A Victorian Wanderer The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger

Bernard Bergonzi has written an absorbing and fascinating biography of Thomas Arnold the Younger (1824-1900), son of the celebrated headmaster of Rugby and younger brother of Matthew, father of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and grandfather of Aldous Huxley. A scholar, teacher, and self-styled "wanderer," Arnold's path in life took him, after a brilliant start at Oxford, to colonial New Zealand, to Tasmania, to Dublin, back to Oxford, and once more to Dublin, where he died in 1900. This biography explores Arnold's diverse path through academia, his complex relationship with Catholicism, and his acquaintances with such luminaries as Wordsworth, Arthur Hugh Clough, Lewis Carroll, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and James Joyce.

A biography of Matthew Arnold's Catholic younger brother Tom, a scholar, teacher, and self-styled 'wanderer'. Arnold's path in life took him, after a brilliant start at Oxford, to colonial New Zealand, to Tasmania, to Dublin, back to Oxford, and once more to Dublin, where he died in 1900. His spiritual wanderings led him into the Catholic Church, then out of it for some years, and finally back to it. He was close both to Matthew and to John Henry Newman, and his relations with them show unfamiliar aspects of these eminent Victorians. As a young man, Tom Arnold knew the elderly Wordsworth, and Arthur Hugh Clough was his closest friend. He was acquainted with such celebrated Oxford personalities as Benjamin Jowett, Mark Pattison, and Lewis Carroll; as a Professor of English in Dublin he was a colleague of Gerard Manley Hopkins; and in the last year of his life he read and approved of an undergraduate essay by James Joyce. The book makes an original contribution to Victorian studies at the same time as telling an absorbing human story. An appendix contains a previously unpublished letter from Matthew Arnold to his brother.

1 - Family and childhood
2 - Oxford and London
3 - New Zealand
4 - Van Diemen's Land
5 - Dublin
6 - Birmingham
7 - Oxford again
8 - London again
9 - Dublin again
10 - Golden autumn

Bernard Bergonzi is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Warwick. His publications include: The Early H. G. Wells (MUP 1961) Heroes' Twilight (Constable 1965, Macmillan 1980, Carcanet 1996) The Situation of the Novel (Macmillan 1970, 1979) T. S. Eliot (Macmillan, 1972, 1978) The Turn of a Century (Macmillan 1973) Gerard Manley Hopkins (Macmillan 1977) Reading the Thirties (Macmillan 1978) The Roman Persuasion: A Novel (Weidenfeld 1981) The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature (Harvester 1986) Exploding English (OUP 1990) Wartime and Aftermath (OUP 1993) David Lodge (Northcote House 1995) War Poets and Other Subjects (Ashgate 2000)