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 summarised his philosophy of literature. He corrected those who wanted to purge the subject of sin from novels. If you want a literature about mankind, it must be a literature of mankind’s fallen nature. An author’s style was inseparable from his or her character. A grand style was not just fancy words, but the result of a grand soul examining complex ideas. Newman’s evaluation of novels was not about art as art, Rather, he approached fiction through the lens of psychological realism and moral philosophy. A great novel should be a faithful record of human behaviour. Authors should be judged on how accurately they captured the human condition and the workings of conscience.
Newman and Sir Walter Scott together explored the intellectual and emotional roots of nineteenth-century Britain. Newman had a lifelong devotion to Scott’s novels. One a titan of the pulpit, the other a titan of the printing press, they shared a theological chemistry. On his deathbed Newman asked to have Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) read to him. To Newman, Scott was a writer of high moral tone and conservative instinct. As the leader of the Oxford Movement through the 1830s, Newman credited Scott with preparing the ground for the Catholic Revival in England. Scott was both novelist and precursor to a spiritual awakening. His historical romances broke the ice of the eighteenth century by reviving an interest in the medieval past: his vivid depictions of the Middle Ages moved the public back towards a world of ritual, chivalry and tradition. His stories embrace the “unseen world” and the grandeur of history; they match Newman’s desire to return British religion back to its ancient roots of religious symbolism. Scott made the old ways fashionable again, assisting Newman to explain that truth could be found more richly in antiquity than in modern innovation.
But for Newman they were only a pathway. Scott’s works were a shadow of finding the truth that led to the assent of faith. They were fiction, not dogma. Scott painted the cathedral that Newman wanted to live inside without a clear explanation as to why the cathedral was there. Waverley (1814) and Ivanhoe (1819) needed his Apologia. The quest to romanticise and preserve history as a source of national identity and charm was a step, but only a step, towards the recovery and definition of religious truth and the vital root of spiritual authority.
Newman was a devoted admirer of Jane Austen’s work. Born in 1775, he was a teenager when she died in 1817. He admired her simple elegance of style and her ability to capture the nuances of English upper crust society. Her books were a “treat” that created vivid interest out of “commonplace” life. Emma was his favourite among her novels. He savoured the novel’s ironic and comic comment on the snobberies and manners of polite society and the tracing of moral growth in Emma Woodhouse with technical precision. “What a wonderful thing is that Jane Austen’s Emma! Everything is so natural, so true, and yet so full of interest.” Austen did not need sensational plots (murders, ghosts, scandals) to hold a reader. Her ability to find moral depth in a drawing-room conversation was to Newman a form of high intellectual discipline.
The industry of the Victorian novel gave scope to Newman’s critical eye. He loved Dickens as a master of the grotesque and the caricature. He recognized that Dickens’ characters were not necessarily real people but were powerful symbols of social moralities. He preferred the earlier, more humorous Dickens to the later, darker, and more socially polemical novels like Bleak House. As a reader of the satirical magazine Punch, Newman had a more complicated response to the author of Vanity Fair. He found Thackeray’s world-weary cynicism at once arresting and disturbing. While he enjoyed Thackeray’s ability to see through social hypocrisy, Thackeray’s scepticism allowed nothing of the comic redemptive element found in Dickens. While after reading The Newcomes, Newman was moved to tears, he remained wary of Thackeray’s mocking of the very institutions Newman held sacred. He was moved by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Struck by the moral struggles of the characters, which resonated with his own interests in conscience and duty, he described it as a remarkable book, though somewhat unpleasant in its intensity. Newman and George Eliot represent the two poles of the Victorian mind: Newman embraced the Christian faith of the Catholic tradition where Eliot embraced a position of secular humanism. He was impressed by her intellectual power and her portrayal of clerical life in Scenes of Clerical Life (1855) and Adam Bede (1859). He recognized in her a profound religious sense that had somehow gone astray, making her novels, to him, beautiful but tragic documents of a soul without a home. To him it was a pity that such a mind should not be a believer.
Other minor writers did not go unnoticed. Newman enjoyed what we might call “light lit” today. Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne or The Earl’s Daughter (1861), a massive sensation novel of the era involving scandal and secret identities, was a Victorian-era bestseller, remembered chiefly for its elaborate and implausible plot centring on infidelity and double identities. Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860), an early example of detective fiction. The use of multiple narrators, including nearly all the principal characters draws on Collins’s legal training. The story is told by more than one character as an offence against the law is told in a court by more than one witness. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham, published in 1828, when Newman was twenty-seven years old, a decade before Queen Victoria’s accession, brought its writer lasting public acclaim and established his reputation as a wit and dandy. Its intricate plot and humorous, intimate portrayal of pre-Victorian dandyism kept gossips busy trying to associate public figures with characters in the book. Pelham resembled Benjamin Disraeli’s first novel Vivian Grey (1827).
