Arnold Matthew - Culture and Anarchy

MATTHEW ARNOLD was born at Laleham-on-Thames on Christmas Eve 1822, the eldest son and second of the nine surviving children of the Revd Thomas Arnold and Mary Penrose Arnold. He was educated at Winchester; at Rugby School, where his father was headmaster; and at Oxford. In 1845 he was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, and in 18467 spent an extended period of time in France. He started to publish his poetry in the late 1840s and early 1850s. In 1847 he became personal secretary to Lord Lansdowne, a leading Whig politician, through whose influence he was appointed inspector of schools in 1851, which gave him a secure enough position to marry Frances Lucy Wightman. It was a close marriage, and they had six children (three of whom died young), to whom Arnold was devoted. Most of Arnolds poetry was written in the first half of his life, on themes of love, faith and doubt, stoicism and aesthetic pleasure. From the mid-i86os his role as a critic came into prominence. Whilst continuing his job as a school inspector, he published reports on education on the Continent, and began to write regularly for the periodical press. He wrote about the place of literatureand of criticismin modern society, especially drawing on classical and European writers to highlight qualities which he felt were lacking in contemporary English culture. As Professor of Poetry at Oxford (185767) he also delivered four lectures on the study of Celtic literature. His practical and theoretical work on education led him to a wider social criticism, which bore fruit in Culture and Anarchy. His lifelong reflection on his own religious experience, on the religious life of the nation, and on the ideas of his father, was to develop from this point into writing on explicitly religious themes. In the later 1870s and 1880s he returned to writing about poetry, and also went on two lecture tours to the United States. In April 1888 he died suddenly of a heart attack in Liverpool.

JANE GARNETT is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford. She is a founder member of the editorial board of the Journal of Victorian Culture, and from 1994 to 2004 acted as Consultant Editor for Women on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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MATTHEW ARNOLD

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
JANE GARNETT

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Where there is no vision, the people perish

Proverbs 29: 18

Always place a definite purpose before you

Thomas Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

THESE quotations were copied by Arnold into his notebook for 1867, alongside many of the references used in the essays which became Culture and Anarchy.

Eliot was right that the status of Culture and Anarchy as a classic, whilst obviously being due to the continued relevance of the themes which he addressed, was also due to the fact that Arnold was indeed more playful and less puritanical than many of the Victorian critics who tackled the same issues. The unsystematic nature of his thoughtthe accumulation of vivid dialectical images rather than rigorous argumentmade it stimulating and suggestive over a wide range. Meanwhileironicallyhis tendency to associate materialistic narrowness with Nonconformity both echoed and served to reinforce metropolitan and university prejudices to this day. Arnolds essential optimism about the potential for educational progress and his positive view of the role of the State came to resonate in Britain with Welfare State idealism. The first substantive new twentieth-century edition of the text was published in 1932, edited by J. Dover Wilson, Professor of Education at Kings College Londonan edition which had been reprinted twelve times by 1963, when it was described on the back cover as a