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It is fortunate for the biographer that this earliest part of Mr Arnold's life is so fertile in poetry, for otherwise, in the dearth of information, it would be a terribly barren subject. The thirty years of life yield us hardly twenty pages of letters, of which the first, with its already cited sketch of Laleham, is perhaps the most interesting.
On August 11, 1820, Dr Arnold married Mary Penrose, and as he had devoted his teaching energies, which were early developed, not to school or university work, but to the taking of private pupils at Laleham on the Thames, between Staines and Chertsey, their eldest son was born there, on Christmas Eve, 1822.
And behind came the Aldermen and the Councillors, and the General and his staff, and the Lord Lieutenant and Lady Laleham and the other members of the Reception Committee. The cheering drowned the strains of the "Conquering Hero." Places were taken on the platform. To the right of the Mayor sat Boyce, to the left his mother. On the table in front were set scrolls and caskets.
In the year 1827, the head mastership became vacant of the Grammar School at Rugby, and the trustees, a body of twelve country gentlemen and noblemen, selected, to the dismay of all the orthodox, the Rev. Thomas Arnold, late fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and then taking private pupils at Laleham, Middlesex.
"If you remember, sir," he said, "I found this man's leave paper in the front garden of the Mackwayte's house at Laleham Villas, Seven Kings, the day after the murder. There are one or two questions I should like to put..." "No need to arsk any questions," said Barling. "I'll tell you the whole story meself, mister. I was on leave at the time, due to go back to France the next afternoon.
It was on the way home from Laleham, after my uncle's burial there, that Mr. George Smith gave me fresh and astonishing news of Robert Elsmere's success. The circulating libraries were being fretted to death for copies, and the whirlwind of talk was constantly rising.
Once at Laleham, when teaching a rather dull boy, Arnold spoke somewhat sharply to him, on which the pupil looked up in his face and said, "Why do you speak angrily, sir? INDEED, I am doing the best I can." Years afterwards, Arnold used to tell the story to his children, and added, "I never felt so much in my life that look and that speech I have never forgotten."
It is stated in his admirable biography, that "the most remarkable thing in the Laleham circle was the wonderful healthiness of tone which prevailed there. It was a place where a new comer at once felt that a great and earnest work was going forward. Every pupil was made to feel that there was a work for him to do; that his happiness, as well as his duty, lay in doing that work well.
Perhaps Lady Laleham had insisted on her husband coming down like a uniformed Lord Lieutenant on the fold. Perhaps the hero himself was laid up with measles. With the lightest heart I drove to Wellings Park. Marigold, straight as a ramrod, sitting in front by the chauffeur.
So did the munitions workers of Godbury. This, of course, upset our plans, which had all to be reconsidered from the beginning. "Who is giving the reception?" cried Lady Fenimore, who could stand upon her dignity as well as anybody. "The County or Wellingsford? I presume it's Wellingsford, and, so long as I am Mayoress, that dreadful Laleham woman will have to take a back seat."
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