Description: 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 which appear in their entirety here for the first time. In his introduction to volume 1, Cecil Y. Lang writes that the letters "may well be the finest portrait of an age and of a person, representing the main movements of mind and of events of nearly half a century and at the same time revealing the intimate life of the participant-observer, in any collection of letters in the nineteenth century, possibly in existence".

Volume 2 covers the important years from 1860 to 1865 when we see Matthew Arnold emerging as a critic and consolidating his reputation in Essays in Criticism, with the famous and influential piece "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time". In 1865, in Europe on an official school study, he records his impressions with his usual keen observations of nature within and nature without. The personal interest does not diminish -- family, children, friends (old and new, at home and abroad), politicians, theologians, servants, deaths, and births are all encompassed in his unhurried, unfailing intellect.

Matthew Arnold wrote with wit, humor, and warmth of his poetry, his work, his travels throughout Europe and America, and his large and loving family. But most of all, what comes across in these letters, writes Lang, is that "Arnold loved to live -- the world within and the world without chiming together.... And he learned to live with a boring, demanding, underpaid,unrewarding occupation largely because -- questing intellectual, husband and father, school inspector, clubbable man-about-town and cosmopolite-about-Europe and America, hunter, fisherman, skater, voracious reader -- he lived to learn".

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