NEWMAN AND HIS FAMILY
By Edward Short; Bloomsbury; RRP $45.
Reviewed by Br Brian Grenier CFC
ACCORDING to Edward Short, “Few eminent Victorians can be understood without reference to their families. … Similarly, no one can understand Newman’s warm, affectionate, playful, gregarious, generous nature unless he knows something of the love he received from and gave back to his family, even though his evolving religious convictions would, in many cases, alienate that love”.
The truth of these assertions is convincingly demonstrated in the excellent book under review.
It is the second volume in a proposed trilogy. Newman and His Contemporaries was published in 2011 and Newman and His Critics is yet to come.
The eight chapters in what the author describes as “in essence, a work of family history” explore in considerable detail Blessed John Henry Newman’s close and complex relationships with his “genial, astute, broadminded father” John (a London banker); his Huguenot mother Jemima (née Fourdrinier), a warm-hearted woman of “radiant good sense” whose most endearing qualities he inherited; his five siblings – Charles, Frank, Mary, Harriett and Jemima – and his nephew John Rickards Mozley (the son of his sister Jemima and one of his many regular correspondents).
The book reveals Newman’s deep and enduring love for his family and the home in which he was nurtured. Exercised even in the face of opposition and sometimes-heartbreaking trials, it was in the writer’s words a “special, difficult, sanctifying love”.
None of the family were ever entirely reconciled to his conversion in 1845 – an event that Gladstone described as “calamitous” – and none of them followed him into the Catholic Church.
Indeed, his brother Frank published a vituperative memoir of his brother shortly after the latter’s death.
Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Edward Short’s book is a volume worthy of a man who in a long life (1801-1890) played with distinction many parts – priest, educator, theologian, philosopher, apologist, preacher, novelist, poet, satirist, sage, friend and likely saint.
Among Newman’s many admirable qualities, Short draws attention to his intellectual rigour, his self-deprecatory honesty, his versatility in friendship, his generosity as a correspondent, his acute sense of home, his undoubted Englishness, his profound simplicity of heart, his singleness of mind and purpose, and “his admirable aplomb under duress”.
He was, moreover, the personification of intelligent discussion on religious matters – a gift not in evidence among some of our more disputatious non-believing contemporaries.
This volume, which makes good use of Newman’s voluminous correspondence, his published and unpublished writings and other primary sources, is enhanced by the inclusion of pertinent photographs, an ample bibliography and a very detailed index.
Appropriate documentation is provided throughout the text in brief footnotes and ismore satisfying than endnotes.
Edward Short wrote: “My only object was to share with my readers how Newman’s relations with his family informed his understanding not only of himself and his contemporaries but of his faith in God.”
I am sure that readers to whom I heartily recommend this work will concur in my judgment that the author has achieved his stated aim admirably.
