The choice of Arnold's poem at the book's moment of crisis is not simply a statement about the therapeutic power of great writing. It seems also to call up that larger Victorian program by which the masses were to be educated into their role as social arbiters in an era of advancing democracy. Saturday appears to promote the same project as Culture and Anarchy in proposing exposure to "the best that has been thought and said" as a way of correctly channeling dangerous energies. … Culture here stands against the "anarchy" seemingly threatened by more or less everyone else: drug addicts, peace protesters, the mentally ill, and Muslims. Perowne's paranoia is almost parodic at times, but the prescribed cure seems offered in all seriousness.

XREF: Links to Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy and its Victorian project of educating the masses into social stability.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 115