8 - A Dangerous Correspondence

Summary

This chapter considers John Henry’s Newman’s correspondences from when he turned his face Romeward, in 1843, through to his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. First, I relate the six-year delay in his converting both to his late release of news of his true religious opinions to three close friends and colleagues and to the way in which, when finally written, the most painful letters enact delay syntactically. Behind these delays lay a reluctance to inflict pain on others by leaving what he called ‘the English Church’, abandoning the struggle to reclaim its catholic identity through the Oxford Movement, attaching himself to what many regarded as the Antichrist and thus cutting off his closest friends and relations. Second, I contrast two correspondences that came to a head in 1844 and 1845, one with two of his disciples, the other with his sister Jemima. Finally, I examine some letters from the time of Newman’s reception. Intimacy involves honesty, and in the letters of 1843–45 Newman was torn between confiding in a correspondent and endangering their own settlement of mind. He warned his friend Henry Edward Manning, the other future ‘convert cardinal’, about engaging in a ‘dangerous correspondence’.