Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer: A Neglected Connection in the Victorian Debate about Scientific and Literary Education

Abstract

Argues that Arnold’s defense of literary culture and education against the advances of science is better understood in comparison with the work of Herbert Spencer, whose popularity and influence made him someone impossible to ignore in the intellectual world of the time. Claims Arnold normally addresses Spencer indirectly as a target for irony, but believes he found it necessary to give more serious treatment to Spencer’s Essays on Education when formulating his thinking about the primacy of literary study. Suggests Arnold’s dismissive attitude toward Spencer was partly related to a personal resentment at what Spencer’s popularity and influence represented: namely, the transfer of authority and power from the literary to the scientific intellectual in the late nineteenth century. Concludes that, while Arnold did little to damage Spencer’s reputation at the time, his arguments helped deepen the divide between the “two cultures” and gave grounds for a continuing hostility toward science on the part of literary teachers.