Matthew Arnold

Article

Matthew Arnold is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 09, 2021 and November 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “His mother was also the niece of Matthew Arnold who wrote Dover Beach”; “two more famous Huxleys: Thomas Huxley (two generations away) and Matthew Arnold”. It most often appears alongside Aldous Huxley, Andrew Huxley, Charles Darwin.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: November 09, 2021
  • Last seen: November 18, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

November 09, 2021 · Original source
Overall I’m not sure I can find any commonalities in these families’ educational styles except that they were all pretty weird. Did I mention Aldous Huxley went to normal school but his schoolteacher there was his mother? Who was also the niece of Matthew Arnold who wrote Dover Beach?
November 18, 2021 · Original source
Another way of thinking about this is: the Huxley brothers (Aldous, Julian, and Andrew) are such a great example that I probably would have included them even if they’d had no other interesting relatives, so they’re hardly cherry-picked. But in fact, there are two more famous Huxleys: Thomas Huxley (two generations away) and Matthew Arnold (also two generations away). Suppose that there are about 100 people who are at most two generations away from Aldous on the Huxley family tree. Should we expect by chance that they include two famous geniuses? I think that’s a lot even for upper-class Victorian Britain.