Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  14 George Orwell, “Oysters and Brown Stout” (December 1944), in George Orwell, Essays, selected by John Carey (Everyman, 2002), pp. 794–95.

  15 It is interesting to note, apropos Vanity Fair, that before Smith Elder finally decided to publish it, the book was turned down by five different publishers.

  16 Since no one has yet to make a proper study of Newman’s journalism, his stature as an historian continues to be underestimated. Nevertheless, like Thackeray, he was profoundly alive to contemporary history, which most professional historians either neglect or get wildly wrong.

  17 See Vanity Fair, Chapter LXI, “In Which Two Lights Are Put Out,” p. 660.

  18 John Carey, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (London, 1977), pp. 20 and 22.

  19 In The Newcomes, Thackeray had Colonel Newcome reside at 120 Fitzroy Square, which he describes vividly: “The kitchens were gloomy. The stables were gloomy. Great black passages; cracked conservatory; dilapidated bathroom, with melancholy waters moaning and fizzing from the cistern; the great large blank stone staircase—were all so many melancholy features in the general countenance of the house …” There, in 1873, the year that Newman published his The Idea of a University, Ford Madox Ford was born.

  20 D. J. Taylor, Thackeray: The Life of a Literary Man (London, 1999), pp. 336 and 257. A good example of what Thackeray meant by his “uncouth raptures” can be found in a letter he wrote to Mrs. Brookfield on 19–22 December 1848: “About my future state I don’t know. I leave it in the disposal of the Awful Father: but for today: I thank God that I can love you: and that you yonder … are thinking of me with a tender regard; Hallelujah may be greater in degree than this, but not in kind: and countless ages of stars may be blazing infinitely: but you & I have a right to rejoice and believe in our little part, and to trust in to day as in tomorrow. God bless my Lady and her husband.” See The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, p. 474.

  21 See Thackeray’s letter to Kate Perry of September, 1851: “I don’t see how any woman should not love a man who had loved her as I did J.; I don’t see how any man should not love a woman so beautiful, so unhappy, so tender … I wish I had never loved her. I have been played with by a woman and flung over at a beck from the lord and master …” See The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. IV, p. 431.

  22 See Vanity Fair, Chapter LXVII, “Births, Marriages, and Deaths,” p. 735, and Chapter LXVI, “Amantium Irae,” p. 722.

  23 William Allingham, Diaries, ed. Christopher Ricks (Folio Society, 2007), p. 79.

  24 See Vanity Fair, Chapter XXXIV, “James Crawley’s Pipe Is Put Out,” p. 364.

  25 See Francis W. Newman. Contributions Chiefly to the Early History of the Late Cardinal Newman (London, 1891), p. 112.

  26 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, p. 685.

  27 See The Tamworth Reading Room, in J. H. Newman, Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects (Notre Dame, 2004), p. 260.

  28 See the essay “English Catholic Literature,” in The Idea of a University, p. 235. In 1869, Newman told a correspondent that “the only master of style I ever had (which is strange considering the differences of language) is Cicero. I think I owe a great deal to him, and as far as I know to no one else. His great mastery of Latin is shown especially in his clearness.” See LD, 24:241, JHN to John Hayes (13 April 1869).

  29 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. III, pp. 552–53.

  30 LD, 20:302 JHN to William Neville (13 October 1862). Austin is Father Henry Austin Mills (1823–1903), one of the Oratorian fathers, whom Newman addressed at the end of the Apologia. “I have closed this history of myself with St. Philip’s name upon St. Philip’s feast-day; and, having done so, to whom can I more suitably offer it, as a memorial of affection and gratitude, than to St. Philip’s sons, my dearest brothers of this House, the Priests of the Birmingham Oratory, Ambrose St. John, Henry Austin Mills, Henry Bittleston, Edward Caswall, William Paine Neville, and Henry Ignatius Dudley Ryder? who have been so faithful to me; who have been so sensitive of my needs; who have been so indulgent to my failings; who have carried me through so many trials; who have grudged no sacrifice, if I asked for it; who have been so cheerful under discouragements of my causing; who have done so many good works, and let me have the credit of them;—with whom I have lived so long, with whom I hope to die.” See Apologia, pp. 371–72.

