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  Clough doubted he would succeed; and when his governors at University Hall heard he had applied, they asked for his resignation. He was shocked: but it is clear the governors had wanted a reason to be rid of him, and this lack of commitment provided one. Clough was told that his ‘resignation would make an opening for a Gentleman whose connexions might perhaps restore this Institution to some prosperity.’40 So he was out of work and, as predicted, did not obtain Sydney. He looked forward instead to ‘unmarried poverty and literary work’, a remark he made to Blanche, with whom he was now largely confined to enjoying an epistolary courtship.41 Arnold had married, and became, inevitably, more distant; which Clough found depressing. It was not merely his wife who distracted him from his old friend, but Arnold’s work as a schools inspector.

  Clough’s life in London nevertheless introduced him to some great figures of the day: the Carlyles, Tennyson, and Richard Monckton Milnes, who was engaged in a futile courtship with the woman who would become Clough’s cousin by marriage, Florence Nightingale. He dined with Darwin, whose celebrity (as with Nightingale’s) lay before him. Clough took private pupils. With Arnold’s help and his connection with Lansdowne he sought a minor post in the Education Department. His former employers, University College, appointed him professor of English language and literature: for which he received £30 a year. By the summer of 1852 he had come to an understanding with Miss Smith to marry her. To achieve this, he wrote to Emerson to ask about securing an academic post in America. Emerson promised to enquire, but was depressed that a man of Clough’s talents, hounded by the Thirty-nine Articles, could find no work in England to occupy him satisfactorily.

  Arnold became exasperated with Clough for allowing his great talent to atrophy, and for allowing himself to take passivity in the face of events to the point of becoming completely inert. However much Arnold might have disliked his work, it motivated him, and he considered the standards and extent of education in Britain as one of the most important social and political matters of the age. Clough had no such motivation, not even the prospect that a better position would allow him to marry. Arnold could see this and it angered him; not realising that it was perhaps Clough’s sense that he had not lived up to Arnold’s father’s spiritual expectations that was largely the problem. In June 1852 he urged Clough: ‘If possible, get something to do before your term at the Hall expires: living on your resources waiting for something to turn up is a bad and dispiriting business.’42 He implored him to use the good offices of his admirer Lady Ashburton; which Clough eventually did.

  But before that, Clough determined to try emigration to America. The dynamic brilliance that had won him his Balliol scholarship fifteen years earlier seemed to have evaporated. Arnold consoled his friend by observing that ‘I am more and more convinced that the world tends to become more comfortable for the mass, and more uncomfortable for those of any natural gift or distinction.’ It is a short step from Arnold’s final exhortation in this letter – ‘nothing can absolve us from the duty of doing all we can to keep alive our courage and activity’ – to the message of ‘Say Not, the Struggle Naught Availeth’.

  Clough sailed to America in the autumn of 1852, encouraged by Emerson. He based himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and proceeded to seek pupils as a private tutor. Arnold wrote urging him to earn money – ‘the object for you is to do well commercially’ – showing how far the high-minded had moved towards recognising the necessities.43 The change of government just before the end of the year, when Aberdeen’s Peelite ministry replaced Russell’s, brought hopes of patronage for Clough. Lady Ashburton, who as well as having a high regard for Clough was also Carlyle’s chief admirer, and whose salon of literary men was legendary, interceded to try to find Clough a post. She failed. Lord Granville, her closest contact with power, then tried to get Clough a school inspectorship in the voluntary sector; but organisations who wanted their schools inspected preferred a clergyman to do it, and not one who had cast himself out through doubt. He turned his hand to writing, but found it difficult. His first substantial literary task was translating Plutarch’s Lives, but he also wrote for the reviews. Money remained a problem, not least because Clough refused to accept any posting at a school or college that might force him to commit to stay in America. By the spring of 1853 his letters are full of longing to get home.

