John Henry Newman Biography

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman is known today primarily for his Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education (1852) and his spiritual autobiography Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). In his own time his fame rested on his hymns, sermons, and theological works, and his leading role in the Oxford Movement and the subsequent Catholic revival in England. His marvelously clear and supple prose, rather than his poetry, entitles him to a place in the English literary canon.

The eldest child of John Newman, a London banker, and Jemima Fourdrinier Newman, of Huguenot descent, Newman spent most of his early years at Ham, Richmond; in old age he dreamed of this home as a lost paradise. He was educated at Dr. Nicholas's private school in Ealing, where he developed a lifelong love of Scott's novels. During 1816 his father's bank failed; he suffered his first serious illness; and, influenced by a schoolmaster, he became a Calvinistic Evangelical, feeling called to a celibate life. In June 1817 he entered Trinity College, Oxford, where he won a scholarship in 1818. Although in 1820 he nearly failed his degree examinations because of exhaustion, in 1822 he won a fellowship at Oriel College, which was then dominated by the "Noetics," a group of liberal theologians. One of these, Richard Whately, drew him out of his congenital shyness; but between 1826, when Hurrell Froude arrived at Oriel, and 1833, when John Keble's National Apostasy sermon launched the Oxford Movement, Newman passed from liberal to High Church convictions. A second serious illness in 1827 and his beloved sister Mary's death in 1828 intensified the otherworldliness that was responsible for his power to inspire both the poor of St. Clement's, whom he served as curate from 1824, and the university congregation of St. Mary's, of which he became vicar in 1828.

In that year Newman wrote, among other poems, his moving "Consolations in Bereavement." He composed four-fifths of the 124 lyrics in Verses on Various Occasions (1868) between November 1832 and July 1833, while accompanying Froude on a Mediterranean cruise prescribed by Froude's doctor. Newman, who rarely wrote without "a definite call," composed short lyrics almost daily to occupy his unaccustomed leisure and to distract himself when feeling seasick. Most of the poems appeared in his friend Hugh Rose's British Magazine and subsequently in Lyra Apostolica (1836), an anonymous collection by members of the movement including Keble, Froude, and Isaac Williams. "In the Lyra," Newman wrote,"my object was not poetry but to bring out ideas." In his little-known essay "Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics" (1829) he finds "poetry" not in a poem's words but in its originating idea, which is best conveyed in "simple and colourless terms." Among these Mediterranean lyrics, "England" and "Progress of Unbelief" best express his apprehensions, "Liberalism" and "The Patient Church" his dogmatic Anglo-Catholicism, "Rome" his divided feelings about the Roman church, "Our Future" (written where St. Paul was martyred) and "Desolation" that sense of being guided toward some great work or vision so evident in his famous "Lead, Kindly Light." Although "The Elements: A Tragic Chorus" has a Sophoclean grandeur, the numerous meditations on St. Paul and other biblical heroes now sound stiff and dated. With one further exception, even Newman's most lucid and graceful lyrics are worth reading only as revealing his preoccupations at that time.

The exception is "Lead, Kindly Light," originally entitled "The Pillar of the Cloud" after the fiery pillar that led the Israelites out of Egypt. After being set to J. B. Dykes's sentimental tune in 1864, this exquisite lyric became one of the favorite Victorian hymns--though Newman never regarded it as a hymn, nor is it often sung now. In April, after Froude had gone home with his father, Newman hastened to revisit Sicily, "the nearest approach to Paradise of which sinful man is capable." There, during his third and most dangerous illness, he muttered in delirium, "I shall not die.... I have not sinned against the light.... I have a work to do." In June, while returning home after his recovery, he wrote the poem one night as his ship lay becalmed in the strait between Corsica and Sardinia. "Lead, Kindly Light" touched the hearts of Victorian and later readers by its image of divine light; its English sense of the spiritual life as a coming home; its simple avowal "I do not ask to see/The distant scene--one step enough for me"; and its nostalgia for the "angel faces" seen in childhood, to be found again hereafter. Though Newman later ascribed his Mediterranean poems to his vision of Anglican renewal, the finest of them achieves its universality of meaning because he transforms his homesickness and wistful retrospect into a metaphor for his own spiritual voyage.

