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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.
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"No letters could be better edited. Cecil Lang's volumes . . . are works of love and scholarship. . . . This correspondence reveals not only the soul of Matthew Arnold, a good poet and great critic as well as a fine, decent man, but also more about Victorian England than those in any other collection of letters."
—Sewanee Review
"Cecil Lang's splendid edition of the Letters of Matthew Arnold for Virginia . . . will do much to redress the prevailing image of Arnold as the chilly mandarin of 'Culture.'"
—Studies in English Literature
"Rare will be the reader who can put down this volume of letters."
—Choice
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Cecil Y. Lang, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Virginia, is the editor of The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle, The Swinburne Letters, and New Writings of Swinburne and coeditor of The Tennyson Letters.
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