The Life of Richard Waldo Sibthorp: Evangelical, Catholic and Ritual Revivalism in the Nineteenth-Century Church by Michael Trott (review)

Abstract

159 Reviews openly exposing the inconsistencies of the Anglo-Catholic position. One by one the Littlemore residents left the experiment or fled to Rome. As Turner notes, his investigation of Newman’s actual road to conversion, rather than the cleaned-up version we put forward as a heroic intellectual narrative, places Newman, surprisingly, among the destroyers of the English Protestant culture. Despite himself, Newman paved the way for larger cultural changes.Although he claimed loyalty to ancient custom as his guide, Newman actually used these pretensions to create the church he liked. Turner writes, “Through that cultural as well as religious apostasy, Newman emerged as the first great, and perhaps the most enduring,Victorian skeptic” (649).Turner’s stunning explosion of the textual untruths in the Apologia and its role in forming a Newman who never really existed are crucial to any subsequent investigation ofVictorian faith. Ja m es Naja r ia n Boston College • The Life of Richard Waldo Sibthorp: Evangelical,Catholic and Ritual Revivalism in the Nineteenth-Century Church by MichaelTrott; pp. xii + 250. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. $67.50. In 1811, at the age of nineteen, Richard Sibthorp ran away from Oxford to become a Catholic and was dragged back, “a prisoner” (in his own words), by his indignant family, only a few hours before he would have made his formal conversion (Sibthorp, qu. Trott 12). Four years later, apparently inspired by Wesleyan Methodism, Sibthorp was to become a fervent evangelical Low Church preacher; in 1833 Samuel Wilberforce converted him to High Church principles; by 1839–40, by introducing elaborate choral worship and High Church decoration into his parish church of St. James’s on the Isle of Wight, Sibthorp was provoking “a national scandal”(94);and in 1841,at considerable personal sacrifice,he became a Roman Catholic.Two years later he rejected the Roman Church as Antichrist and returned to the Church of England, where he was welcomed coldly.Almost immediately Sibthorp was wondering whether he had made the right decision, and for twenty years he wavered between Catholicism —“all her beauties, which are many … will not compensate for spiritual adultery”—and the Church of England:“a most cold,repulsive,unamiable,but chaste old maid, or rather wife,” wrote Sibthorp (qu. 148, 159). In 1864–65 he decided that he had never ceased to be a Roman Catholic priest and settled down as a Catholic while stoutly defending the Church of England, campaigning for Anglican candidates at School Board elections and publicly affirming that the Anglican church contained “a magnificent mass of truth” (qu. 182). victorian review • Volume 33 Number 1 160 In Michael Trott’s detailed and excellent study, we find how the career of one impressionable, impetuous man can illuminate the many forces at work within the Anglican and Catholic Churches through much of the nineteenth century, from the missionary work of the Tract Society in Europe (63–68) to the millennial atmosphere of the 1820s and 1840s (48–52, 145–46). The infighting in the Church of England is sharply highlighted. We find that in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, for High Church bishops in Lincoln, the Bible Society and the Church Missionary Society were subversive forces to be resisted at all costs (23, 43); we hear of theApocryphal Controversy which tore apart the Bible Society in 1821–31 (56–60); we hear of anxieties in 1829 as to whether the Conventicle Act permitted evangelical university students to pray together in their rooms or at meetings for Bible study (72–73, 211 n. 147).We also learn much ofWiseman’s conversion techniques and exploitation of notable converts (103, 132–35) and find how the growth of Catholic Mariolatry shocked the newly Catholic Sibthorp and drove him for decades from the Church of Rome (136, 145–48). Anglican and Catholic reactions to Sibthorp’s tergiversations of 1841 and 1843 are also explored in full. At Sibthorp’s conversion to Rome, for instance, John Henry Newman expressed himself“disgusted” (129); Newman’s own conversion was to come four years later.The clergy at Hull reproached Sibthorp for sinking “into the arms of the enchantress” (qu. 105); and, while convincedAnglicans who...