chapter 10 Thomas Arnold Confronts the “Oxford Malignants” No liberal counterattack raised more blisters during the 1836 controversy over Renn Dickson Hampden’s appointment to Oxford’s regius chair of divinity than Thomas Arnold’s 1836 essay in the Edinburgh Review. The edited provoca- tively titled it “The Oxford Malignants and Dr. Hampden.” It appeared in April, between the originally vetoed censure vote in the Convocation in March and the successful one in May. Arnold’s fury was certainly understandable. The political maneuvering against Hampden violated what he considered the tacit rules governing university politics. The Tractarians also trampled his standards of intellectual decency by slicing up and caricaturing Hampden’s views. The desire to strike back did not resolve the problem of how to do so. Arnold chose to indict the Tractarians for bad behavior. “Our Path is Not Backwards, But Onwards” The journey that brought Arnold into the Hampden controversy began a quarter-century earlier when he arrived in Oxford on an undergraduate schol- arship, the same year (1811) that both Richard Whately and John Keble were elected Oriel fellows. His genial social life combined intense intellectual activity—far beyond academic requirements—with vigorous outdoor pur- suits. As an Oriel fellow he cultivated an aptitude for sophisticated historical analysis. Keble became an intimate friend and later godfather to Arnold’s son Matthew, born in 1822. Fellows could not marry, so Arnold left Oriel after four years to run a private school with his new brother-in-law. He applied for the headmastership of Rugby in 1828. Oriel’s provost Edward Hawkins predicted in recommendation that Arnold would change the face of public-school educa- tion in England; this and similar praise was enough for Rugby’s trustees, who voted to hire Arnold without a personal interview with a one-vote margin over Thomas Short, John Henry Newman’s former Trinity-College tutor.1 1 Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, vol. 1, pp. 7–26. J. Rickaby, “Arnold and Newman,” Month 99 (1902), p. 17. Williamson, The Liberalism of Thomas Arnold, pp. 25–40. Ker, John Henry Newman, p. 9. M. McCrum, Thomas Arnold, Headmaster: A Reassessment (Oxford, 1989), p. 1. A.J.H. Reeve, “Arnold, Thomas (1795–1842),” in vol. 2 of © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004263352_012 <UN> 190 chapter 10 When Arnold arrived at Rugby it had a reputation for barbarous student behavior, bad curriculum, vicious discipline, and squalid living conditions (although things were not as dire as they were in 1797 when rebelling pupils set off a bomb and provoked an armed response from the military). Arnold accel- erated improvements began by the previous headmaster.2 Accounts by Rugby graduates like Thomas Hughes and Arthur Stanley venerated him as the patron saint of mid-Victorian education. A former pupil christened him “the hero- schoolmaster of English public schools” and another Victorian commentator (who did not attend Rugby) gushed that Arnold was “the greatest school- instructor of our age—perhaps the greatest that has ever discharged the office.”3 A single visit convinced Thomas Carlyle that Arnold’s “unhasting unresting diligence” had transformed Rugby into “a temple of industrious peace.”4 Samuel Smiles in Self-Help held up the school under Arnold as a model for creating serious and perseverant men.5 Arnold neither claimed nor deserved all this credit—Rugby’s vitalization and the larger public-school revival relied on far more than the efforts of one man, no matter how indefati- gable and charismatic. The public school also developed into something other than he intended. Lytton Strachey observed in Eminent Victorians that Arnold’s headmastership had a strange after-history. He had not intended to define the public school around the “worship of good athletics and worship of good form”—even if he helped create a system that did just that. Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), Hughes’s novel of Rugby life in the 1830s, celebrated cricket as an institution for building moral character to the point that victory in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford, 2004), pp. 501–505. 2 A. Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–1867 (Chicago, 1972), pp. 140–167. McCrum, Thomas Arnold. N. Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (New York, 1996), pp. 16–19. Hilton, A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846, pp. 465–467. 3 K. Lake, Memorials of William Charles Lake, Dean of Durham, 1869–1894 (London, 1901), pp. vi, 6–12. 4 A.P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, 13th ed., vol. 1, p. 203, vol. 2, p. 275. The phrase that Carlyle used to describe Arnold, according to Stanley, appeared in print prior to Carlyle’s visit to Rugby. In his 1839 essay on “Chartism,” which Arnold admired, Carlyle contrasted the “noisy vehement Irish” with the qualities of the “Saxon Britain”: “justice, clear- ness, silence, perseverance, unhasting unresting diligence, hatred of disorder, hatred of injus- tice which is the worst disorder.” T. Carlyle, “Chartism,” in vol. 29 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H.D. Trail (London, 1899), p. 140. For another account of Carlyle’s 1842 meeting with Arnold, see J.A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of the His Life in London, 1834–1881 (London, 1884), vol. 1, pp. 253–255. 5 Smiles, Self-Help, pp. 255, 269, 291, 307–308. <UN>.