44 pages • 1 hour read
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Mr. Chipping
Known to his students and most of his acquaintances by the affectionate nickname Mr. Chips, Mr. Chipping is the protagonist of Hilton’s novella and the character whose memories and reflections constitute its third-person limited omniscience. A former classics teacher and headmaster of the fictional British public school Brookfield, Mr. Chips has spent over 60 years of his life within the small, orderly world of the school, whether living on campus or in a rented room across the street from Brookfield. Roughly 85 years old in the novella’s present time, Chips first joined the school in 1870 at the age of 22, after a rough year at a different boys’ school, Melbury. Well aware of his lack of brilliance as a teacher or scholar, Chips finds Brookfield, a “second-rank” school, to be an ideal niche for his limited abilities. The school’s staid culture and academics are also a good fit for his innate conservatism. When a new headmaster, Ralston, tries to introduce new methods of teaching Latin, Chips objects, and his former pupils rally to allow him to keep his position.
What makes Mr. Chips a beloved figure at Brookfield is his kindness and firmness, which command both respect and affection, along with his inimitable wit, which includes puns on Latin that also serve as mnemonic devices for his students. A devotee of the tried and true, Chips finds that he can repeat these same jokes to new classes year after year. Chips credits much of his warmth and sense of humor, and thus his popularity, to his brief marriage to Katherine, whom he met in middle age and who, to his surprise and delight, helped bring him out of his shell. His legendary reliability has also endeared him to Brookfield, especially when he comes out of retirement during the war years and calms his students through an air raid with his unflappable courage and humor. Mostly, Chips’s students idolize him because they sense that he genuinely cares for them. Indeed, Chips continues to play host to Brookfield’s students even after his retirement and seems to remember all his pupils, even if he sometimes has trouble recognizing their grown counterparts. He can still summon their young faces from memory decades after they graduate, and their many names still echo in his head like “choruses,” even on his deathbed.
Katherine Bridges
An attractive young woman whom Chips meets while hiking in the Lake District and soon marries, Katherine is a former governess who, at 25, is young enough to be his daughter. Her politics are also quite different from Chips’s own—“radical,” in his estimation—but chance throws them together when Chips twists his ankle while trying to come to her aid on a mountain slope. Surprised and charmed to find his preconceptions about the “New Woman” mostly upended, he quickly warms to her sincerity, compassion, and lively mind as well as her beauty. Katherine, in turn, is pleasantly taken aback by his humor, modesty, and gentle charm, which she had not expected to find in a conservative, middle-aged man. She also finds his line of work endearing since it prepares young minds for the future.
After their whirlwind romance and wedding, the liberal Katherine has a humanizing effect on Chips: Though most of his political and cultural tastes, such as his disdain for Henrik Ibsen, are set in stone, she kindles a new compassion and leniency in the strict schoolmaster, coaxing him to show more mercy toward misbehaving students. She persuades Chips and the rest of the staff to invite underprivileged students from East London to Brookfield for a soccer match: a “dangerous experiment” that is fiercely resisted at first but which succeeds triumphantly. Breaking such barriers, she tells Chips, is the wave of the future. Katherine’s biggest and most lasting effect on Chips may be the happiness, humor, and joie de vivre that she inspires in him, which make him finally loved and respected by his students. Katherine dies in childbirth at 27, only two years after first meeting Chips, making her character a symbol of both Death and Loss and The Long-Lasting Effects of Pivotal Relationships. However, she continues to live on in Chips in his gentleness, compassion, and sense of humor. Her eternal youth in his memories in part feeds his love for his students, who remain ever-youthful in his mind as well.
Ralston
Ralston, the ambitious, “ruthless” 37-year-old who replaces Meldrum as headmaster in 1900, is the closest thing to an antagonist in Goodbye Mr. Chips. Ralston is energetic and efficient but strongly disliked by the faculty, who resent his demands on them. Determined to modernize Brookfield, Ralston sets his sights on Chips, who persists in teaching the traditional, “ecclesiastical” pronunciation of Latin rather than the “restored” style now in fashion. He also recoils at many of Chips’s idiosyncrasies, such as his frayed gown, which is not, he thinks, in keeping with a modern school of the new century. In a brusque interview with Chips, he coldly requests that the 60-year-old retire. Chips, for his part, has disliked Ralston for some time, largely because his “modern” ideology lacks egalitarian warmth epitomized by Katherine, who believed in bringing underprivileged children to Brookfield. Instead, Ralston is shallowly focused on science and industry and on wooing nouveau riche families for their wealth, seeking to streamline the school into a “factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines” (43). Ralston’s cold, shallow approach extends to his relationships at the school, and Brookfield’s staff and old boys do not hesitate to side with Chips against the up-to-date but relatively heartless Ralston.
Unlock all 44 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
