Matthew Arnold wrote Dover Beach while inspecting schools from railway waiting rooms
To afford marriage, the poet Matthew Arnold took a job as a school inspector in 1851 and kept it for 35 years. He called the work drudgery, but constant rail travel meant he saw more of provincial England than any writer before him, while producing poems like Dover Beach that still echo in modern novels.
Arnold was born in 1822 at Laleham-on-Thames, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School; John Keble was his godfather and William Wordsworth a close neighbour at the family's Lake District holiday home. At Balliol College, Oxford, his poem Cromwell won the Newdigate prize in 1843, and he deepened a friendship with Arthur Hugh Clough, whose death he later mourned in the elegy Thyrsis. He heard John Henry Newman preach but never joined the Oxford Movement.
A private secretary's salary would not support a family, so in April 1851 he became one of the royal inspectors of schools and married Frances Lucy Wightman two months later. At first he covered Nonconformist schools across a wide stretch of central England, spending dull hours in small-town hotels listening to pupils recite lessons and parents recite complaints. Parliament also sent him three times to study schooling on the Continent, and he backed state-regulated secondary education.
Elected Oxford's Professor of Poetry in 1857, he was the first to lecture in English instead of Latin, and those talks seeded Culture and Anarchy, his major social critique of 1869. His early poetry sold poorly, and a verse tragedy called Merope tried unusual metres without success. Still, Dover Beach, published in 1867, portrays a world from which old religious certainties have ebbed and is sometimes called an early example of modern sensibility; Ray Bradbury used it in Fahrenheit 451 and Ian McEwan in Saturday.
Harold Bloom judged him very good but derivative, oddly close to Keats, whom Arnold claimed not to admire much. Arnold himself told his mother he blended Tennyson's feeling with Browning's intellect. Charming, fond of fishing but not shooting, he toured America lecturing in 1883 and 1884. In 1888 he died of heart failure while running for a Liverpool tram to meet his visiting daughter.
Source: Matthew Arnold
