John Henry Newman

There were three John Newmans. They were Grandfather John, whom we will call John I; his son, John II; and his grandson, who is known to us all as John Henry Newman. John I came from Cambridgeshire; from a place called Swaffham Bulbeck. He was a very poorman. When -to go still further back -his grandfather William had died, in 1742, he had left little to his heirs: a house, a common and eleven acres of land. He left to John I's father: "All these my three acres of arable land holden by Copy of Court Roll of the Manor of Brughall to him and to his heirs for ever." He left to his other four children the sum, each, of half-acrown. He left a token also to John I, his little grandson: "All that Bed whereon I lye, with the Beadstead, Curtins, and appurtenances belonging to the same, to him and his heirs for ever."

Ham is astonishing domination of place. Years and years after, when John Henry Newman was sailing past the island of Ithaca, he thought less of Homer than of Ham. The rock that looms before his ravished eyes is in the shape of Ithaca , but it could as easily be Eel Pie Island . He writes: "I thought of all the various glimpses which memory barely retains of that earliest time of life when one seems almost to realise the remnants of a pre-existent state." In Naples , in a nightmare, he dreamed that he was escaping to the bower and shrubberies of Grey Court House. When he was a boy lonely at school and dreamed of heaven, why Heaven was Ham.

The gropings of the young, their extravagant enthusiasms, their sophomoric glooms, their fitful happiness, their frightening gallantry, their unfounded fears, their adolescent certainties and their apparently incurable despairs are part and parcel of the joy and heartache of parenthood. In the summer of 1816, when he had much else to cope with, John Newman had to watch his eldest son cleave suddenly to the most narrow brand of Calvinistic Evangelicalism. In due course, Frank followed in his brother's footsteps. Charlie was to develop ideas even more exasperating to his despairing papa.

In later life John Henry would never have it that he had experienced the prescribed and passionate form of Evangelical "conversion." It is true that he never travelled the formal sequence of conviction of sin, terror, despair, the sudden glorious news of the free and full salvation which the apprehension of Christ offered to all men, with its lovely, soothing sense of pardon and its assurance of salvation, culminating in a great sign of joy and peace at the certainty that the converted will now persevere to the end. Yet his cool account of the matter is a bit too cool.

Yet, John was right, if seemingly cold and insensitive; right, at any rate, as for John Henry Newman. This power he had of cutting his losses rationally was of a piece with his non-rational doubts about the world's reality. It is easy to dismiss what so barely exists. His philosophy should have given him, simultaneously, the power of enjoying equally whatever came his way, since no one thing or place can have pre-eminence over another in a world so insubstantial as this, "whether Alton or Norwood, Ealing or Ham, Southampton Street or anywhere else where he may in future be."

Back in London John Newman began to lead a life that hangs midway between Pere Goriot and Wilkins Micawber: a double life behind the respectable family facade. No single word has crept into their letters or memoirs about his secret. There can be no certainty that any of them knew about it. Did he keep it dark even from his wife and his eldest son? John Newman had become a tavern-keeper. His business house at 18, Saint James's Walk, Clerkenwell, is described in his bankruptcy papers as a "brewhouse." The rentals tell us that the house had passed from hand to hand every ten years or so. Since 1766 it had been Walford's, Sellon's, Thorpe's, Newman's and Ellis's. John Newman gave ? 100 a year for it.