Tom Brown's School Days influenced Malory Towers

Hughes invented the form and Blyton is writing inside it ninety years later, with the furniture intact: a new pupil arriving alone, houses that compete, a bully who is eventually understood, sport as the moral arena, and a headmistress whose approval is the plot's currency. What Blyton changes is who it is for. Tom Brown is a boys' book about becoming a Victorian gentleman; Malory Towers is a girls' book about becoming somebody, and the school is a place you are sent to rather than sentenced to.