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Summary
Summary
A biography of Matthew Arnold's Catholic younger brother Tom, a scholar, teacher, and self-styled 'wanderer'. Arnold's path in life took him, after a brilliant start at Oxford, to colonial New Zealand, to Tasmania, to Dublin, back to Oxford, and once more to Dublin, where he died in 1900. His spiritual wanderings led him into the Catholic Church, then out of it for some years, and finally back to it. He was close both to Matthew and to John Henry Newman, and his relations with them show unfamiliar aspects of these eminent Victorians. As a young man, Tom Arnold knew the elderly Wordsworth, and Arthur Hugh Clough was his closest friend. He was acquainted with such celebrated Oxford personalities as Benjamin Jowett, Mark Pattison, and Lewis Carroll; as a Professor of English in Dublin he was a colleague of Gerard Manley Hopkins; and in the last year of his life he read and approved of an undergraduate essay by James Joyce.The book makes an original contribution to Victorian studies at the same time as telling an absorbing human story. An appendix contains a previously unpublished letter from Matthew Arnold to his brother.
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
Son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby, and brother of Matthew Arnold, Tom Arnold was neither as gifted nor as successful as they and has been little remembered. Yet Bergonzi (emer., Univ. of Warwick, UK) has shown Arnold's life to be eminently worth reconstructing as a kind of Victorian paradigm. This sympathetic biography portrays a likeable, intelligent, and devout Oxford scholar vexed lifelong by indecision and vacillation in his vocation and religion. His later life was characterized by friendships with famous men, with a deep marital love, and with diverse intellectual labors. His abandonment of Oxford for Australia, Tasmania, and Dublin for long periods is explained by his chronic need for funds; his changing commitments to teaching, scholarship, and school administration; and his intense alternating devotion to Anglicanism and Catholicism. In his earnestness and idealism, but also in his doubts and anxieties, he exemplified well-attested Victorian traits. Bergonzi draws on all available published sources and on private family correspondence in creating this sensitive, if sometimes overly detailed, narrative of a spiritual wanderer who was the father of novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward and grandfather of Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Graduate and research collections; general readers. A. R. Vogeler emeritus, California State University, Fullerton
Table of Contents
| Introduction |
| 1 Family and childhood |
| 2 Oxford and London |
| 3 New Zealand |
| 4 Van Diemen's Land |
| 5 Dublin |
| 6 Birmingham |
| 7 Oxford again |
| 8 London again |
| 9 Dublin again |
| 10 Golden autumn |
| Appendix A letter from Matthew Arnold |
| Bibliography |