MATTHEW ARNOLD

A scholarly edition of the letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Without the challenging precedent of Culture and Anarchy, literary criticism and sociology in England and the United States would want both purpose and direction. Manifesting the special intelligence of a literary critic of original gifts, Culture and Anarchy is still a living classic. It is addressed to the flexible and the disinterested, to those who are not committed to the findings of their particular discipline, and it assumes in its reader a critical intelligence that will begin its work with the reader himself. Arnold employs a delicate and stringent irony in an examination of the society of his time: a rapidly expanding industrial society, just beginning to accustom itself to the changes in its institutions that the pace of its own development called for. Coming virtually at the end of the decade (1868) and immediately prior to W. E. Forster’s Education Act, Culture and Anarchy phrases with a particular cogency the problems that find their centre in the questions: what kind of life do we think individuals in mass societies should be assisted to lead? How may we best ensure that the quality of their living is not impoverished? Arnold applies himself to the detail of his time: to the case of Mr Smith ‘who feared he would come to poverty and be eternally lost’, to the Reform agitation, to the commercial values that working people were encouraged to respect, and to the limitations of even the best Rationalist intelligence. The degree of local reference is therefore high, but John Dover Wilson’s introduction and notes to this edition supply valuable assistance to a reader fresh to the period.

Culture is] "the best which has been thought and said." -Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy Culture and Anarchy (1869) by Matthew Arnold describes one of two major theories of culture that emerged in nineteenth-century England. It is based on the author's Oxford lectures which articulated a theory of culture that continues to influence thinking about the value of teaching the humanities. Arnold's book reflected the public mood of his time and encouraged his readers to engage in self-analysis and self-criticism. Defining culture in idealist terms (as something to strive for) Arnold popularized his concerns about the state of English society by using his natural wit and dividing the English into three classes-the Barbarians, the Philistines, and the Populace. Fundamentally, however, his concern was with basic questions about what culture really is, what good it can do, and whether it is really necessary.