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 recognised 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. In a letter Eliot wrote to her friend Sara Hennell on 13 July 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 less direct but nevertheless 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. In addition to Scenes from Clerical Life (1857), he is recorded as having read Adam Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1871). He was braced by her realism and her ability to portray matters concerning the human soul.
Scenes of Clerical Life represents a pivotal moment in literary history. It was the debut work of Mary Ann Evans under her famous pen name, signalling the arrival of a voice that would eventually produce Middlemarch. The book is not a single novel but a collection of three novellas. While the title suggests a focus on the Church, the clerical element is a backdrop for exploring the raw, domestic, and often tragic lives of ordinary people in the fictionalized Midlands town of Milby.
The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton centres on an unremarkable man. Amos Barton is a curate with a large family, a small income, and very little social grace. He is well-meaning but tactless, often alienating his parishioners. The tragedy, however, rests on his wife, Amos’s angelic and long-suffering Milly. When the “Countess” Czerlaski (a woman of questionable reputation) moves into the Barton home, local gossip ruins Amos’ standing. Milly eventually dies from exhaustion and the strain of their poverty.
Eliot presents commonplace and unheroic people as deserving of deep sympathy. Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story, the second novella shifts back in time to provide a more romantic, albeit melancholy, narrative. It focuses on the elderly Maynard Gilfil, who was introduced in the first story. A young Gilfil falls in love with Caterina Sarti, an Italian orphan living in a nearby grand manor. Caterina, however, is in love with the heir of the estate, Captain Wybrow, who is merely toying with her. After Wybrow’s sudden death, Gilfil patiently nurses the broken-hearted Caterina back to health. They marry, but their happiness is brief as she dies shortly after in childbirth. The story explores the hidden history of a person’s heart, showing that an unattractive character might have a past defined by profound passion and loss.
Janet’s Repentance, the final story in the collection, deals with surprisingly modern themes of domestic abuse, alcoholism, and religious awakening. Janet Dempster is the wife of a wealthy but brutally abusive and alcoholic lawyer. To cope with her misery, Janet turns to drink herself. She meets Mr. Tryan, an Evangelical curate who is dying of consumption. Tryan provides the moral support Janet needs to leave her husband and find a path toward sobriety and faith. This story was controversial at the time for its realistic depiction of a gentlewoman struggling with alcohol.
Newman read Scenes of Clerical Life with intense interest. In 1858, shortly after the stories were published, by then a Catholic priest, Newman wrote to George Eliot’s publisher, John Blackwood, to express his admiration for the stories. At this stage, the public still believed George Eliot was a man, and probably a clergyman. Newman was particularly struck by the authenticity of the clerical world depicted in the book. In his letter, he wrote:
“I have read them with great interest; the author is a person of remarkable powers, and he has a knowledge of the human heart and a power of description which I have seldom seen equalled.”
He was so convinced by the George Eliot persona that he added some clerical speculation, remarking that while he could not be sure if the author was a clergyman, he was “certainly a man who has a very great knowledge of the clerical character.”
Eliot’s character Isaac Casaubon in Middlemarch (1871/2) bears some resemblance to Newman. They share certain qualities, the ascetic, intellectual scholar immersed in the 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 the study of 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 pedantic attempt to systematise religious history. The link between them is their preoccupation with tradition and its 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 of religious truth. Casaubon, while looking for a single, unifying source of truth, can prove only that all global myths are successive corruptions of a shifting tradition.
Ultimately any comparison of Newman with 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) traces a dynamic, evolving understanding of tradition, Casaubon’s intended Key to All Mythologies is a tomb. He studied 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 it. In a letter to a friend, he admitted that he found it “tedious” and difficult to finish. The density of the provincial detail discouraged him. Eliot’s “religion of humanity”, her secularised morality, was to him somewhat hollow, because it was separated from a living faith in a living God; for Eliot, moral sense was simply 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”, though critical of its being awkwardly structured around the characters of Gwendoline Harlech as English and Daniel as Jewish. Yet he was moved by the character of Daniel as a man who had undergone a socially difficult religious conversion in a quest for identity and the idea of a national religious calling.
An earlier novel, Adam Bede (1859) is a simple story of clerical life. It was Eliot’s 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 poised 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 judging their shortcomings
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 become 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 the moral voice of her generation.
If Adam Bede was the book that made Eliot a star, Silas Marner (1861) is the one that secured 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 framed by his religious community for a crime he did not commit. 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, in Eliot’s terms 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 that he explains in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), 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 himself 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 a sense of belonging to a particular place and particular people. Newman preferred Eliot’s earlier works because they felt more providential. Where Middlemarch felt austere, even 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 loss of faith. Silas Marner is the Newmanesque character who actually finds his way home, back to his community of faith.
They were not personal friends, but Newman and George Eliot moved in the same 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. Another link between the two was 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. He 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 around them.
Reading Hour 