Abstract
In this second volume of what is to be a trilogy on Newman (the first was entitled Newman and his Contemporaries (2011) and a third is to treat Newman and his critics), Short outlines the theologian’s links to eight members of his family: his father, John, his mother, Jemina (née Fourdrinier), his five siblings, and a nephew.
The study is based primarily on Newman’s Letters and Diaries (the 31 volumes were completed from 1961-2008), and in it Short outlines the relationships Newman experienced with each of those persons as he struggled with his changing religious adherences, ‘endeavour[ing] to give this special, difficult, sanctifying love [of family] the closer look it deserves.’ (30) Each of the chapters focuses on Newman’s very disparate family members, most clearly, perhaps with his siblings, each of whom in particular come fittingly alive in the narrative.
Newman’s father died in September of 1824, only three months after Newman was ordained, and his mother in 1836. The brothers, Charles and Frank, provide fascinating foils for Newman’s own development, the first a convinced Owenite of whom relatively little is written and who is engagingly, although somewhat briefly, treated. Frank (that is Francis W.) Newman’s ‘search for truth’ is appropriately given three times as much space, as he moved from being a highly conservative Darbyite to a non-conformist Theist. Newman’s sister Mary (who died early in 1828) is treated briefly, greater attention being given to Harriet (and ‘English Anti-Romaimsm) and above all to Jemima, with the appropriate subtitle ‘the Misery of Difference’). Jemima’s second son, John Rickards Mozley, is treated in a final chapter which incorporates some reflections on ‘Late Victorian Scepticism,’ not always clearly and directly tied, however, to the thought of John Rickards.
The book at large makes interesting reading, although its pages might have done with a more careful paring. Quite properly, its orientation is directed toward Newman himself, but the reader may have wished for a fuller description of each of his brothers and sisters (as well as of his nephew) in greater fullness and in their own right, and perhaps greater constraint on the extensive quotationfrom Newman’s writings could have been imposed by a careful editor.