Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  119 LD, 23:42–3 JHN to Lady Shrewsbury (29 April 1848).

  120 W. M. Thackeray, The Paris Sketch Book, in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, New Century Library (London, 1900), Vol. V, pp. 56–57.

  121 LD 27:199, J. H. Pollen to Ambrose St. John (29 January 1874).

  122 LD, 27:199, JHN to Unknown Correspondent (20 January 1875).

  123 Apologia, p. xxiv.

  124 Ibid., p. xxvi.

  125 John Blackwood, quoted in Geoffrey Tillotson, Thackeray the Novelist (Cambridge, 1954), p. 227.

  126 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. III, p. 337.

  127 In “Before the Curtain,” Vanity Fair, Thackeray writes: “As the Manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards, and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing, and fiddling: there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the look-out, quacks (other quacks, plague take them!) bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind.”

  128 Charlotte Bronte (17 June 1851), in The Brontës: A Life in Letters, ed. Juliet Barker (Folio Society, 2006), p. 345.

  129 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. III, p. 341.

  130 Thackeray, quoted in Gordon N. Ray, The Age of Wisdom: 1847–1863 (Oxford, 1958), p. 121.

  131 For my understanding of the Garrick Club affair, I am heavily indebted to D. J. Taylor’s excellent account of it in his Thackeray: The Life of a Literary Man (London, 1999), pp. 400–14.

  132 Ibid., p. 402.

  133 Ibid.

  134 Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven, 2009), p. 522.

  135 G. M. Young, “Thackeray,” in Today and Yesterday (London, 1948), p. 247.

  136 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. IV, p. 337.

  137 See John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (London, 1969), pp. 94–96.

  138 Taylor, Thackeray: The Life of a Literary Man, p. 408.

  139 Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven, 2009), p. 458.

  140 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. IV, pp. 89–90.

  141 Ibid., p. 97.

  142 Ibid., p. 101.

  143 Ibid., pp. 101–02.

  144 LD, 21:82, JHN to Richard Gell Macmullen (16 March 1864).

  145 See Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Oxford Dickens (Oxford, 1949), p. 69.

  146 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. IV, pp. 133–34.

  147 Thackeray would have been amused by the bravado of that section of Harriet Martineau’s autobiography where the Unitarian mesmerist claims, “To think no more of death than is necessary for the winding up the business of life, and to dwell no more upon sickness than is necessary for its treatment, or to learn to prevent it, seems to me the simple wisdom of the case—totally opposite as this is to the sentiment and method of the religious world …” See Martineau, Autobiography (Boston, 1877), p. 440.

  148 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, p. 253.

  149 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. I, p. 466.

  150 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. II, pp. 206–07.

  151 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. III, p. 82. The Rev. Cesar Jean Salomon Malan (1812–1894), linguist, scholar, and critic of the “Higher Criticism,” held the living of Broadwindsor in Dorset from 1845 to 1885. See Ray’s note.

  152 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. III, p. 217.

  153 See Taylor, Thackeray: The Life of a Literary Man, pp. 162–64. In addition, Carey’s comments on this sad, murky matter are worth taking into consideration. “Isabella’s loss helped to impress on Thackeray the terrible transience of love and beauty. It also occasioned qualms of conscience. Clearly he had been to blame: had he not deserted her and gone to Belgium, her post-natal depression might never have been developed into insanity. He began writing Vanity Fair in 1845, the year Isabella was finally shut away, and when in that novel George Osborne abandons his wife on the night before Waterloo and goes panting after Becky Sharp, Thackeray is near to self portraiture—very near, perhaps, for it is possible that the delights of his ill-timed continental holiday includes a reunion with the ex-governess Mlle Pauline, Becky’s real life prototype.” John Carey, Thackeray: A Prodigal Genius (London, 1977), pp. 17–18.

  154 “The Religion of the Pharisee, the Religion of Mankind” (1856), in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, pp. 16–17.

  155 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. III, pp. 50–51.

  156 The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. III, pp. 347–48.

  157 See Frederick Meyrick, Memories of Life at Oxford and Experiences in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Spain and Elsewhere (London, 1905), p. 213.

