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Life and career
Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham, Middlesex (now in Surrey), where his father ran a small school for boys preparing for university entrance. His father took up his post of headmaster at Rugby when he was five. After three years under the supervision of a succession of governesses, he was sent back to Laleham for two years’ education at a school run by his uncle. He was unhappy there and returned home to be tutored by Herbert Hill, a cousin of Robert Southey. Finally, after a year at Winchester he came back to Rugby School to complete his education. He showed early promise as a poet, winning the Poetry Prize at Rugby with his Alaric.

He was successful in obtaining a place at Balliol College, Oxford, becoming a Fellow of Oriel in 1845. Thereafter he was private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, Lord President of the Council, through whose influence he was in 1851 appointed as one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. On 10 June 1851 he married Frances Lucy Wightman with whom he was to have six children.

In 1867 Arnold sought, but was not appointed to, the post of Librarian to the House of Commons Library. In autumn of that year, he was stricken with a respiratory ailment. First thought to be tuberculosis, the prospect of an early death contributed to Arnold's growing sense of melancholy.

In 1849 he had published his first book of poetry, The Strayed Reveller, which he soon withdrew: some of the poems, however, including "Mycerinus" and "The Forsaken Merman," were afterwards republished, and the same applies to his next book, Empedocles on Etna (1852), with "Tristram and Iseult." These early works were largely met with critical scorn. He was later appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford, an honour which, though it did not pay much, must have felt like vindication for Arnold who had never been a star pupil when he was a student there and struggled to make his artistic mark as a poet. Ironically, however, he coined the term "Dreaming Spires", which has become something of a catchphrase for Oxford.

He wrote most of his best-known poetry before the age of forty, after which he turned to literary and cultural criticism and theology. His principal writings are, in poetry, Poems (1853), containing "Sohrab and Rustum," and "The Scholar Gypsy;" Poems, 2nd Series (1855), containing "Balder Dead;" Merope (1858); New Poems (1867), containing "Thyrsis," an elegy on Arthur Hugh Clough, "A Southern Night," "Rugby Chapel," "The Weary Titan," and his masterpiece, "Dover Beach." In prose he wrote On Translating Homer (1861 and 1862), On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), Essays in Celtic Literature (1868), Essays in Criticism, 2nd Series (1888), Culture and Anarchy (1869), St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Friendship's Garland (1871), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875), Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877), Mixed Essays (1879), Irish Essays (1882), and Discourses in America (1885). He also wrote some works on the state of education in mainland Europe.

In 1883 he received a pension of £2,500. Never fully free from financial troubles (including his son's gambling debts), he left the same year for a lecture tour of America, where his daughter married an American. Five years later, when racing to meet his daughter and new granddaughter, he had a fatal heart attack. He is buried in All Saints' Churchyard, Laleham, Middlesex.

His niece (daughter of his younger brother Thomas), Mary Arnold, was a novelist under her married name of Mrs. Humphry Ward. He also has a school named after him in the Dingle area of Liverpool and a school in the Middlesex town of Staines, which neighbours his native Laleham. Walsh University in Ohio dedicated the Matthew Arnold memorial poetry library in 1966.