Good-Bye, Mr. Chips [Hardcover]

James Hilton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1986

Mr. Hilton's classic story of an English schoolmaster.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin School (January 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395034361
• ISBN-13: 978-0395034361
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,750,929 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars unabashedly sentimental, October 13, 2000

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Good-Bye, Mr. Chips (Hardcover)

When we were kids, our grandparents used to take us to Radio City Music Hall for the movie and Christmas Pageant every year. The year I was 12, the movie was a remake of Lost Horizon--my most graphic memory from that night is my horror when the woman suddenly aged after leaving Shangri-La. As it turns out, that version of the movie is pretty dreadful, while Frank Capra's 1937 original is widely considered to be a classic. At any rate, I liked the film enough to read the book and also Hilton's other classic, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and I loved them both. Recently, our library got a restored edition of the Capra film and we enjoyed it thoroughly. So I went back & reread the books.

I assume most folks know at least the rough outlines of the stories. In Lost Horizon, Hugh Conway, a British diplomat, is skyjacked and he & his traveling companions end up in the Himalayas. Eventually they are lead to the hidden Valley of the Blue Moon and the city of Shangri-La, where folks do not age and the powers that be are collecting all of the world's knowledge and greatest artworks, so that it will be safe from the turbulent political storms of the outside world. Eventually, the high lama reveals to the diplomat that he has been chosen to take over leadership of Shangri-La and after an abortive attempt to leave (at the insistence of one of his fellow travelers), Conway returns to assume his destined place in Shangri-La.

Good-bye, Mr. Chips, on the other hand, is about an eccentric but lovable British schoolmaster, Arthur Chipping (Mr. Chips). Seemingly destined to be a bachelor for life, he meets and marries a young woman who loosens him up quite a bit, before dying in childbirth. Chips is left alone, except that is for the succeeding generations of boys who pass through Brookfield School. After decades at the school, he retires, telling the assembled alumni, "I have thousands of faces in my mind. ... I remember you as you are. That's the point. In my mind you never grow old at all", only to be called back during WWI, at which point he becomes acting headmaster. One of his duties is to read the list of the school's war dead; for everyone else they are just names, but for Chips, each name has a face attached. After the War he reretires, after 42 years teaching Roman History and Latin at Brookfield.

On the surface, these two stories couldn't be more different, but reading them now I realize how similar they actually are. Shangri-La is an oasis of civilzation in a world that was after all between two World Wars. It is a place where the great achievements of our culture will be preserved, even if war consumes the rest of the World, which for much of this Century seemed like a possibility. Mr. Chips, meanwhile, is the living embodiment of institutional memory. The classes of boys, the teachers and headmasters, even the subjects and teaching methods, come and go, but Chips has remained throughout. He "still had those ideas of dignity and generosity that a frantic world was forgetting." He embodies the pre-War world and its values. In his book Mr. Bligh's Bad Language, Greg Dening says that: "Institutions require memory. A memory creates precedent and order." In the very midst of an epoch that was witnessing an unfettered attack on all of the West's institutions and values, Hilton created Shangri-La and Mr. Chips; both represent the conservative ideal--providing a bridge of memory to all that is beautiful and good and decent in our past, lest, in our zeal to create a perfect world, we forget the qualities and accomplishments which bequeathed us the pretty good world in which we live.

These books are unabashedly sentimental and I'm sure some would even find them mawkish. But I love them and I appreciate the subtley non-political way in which they make the most important of political points: even as we move forward we must always preserve those things and ideas of value in our past.

Mr. Chips GRADE: A+

Lost Horizon GRADE: A

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sober, beautifully crafted romance!, February 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Good-Bye, Mr. Chips (Hardcover)

Those who dont like this book may as well stop living in this world - the beauty of the world os not for them. This novel-or rather a novellette- breathes softness and romance in every word. Hilton's books are all most precious to me - they convey the feelings of either a world that is lost forever or perhaps a world that never existed but should. The craft of Hilton is apparent in the way he weaves the tale through flashbacks- the switches between the past and the present are so beautifully handled as to make them rarely apparent. The characters of Mr.Chips and Katherine are to my mind, one of the most delightful in fiction. Darcy and Elizabeth leap to mind - but this couple was not too far behind. I just wish it had been a much bigger novel- but small is beautiful they say. DOnt ever miss this one- or "Random Harvest". They are a couple of the best ever reads u will get.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Institution within an Institution, December 21, 2005

By 

Patrick Shepherd "hyperpat" (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Good-Bye, Mr. Chips (Hardcover)

It's a rare thing that the movie is better than its source material, but I think (at least for American audiences) that this is true for this novelette.

This is a simple story of the life of an English boarding school teacher, a reminiscence from the vantage point of old age, where the accomplishments and disappointments of his life can be properly seen in their entirety. Starting as a young teacher whose main problem is maintaining discipline in the classroom, who still has at least a few ambitions of becoming headmaster at a possibly more prestigious school, Arthur Chipping is portrayed as an average person with perhaps a proclivity to being dogmatic and unyielding in his opinions and methods of teaching. As he grows older, the ambitions recede, replaced by an acceptance of his place within the system, but his rigidity in outlook becomes more pronounced till he marries. His wife's influence does much to make Arthur not only more accepting of other viewpoints, but a kinder, more compassionate man, whose fairness and length of service does much to endear him to his students. Further events in his life eventually lead to his becoming something of an institution, a fixture as much a part of the school as the walls.

The character of Arthur is obviously well defined and is easy to empathize with. However, for American audiences that are not very familiar with the English school system, there is a vagueness about the school, how it is run and the profound influence it has on its students, a lack of background information and clear portraits of the students that really needs to be there to properly understand Arthur's story. This is where the various movie versions of this story surpass this book, as this background can be easily shown in that medium, whereas the book assumes the reader already knows this type of information. Even with this failing, however, both the respect that Mr. Chipping eventually earns and the overriding theme of the constancy of the institution shaping the lives of its students into proper English gentlemen can be easily seen and appreciated.

This book is quite short, but within its confines it manages to define both its major character and a system of learning very well. For those who attended similar institutions, its ending may very well produce some tears and a feeling of `that was my teacher'. Others not familiar with this type of school may find their time better spent watching the movie.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)