SOURCE: Pecora, Vincent P. “Arnoldian Ethnology.” Victorian Studies 41, no. 3 (spring 1998): 355-79.

In the following essay, Pecora considers various critical approaches to Culture and Anarchy, paying particular attention to Arnold's notion, or lack thereof, of race.

In the light shed by current trends in “cultural studies,” Matthew Arnold's version of culture would seem to be precisely that which must be contested: a grand edifice housing only those Europeans responsible for what Culture and Anarchy (1869) calls “the best that has been thought and known in the world” (Arnold 5: 113), dead white males whose “desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are” (5: 91) provides an elite heritage of disinterested reflection to guide the rest of us. And to a large extent, this view of Arnold is correct, albeit terribly reductive. In demonizing Arnold, however, we may overlook the degree...