The Letters of Matthew Arnold (Volume 5) (Victorian Literature and Culture Series) - Hardcover

Arnold, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813916518 ISBN 13: 9780813916514

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 1996

Synopsis

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."

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."

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Publication of this edition of all the known letters of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is an intellectual event of major importance. When complete in six volumes the edition will present close to four thousand letters, nearly five times the number in G. W. E. Russell's two-volume compilation of 1895. Many of the letters appear in their entirety here for the first time. Renowned as a poet and critic, Arnold will be celebrated now as a letter writer. Volume I begins in 1829 with an account of the Arnold children by their father, the notable headmaster of Rugby School, and closes in 1859, when, already a poet and literary critic, Matthew Arnold returned to England after several months on a government educational commission in Europe to find himself acquiring a European reputation. The letters show him as a child; a schoolboy at Winchester and Rugby; a foppish Oxonian; a worldly young man in a perfect, undemanding job; then as a new husband in an imperfect, too-demanding job; Professor of Poetry at Oxford; and finally as an emergent European critic. The letters, with a consecutiveness rare in such editions, are both meaty and delightful, and they contain a great deal of new information about Arnold and his family, both personal (sometimes intimate) and professional. Two new diaries are included, a long, boyish travelogue-letter and a mature essay-letter on architecture, never before recognized as Arnold's, as well as a handful of letters written to Arnold.

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0813916518
• ISBN 13: 9780813916514
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 549