SOURCE: Altick, Richard D. “The Comedy of Culture and Anarchy.” In Victorian Perspectives: Six Essays, edited by John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier, pp. 120-44. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Altick examines Arnold's use of wit and satire in portraying the governors of Victorian society as enemies of the people.

Banter, levity, raillery, superciliousness, badinage, facetiousness, playfulness: all these terms, as well as the less common ‘coxcombry’ and ‘vivacities’, have been used by Matthew Arnold's critics, contemporary and modern, to describe his comic manner in Culture and Anarchy. He himself spoke of it as ‘chaff’ and ‘persiflage’. The broadest term he used, in a letter to his mother some months after the first installment of the book appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, was ‘irony’, which, he explained, referred to ‘the saying rather less than one means’.¹ But, as we shall see, his irony went far...