Worshippers at the high altar

What grabbed me about Newman and His Contemporaries was a puff from an Australian writer quoted on the back. This book, it said, ‘is like a Victorian Dance to the Music of Time’. Sounded like my kind of thing, especially since the central figure interlocking the characters is in this case not Widmerpool but that elusive, ethereal and indefinable figure, John Henry Newman.

It is probably hard for a modern reader to grasp how important Newman was to his contemporaries. Since his beatification last summer, Newman will seem a little bit less real to many people, a bit more of a plaster saint. And it will be perhaps more difficult to recognise how important he was to those who did not share his faith, as well as to those who did. Mark Pattison, thought by some to be the model of Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch, wrote to Newman in the year that book was published:

If I have not dared to approach you in any way of recent years, it has been only from the veneration and affection which I felt for you at the time you left us, which are in no way diminished; and however remote my intellectual standpoint may now be from your own, I can truly say that I learnt more from you than from anyone else with whom I have ever been in contact.

Another agnostic, Matthew Arnold, wrote in very similar terms. George Eliot herself, on a visit to Oxford in the year she was writing Middlemarch, was taken out to see the ‘monastery’ at Littlemore where Newman had lived in retreat before becoming a Catholic, and she expressed huge admiration for him more than once in her letters. Lord Rosebery, one day to become the Liberal Prime Minister, and no Catholic, met Newman at Norfolk House (the Duke of Norfolk’s London house) when the great man was 79 and felt the attraction: ‘He is much younger looking than his photographs, less wrinkled, has a deliciously soft voice and manner’.