Thomia is mainly about St Thomas’s College, but nearly half its chapters are not about the school at all. They cover selected events in Lankan history during the two-hundred-year timeframe of the story, which begins in 1801 with the establishment of modern, Western-style education in British Ceylon and ends with the celebration of the Thomian sesquicentennial in 2001. A few of the early non-STC chapters deal with aspects of the Victorian religious revival, the missionary movement in Britain and Ceylon, what a so-called ‘public school’ really is, the early life and ministry of James Chapman, and other subjects that have an important bearing on the story of St Thomas’s but do not directly involve the school.