These extracts from Arnold's writing come from the period 1866–70 during which he addressed himself to political and social criticism in a series of articles. One, published in the Pall Mall Gazette (1866–7 and 1869–70) as ‘My Countrymen’, and purporting to be a series of letters between Arnold and ‘Baron Arminius’, was subsequently collected in Friendship's Garland (1871); the second, appearing in the Cornhill Magazine (1867–8), became Culture and Anarchy (1869).

Arnold's employment, from 1861, as Inspector of Schools involved him on a daily basis with the effects of government thinking, and encouraged him to think of the long-term consequences of particular events and measures as they might affect future generations. An additional factor in the perspective Arnold adopted was the opportunities he had enjoyed for detailed comparison with other systems of government and their fruit. In 1861 he produced Popular Education in France, the result of close observation of the machinery employed in France to organise, legislate for, and control the educational requirements of the nation in pursuit of an ideal state.

The events leading up to the 1867 Reform Bill may have fired Arnold to write these articles for periodicals, but the range of his inquiry goes far beyond the realms of party politics. Confronted with cabinets largely composed of aristocrats, and a House of Commons in which the landed interest predominated, various nostrums were being advocated.