  He continued to fret about religion; in his letters to Blanche not least, for she was having difficulties too, but also to his friends. His contemporary J. C. Shairp, a master at Rugby and a future Oxford professor of poetry, rebuked him for sharing his difficulties with him; difficulties that appeared to have multiplied since sharing them with Hawkins. ‘To speak of the historical side of Christianity’, Shairp wrote on 19 March 1853, ‘as untenable because there may be diff[icul]ties about the origin of some books of the N[ew] T[estament] or to put down the NT as a mass of “unauthenticated records” (was that the word?) seems simply absurd.’44 Shairp admitted Clough had upset him because ‘the main facts of Christianity are inextricably interwoven with my inmost feelings and . . . I shall hope to live and die in them and using them as ladders to ascend to the spiritual.’ He begged Clough not to write of his feelings again as it would ‘cause only pain. Please, No more of this!’

  Then came the chance to return home. Granville had found a clerkship in the Privy Council office. It paid just £300 a year but had prospects. Carlyle wrote to Clough to urge him to accept it – ‘England is England’, he told him, and as for the low pay it ‘will teach you noble thrift, and various high Spartan virtues, which are worth more to a man than all the yellow rubbish which so many two-legged swine are grubbing for’ (the gold rush continued in California).45 At Granville’s urging Lady Ashburton also wrote to him, beseeching him to ‘prefer us to America’.46 His main concern was that he should earn enough to marry: he feared the clerkship would not allow that. His prospective father-in-law confirmed it: £500 or no marriage.47 Then, an offer was made by Mr Smith of an allowance to give the young couple a sufficient income; by mid-July Clough was home and at work in the Privy Council office and, a year later, married.

  Clough developed a close association with Florence Nightingale, his wife’s cousin through both her mother and her father. Milnes, a friend of Clough, had attempted to court her for years but without success; the sister of another close friend, Stanley, was one of Nightingale’s intimates. She warmed to Clough once related to him by marriage, and Clough escorted her as far as Calais on her journey to Scutari.48 Clough’s mother-in-law went to Scutari to assist Nightingale when she contracted ‘Crimean fever’ – something Clough described as ‘a dreadful sickness and leaves the head in a state of protracted feebleness’. He quoted Nightingale herself as calling it ‘a compound fracture of the intellects’.49 He wrote to his friends with pride of his cousin-by-marriage’s achievements in saving the lives of so many soldiers: he was as attached to and impressed by notions of improvement as any of his generation.

  His work at the Education Office was hardly taxing: he did six hours a day and had long holidays. However, his summer holiday of 1857 saw him drafted in by Nightingale as, effectively, her private secretary, and editor of the manuscript of her Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army, published the following year. Judging from the traffic of proofs and corrections during July 1857, this became a much more demanding job than Clough’s day job. Nightingale was lobbying the government – as she would for decades to come – to improve sanitary conditions for soldiers overseas. Clough’s familiarity with Whitehall and with the language of bureaucracy was useful to her.

  His assistance continued when he returned to work in the autumn, and if anything became more extensive. He also took out some poetry written nine years earlier – ‘my 5 act epistolary tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy’ and tried to prepare it for publication.50 Both Arnold and Tennyson were struggling with the form and Clough observed that ‘England seems as unpoetic as [in the age] between
Chaucer and Spenser’. He was reading Gladstone’s translation of Homer, which he admired, and Froude’s latest volumes of his Tudor histories. He knew that Carlyle, in the midst of an almost soul-destroying effort, was about to produce the first two volumes of Frederick the Great. Clough appears to have felt under pressure to create, but his work for Nightingale became more and more important. His summer holiday in 1858 was, like its predecessor, devoted to secretarial tasks on her behalf.

  He still felt financial pressure, relieved by a salary Nightingale agreed to pay him as secretary of her fund to establish a training school for nurses. He mentioned in October 1858 that ‘Froude I believe has earned £1800 by his books. Hallam, if you care for such statistics, told Sir Francis Palgrave the other day that his total earnings by books had amounted, in all his life, to about £20,000.’51 Clough was preparing his translation of Plutarch for the press, slowed down by the donkey-work of preparing the index. When it came out in 1859 it hardly sold at all because, Clough thought, the price was too high. However, Longman’s agreed to publish an abridged, cheaper edition, and asked him to prepare editions of various classical authors. Although Clough’s own voice seemed quietened, he at least was able to raise his income. He also secured a promotion, becoming private secretary to Robert Lowe, who as vice-president of the Privy Council had responsibility for education in Palmerston’s second ministry.

