Series:

Victorian Literature & Culture

7 total works

Cover of The Letters of Matthew Arnold v. 4; 1871-1878
This is the fourth in a series of six volumes collecting together all the known letters of Matthew Arnold. In his writings, Arnold ranges from religion to literature; ""St Paul and Protestantism"" in 1870 is followed by ""Literature and Dogma, God and the Bible"", and ""Last Essays on Church and Religion"". These books have all more or less been forgotten, but in the 1870s they were an integral part of intellectual culture, as was ""Friendship's Garland"". Equally, the letters here contribute to chronicle Arnold's personal life in the characteristically intimate note of all his correspondence. Arnold loses a son, a brother and his mother (as well as his mother-in-law), and he moves seamlessly from the marvellous letters to his sister remaining at Fox How almost as of he had been writing all along not merely to an individual but also to a spiritual anchor, or even to his moral centre. Arnold travels to France, Switzerland and Italy, recording as always his incomparable impressions. He settles, finally, in Surrey, and poignantly says farewell to his youth in ""George Sand"".

Cover of The Letters of Matthew Arnold v. 2; 1860-65

The University Press of Virginia edition of The Letters of Matthew Arnold, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, represents the most comprehensive and assiduously annotated collection of Arnold's correspondence available. When complete in six volumes, this edition will include close to four thousand letters, nearly five times the number in G.W.E. Russell's two-volume compilation of 1895. The letters, at once meaty and delightful, appear with a consecutiveness rare in such editions, and they contain a great deal of new information, both personal (sometimes intimate) and professional. Two new diaries are included, a handful of letters to Matthew Arnold, and many of his own that will appear in their entirety here for the first time. Renowned as a poet and critic, Arnold will be celebrated now as a letter writer. Nowhere else is Arnold's appreciation of life and literature so extravagantly evident as in his correspondence. His letters amplify the dark vision of his own verse, as well as the moral background of his criticism. As Cecil Lang writes, the letters "may well be the finest portrait of an age and of a person, representing the main movements of mind and of events of nearly half a century and at the same time revealing the intimate life of the participant-observer, in any collection of letters in the nineteenth century, possibly in existence."

Volume 2 covers the years of Arnold's emergence as a critic. During this period, he consolidated his reputation with Essays in Criticism, notably the influential article, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." In 1865, in Europe on an official school study, he records his impressions with his usual keen observations of nature within and nature without. His letters to friends (old and new, at home and abroad), to politicians and theologians continue to display an unhurried, unfailing intellect. Writing to his mother and other members of his family, he exhibits a warm, witty, and always observant devotion to his wife, Flu, and young son, Tom, who often accompany him on his travels in England.

Cover of The Letters of Matthew Arnold v. 6; 1885-1888
In this final volume of the Virginia edition of Arnold's letters, Arnold joins for the last time a Royal Commission on Education, travelling first to Germany, and then on to Switzerland and Paris. Following his wife and younger daughter, Arnold also makes his second American visit, this time to see ""the Midget"", his first grandchild. Both missions reveal his well-known and characteristic zest for people and places - new acquaintances, new scenery, the total experience of living - observing, absorbing, recording and moving on. Finally, with maximum nostalgia and minimum regret, he resigned the inspectorship of schools in which he had spent nearly all of his adult existence and settles down, in sweet, bucolic content, to the life of a country squire. Then, tragically, abruptly and predictably, it screeches to a halt. Manifestly, he had lived daily with intimations of mortality. The series-cumulative index included with this volume is a valuable resource for tracking Arnold's records of his active life.

Cover of The Letters of Matthew Arnold v.5; 1879-1884
The emotional and moral centre of this collection is the series of letters written during Arnold's first American visit, during which he ranged from New York and New England to Madison, Chicago, Richmond, Washington, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec. Like most visiting British luminaries, he meets everyone, everywhere, including the president and former president, the Delanos, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts and especially Andrew Carnegie. But the visit - a lecture tour taken to pay off his sons debts - had other and far more significant repercussions, for Arnold was accompanied by his wife and by his elder daughter, who met the man she was to marry - the direct cause of a second American visit and, in due course, of a flourishing branch of Arnold descendants in the United States.

