five sons (Maurice, James, George, John, and Arthur) and four daughters (Lilian, Evie, Caroline and Mary) of the marriage.