Introduction and Original Front Matter
Introduction to the Digital Edition
This Rotunda edition incorporates the complete text of the six-volume print edition,
The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Charlottesville:
The University Press of Virginia, 1996–2001). Please note the following differences
between the print edition and the online edition:
- Front matter has been consolidated (see individual sections for derivation)
- Positioning of opener and closer elements of correspondence has been
regularized differently to meet the exigencies of HTML display (e.g., name of
addressee when included in the opening;
lineation of closing salutations).
- The compound letter group entitled “The Arnolds at Winandermere, Summer,
1832” in print Volume 1, pp. 11–17, has been broken into smaller groups for consistency
with the remainder of the online edition.
- Greek characters with diacriticals have been rendered using the appropriate
Unicode equivalents. (Note that proper display of Unicode Greek requires recent
versions of operating systems and Web browsers, e.g. Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.3
or later, plus an up-to-date browser.)
- Letters that were added to print Volume 6 as “Appendix A: Additional Letters”
have been integrated into their chronological sequence
- The index derives from the cumulative index to print Volume 6
- A number of errors in the print edition have been corrected: List of corrections
Front Matter from the Print Edition
Each of these components will open as a separate document.