  31 See Bradford Allen Booth, The Letters of Anthony Trollope (London, 1951), p. 403, and LD, 12:433.

  32 LD, 20:566, JHN to Miss Holmes (27 December 1863).

  33 Thackeray, “De Finibus,” in Roundabout Papers, in Works (New York, 1904), Vol. 27, p. 307.

  34 G. K. Chesterton, Thackeray (London, 1903), p. 7.

  35 Ibid., pp. 7–8.

  36 LD, 14:162, JHN to J. D. Dalgairns (8 December 1850).

  37 LD, 17:49, JHN to Ambrose St. John (9 November 1855).

  38 LD, 20:572, JHN to Mssrs. Macmillan and Co. (30 December 1863), and LD, 21:100, JHN to R. W. Church (23 April 1864).

  39 Apologia, p. xiv.

  40 LD, 21:81, JHN to Richard Gell Macmullen (16 March 1864).

  41 LD, 27:207, JHN to Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald (27 January 1875).

  42 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, p. 790.

  43 See Carey, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius, p. 96: “The most prolific breeding ground for … sham sentiment was, [Thackeray] believed, the social-conscience novel, as developed by Dickens. For one thing, he despised the bogus philanthropy that induced comfortably-off readers, who had every intention of remaining comfortably-off, to grow lachrymose over fictional accounts of workers’ woes. For another, he felt that you could not have a political question fairly debated in a novel, in which the author was at liberty to invent characters and motives, in order to revile or revere them. The whole structure was rigged.”

  44 Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) was a good friend of Robert Lowell and a good poet in his own right. The phrase “scrimmage of appetite” is from Schwartz’s poem, “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me,” which can be found in Richard Ellmann’s New Oxford Book of American Verse (New York, 1976), p. 770.

  45 The Idea of a University, p. 316.

  46 W. M. Thackeray, The Irish Sketch Book, in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, New Century Library (London, 1900), Vol. V, p. 41.

  47 LD, 16:110, JHN to Miss Mary Holmes (12 April 1854).

  48 LD, 29:83, George Butler to JHN (20 March 1879).

  49 One notable exception to this on Newman’s part was his reaction to the monsignors he encountered in Rome in 1847: “As far as I can make out,” he wrote to his sister Jemima, “the Roman Parochial clergy here are very exemplary, but Rome is a centre to which all persons come, and the foreign clergy are no ornament to the place. They have left their own neighbourhoods perhaps for no pleasant reason, and live here without public opinion upon them… . But the worst set of all I suppose, (I speak of them as a body) are a number of fellows, part clergymen part laymen (but unluckily all in what to a foreigner the dress of clergymen), called Monsignors – They are often regularly bad fellows – and these are the persons whom the English generally come across, and from whom they take their ideas of a Roman priest. I hear a good account of the Cardinals – and certainly the few I know are pre-eminent instances of humility and sanctity.” See LD, 12:27, JHN to Mrs. John Mozley (26 January 1847).

  50 See Vanity Fair, Chapter LXIV, “A Vagabond Chapter,” pp. 684–85.

  51 D. J. Taylor, Thackeray: The Life of a Literary Man (London, 1999), pp. 33–34.

  52 Ibid., p. 40.

  53 William Makepeace Thackeray, The Irish Sketch Book (New York, 1848), p. 152.

  54 William Makepeace Thackeray. The Book of Snobs (New York, 1848), p. 2.

  55 The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St. John-Stevas (London, 1965), Vol. II, pp. 304–05.

  56 The Letters and Private Papers o
f William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. IV, p. 129.

  57 See W. C. Roscoe, “Thackeray’s Art and Morality,” in the National Review (January 1856), in Thackeray: The Critical Heritage, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (London, 1968), p. 277.

