Chapter 1: Newman’s England
CHAPTER 1
NEWMAN’S ENGLAND
JOHN Henry Newman was born in London, the financial and intellectual capital of the nineteenth century. During his childhood and early youth, England experienced an extraordinary growth in population and military power. Despite its loss of the American colonies, it enjoyed a period of colonial expansion and a booming economy. Industrialization and new markets would allow the British Empire to retain its power for most of the century.
The English society of Newman’s time experienced significant social, political, and religious changes, as the mid-eighteenth-century agrarian economy became an industrial one. Many people were moving to cities looking for work at factories or ports. Working conditions were unhealthy and often dangerous, particularly in the mines and textile mills. Since the wages were low, entire families had to work in these conditions to survive. While a new middle class began to emerge in the cities, consisting of factory owners, shopkeepers, and professionals, the factory workers were almost as poor as the farm workers in the country.
During the 1830s, England barely avoided the revolutions that ravaged Europe, but there was serious social inequality and unrest in the mining and factory cities. In addition to the low wages, child labor, and unsafe work environments, many people lived crowded into buildings without any sewer or lighting systems and with inadequate water supply. In these living conditions, infant mortality was high and crime was common.
England was a monarchy with parliamentary rule and two political parties, the Tories and the Whigs. The Tories supported the Established Church of England and the traditional political and aristocratic structures. During the second quarter of the century the Whig Party carried out important social reforms including the abolition of slavery in the English colonies and the opening up of access to political offices for non-Anglicans.
In 1837, Queen Victoria succeeded to the throne at the age of eighteen. She would have the longest reign of any English monarch, lasting from 1837 until 1901. Her reign was characterized by the expansion of the British Empire together with its customs, its social progress and its literature. Queen Victoria’s reign was also marked by liberalism in religion and tragic foreign policies, especially in Ireland.
John Henry Newman descended from a family of small farmers and village tailors in Cambridgeshire who originally came from Holland. Newman’s paternal grandfather had moved to London and succeeded as a grocer. He and his wife Elizabeth Good had one son, John Newman, and a daughter, as well as two other children, who died at a young age.
John Newman was an ambitious and enterprising man who, wishing to improve his position, began work for a banking firm. He married Jemima Fourdrinier on October 29, 1799 at St. Mary’s church, Lambeth (London). John was thirty-two years old and his wife was twenty-seven. Jemima was the daughter of Henry Fourdrinier, a wealthy papermaker, who had descended from French Huguenots. Jemima received a dowry of £5,000,1 which at her death was passed on intact to her children. The Fourdrinier ancestry can be traced back as far as 1575 to Henri Fourdrinier, who was from Caen in Normandy and in later life became an Admiral of France and was created Viscount.2 His family had emigrated to Holland during a time of religious persecution. John Newman rose up the social ladder and in 1812 opened a banking firm, Ramsbottom, Newman and Ramsbottom, with his uncle and cousin, Richard and John Ramsbottom. The firm was located at 72 Lombard Street at the old Fourdrinier residence. As a part of a new wealthy middle class John Newman enjoyed musical entertainment and good meals. He considered himself a man of the world and not very religious.3 He and his wife were members of the Church of England. Mrs. Newman, inclined to a mild type of Calvinism, was a devoted mother and gave the family life a religious tone.
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1At that time a British pound was worth roughly $5.00, and at that time a U.S. dollar was worth many times what it is worth today.
2See Sieveking, Isabel Giberne, Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., London, 1909, 3; available at: http://www.archive.org/texts/flipbook/flippy.php?id=a608777200sievuoft
3José Morales Marín, Newman (1801-1890), Ediciones Rialp, Madrid, 1990, 12-13.