Chapter 11: Family and Friends
CHAPTER 11
FAMILY AND FRIENDS
AS the head of the family, Newman was concerned about the family’s living arrangements. In August of 1826, he told his mother that she should have a home and argued that he and Frank also needed one. He also wished for his sisters not to have to live where they lived, in a damp little house on the river’s edge. One day during the summer vacation, he looked for a home in Brighton, by the sea, but Mrs. Newman and her oldest son did not agree on a house. In 1827, after one year of hesitation, Mrs. Newman took a house at Marine Square, No. 11, Brighton, but with the agreement that she would sublet it every summer to earn some money. During the summers, mother and daughters stayed scattered about with relatives and friends, and Newman spent part of the Long Vacation with them.
In the summer of 1827, Newman spent six weeks with his mother and sisters in Hampstead, a few miles northwest of London, where he took the duty of a clergyman named Marsh. Charles Golightly and Henry Wilberforce went as Newman’s pupils. Newman also spent some time at Samuel Rickards’s home in Ulcombe. Unlike his friends, during this time Newman did not have a family house that he could call home and to where he could invite his friends.
Newman had a close relationship with his mother and sisters, sharing in their common domestic interests and religious piety. The abundant correspondence between Newman and his family reveals their tender affection, good humor and common everyday concerns. There was frank and lively correspondence between the family members. A letter addressed to Mrs. Newman conveys the affectionate and humorous tone of his relationship with his sisters. Newman sent his sisters the following greeting: “Love to all to saucy H, sly J, and silly M.”1 Whether out of pure affection or with concern for having hurt their feelings, he wrote a few days later: “Love to H, J and M, sensible H, sober J and sprightly M, (this by way of making amends).”2
Mary, the youngest sister, respected the authority and learning of her older brother, nine years her senior, but teased him all the same. She was a lighthearted and very bright young woman, adored by the family. Although, like her sisters, she had not had any formal education, at fifteen, she was able to write letters in French and had read a lot for her age. She resembled John in her philosophical mind, her quick wit, and vivid writing style. To Jemima, for instance, she replied in a letter: “I was very right to begin on a sheet of foolscap, for the ideas of the thermometer of my brain are rising rapidly, and I expect that if they have not room to expand they will overflow and make terrible havoc; besides the name of the paper has something congenial with their nature.”3
Because of their similarities Mary enjoyed the visits of Newman’s friends. During the stay at Hampstead in the summer of 1827, Henry William Wilberforce often went on horseback rides with Newman and ate meals with his family. The Wilberforce family would have, in time, three sons attending Oriel: Robert Isaac, Henry William, and Samuel. The family had strong ties to the Evangelical party, but when the sons attended the university, Robert and Henry were moving toward the High Church party in the Anglican Church.
Mary Newman captured the character of Henry William and his brother Robert Isaac, the one talkative and the other very shy, and she taunted their innocent compliments. She wrote John:
That nice little Henry W. what a nice fellow he is! Has Mamma told you of his absurd impudence last Friday? I like them all better and better; and R.W. with all his quietness and gentleness, he is as bad as H.W. and worse, because he is not so honest. H.W. says, “I am impudent, I am a torment”—and he is so. R. W. says, “I am gentlemanly and timid” and he is—impudent and tormenting.4
In early November of 1827, Mary wrote to Newman twice, expressing her desire to have him visit. With an almost childlike expression, she said, “Oh John … How I long to see you, nice creature! I can fancy your face—there it is looking at me:—how silly I am.”5 In December, she wrote to him with similar words, longing to see him.
Scarcely four weeks later, on January 4, 1828, Mary unexpectedly became ill during a family dinner. She developed a strange chest pain and went sick to her room. Enduring the pain, she repeated some verses from Keble’s Christian Year that she had committed to memory. The next day, after more violent spasms, she had a few hours without pain in which she was told of the severity of her condition. Mary reviewed her short life and asked pardon for her sins. She received medical assistance but to no avail and died at 9 p.m. on January 5. Maria Giberne, who was visiting at Brighton, described Mary’s death and the intense grief experienced by her brother, John. This sudden and premature family death affected him even more profoundly than his father’s death.
To Robert I. Wilberforce, who had written Newman to convey his sorrow, Newman replied that he had had a presentiment of Mary’s future death because he could not conceive of such beauty, goodness, and innocence on earth. Reflecting on her premature death, he concluded that, through her death, God was teaching him to desire Heaven and preparing him for future trials. The loss of his young sister had a lasting spiritual effect on Newman; he began to ponder the transitory nature of goodness and beauty in the visible world, which points to the invisible world that is hidden behind an earthly veil.
