1. David Riede, Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988). Needless to say, other significant work on Arnold has appeared since then and helped to resituate Arnold in the post-structuralist critical world. Kate Campbell’s Matthew Arnold (Horndon, Devon, UK: Northcote House Publishers, 2008) suggests revaluations of Arnold’s critical enterprise that align well with my agenda here but appeared too late for me to make full use of it; and Linda Ray Pratt’s Matthew Arnold Revisited (New York: Twayne, 2000) rehearses traditional as well as more recent views of Arnold’s poetry and prose works, while presenting significant new analysis of her own. Alan Grob’s A Longing Like Despair: Arnold’s Poetry of Pessimism (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2002) presents a more traditional approach to grasping the philosophical underpinnings of Arnold’s poetry. A host of valuable articles and book chapters have also emerged since the late 1980s, but far fewer, for instance, than on Christina Rossetti, who fifty years ago would hardly have been considered his rival for critical acclaim. References to those works relevant to my study appear in the chapters that follow.
2. His life and letters have, however, not remained unrevisited. Two biographies (one by Ian Hamilton [1999] and one by Clinton Machann [1998]) have appeared, as has Cecil Lang’s indispensable edition of his letters, which is cited frequently in this study.
3. Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).
4. Lionel Trilling first made this point seventy years ago: “A writer’s reputation often reaches a point in its career where what he actually said is falsified even when he is correctly quoted. Such falsification . . . is very likely the result of some single aspect of a man’s work serving as a convenient symbol of what other people want to think.” Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: Meridian Books, 1955 [reprint of 1939 edition]), 9. Recent commentaries on McEwan’s use of “Dover Beach” include Molly Clark Hillard, “‘When Desert Armies Stand Ready to Fight’: Re-reading McEwan’s Saturday and Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach,’” Partial Answers—Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6 (2008): 181–206; Deryn Rees-Jones’s review of Saturday in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30 (2005): 31–40; and Elaine Hadley, “On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Liberalism and the Fantasy of Agency,” Victorian Studies 48 (2005): 92–102.
5. Antonio Gramsci’s term, appropriated by John Storey in “Matthew Arnold: The Politics of an Organic Intellectual,” Literature and History 2 (1985): 217.
6. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 37–38.
7. The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996–2001), 1:xiii. See also Herbert Tucker, “Arnold and the Authorization of Criticism,” in Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Suzy Anger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 100–120.
The chapter epigraph is from Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 152–53.
1. Unless otherwise stated, citations to Arnold’s poetry (identified by line number) throughout this volume are from the easily accessible, single-volume Matthew Arnold, ed. Mirriam Allott and Robert H. Super (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). See p. 529.
2. Not reprinted in Allott and Super, “Revolutions” is taken from The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, Green, 1965), 280. Allott cites 1849–52 as the “presumable” date of composition.
3. A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 24–70; Norman McCord, British History: 1815–1906 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 244–49.
4. The best edition of this work currently is Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, ed. Jennifer Foster (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 2000). This passage appears on p. 30, and the passage that follows appears on p. 15.
5. The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996–2001), 1:156. Subsequent references to this collection throughout this chapter appear parenthetically as Letters (cited by volume and page number).
6. This was the case, however, in part because widespread support for the movement surfaced typically in times of economic hardship, and by 1848 England’s economy was expanding toward prosperity. In addition, many of the issues that Chartists wanted addressed through direct and dramatic political change had already been dealt with through legislation enacted after the First Reform Act of 1832 had expanded the franchise. The list of subsequent measures designed to improve the working and living conditions of the “lower orders” is extensive. It includes the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and later revisions of it; the reduction of tariffs on imported items (1842); Factory Acts of 1844 and 1848 that limited the number of hours women and children could work; the Town Improvement Clauses Act of 1847, which expedited implementation of measures for paving, draining, and lighting streets in British cities; the Public Health Act of 1848; and, as important as any of these pieces of legislation, the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. (In the same year that Chartism emerged, the Anti–Corn Law League was formed. A wide and varied, politically savvy, and well-funded constituency was soon brought together in a crusade against the protection of agricultural interests, most of them wealthy landowners. Despite the power of this landed opposition, the league was able to rout it within eight years.)
Thus, by the time of the last Chartist demonstrations in 1848, bread was relatively cheap in England, working and living conditions for the poor were improving measurably, demand for English goods in foreign markets and at home was high, and wages were increasing accordingly. Britain was producing more than half the world’s pig iron (and would treble its output during the next thirty years); Britain’s commercial steamships (and navy) dominated the world’s seas; and within twenty years, the nation’s foreign trade would be more than that of France, Germany, and Italy combined and nearly four times that of the United States. England was heading toward a period of prosperity that would be sustained for two decades; this prosperity was signaled by the opening on May 1, 1851, of the famous Crystal Palace international exhibition of new consumer goods and cutting-edge technologies, hailed by the Times as “a sight the like of which has never happened before” (May 1, 1851).
7. Clough to Smith, March 1848, Bodleian MS Eng. Lett. C. 190.
8. P. J. Keating acknowledges this problem and critical responses to it in his essay “Arnold’s Social and Political Thought,” which appeared in Writers and Their Background: Matthew Arnold (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 207–35. There Keating correctly observes that “elusiveness is [Arnold’s] most characteristic quality. It is one of the tantalizing, and important, ironies of Arnold’s continuing influence that the man who was so proud of his ability to graft instantly memorable labels onto social groups and individuals of the Victorian period, should consistently elude the attempts by others to classify his own social and political beliefs. We do not get very far by calling him an authoritarian, but we get little further by seeing him as a Liberal Civil Servant. The position is complicated by Arnold’s own habit of fixing labels to himself which he immediately qualified or which he intended as ironic. He is a Liberal, but ‘a Liberal of the future’; he can write that, ‘on the reasonableness of the Conservative party our best hope at present depends’ and also ‘I should never myself vote for a Tory’; he will proclaim, as a cardinal doctrine, that ‘the critic must keep out of the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere,’ and yet argue for very specific reforms in his essays on Ireland, local government and education. Many of his letters to the press he signed pseudonymously as ‘A Lover of Light’ which may sometimes be intended seriously, sometimes ironically. And throughout much of his most attractive work, there is certainly an undercurrent of authoritarianism, a feeling that, if pushed far enough, the lover of light really would hurl the enemies of reason from the Tarpeian Rock. . . . [M]uch in this seems contradictory and helps justify the charge made by his Victorian critics that Arnold was an unsystematic and confused thinker” (208).
9. Matthew Arnold, “Democracy,” in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), 2:5. Subsequent citations to this edition in this chapter appear parenthetically in the text as Prose (cited by volume and page number).
10. See Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer Palmgren, eds., Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Allen Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially chapter 6, on the “chivalry of duty” in the nineteenth century.
11. William Butler Yeats, “The Happiest of the Poets,” in Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 62.
12. Ibid., 63.
The chapter epigraph is from “Heinrich Heine” by Matthew Arnold, reprinted in Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism: First Series, ed. Sister Thomas Marion Hoctor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 108.
1. See especially George Ford, Keats and the Victorians (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 51–89; William A. Jamison, Arnold and the Romantics (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1958), 84–104; Leon Gottfried, Matthew Arnold and the Romantics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963); Barbara Fass Levy, “Iseult of Brittany: A New Interpretation of Matthew Arnold’s Tristram and Iseult,”Victorian Poetry 18 (1980): 1–22; Andrew Hickman, “A New Direction for ‘The Strayed Reveller,’” Victorian Poetry 21 (1983): 133–45; and William Ulmer’s series of articles, “‘Thyrsis’ and the Consolation of Natural Magic,” The Arnoldian 12 (1984): 22–43; “Romantic Modernity in Arnold’s Tristram and Iseult,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 27 (1985): 62–65; and “The Human Seasons: Arnold, Keats, and ‘The Scholar-Gipsy,’” Victorian Poetry 22 (1984): 247–61.
2. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:266–67.
3. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 7:200.
4. Arnold to Clough, ca. early December 1848, in The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996–2001), 1:128. Subsequent references to this collection throughout this chapter appear parenthetically as Letters (cited by volume and page number).
5. Geoffrey Hartman, “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn,’” in Hartman, The Fate of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 124–46.
6. All references to Arnold’s prose works are from The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77). The present quotation is from 1:8. Subsequent references to this edition in this chapter appear parenthetically in the text as Prose (with volume and page number).
7. Though dating the composition of some of Arnold’s poems with precision remains impossible, a few of his major works clearly were composed after 1853. These include “Thyrsis,” Merope, “Heine’s Grave,” “Rugby Chapel,” Balder Dead, and “Obermann Once More.”
8. Herbert Tucker has quite properly observed that in Empedocles “the sacrifice of poetry to criticism was performed not just on the poem but in it, and indeed constituted its climactic plot event. For the sacrifice of poetry to criticism is not a bad description of what happens in the second and final act of this closet drama which in essence consists of the depressed hero’s meditations on the way he has traded the life-giving powers of joy and sympathy and creativity for the different, more austerely intellectual powers of doubt and analysis and judgment.” Tucker, “Arnold and the Authorization of Criticism,” in Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Suzy Anger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 102.
9. A friend of Arnold’s father-in-law, Judge Wightman, Croker had even dragged himself from a sickbed to attend Arnold’s wedding. Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 186, 230.
10. For what are still the best discussions of political contexts for Keats’s work, see Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986), a special issue entitled “Keats, Politics, and Then Some.” More recent discussions of these matters appear in Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (New York: Oxford, 1988); Beth Lau, “Class and Politics in Keats’s Admiration of Chatterton,” Keats-Shelley Journal 53 (2004): 25–38; Ayami Mizuhoshi, “The Cockney Politics of Gender—The Cases of Hunt and Keats,” Romanticism on the Net 14 (1999, no pagination); Richard Cronin, “Keats and the Politics of Cockney Style,” Studies in English Literature 36 (1996): 785–806; Thomas Mitchell, “Keats’s ‘Outlawry’ in ‘Robin Hood,’” Studies in English Literature 34 (1994): 753–69; Vincent Newey, “‘Alternate Uproar and Sad Peace’: Keats, Politics, and the Idea of Revolution,” Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 265–89; and Thomas A. Reed, “Keats and the Gregarious Advance of Intellect in Hyperion,” ELH 55 (1988): 195–232.
11. J. G. Lockhart, “The Cockney School of Poetry, no. IV,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3 (August 1818): 522.
12. William Keach, “Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986): 183–85.
13. Lockhart quoted in Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Mathews (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 109.
14. See David Bromwich, “Keats’s Radicalism,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986): 201.
15. Endymion, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 163–64.
16. Patrick McCarthy, Matthew Arnold and the Three Classes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 55.
17. G. B. Shaw quoted in Bromwich, “Keats’s Radicalism,” 198.
18. Gramsci quoted by John Storey in “Matthew Arnold: The Politics of an Organic Intellectual,” Literature and History 2 (1985): 217.
19. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Warhout, 1942), 40–41.
20. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, edited by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 98.
21. P. J. Keating argues against any radical shift in Arnold’s political values in “Arnold’s Social and Political Thought,” in Writers and Their Background: Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 207–35.
22. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott, “Arnold the Poet,” in Allott, Writers and Their Background, 102. Although Byron’s Manfred might, at first glance, appear to be the dominant pre-text for Empedocles, the resemblances remain superficial. Arnold’s appropriation of Manfred’s despair, utter alienation, and suicidal impulses in his own hero—such as Empedocles’ allusions to a Wordsworthian system of values no longer tenable—operate finally to foreground Arnold’s more detailed and extensive allusions to and critique of Keats (and, implicitly, the Spasmodic poets). Just as the associations with Manfred (in act 2) can be seen to subvert perceptions of Empedocles’ high-mindedness (in act 1), so too does his inaccessibility to the restorative power of nature condemn him as an irredeemable and unsympathetic solipsist.
