RSV

Rivista di Studi Vittoriani

30-31
Volume stampato con il contributo del Dipartimento di Scienze
Economico-Quantitative e Filosofico-Educative dell’Università degli
Studi “G. D’Annunzio” di Chieti-Pescara

Gli articoli proposti per la pubblicazione sono esaminati da due referees

coperti da anonimato. Le eventuali revisioni sono obbligatorie ai fini
dell’accettazione.

ISBN 978-88-7433-852-8
ISSN 1128-2290

Direttore Responsabile: Domenico Cara

Supplemento a:
“Tracce - trimestrale di scrittura e
ricerca letteraria”
Edizioni Tracce
Via Eugenia Ravasco, 54
65123 PESCARA
 RSV
Rivista di Studi Vittoriani

Anno XV-XVI Luglio 2010-Gennaio 2011 Fascicoli 30-31

Direttore
Francesco Marroni

Comitato di Redazione
Mariaconcetta Costantini, Renzo D’Agnillo,
Anna Enrichetta Soccio

Comitato Scientifico
Ian Campbell (University of Edinburgh)
J.A.V. Chapple (University of Hull)
Allan C. Christensen (John Cabot University, Roma)
Pierre Coustillas (Université de Lille)
Cristina Giorcelli (Università di Roma III)
Jacob Korg (University of Washington)
Phillip Mallett (University of St. Andrews)
Franco Marucci (Università di Venezia)
Rosemarie Morgan (Yale University)
Norman Page (University of Nottingham)
Carlo Pagetti (Università di Milano)
David Paroissien (University of Buckingham)
Alan Shelston (University of Manchester)

Segreteria di Redazione
Francesca D’Alfonso, Tania Zulli

Con la collaborazione scientifica del C.U.S.V.E.

(Centro Universitario di Studi Vittoriani e Edoardiani - Pescara)
 SOMMARIO

SAGGI

Gloria Lauri-Lucente — “Adapting Edith Wharton.

Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence” ” 7

Anna Enrichetta Soccio — “Elements of the Fantastic in

J. H. Riddell’s The Uninhabited House” ” 31

Michela Marroni — “The Law and the Lady: Wilkie

Collins, detection femminile e testo frammentato” ” 41

CONTRIBUTI

Raffaella Antinucci — “Cardinal Newman, the

Victorian Gentleman, and a New Idea of a University” ” 69

Elisa Bizzotto — “Pater as Intellectual Herald of British

Decadence” ” 83

Viktoria Tchernichova — “Browning’s Regeneration

of the Old Yellow Book” ” 105

Chiara Scargiali — “Le rappresentazioni pittoresche

colonialistiche dell’alterità e il discorso femminista nel
resoconto di viaggio di Alice M. Hart” ” 135

Recensioni e schede di Francesca Caraceni, Francesca D’Alfonso,

Michela Marroni, Saverio Tomaiuolo, Tania Zulli.
 Raffaella Antinucci

Cardinal Newman, the Victorian Gentleman,

and a New Idea of a University

Fought out in the British press and public sphere from the
1830s, the impassioned debate about the gentleman deeply
affected the movement of reform that ran through the halls of
Victorian academia. The reorganization of the education system
lay at the root of the activity promoted by the “Royal Commission
for Enquiry” in 1850 and by the Clarendon parliamentary
commission, whose final report led to the passage of the Public
School Acts in 1868. Literature, in its turn, played a crucial role in
shaping the poles under discussion.
The present contribution intends to consider Cardinal
Newman’s Idea of a University (1858) as the ideological space
where these parallel discourses forcibly converge and conflate. As
a first step, the main points of the question on education and the
gentleman, highlighted in the seminal remarks of such “prophets”
as Mill and Ruskin, Arnold and Smiles, will be briefly discussed.
Within this cultural frame, the essay attempts to investigate to what
extent Newman’s discourses refashion contemporary notions in
order to link the ideal of manliness with the academic world. In
particular, the analysis will focus on Newman’s contribution to
the process that, beginning from the Eighties, turned university
education into the new standard for gentlemanliness, a property
that could now be “manufactured”. By the end of the century,
public schools and universities had grown into “factories for
gentlemen”, marking the very end of the debate. At the same time,
the stress Newman lays on the organic and dialectical relationship
between knowledge and religion accounts for both the originality
and the limit of his idea of a university, which will eventually
sustain the secularization of higher education.