When it comes to Benjamin Disraeli, Newman’s critique is sharp and personal. Newman and Benjamin Disraeli were childhood playmates. Around 1810 they played together in the garden of Bloomsbury Square. Their adult relationship, however, was distant and characterised by mutual political and religious suspicion. Disraeli owned and read Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua. His library at Hughenden contained several of Newman’s works, indicating that the interest was more significant on Disraeli’s side than on Newman’s, as he uses contemporary religious figures as thinly veiled inspirations for characters in his silver-fork and political novels. Newman’s reading of Disraeli’s novels was framed by his disapproval of Disraeli’s politics and personality. He was pleased when Disraeli’s government was defeated in the election of 1880. Disraeli’s novels, especially his Young England trilogy (Coningsby, Sybil, Tancred), were written as political manifestos. His use of fiction to push Tory Democracy was to Newman clever but fundamentally insincere. Disraeli’s novels felt like a mask or a performance. His depictions of the Church were purely decorative, a useful tool for national unity.
Lothair (1870) is the most significant point of literary contact. The novel is a satire about a young nobleman being pulled between the Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and secret revolutionary societies. Cardinal Grandison, many believed, was a caricature of either Newman himself or the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Manning. Disraeli wrote Lothair as an anti-Catholic novel intended to shore up his Protestant political support. Newman saw the book as a vile attempt to stir up anti-Catholic sentiment for political gain, using religious tensions as plot points for a silver-fork romance. To Newman Disraeli’s literary and political manoeuvres were bogus theatrics, flashy and hollow, his style gaudy and unreal. Disraeli’s characters were more like mannequins draped in expensive ideas than living, breathing humans with consciences.
By contrast, Newman read Anthony Trollope with great interest and enjoyment, particularly for his depictions of the life and times of Church of England clergy. He was especially entertained by the Barchester Chronicles (1855). Having lived through the Oxford Movement, Newman found Trollope’s portrayal of clerical politics with its High Church and Low Church dynamics familiar and amusing. Trollope wrote about the very thing Newman had abandoned, the inner workings, social politics, and comfortable livings of the Anglican clergy. But unlike Newman, Trollope understood the Church of England not as a vehicle of divine mystery, but merely as a social institution of manners and behaviour. Cynical about the loaves and fishes, the salaries and status of the clergy, Newman saw it as an accurate depiction of the world he had left behind. He recognised the figures in Barchester, the ambitious Archdeacon Grantly, the weak Bishop Proudie, as types he had encountered personally during his time at Oxford. (Trollope, for his part, was somewhat intimidated by Newman’s intellect, observing that Newman’s prose style was so clear and persuasive that he could make a man believe anything.)
Newman noted, however, that while Trollope had written thousands of pages about priests and bishops, hardly at all had he mentioned religious doctrine or spiritual struggle. This was not a failure of the novelist, but a shrewd commentary on the state of the Victorian Church. He saw Trollope’s novels as evidence that the Church of England had become more a social glue than a spiritual force. Trollope’s characters were men of the world in surplices, he uexposed the business of life, money, inheritance, power. When Newman read The Warden, the story of Septimus Harding’s crisis of conscience over a Church salary, he identified with Harding’s predicament. Harding is a man caught between his private conscience and public duty, a theme that was the beat of Newman’s own life.
Newman’s interest in American literature was surprisingly robust for a man so deeply rooted in the European tradition. He viewed American novelists as writers who were grappling with a new world that lacked the historical drag of England, which he found both liberating and troubling. He read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) when it became a global sensation. The story depicts the harsh conditions experienced by enslaved African Americans at the end of the eighteenth century. Like many nineteenth-century readers, he was moved by its emotional weight, though he criticised the way in which it handled religious sentiment. Newman generally distrusted literature that used raw emotion to avoid intellectual analysis. Stowe’s Methodism, though he admitted the book was a wonderful achievement in terms of its impact, lacked the element of emotional distance that convincing verisimilitude requires. He read James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which included The Last of the Mohicans (1826), a historical romance set during the French-Indian War of 1757, focusing on frontier adventure, Native American characters, and their struggle for survival. He saw Cooper’s characters as natural men who, despite lacking a formal religious system, possessed a rudimentary “natural religion” that Newman found impressive from a philosophical standpoint. Of all the Americans, Nathaniel Hawthorne resonated most deeply with Newman. He read The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) with intense interest. These novels explore themes of sin, guilt, and societal judgment in Puritan Massachusetts. Newman thought Hawthorne understood the psychological reality of the Fall of Man better than many English writers, employing symbolism and romance to get at spiritual truths. Hawthorne was not simply telling stories; he was performing a psychological autopsy on the human conscience. Newman was an old man when Henry James rose to prominence, but he was aware of James’s early work. James visited Newman in Birmingham in 1877. The master of the interior monologue found Newman to be a compelling figure. Newman found James’ “American abroad” theme interesting as a study of how different cultures approach moral dilemmas. He could see that English society was from the American point of view stale and smug. American writers could treat the plain human spirit without layers of English class and social convention. There was a certain boldness in the American mind, unafraid to look at the dark corners of the heart. He saw the New England Puritan legacy, in Hawthorne especially, to be a serious, if incomplete, search for God.
