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, who had abandoned her evangelical faith for rationalism, nevertheless found Newman’s account of his religious conversion of profound interest. She said of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua that it had a “breathtaking” quality, replete with psychological depth and commitment to the following of conscience.
When Newman published the Apologia in 1864, it was a cultural sensation. Moved by its sincerity, Eliot recognized in its writer a man who took the problem of belief seriously. Both of them were writers concerned with the “inward life”, Newman in his sermons and spiritual writings and Eliot in her focus on human sympathy and moral complexity. For Eliot, Newman represented the highest form of religious feeling, one based not on blind acceptance of dogma but on a rigorous, personal search for truth. She respected Newman because “he is a man who has lived a life of thought”.
References to Newman are found in George Eliot’s private letters and journals. They reveal her diligent reading of Newman. In a letter Eliot wrote to her friend Sara Hennell on July 13, 1864, just as she had finished reading the Apologia, she confides “I have been reading Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua with such absorbing interest that I found it impossible to forsake the book until I had finished it… it mainly affects me as the revelation of a life – how different in form from one’s own, yet with how close a fellowship in its needs and burthens – I mean spiritual needs and burthens.”
Newman’s references to Eliot are more indirect but ascertain that he was a reader of her fiction. Eliot’s works were frequently discussed in the intellectual circles he influenced. He encouraged his students at the Oratory School to read good novels.
He is recorded as having read Middlemarch (1871) and Adam Bede (1859). While he wrote no formal critique of her, he was braced by her realism and her ability to portray matters concerning the human soul.
Eliot’s character Isaac Casaubon in Middlemarch bears some resemblance to Newman. They share certain qualities, the ascetic, intellectual scholar immersed in the deep history of the Church, but the comparison serves only to highlight the dramatic gap between successful discovery of faith and failed scholarship. Newman was not like Casaubon, a nineteenth-century image of the “pale scholar”. Newman was the brilliant academic at Oxford, deeply invested in patristics and the continuity of Christian doctrine, who inspired many friends and a whole religious movement. Casaubon, by contrast, is the man whose entire life is consumed by the book he wants to write, The Key to all Mythologies, a massive, pedantic attempt to systematize religious history. The link between them is their preoccupation with tradition and origins. Newman looked back to the early Church to find a solid foundation for modern faith, eventually leading him to convert to Catholicism because there he found the authentic historical thread. Casaubon, while looking for a single, unifying source of truth, wants to prove that all global myths are corruptions of a tradition originally revealed.
Ultimately any comparison between Newman and Casaubon breaks down into an ironic contrast between virility and sterility. Newman’s goal is to find a living truth that guides the soul; Casaubon’s goal is to finish a book that organises dead facts. Newman’s legacy is his Apologia; Casaubon’s legacy is a pile of disorganised notebooks. Newman is a man with many friends and followers. Casaubon is utterly isolated, even from his wife Dorothea. Newman engaged with the scientific philosophy of his day. Casaubon is ignorant of modern German scholarship. Casaubon is what happens when you take Newman’s scholarly rigour and historical focus but remove human relationships and intellectual flexibility. While Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) traced a dynamic, evolving understanding of tradition, Casaubon’s intended Key to All Mythologies is a tomb. He stayed in the library so long that he forgot that the world, and his wife, existed.
Newman found Middlemarch to be less attractive than Eliot’s earlier novels. He struggled to get through Middlemarch. In a letter to a friend, he admitted that he found it “tedious” and difficult to finish. The density of the provincial detail exhausted him. Eliot’s “religion of humanity”, her secularized morality, was to him somewhat hollow, because it was separated from a living faith in a living God; for Eliot, moral sense was all about human sympathy. To Newman Middlemarch lacked a “heart” or a clear spiritual centre, despite its narrative brilliance. His reaction to another later novel, Daniel Deronda (1876) was more sympathetic. Indeed, he described Daniel Deronda as “a wonderful book”, despite being critical of its being awkwardly structured around the character of Gwendoline Harlech as English and Daniel as Jewish. He was moved by the character of Daniel as a man who had undergone a massive, socially difficult religious conversion in a quest for identity and the idea of a national religious calling.
