The Letters of Matthew Arnold edited by Cecil Y. Lang

The Volumes:
Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 4
Volume 5
Volume6

The Letters of Matthew Arnold

Edited by Cecil Y. Lang

Volume 1: 1829-1859 • 549 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1651-8

Volume 2: 1860-1865 • 505 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1706-9

Volume 3: 1866-1870 • 544 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1765-4

Volume 4: 1871-1878 • 496 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1896-0

Volume 5: 1879-1884 • 536 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1999-1

Volume 6: 1885-1888 • 416 pages plus cumulative series index • 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 • $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-2028-0

Specially priced six-volume set available in limited quantities • $300.00 • ISBN 08139-2094-9

"It is entirely clear from volumes 1 and 2 that Lang has pulled off yet another triumph or industry, wisdom, and precision....The letters that do survive have now been edited respectfully but not pedantically, and with a light touch that Arnold would have relished. Arnold altogether, we feel sure, would have approved of Cecil Lang."
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Reviews
Editor
Related Links
To Order

The University Press of Virginia edition of The Letters of Matthew Arnold, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, represents the most comprehensive and assiduously annotated collection of Arnold's correspondence available. When complete in six volumes, this edition will include close to four thousand letters, nearly five times the number in G.W.E. Russell's two-volume compilation of 1895. The letters, at once meaty and delightful, appear with a consecutiveness rare in such editions, and they contain a great deal of new information, both personal (sometimes intimate) and professional. Two new diaries are included, a handful of letters to Matthew Arnold, and many of his own that will appear in their entirety here for the first time. Renowned as a poet and critic, Arnold will be celebrated now as a letter writer. Nowhere else is Arnold's appreciation of life and literature so extravagantly evident as in his correspondence. His letters amplify the dark vision of his own verse, as well as the moral background of his criticism. As Cecil Lang writes, the letters "may well be the finest portrait of an age and of a person, representing the main movements of mind and of events of nearly half a century and at the same time revealing the intimate life of the participant-observer, in any collection of letters in the nineteenth century, possibly in existence."

from "The Scholar-Gipsy"

Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill;
Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes!
No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,
Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,
Nor the cropp'd herbage shoot another head.
But when the fields are still,
And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,
And only the white sheep are sometimes seen
Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd green.
Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest!

(1853)

Reviews

"The book is a model of the kind of careful, loving scholarship that demands years of work, the kind of scholarship denigrated by people who whip out a new book of High Theory every year....I cannot think of anything that could restore humanity to Arnold's idea of the canon more than the volume of his letters in the years 1829-1859."

--Sewanee Review

"In Lang's expert hands Arnold emerges as a Stendhalian observer of the major European tendencies of his time. He is also seen in his non-Stendhalian capacities as a devoted friend and family member, as engaged social critic and hardworking civil servant, as poet, nature-lover, and Francophile."

--Nineteenth-Century Literature

The Volumes

Volume 1: 1829-1859

Volume 1 begins with an account of the Arnold children by their father, headmaster of Rugby School. The letters show Arnold as a precocious schoolboy, doted on and remonstrated by his extended family; as a foppish Oxonian; as a young man enjoying the pleasures of Paris and working at a perfect and undemanding job; then as a new husband in an imperfect, too-demanding job; as Professor of Poetry at Oxford; and finally as an emergent European critic. As Cecil Lang writes in his engaging and spacious introduction, "Arnold learned to live with a boring, demanding, underpaid, unrewarding occupation largely because—questing intellectual, husband and father, school inspector, clubbable man-about-town and cosmopolite-about-Europe and America, hunter, fisherman, skater, voracious reader—he lived to learn."

Volume 2: 1860-1865

Volume 2 covers the years of Arnold's emergence as a critic. During this period, he consolidated his reputation with Essays in Criticism, notably the influential article, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." In 1865, in Europe on an official school study, he records his impressions with his usual keen observations of nature within and nature without. His letters to friends (old and new, at home and abroad), to politicians and theologians continue to display an unhurried, unfailing intellect. Writing to his mother and other members of his family, he exhibits a warm, witty, and always observant devotion to his wife, Flu, and young son, Tom, who often accompany him on his travels in England.

Volume 3: 1866-1870

"Today's Arnold scholars can sometimes seem a po-faced bunch, uncomprehending of the jaunty insouciance of their subject—that notorious "vivacity"—and reflecting frigidly to the trespass of the interested outsider. Into that stuffiness, Lang pumps an invigorating burst of fresh air."
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT on Volume 3

The letters in this volume show Arnold, now midway in his professional career, publishing his first volume of poems in a decade and emerging as a critic—simultaneously—of society, of education, of religion, and, as always, of politics. In 1867 he published New Poems, containing several of his best-known and most beloved works, "Dover Beach," "Thyrsis," "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," and many others, including the first reprint since 1852 of "Empedocles on Etna," and in 1869 Culture and Anarchy, of which the germ is visible in a remarkable letter to his mother in 1867, as well as the influential reports on continental schools, and the seminal St. Paul and Protestantism.

