Chapter 14: Tutor at Oriel
CHAPTER 14
TUTOR AT ORIEL
ON January 20, 1826, ten years after entering Trinity College, Newman agreed to be a Tutor at Oriel. He had been a Fellow at Oriel for four years and the promotion was the natural advancement in academic life that he pursued as a part of a larger spiritual calling. He wished to reform the moral and spiritual climate of his college.
The tutorial system was, as it is now, an integral part of the Oxford education. Prior to Newman’s time, college Tutors were supposed to oversee the expenditures of young scholars and their moral conduct and, at times, to discipline them. When Newman was appointed Tutor, ordination to the clerical life was still a qualification for this office, but things were beginning to change. While Mayers advised Newman to be ordained at once, others discouraged any haste with such a decision. Hawkins even pointed to some incompatibility with activities of college life, such as hunting, shooting, and theater. Hawkins held a disciplinarian view of the Tutor while Newman held a pastoral one. For Newman, the ordination vow was not incompatible with, but rather intrinsic to, the mission of a Tutor. He believed that the ordination vow made him a minister of Christ, who was responsible for souls. He resisted Hawkins’s view because he was convinced that a Tutor should be more than a college lecturer and disciplinarian. Newman wrote his sister, Harriet:
I have a great undertaking before me in the Tutorship here. I trust God may give me grace to undertake it in a proper spirit, and to keep steadily in view that I have set myself apart for His service for ever. There is always the danger of literary pursuits assuming too prominent a place in the thoughts of a College Tutor, or his viewing his situation merely as a secular office, a means of future provision when he leaves College.1
On a larger scale, the culture of Victorian England had brought a considerable change to university education. At the start of the nineteenth century, gentry and nobility wanted their sons to return home as gentlemen with social skills like dancing and fencing; they did not want them to return home as monks or deacons.2 Victorian society no longer appreciated a rigorous education in the Classics, and instead preferred social polish, good manners, and knowledge of foreign countries. The nobility regarded a classical university education as useful only for the training of future clergymen. Furthermore, modern employment called for the practical knowledge of science, law, and other professions. The ideal of the Christian gentleman and scholar was replaced by the new ideal of the “virtuoso,” a person skilled in arts and science.
Many Oxford students who proceeded from noble families lived an idle lifestyle and were commonly called “smarts.” By extension, the name was used to denote the increasing numbers of idle students from other social classes. Excessive drinking, extravagant lifestyles, and idleness were common aspects of student life. The university was equated with a place of moral corruption, and respected men, like the First Earl of Clarendon, lamented the excessive drinking and how little he had learned at Oxford. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called Oxford a breeding place for left-wing Radicals. In the mid-nineteenth century, society complained of the aristocratic lifestyle and education forced upon middle-class students who needed training to become attorneys, engineers, and merchants.
Years later, in a series of lectures titled The Tamworth Reading Room, Newman opposed this rejection of classical education at Oxford for an education aimed at science and practical knowledge. In these lectures Newman argued that physical science does not make men moral. He wrote:
I consider, then, that intrinsically excellent and noble as are scientific pursuits, and worthy of a place in a liberal education, and fruitful in temporal benefits to the community, still they are not, and cannot be, the instrument of an ethical training; that physics do not supply a basis, but only materials for religious sentiment; that knowledge does but occupy, does not form the mind; that apprehension of the unseen is the only known principle capable of subduing moral evil, educating the multitude, and organizing society …3
In 1826, however, Newman’s main concern was the moral reform of the college and the individual attention given to students by Tutors, not the threat of practical education which came later. He fought the decadence of the “Gentlemen-Commoners” who were the “scandal and the ruin of the place.” He tried to check their haughtiness and their custom of gaining influence from authorities at the university.
Newman thought that theology and the practice of religion make men moral, and advocated the Tutors’ responsibility for the religious formation of their pupils. He lamented the practice of compulsory Communion at the opening of the School Year because he considered that undergraduates’ drinking habits and other sinful revelry were tantamount to profanation of a sacred rite. The authorities, including Hawkins, turned a blind eye and did not want to hear about this. Newman, on the other hand, wanted the Tutors to fight such evils.
In 1832, when Joseph Dornford retired as Dean of Oriel to a living in Devonshire, Newman was next in line for the position. The office was to be decided by election, but Henry Jenkyns, one of the Fellows close to the Provost, asked Newman to withdraw from the contest due to his differences with Hawkins and his interpretation of college rules. Newman explained to Jenkyns: “I am against the present rule of obliging undergraduates to receive the Sacrament.”4 Newman believed that in certain cases he could deny the Sacrament to a student, over the veto of the Provost.5 Soon, though, the election was not an issue because a long trip to the Mediterranean on which he was about to embark made it no longer possible for him to be Dean of Oriel that academic year. A few years later he held the office.
Newman’s complaints did not end there. The new Tutor also opposed the practice of obtaining Private Tutors, Bachelors or Masters, who prepared undergraduates to obtain honors at the Schools. As an undergraduate, Newman had been tutored by James Ogle for the exams and, as a Fellow, had tutored students himself. His experience with this system led him to object to the additional costs for students and its unfair advantage over those who could not afford Private Tutors. He also thought that the Private Tutors interfered in the relationship between the College Tutor and the pupil.
The custom at Oriel was for Tutors to give lectures to many students without much direct contact with them. Through his own more personal manner of treating his students, Newman began to reform the tutorial system on his own when he was appointed a Tutor. In 1828, Hurrell Froude and Robert I. Wilberforce, newly elected Tutors at Oriel, joined Newman in his reform effort. They agreed on the preeminence of the Tutor’s role in the moral and religious education of students by means of personal influence and friendship.