  Nightingale recognised her debt to him. There is in her papers a note of April 1859 that reads: ‘I wish that all that comes to me upon my father and mother’s death should go to A H Clough – with only the proviso that whatever he has had out of the N[ightingale] Fund should be repaid but with compound interest.’52 In the autumn of 1860 Clough sent Jowett the manuscript of Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought, without disclosing who the author was. He initially described it as a work of ‘remarkable metaphysical and diabolical power’.53 Jowett suggested it should be rewritten – ‘they appear to me to be too emphatic, ecstatic and positive in style – too much impression of certainty and not enough “latent power”.’54 However, once he learned the identity of the author his tone softened – ‘I hope Miss Nightingale will not overexert herself in the attempt to correct them.’55 He added: ‘With her experience she must be well aware that it is not always safe to exert the mind because it is clean and bright. If her life is spared she will be hereafter able to rewrite the book so as to do justice to the ideas contained in it.’

  In 1861 Clough took prolonged leave of absence. He had struggled to recover from scarlet fever; but was also increasingly exploited by Nightingale, who piled work upon him without regard for his physical or mental state. He went with his family to the Isle of Wight for six weeks in February and March, then on his own to Greece and Constantinople. After his return in the summer he became increasingly ill and went abroad again, to southern France, without his wife and children, in a final attempt to recuperate. He felt ‘that my health appears to have suffered with the daily rather-hurrying routine of office work’, and he left his wife, in his absence, to negotiate a transfer within the Civil Service to something less demanding.56 He thought of taking an examinership at the Woolwich Military Academy, which paid just £150 a year, supplementing it with other occasional government work: but Arnold warned him of the precariousness of such an arrangement, which piled an additional strain on Clough. He had extended his leave of absence until mid-November: but, realising how debilitated he was, wrote from France at the end of July 1861 to request leave until February 1862; with the promise that if he was still not fit then, he would resign.57

  His wife was distressed at his being so ill, and alone abroad for so long. She urged him to come home, but with reservations, given his inability to stop work, or to stop being put upon by Nightingale, against whom Blanche nurtured a serious animus: ‘I do feel afraid of your coming back to these places. If you really could come for 10 days and see the children and take me and never go near any of the Fund or Flo or anything – I think it might be possible, but I am sure nothing but the greatest strictness would make it safe.’58 Blanche had a daughter in early August, making the separation even more painful. She wrote to her husband to ask what to call the child: he replied, by return, ‘Blanche Athena’.59 By now in the Pyrenees, he met the Tennysons, so at least his isolation was over; and he arranged for his wife to come to France, as soon as she was strong enough. She reached the Continent and met her husband in Paris on 18 September. They travelled through Switzerland to Florence; but he weakened steadily, first with neuralgia, then with a bout of malaria: he also caught a cold in the Alps that went to his chest. He died on 13 November, a month before his exact contemporary the Prince Consort and, like him, aged just forty-two.

  Jowett called him ‘one of the very best persons I have ever known, gifted too with a great deal of genius, though not destined to bring forth its perfect fruit. He had the trials of genius as well as its gifts.’60 Perhaps less tactfully, he told Blanche that Clough had been ‘a most noble-looking youth before troubles and cares and false views of religion came upon him.’61 With an equal lack of tact F. W. Newman, John Henry’s brother, in his letter of condolence, wrote that ‘I hardly know whether it lessens the pang of his loss, to be told, (as I have been told), that the fatal weakness of the brain was induced by overwork in the cause of Florence Nightingale and her benign plans. Alas, we cannot be satisfied that one martyrdom should thus entail another.’62

