LETTERS OF THOMAS ARNOLD THE YOUNGER

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XI, 1 November 1953, Page 9

LETTERS OF THOMAS ARNOLD THE YOUNGER

The recent appearance on the London market of a group of forty letters by Thomas Arnold, younger son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and brother of Matthew Arnold, provided the opportunity of securing records of interest to New Zealand history.

Dr. Arnold had purchased two town acres and two country sections in the Wellington Settlement, and after his death, the son, finding his appointment in the Colonial Office irksome (albeit leisurely—ll.ls a.m. till 5 p.m.), received the family’s sanction to his turning colonist, with a view to taking up the two sections. The series of letters covers his last weeks at the Colonial Office and his sojourn in New Zealand and Tasmania.

In 1847 when these letters to his mother and sisters commence, Thomas Arnold was twenty-five years old, and they continue till 1850. He was a good observer who wrote with some ability, and the name of his illustrious father enabled him to move in circles where his own education (M.A. Oxford) and personality made him acceptable.

The fact of his travelling to Otago by the John Wickliffe with Captain Cargill and his settlers gives his letters immediate interest, for persons and events of the trip are well described. He goes on to say something not as fully as one could wish —of the Dunedin settlement during the weeks he spent waiting for the John Wickliffe to continue its voyage to Wellington.

He seems to have taken one look at his bush-clad sections in the Makara Valley, and then attempted to exchange them for others near Johnsonville and Tawa Flat: one infers that his colonizing spirit was not ardent. On the latter section near Leigh’s stockade he built a whare, but occupied it little before going to Nelson to open a school. Governor Grey visited him at his whare,

and a school and a secretaryship were discussed. He spent much time with Alfred Domett: he stayed with Swainson at the Hutt, and with Weld at Flaxbourne. Here he was when he felt the severe earthquake that did such damage in Wellington. His school in Nelson endured only a few months: he found fees difficult to collect, and books almost impossible to obtain. It was therefore with something of relief that he welcomed the invitation of Sir William Denison, Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, to accept the post of Inspector of Schools. The offer was largely due to Captain Charles Stanley, brother of Dean A. P. Stanley, who had published the standard Life and Correspondence of Dr. Arnold (1844). Captain Stanley, then in service in Hobart Town, died before Arnold took up the position.

Here Arnold lived busily and happily till 1856. The letters, however, end in 1850, just after his marriage to Julia Sorell, daughter of the registrar of deeds. Some of his charming and devoted love-letters to her are in this series.

His letters manifest his devotion to his mother and sisters, and particularly his boundless affection for his brother Matthew. His strong religious feeling is evident here, too, and presages his later and greater concern with spiritual matters. His conversion to Roman Catholicism is said to have evoked such comment that he decided in 1856 to take leave, from which he never returned. Thomas Arnold records much of this, but in less detail, in his Passages in a Wandering Life (1900), which depicts a life of singular variety and scholastic attainment. The subjoined excerpts may give an idea of the writer’s easy style and interesting comments on the early New Zealand scene.

The “John Wickliffe,” Off the Shore. My Dearest Mother, Thursday evening [2sth November 1847] . . . The pilot has just come in to say that he intends taking the ship thro’ the Downs tonight, should the wind, as he expects, get round to the North. This pilot is a strange character . . . He is an astute reasoner, and floors most

of those whom he argues with; but it is curious to observe how his logic falls like water off the thick sides of Capt. Cargill’s interminable declamations. Capt. Cargill is one of those broad assumers with whom it is impossible to argue, because he is incapable of seeing a distinction, and is invincibly satisfied of the truth, perhaps one might say of the exclusive truth, of his own views. Yet he seems a good old man, and though certainly prolix he becomes interesting when he talks of the Otago scheme, and of the principles on which he is founding his colony. These, he says, are unchanged and unchangeable, they are what the Church of Scotland has always held from the first; they animated the Pilgrim Fathers, and their results have been seen in the astonishing growth of the United States; and he anticipates similar results from his own efforts. All this is interesting, yet one sighs as one listens, and thinks to oneself how times are changed. Puritanism is no longer at the van of human thought; it is vain to try to cheat oneself into the belief that it is; and a man preaching Puritanism now is like St. Paul preaching Judaism when a better light had come into the world . . .

[Wellington] Friday May 26th [lß4B] ... I am now staying for a day or two at the Revd. Mr. Cole’s. This morning I got all my goods out of the ship and stored them safely in a warehouse. Every one is exceedingly kind to me. On Wednesday, finding that the Bishop was staying at Mr. Cole’s, I called upon him; he was certainly most kind and insisted on taking me, undressed as I was, to the levee at Government House (it was the Queen’s Birthday) to introduce me to Mr. Eyre the Lieut. -Governor. Eyre was very civil and asked me a great many questions about Otago. It was amusing to see all the people presented, and to notice the ungracefulness and gaucherie with which most of them made their bows. In the course of the afternoon the Bishop embarked in his schooner to sail to the Chatham Islands, so that I just caught him in time. I dined after the levee with Thomas the Auditor-General, a half-brother of Gov. Grey, a frank, pleasant young fellow. He has a little

bit of a wooden house consisting of just two rooms and a kitchen, but very snug. We did not dress, but there were silver forks, etc., and everything went off so exactly the same as in England that I could have fancied myself at an undergraduate party at Oxford. That night I slept at an inn, and the next morning breakfasted with Domett the Col. Secretary . . . Wellington May 29th, 1848

My dearest K [Miss Jane Arnold, the writer’s eldest sister] . . . The town of Wellington is principally built on two level pieces of land backed by hills, called Thorndon flat and Te-Aro flat. These flats are about a mile from each other, and for that distance there is barely room for one row of houses between the sea and the hills ... I have been today over to the Makara valley to look at the country sections, or rather at one of them. For about 5 miles there is a cart road, though a most infamous one, leading to the end of what is called the Karori district; thence a very good bridle-path, recently cut, conducts you over a pass in the hills about 2 miles down into the Makara valley, and stops about half a mile from our section No. 19 .. . There are many clearings in the Karori district, and the huge pine logs and the blackened stumps lie about, just as they are described to do in the American backwoods. The land .is very much parcelled out among small proprietors, so that one sees a great many small wooden cottages, and children running about, and everywhere the saw and the axe are busily at work, for it is from Karori that Wellington is principally supplied with sawn timber. But after leaving the Karori road and entering upon the bridle path, you plunge at once into the unbroken solitude of the forest . . .