23. Paul Zietlow, “Heard but Unheeded: The Songs of Callicles in Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna,” Victorian Poetry 21 (1983): 241–56.
24. Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (1939; reprint, New York: Meridian, 1955), 135.
25. For a complementary commentary on the dialogical operations of Empedocles, see David Riede, Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988), 78–93.
26. Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott and R. H. Super (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 79 (act 1, scene 1, line 113). Future citations of this easily accessible edition of Arnold’s poems appear parenthetically throughout this chapter.
27. See Kenneth Allott, “Matthew Arnold’s Reading-Lists in Three Early Diaries,” Victorian Studies 2 (1959): 254–66.
28. Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, October 14–31, 1818, in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, ed. Richard Monckton Milnes, 2 vols. (London, 1848), 1:235–36. See also Rollins, Letters of John Keats, 1:404.
29. Keats to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:387.
30. For the best discussions of Arnold and Wordsworth, see U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Dover Revisited: The Wordsworthian Matrix in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 1 (1963): 17–26; and Thais Morgan, “Rereading Nature: Wordsworth between Swinburne and Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 24 (1986): 427–39.
31. Book 1 of Hyperion concludes with the “bright Titan, frenzied with new woes, / Unused to bend” bending “his spirit to the sorrow of the time” (2:299–301). He “arose, and on the stars / Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide” only to find that “still they were the same bright, patient stars” (2:350–53).
32. Manfred Dietrich suggests rather different reasons for the inevitable fate of Empedocles in Arnold’s mind. See Dietrich, “Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna and the 1853 Preface,” Victorian Poetry 14 (1976): 320–24.
33. In his selections from Keats in Thomas Humphry Ward’s The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions, 4 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1880), Arnold chose to include the following lines from Hyperion: book 1, lines 1–51; book 2, lines 167–243; and book 2, lines 346–78 (Prose, 9:323). He could not have known The Fall of Hyperion when he composed Empedocles, because it was not published until 1856 (by Milnes).
34. Arthur Hugh Clough, review of Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems and Alexander Smith’s Poems, in Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry, 1830–1870, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Athlone, 1972), 159.
35. Charles Kingsley, Fraser’s Magazine 29 (1849): 575–80. Quoted in Matthew Arnold: The Poetry: The Critical Heritage, ed. Carl Dawson (London: Rout-ledge, 1973), 42.
36. William Edmonstoune Aytoun, review of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, Blackwood’s Magazine 66 (1849): 340–46. Reprinted in Dawson, Matthew Arnold, 52.
37. North British Review 9 (1853): 209–14. Reprinted in Dawson, Matthew Arnold, 70.
38. Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 50.
39. Richard Cronin, “The Spasmodics,” in The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002), 291. For the most wide-ranging and useful compilation of essays on the Spasmodic phenomenon in Victorian England, see Victorian Poetry 42 (Spring 2005), a special issue of the journal devoted to Spasmodicism.
40. Arnold to Clough, March 21, 1853, in Lang, Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1:258.
41. Joseph Bristow, “‘Love, let us be true to one another’: Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and ‘Our Aqueous Ages,’” Literature and History, 3rd ser., 4, no. 1 (1995): 32.
42. Rossetti quoted in Sidney Coulling, Matthew Arnold and His Critics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), 27.
43. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Formative Years, 1835–1862, ed. William E. Fredeman, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 1:255.
44. Arthur Henry Hallam, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson,” Englishman’s Magazine 1 (August 1831): 616–28.
45. In Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), Isobel Armstrong reads Clough’s view of Smith as far more derogatory than it appears to me (179–80).
46. Alexander Smith, Poems, 2nd ed. (London: David Bogue, 1853). All page references to Smith’s poetry are taken from this edition.
47. At the end of scene 12, for example, after Walter’s rape of Violet and subsequent collapse, his intimate friend Edward correctly predicts that Walter
. . . will return to the old faith he learned
Beside his mother’s knee. That memory
That haunts him, as the sweet and gracious moon
Haunts the poor outcast Earth, will lead him back
To happiness and God.
