Thomas Hughes was born in Uffington, Oxfordshire, England in 1822. In the 1830s, he attended the Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, where he was greatly influenced by the school's progressive headmaster, Thomas Arnold. Both Rugby School and Arnold figured prominently in Hughes's 1857 novel, "Tom Brown's School Days", and the school would eventually be the namesake for Hughes's utopian colony in Tennessee. In "Tom Brown's School Days", Hughes espoused the ideals of Christian socialism, namely the cooperative ownership of community businesses. By the 1860s, Hughes had grown disenchanted with the materialism of late Victorian England. He was disheartened by the fact that the talents of many of England's younger sons were wasted due to an economic recession and the medieval system of primogeniture, in which the oldest son inherited all of the family's land.