This was the second close death in the family and a painful one for all. Newman grieved the death of his young sister for a long time. While riding on horseback in the countryside, he thought about her and about life after death. He wrote to Jemima how the beautiful countryside was but a veil to an invisible world: “I never felt so intensely the transitory nature of this world as when most delighted with these country scenes … Dear Mary seems embodied in every tree and hid behind every hill. What a veil and curtain this world of sense is! beautiful but still a veil—.”6 Many of his sermons subsequently referred to this invisible world of which faith affords us only a dim glance.
As a young clergyman, he had assisted his parishioners to prepare for death and God’s judgment, but now he was obliged to experience, in his own flesh, the sorrow produced by the loss of a loved one. Mary’s premature death forced him to think of eternal life in a new light. His thoughts and feelings were expressed in a succession of poems. Three months after Mary’s death, he wrote in a poem entitled “Consolations in Bereavement” that Mary’s swift death was a divine consolation because it had spared her, as well as the family, greater suffering. A few months later, in another poem entitled “A Picture,” Newman reflected on Mary’s spiritual presence among her loved ones: “She is not gone;—still in our sight / that dearest maid shall live …”7 He portrayed Mary’s love for her Maker, which was manifested in a serene and hope-filled response to His call. The poem ends, evoking the blessedness of glory where God will “knit in love souls parted here, / where cloud is none, nor change.”8 In addition to acceptance of God’s Providence, Mary’s death was made bearable for John by his family’s love and friendship.
Almost a year after Mary’s death, his sentiments alternated between prayerful submission to God’s will and prolonged grief. The overall tone of his feeling was, however, one of acceptance of that which he considered the Providence of a loving and wise God. He knew that Mary had been prepared for Heaven and expressed this thought in verse: “All warning spared, / for none He gives where hearts are for prompt change / prepared.”9
With the death of Mary as a reminder of the finitude of life, John determined to remain close to the rest of his family, something that came easily because he shared intellectual and religious interests with his mother, Harriet, and Jemima. The three women read and commented on his sermons and read religious books by authors such as Bishop Warburton and Thomas Arnold. Mrs. Newman and Jemima studied Greek and used this knowledge to read St. John’s Gospel in its original language. Mrs. Newman shared her son’s fondness for Walter Scott and read this author’s History of Scotland and his novel, Ivanhoe. Harriet and Jemima’s interests extended also to history and politics. In 1828, both studied Euclid; Harriet worked on learning German. Many of their interests were related to those of their older brother. They liked to discuss his verses and papers and to be kept abreast of news from the different colleges.
Newman’s mother and sisters did not like Brighton, for the cold winters at Brighton affected Mrs. Newman’s health. They longed to be together, especially after the loss of Mary. John Henry needed help in the parish at Little-more, and Mrs. Newman wished to reduce John’s contribution to their income. For all these reasons, the family moved closer to John, first to Nuneham and Horspath and then to Iffley, just outside of Oxford. At John Henry’s urging, in August 1828, Newman’s mother and sisters subleased the Brighton home and rented a cottage in Nuneham, a few miles south of Oxford. Newman wrote in his diary: “Thank God, my Mother and Sisters came safe.”10 He moved in with them, and they often dined and went on walks together. They stayed in Nuneham until the end of October, during which time Newman rode back and forth to Oxford on Oriel business.
During the Long Vacation of 1829, Mrs. Newman and her two daughters moved again to the vicinity of her oldest son. They leased a cottage in Horspath, a few miles to the east of Oxford. As had been the case during the previous summer, Newman moved in with his family and traveled back and forth to Oxford as needed. During the times together at home, one of the family activities was reading out loud from Volume I of David Hume’s History of England on King James I. Once more Henry Wilberforce lodged near the Newmans and was tutored by Newman. Thanks to Newman’s guidance and teaching, the following year Wilberforce obtained first-class honors in Classics and second-class honors in Mathematics.
From October 1829 to March of the following year, the Newman family leased the same cottage in Nuneham once more. Newman moved back to Oriel College and, when his busy schedule permitted, visited his family, but the visits were often short. Jemima later recalled that he “used to come ramping over hedge and ditch now and then.” At Oxford, he received daily letters from Nuneham, and in one of them, Harriet complained: “I hope you can give us a decent-lengthened call—I should like a quarter of an hour’s quiet time with you.”11
In 1828, Newman had introduced his mother and sisters to Edward B. Pusey, whom they immediately admired. A friendship arose between them and soon afterward with Maria Pusey, his wife. In August 1830, Pusey and his wife went with Newman to see some houses for lease in Iffley, a town just east of Oxford. They had the hope of having Newman’s family close by, and offered their home to the Newmans until their house was ready.
