Abstract
The widely divergent religious reconversions of the two Newman brothers — John Henry to Roman Catholicism and Francis William to a ‘primitive Christianity’ — have intrigued and troubled commentators and historians since the mid-nineteenth-century, when their religious crises represented a national concern. With the publication of Francis William Newman’s The Soul (1849) and Phases of Faith (1850), at least one reviewer lamented the loss of two of the Church of England’s most talented scholars and brothers — the one to ‘superstition’ and the other to ‘unbelief’.1 The fascination with the religious lives of ‘the Newman brothers’ continued well into the twentieth century and became the title of a book.2 Even broader studies of the period included discussion of the two Newmans.
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Notes
Anon. (1851) ‘Forms of Infidelity in the Nineteenth Century’, The North British Review 15.29, 35–56, at 52.
W. Robbins (1966) The Newman Brothers: An Essay in Comparative Intellectual Biography (London: Heinemann Educational Books).
B. Willey (1956) ‘Francis W. Newman’, More Nineteenth-Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters (New York: Harper & Row), p. 11; hereafter referred to as Honest Doubters.
J. M. Wheeler (1891) ‘Biographical Sketch’, in C. R. Newman, G. J. Holyoake, and J. M. Wheeler (eds) Essays on Rationalism: By Charles Robert Newman … With Preface by George Jacob Holyoake. And Biographical Sketch by J.M. Wheeler (London: Progressive Pub. Co.), p. 9.
D. Hempton (2008) Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 13.
See E. Royle (1974) Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement 1791–1866 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 155–58.
The phrase is from Leigh Hunt’s book: L. Hunt (1853) The Religion of the Heart: A Manual of Faith and Duty (London: John Chapman). But the phrase aptly describes the school that Francis Newman effectively inaugurated with F. W. Newman (1849) The Soul: Its Sorrows and Aspirations: An Essay towards the Natural History of the Soul, as the True Basis of Theology (London: Chapman). Hunt approvingly referred to The Soul in The Religion of the Heart (p. 84). A ‘religion of the heart’ could also be found much earlier in evangelical persuasions of traditional Christianity. However, the phrase refers here to a justification of faith by the heart or soul alone, independent of, or even as, a doctrine.
Pietro Corsi uses this phrase to describe the religious school of Newman and others in P. Corsi (1988) Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 200.
This phrase was used by Newman himself in F. Newman (1862) The Soul: Its Sorrows and Aspirations: An Essay towards the Natural History of the Soul, as the True Basis of Theology (London: George Manwaring), p. 183. Hereafter The Soul. The original publication date was 1849. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent citations of the text will be to this, the seventh edition.
A. W. Benn (1906) The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols, Vol. 2 (New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green, & Co.), pp. 18 and 28. As P. Corsi points out, ‘At the opposite side of the theological spectrum [from the Tractarians], the “mystics” — a term employed by Baden Powell to indicate the followers of the American transcendental school, or individual thinkers like Blanco White, Francis Newman, John Daniel Morell (1816–1891) or John Sterling (1806–1844) — made religious ideas and feelings the basis of their philosophy of religion’. See P. Corsi, Science and Religion, p. 194.
See T. Larsen (2001) ‘The Regaining of Faith: Reconversions among Popular Radicals in Mid-Victorian England’, Church History 70.3, 527–43, at 534.
J. R. Moore (1988) ‘Freethought, Secularism, Agnosticism: The Case of Charles Darwin’, in G. Parsons (ed.) Religion in Victorian Britain: I, Traditions, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press), p. 298.
J. H. Newman (1870) An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (New York: The Catholic Publication Society), p. 234; hereafter, Grammar of Assent.
Quoted in M. Ward (1948) Young Mr. Newman (New York: Sheed & Ward), p. 360.
F. M. Turner (2002) John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven & London: Yale University Press), p. 23.
W. R. Ward (2006) Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
T. Purnell (1884) ‘Charles Robert Newman’, The Athenaeum: Journal of Literature, Science, The Fine Arts, Music and the Drama, No. 2944, p. 408; J. M. Wheeler (1891) ‘Biographical Sketch’;S. O’Faoláin (1952) Newman’s Way (London: Longmans, Green & Co.); M. Ward, Young Mr. Newman; and J. M. Svaglic, ‘Charles Newman and His Brothers’.
A. W. Benn, The History of English Rationalism, Vol. 2, pp. 26–7.
K. Manwaring (1988) ‘The Forgotten Brother: Francis William Newman, Victorian Modernist’, Courier 23.1, 3–26, at 26.
A. W. Benn, The History of English Rationalism, Vol. 2, p. 18, emphasis mine.
Letter from F. W. Newman to G. Griffen (16 January 1860) quoted in M. Francis (2007) Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), p. 368, note 54.
