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."
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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