Selected Letters of Matthew Arnold

363 Pages·1993·35.72 MB·English

by  Clinton Machann

SELECTED LETTERS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD
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Matthew Arnold, at the age ofe leven, writing to his uncle Trevenen Penrose (his mother's
brother). 'MrHill' is Herbert Hill, tutor to Arnold and his brother Tom. (The letter is from
the private collection of Arnold Whitridge, reproduced by kind pennission of Frederick
Whitridge).
Selected Letters of
Matthew Arnold
Edited by
CLINTON MACHANN
Associate Professor of English
Texas A&M University
and
FORREST D. BURT
sometime Professor of English
Texas A&M University
M
MACMILLAN
Editorial matter and selection
© Clinton Machann and Veva Burt 1993
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1993 978-0-333-52487-9
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court
Road, London W1P 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
First published 1993 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-349-11587-7 ISBN 978-1-349-11585-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-11585-3
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Typeset by Nick Allen I Longworth Editorial Services
Longworth, Oxon
In memoriam Forrest D. Burt (1939-90),
who died before this project was completed.
Dearest friend, you worked for knowledge and love
while you looked death in the face.
Contents
Frontispiece
Preface ix
Notes on Editorial Policy xiii
Acknawledgements xiv
Introduction 1
Chronology 17
SELECI'ED LETIERS 23
1 The Young Poet, 1844-51 25
2 The Married Poet and Inspector of Schools, 1851-7 67
3 The Professor of Poetry and Literary Critic, 1857-67 104
4 The Critic of Society and Religion, 1867-88 204
Cue Titles 293
Chronological List of the Selected Letters with Notes 294
Index 336
vii
Preface
Three major collections of Matthew Arnold's correspondence
have been published since his death in 1888. The first, and still
the standard edition, was Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-1888 (2
volumes, 1895), edited by G. W. E. Russell. This important work,
consisting primarily of Arnold's correspondence with members
of his family, contains only minimal annotations and lacks an
index. Russell worked under the heavy supervision of Arnold's
widow and sister, and, at their request, made certain omissions
in the texts of the letters.l In 1923, Arnold Whitridge, Arnold's
grandson, supplemented Russell's collection with a slender vol
ume entitled Unpublished Letters of Matthew Arnold.
The third collection, Howard F. Lowry's edition of The Letters
of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough (1932), had the greatest
impact on scholarship in the field of Victorian literature: the
Clough letters revealed a great deal about Arnold's development
as a poet. This was the last major volume of correspondence to
appear. However, William Buckler's Matthew Arnold's Books:
Toward a Publishing Diary (1958) included portions of letters
written by Arnold to his publishers George Smith and Alexan
der Macmillan, letters that help to document Arnold's publishing
record, and various additional single letters and small groups of
letters have been published in appendices lo books and in
journals through the years.
In the early 1960s, Roger L. Brooks noted that 'the dispersed
nature of the uncollected correspondence has for many years
prevented much thorough scholarship on Matthew Arnold and
his work',2 and, a decade later, David J. DeLaura thought that
'the greatest remaining impediment to the study of Arnold's
biography and his intellectual development is the lack of a
complete edition of the letters' .3 The same generalisations can
still be reasonably applied today; however, progress has been
steady if slow. Several checklists of Arnold's letters have been
compiled, beginning in the 1930s and culminating in Arthur
Kyle Davis Jr's Matthew Arnold's Letters: A Descriptive Checklist
(1968), an updated version of which is located at the University
of Virginia libraries in Charlottesville. Most importantly, Cecil
ix
X Preface
Y. Lang began work on an edition of Arnold's complete letters
in the 1960s, and the first volume of that long-awaited work
will be published in the near future.
Lang's edition will provide definitive texts and full annotation
of all known Arnold letters. The purpose of our collection is
much more modest: to provide a convenient, readable, single
volume work that will be easily accessible to students, scholars,
and general readers. Although several popular anthologies of
Arnold's works include selections from his letters, no general
anthology can do justice to the wide-ranging points of interest
to be found in Arnold's extensive correspondence. Even in
assembling a full volume of selected letters, difficult choices had
to be made. Because we were faced with strict limitations on
length imposed by editorial purpose and economic considera
tions, we decided to accommodate the maximum number of
interesting letters by excising portions of some letters and by
holding the editorial apparatus to a minimum. A separate
chronological, annotated list of the letters provides bibliograph
ical information to the reader interested in further research. In
some cases, notably the Clough letters which appeared in the
Lowry edition, elaborate annotation and analysis is available
elsewhere. At the other extreme, some letters are published here
for the first time.
In determining the text of each letter, whether or not it had
been published previously, we referred to a copy of Arnold's
original manuscript letter (ALS) whenever it was available in
order to obtain the most reliable text. Russell, in particular, who
worked in a time when editors conventionally took certain
liberties in dealing with their materials, freely edited Arnold's
punctuation and routinely deleted words, sentences, and even
groups of sentences (presumably acting under the censorship of
the Arnold women) without using the ellipsis symbol. Our goal
was to restore Arnold's original text, though Arnold's punctua
tion is in some respects eccentric. We also corrected a few
obvious errors in transcription made by previous editors. No
doubt we have made errors ourselves; some of the letter
manuscripts are very difficult to read, and for the most part we
were working with xerographic copies. When a copy of the ALS
was unavailable we based our text on the most authoritative
published version available - in most cases Russell's. We did
not attempt to revise these previously published texts except to
Preface xi
standardise the format for beginnings and endings and to print
titles of books and journals and certain common words in the
text in a manner that is consistent with Arnold's own usage
when that usage is well established (for example 'today' rather
than 'to-day').
The process of choosing letters for inclusion in this collection
consisted of several stages. First, we felt compelled to include
the 'classic' Arnold letters that have become familiar to virtually
all serious students of Arnold: the 1869 letter in which he
described his poems as representing 'the main movement of
mind of the last quarter of a century' and compared his poetic
achievement to that of Tennyson and Browning (no. 153) is one
obvious example. Other familiar examples will come to mind,
especially from the Clough letters. We expanded this list of
essential letters by identifying those letters that have been most
often quoted and cited in scholarly books and articles on·
Arnold. Naturally, these letters document important events in
Arnold's life and career and contain his views on various
subjects. We added certain previously unpublished letters that
seemed similarly important but had not been generally available
to scholars.
At this point our scheme of organisation helped to determine
our selection. It seemed to us that a chronological arrangement
of the letters by which Arnold implicitly tells the story of his
life in his own words would be most useful and enjoyable for
most readers. We chose to organise the letters according to
important turning points in Arnold's life and career and finally
arrived at four divisions: 'The Young Poet' (1844--51), 'The Mar
ried Poet and Inspector of Schools' (1851-7), 'The Professor of
Poetry and Literary Critic' (1857-67), and 'The Critic of Society
and Religion' (1867-88). Thus we selected some of the letters
primarily because they provided a sense of transition in the
implicit narrative of Arnold's life.
Other letters were chosen because they seemed represent
ative. For example, in Arnold's voluminous correspondence to
his mother there is much description of the private and domes
tic details of his life. Many letters contain humorous anecdotes
concerning his children, while others describe their ill health
and misfortunes. (Arnold buried three sons.) Other frequent
topics are Arnold's travels and his often rigorous schedule of
work as school inspector - a favourite subject of complaint. A