  Chapter 9 Newman and the Americans

  1 LD, 5:282, Robert Wilberforce to JHN (20 April 1836).

  2 In Discussions and Arguments, Newman speaks of “the spread of a Pantheistic spirit, that is, the religion of beauty, imagination, and philosophy, without constraint moral or intellectual, a religion speculative and self-indulgent. Pantheism, indeed, is the great deceit which awaits the Age to come.” The man most responsible for reviving pantheism in nineteenth-century Britain was Wordsworth. As a brilliant new intellectual history shows: “Wordworth’s rhapsodies on the active powers immanent in the fabric of nature troubled some commentators, because he could be understood to be expressing pantheism and seemed to disregard Christian doctrine.” For the poet James Montgomery, “We do not mean to infer that Mr. Wordsworth excludes from his system the salvation of man, as revealed in the Scriptures, but it is evident that that he has not made ‘Jesus Christ the corner-stone’ of it.” Coleridge was even more censorious, admitting that “the vague misty, rather than mystic, Confusion of God with the World & the accompanying Nature-worship … is the trait in Wordsworth’s poetic works that I most dislike.” See P. M. Harman, The Culture of Nature in Britain 1680–1860 (New Haven, 2009), p. 169. At the same time, Wordsworth can be seen as laying some of the groundwork for the Oxford Movement. As Juliet Barker writes in her biography of the poet, “In John Ruskin’s beautiful phrase, William had taught [his admirers, including John Keble and John Henry Newman] that, ‘A snowdrop was to me, as to Wordsworth, part of the Sermon on the mount.’” In the Latin oration, which Keble was required to deliver as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, he extolled this aspect in Wordsworth. “What Keble’s oration also did was to claim William for the Oxford Movement, which sought to rise above doctrinal squabbles and regenerate the heart of the Anglican Church.” Keble, Newman and Frederick Faber had been disciples of his poetry since youth, so that, in influencing them, he might even be said to have laid the foundations for the Oxford Movement. It was a debt which Newman himself identified, saying [Wordsworth] had been central to the “great progress of the religious mind of our Church to something deeper and truer than satisfied the last century.” See Juliet Barker Wordsworth: A Life (London, 2000), p. 467.

  3 Newman, “The Anglo-American Church” 1839, in Essays Critical and Historical, Vol. I, p. 347.

  4 LD, 9:435, JHN to Mrs. John Mozley (22 July 1843).

  5 LD, 27:102, JHN to Mrs. Wilson (3 August 1874): “I think our Lord’s words are being fulfilled, ‘When the Son of Man cometh shall He find faith upon earth?’ The plague of unbelief is in every religious community, in the Unitarian, in the Kirk, in the Episcopalian, in the Church of England, as well as in the Catholic Church. What you want is faith, just
as so many persons in other communions want faith. The broad section of the Church of England wants faith – you in the Catholic Church want faith. The disease is the same, though its manifestations are different.”

  6 See David K. Brown, R.C.N.C., The Way of a Ship in the Middle of the Sea: The Life and Work of William Froude (London, 2005), p. 34. Presumably Brown was given this figure by Gerard Tracey, the Oratory’s archivist, who guided his research into the Newman/Froude friendship. I have rounded off the number.

  7 See J. M. Robert, “The Idea of a University Revisited,” in Newman after 100 Years, ed. Ker and Hill (Oxford, 1990), p. 219.

  8 From The Great Gatsby, in F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald (London, 1963), pp. 162–63.

  9 “The Mission of St. Philip” (1850), in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, p. 205.

  10 LD, 25:324, JHN to William Robert Brownlow (29 April 1871).

  11 William Palmer (1803–1885) of Worcester College, was one of the most learned of the Tractarians, and a champion of the ‘Branch Theory’ of the Church. In 1846 he published an answer to Newman’s “Essay on Development” entitled “The Doctrine of Development and Conscience considered in relation to the Evidences of Christianity and of the Catholic System.” He condemned Newman’s understanding of development as rationalistic.

