SOURCE: Mermin, Dorothy. Review of A Gift Imprisoned, by Ian Hamilton. Nineteenth-Century Literature 54, no. 1 (June 1999): 110-13.

In the following essay, Mermin discusses Hamilton's A Gift Imprisoned and three other recent biographies of Matthew Arnold. Mermin asserts that Hamilton's biography does not address the relevance of Arnold's poetry to modern intellectual and political issues.

Students of Matthew Arnold have available a rich store of unpublished and underutilized manuscript material, most notably the family papers recently made accessible in the Brotherton Collection at Leeds University Library and the correspondence now being published by Cecil Lang, as well as older holdings at Balliol, Yale, and elsewhere. These materials show us—in addition to the sad and solitary poet, the authoritative apostle of culture, and the overworked inspector of schools—a human being bound up in a complex web of familial and social relationships and struggling to come to terms with ambition...