A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger - Hardcover

Bernard Bergonzi has an unequalled command of major and minor 19th-century English figures and their connections with each other. He understands the texture of Victorian academic and literary life and sheds pioneering light on a little considered subject through its tributaries. He describes Arnold's life with subtlety and sympathy and presents him as a remarkable witness to his times. (Catholic Herald)

... a charming biography ... Through this biography we get to know not only a man but a type that helped to make up the great canvas that was Victorian life. (Contemporary Review)

... clear and detailed ... scrupulously fair to all the actors in the drama. (Rosemary Ashton, Times Literary Supplement)

One never dips into Arnold family history without being fascinated. Professor Bergonzi has painted a perfect Victorian miniature. (A. N. Wilson, The Spectator)

A biography of Matthew Arnold's Catholic younger brother Tom, a scholar, teacher, and self-styled 'wanderer'. Arnold's path in life took him, after a brilliant start at Oxford, to colonial New Zealand, to Tasmania, to Dublin, back to Oxford, and once more to Dublin, where he died in 1900. His spiritual wanderings led him into the Catholic Church, then out of it for some years, and finally back to it. He was close both to Matthew and to John Henry Newman, and his relations with them show unfamiliar aspects of these eminent Victorians. As a young man, Tom Arnold knew the elderly Wordsworth, and Arthur Hugh Clough was his closest friend. He was acquainted with such celebrated Oxford personalities as Benjamin Jowett, Mark Pattison, and Lewis Carroll; as a Professor of English in Dublin he was a colleague of Gerard Manley Hopkins; and in the last year of his life he read and approved of an undergraduate essay by James Joyce.

The book makes an original contribution to Victorian studies at the same time as telling an absorbing human story. An appendix contains a previously unpublished letter from Matthew Arnold to his brother.