The novel tells the story of a much-beloved schoolteacher and his long tenure at Brookfield, a fictional boys' public boarding school. Mr. Chipping conquers his inability to connect with his students, as well as his initial shyness, when he marries Katherine, a young woman whom he meets on holiday and who quickly picks up on calling him by his nickname, "Chips". Despite his own mediocre academic record, he goes on to have an illustrious career as an inspiring educator at Brookfield.



Although the book is unabashedly sentimental, it also depicts the sweeping social changes that Chips experiences throughout his life: he begins his tenure at Brookfield in 1870, as the Franco-Prussian War is breaking out and lies on his deathbed shortly after Adolf Hitler's rise to power. He is seen as an individual who is able to connect to anyone on a human level, beyond what he (by proxy of his former wife) views as petty politics, such as the strikers, the Boers, and a German friend.



Clearly discernible is a nostalgia for the Victorian social order that had faded rapidly after Queen Victoria's death in 1901 and whose remnants were destroyed by the First World War. Indeed, a leitmotif is the devastating impact of the war on British society. When World War I breaks out, Chips, who had retired the year before at age 65, agrees to come out of retirement to fill in for the various masters who have entered military service. Despite his being taken for a doddering fossil, it is Chips who keeps his wits about him during an air raid, averting mass panic and sustaining morale. Countless old boys and masters die on the battlefield, and much of the story involves Chips's response to the horrors unleashed by the war. At one point, he reads aloud a long roster of the school's fallen alumni, and, defying the modern world he sees as soulless and lacking transcendent values of honour and friendship, dares to include the name of an Austrian former master who has died fighting on the opposite side.