WITH PUBLICATION OF "LETTERS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD,"
 YEARS OF DIGGING BRING TO LIGHT ONE OF THE LAST 
GREAT ENGLISH LETTER-WRITERS

	CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Sept. 27 -- Years of painstaking
research and some literary sleuthing by a University of Virginia
scholar will result next month in the launch of a multi-volume
publication of all the known letters of one of the 19th century's
greatest cultural figures.
	"The Letters of Matthew Arnold," when published in their
full six volumes in the University Press of Virginia's Victorian
Literature and Culture series, will not only shed new light on a
major Victorian poet and the major literary critic of his time, but
will add to a fuller understanding of the era.
	The result of a 20-year effort by Cecil Y. Lang, professor
emeritus of English and a noted editor of Victorian letters, the
Virginia Press publication will present fully-annotated some 4,000
Arnold letters, nearly five times the number in the only other
compilation and many appearing in their entirety for the first
time.  Volume I, to be published next month, covers Arnold's early
life during the years 1829-59, with Volume II scheduled for
publication next spring and subsequent volumes to follow.
	Renowned as a poet, especially for the often-anthologized
classic "Dover Beach," as a prose stylist, and as an important
commentator on culture and society for his generation, Arnold will
also be celebrated as one of the great letter-writers in English,
Lang believes.  Although many of Arnold's views on literature and
culture are challenged today as too rigid or the product of another
era, his dedicated letter-writing to family and friends reveals the
main movements of events in England over much of the 19th century as
well as forming an intimate portrait of someone actively involved
the life of his time, Lang adds.
	  Arnold wrote with wit, warmth and humor about his poetry,
his ideas, his work, his travels throughout Europe and America and
his large family, Lang notes.  But most of all, what comes across in
the hundreds of his letters, the editor says, is that "Arnold loved
to live" and was immensely curious about the world.  The letters,
along with two new diaries, also contain a great deal of new
biographical and personal information about Arnold and his family.
	Volume I begins when Arnold was a child ("My dearest
Aunt....I am now in School with the Boys writing Exercises
and...think I cannot do better than write to you") and closes in
1859 when, in his thirties, he was already acquiring a literary
reputation and becoming well known in Europe.  The early letters
show him as a schoolboy, an Oxford dandy, a husband in an overly
demanding job as a government inspector of schools, and then as
professor of poetry at Oxford.
	Throughout his very busy life, "Arnold, like Byron and
Keats, loved to write letters," Lang says.  "He especially loved to
write to his family and took time to do it every weekend,
intelligent letters commenting on the political scene and life
around him.  He was perhaps one of the last of the great
letter-writers."
	Lang himself has been closely involved with letters of the
Victorian era throughout his own career.  He edited six volumes of
the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne's letters and co-edited with
former U.Va. President Edgar Shannon Jr. the complete "Letters of
Alfred Lord Tennyson."
	In tracking down, annotating and editing the letters of
Arnold, Lang was able to build on the work of the late Arthur Kyle
Davis, a devoted Arnold scholar and former chair of the U.Va.
English department.  In an era before automatic copying machines,
Davis had assembled records and photographic copies of hundreds of
Arnold's letters, published or unpublished, institutionally or
privately owned.
	After Davis's death in 1972, Lang was urged to bring the
project to fruition with a complete, published edition, and he
continued Davis's research of all public and private Arnold
manuscript collections.  Lang wrote to every major library in the
English-speaking world and France to gather copies of all Arnold
letters and travelled to many of them to work with and photocopy the
original manuscripts.
	He received response and assistance from all over, he
recalls.  "A librarian in Paris once telephoned me in
Charlottesville about a comma in an Arnold letter.  One in Oxford
pulled himself away from the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, then in a
dead heat, to let me know I was pursuing a dead end" in one search.
	His most dramatic and satisfying find was at a country
estate in England, where a descendent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
claimed to have some Arnold letters stashed "somewhere" in his vast
cluttered house.  Together they searched through trunks of old
letters and cold dusty rooms full of family memorabilia but turned
up nothing related to Arnold.  Sure that the letters were there but
misplaced, a determined Lang made a second long trip back and, just
as they were about to give up again, spotted an overlooked box
stowed under a table.  Lang hastily made copies of 65 previously
unknown Arnold letters on the estate's photocopier in time to catch
the last train of the day. 
	On some of Arnold's letters, protective family members had
occasionally blacked out passages they deemed sensitive.  To uncover
such sections, now of historical interest, Lang used an FBI-like
method he and Edgar Shannon had devised on Tennyson's letters, at
the suggestion of U.Va. library curators.  He used a dermatologist's
brilliant lamp to illuminate the crossed-out lines enough to read
them or decipher the script from the edges of the letters.
	Because of its editorial thoroughness and their vast sweep,
Lang's complete edition of Arnold's letters is being hailed not only
as a major scholarly achievement but as one with an almost
novelistic appeal for general readers.
###
September 26, 1996
	To obtain review copies contact the University Press of
Virginia at (804) 924-3468.  Cecil Lang may be reached at (804)
293-4673.  Television reporters should call our TV News Office at
(804) 924-7550.