<em>Newman and his Contemporaries</em>, by Edward Short

Abstract

Reviewed by: Newman and his Contemporaries by Edward Short Sheridan Gilley (bio) Newman and his Contemporaries, by Edward Short; pp. xi + 530. New York and London: T & T Clark, 2011, $110.00, $32.95 paper, £60.00, £18.99 paper. This book is founded on two of John Henry Newman’s own principles, that a man’s life lies in his letters, and that, in the words of his Salesian motto as a cardinal, “cor ad cor loquitur,” heart speaks to heart: not only the human heart to God, but one human heart to another. Edward Short’s work quotes lavishly from Newman’s Letters and Diaries (1961–2008), the wonderfully edited and produced thirty-two volume project begun by the Oratorian Charles Stephen Dessain and the publishing house of Thomas Nelson and Sons, and carried to completion by other distinguished scholars and by the Oxford University Press. Newman’s correspondence, as much as his learned works, embodies his teaching of the personal character of religious movements and the personal apprehension of religious belief, and records the connection between his public doctrine as he developed it and the friendships and enmities of his own history. Thus Short traces Newman’s relations with his sometime fellow-Tractarians John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey, even after his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Short also provides good studies of Newman’s relations with the High Churchman W. E. Gladstone and with the skeptical engineer William Froude, whose family Newman received into the Roman Catholic Church. As Short describes it, Newman was especially attentive to women converts, such as his old friend Maria Giberne, Emily Bowles, the novelists Georgiana Chatterton and Georgiana Fullerton, Mary Holmes, and Froude’s wife Catherine, who received from him what amounted to a complete course of apologetics. I found very moving the chapter on the former Unitarian Richard Holt Hutton, editor of The Spectator, Newman’s champion and critic, in correspondence which shows Newman at his sympathetic best. A chapter on Newman and the United States is less substantial. There are further studies of Newman’s opposition to the growth of skepticism, liberalism, and unbelief, embodied in his views of Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and William Makepeace Thackeray. The chapter on Thackeray is the most speculative and remote from Newman, though he read the novelist comprehensively and had a link with him through Holmes. Short is highly critical of Arnold’s attempt to substitute culture and literature for religion, but is, I think, particularly good in capturing Clough’s intellectual fragility. Here we see Newman opposed to the central irreligious current of the nineteenth century, which was so strongly in conflict with its religious revival. It is a joy to hear Newman’s characteristic voice speaking through such a mass of adroitly chosen quotations and contextual material from a wide range of writings by other great Victorians, in a work which is easily and agreeably written and a pleasure to read. Some readers may be deterred by its strongly apologetic Roman Catholic tone, which is dismissive of Anglicanism, repudiates whole and entire the recent work on Newman by the late Frank Turner (who did at least call attention to the important element in Newman of anti-Evangelicalism), calls Peter B. Nockles’s great book The Oxford Movement in Context (1994) “slippery,” and more mysteriously names Owen Chadwick a Puseyite, not a word which I thought was still in use (20). There is the occasional slip, like the delightful “Green Chartreuse” for the “Grande Chartreuse” of Matthew Arnold’s poem (353). A great deal has been written about Newman, and the author is [End Page 158] not exhaustive in his reading, but there is much here to value in this sympathetic and enlightening account of Newman and his world. Sheridan Gilley Durham University Sheridan Gilley Sheridan Gilley (sheridan.gilley@talktalk.net) is Emeritus Reader in Theology at Durham University. He was President in 2010 of the Ecclesiastical History Society, and his introduction and Presidential Address have just appeared in The Church and Literature (Studies in Church History, Volume 48). Copyright © 2013 The Trustees of Indiana University