Author Description

Thomas Arnold, second son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, left England in search of a new life, first in New Zealand and then in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1850. There he became an inspector of schools and married the beautiful Julia Sorrell. The record covered in this second volume of his letters begins at this point and continues with a generous selection of his letters to the end of his life in 1900. The earlier letters give a vivid impression of life in Van Diemen's Land and of his own home life. Arnold holds an interesting, if minor, place in literary and educational history. However, the great strength and fascination of these letters probably lies in their record of the man himself, caught up, sometimes tempestuously, in the movements of his time, particularly in his religious unsettlement and wrestling with Roman Catholicism; and of a marriage in which agonising disagreements on the deepest issues threatened but never overwhelmed the mutual love of both.