Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham, a village on the River Thames, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, who became the famous headmaster of Rugby School. Matthew went to Rugby and then to Oxford, where he seemed to his friends more of a dandy than a scholar, with fashionable clothes and a lazy manner. He won a prize for poetry anyway.

He needed a job, and in 1851 he became an inspector of schools. He held the post for thirty-five years, traveling all over England by train to examine pupils, mostly in schools for the poor, and writing reports to the government. He found it tiring and often dull. He also became an expert on education in Europe, and argued for better schools for ordinary children.

He wrote poetry in the time that was left. His best-known poem, “Dover Beach,” was probably drafted around the time of his marriage in 1851 and published in 1867. A man stands at a window at night with the woman he loves, looking out at the moonlit sea and listening to the pebbles drawn back and forth by the waves. He hears in it the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith, the religious certainty of earlier ages, ebbing away. All he can offer in its place is love: “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” The poem ends with an image of “ignorant armies” clashing by night.

In 1857 Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, the first to give his lectures in English instead of Latin. Gradually he turned from poetry to criticism. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) he argued that culture means knowing “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” and that it should belong to everyone, not only a privileged few. His phrase for what culture offers, “sweetness and light,” has entered the language.

Arnold died suddenly in Liverpool in 1888, of a heart attack, while running to catch a tram to meet his daughter, who was arriving from America.