  It cannot be heartening to hear that one’s cousin has killed one’s husband by working him into the ground; however, Blanche was far from stupid, with no illusions about Cousin Flo. She wrote that ‘it was pure overwork which exhausted his brain and left no strength to stand against the final attack.’ She had been touched by the happiness that, in his last few weeks of life, attempts to write poetry had brought him. ‘He had entirely given up writing while he was at work but the rest seemed to bring back the power and when I saw that, I could not help desiring that we might still give up all the money-making and working for F. Nightingale which had worn him out and let him go and rest by the seaside and follow his own heart.’ But she knew he would not have been persuaded to do that.63 Blanche buried him in the Protestant cemetery at Florence.

  Blanche’s conviction that Flo had pushed her husband into an early grave was not unique to her. Nightingale herself may have shared it, for there was a delay in her sending condolences. Such was Blanche’s anger that she asked other members of the family not to give Nightingale details of Clough’s last days: and for a time they did not, which may help explain the delay in the letter of condolence. In it, Nightingale professed that although it was tardy, the letter should not suggest she had been anything other than prostrate at the news: she had felt the loss ‘at every waking hour’. Blanche, in her reply, took the gloves off. ‘I know that his loss has been to you what it could hardly be to anyone, and I have truly grieved for you in your great suffering.’64

  Arnold wrote: ‘People were beginning to say about Clough that he never would do anything now, and, in short, to pass him over. I foresee that there will now be a change, and attention will be fixed on what there was of extraordinary promise and interest in him when young, and of unique and imposing even as he grew older without fulfilling people’s expectations.’65 He was stricken: ‘Few can have received such a shock in hearing of his death as I did,’ he told Blanche.66 Even to her, he expressed his puzzlement at Clough’s underachievement. Talking of how much Clough’s men friends had admired him, he said that ‘with no one of them was the conviction of his truly great and profound qualities so entirely independent of any visible success in life which he might achieve.’

  The greatest frustration was that Clough’s genius and promise would remain unfulfilled. As F. W. Newman also said, ‘he always seemed to me to have his voice choked by his own fullness and by his conscientiousness, besides his too great modesty.’ One of his early biographers, J. I. Osborne, wrote of him that ‘Clough’s sanction increased the value of any idea, because it was the san
ction of a superlatively honest man.’67 Perhaps Clough’s commitment to the work of his wife’s cousin was a form of atonement for his loss of faith at Oxford, and the decision to derail, on that account, an otherwise promising career as a teacher and shaper of intellects.

  III

  Matthew Arnold was Clough’s closest friend. He was the second of Dr Arnold’s nine surviving children, born on Christmas Eve 1822. His father asked Keble to be the boy’s godfather, something he would regret when Keble became one of the leaders of the High Church movement that Arnold regarded with contempt. As a child Matthew had a reputation as the idler of the family. In a life packed with achievement as poet, critic, teacher, school inspector and intellectual, Matthew had one towering success: his championing of the critical faculty, central to a desire to lead humanity towards perfection. He admitted this in the superscription to Culture and Anarchy: ‘Estote ergo vos perfecti!’. In ‘Be ye perfect!’ lay the driving force of what Asa Briggs called ‘the age of improvement’. Matthew Arnold taught the benefits of evaluating one’s surroundings, culture, way of life, and the understanding that, whatever we had, much could be better. He began as a product of his father – deeply religious, defined by Christianity, which until he went to Oxford was the be-all and the end-all of his life. Then, thinking for himself, and imbibing a wider range of thought, he became a different man. He began to observe, more completely, his context and his surroundings, and the thoughts and attitudes of others. As he became more worldly in the 1840s, he passed through a phase of being a superlative poet. Then he began to become the person he would be: the critic, the teacher, the analyst of mid-Victorian England. His is perhaps the greatest mind of the nineteenth century, in its ability to cut to the heart of debate and to identify what the issues of society really were; but before he could become so influential, he had to shake off his father’s obsession with Christianity.