  58 Apologia, p. 18.

  59 Ibid., pp. 15, 17.

  60 Ibid., p. 18.

  61 Ibid., p. 16.

  62 See Newman’s profoundly moving sermon, “The Invisible World.”

  63 See Vanity Fair, Chapter LXI, “In Which Two Lights Are Put Out,” pp. 651–52.

  64 Anglican Difficulties, p. 250.

  65 Ibid., p. 251.

  66 See Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), pp. 12–13.

  67 Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (Folio Society, 2009), Vol. I, p. 2.

  68 See “Christ upon the Waters” (Part 1) (1850), in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, p. 131.

  69 Ibid., p. 132.

  70 See Vanity Fair, Chapter XXXV, “Widow and Mother,” p. 37.

  71 See Vanity Fair, Chapter LI “In Which a Charade Is Acted Which May or May Not Puzzle the Reader.” p. 543.

  72 See Vanity Fair, Chapter XXXV, “Widow and Mother,” pp. 379–80.

  73 See Vanity Fair, Chapter XXXVII, “How To Live Well On Nothing A Year,” p. 403.

  74 Carey, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius, p. 180.

  75 See Newman’s sermon, “Religious Joy” (1825), in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Book 8, Sermon 17: “ ‘The shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known to us.’ Let us too go with them, to contemplate that second and greater miracle to which the Angel directed them, the Nativity of Christ. St. Luke says of the Blessed Virgin, ‘She brought forth her first-born Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger.’ What a wonderful sign is this to all the world, and therefore the Angel repeated it to the shepherds: ‘Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ The God of heaven and earth, the Divine Word, who had been in glory with the Eternal Father from the beginning, He was at this time born into this world of sin as a little infant. He, as at this time, lay in His mother’s arms, to all appearance helpless and powerless, and was wrapped by Mary in an infant’s bands, and laid to sleep in a manger. The Son of God Most High, who created the worlds, became flesh, though remaining what He was before. He became flesh as truly as if He had ceased to be what He was, and had actually been changed into flesh. He submitted to be the offspring of Mary, to be taken up in the hands of a mortal, to have a mother’s eye fixed upon Him, and to be cherished at a mother’s bosom. A daughter of man became the Mother of God—to her, indeed, an unspeakable gift of grace; but in Him what condescension! What an emptying of His glory to become man! and not only a helpless infant, though that were humiliation enough, but to inherit all the infirmities and imperfections of our nature which were possible to a sinless soul. What were His thoughts, if we may venture to use such language or admit such a reflection concerning the Infinite, when human feelings, human sorrows, human wants, first became His? What a mystery is there from first to last in the Son of God becoming man! Yet in proportion to the mystery is the grace and mercy of it; and as is the grace, so is the greatness of the fruit of it.”

  76 Anthony Trollope, Autobiography, The Oxford Illustrated Trollope (Oxford, 1950), p. 186.

  77 See William Makepeace Thackeray. Henry Esmond ed. John Sutherland (Penguin, 1970), Part III, Chapter 5, “Mohun Appears For the Last Time in This History,” p. 418.

  78 Anglican Difficulties, pp. 4–5.

  79 LD, 20:569, JHN to William Monsell (27 December 1863).

  80 Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Mulhauser (Oxford, 1950), Vol. I, pp. 247–48.

  81 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, p. 581.

  82 The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, Vol. II, p. 245.

  83 See Clough’s superb poem, “Easter Day, Naples, 1849,” which Anthony Kenny unaccountably imagines a paean to atheism.

  84 Carey, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius, p. 174. Leslie Stephen is nearer the mark when he refers to The Roundabout Papers as “models of the essay which, without aiming at profundity, give … the playful and tender conversation of a great writer” (DNB).

  85 See “Small-Beer Chronicle,” in W. M. Thackeray, Roundabout Papers, pp. 166–67.

  86 Present Position of Catholics in England (London, 1851), pp. 180–81. It is interesting to note that one of Newman’s childhood friends from Ealing School was the sculptor Richard Westmacott (1799–1872), who succeeded his father as Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy in 1857. His bust of Newman (1841), which adorns the recreation room of the Birmingham Oratory, is one of the best likenesses of Newman. That he and his father before him educated many of the sculptors who made the idolatrous monuments which Thackeray and Newman found outré gives Thackeray’s piece added interest.

  87 J. H. Newman, “The Religion of the Pharisee, the Religion of Mankind” (1856) in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, ed. James Tolhurst (London, 2007), pp. 24–25.

  88 The Irish Sketch Book, p. 16.

  89 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, pp. 675–76.

  90 See ODNB.

  91 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, p. 705.

  92 “The Religion of the Pharisee, the Religion of Mankind” (1856), in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, p. 26.

  93 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, pp. 711–12.

  94 Ibid., p. 616.

  95 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. III, p. 13.

  96 For a good sense of Newman’s idea of sanctity, see “A Short Road to Perfection:” “We must bear in mind what is meant by perfection. It does not mean any extraordinary service, anything out of the way, or especially heroic—not all have the opportunity of heroic acts, of sufferings … By perfect we mean that which has no flaw in it, that which is complete, that which is consistent, that which is sound… . I insist on this because I think it will simplify our views, and fix our exertions on a definite aim. If you ask me what you are to do in order to be perfect, I say, first:—Do not lie in bed beyond the due time of rising; give your first thoughts to God; make a good visit to the Blessed Sacrament; say the Angelus devoutly; eat and drink to God’s glory; say the Rosary well; be recollected; keep out bad thoughts; make your evening meditations well; examine yourself daily; go to bed in good time, and you are already perfect.” (Meditations and Devotions, p. 209)

  97 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, pp. 423–24.

  98 G. K. Chesterton, Introduction to the Book of Snobs (London, 1911), p. ix. See also Gordon Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (London, 1955), p. 377.

  99 T. S. Eliot to Eleanor Hinkley (1 April 1918), in The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. I: 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York, 1988), p. 228.

  100 Gordon Ray, Thackeray: The Use of Adversity: 1811–1846, p. 398.

  101 See Vanity Fair, Chapter XXXVI, “How To Live On Nothing a Year,” p. 388.

  102 The Idea of a University, p. 121.

  103 Ibid., p. 121.

  104 See Vanity Fair, Chapter XXXV, “Widow and Mother,” p. 371.

  105 In 1854 Thomas Arnold wrote to his mother from Hobart Town, “I have just finished ‘Pendennis’, and found myself wishing at the end of it that it had been five times as long …” See The Letters of Thomas Arnold the Younger, ed. James Bertram (Auckland and Oxford, 1980) p. 43.

  106 Thackeray, Pendennis (Penguin, 1994), Chapter LXI, “The Way of the World,” p. 801.

  107 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, p. 581.

  108 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. III, p. 439.

  109 See Pendennis, C
hapter LXI, “The Way of the World,” p. 802.

  110 See Samuel Wilberforce quoted in David Newsome, The Parting of Friends (London, 1966), p. 401.

  111 See W. M. Thackeray, The Newcomes. (London, 1855), pp. 355–56. See also T. B. Macaulay. Critical and Historical Essays (Everyman’s Library, 1937), Vol. 2, p. 39.

  112 “The Adventures of Philip on his Way through the World,” in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, Vol. II, p. 317.

  113 See Pendennis, Chapter XVI, “More Storms in the Puddle,” pp. 183–84.

  114 LD, 19:415, JHN to Miss Holmes (4 November 1860).

  115 Richard Doyle was the Punch illustrator who resigned his position to protest against what he felt were the paper’s unacceptably anti-Catholic gibes during the period known as Papal Aggression in 1850; after Doyle departed, he was succeeded by John Tenniel, who would go on to illustrate Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). When Thackeray supported Doyle, the false rumor went round that he himself might be moving towards Rome, which Newman seems to have credited. After Thackeray’s death, he told Gladstone’s political ally, the Catholic Irish Unionist William Monsell: “Thackeray’s sudden death is very shocking, especially considering his utter contempt of Protestantism and his drawings to the Church.” See LD, 20:569, JHN to William Monsell (27 December 1863).

  116 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. IV, p. 340.

  117 See Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (New Haven, 2007), p. 283.

  118 Pollen wrote an indispensable account of St. Saviour’s Leeds in Narrative of Five Years at St. Saviours (London, 1851).