The marvelous letters to his mother and other family members continue unabated; two of his sons die, their deaths recorded in wrenching accents; his essays, possibly by design, draw flak from all directions, which Arnold evades (any poet to any critic) as adroitly or disarmingly as usual; for two years he takes into his home an Italian prince; and he is awarded an honorary Oxford degree. He remains in every way both Establishment and anti-Establishment, both courteous, as has been said, and something better than courteous: honest.

Volume 4: 1871-1878

In volume 4, Matthew Arnold regroups. In his writings, he ranges from religion to literature; St. Paul and Protestantism in 1870 is followed by Literature and Dogma, God and the Bible, and Last Essays on Church and Religion, all with their redemptive and customary wit and wisdom. These books have all more or less been forgotten now, but in the 1870s they were an integral part of intellectual culture, as was Friendship's Garland. Mixed Essays, revealing what Arnold calls a "unity of tendency," is an important and suggestive pivot combining literature and society, and it leads easily to his highly influential, enduring, and endearing Poems of Wordsworth.

Equally, the letters here continue to chronicle Arnold's personal life in the characteristically intimate note of all his correspondence. Arnold loses a son, a brother, and his mother (as well as his mother-in-law), and he moves seamlessly from the marvelous letters to his mother to the marvelous letters to his sister remaining at Fox How almost as if he had been writing all along not merely to an individual person but also to a spiritual anchor, or even to his moral center.

Arnold travels in France, Switzerland, and Italy, recording as always his incomparable impressions. He settles, finally, in Surrey, and poignantly says farewell to his youth in "George Sand," a moving and beautiful essay, just as he seems in his last home, Pains Hill Cottage, to be saying good-bye to Fox How.

Volume 5: 1879-1884

In this penultimate volume of the Virginia edition of Matthew Arnold's letters, we see Arnold at his best. This period saw publication of Mixed Essays, Irish Essays, and Discourses in America as well as of several essays gathered later in Essays in Criticism, Second Series. The Poems of Wordsworth and The Poetry of Byron appeared, as did the controversial essay "The Study of Poetry," with its notorious and very readable touchstone theory.

The emotional and moral center of the volume, however, is the extraordinary series of letters written during Arnold's first American visit, during which he ranged from New York and New England to Madison, Chicago, Richmond, Washington, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. Like most visiting British luminaries, he meets everyone everywhere, including the president and former president, the Delanos, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, and, especially, Andrew Carnegie. But the visit—a lecture tour undertaken to pay off his son's debts—had other and far more significant repercussions, for Arnold was accompanied by his wife and by his elder daughter, who met the man she was to marry—the direct cause of a second American visit and, in due course, of a flourishing branch of Arnold descendants in the United States.

Volume 6: 1885-1888

In this final volume of the Virginia edition of Arnold's letters, Arnold joins for the last time a Royal Commission on Education, traveling first to Germany, and then on to Switzerland and Paris. Following his wife and younger daughter, Arnold also makes his second American visit, this time to see "the Midget," his first grandchild. Both missions reveal his well-known and characteristic zest for people and places—new acquaintances, new scenery, the total experience of living—observing, absorbing, recording, and moving on.

Finally, with maximum nostalgia and minimum regret, he resigns the inspectorship of schools in which he had spent nearly all of his adult existence and settles down, in sweet, bucolic content, to the life of a country squire. Then, tragically, abruptly, and predictably, it screeches to a halt. Manifestly, he had lived daily with intimations of mortality.

The series-cumulative index included with this volume is an invaluable resource for tracking Arnold's records of his active life.

The Editor

Cecil Y. Lang was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Virginia. He was the editor of The Swinburne Letters, New Writings of Swinburne, and The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle, and coeditor of The Tennyson Letters.

Related Links

University of Toronto English Library: Matthew Arnold Page. . . .includes a biographical note plus the full searchable text of Culture and Anarchy and Selected Poetry and Prose .

