The strongest impression to emerge from this disappointing book is that poet and critic Hamilton is not a natural biographer. Having been foiled in his efforts to write a biography of the author of The Catcher in the Rye, he earned his advance by then writing In Search of J.D. Salinger (1988), a laconic account of his difficulties. This lazy study of Arnold, one of Victorian England's major poets, is a disappointment on several counts. Hamilton seems more interested in the great educationalist Thomas Arnold, the poet's father. Far more problematic, however, is Hamilton's tone of self-regarding smugness and his irritiatingly knowing asides which are laboured and distracting, while the text resounds with flat, bland pronouncements. It is true that Matthew Arnold, who died at 66 in 1888, having waited for an early death all his life, at best never seemed more than half-alive and that his poetic career was compressed into a brief period, allowing Arnold the essayist to develop. But the strange, lyric genius behind Dover Beach surely deserves a more considered, scholarly study than this.
Eileen Battersby