Caricature of James Anthony Froude from Punch, December 30 1882
The 1840s were marked by as distinguished an array of publications as any period of English literature can boast. In that decade alone, Dickens published Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and Dombey and Son (1848); Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848) and Pendennis (1849); Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841) and Past and Present (1843). These years also saw the appearance of Tennyson’s Poems (1842), Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), George Eliot’s translation of Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1846), the Brontes’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (both 1847), Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), and, posthumously, Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare (1849). Yet for many, the most significant title was none of these, nor was it as pithy. Remarks on Certain Passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles (1841)—otherwise known as Tract 90—by John Henry Newman struck the Church of England with the force of a thunderbolt. Newman’s book set out to show that many central Roman Catholic doctrines might be held in good conscience by Protestants, and that interpretations of the sixteenth-century Articles (to which all Anglican clergy were required to subscribe) which held that they condemned those doctrines, were erroneous. Newman was unconvinced by his own arguments, and his secession to the Catholic Church in 1845 produced another sensation. But in his heyday, according to one of his early followers, “For hundreds of young men Credo in Newmannum was the genuine symbol of faith.”
That particular follower, James Anthony Froude
