ABSTRACT
The term 'culture' came to be used to refer to the general body of the arts, the 'high culture' of music, painting and literature. No English composer could escape from this pervasive zeal for oratorio but, at the close of the century, Elgar's Dream of Gerontius gave fresh life to an established tradition. Orchestral music in the north of England and the midlands owed much to the Anglicized Halle, who based himself in Manchester. Culture could not replace religion as the cement of British society because religion had not been the cement of that society since the seventeenth century. The 1860s had seen a good deal of concern about the uncivilized nature of the secondary schoolchild. The Taunton Commission considered that 'it would be a most valuable result if anything like a real interest in English literature could be made general in England'. Matthew Arnold used the term culture in 1869 to mean 'the study of perfection'.