Cover of The Letters of Matthew Arnold
The University Press of Virginia edition of ""The Letters of Matthew Arnold"", edited by Cecil Y. Lang, represents the most comprehensive and assiduously annotated collection of Arnold's correspondence available. When complete in six volumes, this edition will include close to four thousand letters, nearly five times the number in G.W.E. Russell's two-volume compilation of 1895. The letters, at once meaty and delightful, appear with a consecutiveness rare in such editions, and they contain a great deal of new information, both personal (sometimes intimate) and professional. Two new diaries are included, a handful of letters to Matthew Arnold, and many of his own that will appear in their entirety here for the first time.

Cover of The Letters of Matthew Arnold v. 1; 1829-59
The publication of all the known letters of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), when complete in seven volumes, will present close to 4000 letters, nearly five times the number in G.W.E. Russell's two-volume compilation of 1895, many of which appear in their entirety here for the first time. Renowned as a poet and critic, Arnold will be celebrated now as a letter writer. In his introduction, Cecil Y. Lang writes that the letters ""may well be the finest portrait of an age and of a person, representing the main movements of mind and of events of nearly half a century and at the same time revealing the intimate life of the participant-observer, in any collection of letters in the 19th century, possibly in existence"". Volume 1 begins in 1829 with an account of the Arnold children by their father, the notable headmaster of Rugby School, and closes in 1859, when already a poet and literary critic, Matthew Arnold returned to England after several months on a government educational commission in Europe to find himsef acquiring a European reputation. The letters show him as a child; a schoolboy at Winchester and Rugby; a foppish Oxonian; a worldly young main in a perfect, undemanding job; then as a new husband in an imperfect, too-demanding job; Professor of Poetry at Oxford; and finally as an emergent European critic. The letters, with a consecutiveness rare in such editions, contain a great deal of new information about Arnold and his family, both personal (somtimes intimate) and professional. Two new diaries are included, a long, boyish travelogue-letter and a mature essay-letter on architecture, never before recognized as Arnold's, as well as a handful of letters written to Arnold. Matthew Arnold wrote with wit, humour and warmth of his poetry, his work, his travels throughout Europe and America, and his large and loving family. But most of all, what comes across in these letters, writes Lang, is that ""Arnold loved to live - the world within and the world without chiming togther...And he learned to live with a boring, demanding, underpaid, unrewarding occupation largely because - questing intellectual, husband and father, school inspector, clubbable man-about-town and cosmopolite-about-Europe and America, fisherman, skater, voracious reader - he learned to live"".

Cover of The Letters of Matthew Arnold v. 3; 1866-70
The letters in this volume show Arnold, now midway in his professional career, publishing his first volume of poems in a decade and emerging as a critic - simultaneously - of society, of education, of religion, and, as always, of politics. In 1867 he publishes ""New Poems"", containing several of his best-known and most beloved works, ""Dover Beach, ""Thyrsis"", ""Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse"", and many others, including the first reprint since 1852 of ""Empedocles on Etna"", and in 1869 ""Culture and Anarchy"", of which the germ is visible in a remarkable letter to his mother in 1867, as well as the influential reports on continental schools, and the seminal ""St. Paul and Protestantism"". The letters to his mother and other family members continue unabated; two of his sons die, their deaths recorded in wrenching accents; his essays, possibly by design, draw flak from all directions, which Arnold evades (any poet to any critic) as adroitly or disarmingly as usual; for two years he takes into his home an Italian prince; and he is awarded an honourary Oxford degree. He remains in every way both Establishment and anti-Establishment, both courteous, as has been said, and something better than courteous: honest.