Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy - About The Age & Author

 

Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy

About The Age & Author 

Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837 and reigned over Britain till her death in 1901. The Victorian Age proper extends from the year 1837 to the year 1901. However, for literary purposes, the Victorian Age may be said to have begun from the year 1832 (the year of the passing of the first Reform Bill) and to have ended with the year 1892 (the year of the death of Tennyson, the most outstanding literary figure of the period). The Victorian Age was wonderfully rich and varied in all respects. The most obvious feature of this great epoch in British history was the enormous material progress that was achieved by the British people. The wealth of the country increased several times, though at the same time the population of England almost doubled. The effect of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century altered the whole structure of society. The relations of class with class were changed.

The progress of science was a conspicuous feature of the Victorian Age. The discoveries of science added far more to people’s positive knowledge of themselves and the universe than their forefathers and gained in all the preceding eighteen centuries of the Christian era. The spread of popular education, newspapers, magazines, and cheap books, the facts and speculations of the experts were passed rapidly into the possession of the reading public at large.

The Victorian Age was marked throughout by the prominence of a spirit of inquiry and criticism, by scepticism and religious uncertainty, and by spiritual struggle and unrest. The analytical and critical habit of mind profoundly influenced literature in other ways, and a marked development of realism was one important result.

Another important feature of the Victorian Age was the progress of democracy. The Reform Bill of 1832 did not satisfy those who had pressed for a more radical measure. The agitation for electoral reform therefore continued, and a popular movement called “Chartism” kept England in a state of political unrest for about ten years.

A strong individualism was another aspect of the Victorian Age. In its crudest form, it could lead to the justification of ruthless competition in business. It also led to the assertion that only lack of initiative and hard work prevented any one from making a fortune. The belief in individualism (every man for himself) meant an opposition to those schemes of reform which affected society collectively. Particularly in the first half of the period, there was an emphasis on the virtues of the self-made man.

The Oxford Movement was an attempt to recover a lost tradition. It was responsible for a good deal of spurious medievalism; but it did grasp the truth, which the 18th century had observed: that the Middle Ages had qualities and capacities which the moderns had lost. The theologians of this movement wished to recover the connection with the Continent and with its own past which the English Church had lost at the Reformation. The great writers of the period could not reconcile themselves to the glorification of material and commercial progress by the people. There is, therefore, a note of revolt in the literature of the time against this glorification and against the general complacency which resulted from it.

About The Author

Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham, in the valley of the Thames, on the 24^th December, 1822. Of the ten children born to his parents, he was the second. At the time of his birth, his father Thomas Arnold was not yet famous. Afterwards, in 1828, Thomas Arnold was appointed Headmaster of Rugby School and acquired a wide reputation in the country. Mary Penrose Arnold, Matthew’s mother, was the daughter of a clerical family of some distinction. At the age of thirteen, Matthew was sent to Winchester, his father’s old school where he stayed for one year only. In August 1837, he became a pupil at Rugby School and there he remained until 1841.

In 1841 Matthew Arnold entered Balliol College, Oxford, as a classical scholar. There he distinguished himself by winning prizes in poetry and by his general excellence in the classics. Due to his social activities, he could secure only second class. In Oriel College where he was elected a Fellow in 1845. In the summer of 1846, he made a trip to France and obtained an interview with George Sand, the famous French novelist. In 1847, Matthew Arnold was appointed Private Secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the influential Whig statesman.

During his visit to the Continent in 1846-47, Arnold seems to have met a girl with blue eyes. Her identity is unknown, but in his volume of poems published in 1849, he gave her the name Marguerite. There seems to have been a love-affair between the two, but the actual facts are not known. The love-affair did not develop much because there seems to have been some obstacle in the way of its continuance. Subsequently, Matthew Arnold fell in love with Miss Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of a judge, Sir William Wightman. Sir William refused his consent to the marriage because Arnold’s income as Private Secretary to Lord Lansdowne was not enough. Arnold now began to look for a more remunerative job. Through the patronage of Lord Lansdowne, Arnold was appointed an Inspector of Schools on the 14^th April, 1851. Arnold’s marriage to Miss Wightman took place in the June 1851, and the honeymoon was spent in France, Switzerland, and Italy. Arnold and his wife had six children. Of the three boys, one died in infancy, and two in their teens. These were tragic losses, but the marriage itself proved to be remarkably happy. Both husband and wife were extremely sociable and had a wide circle of friends. One of the daughters shared her father’s love of travel, and he almost found her company indispensable on his journeys.

In 1857 Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, in which capacity he worked for ten years, having been re-elected for a second term in 1862 on the expiry of his first five-year term. He was the first layman to occupy the Chair of Poetry at Oxford University, and he was the first to lecture in English instead of in Latin. Arnold had by this date published three volumes of literary criticism: On Translating Homer (1861), Essays in Criticism (1865), and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). These were followed by Culture and Anarchy (1869). In this book and in Friendship’s Garland (1879), he handled social and political problems. He also wrote books on religion. In St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1975), and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877), he grappled with the question of religious beliefs. In 1879 was published a collection of political and literary studies entitled Mixed Essays. In 1888 came the second series of his Essays in Criticism. In 1888, on the 15th April, he went to Liverpool to meet his daughter and granddaughter who were arriving from America; in his eagerness he leaped over a low fence and fell down dead, his heart having failed.