Thomas Arnold is remembered today chiefly as a reformer of the English public schools and as the father of major Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold. His reputation as an educator is based less on his published works than on the legend of his headmastership at Rugby created by influential former students and by works such as A. P. Stanley's adulatory biography (1844) and Thomas Hughes's enormously popular fictionalized account of his Rugby days, Tom Brown's School Days (1857). Arnold himself wished to be known primarily as a historian and social and religious reformer. In fact, his appointment as regius professor of modern history at Oxford in 1841 signaled his increasing recognition as a historian, but he died of a heart attack the next year, on the day before he would have turned forty-seven.

He was born at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, the son of William and Martha Delafield...