John Henry Newman wrote two novels, Loss and Gain (1848) and Callista (1855). The earlier novel focuses on the intellectual friction within Anglicanism and the personal cost of conversion, the later shifts from contemporary Oxford to an epic historical setting, drawing parallels between early Christian history and Victorian religious tensions. Newman used both novels as creative vehicles to illustrate his theological ideas.
In The Idea of a University (1854), Newman summarised his philosophy of literature. A literature about humankind must be a literature that includes 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. Typical among Victorian readers, Newman read fiction in the expectation of finding moral delineation and psychological realism. A great novel was a faithful record of human behaviour in human predicaments. Thus, authors were judged on how accurately they captured the human condition and the workings of conscience.
Newman admired Jane Austen’s work. 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 created vivid interest out of “commonplace” life. Emma was his favourite among her novels. He enjoyed the novel’s ironic and comic comment on the snobberies and manners of polite society and the tracing of moral growth in Emma Woodhouse. 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 moral insight and intellectual discipline.
The industry of the Victorian novel gave plenty of scope to Newman’s critical eye. He enjoyed Dickens as a master of the grotesque and the caricature, whose characters were not necessarily real people but powerful symbols of social moralities. He preferred the earlier, more humorous Dickens to the later, darker, and more socially polemical novels like Bleak House (1853) As a reader of the satirical magazine Punch, Newman enjoyed Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) for its satirising of social hypocrisy. He was moved by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), struck by the moral struggles of the characters, which resonated with his own interests in conscience and duty. Newman and George Eliot represent the two poles of the Victorian mind: Christian faith and secular humanism: he was impressed by her intellectual power and her persuasive portrayal of clerical life in Scenes of Clerical Life (1855) and Adam Bede (1859).
Other writers were found on his bookshelves. 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 bestseller, remembered chiefly for its elaborate and implausible plot centring on infidelity and double identities. Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860), is 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, 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 ushered in Benjamin Disraeli’s first novel Vivian Grey (1827). Disraeli and Newman were childhood playmates in the garden of London’s Bloomsbury Square. Their adult relationship, however, was one of mutual political and religious suspicion. Disraeli owned and read Newman’s Apologia. Newman’s reading of Disraeli’s novels was inevitably framed by his disapproval of Disraeli’s personality and his politics. He was pleased when Disraeli’s government was defeated in the election of 1880. The novels, especially his Young England trilogy (Coningsby, Sybil, Tancred), written between 1844 and 1847, were political manifestos. His depictions of the Church of England were a useful tool for espousing national unity. Lothair (1870) is a significant point of literary contact between the two men. It is a satire about a young nobleman pulled between the Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and secret revolutionary societies. The machiavellian Cardinal Grandison is a caricature of 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 an attempt to stir up anti-Catholic sentiment for political gain. 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.
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.
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 alarmed 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 issues of conscience and the moral need for repentance. Honore Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine (1825-1848) was obsessed with money, greed, and social manoeuvring. Balzac depicts a society where the only glue is self-interest, a brilliant observation of a decaying civilization.
A French writer who could be said to have influenced Newman’s spirituality was Francois-Renee de Chateaubriand, the author of Atala (1801) and The Genius of Christianity (1802). Chateaubriand was a kindred spirit. Newman 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 repelled by the naturalist school. Writers like Zola, by focusing purely on the animal and material aspects of human life, were misrepresenting 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.
But where the French repelled, the Italians appealed. Newman revered the Italian novelist, Alessandro Manzoni. The Betrothed (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 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.
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. 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 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 Franco-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.
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.
There are two novelists whose works connect directly with Newman’s own interests as historian and churchman. They are Sir Walter Scott and Anthony Trollope. His devotion to Scott’s novels was lifelong. They explored the intellectual and emotional roots of nineteenth-century Britain. Newman and Scott shared an ecclesiological chemistry. On his deathbed Newman asked to have Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) read to him as it had been read to him as a child. To Newman, Scott was a writer of high moral tone and conservative instinct. As the leader of the Oxford Movement through the 1830s, he credited Scott with preparing the ground for the Catholic Revival in England. In Chapter 3 of the Apologia he acknowledges that Scott was precursor to a spiritual awakening. His historical romances broke the ice of the eighteenth century by reviving an interest in the medieval past: Scott’s 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 to its ancient roots of religious symbolism. Scott seemed to make the old ways fashionable again, assisting Newman to explain that truth could be found more richly in antiquity than in modern innovation. Waverley (1814) and Ivanhoe (1819) are fiction, not dogma, but the quest to romanticise and preserve history as a source of national identity and charm was a step towards the recovery and definition of Catholic faith and the vital root of spiritual authority.
When Newman read Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1855), the story of Septimus Harding’s crisis of conscience over a Church salary, he identified with Harding’s predicament as a man caught between his private conscience and public duty, a theme that was the beat of Newman’s own life. He read 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 Towers (1857). 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 the comfortable livings of the Anglican clergy. But unlike Newman, Trollope saw the Church of England not as a vehicle of divine salvation, but as a social institution of manners and behaviour. Newman saw Barchester Towers 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. But while Trollope had written thousands of pages about priests and bishops, hardly at all had he mentioned religious doctrine or spiritual struggle, 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 social glue than spiritual force, his characters men of the world in surplices sketching the business of life, money, inheritance, power.
Newman’s reading habits reveal a man who was far less the unworldly cleric than his public image suggested. 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, provided a point of view regarding human nature. Intelligent Victorian 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 mere 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. He was a reader 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.
Bibliography
John Henry Newman The Idea of a University (1854)
Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864)
Essays Critical and Historical Vol. 1, Essay 6 (1871)
Sheridan Gilley Newman and his Age (1990)
Helmstadter & Lightman (Ed) Victorian Faith in Crisis (1990)
Elisabeth Jay The Religion of the Heart (1986)
Ian Ker
John Henry Newman: a Biography (1988)
Margaret M Maison The Victorian Vision (1961)
G B Tennyson Victorian Devotional Poetry (1981)
