Beginning of Essay
Dover Beach and Self-Dependence Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham on the Thames, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, in 1822. He had to live in the shadow of his famous father who ran the Rugby school beginning in 1828. He went to the Rugby school since age 6, bu ....

Middle of Essay
.... connotations of "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that was a second English Renaissance. In science and technology, the Victorians invented the modern idea of invention -- the notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new means of bettering himself and his environment. In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine ....