by Edward Short
Miss Bowles was not only a devout but a sociable woman. In one letter, she described for Newman an evening party she attended at 72 Eaton Place, the home of the liberal politician and convert, Sir John Simeon, a good friend of Newman’s and a staunch supporter of the Oratory School:
I was there last night, to a great assembly to meet Tennyson – whom I was very glad to see and know. Otherwise it was painful. Mr Lecky was there whose “Morals” [History of European Morals (1869)] you have no doubt seen – and who is certainly a remarkable man – 25 – and looking like a lank-gawky, dreamy boy. He was introduced to me – but he came in late – and I did not say much. He said he was tired of hearing and reading strictures on his book. He is very interesting to me – pure minded and good evidently – having no belief – no ground of standing – no certainty of comparing – seeking God and finding Him only in glimpses – says conscience is the only guide – and wrongdoing only hindering self progress. I felt the greatest pain to see that soul – on the threshold of life – with a ship freighted out with such gifts – without compass or rudder. There were two girls friends of his, who say they would give the world to believe there was anything beyond this life – but have no belief … . And poor Louy [Louisa Simeon, Sir John’s daughter, with whom Newman also corresponded] – looking so bright and noble – in the midst of all this throng of half-unbelieving protestants half unCatholic Catholics. Surely Sir John is not wise to drift into this seething mass of doubtful society – and take this child with him?13
Here one gets a good glimpse into Miss Bowles’s delight in people, her eye for social comedy, her deep but never sanctimonious faith, and her critical acumen. W. E. H. Lecky (1838–1903), the brilliant historian of eighteenth-century Ireland, never did feel comfortable in society and his lack of faith trapped him in a Victorian skepticism he never transcended.14 And she was right about Tennyson: his table-talk was full of charm. Recalling his peculiarly rhapsodic juvenilia, Tennyson told one dinner companion: “At about twelve and onwards I wrote an epic of six thousand lines à la Walter Scott—full of battles, dealing too with sea and mountain scenery—with Scott’s regularity of octo-syllables and his occasional varieties. Though the performance was very likely worth nothing I never felt myself more truly inspired. I wrote as much as seventy lines at one time, and used to go shouting them about the fields in the dark.”15 One can easily imagine the lover of poetry in Miss Bowles delighting in such reminiscences. When she first read Newman’s verses, they struck her as “startling oracles or newly discovered inscriptions in a strange character,” utterly different from what she described as the “running water” of Keble’s verses.16 Like many young English Protestant women inclined to Rome, she was also deeply moved by Emily Agnew’s Geraldine: A Tale of Conscience (1837), which vividly described the heroine embarking on the religious life:
Amongst her numerous sister-novices, Geraldine found exemplified the effects of the admirable instructions they received from the spiritual lectures and exhortations of mother Juliana … . In all the novices, was marked the endeavour to guard those doors by which the interior life is molested; no one relating, or willingly hearing, news of the world she had left; and no one being occupied with any soul but her own; each being responsible, under God, to her mistress alone; and bound to give each other the edification only of silent example. Thus, in holy silence and peace, each soul was hidden with Christ; or, as it is of novices we spoke, it was her prayer and aim to be thus hidden: for … during the noviciate the greatest warfare takes place between nature and grace … The sensibilities and little artifices of self-love—the desire that the poor should recognise, and feel grateful, to one’s individual self—the wish to relate with credit to one’s self, at the recreation, some interesting scene—chagrin at being no longer sent to the places where one had become so useful, and so popular,—all this had passed; for the true spouse of Christ had long realized the truth that “all that is not God is nothing!” and insensible to the popular voice of praise or blame, to the gratitude or ingratitude of the object relieved, to the interior satisfaction or difficulty experienced in the path of duty, walks simply with her God, disregarding everything that would lift the idol self on the altar raised in her heart to Him alone.17
For a well-to-do Anglican woman, brought up on the decorous pieties of what Thackeray once called “Church of Englandism,” this was a religion from a different world and Miss Bowles was deeply drawn to it. That she emulated Geraldine by joining a convent and ministering to female prisoners shows what a direct personal impact the book had on her. Geraldine may also have influenced Newman. He reviewed the book for the British Critic and although he noted its amateurism and theological errors, he also praised its characters for being “amusingly drawn.”
There is a religious indifferentist, with a sufficient insight into the absurdities of the popular ways of thought, a hankering after Catholicity, and a kindness towards the imaginative parts of Romanism; a Whig lord enduring Protestantism and Romanism, yet attached to neither; a High-Church Oxford divine; a Reformation-Society Protestant; a pert young lady inclined to the Presbyterian persuasion; and a parish clergyman of the modern school, amiable, active, uxorious and absurd.18
It is difficult reading this without wondering whether Newman wrote Loss and Gain, in part, as a kind of Oxonian Geraldine, one which would “recommend the Roman Catholic religion to the English Protestant” but in a more substantial, truer, wittier way. It is also worth pointing out that when Newman wrote his review in July 1837, he was still committed to promulgating the via media. Consequently, the pro-Roman moral of Geraldine was not one for which he could muster much sympathy. “It is impatience and a sinful impatience,” he declared, “to go out of the English Church for what every believing mind may find in it.” And here he made the argument for staying put that Keble and Pusey would make repeatedly after Newman abandoned the Church of England. “The capabilities of our actual state, in the hands of any individual who is moved to use them, are so great, that, putting duty out of the question, it is great inconsiderateness to require more than is given us … We have the high doctrines of the Sacraments, Apostolical Succession, Confession, Absolution, Penance, Fasts, Festivals, the daily Service, all recognized as existing ordinances; what do we want but the will to bring into existence what the Prayer Book contains …”19
When Miss Bowles met Newman at Littlemore, which Matthew Arnold described as “a mean house such as Paul might have lived in when he was tent-making at Ephesus,” she recalled how “One face, grand, reticent, powerful both in speaking and at rest, and slightly forbidding … detached itself from the rest and remained for ever stamped on my mind.”20 She also recalled “the awful sense of the Invisible Presence which he [Newman] brought among us.” With these exalted notions in her head, she was taken aback when the Vicar of St. Mary’s turned to her and asked, “Will you have some cold chicken?” Invariably, Newman’s unaffected simplicity baffled his more romantic admirers. Later, in the 1860s, Miss Bowles returned to Littlemore and reported back to Newman: “The trees have grown up, now making the churchyard a shady grove—and there I stood in your place—calling up all the words I had heard—the voice that had shown me the way of salvation … . The bells seemed to bring you constantly before me …”21 And yet she also recalled that when she and the Catholic Eystons saw him that day they were convinced that he would never become a Catholic himself. Doubtless Miss Bowles had read Newman’s review of Geraldine in the British Critic and recalled his claiming that it would be “nothing but sinful impatience to go out of the English Church for what every believing mind may find in it.” Moreover, on that day in Littlemore in 1840, Newman did not appear preoccupied or distraught. Over twenty years later, when she read his account of his true condition at that time in the Apologia, she was amazed to learn of “what anguish and travail of the soul lay hidden … beneath that calm face and voice of utter serenity.”22
After converting, Miss Bowles joined Cornelia Connelly’s So
ciety of the Holy Child and accompanied her to the opening of the Society’s first Convent at Derby. Later she was sent to Liverpool as superior to found a convent and school. There she purchased property for the Society without Connelly’s approval with money borrowed from her brothers, which drove the Society into serious debt. Consequently, Connolly and Bowles fell out and never reconciled. Once Bishop Goss of Liverpool relieved Miss Bowles of her vows, she left the Society. Joyce Sugg, in her excellent book, Ever Yours Affly: John Henry Newman and his Female Circle, demonstrates that in the bitter financial row that followed, Miss Bowles was clearly in the wrong, though it has to be said that she did pay for her poor judgment by losing her own patrimony as well.23 After leaving Connelly’s new order, Emily returned to London, where she set herself up in lodgings in Mayfair at No. 2 South Street, not far from Farm Street, “in those reduced circumstances of the Victorian age,” as Meriol Trevor noted, “which admitted of her keeping a servant.”24 When Newman came to visit in 1865, she sat him down in her drawing room, which, as she recalled, “he seemed to fill with his sweet dignity, the singular charm of his majestic simplicity and the magic of his voice.”25
