’ CULTURE AND ANARCHY M A was born at Laleham-on-Thames on Christmas Eve , 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 he was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, and in – spent an extended period of time in France. He started to publish his poetry in the late s and early s. In he became personal secretary to Lord Lansdowne, a leading Whig politician, through whose influence he was appointed inspector of schools in , 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 Arnold’s poetry was written in the first half of his life, on themes of love, faith and doubt, stoicism and aesthetic pleasure. From the mid-s 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 literature––and of criticism––in 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 (–) 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 s and s he returned to writing about poetry, and also went on two lecture tours to the United States. In April he died suddenly of a heart attack in Liverpool. J G 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 to acted as Consultant Editor for Women on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. ’ For almost years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over titles––from the ,-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels––the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS MATTHEW ARNOLD Culture and Anarchy Edited with an Introduction and Notes by JANE GARNETT 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Editorial material © Jane Garnett 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc ISBN 0–19–280511–8 978–0–19–280511–9 1 CONTENTS Abbreviations vi Introduction vii Note on the Text xxix Select Bibliography xxxi A Chronology of Matthew Arnold xxxiii CULTURE AND ANARCHY Appendix: Henry Sidgwick, ‘The Prophet of Culture’ Explanatory Notes ABBREVIATIONS Letters The Letters of Matthew Arnold, vols., ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Charlottesville, Va., and London, –). Note-Books The Note-Books of Matthew Arnold, ed. H. F. Lowry, K. Young, and W. H. Dunn (Oxford University Press, ). Super Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vols., ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, –). INTRODUCTION Where there is no vision, the people perish Proverbs : Always place a definite purpose before you Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ T quotations were copied by Arnold into his notebook for , alongside many of the references used in the essays which became Culture and Anarchy.1 The project of writing the essays was a very serious one for Arnold, who wanted to establish his credibility as a cultural critic of society as a whole, to ensure that his ideas made an impact, and to dispel accusations of dilettantism. He wanted to defend his role as a thinker, rather than a doer (in the political sense), but, in so doing, to promote the idea of culture as an active principle, an approach to life––as the engaged thought without which action was futile. In Arnold’s view, people needed to think more, and in a more disciplined way. The ideas of Culture and Anarchy made an immediate mark––negatively as well as positively––and the terms which Arnold used entered the vocabulary of later Victorian cultural debate. But it was in the twentieth century that the book acquired the status of a classic. The image of Arnold presented by Max Beerbohm in his famous cartoon is on the face of it a rather different one from that captured in the notebook entries and fits better the notion of him as an intellectual dandy: Arnold stands in a debonair pose, leaning with one leg folded over the other, an elbow on the mantelpiece, a wide grin on his face, whilst a small pigtailed girl looks up at him and says: ‘Why, Uncle Matthew, oh why, will not you be always wholly serious?’ The girl is his niece, Mary, by this point the famous novelist Mrs Humphry Ward, who had a reputa- tion for lacking a sense of humour. The irony of Beerbohm’s cartoon has multiple layers: as well as making play with Mary Ward, it sug- gests Arnold’s reputation for poking fun, whilst in fact the joke at Mary Ward’s expense is funnier if one sees Arnold as fundamentally serious. For Beerbohm, reacting against High Victorian earnestness, 1 Note-Books: Proverbs text: () and (); Imitation text: almost every year between and . viii Introduction Arnold was in fact a sympathetic figure: it was because he was so highly serious that one enjoyed the outbursts of fun.2 Whereas to many of Arnold’s contemporaries, the tone of his writing was often problematic (as Sir Michael Sadler put it in , he had a ‘suppressed impishness which came out as impertinence’3), for the post-Victorians this tone either did not matter, or was a positive recommendation by comparison with that of other Victorian critics. T. S. Eliot, writing in , whilst critical of Arnold, thought that the form of his satire made Culture and Anarchy still approachable in a way in which the writing of Thomas Carlyle or John Ruskin (and, indeed, much of the rest of Arnold’s own writing) was not.4 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 thought––the accumulation of vivid dialectical images rather than rigorous argument––made it stimulating and suggestive over a wide range. Meanwhile––ironically––his tendency to associate material- istic narrowness with Nonconformity both echoed and served to rein- force metropolitan and university prejudices to this day. Arnold’s 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 , edited by J. Dover Wilson, Professor of Education at King’s College London––an edition which had been reprinted twelve times by , when it was described on the back cover as ‘a living classic . addressed to the flexible and the disinterested’. In the late twentieth century, in a Western cultural environment which was much less co- hesive, Arnold’s cultural project was reassessed in the context of 2 Letters of Max Beerbohm –, ed.