(Smith, 130)
In the next and final scene of the poem, as Violet forgives Walter and concludes, “Love will redeem all errors,” Walter views his beloved as a “noble soul” who will “lift [him] up / By [her] sweet inspiration” and enable him to perform “great duties” and pen “great songs,” so that “when [he] fall[s] / It matters not, so that God’s work is done” (Smith, 138).
48. See, for instance, Coulling, Matthew Arnold, 23–34.
The first chapter epigraph is from Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897; London: Jonathan Cape, 1922), 13.
The second chapter epigraph is from Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 211.
1. Arnold to Clough, September 29, 1848, in The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996–2001), 1:120. Subsequent references to this collection throughout this chapter appear parenthetically as Letters (cited by volume and page number).
2. It is therefore especially intriguing that both G. D. Boyle, in his unsigned British Review commentary on Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems, and William Edmonstoune Aytoun, in his 1849 Blackwood’s review of The Strayed Reveller, compare Arnold’s (to them anonymous) poetry with that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Boyle insists that “The New Sirens” does “more than recall Mrs Browning, and that too by no means in her happiest mood.” Quoted in Matthew Arnold: The Poetry: The Critical Heritage, ed. Carl Dawson (London: Routledge, 1973), 69. Three and a half years earlier, Aytoun had made the same point, providing several stanzas from that poem to demonstrate that “they are an exact echo of the lyrics of Elizabeth Barrett Browning” (Dawson, Matthew Arnold, 52). But Aytoun acknowledges, “High and commanding genius is able to win our attention even in its most eccentric moods. Such genius belongs to Mrs Browning in a very remarkable degree, and on that account we readily forgive her for some forced rhyming, intricate diction, and even occasional obscurity of thought. But what shall we say of the man who seeks to reproduce her marvelous effects by copying her blemishes.” He concludes that The Strayed Reveller as a volume “fails altogether with Mrs Browning; because it is beyond his power, whilst following her, to make any kind of agreement between sound and sense” (Dawson, Matthew Arnold, 52–53).
3. See Antony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 96–98; Antony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 114–15.
4. Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1996.
5. See Douglas Thorpe, “‘No Woman More’: Matthew Arnold and the Loss of the Feminine,” Victorian Review 16, no. 2 (1990): 8–23; Joseph Bristow, “‘Love, let us be true to one another’: Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and ‘Our Aqueous Ages,’” Literature and History, 3rd ser., 4, no. 1 (1995): 27–49.
6. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 7:183, 158.
7. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, ed. David Damrosch, vol. 2 (New York: Longman, 1999), 707.
8. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, 14 vols. (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone, 1983–97), 1:352.
9. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan Wolfson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11.
10. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 2002), 15–16. Subsequent citations of this edition throughout the chapter appear parenthetically as Kelly.
11. Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 46.
12. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, review of Romance and Reality, in New Monthly Magazine 32 (December 1831): 546.
13. See, for instance, Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 1997), 341–51. Parenthetical page references to Landon’s works in this chapter cite this edition unless otherwise noted.
14. Subsequent references to Arnold’s poetry (given parenthetically by line number) in this chapter are from Matthew Arnold, ed. Mirriam Allott and Robert H. Super (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
15. Leighton describes The Improvisatrice as “a Childe Harold for women” (Victorian Women Poets, 47), but Daniel Riess observes that although “it is quite true that Landon borrows the Orientalism of Byron’s Eastern tales for [several] poems in The Improvisatrice,” her plot was taken not “from Byron, but from de Stael’s novel [Corinne]” and demonstrates “her shrewd skill at transforming potentially controversial Romantic works into a non-polemical Romanticism suitable for the mass market.” Riess, “Laetitia Landon and the Dawn of English Post Romanticism,” Studies in English Literature 36 (1996): 815.
