THE VICTORIAN TRANSITION TO MODERNITY: ARNOLD'S AND NEWMAN'S SEARCH FOR A PRINCIPLE OF HARMONY (ATOMISM, ORGANICISM)

This study examines the Victorian Age as an age of transition through the prose and poetry of two very different Oxford men: John Henry Newman and Matthew Arnold. The dissertation specifically studies their perceptions of the social and religious changes in the nascent industrial society, or the modern atomistic society. The introductory chapter offers a general background of various cultural currents associated with the Victorian transition to modernity from the period's major essayists. Special attention is given to Thomas Carlyle as a seminal Victorian sage.Chapter III treats Newman's reaction to a very important development in the Victorian transition: the ascendancy of philosophical liberalism and its attendant subjectivism and agnosticism. Newman's response to what he calls the "anti-dogmatic principle" is analyzed here in contrast to Arnold's own moderate liberalism and skepticism and with some reference to nineteenth-century and modern theological and ecclesiastical developments. His solution for the age's social and individual fragmentation through Christian orthodoxy and proper authority is considered within the larger cultural context. Chapter IV looks at The Dream of Gerontius, Newman's little known poem, as a statement of that orthodox creed in relation to the metaphysical transition from this world to the next.Arnold's and Newman's different solutions to the problem of Victorian isolation and sense of displacement foreground the anxieties of various other Victorians and show the period's formative influence on our own century.The second chapter is a detailed analysis of Matthew Arnold's poetic consideration of the Victorian individual in transition, intellectually and emotionally divided by the tension between a desire for an escapist retreat to nature and the sense of social duty, by his isolation and his desire to effectively establish a loving communion with others, and by his skepticism and will to believe the old religious orthodoxy. Reference is made to Arnold's prose efforts, particularly in the philosophical and theological essays, to offer the Victorians and the moderns a guidance and inspiration through literature which was formerly supplied by Christian orthodoxy and the cohesiveness of the organic society.