Acting with the “discretion” afforded him under university statutes, Newman introduced modifications that provided Froude, Wilberforce, and himself an opportunity for a more personal connection with the students and influence over them. This did away with the need for Private Tutors. Dornford, Dean and Senior Tutor, agreed to the changes on a trial basis. The modifications gave the Tutor the intended role of Tutor, not of a mere lecturer. Each Tutor was first responsible for his pupils, not for all of the undergraduates. He would choose the subject matter for the lectures his pupils should attend, and have first choice on giving those lectures himself.
Newman began to focus his attention on his assigned pupils that were most methodical and promising. He helped them in their college work and cultivated a mutual friendship. This relationship went beyond the appearance of a mere friendship. It was in no way condescending. Newman exercised with his pupils, spent evenings in their company, and vacationed with them. His goal was a spiritual one, to gain souls for God, and these friendships allowed him to exert the requisite spiritual and moral influence. Many of the students attended his sermons at St. Mary’s and thus received his religious instruction.
In light of his conflict with Hawkins, Newman did not formally inform him of his plans for the tutorial system. When Hawkins noticed the changes, he allowed them at first because he was new as Provost and the standards at the college began to improve, but he did not agree with Newman’s philosophy. Later, the differences of opinion were mixed up with other academic and ecclesiastical differences, and collision was unavoidable. In the aftermath of the reelection affair with Peel, the Provost ordered a return to the old tutorial system.
The controversy came to a head when, in April of 1830, the Provost asked Newman for a short sketch of the new system, arguing that the old one worked perfectly well. Newman replied that the alleged “new system” was, in fact, a modification of the old system that only worked when students, at their own request and at great expense, sought extra Private Tutors. Newman argued that since 1823, when idle students were admitted to Oriel and Tutors ceased to take private pupils, men had ceased to obtain high honors. Newman summed up his case on honors to Hawkins thus: “Nature (so to say) forces us into the private-tutor system—why not recognize it, control it, and make it economical?”6
Hawkins argued that others with more experience had established the present system in which the students had contact with all the Tutors and not an almost-exclusive contact with one. Hawkins made it clear to Newman that there was only one Tutor in Oriel; the others were Assistant Tutors and Lecturers. Newman replied that under this arrangement he felt obliged to resign, but he would wait for the Provost’s decision; until then, he would continue to consider himself as the real Tutor of the men to whom, upon their admission, he was committed.
A number of letters ensued between Provost Hawkins and Tutor Newman. Hawkins gave the appearance of being conciliatory and urged Newman to return gradually to the college system. Hawkins, however, did not seem to assess the merits of Newman’s proposed plans and attributed some of Newman’s views to being overworked and depressed; all of this controversy and especially the latter remarks annoyed Newman. Despite Newman’s arguments and support from junior Fellows, the Provost prevailed. In June 1830, Hawkins stopped assigning students to Newman as well as to Wilberforce and Froude. In doing so, Hawkins eventually eliminated Newman from his Tutorship, save for the few students he had already been assigned. Newman informed his mother of Hawkins’s arrangement to have Wilberforce, Froude, and himself “die off gradually with our existing pupils.”7 After this drawn-out controversy, Newman remarked with an air of relief that he welcomed having more time on his hands with the same financial resources.
The last students that Newman prepared for examinations at Oriel honored him well when they took their exams in the spring of 1831. Samuel Francis Wood and Robert Francis Wilson obtained first class in Classics; Algernon Perkins obtained first class in Mathematics, and Wilson second class. Frederic Rogers, one of Newman’s favorite pupils, obtained a “double first,” two first-class honors, when he graduated in 1832. On June 11, 1831, Newman wrote in his journal: “second day of Collections—finished my men—and so ends my Tutors-work!”8 Newman had had a beneficial influence on his students, but the overall attempt at reform of the college had failed. While he resigned from his position as Tutor, he would retain his Fellowship at Oriel until October 3, 1845.
The end of the controversy over the tutorial system was a blessing in disguise. Newman wrote to his mother about his intentions: “Now that I shall have more time, I am full of projects what I shall do [sic]. The Fathers arise up again full before me.”9 The following year he received, as a present from friends and pupils, the valuable gift of thirty-six volumes of Church Fathers.10 Newman began to study the Fathers of the Church and to write on the history of the Arian Heresy, which would have a significant impact on his life. A new and rich period in his intellectual and spiritual life was beginning. In addition to the study of the Fathers and of the Arian Heresy, he applied his teaching energy to sermons that he preached at St. Mary’s.11 Years later, he would acknowledge to a friend that, had his work at Oriel not terminated, he would not have studied the Fathers, and the Oxford Movement would not have begun.12
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1LD, Vol. I, JHN to Harriet Newman (March 21, 1826), 280-81.
2Stone, The University and Society, 48-52.
3John Henry Newman, “The Tamworth Reading Room,” in Discussions and Arguments (February 1841), 304. Available at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/arguments/tamworth/section7.html. After this it will be cited DA.
4LD, Vol. III, JHN to Henry Jenkyns (before July 4, 1832), 62-63; 63.
5LD, Vol. III, JHN to Henry Jenkyns (on or after June 29, 1832), 60-61.
6LD, Vol. II, JHN to Edward Hawkins (April 29, 1830), 212.
7LD, Vol. II, JHN to Mrs. Newman (June 18, 1830), 244.
8LD, Vol. II, Diary entry (June 11, 1831), 334.
9LD, Vol. II, JHN to Mrs. Newman (June 25, 1830), 245.
10LD, Vol. II, JHN to Mrs. Newman (October 24, 1831), 368-69.
11Trevor, Newman, The Pillar of the Cloud, 99. According to Trevor, when Newman published his sermons, he took more from 1831 than from any other year.
12LD, Vol. II, 245. Footnote refers to a letter to Henry James Coleridge.