16. “New Sirens” was composed in 1846 (Allott and Super, Matthew Arnold, 507). Composition dates for the other poems by Arnold under discussion in this chapter are as follows: “The Forsaken Merman,” no composition date, published in 1849; Switzerland poems, all composed between 1847 and 1850 except “The Terrace at Berne,” which was composed mostly in 1863 (ibid., 553); “Dover Beach,” composed in 1851 (ibid., 529); “The Buried Life,” no composition date, published in 1852 (ibid., 534); Tristram and Iseult, composed primarily between 1849 and 1853 (ibid., 525).
17. Also see Mary Ellis Gibson, “Dialogue on the Darkling Plain: Genre, Gender, and Audience in Matthew Arnold’s Lyrics,” in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, ed. Antony H. Harrison and Beverly Taylor (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 30–48.
18. Alternatively, Bristow views “Dover Beach” as “a failed prelude in courtship, since the elegiac tone hints at an unconsummated relationship where the speaker’s displays of erudition would appear to be compensating for his sexual inadequacy.” Bristow also suggests that the speaker’s “meditation upon Sophocles and Wordsworth may be read as the confused outpourings of an intellectual who is not at all well-practised in the art of seduction, and whose discomfort with women is more than a little evident” (29).
19. See Alan Richardson, “Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 13–25. Richardson explains, “Because the gendered opposition of reason and emotion is . . . so deeply embedded in Western culture, Romantic writers could not simply claim emotional intensity and intuition as male prerogatives. Instead, where male writers had relegated sympathy and sensibility to their mothers, wives, and sisters, they now sought to reclaim ‘feminine’ qualities through incorporating something of these same figures” (15). As I have explained, however, Arnold goes well beyond merely “incorporating” such characteristics.
20. Byron, Don Juan, 1:1713–14.
21. For a brief but helpful discussion of this element in Landon’s poetry, see Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 229–43.
22. Slinn’s work along these lines began with “Poetry and Culture: Performativity and Critique,” New Literary History 30, no. 1 (1999): 57–74, from which my citations are taken, but this work was expanded on in Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative Language (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).
23. All citations for “Love’s Last Lesson” are to The Poetical Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, vol. 3: The Golden Violet (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1839).
24. Bristow observes that “the [monologue] genre in which [Arnold] worked was, in a sense, militating against [his] gender” (32).
The chapter epigraph is from The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), 9:232, 236. Subsequent citations to the collection in this chapter appear parenthetically as Prose (with volume and page number).
1. Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 26.
2. One major exception is Deborah Espstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), which appeared some years after this chapter was published in its earliest version. Nord’s chapter 2, “Vagrant and Poet: The Gypsy and the ‘Strange Disease of Modern Life’” (43–70), is especially relevant to my commentary here. A superficial explanation of Arnold’s prolonged attachment to gypsy motifs in his poetry is provided by George K. Behlmer: “[P]recisely because the Gypsies stood apart from the mainstream of urban-industrial life, they held a special fascination for the critics of that life.” Behlmer, “The Gypsy Problems in Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 28 (1985): 232.
3. Françoise Meltzer has usefully summarized the originally Hegelian self/Other, master/slave dialectic: “For Hegel, the master-slave relationship is born of the confrontation between two consciousnesses, each seeking to be recognized as primary by the other. Obviously, one will win and one will lose. The winner will become the master of the loser. The master is the one who will be recognized, and the slave will be the unrecognized Other whose sole purpose is to feed and generally sustain the master. Ultimately, in Hegel, the roles will subtly reverse themselves: the slave, because he is working, is a maker and a producer of goods who has a purpose. The master, because his victory allows for it, basks in inactivity; his only purpose is to consume the goods provided by the slave. . . . Thus the master is useless and must depend upon the slave for his existence. The slave, on the other hand, is only apparently suppressed: in fact, he is more independent and freer than the passive master.” Meltzer, “Unconscious,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 157–58. In Arnold’s work, as I shall show, the concept can be seen to apply not primarily to material relationships among classes and subclasses in society but instead to ideological relationships.
4. William Wordsworth, “Gipsies,” in Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 211–12. The most extensive discussion of Wordsworth’s poem in its historical and biographical contexts appears in David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Routledge, 1987), 22–55.
