Years of research inform a definitive study of Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, the author of "Dover Beach," chronicling the life and work of the masterful writer, devoted family man, and impassioned critic of Victorian materialism.

1904. Contents: Method; Education; Society; Conduct; Theology.

A detailed biography of the Victorian poet, literary and social critic, and essayist.

Matthew Arnold, the foremost Victorian 'man of letters', forged a unique literary career, first as an important post-Romantic poet and then as a prose writer who profoundly influenced the formation of modern literary and cultural studies. Machann challenges the popular image of Arnold as an elitist intellectual and shows how his poetry and prose grew out of his personal life and his passionate engagement with the world, emphasizing the journal publications that drove his career as a literary, social and religious critic.

Culture and Anarchy is a series of essays by Matthew Arnold. According to his view advanced in the book, "Culture is a study of perfection". His often quoted phrase "[culture is] the best which has been thought and said" comes from the Preface to Culture and Anarchy: The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. The book contains most of the terms - culture, sweetness and light, Barbarian, Philistine, Hebraism, and many others - which are more associated with Arnold's work influence.

In addition to the celebrated title poem, this volume contains a rich selection of Arnold's most famous verse: "The Scholar Gipsy," "Thyrsis," "The Forsaken Merman," "Memorial Verses," "Rugby Chapel," and many more.

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 2 covers the years of Arnold's emergence as a critic. During this period, he consolidated his reputation with Essays in Criticism, notably the influential article, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." In 1865, in Europe on an official school study, he records his impressions with his usual keen observations of nature within and nature without. His letters to friends (old and new, at home and abroad), to politicians and theologians continue to display an unhurried, unfailing intellect. Writing to his mother and other members of his family, he exhibits a warm, witty, and always observant devotion to his wife, Flu, and young son, Tom, who often accompany him on his travels in England.