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Newman and the Victorian Self: From Loss and Gain to the Apologia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

John Peck
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This essay started with the experience of teaching Loss and Gain to an English Literature research class. I was teaching a novel that illustrated an important aspect of the intellectual history of Victorian Britain; the class had been reading a psychological novel which they found (often simultaneously) both perverse and amusing. They were, of course, laughing at Newman rather than with him. I imagine that the response I encountered is not untypical: however Loss and Gain might have been regarded in the past, it is not going to be looked at in the same way today. And when we take account of the impact of critical theory, the picture becomes even more complicated: feminist and New Historicist critics, while not necessarily taking a hostile view of Loss and Gain, are inevitably going to discuss it in a way that challenges traditional approaches. This prompts the question I want to consider: whether current sceptical critical approaches can be reconciled with a sympathetic appreciation of the serious intent of Loss and Gain?

I

A split in criticism becomes apparent immediately if we consider a basic point: Newman is writing about a man’s world. And why not? The Oxford of his day did not admit women. But times change, and even nonfeminist readers today are likely to be struck by the effete remoteness of the university life he depicts, perhaps seeing it as an environment that encourages a fear of women. The problems are apparent in the breakfast party that the junior tutor, Mr Vincent, arranges for Charles Reding and other undergraduates.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 78 , Issue 912 , February 1997 , pp. 85 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Newman, John Henry, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 55Google Scholar. AU subsequent references are to this edition.

2 For a survey of critical interpretations of David Copperfield. see Peck, John, ‘David Copperfield’ and ‘Hard Times’. London, Macmillan and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 1–30Google Scholar.

3 The manner in which characters echo the main character in novels of this period might help explain the fact that a number of critics identify someone other than Reding as a portrait of Newman in Loss and Gain. Charles Stephen Dessain, for example, suggests that ‘Newman is Smith’ (John Henry Newman, London, Nelson, 1966, p. 94)Google Scholar.

4 Ian Hooker, in his major biography of Newman, gets round this problem by discussing Loss and Gain exclusively as a novel of ideas, merely referring in passing to he fact that it ‘contains a number of interesting autobiographical elements’ (John Henry Newman: A Biography. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 336)Google Scholar.

5 Coulson, John. Newman and the Common Tradition: A Study in the Language of Church and Society, Oxford, Clarendon Press. 1970, p. 142Google Scholar.

6 Dessain, op. cit., p. x.

7 Levine, George, The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Ibid., p. 229.

9 Ibid., p. 222.

10 Alan G. Hill, in his introduction to the World's Classic edition, tends to invent a fully‐rounded character who is not actually there in the text (Loss and Gain, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. vii‐xixGoogle Scholar.).

11 Apologia pro Vita Sua, London, Dent and Rutland, Charles E. Tuttle, 1993, p. 87Google Scholar.

12 See Peterson, Linda H., ‘Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua and the Traditions of the English Spiritual Autobiography. PMLA, 100 (1985), 300—14,Google Scholar for a discussion of how Newman adopts and adapts the pattem of other works.

13 See Margaret Myers, ‘The Lost Self: Gender in David Copperfield’, in Peck, John, ed., 'David Copperfield and ‘Hard Times’, London, Macmillan and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 108–24Google Scholar, for a discussion of the idea of feminine‐identified traits in the heroes of Victorian fiction.

14 Poovey, Mary, ‘The Man‐of‐Letters Hero: David Copperfieid and the Professional Writer’, in Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid‐Victorian England, London, Virago, 1989, p. 89Google Scholar.

15 Levine, op. cit., p. 223.

16 Levine, op. cit., p. 223. For a discussion of how Newman in the Apologia successfully confronts the aggressive manliness of Charles Kingsley. see Buckton, Oliver S., “‘An Unnatural State”: Gender, “Perversion”, and Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Victorian Studies, 35 (1992). 359–83.Google Scholar

17 The majority of Newman's critics and biographers have very little to say about Loss and Gain. Ian Ker, for example, sums it up as ‘essentially a sketch’ (op. cit., p. 336).