  12 LD, 26:365, JHN to Miss Rowe (16 September 1873).

  13 Present Position of Catholics, p. 43.

  14 See Matthew Arnold, ‘Civilization in the United States’ (1888).

  15 LD, 26:114, JHN to Lord Blachford (14 June 1872).

  16 See Francis W. Newman, Contributions chiefly to the early history of the late Cardinal Newman (London, 1891), p. 6.

  17 LD, 5:60, W. F. Hook to JHN (11 April 1835).

  18 See the entry by George Herring for Hook in the ODNB.

  19 One of the St. Saviour’s converts was the gangling, indecisive, dutiful William Neville, who joined the Oratory in September 1851 and later became Newman’s secretary. “William, William” were Newman’s last recorded words. After his death, as literary executor, Neville diligently collected and copied Newman’s letters and papers. See also Neville’s comment in his preface to Newman’s Meditations and Devotions (London, 1907), p. xi: “One name more there is to mention—and it belongs to America, where though our Cardinal had so many friends, one was pre-eminently such—that of Bishop James O’Connor, Bishop of Omaha, whose unaffected kindness was most grateful to our Cardinal, lasting as it did through all but the whole of his Catholic lifetime. For Bishop James O’Connor the Cardinal had a great affection, remembering always, with something of gratitude, the modesty and simplicity with which, as a youth, the future Bishop attached himself to him and to Father St. John when the three were at Propaganda together, thus forming a friendship which distance and years did not lessen, and which later on was enlivened by personal intercourse when the visits ad limina Apostolorum brought Bishop O’Connor through England.”

  20 See Henry Parry Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey (London, 1898), Vol. III, p. 123.

  21 John Hungerford Pollen, Narrative of Five Years at St. Saviour’s, Leeds (Oxford, 1851), p. 166.

  22 William Richard Wood Stephens, Life and Letters of Dean Hook (London, 1881), Vol. II, p. 279.

  23 LD, 5:180, JHN to F. W. Hook (21 December 1835).

  24 See Ronald Knox, “Newman and Roman Catholicism,” in Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians (New York, 1966), p. 127: “How Newman, an Evangelical at the roots of him and a Liberal by his early training, came to throw in his lot with the party of reaction, is (humanly speaking) a mystery; not solved for us by the Apologia, or by Church’s history of the Movement. Most probably it was due to the personal influence of Hurrell Froude, that infinitely attractive enfant terrible who so charmed and dazzled and shocked his contemporaries; the man whose early death sets one’s mind aching with the problem, ‘What line would he have taken in 1845?’ ”

  25 William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (London, 1857), p. 14. Here Cobbett refers to what he calls: “Monkish ignorance and superstition.” “Monkish ignorance and superstition is a phrase that you find in every Protestant historian, from the reign of the ‘Virgin’ Elizabeth to the present hour. It has, with time, become a sort of magpie-saying, like ‘glorious revolution,’ ‘happy constitution,’ ‘good old king,’ ‘envy of surrounding nations,’ and the like. But there has always, false as the notion will presently be proved to be, there has always been a very sufficient motive for inculcating it.”

  26 LD, 7:164, John Strachan to JHN (23 May 1840).

  27 LD, 9:293, B. T. Onderdonk testimonial for Parochial Sermons.

  28 LD, 9:293, G. W. Doane testimonial for Parochial Sermons.

  29 LD, 7:366, JHN to E. B. Pusey (25 July 1840).

  30 LD, 9:304, JHN to G. W. Doane (7 April 1843).

  31 See Introduction to Tract 90 (1841).

  32 One of Carey’s closest associates at this time was James McMaster (1820–1886). In his account of the Oxford Movement in America, the convert Clarence Walworth recalled how “They walked together, talked together, and read together, eagerly discussing every new publication that issued from Oxford, and prospecting together over every storm that threatened their church and every opening in the clouds that gave hope of coming sunshine.” See Clarence E. Walworth, The Oxford Movement in America (New York, 1895), pp. 59–60. At the General Theological Seminary, McMaster also became friendly with Isaac Hecker and Walworth himself. After becoming a Catholic in 1845, he accompanied them to Louvain, where they meant to prepare for becoming Redemptorists. They also called on Newman in August 1845, though McMaster discovered that he had no vocation and returned to New York. In July 1848 he bought Bishop Hughes’s share in the New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register, and became sole owner and editor until his death. Taking Louis Veuillot as his model, he criticized the episcopate and was anti-Abolitionist. In 1861–1862 President Lincoln had his paper withheld from the mails, and he was for a short time imprisoned. At the time of the First Vatican Council, he was wildly Ultramontane. See the entry on McMaster in the old Catholic Encyclopedia.

