Arnold the Humorist? Romantic Irony in Friendship’s Garland

Abstract

Reassesses Arnold’s humorous and slightly satirical work Friendship’s Garland. Acknowledges that “Arnold’s reputation as something of a ‘humorist’ negatively impacted his early reception at the expense of his seriousness”; but in later years he “became first and foremost associated with his seriousness.” Attempts to recapture Arnold’s sense of humor by examining Friendship’s Garland as a work of “romantic irony” and brings it into conversation with one of the few recognized works of English romantic irony, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. In Friendship’s Garland, Arnold enacts the romantic ironist’s goal of “active implication of the very same subject who is ironizing the world.” Read in this light, Friendship’s Garland emerges as one of Arnold’s most engaging acts of the critical “disinterestedness” that he held in such high regard but that many detractors, in his own time and more than a century later, believe he rarely practiced.