The Letters of Matthew Arnold
Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Volume 1: 1829-1859 • 549 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1651-8
Volume 2: 1860-1865 • 505 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1706-9
Volume 3: 1866-1870 • 544 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1765-4
Volume 4: 1871-1878 • 496 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1896-0
Volume 5: 1879-1884 • 536 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1999-1
Volume 6: 1885-1888 • 416 pages • 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-2028-0

Specially priced six-volume set available in limited quantities • Cloth $300.00 • ISBN 0-8139-2094-9

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/arnold_lang.html

Revised 5/30/07

The Volumes: Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume6		The Letters of Matthew Arnold
		Edited by Cecil Y. Lang
		Volume 1: 1829-1859 • 549 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1651-8
		Volume 2: 1860-1865 • 505 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1706-9
		Volume 3: 1866-1870 • 544 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1765-4
		Volume 4: 1871-1878 • 496 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1896-0
		Volume 5: 1879-1884 • 536 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1999-1
		Volume 6: 1885-1888 • 416 pages plus cumulative series index • 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 • $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-2028-0
		Specially priced six-volume set available in limited quantities • $300.00 • ISBN 08139-2094-9
		"It is entirely clear from volumes 1 and 2 that Lang has pulled off yet another triumph or industry, wisdom, and precision....The letters that do survive have now been edited respectfully but not pedantically, and with a light touch that Arnold would have relished. Arnold altogether, we feel sure, would have approved of Cecil Lang." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Reviews Editor Related Links To Order		The University Press of Virginia edition of The Letters of Matthew Arnold, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, represents the most comprehensive and assiduously annotated collection of Arnold's correspondence available. When complete in six volumes, this edition will include close to four thousand letters, nearly five times the number in G.W.E. Russell's two-volume compilation of 1895. The letters, at once meaty and delightful, appear with a consecutiveness rare in such editions, and they contain a great deal of new information, both personal (sometimes intimate) and professional. Two new diaries are included, a handful of letters to Matthew Arnold, and many of his own that will appear in their entirety here for the first time. Renowned as a poet and critic, Arnold will be celebrated now as a letter writer. Nowhere else is Arnold's appreciation of life and literature so extravagantly evident as in his correspondence. His letters amplify the dark vision of his own verse, as well as the moral background of his criticism. As Cecil Lang writes, the letters "may well be the finest portrait of an age and of a person, representing the main movements of mind and of events of nearly half a century and at the same time revealing the intimate life of the participant-observer, in any collection of letters in the nineteenth century, possibly in existence."
from "The Scholar-Gipsy" Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill; Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes! No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed, Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats, Nor the cropp'd herbage shoot another head. But when the fields are still, And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest, And only the white sheep are sometimes seen Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd green. Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest! (1853)		Reviews
		"The book is a model of the kind of careful, loving scholarship that demands years of work, the kind of scholarship denigrated by people who whip out a new book of High Theory every year....I cannot think of anything that could restore humanity to Arnold's idea of the canon more than the volume of his letters in the years 1829-1859." --Sewanee Review "In Lang's expert hands Arnold emerges as a Stendhalian observer of the major European tendencies of his time. He is also seen in his non-Stendhalian capacities as a devoted friend and family member, as engaged social critic and hardworking civil servant, as poet, nature-lover, and Francophile." --Nineteenth-Century Literature
		The Volumes
		Volume 1: 1829-1859
		Volume 1 begins with an account of the Arnold children by their father, headmaster of Rugby School. The letters show Arnold as a precocious schoolboy, doted on and remonstrated by his extended family; as a foppish Oxonian; as a young man enjoying the pleasures of Paris and working at a perfect and undemanding job; then as a new husband in an imperfect, too-demanding job; as Professor of Poetry at Oxford; and finally as an emergent European critic. As Cecil Lang writes in his engaging and spacious introduction, "Arnold learned to live with a boring, demanding, underpaid, unrewarding occupation largely because—questing intellectual, husband and father, school inspector, clubbable man-about-town and cosmopolite-about-Europe and America, hunter, fisherman, skater, voracious reader—he lived to learn."
		Volume 2: 1860-1865
		Volume 2 covers the years of Arnold's emergence as a critic. During this period, he consolidated his reputation with Essays in Criticism, notably the influential article, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." In 1865, in Europe on an official school study, he records his impressions with his usual keen observations of nature within and nature without. His letters to friends (old and new, at home and abroad), to politicians and theologians continue to display an unhurried, unfailing intellect. Writing to his mother and other members of his family, he exhibits a warm, witty, and always observant devotion to his wife, Flu, and young son, Tom, who often accompany him on his travels in England.
		Volume 3: 1866-1870
