VICTORIAN PHILOLOGY AND THE LITERARY LANGUAGES OF MATTHEW ARNOLD AND ...

345 Pages·2006·1.35 MB·English

EDUCATED SPEECH: VICTORIAN PHILOLOGY AND THE LITERARY
LANGUAGES OF MATTHEW ARNOLD AND ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of The Ohio State University

By

Daniel S. Kline, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University
2007

Dissertation Committee:

Professor David Riede, Adviser
Approved by
Professor Clare Simmons
_______________________
Professor Amanpal Garcha Adviser
Graduate Program in English
ABSTRACT

Educated Speech: Victorian Philology and the Literary Languages of Matthew
Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough argues that Matthew Arnold’s and Arthur Hugh
Clough’s poetry and its political and social resonances can be fruitfully illuminated by
focusing on the extended encounter between the language of their poems and Victorian
philology—the nineteenth-century discourse that brought together issues of language,
history, class, culture, and nationalism.
This dissertation explores the ways that Clough’s and Arnold’s understanding of
their medium was shaped by a sustained engagement with this complex and
heterogeneous cluster of linguistic ideas including the persistence of eighteenth-century
concepts of language, Romantic philology, and the emergence of historicist/comparativist
orientations to language that all co-exist during the Victorian period. I argue that
Arnold’s and Clough’s evolving understanding of language emerges from the ways in
which Victorian philological insights are mediated through the Victorian educational
establishment, and subsequently has such a mediated understanding is translated into
specific and significant aesthetic features in their poetry such as the use of slang or the
deployment of the simile. Further, because both Clough and Arnold subscribed to the
central creed of Victorian philology—that language indexed cultural health—, the
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grounding of such aesthetic and formal qualities of the poems in this discourse allows us
to recover or foreground additional aspects of the political and cultural resonances of
Arnold’s and Clough’s poetry. Finally, by highlighting the differences in their responses
to Victorian philology, Educated Speech demonstrates that the combined oeuvres of the
two poets constitute an extended and ultimately disconnected dialogue about the nature
and function of language that stretches over four decades.

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Dedicated to Marie
ἀγάπη

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my adviser, Professor David Riede, for his dedication and
assistance with this project at every step in the process. His patience, encouragement,
helpful suggestions and critical questions were instrumental in seeing this project through
to its eventual completion. Professor Riede’s extensive knowledge of the Victorian
period and Victorian poetry more specifically were brought to bear on this dissertation to
its great advantage.
I would also like to thank Professor Clare Simmons for her commitment to and
enthusiasm for my work. Her comments and questions on the various chapters at the
various stages of their composition always resulted in an improved subsequent draft. I
thank both Professor Riede and Professor Simmons for the opportunity to study
nineteenth-century literature with them through the dissertation, the courses that they
taught and in other departmental activities and functions.
Further thanks must be extended to Professor Les Tannenbaum, Professor
Terence Odlin and Professor Marlene Longenecker who all were involved with the
project at different stages of its development. A special thanks to Professor Amanpal
Garcha who joined the dissertation committee towards completion of the project and
offered encouraging feedback and useful suggestions on the work.
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I also extend my gratitude to Professor Donald S. Hair of the University of
Western Ontario. It was Professor Hair who first sparked my excitement and interest in
nineteenth-century British literature as an undergraduate—a gift for which I will always
be appreciative. Professor Hair also introduced me to the fascinating field of Victorian
philology when I was a student in one of his graduate seminars and he has been providing
long-distance but unfailing encouragement and support ever since I left Western.
Thanks also to the staffs of the Brotherton, Balliol and Bodleian libraries for their
assistance in accessing and consulting archival materials related to my dissertation. I also
extend my appreciation to the Department of English, Office of International Students,
and the Ohio State University for providing institutional support and resources. I would
also extend my thanks to the many friends and fellow graduate students here at Ohio
State and those at other institutions whom I have had the opportunity to get to know at
conferences and professional meetings.
Finally, I cannot begin to express the depths of my gratitude to my family for their
constant encouragement, enthusiasm and patience. The same must also be said of my
wife Marie, whose faith in me seems limitless and whose love makes the work that I do
both possible and worthwhile.

