Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1869

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Key Figures

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was born on December 24, 1822, in Middlesex, England. His father became the headmaster of a school in Warwickshire, where Arnold would spend much of his childhood and receive most of his early education. William Wordsworth, one of the leading figures of English Romanticism, was a close friend of the Arnold family and undoubtedly exercised considerable influence over the young Matthew. While still a schoolboy, Arnold became interested in poetry and began writing verses of his own, some of which attracted favorable attention from his school. In the fall of 1840, Arnold began attending the University of Oxford, where he majored in Classics. Arnold found his time at Oxford both intellectually stimulating and personally satisfying: He did well in his studies, continued to write and win school prizes, and made many friends. He graduated with his B.A. degree in 1844, receiving second-class honors.

Upon graduating from Oxford, Arnold returned to Warwickshire to teach for a short period at his old school. In 1847 Arnold left teaching to begin working as a private secretary to Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Lord Lansdowne, who was at that time Lord President of the Council. In his spare time, Arnold continued to pursue writing, publishing his debut poetry collection The Strayed Reveller in 1849. In 1851 Arnold switched careers again to become a school inspector. While Arnold often found his work intellectually dissatisfying, he relished the opportunities his work provided for travelling frequently throughout England to conduct his school inspections. His work as an inspector brought him into closer contact with the Nonconformist movement in Protestantism, as there were many new Nonconformist schools operating at that time. Arnold’s skepticism toward Nonconformism would later form one of the argumentative threads in Culture and Anarchy.

Arnold continued to publish poetry throughout the 1850s; his verse gradually attracted favorable notice for its careful attention to form and its elegant, sometimes melancholy style. His alma mater, Oxford, responded by electing him Professor of Poetry in 1857, although Arnold continued to balance his lecturing duties with work as an inspector. Ironically, in spite of his professorship, Arnold’s interest in writing poetry began to lessen the older he grew, with his literary pursuits turning increasingly toward criticism. Culture and Anarchy—the subject of this present guide—was first published in 1869 and contained Arnold’s most influential critical work. Culture and Anarchy became famous for Arnold’s argument for “sweetness and light” as the essence of true culture and his spirted defense of establishments and the social order against the forces of radical change.

In the last decades of his life, Arnold became more and more interested in religious matters. His major work of religious reflection, Literature and Dogma, was published in 1873. Arnold spent much of the 1880s travelling throughout North America, retiring from his school inspector role in 1886. He died of heart failure on April 15, 1888, at the age of 65. He was survived by his wife, Lucy, whom he had married in 1851, and their three surviving children.

Since his death, Arnold has remained a noteworthy figure of Victorian literature as both a poet and critic. Some of his most famous lyrics include “Dover Beach” and “Thyrsis.” In his poetry, Arnold pays close attention to both form and diction, displaying his respect for poetic traditions. As a prose writer, his most famous work by far remains Culture and Anarchy, which remains both an important milestone in Victorian social and cultural criticism and an enduring contribution to the ongoing debates surrounding the essence of “high culture.”

Bishop Thomas Wilson

In his Preface to Culture and Anarchy, Arnold begins by praising the works of Bishop Thomas Wilson, in particular Wilson’s Maxims of Piety and Christianity, a work Arnold claims inspires and instructs him. For Arnold, Wilson serves as a dual exemplar of a serious man of letters and wise religious figure, one whose spiritual and moral outlook can, Arnold believes, continue to exercise a beneficial influence on the minds of his Victorian contemporaries.

Thomas Wilson was born on December 20, 1663, in Cheshire, England. As a child he attended the King’s School in Chester before moving to Ireland and studying at Trinity College in Dublin. At first Wilson desired to become a doctor, studying medicine and receiving his degree in 1686. However, in spite of his medical qualifications, Wilson became increasingly interested in religion and ultimately decided to dedicate his life to the church. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1689, first serving in England before becoming the Bishop of Sodor and Man on the Isle of Man in 1697. He would serve the community in the Isle loyally until his death on March 7, 1755, at the age of 91, remaining popular with his parishioners throughout his many decades of religious service and leadership. As a Bishop, he was known for his tolerance toward dissenting views and his desire to reach compromises with nonconforming Protestant sects.

While Wilson published a few religious works during his lifetime, his most notable works appeared after his death. Maxims of Piety and Christianity was first published in 1781, with another work of religious devotion, Sacra Privata, appearing in print that same year. Wilson remained a highly respected figure in Anglicanism in the decades after his death. Matthew Arnold’s godfather, John Keble (1792-1866), was both an Anglican priest himself and a leading figure in the Oxford Movement (see: “The Oxford Movement” below) who was strongly influenced by Bishop Wilson’s life and work. Keble edited Wilson’s works and wrote a biography of Wilson’s life, which was published in 1863. Arnold’s many admiring comments on Wilson’s work in Culture and Anarchy are evidence of Wilson’s direct influence upon Arnold’s own religious and social thought while also mirroring the influence of Arnold’s godfather, Keble, whose connection to the Oxford Movement Arnold regarded favorably.

