Matthew Arnold

In June 1851, Mathew Arnold married Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of Sir William Wightman, Justice of the Queen's Bench. They had six children; Thomas, Trevenen William, Richard Penrose, Lucy Charlotte, Eleanore Mary Caroline and Basil Francis.

On 15 April, 1888, Arnold died of heart failure in Liverpool, where he had gone to meet his daughter Lucy Charlotte, on a visit from the USA. He now lies buried at the graveyard of All Saints Church, Laleham.

Many consider Mathew Arnold to be the third great Victorian poet after Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning while others consider him to be a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism.

Mathew Arnold was born on 24 December, 1822 in Laleham, a village in Surrey located immediately downstream from Staines-upon-Thames. He was the second child and eldest son of Thomas Arnold, a noted educator and historian, and Mary Penrose Arnold, daughter of an Anglican clergyman.

From his childhood, Mathew was proud of by his father’s ethical views, his activities as educational reformer, his engagement in religious controversies, and his devotion to history. However, he was closer to his mother than to him.

It was his mother’s support, which helped him to go through those difficult days when as a child he had to wear leg braces. In her, he always saw a sympathetic, but analytically intelligent friend, with whom he could talk frankly.

Mathew was also very close to his elder sister Jane. Among his younger siblings were English literally scholar Thomas Arnold the Younger, the well-known author and colonial administrator William Delafield Arnold and the inspector of schools Edward Penrose Arnold.

Mathew spent the first few of his life at Laleham, moving to Rugby in Warwickshire in 1828, as his father was appointed the headmaster of Rugby School. It was here that Mathew began his education under private tutors.

In 1844, Mathew Arnold began his career as a teacher at the Rugby School. Sorely disappointed by his result, he now began working for a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, winning the same in 1845. Many years ago, his father was also a fellow of the same college.

At Oriel, he studied both Western and Oriental philosophy. He also read English, French and German literature extensively, especially admiring the writings of George Sand. His studies here widened his intellectual perception.

In April 1847, he was appointed Private Secretary to Lord Lansdowne, then the Lord President of the Council in the Liberal government. Matthew moved to London to take up the post. All along he continued to write poems, publishing his first collection, ‘The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems’ two years later.

The poems in ‘The Strayed Reveller’, published in 1847 under the pseudonym of “A”, were mostly of melancholic in nature. This surprised his family and friends, who had all along known him as a lighthearted young man. However, the sale was poor and the book was subsequently withdrawn.

In April 1851, Arnold secured the position of an Inspector of Schools with the assistance of Lord Lansdowne, a job he held until 1886. Although he found it dull and boring, he was aware of the benefit of holding a regular job and hence continued with it.

In 1857, while working as the Inspector of Schools, Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a part time position, requiring the appointee to give only three lectures per year. While traditionally the professors gave the lectures in Latin, Arnold spoke in English, setting up a new precedence.

While he continued to publish poems such as ‘Merope. A Tragedy’ (1858), he now began to steer towards prose. ‘On Translating Homer’, published in January 1861, was one such work. It was based on a series of lectures he gave at Oxford from 3 November 1860 to 18 December 1860.

’The Popular Education of France’, also published in 1861, was another important work of this period. In 1859, he had conducted a trip to the continent at the request of the parliament to study the European educational system and the work was an outcome of it.

In 1862, he was reelected as Professor of Poetry at Oxford for another five-year term. In the same year, he published ‘Last Words on Translating Homer’, a sequel to his 1861 publication, ‘On Translating Homer’ entitled.

Continuing to write both poems and prose, he published ‘Essays in Criticism: First Series’ in 1865, and ’Thyrsis’, an elegy to his old friend Clough, in 1866. He also wanted to publish ‘Essays in Criticism: Second Series’; but that did not happen until after his death.