W. F. Bynum (2000) ‘The Cardinal’s Brother: Francis Newman, Victorian Bourgeois’, in P. Gay, M. S. Micale, and R. L. Dietle (eds) Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 131–47, at 132, emphasis mine.
R. H. Ross and A. Tennyson (1973) Alfred, Lord Tennyson in Memoriam: An Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Sources Criticism (New York: Norton), section 96, p. 62.
F. W. Newman (1850) Phases of Faith; or, Passages from the History of My Creed (London: J. Chapman), p. iii.
S. L. Stephen, R. Blake, and C. S. Nicholls (1921) The Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford University Press), Vol. 22, p. 193.
The missionary trip is recounted in Newman’s latterly published book, F. W. Newman (1856) Personal Narrative, in Letters, Principally From Turkey (London: Holyoake and Co.). The best brief account of this disastrous missionary pilgrimage and its impact on Newman’s life and belief is in D. Hempton, Evangelical Disenchantment, pp. 45–51.
A. W. Benn, The History of English Rationalism, Vol. 2, pp. 19–20.
G. J. Holyoake (1851) The Philosophic Type of Religion: As Developed by Prof. Newman, Stated, Examined, and Answered (London: J. Watson), p. 6.
W. H. Dunn (1961) James Anthony Froude, a Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 134, note 1.
Anon. (1850) ‘Newman’s Phases of Faith’, The British Quarterly Review 12.23, 1–56, at 56.
Anon. (1851) ‘Forms of Infidelity in the Nineteenth Century’, The North British Review 15.29, 47–48.
Anon. (1851) ‘Modern “Spiritualism”’, The Journal of Sacred Literature 7.14, 360–77.
Anon. (1851) ‘Newman on the True Basis of Theology’, Brownson’s Quarterly Review n.s. 5.4, 417.
D. Walther (1851) Some Reply to ‘Phases of Faith’ (London: J. K. Campbell), p. 3, emphasis in original.
[J. N. Darby] (1853) The Irrationalism of Infidelity, Being a Reply to ‘Phases of Faith’ (London: Groombridge and Sons), pp. v–vi.
See J. A. Secord (2000) Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
F. W. Newman, The Soul, p. 10. For the influence of Auguste Comte’s ideas on Newman, see C. D. Cashdollar (1989) The Transformation of Theology, 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant thought in Britain and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 312–14.
S. During (2013) ‘George Eliot and Secularism’, in A. Anderson and H. E. Shaw (eds) A Companion to George Eliot (Chichester, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 428–41, at 435.
See S. J. Gould (1999) Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Pub. Group).
G. J. Holyoake, ‘The Philosophic Type of Religion, Developed by Prof. Newman: Stated and Examined’, Reasoner 11.6, 83–86; [William H. Ashurst] (25 June 1851) ‘On the Word “Atheist”’, Reasoner 11.6, 88, emphasis in original. In response to Ashurst, Holyoake proposed the term ‘Secularism’ to refer to ‘the work we have always had in hand, and how it is larger than Atheism’.
S. D. Collet (1855) George Jacob Holyoake and Modern Atheism: A Biographical Essay (London: Trübner & Co.), pp. 18–20.
M. Francis (2007) Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 115.
See F. W. Newman (1854) Catholic Union: Essays towards a Church of the Future, as the Organization of Philanthropy (London: J. Chapman). Secularists are mentioned explicitly on page 99: ‘I mean, many who call themselves Socialists and Secularists, of whom the latter, under their able, upright and estimable leader, G. J. Holyoake, have already attained a considerable organization, and would at once be valuable allies.
F. W. Newman to J. H. Newman (17 January 1860) quoted in E. Short (2013) Newman and His Family (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 191–92.
G. J. Holyoake (1851) The Last Days of Mrs. Emma Martin, Advocate of Freethought (London: Watson) quoted in S. Dobson Collet, George Jacob Holyoake and Modern Atheism, pp. 20–21, emphasis in original.
G. J. Holyoake (1905) ‘The Three Newmans’, in Bygones Worth Remembering 2 Vols (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.), Vol. 1, pp. 192–201, at 192.
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© 2016 Michael Rectenwald
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Rectenwald, M. (2016). The Three Newmans: A Triumvirate of Secularity. In: Nineteenth-Century British Secularism. Histories of the Sacred and the Secular, 1700–2000. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463890_6
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