  33 See “The Ordination of Mr. Arthur Carey,” in The New Englander and Yale Review, Vol. 1, Issue 4 (October 1843), pp. 586–96.

  34 See Francis McGrath’s biographical entry for Carey in LD, 9:785.

  35 LD, 10:57, Arthur Carey to JHN (13 November 1843).

  36 Samuel Seabury, The Joy of the Saints: A Discourse on the Third Sunday After Easter A.D. MDCCCXLIV Being the First Sunday after the Intelligence of The Death of the Rev. Arthur Carey, A.M. An Assistant in the Church of the Annunciation, New York (New York, 1844), p. 5.

  37 Clarence Augustus Walworth, The Oxford Movement in America (New York, 1895), p. 34.

  38 LD, 22:234–35, JHN to Augustine Francis Hewit (16 May 1866).

  39 LD, 4:362, JHN to Richard Hurrell Froude (12 November 1834).

  40 LD, 30:202, William Stang to JHN (23 March 1883).

  41 LD, 30:202, JHN to William Stang (13 April 1883).

  42 See Speech of Mr. John Duer, delivered in the Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of New York, on Friday, the 29th of September, IMA in Support of the Resolutions offered by Judge Oakley, New York, 1843, in Christian’s Monthy Magazine and Monthly Review (London, 1844), pp. 447–49.

  43 Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (London, 1997), p. 311. Lyman Beecher (1775–1863) was an eloquent Presbyterian preacher who worked to make Calvinism palatable to the young republic. The founder of the American Bible Society, he was also a fierce critic of Unitarianism, as well as of the rising presence of Catholicism in America, which he portrayed as foreign, authoritarian and power-hungry. When an anti-papist mob burned down the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1831, a series of anti-Catholic lectures that Beecher gave in Boston was held responsible. In the western territories, Beecher became an indefatigable missionary, after taking con
trol of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was also an attentive paterfamilias, whose seven sons and three daughters all led distinguished public lives. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was one of his daughters. Samuel Morse (1791–1872), the inventor of the telegraph, was an anti-Catholic abolitionist who in 1836 ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York on the Native-American ticket.

  44 See Duer’s speech in Christian’s Monthly Magazine and Monthly Review (London, 1844), pp. 447–49.

  45 From Tract 85, later published as “Difficulties in Scripture Proof of Doctrine,” in John Henry Newman, Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects, ed. James Tolhurst (South Bend, 2004), p. 123.

  46 Henry Caswall (1810–1870) was the author of America and the American Church (1839) and studies of Joseph Smith and Mormonism. In 1843 he returned to England, and was Vicar of Figheldean, Wiltshire, from 1848–1870, and from 1860 a Prebendary of Salisbury.

  47 J. H. Newman, “The Anglo-American Church” (1839), in Essays Historical and Critical, Vol. I, p. 326.

  48 J. H. Newman, quoted from an unpublished manuscript in The Living Thoughts of Cardinal Newman, ed. Henry Tristram (London, 1946), p. 21.

  49 See LD, 16:557–61.

  50 Newman, Essays Historical and Critical, Vol. I, pp. 314–15.

  51 Lyman Beecher, from his Autobiography, Vol. I, p. 253, quoted in Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848 (Oxford, 2007), p. 165.

  52 Essays Historical and Critical, Vol. 1, p. 318.

  53 See LD, 7:138, JHN to Mrs. John Mozley (8 September 1839): “I have no news to tell you. The thing uppermost in my mind of course is that B.C. Keble’s Article on Gladstone is a very impressive one. I have written what I fear is a flippant one on the American Church, though I respect her members too much to mean to be so.” The B.C. is the British Critic, which Newman edited from 1838 to 1840; hence his referring to himself in the article on the Anglo-American Church as a “Christian journalist.”