‘Old Fashioned Ideas and Customs’

When Matthew Arnold, writing in the late 1860s, wanted an example of the threat of ‘anarchy’ produced by contemporary developments in the middle and working classes he repeatedly referred to the ‘nopopery’ rioting at Birmingham in 1867. ¹ When he sought to typify ‘the notion of defect in the essential quality of a working class’ he cited the ‘Needy Knife-Grinder’, that central figure in Sheffield’s economy. ² Nonconformist manufacturers hooked on biblical texts and obsessed with the power bestowed by their new machinery; ignorant workers combining their physical force to wreak havoc in the name of ‘liberty’: these were Arnold’s bogeys. The state of relations between social classes had been dramatised during the late 1860s by a series of events such as the investigations of the Schools Inquiry Commission, the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and the extension of the franchise to many skilled workers. However, in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold is not presenting a general plea on behalf of ‘the upper class’ but rather appealing for principles of social order, enforced by the state, which would give special recognition and a privileged position to styles of learning and forms of understanding embedded in the values and routines of Oxford. ³