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Of Poets and of Rivers: Five Letters of Matthew Arnold to George Stovin Venables
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
Among the surviving papers of the indefatigable journalist, parliamentary barrister, and Cambridge “Apostle” George Stovin Venables (1810–88) recently deposited at the National Library of Wales are five delightful letters to Venables from Matthew Arnold – two written in 1879 and 1880 and three during the last full year of his life in 1887. The first two, being concerned with Arnold's 1879 book of selections from Wordsworth and with Venables' review of it in the Saturday Review, give us Arnold's reaction to published criticisms of his Wordsworth book and its well-known introductory essay. The three 1887 letters anticipate a visit by Arnold to the Venables family seat, Llysdinam, at Newbridge-on-Wye, in Radnorshire, Wales, hoping to include fishing in the river.
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References
NOTES
1. Llysdinam Papers (B2022–26), at the National Library of Wales, published by permission of Professor Arnold Whitridge and Lady Delia Venables-Llewellyn. I have received many courtesies from the Manuscript Division of the Library, and especially from Kathleen Hughes, research assistant. From the numerous persons who have assisted me in this and the wider study of which it is a part, I mention Laurence Elvin, Susan Gates, and Aidan Day of the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln; Professor and Mrs. Walter E. Houghton, Jr., and Professor Michael Hyde of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals; Professor Peter Allen of Innis College, University of Toronto; and, immeasurably, Roger and Diana Lushington of Dorking, England. Andrews University provided leave time with financial assistance in 1975, 1978, 1979, and 1980. Arnold's handwriting being quite legible, editing was relatively simple. Spelling, capitalization, abbreviations, and punctuation (or lack of it) are given as found. All the letters except the second (Wood-house, Loughborough) have printed headings. I placed headings and datelines to right. I do not follow Arnold in underlining his signature.
2. Poems of Wordsworth, chosen and edited by Arnold, Matthew (London: Macmillan, 1879)Google Scholar, appeared first in September and was reprinted with additions in November. Venables' review was in Saturday Review, 49 (3 01 1880), 19–21.Google Scholar Arnold's essay appeared first in Macmillan's Magazine, 07 1879Google Scholar, was included in the posthumous Essays in Criticism, Second Series (1888)Google Scholar, and is accessible now in Super, Robert H., ed., The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Vol. 9, English Literature and Irish Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), pp. 36–55Google Scholar, with critical and explanatory notes, pp. 336–45.
3. His only book was a collection of three essays (reprinted from periodicals) by his closest friend Lushington, Henry (1812–1855)Google Scholar, with a 99-page memoir of Lushington: The Italian War, 1848–9, and The Last Italian Poet: Three Essays by the Late Henry Lushington, with a Biographical Preface by George Stovin Venables (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1859).Google Scholar
4. The DNB quotes Stephen's father, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, as having called Venables “a sort of spiritual uncle or elder brother.” Both J. F. Stephen and Venables were early and regular contributors to the Saturday Review.
5. For an account of this incident see Melville, Lewis, The Thackeray Country (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905), p. 35.Google Scholar
6. Ms. letter, Lushington, Henry to Lushington, Thomas Davies, 25 03 1832Google Scholar, now in possession of Roger Lushington, used with his permission. For more concerning Venables as one of the Cambridge “Apostles,” see Brookfield, Frances M., The Cambridge “Apostles” (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906), pp. 347–63Google Scholar, and Allen, Peter, The Cambridge Apostles: The Early Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, passim.
7. See Bevington, Merle Mowbray, The Saturday Review 1855–1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941)Google Scholar, passim, with a list of Venables' identified contributions on pp. 383–85. Unfortunately, relatively few of his journal entries identify the subjects of his articles.
8. Arnold's unmarried sister Frances (1833–1923) was living at Fox How, the Arnold family home (built 1833). The father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School, and professor of modern history at Oxford University, had died there in 1842, and the mother, Mary Penrose Arnold, in 1873. Miss Frances (Matthew's “Dearest Fan”) lived on there until her death, a month before her ninetieth birthday.
9. Given erroneously on p. 6 as 1852, instead of 1850.
10. On 24 Sept., two days after writing Venables, Arnold commented on this same misprint to Locker, Frederick: “This is the sort of thing which hurries the sensitive into suicide” (quoted by Super, ed., Prose Works, IX, 337).Google Scholar
11. Arnold would soon be informing Jemima Quillinan, daughter of Wordsworth's son-in-law, that nearly 4,000 copies had sold in less than five months (Super, IX, 338).
12. Woodhouse is a Leicestershire village about three and a half miles south of Lough-borough, on the edge of Charnwood Forest. It has a free school, founded and endowed in 1691, which Arnold may have been visiting in his capacity of school inspector (information graciously supplied by Lorna H. Rattray, team librarian, Loughborough Public Library).
13. The Times, 27 12 1879.Google Scholar See below for my summary of the review.
14. Venables' review had said, “Although Wordsworth displayed faint gleams of playfulness in Peter Bell, and while he was not incapable of indignant sarcasm, his intellectual constitution was imperfect in the almost total absence of humour. Milton had shown that the same defect is not incompatible with almost the highest order of poetical genius. But for his unfailing seriousness Wordsworth would have been sensible of the heaviness of his duller compositions; but, like all other poets, he must be judged by his best work and not by his failures. In the poems on which his fame must depend there is no need for the relief of gaiety and no room for humorous contrasts.”
15. From an “Air” in “The Jolly Beggars: A Cantata.”
16. Nation (New York), 29 (24 07 1879), 59.Google Scholar
17. Comp. Ehrsam, Theodore G., Deily, Robert H., and Smith, Robert M. (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1936).Google Scholar
18. Agnes Venables, Minna Pearson (1834–1908)Google Scholar, second wife of the Reverend Venables, Richard Lister (1809–1894)Google Scholar, elder brother of GSV.
19. Sir Stephen, James Fitzjames (1829–1894)Google Scholar is best known as an authority on the history of English criminal law. See also n. 4, above.
20. Coleridge, John Duke (1820–1894)Google Scholar, grandnephew of the poet, and Lord Chief Justice of England from 1880 until his death, had been a friend of Arnold's since their childhood, their fathers having been intimates and young Coleridge having been sent at age nine to the school at Laleham conducted by Arnold's uncle, John Buckland. Coleridge had preceded Arnold to Balliol College, Oxford, by two years. Coleridge's home in 1880 was at Heath's Court, Ottery St. Mary, Devon. For a description of Heath's Court, see Life and Correspondence of John Coleridge, Lord Chief Justice of England, written and edited by Coleridge, Ernest Hartley (London: William Heinemann, 1904), II, 391–92.Google Scholar
21. Arnold, and Carnegie, Andrew (1837–1919)Google Scholar, Scotland-born American industrialist and philanthropist, had been introduced at a dinner party given by Mrs. Yates Thompson, wife of the proprietor of the Pall Mall Gazette, in June 1883. Carnegie came to consider Arnold, “the most charming man” he “ever knew.” See Carnegie's Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), p. 286.Google Scholar The visit in Scotland, here mentioned by Arnold, occurred at Kilgraston Castle, where Carnegie was on honeymoon with the former Louise Whitfield, whom he had married during the year following the death of his mother. For further details concerning the Arnold-Carnegie friendship, see Hendrick, Burton J., The Life of Andrew Carnegie (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1932), I, 242–58, 316–17; II, 248–49.Google Scholar
22. The Pall Mall Gazette.