
Stefan Collini’s latest book is Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics. He teaches at Cambridge.
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Vol. 22 No. 2 · 20 January 2000
pages 32-34 | 4483 words

An Abiding Sense of the Demonic
Stefan Collini
- The Letters of Matthew Arnold. Vol. I: 1829-59 edited by Cecil Lang
Virginia, 549 pp, £47.50, November 1998, ISBN 0 8139 1651 8
- The Letters of Matthew Arnold. Vol. II: 1860-65 edited by Cecil Lang
Virginia, 505 pp, £47.95, November 1998, ISBN 0 8139 1706 9
- The Letters of Matthew Arnold. Vol. III: 1866-70 edited by Cecil Lang
Virginia, 483 pp, £47.95, November 1998, ISBN 0 8139 1765 4
I shall put together either for a pamphlet or for Fraser, a sort of résumé of the present question, as the result of what I have thought, read, and observed here, about it. I am very well and only wish I was not so lazy, but hope and believe one is less so from 40 to 50, if one lives, than at any other time of life.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 4 · 17 February 2000
From L.P.E. Edwards
Reviewing Matthew Arnold's letters Stefan Collini (LRB, 20 January) writes: 'Reflecting during a frosty December on "how a fire to get up by is perhaps the greatest comfort in the world", Arnold was a man of his time and class in making no mention of how the fire might have got there.' Readers acquainted with Arnold's poetry will remember the extended simile in Sohrab and Rustum:
As some rich woman, on a winter's morn,
Eyes through her silken curtains the poor drudge
Who with numb blacken'd fingers makes her fire.
L.P.E. Edwards
Oxford