Newman, the Tractarians and the British Critic

Abstract

We state as a fact, which we have received, on what we deem undoubted authority, that the Puseyite party have bought up the BRITISH CRITIC, which publication accordingly will from henceforth be dedicated to the promulgation of their principles: The Record, 1 Jan. 1838

This article focuses on the Tractarian takeover and subsequent control of the British Critic, a politically and theologically conservative quarterly periodical, between 1838 and 1843. In doing so it claims several justifications. Firstly, and primarily, it seeks to demonstrate the importance of the Critic within first-generation Tractarianism and therefore to rehabilitate an extensive periodical journalism as a vital yet neglected source for historians of the movement. Though various Tractarians such as Richard Hurrell Froude, John Henry Newman, John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey had all written for the British Magazine and William Sewell regularly for the Quarterly Review in the early 1830s, it was the Critic which came to serve as the principal medium for the movement's commentary. Historians' neglect of this commentary, it is suggested, has had important consequences in terms of our understanding of Tractarianism, for it has served to marginalise certain aspects of the movement's early thought – in particular the social criticism which was a consistent feature of the Critic's pages.