Newman’s relationship with French literature was a classic love-hate affair. He was a master of the French language and admired the clarity and precision of French prose. But as a Catholic priest and an English Victorian, he was horrified by what he saw as the immorality and godlessness of the nineteenth-century French novel. While English literature was Protestant, modern French literature was Atheist. Newman read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) shortly after it was published. He acknowledged Hugo’s genius but was unsettled by his politics and his sentimental view of crime and sin. Hugo made saints out of social outcasts in a way that dispensed with conscience and the moral need for repentance. Newman found Honore Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine (1825-1848) obsessed with money, greed, and social manoeuvring, to be wearisome and sordid. Balzac showed a society where the only glue was self-interest. Balzac was a brilliant observer of a decaying civilization. If there was one French writer who influenced Newman’s spirituality, it was Francois-Renee de Chateaubriand, the author of Atala (1801) and The Genius of Christianity (1802). Chateaubriand was a kindred spirit. He admired his use of beauty and emotion to defend the Catholic faith against the dry rationalism of the Enlightenment. Chateaubriand’s romanticised, aesthetic defence of Catholicism provided a template that Newman would later refine with his own more intellectual approach. By the time the Naturalism of Emile Zola and the Realism of Gustave Flaubert were dominating France, Newman was an elderly Cardinal. He was generally appalled by the “Naturalist” school. Writers like Zola, by focusing purely on the animal and material aspects of human life, were telling a lie about human nature. Newman’s critique of secular literature in The Idea of a University was largely a response to the trend of French realism: if you study man without God, you are not studying man as he truly is, only a mutilated version of him. The French had a lucidness that the English lacked, but this clarity was too often used to describe wickedness with terrifying effectiveness. French novelists were more logical than the English. An Englishman might be a confused Christian, but a Frenchman would be a consistent infidel. For Newman the French mind is a clear-seeing mind but it sees the earth so clearly that it often forgets to look at the sky.
But if the French repelled, the Italians appealed. Newman revered the Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni. The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi) (1825-1827) he considered one of the greatest novels ever written. Its blend of historical realism, Catholic piety and moral depth made it a personal favourite. Though Manzoni was Italian, he was deeply influenced by French literature and the French language. The Betrothed was written in the French historical romance style. Newman held it up as the ideal novel. It had the realism of Balzac, the historical sweep of Scott, and the moral clarity that Hugo lacked. It was the Catholic novel Newman wished a Frenchman would write.
A rising star in Newman’s old age was Thomas Hardy, but instead of Newman reading Hardy, Hardy read Newman. In Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), he refers to Newman’s famous hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light.” In Jude the Obscure (1895), Hardy sets the story in Christminster, a fictionalised Oxford, where he mentions the haunting presence of Oxford figures like Newman and John Keble. Hardy’s novels explore themes of faith, doubt, and the transition from traditional religious views to modern thought They led Hardy toward agnosticism. While Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) or The Return of the Native (1878) would have been available to the elderly Cardinal, there is no mention of them in his Letters and Diaries. Hardy’s increasingly bleak naturalism would excuse Newman’s avoiding him in his twilight years.
Newman’s reading habits reveal a man who was far less an unworldly cleric than his public image suggested. He understood that in order to serve the world as priest and intellectual he had to understand it. The novel was the best laboratory for the acquisition of that understanding. His open-mindedness was grounded in a few specific, almost modern, principles. You cannot have a Christian Literature that only depicts good people. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man. He was eclectic because every novelist, from sensational writers like Mrs Henry Wood to the grim realists like Nathaniel Hawthorne, was providing a point of view regarding human nature. Intelligent readers of novels read not to be edified but to be informed.
Newman was one of the first major religious figures to speak openly about the psychological need for recreation. He called reading novels “unbending the bow.” His bookshelves at the Birmingham Oratory are a reflection of his eclectic mind. To read fiction was not a guilty pleasure but a necessary mental reset. He could enjoy low-brow mystery novels and high-brow social satires with equal enthusiasm and intelligence. In literary critical terms, his most open-minded trait was that he preferred a talented and skilled unbeliever to a mediocre believer. He would rather read the atheist Victor Hugo or the sceptic Thackeray, because they were masters of their craft, than read a poorly-written pious story. Beauty and technical excellence were themselves a form of truth.
Newman was generally a sympathetic reader. He looked for the religious sense in authors, such as George Eliot, who had abandoned formal faith. He read her not to condemn her; he read her to mourn the loss of her faith and to admire the residue of Christian morality that remained in her work. He was a man who lived in the world of ideas but never forgot that those ideas were ultimately about people. His love of the novel was his way of keeping his finger on the pulse of the human heart.
Reading Hour 