Note 1 — Chapter I · CHILDHOOD 1851-1867
Reading edition
The following is a letter written long afterwards by Tom Arnold to his sister Fan, with reference to Clough: “I loved him, oh! so well: and also respected him more profoundly than any man, anywhere near my own age, whom I ever met. His pure soul was without stain: he seemed incapable of being inflamed by wrath, or tempted to vice, or enslaved by any unworthy passion of any sort. As to ‘Philip’ something that he saw in me helped to suggest the character, that was all. There is much in Philip that is Clough himself and there is a dialectic force in him that certainly was never in me.”
December 21, 1895.