These two Victorian giants who, despite moving in different social and intellectual circles, shared a profound concern for the “soul” of England during the Industrial Revolution.
Newman (1801-1890) and Dickens (1812-1870) represent two responses to the onset of the Machine Age. Dickens fought the machine with sentiment and satire; Newman fought it with theology and philosophy. Theirs was a shared suspicion of conclusions drawn only from cold logic. From their different points of view they deplored Benthamite utilitarianism, the idea that society should be governed purely by “usefulness” and “the greatest good for the greatest number”. Dickens satirized this in Hard Times (1854) through the character of Thomas Gradgrind, who demands “facts, facts, facts” and views children as “little vessels” to be filled with data. He defines his educational philosophy by stripping away everything but the measurable.
Newman attacked this mindset in The Idea of a University (1852) in his proposition that education should not simply inculcate useful skills for the job market but should cultivate the mind and a “philosophical habit.” Education without imagination leads to moral death and emotional stuntedness. Education without liberal knowledge leads to a narrow, uncultivated mind that cannot see the whole of truth.
In Hard Times the pupils in Gradgrind’s school are “little vessels… ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim”. A star pupil, Bitzer, defines a horse as a “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth…” while Sissy Jupe, who lives with horses, is shamed for her lack of “scientific” definition. Newman would have seen Bitzer as the ultimate failure of education. Information is not knowledge: piling up facts (what Newman called “loading the memory”) is not the same as shaping a curious and sensitive mind. An educated person should be able to view any subject in its place within the world. Bitzer knew the parts of a horse but had no concept of its nature, beauty or essence.
Newman was an enthusiastic reader of Dickens. His humour and characters were a relief from ecclesiastical and theological labours, and they were an insight into the variety of human character. He recognised that Dickens’ works captured a “Christian spirit” of kindness and charity while picturing also the human capacity for their opposites and even for naked evil. For his part Dickens, though religious dogma had little if any appeal for him, was impressed and moved by Newman’s poem ‘The Dream of Gerontius’. Several of Dickens’ friends and distant family drifted toward Newman’s Oxford Movement activities as they sought a more aesthetic or authentic spiritual life to match the emotional power that could be found in Dickens’ novels.
While Newman’s cast of mind leaned to the intellect, the capacity for refined, disciplined thought in order to penetrate social and spiritual problems, he was also, like Dickens, a man of the heart. The tears of love and pathos as evoked in Dickens’ storytelling, were not absent from Newman’s emotional range. While a good novel could not save a soul, it could certainly move the heart, as evinced in his choice of the motto cor ad cor loquitur when he was made a cardinal.
In The Idea of a University, Newman makes a stinging observation: literature can make a man appear virtuous without making him be virtuous. Reading a moving story (like those by Dickens) could easily become a substitute for real moral action.
Literature can offer a “spurious” or “counterfeit” religion. You can weep over a character’s poverty in a Dickens novel in a spirit of empathy, but if you do not stir yourself to help the poor, a book can damage your conscience by providing the feeling of virtue without the work of it.
In a passage in The Idea of a University, Newman explains that a “Gentleman” is commonly thought of as someone who “never inflicts pain”, someone educated, polished, courteous, but also a person who can be vain, selfish, insincere, for social ease agreeable to whatever is being said. Pip, in Great Expectations, has some of these qualities. But Newman explains that being a gentleman is not the same as being a Christian, nor is it about the mere avoidance of giving pain. A gentleman of society can be refined in manners, but a Christian is refined by courteous frankness and sincerity, free of the restriction to avoid giving pain if truth requires the giving of it. For Dickens, being a gentleman was about heart-felt sincerity, so Joe Gargery is his true, natural gentleman, not a cultivated one like Pip.
For Newman, Dickens’ gentle kindness is beautiful but incomplete. It lacks the structural first principles of religious faith and discipline. The pursuit of personal virtue is an intrinsic element of Christian faith. The disciplines of examination of conscience, penance and confession of sins are the structure offered in Catholic doctrine for the pursuit of virtue. For Newman that was a part of daily life. Dickens’ characters do not occupy this world.
Dickens was a man of his time, he lived in an era of “No Popery” riots and deep-seated English suspicion of the Roman Church and of the Pope as a foreign power. In Barnaby Rudge (1841) Dickens depicts the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780. While he condemns the mob’s violence, he portrays Catholicism as something foreign and strange. It belongs with the dark, dusty corners of the past, rather than the bright, if smoky, future of England. Later in life, however, Dickens’ view softened, mainly after his travels in Italy, recorded in Pictures from Italy (1846). He was by then able to distinguish between the system of the Roman Church and its Ultramontane authority (which offended him) and the lively charity of its people. He was particularly impressed by the work of Catholic nuns in hospitals.
Dickens’ biographer, John Foster (1812-1876), records that while in Italy, prompted by a picture of the Virgin Mary hanging in his hotel room, he had a recurring dream of a lady in a blue spirit-form. John Forster was a heavyweight of Victorian literary circles, Dickens’ best friend and official biographer. Newman and Forster moved to some extent in the intellectual orbits in London. As an influential critic and editor, Forster was well aware of Newman as a master of English prose, respected by the literary establishment even after his conversion to Catholicism. They exchanged occasional correspondence regarding literary matters or mutual acquaintances.
Another of Dickens’ biographers, Percy Fitzgerald (1830-1925), a prolific writer of exceptional longevity, was a close friend and protégé of Dickens as a regular contributor to Dickens’ magazine All the Year Round. He was also a devoted friend and admirer of Newman’s. He wrote a major work titled Fifty Years of Catholic Life and Social Progress under Cardinals Wiseman, Manning, Vaughan and Newman, with an account of the various personages, events and movements during the era (1901) in which Newman features prominently. He frequently visited Newman at the Birmingham Oratory. Close to both men, Fitzgerald served as a living link between their circles. A Catholic, Newman regarded him as a spiritual son. He recorded Newman’s admiration for Dickens’ work. The Pickwick Papers, in which in May 1827 four members of the Pickwick Club in London establish a travelling society journey about England and make reports on their travels, was a favourite.
From their different points of view, then, Newman and Dickens fought the social, intellectual and spiritual asphyxiations brought on by the factory smoke of Victorian England.
Reading Hour 