Middlemarch is George Eliot’s complex, intellectual autopsy of a modern society. Newman preferred her earlier novels. Adam Bede (1859) was a simpler story of clerical life. It was her first full-length novel and the one that made her literary name. For Newman the book succeeded because it felt authentic in its depiction of English rural life and the spiritual struggles of the working class. Set in the fictional community of Hayslope around 1799, the novel follows a classic four-tier tragedy: Adam Bede, the virtuous, hardworking carpenter (modelled partly on Eliot’s own father); Hetty Sorrel, the beautiful but shallow dairymaid whom Adam loves; Arthur Donnithorne, the local squire’s grandson who seduces Hetty, leading to disaster; and Dinah Morris, a Methodist lay-preacher of exemplary moral purity. The plot hinges on Hetty’s pregnancy and her subsequent trial for child-murder, a dark turn that shatters the idyllic pastoral setting. The novel does not shy away from an exploration of the “bitter fruit” of sin. Arthur Donnithorne is not a villain, but his callow vanity causes irreparable harm to Hetty’s life, pointing up a theme of the gravity of individual moral responsibility. Newman admired the earnestness of Dinah Morris. In the nineteenth century, Methodism was often mocked in literature as dull and earnest, but Eliot treats Dinah’s faith with immense dignity. And he enjoyed the character of Mr Irwine, the old-fashioned Anglican rector who is more interested in his parishioners’ well-being than in strict dogma.
In Chapter 17 of Adam Bede Eliot pauses the story to explain her philosophy of realism. Art should not merely depict heroic or perfect people, but the common and coarse people too.
I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath.
For Newman Eliot’s later works are “tedious” because they became too heavy with a Casaubon-style intellectualism, Adam Bede remained a favourite because it captured a “living” faith in a recognizable English landscape. The book has a soft ending. While Hetty is spared the gallows, she is transported to a penal colony, and Adam eventually finds a quiet, stable happiness with Dinah. Some critics (and possibly Newman) felt this was a bit too neat a conclusion, but it cemented Eliot’s reputation as a moral voice of her generation.
If Adam Bede was the book that made Eliot a star, Silas Marner (1861) is the one that cemented her reputation as a master of the moral fable. It is a much shorter, tighter novel, almost a fairy tale in its structure. It deals with themes that would have been poignant to someone like Newman: exile, the loss of faith, and the possibility of spiritual rebirth. The novel follows a linen-weaver who is framed for a crime by his religious community. When Silas is found guilty, despite his innocence, his faith in God and man shatters. He moves to the village of Raveloe and becomes a recluse. For fifteen years, Silas replaces God with gold. He works obsessively, not for what money can buy, but for the sight of the coins themselves. He becomes a miser, which in Eliot’s terms is a form of spiritual death, a narrowing of the soul to a single, cold object. The turning point in the story is one of the most famous images in Victorian literature. Silas’s gold is stolen, leaving him in despair, but shortly after, a golden-haired toddler, Eppie, wanders into his cottage. In the firelight, Silas initially mistakes her hair for his returned gold. The “hard” gold, which is sterile and dead, is replaced by the “living” gold of the child. By caring for Eppie, Silas is recalled to his humanity and the human community. His heart re-awakens.
Silas Marner captures Newman’s own interest in the Illative Sense, the idea that we come to believe things not through logic alone, but through a combination of experience, feeling, and personal history. Silas does not find his way back to faith through a theological argument. He finds it through the kindness of his neighbour, Dolly Winthrop, and the simple duty of raising a child. Newman, who was for many years an exile from Oxford and from his friends in the Church of England after his conversion, understood the pain of being cast out by the community he once loved. He understood Eliot’s insight that a person’s faith is often tied to their sense of belonging. Newman preferred Eliot’s earlier works because they felt more providential. Where Middlemarch can feel cynical or bleak, Silas Marner suggests a world that has a way of balancing the scales, that love can actually heal the damage done by injustice and a loss of faith. Silas Marner is the Newmanesque character who actually finds his way home, back to his community of faith.
They were not friends, but Newman and George Eliot moved in the same elite intellectual orbit of Victorian England. Eliot was a friend of the Cardinal’s brother, Francis William Newman (1805-1897), a professor of Latin and a fellow religious sceptic. Eliot referred to Francis as “our blessed St. Francis” because of his intelligent gentle nature. Mark Pattison (1813-1884), the Rector of Lincoln College Oxford, who had been a former disciple of Newman’s at Oxford during the 1830s and who later identified with the liberal humanistic thinking of George Eliot, became her close friend. Pattison, like Maggie Tulliver of The Mill on the Floss, Dorothea of Middlemarch and George Eliot herself struggled with the clash of traditional ways of religious thinking with individual conscience. So too did Newman. These two powerful minds of the Victorian era grappled with how to live a meaningful life in a world that was rapidly changing.
Reading Hour 