Another frequent visitor to Miss Bowles’s South Street lodgings was Lady Georgiana Fullerton, the author of two of the most celebrated religious novels in nineteenth-century England, Ellen Middleton (1844), which dramatized the need for confession, and Grantley Manor (1847), a more explicitly Catholic book, which treated of a secret Protestant–Catholic marriage. Lady Georgiana Leveson-Gower, the daughter of the 1st Earl Granville, and Lady Harriet Leveson-Gower, second daughter of William Cavendish, fifth duke of Devonshire, was born at the very pinnacle of the aristocracy at Tixall Hall in Staffordshire. Her grandmother, after whom she was named, was that beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the friend of Fox, Sheridan and Marie Antoinette, of whom Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds painted so many magnificent portraits. It is strange to think of the devout Lady Georgiana descended from this other Georgiana, who was so insatiably fond of drink, cards and party politics. Yet the passion and the dedication that the one gave to the gaming table, the other gave to the care of Christ’s poor. Lady Georgiana’s father also had something of the eighteenth-century Duchess in his make-up. The intimate friend of Canning, he served as ambassador at Paris from 1834 to 1843 but was so addicted to whist that he actually lost £23,000 at a sitting at Crockford’s.26 Nevertheless, he doted on his daughter and did not neglect her education. She was taught piano by Liszt and given enough French lessons to make her completely fluent in the language, which doubtless endeared her to Becky Sharp’s creator.27 She also recalled sitting on the knee of George III. Yet despite her impeccably patrician upbringing, she was a simple woman who lived her life with dutiful simplicity. In 1833, she married Alexander George Fullerton, an officer in the Irish Guards from Ballintoy Castle, Antrim. For the first eight years of their marriage they lived in Paris in the home of Earl Granville. In 1843, Fullerton converted to Rome and three years later his wife followed, after receiving instruction from that extraordinary Jesuit, Father Brownbill, who received so many of Newman’s friends into the Church, including Maria Giberne, Sir John Simeon, Mr. and Mrs. George Ward, Catherine Anne Bathurst, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Simpson, Mrs. Henry Wilberforce and the Marchioness of Lothian.28 The death of Lady Georgina’s only son in 1854 at the age of 21 devastated her and her husband, and for the rest of her life she was in mourning.
When Lady Georgiana wrote to Newman in 1853 expressing interest in writing a historical novel set in the time of the early Church, Newman suggested an impressive reading list—including Bingham’s Antiquities, Tillemont’s books and Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History—before observing, “Your difficulty will be character. This is the position in which you excel, and on which your works have hitherto turned—and female character. Now I do not know what work would help you to understanding the Roman female character. I suppose it was absolutely different in kind from the Protestant or English. I suppose a genuine Roman woman had very little education. The known historical specimens, on the other hand, were often monsters. I doubt whether any of them, heathen or Christian, had that peculiar refinement or feeling and complexity of motive and passion, which you delight to draw.”29 As it happened, Lady Georgiana never pursued the novel, though she might have had fun disabusing Newman of his one-dimensional notions of Roman matrons.
