Charles Lyell’s Churches and the Erosion of Faith in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”

Abstract

The author discusses how in the poem “Dover Beach” (1851-52) Matthew Arnold engages with literary texts of the past as well as with works of contemporary writers. Thus parallels in Arnold’s text with passages written by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Thucydides, Arthur Clough, William Shakespeare, and William Wordsworth are highlighted. Special attention is paid to Arnold’s metaphor of the retreating tide of the sea of faith by linking it to the processes of erosion described in great detail in the first volume of Charles Lyell’s influential Principles of Geology (1830), and it is argued that the numerous descriptions and woodcuts of collapsing churches along the British coast in this volume might have inspired Arnold to represent the loss of faith as a process of erosion.