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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Most students of Victorian literature know that John Henry Newman had a once prominent younger brother named Francis William, the erudite professor of Latin at University College, London, whose translation of Homer provoked an essay in protest by Matthew Arnold. Few, however, seem aware that there was a third Newman brother named Charles Robert, one year younger than John, the story of whose eccentric life has come to be known in any detail only since 1948, thanks to the researches of Maisie Ward and of Sean O'Faolain. Francis Newman passed it over on one page of his strange little “corrective” book on the Cardinal, calling it a wasted life, better left in silence. John Henry did his best to keep hidden from public curiosity what he called the “aimless, profitless, forlorn” life of his brother, even to the point of buying up from a virtual blackmailer a batch of Charles's letters, after his death in 1884, to prevent their coming to popular attention.
1 Cf. Ward, Young Mr. Newman (New York, 1948); and O'Faolain, Newman's Way (New York, 1952), passim. The latter work is especially valuable, despite its tendency to simplification of character at times approaching caricature.
2 Contributions, Chiefly to the Early History of the Late Cardinal Newman (London, 1891), p. viii.
3 Newman's private journal of 1821–28 and the four volumes of “Personal and Family Letters” were of the greatest value. Extracts from the former are preserved among the Miscellaneous Papers in the Cardinal's room at the Oratory under the title “Memoranda, Personal and Most Private, II.” The Oratory catalogue number is A10.2.
4 Can we be surprised at the veneration he would soon accord, even as an Evangelical, to the Fathers of the Church?
5 Cf. O'Faolain, pp. 191–192.
6 Cf. his letter of 2 July 1871 to Maisie Ward, p. 57. He also kept this crucial event of the family history out of the Autobiographical Memoir prefixed to his published Letters and Correspondence, 2 vols. (London, 1891). For more understandable reasons, he did his best to avoid all mention of Charles in this Memoir and virtually succeeded.
7 Holyoake, “The Three Newmans,” in Bygones Worth Remembering, 2 vols. (New York, 1905), i, 193. Despite its title, the essay is almost entirely a tribute to Frank, who, according to Holyoake, wrote more books than any other scholar of his time.
8 Cf. op. cit., pp. 323–325.
