Author: Newman, John Henry
Biography:
NEWMAN, John Henry (1801-1890: ODNB)
The eldest son of a London banker, John Newman (1767-1824), and his wife, Jemima Fourdrinier (1772-1836), the daughter of a papermaker, Newman was born at 80 Old Bond Street, on 21 Feb 1801. To age seven, he lived at Ham House, on the Thames near Richmond. In London, his family lived in Bloomsbury at 17 Southampton Place. He gained his earliest ideas about religion at age 15 under the influence of an evangelical, the Rev. Walter Mayers, at a private school near Ealing. In 1810, he briefly entered Lincoln’s Inn. Newman matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford, on 14 Dec 1816 (BA 1820), and was elected fellow of Oriel College (12 Apr. 1822). At Oriel, John Keble (q.v.) was one of his closest friends. He was ordained priest in 1826. In 1830, he signaled his break from evangelicalism by withdrawing his subscription to the Oxford auxiliary of the Church Missionary Society. Beginning in 1833, he cooperated with Keble and others to defend apostolic succession and the prayer book in documents seminal to the Oxford Movement, Tracts for the Times. On 9 Oct 1845, having resigned as vicar of the university church of St Mary the Virgin and his Oriel fellowship, he abandoned his effort to find a via media between Protestantism and Catholicism and was received into the Church of Rome. He was ordained priest in Rome in 1847, elevated to cardinal in 1879, proclaimed venerable in 1991, beatified in 2010, and canonized on 13 Oct. 2019. Newman’s works that have been influential beyond religious circles include his defence of a liberal education, The Idea of a University (1852); his riposte to Charles Kingsley’s Anti-Catholic bigotry, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864); and his investigation of the origin of conviction, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). Additional to the poems listed in this database, he published The Dream of Gerontius in 1865. He was the author of religious novels, Callista (1855), and Loss and Gain (1848). OUP have published his letters and diaries (32 vols, 1961-2008). Newman died on 11 Aug. 1890 at Edgbaston Oratory, Birmingham. He is buried in the oratory’s cemetery. His brother Francis (1805-1897) wrote favourably of vegetarianism and unfavourably of birth control, vaccination, vivisection, centralized government, and private ownership of land (ODNB 17 Apr. 2023; ancestry.com 17 Apr. 2023; CCEd 17 Apr. 2023) JC
Other Names:
- J. H. N.
- J. H. Newman