Introduction

Abstract

Matthew Arnold’s personal letters, like those of any writer, capture fleeting moments of his consciousness as they offer up fragments of his life story. But they rarely create the effect of literary stream-of-consciousness: even in the private letters in which Arnold most fully reveals himself, there is a wakefulness, a conscious articulation, a full awareness of audience. Arnold was a spontaneous, habitual letter writer who took great pleasure in his correspondence, but he also had a highly serious view of this kind of writing, which, he believed, had the special capacity to reveal the genuine character of the writer. In an 1848 letter addressed to his mother (no. 1 in our collection) Arnold refers to the correspondence of his deceased father in The Life and Letters of Thomas Arnold, which had recently been published by A. P. Stanley:

on whatever subject he touches he seems in these letters, above all other places, to have got a free full expression of himself: the compass of a letter constrains him to be pithy, and the writing to one man instead of to the world lets him open his heart as wide as he likes. It often does happen that the rough sketch a man throws off says more about him than the same sketch filled and transferred in all its fullness into a book.