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. He was well tuned in to the Victorian cultural landscape.
Punch was the most popular satirical periodical of the time. Newman was often the target of its sharp, anti-Catholic barbs. He needed to keep an eye on it. His reading of the magazine is documented in his letters and diaries. He frequently commented on its contents, especially when they touched on the Oxford Movement or matters concerning English Catholicism or the Pope. His dry, ironic sense of humour disposed him to the magazine’s wit even when it was directed against his own cause. In Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), he explicitly references the popular prejudices fuelled by Punch. There was usually a copy to be found at the Birmingham Oratory. He respected the literary calibre of the writers associated with the magazine, even if he disagreed with their ecclesiastical leanings.
Newman was also a reader of the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), a major contributor to Punch. He enjoyed Thackeray’s novels as the work of a mildly cynical but tender-hearted satirist. For him Thackeray was the great novelist of his age, greater even than Charles Dickens. He relished Thackeray’s subtle irony and his sharp observation of human vanity, in preference to Dickens’ more theatrical sentimentality. He saw in Thackeray’s writing a profound sympathy with the sadness of things and the complexities of the human heart. He was so moved by the ending of The Newcomes (1854), a sprawling critique of social snobbery, the marriage market and the corrosive effects of money, that he wept.
For his part, Thackeray, notwithstanding his secular and sceptical social outlook, held Newman in high esteem as a master of English prose. In his estimation Newman was one of the few contemporary writers whose style was consistent in clarity, urbanity, and lack of fuss. Stylistically both valued accuracy over ornament. They were both masters of irony. Newman employs irony, for example, to dismantle Protestant prejudices in Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. In Vanity Fair (1847) and The Book of Snobs series (1848) Thackeray applies irony to dismantle the social pretensions of the English middle class. Both targeted Victorian earnestness, hypocrisy and dehumanising social distinctions. Both mocked the Victorian cult of progress, materialism and social climbing. When Thackeray died in 1863, Newman mourned the occasion, marking Thackeray as a writer who, in the mode of satirical realism, promoted social values compatible with those he found in the teachings of the Catholic Church.
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