The Anglican Church of England

For many centuries in Europe, the Roman Catholic Church was the only dominant church. While there were instances of dissenting movements over the centuries, the Catholic Church succeeded in suppressing them. In the 16th century, this situation rapidly began to change. Martin Luther (1483-1546) became a leading figure of dissent after spending some years as an Augustinian friar, spearheading what later became known as the Protestant Reformation. Luther argued that the Catholic Church had become worldly and corrupted; in his work known as the Ninety-Five Theses, which he nailed to the doors of churches in Wittenberg in 1517, Luther listed 95 arguments that challenged key points of Catholic doctrine. At first, Luther and his followers wished only to reform the Catholic Church, but upon facing the Catholic Church’s heated resistance, Luther and his followers broke openly with Catholicism, rejecting the authority of the Pope and the traditional hierarchy in Rome. Luther disavowed key aspects of Catholic dogma, instead arguing for “justification by faith alone” and advocating a return to a simpler, stricter form of religious devotion he claimed was more faithful to the teachings of the early Church Fathers. Luther’s teachings became widely popular in many parts of northern and western Europe, causing a deep schism to develop between Catholicism and the new rival Protestant denominations.

In England, Henry VIII (1491-1547) was then king, and at first Henry remained a devoted Catholic, even publishing a work denouncing Luther as a heretic and persecuting Luther’s English followers. Things began to change in the 1520s, when Henry fell in love with Anne Boleyn and pursued an annulment from Queen Catherine of Aragon, his wife. For years, Henry tried in vain to win an annulment from the Pope, but the religious authorities in Rome ultimately found in Catherine’s favor, ordering Henry to return to her. Infuriated, Henry broke with the Catholic Church, declaring himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. He denounced his marriage to Catherine and married Anne Boleyn in 1532 in defiance of the Pope’s orders, making his renunciation permanent.

Henry’s creation of a new Church of England later became known more broadly as Anglicanism. In spite of Henry’s break with Rome, Henry’s religious instincts remained conservative. Although technically a Protestant denomination, Henry shaped the Anglican Church of England in accordance with many traditional Catholic beliefs and customs, including the existence of a strict religious hierarchy. The Church of England would undergo many controversies and changes in the years following Henry’s death, in which England lurched between extreme Protestant influences and more moderate ones throughout the successive reigns of Henry’s heirs. Anglicanism gradually settled into its role of state religion during the long reign of Elizabeth I (1533-1603), who tried to create a church that compromised between its Protestant and Catholic influences.

The Anglican Church continued to keep many vestiges of Catholic influences in its liturgy, hierarchy, and church ceremonies while also honoring its Protestant essence through the creation and use of its own liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer and later, during the reign of James I (1566-1625), through the dissemination of its official English translation of the Bible, known as the King James’ Bible, or KJV. As the official state religion, the monarch remained (and remains to this day) the Supreme Head of the Church of England. During Arnold’s lifetime, Queen Victoria was therefore both the nominal head of government and the top figure in the Anglican religious hierarchy.

While Anglicanism provided England with a stable, national religion and became a key part of English religious and cultural identity, it too faced challenges from dissenting movements over time. During the 19th century, Nonconformist sects within Protestantism began to gain in popularity and strength. Within the Anglican Church, there were also attempts at reformation: The most famous—and the one most important to Arnold in Culture and Anarchy—was known as the Oxford Movement (see: “The Oxford Movement” below). In spite of all of its challenges, the Anglican Church continued to be the state religion throughout Arnold’s lifetime and beyond and remains the official church in England to this day.

The Oxford Movement

The Oxford Movement was born, as its name suggests, at the University of Oxford in the first half of the 19th century. The Movement began in the early 1830s as an attempt to draw the Anglican Church of England closer to Catholicism. The leading figures of the movement included John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and John Keble (1792-1866), Matthew Arnold’s godfather.

Throughout the 1830s, the Oxford Movement published a series of pamphlets known as Tracts for the Times, in which the key ideas and objectives of the Movement were explicitly formulated. In total, 90 Tracts for the Times were published by 1841, with Keble writing nine of them. The main beliefs of the Oxford Movement were that the Church of England was, both theologically and historically, a Catholic Church, and that as such the Church of England should more openly embrace Catholic doctrine and authority in all religious matters. Supporters of the Movement became known as “Tractarians,” named after the Tracts for the Times.

The Oxford Movement was highly influential in Victorian Anglicanism and enjoyed notable success in propagating many of its ideas. While the Church of England remained independent of Rome and nominally Protestant, the movement succeeded in reintroducing certain aspects of Catholic ritual and dogma into Anglican churches, and they even established monasteries. Despite these victories, many Tractarians became increasingly attached to the Catholic Church itself: in 1845, Newman, the Movement’s most important leader, officially converted to Roman Catholicism. He eventually rose to become a cardinal, with the Catholic Church recognizing him as a saint in 2019.

In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold invokes the Oxford Movement and speaks of it favorably, even though he himself was not a Tractarian and remained a firm upholder of the Church of England’s status as both an independent church and important state institution. For Arnold, the main worth of the Oxford Movement is more cultural than religious: He praises the Movement for its “keen desire for beauty and sweetness” (190, emphasis added) and “the deep aversion it manifested to the hardness and vulgarity of middle-class liberalism” (190). However, Arnold regards the Oxford Movement as ultimately a failure: He claims that it was that very “middle-class liberalism” that “really broke the Oxford movement” (189) and that the Movement’s wider cultural impact has therefore been rather muted. Vestiges of the Oxford Movement’s respect for tradition and hierarchy are nevertheless apparent in Arnold’s own approach to cultural and religious matters, as Arnold staunchly defends the Church of England as an establishment and remains highly skeptical of all Nonconformist challenges to its authority.