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VITA

August 22, 1973 Born-Toronto, Ontario, Canada

1996 B.A. English, University of Western Ontario

1997 M.A. English, University of Western Ontario

PUBLICATIONS

1. “”For rigorous teachers seized my youth”: Thomas Arnold, John Keble and the
Juvenilia of Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold.” John Keble In Context. London:
Anthem Press, 2004.

2. “‘Unhackneyed Thoughts and Winged Words’: Arnold, Locke and the Similes of
Sohrab and Rustum.” Victorian Poetry 41:2 (2003): 173-195.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....ii
Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iv
Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………v
Vita……………………………………………………………………………………....vii

Chapters:

Introduction: Educated Speech……………………………………………………………1

1. Rugby…………………………………………………………………………….18

2. Oxford……………………………………………………………………………86

3. Legislators of the Word:
Clough’s and Arnold’s Major Poetry at Mid-Century………………………….175

4. Poet Pedagogues: Clough’s and Arnold’s Later Poetry……………………….268

Afterword……………………………………………………………………………….313

Notes……………………………………………………………………………………317

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………330

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INTRODUCTION
EDUCATED SPEECH

“I merely mean,” said Will in an offhand way, “that the Germans have
taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which are
got by groping about the woods with a pocket-compass while they have
made good roads.”
Eliot, Middlemarch

Are Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold two such amateur wanderers in the
woods of philological error as Will Ladislaw describes? At some point between 1852
and 1853, Matthew Arnold, former fellow of Oriel College and recently appointed H.M.
Inspector of Schools, found some spare moments in his busy schedule to compose a
poem that was later given the title “Philomela.” The poem is a competent retelling of the
popular Greek and Roman myth. The most memorable aspects of that myth are, of
course, when Tereus, after raping Philomela, attempts to silence her by cutting out her
tongue and later when Philomela, turned into a nightingale in order to escape Tereus’s
wrath, sings mournfully of the fate that has befallen both her and her sister Procne. The
ideas of silence and transformed song that are central to the Philomela story undoubtedly
resonated with Arnold who at this period was in the midst of a serious crisis with regard
to language. The poem, however, is noteworthy not just for what it says but for where its
original draft was transcribed. The untitled first draft of the poem was composed on the
flyleaf of Arnold’s copy of R.G. Latham’s English Grammar (1848). Latham’s name has
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been eclipsed by those such as Richard Trench and F.D. Maurice, but he was a well-
known and popular Victorian philologist, rising to the professorship of English Language
and Literature at University College, London in 1839 (a position, coincidentally, that
would be later held by Arnold’s friend and fellow poet, Arthur Hugh Clough). Latham’s
contributions to Victorian philology included his well-known English Language (1841)
and An Elementary English Grammar for the Use of Schools (1843). As both Hans
Aarsleff and Richard Turley have pointed out, these texts and others were largely
responsible for transmitting, promoting and popularizing the insights of the Continental
philology of Rask, Grimm, Bopp and others to an educated English reading audience in
the 1830s and 1840s.1 I begin with this detail of textual provenance because the concrete
image of a poet’s words physically situated in the midst of a philological text is a fitting
emblem of the concerns of this study, which will explore the relationship between the
language of Matthew Arnold’s and Arthur Hugh Clough’s poetry and the discourse of
Victorian philology.
Despite the frequent appearance of the adjective “linguistic” in the following
pages, this examination of the language of Arthur Hugh Clough’s and Matthew Arnold’s
poetry is not a study in linguistics. There will, therefore, not be any discussion of topics
from articulatatory phonetics to zero affixes. Rather, this is a study of the evolving sets of
ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and convictions about language that Clough and Arnold held
throughout their poetic careers. That many of these same ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and
convictions seem, from our post-Saussurean perspective, to be erroneous, inconsistent,
and simplistic is not the point. What is important is that Clough and Arnold sincerely
believed in these ideas to the extent that they were carried, adopted and translated, often
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