When Matthew Arnold (1822–88) is mentioned in college lectures on the history of “culture” today, it is usually accompanied by a rolling of the professor’s eyes. The students, obligingly, respond with nervously dismissive laughter. What, after all, could a Victorian Englishman have known that remains worth teaching today?

Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy of 1869 is nowadays much more quoted than read, and especially his notion of culture as “the best which has been thought and said in the world”—a phrase certainly familiar to readers of this magazine. And while he did of course say this, it is intellectually lazy to think that was all that he had to say and to dismiss him as a nineteenth-century elitist with a purely hierarchical notion of culture.

It is true that Matthew Arnold was a Victorian, but it would be foolish to write him off just for that. On the contrary, it makes much more sense to laud him for being such an early contributor to the whole conversation about culture’s importance and value, a conversation that remains so vital and animated today.

With such an impeccably nineteenth-century background, what could he have to tell us about culture in the twenty-first?

Culture had of course been valued long before Arnold, but so much of this was concerned with connoisseurship and the sine qua nonthat at least some cultural knowledge was required for full membership in the ruling classes. It was necessary to be “cultured.” Arnold himself