Between 1833 and 1839, Newman's editing of Tracts for the Times (of which he wrote or coauthored thirty) and his Sunday afternoon sermons at St. Mary's--memorably described by Matthew Arnold; J. A. Froude, the historian; and many others--gave him an unparalleled influence over Oxford undergraduates. In 1839 his study of the Donatist heresy made him doubt the catholicity of the Anglican church. After his Catholic interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles in Tract 90 was censured by the assembled heads of colleges in 1841, the bishop of Oxford advised him to discontinue the Tracts. In 1843 he retracted his criticisms of Rome, resigned as vicar of St. Mary's, and withdrew to the nearby village of Littlemore. In 1845 he joined the Catholic church.

While at Littlemore, Newman and his friends daily recited the Offices of the Breviary, from which he translated a number of hymns from Latin into English. These translations never came into use as hymns as did those of the Catholic Edward Caswall, who joined the Birmingham Oratory of St. Philip Neri, which Newman founded in 1849, or those of the Anglican J. M. Neale.

In the next fifteen years Newman suffered many setbacks, notably his unfair conviction in a libel suit brought by the renegade ex-monk Achilli and the failure of his attempts to found a Catholic university at Dublin and to inaugurate a new translation of the Bible. During this time he wrote a mere handful of occasional poems, mostly in honor of St. Philip and of departed Oratorians. Two poems on early Christian martyrdom, a subject also dealt with in his novel Callista (1856), pursue the major theme of his imaginative writing, the spiritual journey. This received its finest expression in his Apologia, written to rebut Charles Kingsley's charge of intellectual dishonesty. During the controversy, he felt a presentiment of impending death. Since the failures of his middle years, moreover, the onset of old age had become almost an obsession. On 17 January 1865, as he wrote in a letter, "it came into my head.... I really cannot tell how" to write his only long poem, The Dream of Gerontius. He finished this in three weeks, put it away, and forgot it until the rejection of an article by the Jesuit magazine the Month caused him to search his desk. The poem occupied two numbers of the magazine; when it was published in book form in 1865, it won even more acclaim than the Apologia. The Times and lesser papers printed long, enthusiastic reviews, and as late as 1888 Gladstone hoped it would "take its position in the literature of the world." By 1900, when Edward Elgar composed his oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius had been reprinted some thirty times and translated into French and German. Now only choral performances of Elgar's masterpiece keep the complete poem before non-Catholics.

Newman especially feared death from a stroke, such as had afflicted Keble, Scott, and others of his favorite authors. Significantly, Gerontius experiences in his dream a "strange inmost abandonment ... shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss" and "utter nothingness of which I came." He hears his own last rites before his guardian angel conducts his soul safely past the Chorus of Demons into the divine presence. After judgment, his soul is finally bathed in the cleansing waters of Purgatory.

Despite its severely splendid rhetoric, The Dream of Gerontius only occasionally rises to the unforgettable incantation characteristic of great poetry. Its finest moment is the climax, when the Fifth Choir of Angelicals sings "Praise to the Holiest in the Height," a recital of the Fall, Incarnation, and Redemption that epitomizes, in phrases redolent of St. Paul and St. Augustine, two millennia of Christian belief. In this great hymn, now sung wherever Christians worship in English, Newman transcends the self-preoccupation that constitutes both his ground and his limitation as a poet. As many critics have remarked, it was in prose that he regularly attained poetic greatness.

Created cardinal in 1879, Newman, by then a national institution, lived in retirement until his death in 1890. His pervading metaphor of the spiritual journey finds its last expression in his epitaph at the Oratorian cemetery in Rednal: Exumbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and images into truth").