472 Reviews or the eighteenth-century novel and important additions to any college or university library. Somerville College, Oxford Kate Williams The Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. vi: 1885-1888. Ed. by Cecil Y. Lang. (Vic? torian Literature and Culture) Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. 2002. xxiii + 552 pp. $60. ISBN 0-8139-2028-0. The final volume of The Letters of Matthew Arnold, which includes a cumulative index forthe whole series, brings to a close a splendid edition of the correspondence of one of the central figures of the Victorian age. Readers who enjoyed the earlier volumes will findhere the same combination of public and private concerns, of letters about work, writing, and family life, and issues such as mortality, which have made the edition as a whole such enlightening and poignant reading. January 1885 begins in the customary manner with Arnold juggling the demands of his day job as Inspector of Schools with requests for articles and lectures, while at the same time overseeing the publication of his Discourses in America, and honouring a promise to write once a fortnight to his newly married daughter, Lucy Charlotte. His preoccupations are also familiar: he continues to complain about the way the daily school inspections eat up his time (he talks of being shut up in his 'hermit's cell' (p. 143) trying to finish a report), and he is still pleasantly surprised that publishers are willing to pay him to bring out a volume of his poetry: as he puts it in a letter to George Craik, 'Your offerforthe Poems was above what I expected?an unusual avowal, I suppose, foran author to have to make to a publisher' (p. 32). Travel, which had long been a feature of Arnold's work and home life, still plays a role in his finalyears. In 1886-87 he made a second trip to America, as well as touring Germany, France, and Switzerland to report fora Royal Commission on Education. His comments on people and places are full of precise local detail, particularly about flora and fauna. One does not immediately think of Arnold as an observer of nature (certainly not in comparison to, say, Ruskin); yet his insights in letters to his family reveal him to have been both sensitive to and knowledgeable about the natural world, recording weather patterns, plant species, and the particularities of landscapes. A 'botanising' Arnold who potters 'about the garden, and arrangefs] little matters of planting [. . .] however bad the weather may be' (p. 215) will constitute a new image for some readers. In describing foreign places Arnold makes much use of domestic comparisons. So Pittsburgh is likened to towns in the 'Black Country'; the width of the Ohio river is like 'that ofWindermere'; and (touchingly) the white flowers of some 'great rhododendrons' are 'as big as the big ones at Fox How', a favourite holiday home of the Arnold family (p. 181). In April 1887 Arnold retired, and with evident relief, from his position as Inspec? tor of Schools. In a letter to Henry Willett, declining an invitation to give a lecture, he described himself as 'only just free from a public service of thirty five years'; Arnold went on, 'I want to establish myself as altogether a private person' (p. 272). One of the tragedies of Arnold's life, played out in the final pages of this volume, is that he lived to enjoy this new-won privacy for only a year. His last letters reveal a man still actively engaged in literary and cultural debate, puffingRobert Elsmere by his niece, Mary Ward, and fending offcriticism of a typically forthrightlecture on 'Civilisation in the United States'. Frances Arnold, Matthew Arnold's sister, wrote of how the family were 'stunned' at Arnold's sudden death from a heart attack: it was 'an appalling blow'. She continued: 'Never was a man more deeply beloved or more loving' (p. 364). Modern readers are indebted to Lang's magisterial editorial work for MLR, 99.2, 2004 473 revealing the fitness of this judgement. The decent family man, loyal public servant, modest poet, and trenchant cultural critic who emerges from this six-volume edition is testimony to some...