Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses antisemitic comments and corporal punishment in a learning institution (“thrashing,” probably with a cane), practiced by the main character, a teacher.

Mr. Chippings, a retired schoolteacher and headmaster now in old age, has never quite left Brookfield, the fictional English public school where he taught classics for almost 50 years. For the last two decades, he has lived just across the street in a room rented from Mrs. Wickett, the former linen-room maid at Brookfield. Both he and Mrs. Wickett still “measure time” by the school bells: dinner, call-over, prep, and lights-out. Chippings, forever a creature of habit, has tea just before the prep bell and goes to bed just after the lights-out bell. For much of the day, he rests comfortably by the fire, living contentedly in his memories. His doctor assures him that he could live for years, but the 80-something Chippings (known to the school by the affectionate nickname Mr. Chips) sometimes hears him whisper to Wickett that someone of Chips’s age could easily be killed by a cold.

Chips, born in 1848, thinks back to when he was 22 and first arriving at Brookfield after an unsuccessful year teaching at Melbury, a more progressive school.