Many letters went back and forth between John and his mother about the endless details needed to prepare the house. Mrs. Newman wanted his opinion about many things such as furniture, carpeting, glass, and crockery. She also asked him for money for moving expenses. Newman had someone go to sales looking for furniture and found a carpenter to make some repairs. In October, Mrs. Newman, Jemima, and Harriet moved to Rose Hill, their new place of residence in Iffley. The mother and sisters promised to make the house neat and beautiful. They soon prepared a comfortable and charming room and study for John.
In the various homes, the family entertained occasional visitors from nearby Oxford. Family life was captured in The Lost Brooch, a short story by Harriet. In this story, she depicted a group of girls sewing while duets were sung and verses recited; the attitudes toward their brothers and life in general were discussed. In addition to this story, Maria Giberne sketched an image of the home circle with humorous conversations alternating with serious ones on history, religion, and church affairs. According to Maria, the charm, good humor, and wit of the sisters were coupled to their physical attractiveness and pretty apparel. John acquired some of his good taste in this family setting and sharpened his wit and good humor in the daily exchange with his sisters.
It was a happy family scene in these years despite the loss of father and youngest daughter. The family unity, though, was slowly becoming unraveled. Frank and Charles were going their own ways, the former traveling far from home and the latter separating himself from the family. In many letters prior to the move to Iffley, Mrs. Newman expressed to John her concern with the sons. For his part, John spent less time with the family, and gradually his diverging religious views would meet with resistance from his mother and his sisters.
Newman did not write down much about his brother Frank, with whom he attended Oxford. After obtaining double first-class honors at Worcester College in 1826, Frank was elected a Fellow of Balliol College. In the following years, the two brothers would sometimes dine together or meet to talk. They differed greatly in religious views. Whereas John was becoming more Catholic, Frank was becoming more Evangelical. Also, in contrast to his brother, Frank advocated Catholic Emancipation. He was convinced that justice demanded the admission of Roman Catholics to Parliament.
In 1827, while working as a tutor to a family in Ireland, Frank met John Nelson Darby, the founder of a branch of the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian denomination that had arisen at the start of the 1800s. This encounter revived Frank’s earlier desire to be a missionary, and in May 1830, he decided to go as such to Persia (Iran). Before his departure and after his return, Frank proposed marriage to Maria Giberne; she refused twice.
John was disappointed that his brother did not consult him before making final plans for missionary work in Persia and, even more, that he was not going there as a part of an established Christian church. Nonetheless, he wished Frank well and prayed for the success of his plans. The expedition turned out to be a failure, and Frank was very ill on two occasions; he almost died during the second illness. He returned from Persia in 1833.
Frank never took his M.A. degree at Oxford because religious objections kept him from signing the Thirty-Nine Articles. Sacrificing a career at Oxford, he went to Bristol, where he joined a Baptist sect. Later he would move to London and go through other religious affiliations. He had an eccentric personality and seemed to substitute faith with a large number of causes, such as anti-vaccination, anti-vivisection, anti-tobacco, and so forth.12 In 1834 he married Maria Kennaway, a Plymouth Sister. (After the death of his wife in 1876, he married a second time.) In 1840 he became professor of Latin at New College in Manchester and, in 1846, at University College in London. He was a scholar also in Greek, Arabic, Berber, Numidian, and other North African tongues. Despite their diverging religious beliefs, academic pursuits and personal interests, Frank and John respected each other and remained in occasional contact.
