Dover Beach: Historical & Literary Context

The Industrial Revolution

During the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, England experienced a period of rapid industrialization that massively transformed the manufacturing sector. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most manufacturing processes were conducted methodically by people trained in a particular craft or trade. With the invention of steam engines, however, it became possible to mechanize many processes, making them more efficient. As manufacturing became more efficient, it also became more profitable. Technological advancement therefore became a key player in the political economy, since whoever was on the cutting edge had a better shot at amassing ever greater fortunes. In this way, industrialization contributed to a broad social shift that increasingly emphasized advancements in science and engineering above all else. The idolization of market value occurred at the expense of more traditional forms of cultural and religious value. Educational emphasis on the liberal arts began to wane. Likewise, the dominance that Christianity had enjoyed in preceding centuries began to lose its grip. It is precisely this diminishing of cultural and religious value that Matthew Arnold mourns in “Dover Beach,” and which he spent his later career as a cultural critic and education advocate attempting to resist.

Lyric Poetry of the British Romantic Period

Matthew Arnold lived during the Victorian period and is most frequently associated with the more regimented social and moral codes of that era. Even so, “Dover Beach” owes much to the literary legacy of British Romanticism. In particular, it draws on the revitalized tradition of lyric poetry that emerged during the Romantic period. To be sure, lyric poetry existed prior to the Romantics. Any poem with a first-person speaker who expresses their inner state of mind can be classified as a lyric. However, British Romantic poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge brought renewed attention to the form. The key text here is the preface that Wordsworth wrote to a collection of poetry he assembled collaboratively with Coleridge, titled Lyrical Ballads. In his preface, Wordsworth rejected the elevated diction of neoclassical poetry and argued in favor of simpler, more natural language that is “really used by men,” and which can better represent “incidents and situations from common life.” Wordsworth modeled this more rustic lyric form in poems like “Tintern Abbey” (1798). Although Arnold’s cultural moment differed greatly from Wordsworth’s, “Dover Beach” strongly recalls the Romantic legacy both in its straightforward diction and in the ordinariness of its seaside setting.