Culture Wars? Arnold’s Essays in Criticism and the Rise of Journalism 1865–1895

Abstract

Matthew Arnold’s concept of ‘Essays in Criticism’ in 1865 coincided with an upsurge of journalism, including the appearance of two innovative forms of the Fourth Estate that were significantly to influence their successors: the Pall Mall Gazette, a review-like daily, and the Fortnightly Review, a news-oriented review in its initial fortnightly phase, 1865–66.2 Like these serial publications, Arnold’s ‘essays’ and ‘criticism’ were generically hybrid, with their implicit displacement of journalism’s ‘articles’ and polemics, and their gestures toward literature and Art. At this time and for the rest of the century, journalism and literature (in the wider sense in which it was used in the period, to include writing in the arts and social sciences) often overlapped, in a symbiotic relationship that in 1864–65 Arnold began to prise apart, with his invocation and revival of a literary tradition that includes Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’. Although Arnold’s subsequent practice is regular publication of articles in journals and newspapers that fuel his future publication of volumes of literature, his attempt to separate journalism from literature persists, famously ending only a year before his death, in his denunciation of the ‘new journalism’ in 1887.3