The School Inspector

Matthew Arnold: poems, essays and great facial hair

On Christmas Eve 1822 a boy was born, not in a stable, but in the comfortable home of Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Laleham School (but soon to be promoted to Rugby). Matthew was the eldest son of the family, and always marked out for notice: his godfather was the cleric John Keble, and he spent his holidays at Fox How, the family home in the Lake District where they were friends and neighbours of William Wordsworth. Matthew was educated at Winchester College as well as at Rugby, and in 1840 won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He began to write poetry and to win prizes, swapping ideas with his best friend, Arthur Hugh Clough (author of that wonderful poem, Say Not The Struggle Nought Availeth).

When Matthew was just twenty, his father Dr Arnold died suddenly of a heart attack, and for a while the young man seemed to lose his way. Although he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, he only achieved second class honours. He took a fellowship at Oriel College, and then became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne. But he had fallen in love, and knowing that he could not support a wife on the salary of a secretary, he took a position as one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, a job he stuck with for thirty five years, although he often found it ‘drudgery’. It required him to travel miles across the North of England and the Midlands, spending hours in trains and drafty railway waiting rooms, and hours more listening to children recite the catechism.

It was Matthew Arnold’s interior life which sustained him, and alongside this ‘drudgery’ he began to publish his poetry, and became in time a well-respected and ground-breaking literary critic. You may not be familiar with his work, but if you have used the phrase ‘sweetness and light’, or talked of people as ‘Philistines’, or have referred to Oxford as the city of ‘Dreaming Spires’, you are quoting Arnold, or at least using phrases that he popularised. In the 1860s Alexander Macmillan became one of his two publishers, and the men struck up a relationship of mutual respect and admiration. Macmillan would have been thrilled to add any member of Dr Thomas Arnold’s family to the catalogue, especially after the success of Tom Brown’s School Days, but Matthew was proving himself the ablest of the Arnold family. In 1857 he had been elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His relationship with Macmillan began when his scornful review of Colenso’s Commentary on the Pentateuch was published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1862, launching him into the public’s consciousness.¹ He became an occasional guest at Macmillan’s Tobacco Parliaments, and later a regular guest at the publisher’s All Fools’ Day dinners, usually held at the Garrick Club.

In 1864 Macmillan published Arnold’s brief work, A French Eton, which attacked the English public school system, suggesting that by keeping fees so high, these institutions were failing the aspirational middle classes, to the detriment of the men who would be required to govern an ever-expanding empire. Arnold knew what he was talking about, drawing on his experiences as an inspector of schools, and he dreamt of a great future of state-subsidized education. Macmillan had helped him with the research for this piece, gathering information from Edward Thring, reforming headmaster of Uppingham, on the economics of a small public school.

Arnold’s poetry was some of the best-loved of late Victorian England, and Macmillan was proud to publish it, including his best-known piece, Dover Beach. ‘Ah love, let us be true to one another…’

The returns were not great; Macmillan earned less than £10 per year from the Collected Poems, but it never dinted Alexander’s pride. He was not Arnold’s only publisher: George Smith of Smith, Elder seems to have had a more convivial relationship with his author, but Arnold’s letters to and from Macmillan discussed the content of his writings rather than just matters of business. It is an illustration of how far the boy from Irvine, the school-leaver at age 15 had come, that they could converse as equals in this way. In 1862 Macmillan wrote to Arnold:

The stuff that passes for criticism in our common English press is, as a rule, at present the dreariest stuff – barren platitudes or stupid and impertinent witticisms. I don’t read all of course but I see none that have an approach to the honest pains which Brimley used to take with his work . . . too often it is about how to say a clever thing. Not really how to make clear the character of the book you are handling.

It was with the enthusiasm of the genuine admirer that Alexander encouraged Arnold to pull together his Essays in Criticism in 1865: the volume went through many editions and reprints, although the most famous of his essays, ‘Culture and Anarchy’, went to George Smith.

Cartoon 1872 by Frederick Waddy: WikiCommons

If Arnold had outlived Tennyson, he would have been a good candidate for Poet Laureate. As it was, his death was sadly unpoetic: he was a family man, he and his wife had six children, one of whom died in childhood and two as teenagers². Of the survivors, his daughter Lucy married a New Yorker she met when accompanying her father on an American lecture tour. In April 1888 she sailed back to Liverpool to see her family: Matthew Arnold died of a heart attack while running to catch the tram that would have taken him to meet the ship.

He left a message for all of us on Substack:

‘Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.’

Matthew Arnold, quoted in Collections and Recollections 1898.

(There is only one more name to visit in my circumnavigation of the cover of Literature for the People: Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I’m saving him for a short but fitting piece on New Year’s Eve)

1. If you want to know more about the extraordinary spat between Arnold, Macmillan, and the Bishop of Natal, you will have to buy my book!

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/literature-for-the-people-how-the-pioneering-macmillan-brothers-built-a-publishing-powerhouse-sarah-harkness/7540689

2. The Arnold bloodline is impressive: Matthew’s niece, Mary, became the best-selling author Mrs Humphrey Ward. His other niece Julia married Leonard Huxley, daughter of TH Huxley. Her children were Julian and Aldous Huxley.