		"Today's Arnold scholars can sometimes seem a po-faced bunch, uncomprehending of the jaunty insouciance of their subject—that notorious "vivacity"—and reflecting frigidly to the trespass of the interested outsider. Into that stuffiness, Lang pumps an invigorating burst of fresh air." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT on Volume 3 The letters in this volume show Arnold, now midway in his professional career, publishing his first volume of poems in a decade and emerging as a critic—simultaneously—of society, of education, of religion, and, as always, of politics. In 1867 he published New Poems, containing several of his best-known and most beloved works, "Dover Beach," "Thyrsis," "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," and many others, including the first reprint since 1852 of "Empedocles on Etna," and in 1869 Culture and Anarchy, of which the germ is visible in a remarkable letter to his mother in 1867, as well as the influential reports on continental schools, and the seminal St. Paul and Protestantism. The marvelous letters to his mother and other family members continue unabated; two of his sons die, their deaths recorded in wrenching accents; his essays, possibly by design, draw flak from all directions, which Arnold evades (any poet to any critic) as adroitly or disarmingly as usual; for two years he takes into his home an Italian prince; and he is awarded an honorary Oxford degree. He remains in every way both Establishment and anti-Establishment, both courteous, as has been said, and something better than courteous: honest.
		Volume 4: 1871-1878
		In volume 4, Matthew Arnold regroups. In his writings, he ranges from religion to literature; St. Paul and Protestantism in 1870 is followed by Literature and Dogma, God and the Bible, and Last Essays on Church and Religion, all with their redemptive and customary wit and wisdom. These books have all more or less been forgotten now, but in the 1870s they were an integral part of intellectual culture, as was Friendship's Garland. Mixed Essays, revealing what Arnold calls a "unity of tendency," is an important and suggestive pivot combining literature and society, and it leads easily to his highly influential, enduring, and endearing Poems of Wordsworth. Equally, the letters here continue to chronicle Arnold's personal life in the characteristically intimate note of all his correspondence. Arnold loses a son, a brother, and his mother (as well as his mother-in-law), and he moves seamlessly from the marvelous letters to his mother to the marvelous letters to his sister remaining at Fox How almost as if he had been writing all along not merely to an individual person but also to a spiritual anchor, or even to his moral center. Arnold travels in France, Switzerland, and Italy, recording as always his incomparable impressions. He settles, finally, in Surrey, and poignantly says farewell to his youth in "George Sand," a moving and beautiful essay, just as he seems in his last home, Pains Hill Cottage, to be saying good-bye to Fox How.
		Volume 5: 1879-1884
		In this penultimate volume of the Virginia edition of Matthew Arnold's letters, we see Arnold at his best. This period saw publication of Mixed Essays, Irish Essays, and Discourses in America as well as of several essays gathered later in Essays in Criticism, Second Series. The Poems of Wordsworth and The Poetry of Byron appeared, as did the controversial essay "The Study of Poetry," with its notorious and very readable touchstone theory. The emotional and moral center of the volume, however, is the extraordinary series of letters written during Arnold's first American visit, during which he ranged from New York and New England to Madison, Chicago, Richmond, Washington, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. Like most visiting British luminaries, he meets everyone everywhere, including the president and former president, the Delanos, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, and, especially, Andrew Carnegie. But the visit—a lecture tour undertaken to pay off his son's debts—had other and far more significant repercussions, for Arnold was accompanied by his wife and by his elder daughter, who met the man she was to marry—the direct cause of a second American visit and, in due course, of a flourishing branch of Arnold descendants in the United States.
		Volume 6: 1885-1888
		In this final volume of the Virginia edition of Arnold's letters, Arnold joins for the last time a Royal Commission on Education, traveling first to Germany, and then on to Switzerland and Paris. Following his wife and younger daughter, Arnold also makes his second American visit, this time to see "the Midget," his first grandchild. Both missions reveal his well-known and characteristic zest for people and places—new acquaintances, new scenery, the total experience of living—observing, absorbing, recording, and moving on. Finally, with maximum nostalgia and minimum regret, he resigns the inspectorship of schools in which he had spent nearly all of his adult existence and settles down, in sweet, bucolic content, to the life of a country squire. Then, tragically, abruptly, and predictably, it screeches to a halt. Manifestly, he had lived daily with intimations of mortality. The series-cumulative index included with this volume is an invaluable resource for tracking Arnold's records of his active life.
		The Editor Cecil Y. Lang was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Virginia. He was the editor of The Swinburne Letters, New Writings of Swinburne, and The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle, and coeditor of The Tennyson Letters. Related Links University of Toronto English Library: Matthew Arnold Page. . . .includes a biographical note plus the full searchable text of Culture and Anarchy and Selected Poetry and Prose .

		The Letters of Matthew Arnold Victorian Literature and Culture Series Volume 1: 1829-1859 • 549 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1651-8 Volume 2: 1860-1865 • 505 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1706-9 Volume 3: 1866-1870 • 544 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1765-4 Volume 4: 1871-1878 • 496 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1896-0 Volume 5: 1879-1884 • 536 pages • 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-1999-1 Volume 6: 1885-1888 • 416 pages • 6 1/4 x 9 1/2 • Cloth $70.00 • ISBN 0-8139-2028-0 Specially priced six-volume set available in limited quantities • Cloth $300.00 • ISBN 0-8139-2094-9
		http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/arnold_lang.html
		Revised 5/30/07