About her first novel, Ellen Middleton, Gladstone wrote a long, revelatory piece in The English Review, in which he concluded that “the eternal march of the Divine law of retribution forms the fundamental harmony of the book,” after advising his readers: “Let us not conceal it from ourselves, that men cannot live for generations, and almost for centuries, deprived of any other spiritual discipline than such as each person, unaided by the external forces of the Church and the testimony of general practice, may have the desire and the grace to exercise over himself, without being the worse for it,” a startling concession from a man who otherwise abominated the Catholic sacrament of confession.30 One can see his tortured refusal to credit the clear logic of the novel in an amusingly defensive passage:
… this reminds us of a frivolous objection: it has been somewhere surmised, as of most other things in this day of reckless fancies, that if the representations of this book be just, we ought to return to the Church of Rome. No! but if they be just, then indeed we ought to return to the Church of England. We ought to remember her solemn admonitions of repentance; her constant witness in favour of holy discipline for the souls of her children; the heavy responsibility of self-examination and self-judgment which she throws upon them, the means of authoritative support, of consolation ever divine, though ministered through the weakness and foolishness of a fleshly organ, to which she habitually points the way as their meet refuge, if they shall not of themselves suffice to the discharge of that awful duty. Yes, we have, as a nation and as individuals, a long and weary path to traverse before we attain to the level of that practice which the injunctions of our own yet living and speaking mother require. When we have reached it, we may find that we have passed by the point to which belongs the system of auricular confession …31
In a letter to Edward Pusey, Newman made reference to Gladstone’s review, remarking of the novel’s moral, which he saw as “the expedience of Confession,” that the then President of the Board of Trade “seems to think it had better be begun,” and not by Priests but by individual Anglicans, “by way of accustoming people to the thing itself. Yet so very awful a thing, as it is to many persons, requires that support from sacred and sacramental sanctions which a Priestly ordinance alone can give. Confession cannot well be disjoined from absolution.”32 After he converted, Newman took a very practical view of confession. When Henry Wilberforce’s newly converted wife confided to him that she was unsure of how to approach the sacrament, Newman wrote back to her: “Do not trouble yourself over much about your confession. God asks what you can do and nothing more. Let your one thought be that of His tender mercy and love of you. Say every day a prayer to each of the Five Wounds – before the Crucifix, if you have one. If you have no prayer, say with the thought of each wound before you, one Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory. And at some other time of the day make Acts of Faith, Hope, Love, and Contrition, as you find them in any Catholic Book.”33 Even as an Anglican, Newman recognized the indispensability of confession to the pastoral charge, writing in one of his letters: “I cannot understand how a clergyman can be answerable to souls, if souls are not submitted to him. There is no real cure of souls in our Church.”34
In his monograph, The Mind of Gladstone (2004), the historian David Bebbington misrepresents Gladstone’s ambivalent response to the novel by claiming that he found the characters “unamiable.”35 This is not true. In the pertinent passage, Gladstone remarks: “Again; it has been said that the characters of the book are unamiable: that Edward is too stern and hard; that Alice is too still; that Ellen repels more than she attracts. But it is no reproach to the pa
inter, if, instead of daubing his canvas with masses of colour, cold and warm, in violent contrast, he follows nature in the inexplicable blending of her myriad shades.”36 By misrepresenting Gladstone’s review of a novel that spoke so directly to the Liberal politician’s sense of guilt—which his scrupulous diary exhibited on nearly every page and which his Anglican faith could do nothing to resolve—Bebbington hardly does justice to the mind of his subject. Nevertheless, Lady Georgiana was thrilled to have her first novel reviewed by so prominent a politician, however impelled he might have been to deny its true import.
After converting to Rome in 1849, Lady Georgiana would often visit Miss Bowles in South Street on her way to the Jesuit Church in Farm Street. After her death, Miss Bowles wrote a touching memorial of her friend for the Dublin Review. Turning over the pages of Mme. Craven’s biography of Lady Georgiana, Miss Bowles wrote, “we live once more in that gracious presence, we note the peculiar radiance of the smile, the brightening of the eyes, the rich harmony of the low-pitched voice, so full of refinement and of power. We see her again, in her poor mourning garb, bent and feeble, making her way with a stick down South Street to the long-frequented church, in which we shall presently find her kneeling, rapt in prayer. Following her at a little distance, through Farm Street Mews, we wonder again, as we have many times wondered, whether the rude crowd of grooms gathered at their noisy work did not recognize in that poorly clad woman as she passed some higher angelic presence, that brought with it healing and a blessing. To us it ever truly verified the words, Christianus alter Christus est. May she plead for us in her Eternal Home!”37 Hilaire Belloc’s mother also vividly recalled Lady Georgiana. “Of her manifold charities one knows not how to speak. She was the kindest and the most industrious of women. The charge of orphans, sick people, and schools was a daily matter of course to her … . And so, year by year, Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s life went on, until the time came when she was attacked by a painful disease, and the black gown hung in long thin folds on a wasted figure, which recalled some early Italian picture in the severe grace of old age. On her deathbed she asked that the curtain covering her son’s portrait should be withdrawn, saying that she had the courage to look at it now. Another time, when Father Gallwey was reading the Scriptures to her, he saw her eyes fill at an allusion to the death of a child; an involuntary revelation of the pain silently endured for thirty years. Please God they are now together, the mother and the son; and of her it may most emphatically be said: ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord!’”38