It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages in this book that the secret of this unfortunate twist is at least partly to be found in the peculiar character of Mr Arnold’s official employment.  For nearly twenty years he had been constantly thrown into contact with the English Dissenters; and, far earlier than the time which we have reached, they seem not only, in familiar phrase, to have “got upon his nerves,” but to have affected his brain.  He saw all things in Dissent—­or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter.  His Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the average Dissenting middle-class household.  The religion which Mr Arnold attacks is not the religion of the Church of England at all, or only of what was even then a decaying and uninfluential part of it, the extremer and more intolerant sect of the Evangelicals.  Once more, I cannot from personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true of Dissent, but I can believe it.

Now, to derive an idea of England from the English Dissenter is and was absurd.  Politically, indeed, he had only too much power between 1832 and 1866, from the tradition which made Liberal politicians fond of petting him.  Socially, intellectually, and to a great extent religiously, he had next to no power at all.  To take the average manager of a “British” school as the average representative of the British nation was the wildest and most mischievous of confusions.  Yet this practically was the basis of Mr Arnold’s crusade between 1867 and 1877.

The First Blast of the Trumpet was, intentionally no doubt, the last of the Oxford lectures, and for that very reason a rather gentle and insinuating one. Culture its Enemies, which was the origin and first part, so to say, of Culture and Anarchy, carried the campaign begun in the Essays in Criticism forward; but only in the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of the author’s expressed, and very natural and proper, intention of closing his professorial exercises with the bocca dolce.  Still this is at least conceivably due to the fact that the boldest extension of the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at least possessed, the author’s mind.  A considerable time, indeed from July 1867 to January 1868, passed before the publication of the lecture as an article in the Cornhill was followed up by the series from the latter month to August, which bore the general title of Anarchy and Authority, and completed the material of Culture and Anarchy itself.  This, as a book, appeared in 1869.