Tom Arnold (literary scholar)

After gaining a first class degree at University College, Oxford, Arnold grew discontented with Victorian Britain and attempted to take up farming in New Zealand.

While in Tasmania, Arnold converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, a move which angered his Protestant wife sufficiently to cause her to smash the windows of the chapel during his confirmation.

He left in 1865, when a letter he had written insisting that he would need a higher salary to continue at the school was interpreted by Cardinal Newman as a tendering of resignation.

Finding that some supporters were campaigning for him as the "Anglican" candidate, he felt this put him in a false position; on the eve of the election he announced his intention of being reconciled to the Catholic Church.

After a period of financial hardship, in which his main occupation was editorial work for the Rolls Series, Arnold returned to Dublin in 1882 as professor of English literature at University College, teaching to the end of his life in 1900.