Culture and Anarchy and Other Selected Prose: Matthew Arnold

Poet, education reformer, social theorist and passionate critic of Victorian England, Matthew Arnold condemned an industrial society in `bondage to machinery` and argued instead that the wonder and joy of culture - in particular the `sweetness and light` of classical civilization - were essential to human life. The other pieces here, on literary criticism, schools, France, journalism and democracy, form a powerful call to arms from a writer who believed that the English needed to be taught not what to think, but how to think.

Edited with an introduction by P. J. Keating.