Reputation
The biography, Life of Arnold, published two years after his early death by one of Arnold's former pupils Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, is considered one of the best works of its class in the language and added to his growing reputation. A popular life of him by the novelist Emma Jane Guyton also appeared. In 1896 his bust was unveiled in Westminster Abbey alongside that of his son, Matthew and the Times asserted that "As much as any who could be named, Arnold helped to form the standard of manly worth by which Englishmen judge and submit to be judged". However, his reputation suffered as one of the Eminent Victorians in Lytton Strachey's book of that name published in 1918.
A more recent public school headmaster, Michael McCrum of Tonbridge School and Eton College in the 1960s through 1980s, and also a churchman and Oxbridge academic (Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Vice-Chancellor), wrote a biography and reappraisal of Arnold in 1991. McCrum was steeped in the significance of Rugby and of public schools; he too had briefly been a master at Rugby and was married to the daughter of another former headmaster.
More recently, a biography entitled Black Tom has been written by Terence Copley. Both McCrum and Copley have sought to restore some of the lustre to the Arnold legacy which has been heavily under attack since Strachey's sardonic appraisal.
A. C. Benson once observed of Arnold that, "A man who could burst into tears at his own dinner-table on hearing a comparison made between St. Paul and St. John to the detriment of the latter, and beg that the subject might never be mentioned again in his presence, could never have been an easy companion".
Read more about this topic: Thomas Arnold
Famous quotes containing the word reputation:
“How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“A good reputation is more valuable than money.”
—Publilius Syrus (1st century B.C.)
“The reputation of a man is like his shadow; it sometimes follows and sometimes precedes him, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter than his natural size.”
—French Proverb. Quoted in Dictionary of Similes, ed. Frank J. Wilstach (1916)