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Newman the Novel Reader
John Henry Newman was a voracious, lifelong reader of fiction. He used novels as a way to “unbend” his mind. Beyond the English giants, Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackery, his reading habits were eclectic, ranging from contemporary bestsellers to European and American classics. In The Idea of a University (1854), Newman…
Newman & George Eliot
On the surface, John Henry Newman (1801-1890), the Catholic Cardinal, and George Eliot (1819-1880), the agnostic novelist Mary Anne Evans, might be thought to share little in common: Newman the towering figure of nineteenth-century religious orthodoxy, Eliot a leading intellectual voice of secular realism. Yet there is an intellectual kinship despite their religious divide. Eliot,…
Newman & Satire
John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was a regular reader of Punch magazine. A savvy media consumer, he read Punch to stay up to date, laugh at the Victorian zeitgeist, and understand the caricatures being drawn of his own character and religious beliefs. Punch was a source of amusement and information. By reading it Newman was well…
Newman, Ruskin & the Imagination
John Henry Newman (1801–1890) and John Ruskin (1819–1900) were two of the most influential thinkers of the Victorian era, but they occupied very different spiritual and intellectual spaces. They shared a deep concern for the culture of England and the role of the imagination in philosophical inquiry, but their direct interactions were limited by a…
Newman, Robert Hunt and the relation of Poetry to Science
Robert Hunt (1807–1887) was a polymath of the Victorian era. A philosopher of science, he was also a pioneer in photography, a geologist, and a statistician. He bridged the gap between the Romantic era of nature mysticism and the systematic science of the late nineteenth century. Hunt was a devotee of the Romantic poets, particularly…
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