The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold (review)

Antony H. Harrison's new book on Matthew Arnold is significant because it apparently represents the culmination of his work on this Victorian poet and critic over the past two decades. In Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems (1990) he already studied Arnold's relationships with Romantic precursors, an important topic in the new book. In his Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture (1998), a chapter on Arnold examines the complex uses of Gypsy figures in his poems, and this, too, is one of the principal topics in The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold. Drawing on other previously published essays and book chapters as well, Harrison combines and revises his materials to present a picture of Arnold, "eminent poet and the preeminent critic of his generation" who was manufactured by "various nineteenth-and twentieth-century intellectual fields of force" (viii, emphasis original). Harrison's 1990 book was linked to New Historicism, and his 1998 work was oriented in cultural studies with an emphasis on ideology, informed by critics such as Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams, and Michel Foucault. In his Arnold book Harrison continues to employ a historicist cultural studies methodology, pointing to Pierre Bourdieu as an especially important influence in his prefatory "Rationale" section. In its distinctive way Harrison's approach also carries forward interpretations of Arnold's bourgeois hegemonic agenda developed by critics associated with the British New Left, such as Chris Baldick and Francis Mulhern.

In chapter 1, Harrison offers close readings of Arnold's poems written in the late 1840s and early 1850s, in which he finds subtexts related to various European political events in the revolutionary year of 1848, as well as Chartism in England. In works such as "Dover Beach," (probably written in 1851 but not published until 1867), as well as "The World and the Quietist" (1849), "To a Republican Friend" (1848), and the less well-known "Revolutions" (1852), Arnold "devalue[s] activity in the sociopolitical world and open[s] up discursive spaces through which readers might achieve the illusion of transcending that world" (21). He "elides" issues related to European revolution and the suffering of the working class at home (8), and he "mystifies" details referring to particular historical events (3), sometimes employing medievalism or Eastern philosophy in his search for the "detachment and a suprahistorical view of human activity and human nature" that will later characterize his critical prose (24). "Elision" and "mystification" are key terms that Harrison employs in this sense throughout the book.

Harrison develops his ideas about Arnold's reactions to Romantic poets—especially John Keats, and the Spasmodic Alexander Smith—in chapter 2. Arnold is "the most intertextual of Victorian poets" though he often "elides" direct references to Keats (29), for example. In his discussion of the Keatsian subtexts of Empedocles on Etna (1852), which he judges to be Arnold's most important poem, Harrison emphasizes "Arnold's profound anxieties over the conflict between Keats's social origins and his poetic aspirations" (71). While composing Empedocles, Arnold's discomfort with his increasing identification with Keats, now associated with the new Spasmodic school of poetry, led to his "metaphorical suicide as a poet" when he rejected his own finest poem in his infamous "Preface of 1853" (34). Harrison also discusses Arnold's critique of the popular Smith and his disappointment with his old friend Arthur Hugh Clough, who defended Smith and the Spasmodics and in an 1853 review contrasted the originality and energy of Smith (a Glasgow muslin designer) with the tired aestheticism of poets like Arnold. Harrison does not really attempt to rescue the reputation of Smith's poetry, with its overblown, sensational style. He emphasizes Clough's appreciation for the "profoundly democratic" quality of Smith's "transcendental realism" (63), however, and he finds evidence of class warfare in Arnold's rejection of Smith as the representative of a potential new social order.

In chapter 3, Harrison moves from social class to gender issues, beginning with...