Matthew Arnold’s name will be forever linked to Oxford, the city that inspired some of his greatest work and launched his literary career. In particular, he will always be remembered for his famously evocative description of Oxford as ‘that sweet city with her dreaming spires’, a line from his 1865 poem ‘Thyrsis’, written in memory of his friend Arthur Clough and reflecting the affection both men felt for the countryside around Boars Hill to the west of the city.

These days it is still possible to tread in Arnold’s footsteps to enjoy the gently rolling hills and that famous view of the ‘dreaming spires’, with much of this land now in the care of the Oxford Preservation Trust.

But Matthew Arnold was much more than just a poet with an affection for this great university city and its surrounding countryside. Although it is his poetry that has largely endured, in a career spanning four decades he also worked as a teacher and a school inspector, was a prolific essayist, becoming one of the most influential literary, social and religious critics of his day, and was a popular and highly regarded lecturer on both poetry and education.

A family of teachers and writers
Born on 24 December 1822 at Laleham-on-Thames, Middlesex (now Surrey), Matthew Arnold was the eldest of ten children, of whom all but one survived childhood.

Writing and teaching were prominent in the Arnold family, so it is little surprise that Matthew followed in their footsteps. His mother, Mary Arnold (née Penrose), was a keen poet, while his father was the great education reformer Dr Thomas Arnold, best known as the much-feared headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 until his death in 1842.

Dr Arnold was famously immortalised by one of his former pupils, Thomas Hughes, in the semi-autobiographical novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), in which Hughes records that the boys ‘feared the Doctor with all our hearts’.

One of Matthew’s younger brothers, also Thomas Arnold, was a literary scholar and professor, who wrote and edited several books as well as teaching English literature at the Oratory School, Birmingham, and University College, Dublin, among others. He was the father of novelist and social reformer Mary Augusta Ward, while another of his daughters, Julia Frances, married teacher and writer Leonard Huxley, and one of their sons was the novelist Aldous Huxley.

In 1902, Julia founded Prior’s Field School for Girls in Godalming, Surrey, and the school still exists as a girls’ independent day and boarding school.

Another brother, William Delafield Arnold, was a magazine journalist and author of the 1853 novel Oakfield; or Fellowship in the East, his writings inspired by his work as an educational administrator and reformer in colonial India. His tragically early death at the age of 31 inspired Matthew to write the poem ‘A Southern Night’ in his memory.

Oxford
Arnold was educated at Rugby School and Winchester College, where he began writing poetry and won several prizes. In 1841 he won an open scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was taught by one of the university’s most influential tutors, Benjamin Jowett, later Master of Balliol. Throwing himself enthusiastically into student life, Arnold spent three fun-filled years socialising, playing practical jokes and generally idling his time away rather than studying. Despite this, he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Cromwell’ in 1842 and graduated the following year with a respectable Second.

Much of his time was spent exploring Oxford, absorbing its history and culture and later capturing the spirit of this ancient city and its surrounding countryside in his poetry. He and fellow undergraduate Arthur Hugh Clough, also a former pupil of Rugby School, spent many happy hours rambling across the hills at Cumnor and Shotover, as well as enjoying boating trips on the river and sampling the local pubs.

After graduating, Arnold taught briefly at Rugby School but returned to Oxford in 1845 to take up a fellowship at Oriel College. His first volume of poetry, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, was published in 1849. A second volume, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems followed in 1852, with an updated version appearing in 1853, notably including one of his most famous poems, ‘The Scholar Gypsy’.

Based on a 17th century story by Exeter College graduate Joseph Glanvill, ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ is the tale of an impoverished young scholar who abandons his formal studies to immerse himself in nature and learn about gypsy lore. The idea of escaping from the formality of academic life and the general travails of everyday life appealed to Arnold, and his poem captures that sense of freedom from ‘this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims’.

Arnold reimagines Glanvill’s original gypsy scholar as an elusive figure who flits, largely unseen, among the ancient buildings of Oxford, and who, released from the ‘sick fatigue’ of life, has become immortal.

Like much of Arnold’s poetry, ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ reflects his nostalgia for his youthful wanderings around the Cumnor hills. This nostalgia intensified in ‘Thyrsis’, written in 1866 to mourn the death of his great friend Clough. In this poignant and heartfelt poem, Arnold laments the changing of the landscape he and Clough had explored during those far-off student days, commenting that ‘nothing keeps the same’, yet there is still the enduring beauty of ‘the signal-elm’ from which could still be seen ‘that sweet city with her dreaming spires’.

That ‘signal elm’ – actually an oak tree – is now a focal point of Boars Hill, along with the famous view of those ‘dreaming spires’ and the area known as Matthew Arnold’s Field.

‘The Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’ established Arnold’s credentials as an Oxford poet and encouraged other poets to make their home in Boars Hill and other villages around Oxford. These included John Masefield, Robert Bridges, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden.

Years later, Ralph Vaughan Williams was inspired to set parts of both poems to music, resulting in ‘An Oxford Elegy’, a short choral work with narrator that evokes the Oxford of Arnold’s youth. The piece premiered in Oxford in 1952.

Later career
By the time he wrote ‘Thyrsis’, Arnold had moved away from Oxford to become a school inspector – a job he regarded as ‘drudgery’ but necessary to augment his income. In June 1851 he married Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of eminent British judge Sir William Wightman, and the couple went on to have six children: Thomas (1852–68), Trevenen William (1853–72), Richard Penrose (1855–1908), Lucy Charlotte (1858–1934), Eleanore Mary Caroline (1861–1936) and Basin Francis (1866–68).

The family lived mostly in various locations in London – including, from 1858 to 1868, at 2 Chester Square, Belgravia, which is now marked with a blue plaque.

While at Chester Square Arnold wrote another of his most notable poems, ‘Dover Beach’, which was published in New Poems in 1867 and mourns the loss of religious faith in England during the mid-19th century as science began to dominate the public debate.

Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857 and immediately made his mark by delivering lectures in English rather than Latin. He was one of the most popular lecturers to hold the professorship, frequently attracting full houses, and was re-elected in 1862.

His published lectures included On Translating Homer (1861) and Last Words on Translating Homer (1962), and these were followed by further hugely influential essays on literary criticism. In 1869 he ventured into social criticism with Culture and Anarchy, while Literature and Dogma in 1873 established him as a notable religious critic.

Although best known for his poetry now, during his lifetime Arnold was more noted for his lectures and essays, and he frequently travelled to Europe, Canada and the United States to deliver lectures on education and democracy. In 1883 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He died of heart failure on 15 April 1888 and was buried at All Saints’ Church in his childhood village of Laleham-on-Thames. A memorial bust was unveiled in Westminster Abbey in 1891 in the south-west tower chapel, to be joined by a bust of his father, Thomas, in 1896. Matthew’s bust was later moved to Poets’ Corner. A second memorial, a mural tablet, was unveiled in 1989.

Although he only spent 20 years of his life living in Oxford, it was unquestionably that ‘sweet city’ that inspired his poetry and the critical essays that followed. Few poets have so successfully captured the romantic spirit of Oxford, and ‘the beauty and sweetness of the beautiful place’ (Culture and Anarchy, 1869) remained forever in his affections. {

For more information about Matthew Arnold and his Oxford connections, visit oxfordpreservation.org.uk