Edwin Arnold

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50004222

J. P. Phelan, ‘Arnold, Sir Edwin (1832–1904)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/30455, accessed 1 Sept 2017]

Arnold, Sir Edwin (1832–1904), poet and journalist, was born at Gravesend on 10 June 1832, the second son of Robert Coles Arnold (b. 1797), of Whartons, Framfield, and his wife, Sarah, née Pizzey (or Pizzi). He was the elder brother of Sir (Robert) Arthur Arnold (1833–1902). His childhood was spent at the family farm of Southchurch Wick, in Essex. Educated at Rochester grammar school, where in 1849 he won ‘every available prize for English or Latin prose or verse’ (Peiris, 37), and at King's College, London, Edwin Arnold obtained a scholarship at University College, Oxford, in 1851 and graduated BA in 1854 and MA in 1856. Although he won only a third class in the final classical school, he read Greek poetry with enthusiasm, and in 1852 obtained the Newdigate prize with his first poem, ‘The Feast of Belshazzar’. This was published separately in 1852, and reissued the following year as part of his Poems Narrative and Lyrical (1853), a collection which obtained the distinction of a joint review with Matthew Arnold's poems in Blackwood's Magazine (March 1854). It is said that in America, many years later, Matthew Arnold found himself credited to an embarrassing extent with the poetical baggage of his namesake.

Arnold took up a position as second English master at King Edward VI School, Birmingham, in 1854, and on 4 January 1855 he married Catherine Elizabeth Biddulph at Taunton in Somerset. He retired from his duties as a schoolmaster in 1856 in order to take his MA degree at Oxford, and obtained the position of principal of the Deccan Sanskrit College at Poona, India, in November 1857, largely through the good offices of his brother-in-law General John Lester. On settling there he was elected a fellow of Bombay University. He soon studied Eastern languages, and mastered not only those of India but also Turkish and Persian. His time in India produced a pamphlet on education in that country (1860), a successful translation, The Book of Good Counsels, from the Sanskrit of the Hitopadésa, with illustrations by Harrison Weir (1861), and a History of the Marquis of Dalhousie's Administration (2 vols., 1862–5). According to his son, he ‘twice had the honour of receiving the thanks of the Governor in Council’ during his period in India (Arnold, 7).

Arnold resigned his post in 1861, primarily because of fears for his wife's health. On returning to England he responded to an advertisement for the post of leader writer on the Daily Telegraph, which Joseph Moses Levy was just setting to work to regenerate. This appointment finally determined his career. He wrote six leading articles in his first week, and went on to produce well over six thousand more over the next twenty years. On Thornton Hunt's death in 1873 Arnold became a chief editor of the Daily Telegraph, and with the proprietors was responsible for the dispatch of some of the most enterprising and important journalistic missions of the time, including those of George Smith to Assyria in 1874, H. M. Stanley (jointly with the New York Herald) to Africa in the same year, and Sir H. H. Johnston to Kilimanjaro in 1884. Arnold's strong interest in eastern affairs was reflected in his support for the ‘forward policy’ of Lord Lytton in India, and especially in his advocacy of the Turkish cause during the Russo-Turkish War of 1878, a stance which helped to shift the Daily Telegraph's political allegiances from radicalism to ‘modified conservatism’. He was made companion in the Order of the Star of India when Queen Victoria was proclaimed empress of India on 1 January 1877, and was also decorated by the sultan of Turkey and the shah of Persia.

In 1879 Arnold published The Light of Asia, a versified account of the life and teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. According to his son, the poem ‘was mostly written at Hamlet House, near Southend in Essex’ (Peiris, 33). It proved to be tremendously popular; there were sixty editions in England and eighty in America, and translations were numerous. Its apparent promotion of Buddhist values and beliefs aroused the hostility of some Christian commentators, but it was warmly received in the Buddhist world; the king of Siam conferred the order of the White Elephant on Arnold for services to Buddhism in 1879. In an attempt to placate his critics, Arnold published a sequel in 1891 on the life of Christ called The Light of the World, but it proved a signal failure.

Arnold's first wife died in 1864, and on 3 August 1868 he married Francis (Fannie) Maria Adelaide, the daughter of the Revd W. H. Channing of Boston. He was made knight commander in the Order of the Indian Empire on 1 January 1888. On the death of his second wife in March 1889, he left the editorial room of The Telegraph to become a ‘travelling commissioner’ of the paper. In August 1889 he was invited to deliver two lectures at Harvard University by its president, Charles William Eliot, and in 1891 he returned to the United States to undertake a lecture tour. He also visited Japan twice during these years, returning to England the second time with his third wife, the twenty-year-old Tama Kurokawa, whom he married in 1893. These experiences resulted in a number of travel books, including East and West (1891), an optimistic account of Japanese progress and culture.

Arnold was a serious candidate for the poet laureateship on the death of Tennyson in 1892, and, indeed, ‘expected the appointment’ (Peiris, 67), but he encountered the formidable opposition of Gladstone, and eventually lost out to Alfred Austin. During the last nine or ten years of his life his sight gradually failed, but in spite of infirmities he maintained a keen interest in contemporary affairs and continued to publish both poetry and prose. He was well enough to attend the coronation of the tsar of Russia in 1896, and to undertake a cruise around the Mediterranean in the following year. In 1899, however, his eyesight and his general health both deteriorated rapidly, and he retired from active work.

Arnold died at his house at 31 Bolton Gardens, London, on 24 March 1904; he was cremated at Woking and his ashes were placed in the chapel of his old college at Oxford. He was survived by his third wife and by three sons and two daughters, including his eldest son, Edwin Lester Arnold (1857–1935), a journalist and novelist.

The vast majority of Arnold's copious literary output is likely to remain undisturbed by future generations of readers. Such modern interest as there is in his poetry stems almost exclusively from the role played by The Light of Asia in popularizing Buddhist thought in the West. It has been claimed that Arnold in fact became a Buddhist despite officially remaining a member of the Church of England until his death. Evidence for this view is sought in his adoption of many Buddhist practices; he was, for instance, ‘vice-president of a vegetarian society in Bayswater of which a young Indian student then M. K. Gandhi, later Mahatma Gandhi, was secretary’ (Peiris, 76).

J. P. Phelan