Charles Robert, who was older than Frank, rebelled early in life against the religious beliefs of his brothers and against the family as a whole. Although intelligent, he was, according to John, both proud and ungrateful. In 1825, he began to argue with his older brother on the credibility of Christianity and started an intense exchange of long letters on the subject. John reproved him for making precipitous changes in his beliefs, for faulty reasoning based on a priori objections to Christian doctrines, and for drawing conclusions from partial facts. Against wavering opinions he counseled him that “Truth is to be preferred to comfort.”13
A few days later, John wrote his brother: “I do not assert that the Christian evidences are overpowering, but they are unanswerable …”14 He wished to prove to his brother the rational nature of Christianity. Then, attempting to frame the discussion, he sent Charles a long list of questions on Sacred Scriptures and on miracles for him to answer. John wrote to Charles that he should contend with the idea of man’s need for revelation and the external evidence for that revelation rather than judge its contents. He explained that the very notion of revelation implies that certain truths are not discoverable by human reason.15 These important religious and moral truths require revelation. Charles needed first to begin by examining the external evidence for revelation, rather than start at the wrong end by examining the contents.16 Since there are revealed truths that are beyond the reach of one’s present reason, it would be a mistake to judge the truth of a revelation on its content, unless there were flagrant immoralities or falsehoods.17
Charles sought moral or ethical proof of the truth of Christian Revelation. According to his older brother, he was acting with pride by rejecting without due consideration the arguments of wiser men. He chastised him for his pride: “you’re rejecting the credentials of Christianity because you dislike the contents.”18 By “credentials” John was referring to miracles, prophecies, the establishment of Christianity, and other events that are considered a preparation for faith.19
John, who was busy as a Fellow and a curate, was annoyed by his brother’s careless manner of debating in letters. Before continuing further epistolary discussions, he insisted that Charles reply to the entire list of questions and keep to one subject. Charles, who had begun by refuting the inspiration of the New Testament, wanted to move on to the refutation of miracles.
After this, Charles sent his brother a long paper on Judaism and introduced an argument against one of Ezekiel’s prophecies. John replied to his brother that the validity of the New Testament does not depend on a book of the Old Testament. In addition, John argued that neither the lack of inspiration of an Old Testament book, an error in copying a text, nor an interpolation of a passage would be proof that the Christian religion is false.20 Although John was upset with his brother, he sent him a paper on the authenticity of the Gospels. By means of this paper, he wished to show Charles that “there are no reasonable grounds for doubting, and good grounds for believing the genuineness of the Gospels.”21 After a few months, the lengthy correspondence was closed.
In October 1828, Charles wrote to John wishing to continue the debate, but John replied: “I will not get into an unprofitable correspondence with you.”22 In May 1830, Charles demanded again that his older brother re-commence their discussion, but John refused to do so, considering it pointless. In August of the same year, however, John replied to his brother in a twenty-four-page letter, in which he recounted all of their correspondence of 182 5.23 It took John over a week to write this long and painful epistle.
Although the letter exposed Charles’s rambling, faulty reasoning and false accusations that John had not answered his objections, the letter also conveyed John’s impatience and harshness with an opponent. In the letter, John’s reply did not leave a stone unturned in showing the false assumptions and inconsistencies of his brother’s reasoning. The tone of his reaction was, however, excessive.
John refuted his brother’s assertion that demonstration alone is certain proof and that certainty arising from probability does not provide sufficient certainty for action.24 He explained that practical matters are not decided from demonstrative proof, which is only found in pure mathematics. For example, if a man were roused by a cry of fire, he would not go back to sleep waiting for some demonstration, because he could well be burned. He concluded that, likewise, the testimony of the Apostles should not be rejected because it is not demonstrative proof.
It was not only in religious matters that Charles annoyed his brothers. John and Frank found various employments for Charles that he lost after a relatively short time, often with embarrassment to them. To a clergyman by the name of Mullins, whom he disliked, Charles went so far as to address a package, “Parson Mullins, Pharisee Cottage.”25 He always incurred debts that his brothers would forbearingly pay for him; Charles felt entitled to their financial support. All the while, Mrs. Newman suffered greatly and prayed a lot for her second son, advising him when he would listen and writing to John about him.
Meanwhile, in his professional life, throughout the years of 1828 to 1831, Newman was consumed with both treasurer’s duties at Oriel and parochial duties at his new vicarage. However, he managed to spend time with his friends, sharing meals, long conversations, walks, and rides on horseback with them. With those who were away, he kept in touch by writing.
One such friend who was away from Oxford for most of these years was Blanco White. When he stopped to visit at the university, he and John Henry would often eat dinner and meet to play music together, improvising a quartet. These musical soirées provided solace for Blanco White, who felt humiliated as an outsider at Oxford. He sometimes assisted Newman with the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, but before long, recurring doubts of faith made him incapable of carrying out any religious duties.
