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NEWMAN & CHARLES DICKENS
These two Victorian giants who, despite moving in different social and intellectual circles, shared a profound concern for the “soul” of England during the Industrial Revolution. Newman (1801-1890) and Dickens (1812-1870) represent two responses to the onset of the Machine Age. Dickens fought the machine with sentiment and satire; Newman fought it with theology and…
NEWMAN & DR JOHNSON
John Henry Newman read, studied and imitated Samuel Johnson’s style as one of the foundational influences on his own prose style. Attentive also to the Romantic poets, especially Southey and Wordsworth, his intellectual and literary roots were firmly planted in the English Augustan tradition of the eighteenth century of which Johnson was the titan. Included…
NEWMAN & THE POETS
ON POETRY AND POETS JOHN HENRY NEWMAN AND THE ENGLISH POETS I Introduction This essay traces Saint John Henry Newman’s encounters, intellectual, moral, spiritual and literary, with the poets of the English tradition, from medieval poets to the Victorian poets of his own day, and it explores his influence on two Catholic poets of the…
Catholic Converts
Melanie McDonagh, Converts, From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, Yale University Press 2025 In Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Christ and the Soldier’, an honest Tommy passes by a stone roadside cross somewhere on the Western Front. When he starts chatting to the crucified figure, he hears a whispered reply:…
The Spiritual Adventure of Henri Matisse
Charles Miller, The Spiritual Adventure of Henri Matisse, Vence’s Chapel of the Rosary, Unicorn Publishing Group 2024 232 pp £27 This is a beautiful book, both physically and in its content. Unicorn has provided the spacious format and excellent photographic reproduction essential for the telling of a story in which drawing, colour and spatial awareness express “the spiritual adventure”…
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