5. For example, see William Wordsworth, The Prelude, book 8, lines 676–81.
6. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), 356. Subsequent citations in this chapter are given parenthetically as Poems.
7. The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996–2001), 1:156. Subsequent references to this collection throughout this chapter appear parenthetically as Letters (cited by volume and page number).
8. David Mayall, Gypsy-Travelers in Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 92.
9. For a useful bibliography of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature on the gypsies in England, see Mayall, Gypsy-Travelers, 245–56.
10. In 1857, Borrow published the work that made him famous for later generations: The Romany Rye. For a brief summary of pre-Victorian literary treatments of gypsydom, see Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination, 43–46.
11. “‘This is a most remarkable book,’ exclaimed The Examiner: ‘Apart from its adventurous interest, its literary merit is extraordinary. Never was a book more legibly impressed with the unmistakable mark of genius.’ The Athenaeum: ‘There is no taking leave of a book like this.’ The Dublin University Magazine: ‘We have had nothing like these books before. . . . The Zincali was the prize book of last season, and The Bible in Spain is likely to be the favorite of the present one.’” Quoted in Michael Collie, George Borrow, Eccentric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 77.
12. See, for example, Collie, George Borrow, 46ff. Dwight Culler also suggests the influence of Borrow on Arnold, especially in “The Scholar-Gipsy”; Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 193. Kenneth Allott cites “The Wandering Mesmerist” as the original title for “The Scholar-Gipsy” on Arnold’s list of poems for his 1852 volume (Poems, 356).
13. George Borrow, The Zincali (London: John Murray, 1843), 1.
14. Poems, 545. For the full text from Glanvill, see C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 205–6.
15. David Riede, Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 142. Several studies that are more recent are also relevant to my commentary here, although they do not relate specifically to the historical controversies surrounding gypsies in Britain that I engage in this chapter. See David Rampton, “Back to the Future: Lionel Trilling, ‘The Scholar-Gipsy,’ and the State of Victorian Poetry,” Victorian Poetry 45 (2007): 1–15; Regina Gagnier, “Cultural Philanthropy, Gypsies, and Interdisciplinary Scholars: Dream of a Common Language,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2005): 1–24; and John Farrell, “‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ and the Continuous Life of Victorian Poetry,” Victorian Poetry 43 (2005): 277–96.
16. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 10.
17. Wendell Harris, “The Continuously Creative Function of Arnoldian Criticism,” Victorian Poetry 26 (1988): 122.
18. Marjorie Levinson, “Back to the Future: Wordsworth’s New Historicism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 647.
19. Despite numerous recent critics who disparage or deny Arnold’s power, Jonathan Arac—like Edward Said—convincingly affirms it: “I . . . emphasize not Arnold’s weakness but his power, both in those prophetic moments and in the present, for I find that the debate between ‘Wittgenstein’ and ‘Nietzsche’ in current criticism is also the struggle for control over one element in the Arnoldian apparatus.” Further, Arac makes clear that in his own day, Arnold, “associated . . . with the power of the growing educational bureaucracy, the traditional university, and the new world of publishing, . . . could feel confident that culture was a power. . . . It is an agency of Enlightenment, like so many of the characteristic modes of power in its time and ours, and like the panoptic eye of Bentham, its vision is productive. Culture produces both the synoptically seen ‘tradition’ and what Irving Babbitt called the ‘all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman’ who is the subject of that tradition—that is, empowered to a certain vision by means of a certain blindness.” Arac, Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 117, 132. More recently, Herbert Tucker rightly asserts that Arnold’s “careful critical takeover” has “exerted on English studies an abiding influence—a culturally authoritative force—which spreads well beyond the current of tastes and beliefs ordinarily specified as Arnoldian.” Tucker, “Arnold and the Authorization of Criticism,” in Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Suzy Anger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 100.
20. The Portable Matthew Arnold, ed. Lionel Trilling (New York: Penguin Books, 1949), 2–3.