Tractarians and the 'Condition of England': The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement

Abstract

Dr Simon Skinner's erudite study of the social and political doctrine of the Oxford Movement makes an arresting and highly significant difference to its subject, by redeeming its early champions, John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, from the misconception that they were simply reactionaries. Skinner draws primarily on two neglected sources for the ‘radical-reactionary discourse’ of these Tractarians (so-called from their Tracts for the Times, 1833-41). The first comprises the writings of contributors to the quarterly journal, the British Critic, during the period of the editorship of Newman and then of his brother-in-law Tom Mozley, between 1838 and 1843. The second is the once popular novels of two now forgotten clerics, William Gresley and Francis Paget. The Oxford Movement's ideal of the church-state union was summed up by Keble as ‘Incorporation’, in which the church corporation was the superior partner, a vision compatible with sharp criticism of the actual establishment. The principle that Christianity was chiefly desirable in order to protect a traditional social order—The rich man in his castle, /The poor man at his gate’—was to the Tractarians an inferior utilitarian argument for the Church, which ignored her supernatural claims and comforted the wealthy, who were targeted in uncounted sermons on the dangers of damnation for their riches. A properly Christian society would give the Church the power to protect the poor and weak, an ideal underlying the campaign against rented pews as offending the equality of rich and poor before God. The practical and populist dimensions of the pastoral theory and practice of the first generation of Tractarians were also reflected in their stress on simple direct preaching, daily services, the offertory and auricular confession, which they defended in terms of social inclusiveness as well as on sacerdotal, sacramental and incarnational principles. The Oxford Movement's anti-utilitarian romantic medievalism and its nostalgia for ‘merrie England’, shared with such illustrious nineteenth-century sages as Carlyle, Cobbett, Pugin and Disraeli (Skinner is careful to show this wider context), were founded in a profound anti-commercialism, anti-urbanism and anti-industrialism which looked back to monastic charity, championed recreation for the poor on Sundays and holy days, defended them against the denigration of liberal reformers, and opposed laissez-faire political economy and the cruelties of the new poor law.