Besides these old friends, there was also Frederic Rogers, one of Newman’s pupils at Oriel. He was one of the students to whom Newman dedicated most attention. The Tutor and pupil became close friends through their hours of study, meals together, and walks. One day in August 1831, Newman took tea with Rogers to meet William Ewart Gladstone, the future Prime Minister. In preparation for Rogers’s undergraduate examination, Newman actually read to him for weeks because Rogers was afflicted by an illness affecting his vision. The clever and shrewd student, who would later become a politician, honored his Tutor by gaining first-class honors at Oriel in 1832.
While lodging at Iffley in 1831, Rogers visited the Newmans and played violin with John Henry. Beethoven, then recently deceased, was Newman’s favorite composer. Many years later, Newman recalled Rogers, then Lord Blachford, as one of his intimate friends at Oriel and dedicated the work, Two Essays on Biblical and on Ecclesiastical Miracles, to him.
Thomas Mozley was another of Newman’s pupils at Oriel. He obtained a B. A. degree in 1828, and, urged on by Newman, stood for a Fellowship, to which he was elected the following year. Beginning at this time, he entered into close terms with Newman’s mother, sisters, and circle of friends. Newman tried to obtain support from the Archdeacon of Oxford in procuring the election of Mozley as curate for a parish, but the Bishop of Oxford naturally declined because Mozley was not a clergyman. Newman then encouraged Mozley to take Orders, and in 1831, Mozley was ordained a deacon and took up parochial duties. Thomas Mozley married Harriet Newman in 1836. It is no surprise that Newman would figure prominently in Mozley’s Reminiscences Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, published while Newman was still alive.
While at Oriel, Newman also maintained correspondence with earlier friends, such as William Bowden, Simeon Lloyd Pope, and Samuel Rickards; Newman had a standing invitation from them and from John Keble and Richard Hurrell Froude to visit their homes. When Newman traveled to London in order to go to the dentist or to a bank, he visited Bowden, a close friend from his undergraduate years at Trinity, and his family. In 1831, he was honored to baptize Bowden’s second child, Julia Marianne. The ties between Newman and the Bowdens continued to grow and became lifelong.
Newman knew how to love his friends. He was loved and admired by them. He had many good friends from among his peers, students, and some of his teachers. They were drawn to friendship with him by his genuine concern for their families, their endeavors and difficulties, his sincere advice to them, his good humor, and high moral standards. He managed to stay close to his family and to maintain the ties of friendship with each one of its members, except with Charles, with whom it was increasingly difficult to get along. Although the years between 1827 and 1831 were marked for Newman by university conflicts and a significant controversy over the tutoring system at Oriel, he continued to act as the head of the family and, at last, brought his mother and sisters to live close to him and to assist him in the parish duties at Littlemore. All the while, he felt the spiritual company of his sister Mary and continued to write about her.
________
1LD, Vol. II, JHN to Mrs. Newman (Feb. 1, 1827), 3-4.
2LD, Vol. II, JHN to Mrs. Newman (March 8, 1827), 7.
3Ward, Young Mr. Newman, Letter from Mary Newman to Jemima Newman, 119.
4Ward, Young Mr. Newman, Mary Newman to John Henry Newman, 129.
5Ibid.
6LD, Vol. II, JHN to Jemima Newman (May 10, 1828), 69.
7“A Picture,” in VV, (Oxford, August 1828) 29-32; 29.
8Ibid., 32.
9“Consolations In Bereavement,” in VV (Oxford, April 1828), 26-28; 27.
10LD, Vol. II (August 26, 1828), 93.
11LD, Vol. II, Harriet Newman to JHN (November 3, 1829), 172.
12Ward, Young Mr. Newman, 166.
13LD, Vol. I, JHN to Charles Robert Newman (March 3, 1825), 212-15; 215.
14LD, Vol. I, JHN to C. R. Newman (March 24, 1825), 219-21; 219.
15LD, Vol. I, JHN to C. R. Newman (July 7, 1825), 240-41.
16LD, Vol. I, JHN to Charles Robert Newman (April 14, 1825), 224-28.
17Ibid., 226.
18Ibid., 224-28; 228.
19LD, Vol. I, JHN to C. R. Newman (July 7, 1825), 240-41.
20LD, Vol. I, JHN to Charles Robert Newman (August 25, 1825), 253-55.
21Ibid., 255.
22LD, Vol. II, JHN to C. R. Newman (October 10, 1828), 101.
23LD, Vol. II, JHN to C. R. Newman (August 19, 1830), 266-81.
24LD, Vol. II, JHN to Charles Robert Newman (August 19, 1830), 266-81; 280.
25Ward, Young Mr. Newman, JHN to Jemima Newman, 169.