Synopses & Reviews
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 1 begins with an account of the Arnold children by their father, headmaster of Rugby School. The letters show Arnold as a precocious schoolboy, doted on and remonstrated by his extended family; as a foppish Oxonian; as a young man enjoying the pleasures of Paris and working at a perfect and undemanding job; then as a new husband in an imperfect, too-demanding job; as Professor of Poetry at Oxford; and finally as an emergent European critic. As Cecil Lang writes in his engaging and spacious introduction, Arnold 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, hunter, fisherman, skater, voracious reader--he lived to learn.
Synopsis
In this final volume of the Virginia edition of Arnold's letters, Arnold joins for the last time a Royal Commission on Education, traveling 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 resigns 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 an invaluable resource for tracking Arnold's records of his active life.
Synopsis
The University Press of Virginia edition of The Letters ofMatthew Arnold, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, represents the most comprehensive andassiduously annotated collection of Arnold's correspondence available. When completein six volumes, this edition will include close to four thousand letters, nearlyfive times the number in G.W.E. Russell's two-volume compilation of 1895. Theletters, at once meaty and delightful, appear with a consecutiveness rare in sucheditions, and they contain a great deal of new information, both personal (sometimesintimate) and professional. Two new diaries are included, a handful of letters toMatthew Arnold, and many of his own that will appear in their entirety here for thefirst time. Renowned as a poet and critic, Arnold will be celebrated now as a letterwriter. Nowhere else is Arnold's appreciation of life and literature soextravagantly evident as in his correspondence. His letters amplify the dark visionof his own verse, as well as the moral background of his criticism. As Cecil Langwrites, 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 andat the same time revealing the intimate life of the participant-observer, in anycollection of letters in the nineteenth century, possibly inexistence.
Volume 2 covers the years of Arnold'semergence as a critic. During this period, he consolidated his reputation withEssays in Criticism, notably the influential article, The Function of Criticism atthe Present Time. In 1865, in Europe on an official school study, he records hisimpressions with his usual keen observations of nature within and nature without.His letters to friends (old and new, at home and abroad), to politicians andtheologians continue to display an unhurried, unfailing intellect. Writing to hismother and other members of his family, he exhibits a warm, witty, and alwaysobservant devotion to his wife, Flu, and young son, Tom, who often accompany him onhis travels in England.
Synopsis
In this penultimate volume of the Virginia edition of MatthewArnold's letters, we see Arnold at his best. This period saw publication of MixedEssays, Irish Essays, and Discourses in America as well as of several essaysgathered later in Essays in Criticism, Second Series. The Poems of Wordsworth andThe Poetry of Byron appeared, as did the controversial essay The Study of Poetry,with its notorious and very readable touchstonetheory.
The emotional and moral center of thevolume, however, is the extraordinary series of letters written during Arnold'sfirst American visit, during which he ranged from New York and New England toMadison, Chicago, Richmond, Washington, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. Like mostvisiting British luminaries, he meets everyone everywhere, including the presidentand former president, the Delanos, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, and, especially, Andrew Carnegie. But the visit -- a lecture tour undertaken to pay off his son'sdebts -- had other and far more significant repercussions, for Arnold wasaccompanied 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 flourishingbranch of Arnold descendants in the United States.