Goodbye, Mr. Chips

‘Good-Bye, Mr. Chips' is a novella by James Hilton, published in both the United States and the United Kingdom in 1934. Such is its popularity that it has been adapted in two films and two television series. Mr Chips is an admirable school teacher at Brookfield, a fictional boys' English public boarding school. It is a sentimental book showing how he overcomes his own mediocre academic record and his profound shyness to become a tremendous educator. Chips has been inspired by the unremarkable and the extraordinary alike, by his colleagues, by a woman who will change him forever, and by his children, “thousands of them, all boys.”
It also depicts the sweeping social changes that Mr Chips experiences. He begins his tenure at Brookfield in 1870, at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War and covers Victoria's death and along with her the social order, and the devastating impact of war on British society, with countless old masters and schoolboys dying on the battlefield in World War I. Mr Chips dies just as Adolf Hilter rises to power.

James Hilton was born in Lancashire in 1900, the son of a headmaster. His best known books, Lost Horizon and Goodbye Mr Chips, were written during the thirties, a period which afforded him great commercial success and enormous popularity. Lost Horizon was made into a blockbuster Hollywood film in 1937. For a time, Hilton was highest paid screen-writer in Hollywood and he won an Academy Award in 1942 for his work on the screenplay of Mrs. Miniver. Hilton continued to write novels throughout his career. He died in 1954.