From Library Journal
In the words of editor Lang, Arnold was possessed of a "voracious appetite for meeting and talking with everybody in the known world." By the age of 37, when these letters end, he had corresponded across three continents with such luminaries as the Tennysons and Wordsworths and Coleridges, Saint-Beuve, Merimee and Michelet, Gladstone, Harriett Martineau, Sand, Renan, and Froude. Arnold exhibited the same virtues in private as in public: a sunny disposition, a desire to be used, a consuming passion for the letters, and constant efforts to improve mind and character. A letter to his mother, dated May 16, 1855, demonstrates Arnold's ineradicable sense of fairness: he praises the controversial bluestocking Martineau for her independence of mind, though he could agree with her on nothing. The standard of editing in this first volume is uniformly high; Lang, an Arnold scholar, offers lively and informative comments. For academic collections.?David Keymer, California State Univ., StanislausCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

In the words of editor Lang, Arnold was possessed of a "voracious appetite for meeting and talking with everybody in the known world." By the age of 37, when these letters end, he had corresponded across three continents with such luminaries as the Tennysons and Wordsworths and Coleridges, Saint-Beuve, Mrime and Michelet, Gladstone, Harriett Martineau, Sand, Renan, and Froude. Arnold exhibited the same virtues in private as in public: a sunny disposition, a desire to be used, a consuming passion for the letters, and constant efforts to improve mind and character. A letter to his mother, dated May 16, 1855, demonstrates Arnold's ineradicable sense of fairness: he praises the controversial bluestocking Martineau for her independence of mind, though he could agree with her on nothing. The standard of editing in this first volume is uniformly high; Lang, an Arnold scholar, offers lively and informative comments. For academic collections.David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus

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