SOURCE: Wilson, J. Dover. “Editor's Introduction.” In Landmarks in the History of Education: Culture and Anarchy, edited by J. Dover Wilson, 1932. Reprint, pp. xi-xl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955.

In the following introduction, Wilson considers the development and background of Culture and Anarchy.

Matthew Arnold holds a position in the history of modern English civilisation which it requires an unusual combination of qualities and interests to appreciate. As a poet and a critic he was the most considerable literary figure of the mid-Victorian period; for though his poetry ranks third after that of Browning and Tennyson, it is a good third, and they have nothing in criticism in any way comparable with his brilliant Essays. As a religious thinker he produced books which had a remarkable vogue and much influence in his own day and, though at the moment a little outmoded, one of them at least, the beautiful...