Penguin Classics Culture and Anarchy and Other Selected Prose

by Matthew Arnold

'One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.' Poet, education reformer, social theorist and passionate critic of Victorian England, Matthew Arnold condemned an industrial society in 'bondage to machinery' and argued instead that the wonder and joy of culture - in particular the 'sweetness and light' of classical civilization - were essential to human life. The other pieces here, on literary criticism, schools, France, journalism and democracy, form a powerful call to arms from a writer who believed that the English needed to be taught not what to think, but how to think. Edited with an introduction by P. J. Keating.

Genres: Essays, 19th Century

480 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2015

About the author

Poems, such as "Dover Beach" (1867), of British critic Matthew Arnold express moral and religious doubts alongside his Culture and Anarchy , a polemic of 1869 against Victorian materialism.

Matthew Arnold, an English sage writer, worked as an inspector of schools. Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of rugby school, fathered him and and Tom Arnold, his brother and literary professor, alongside William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew...

Reviews

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had long wanted to read this book, as I really like his poem Dover Beach, and had always thought of him as sitting somewhere in the progressive tradition of education that I feel aligned to. The book is a bit bewildering in some places as it is so deeply submerged in the politics and petty concerns of its time... but it has moments where from the contemporary it starts naming ideas which resonate through time up to the present. You can see the early articulation of holistic and experiential learning here, and the Helenistic archetype of learning that is informed by the development of the whole character. There is a wonderful section on what we would call now the difference between technical and adaptive change, and there is a part which in spirit echos Dee Hock's famous quote about the importance of clear principles, rather than complex procedures. The most powerful thing about the book is that it helps make sense of a lot of the concerns of other Victorian and later literature - Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest, EM Forster's 'only connect' quote, and Howard's End, suddenly make more sense in this context... and holistic education is given another tap root which makes sense of its later flourishing in figures like Kurt Hahn.

There are sections on 'culture' that feel quite oppressive, and the emphasis on 'the establishment' and shared culture really troubling to me - but I can see the diamonds inbetween the rough and rubble.

[Dylan Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent of essays, a master of the style