RSV / a. XV-XVI, n. 30-31, luglio 2010-gennaio 2011 69

Raffaella Antinucci

1. In its concern for respectability, Victorian imagination

seems to be haunted by the figure of the gentleman, or rather
by the anxiety to find a final definition for true gentlemanliness
against the social arena of an age, as well as a class system, in
endless transition. Although in many ways the by-product
of the emerging new woman, the debate over the gentleman
represents the most palpable point of intersection between
cultural and political discourses aimed at facing and containing
the epistemological repercussions of the Industrial Revolution.
Beyond his manifold depictions and literary fashionings, the
Victorian gentleman embodies a dream of order, and its code
of ethics, in Philip Mason’s definition, “almost a religion”, a
sub-Christian cult1, implementing the programme of spiritual
renewal unfolded in the passage from a designation of rank to
a constellation of moral qualities. If from Dante and Chaucer to
Defoe and Austen the ideal model had fluctuated between social
status and moral conduct, during the mid-nineteenth-century
its meaning was gradually shifting from birth to character, or,
according to Castronovo, “from condition to process”2.
Indeed, the elevation of “character” can be regarded as the
leitmotiv underlying the writings of novelists and critics alike, such
as Dickens and Carlyle, Gaskell and Mills, as well as enlivening
the pages of newspapers and conduct-books. It is not surprising
that in his popular Self-help, Samuel Smiles opens the last chapter,
titled “Character-the True Gentleman”, with the following passage
from The Times: “This aristocracy is not an aristocracy of blood,
not an aristocracy of fashion, not an aristocracy of talent only; it
is an aristocracy of Character. That is the true heraldry of man”3. The
progressive democratization of the gentleman encapsulated in
the quote is further discussed in the final pages of the volume,
devoted to a detailed clarification of the substantial difference

1
Philip Mason, The English Gentleman. The Rise and Fall of an Ideal, London, André
Deutsch, 1982, p. 105.
2
David Castronovo, The English Gentleman. Images and Ideals in Literature and
Society, New York, Ungar, 1987, p. 15.
3
Samuel Smiles, Self-help, with Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance,
ed. Peter W. Sinnema, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 314, emphasis
added.

70
 J. H. Newman

between the plain self-made man and the true gentleman. Often
interpreted as a paean to social advancement, Smiles’s celebrated
book turns out to be the Victorian Bible of gentlemanliness. The
great emphasis placed on behaviour is apparent in every page
of Smiles’s volume, beginning from its epigraph drawn from
Mill: “The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the
individuals composing it”4. Refraining from giving a personal
version of the gentleman in any of his works, Mill’s sublimation
of the average man informs Smiles’s eulogy of self-improvement,
showing how deeply the very idea of the Victorian gentleman is
ingrained in the humanist individualism championed by Mill.
Character and individuality are the key-concepts linking
the Victorian gentleman with the debate over the function of
university addressed by Newman, for the surfacing of a new
model of masculinity entailed a concurrent rethinking of the
educational system. Although very ancient, only during the
first decades of the nineteenth-century did the English public
school become a national institution, perceived as the proper
proving ground for an expandable governing class. If the several
reforms brought about in the second half of the century left the
primacy given to gentlemanliness and to a traditional syllabus
based on the Bible and on the classics almost unchallenged,
formal education was entrusted with the new responsibility of
moulding the character of England’s young citizens in the shape
of Christian gentlemen. The Victorian distinction between moral
education and intellectual training implied a hierarchical order
that subordinated school performance to the formation of what
Raymond Williams calls a “social character”. In the words of
Thomas Arnold, the prophet of the public school ethos, the aims
of higher education were to instil: “first, religious and moral
principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual
ability”5. Dr Arnold’s headmastership at Rugby from 1828 to
1841 provided a new model of education which was popularized
through the publication of two renowned testimonials: Dean

4
Ibid., p. 17.
5
Arthur Stanley, The Life and Corrispondence of Thomas Arnold, D. D., London,
Murray, 1887, vol. I, p. 107, emphasis added.

71
Raffaella Antinucci

Stanley’s Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold (1844) and

Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1858), which
inaugurated a novel genre in European literature. Insisting on the
character-forming role of the new public school, with its blending
of team games and hardship, flogging and bullying, both books
were influential in circulating Arnold’s creed through intellectual
circles and among a wider reading public respectively.
However, the most enduring aspect of Arnold’s legacy can be
traced in its identification of the gentleman of education with the
gentleman of religion. The impulse towards morality that began
to connote the gentleman in the late-eighteenth-century resulted
in the position of centrality gained by religion within the idea
of the gentleman during the Victorian age. In its turn, the pre-
eminence granted to public schools and universities as “characters
factories” and microcosms of society had repercussions on the
religious fabric of Victorian Britain, stirred by several streams of
reforms — Methodism, the Oxford Movement, Evangelicalism
and Muscular Christianity. According to Stanley — the young
Arthur in Hughes’s novel —, Dr Arnold “insisted that the essence
of Christianity lay not in doctrine, but in a Christian Character”6.
Addressing the problem of the place of religion and moral
values in the university setting, and (re-)asserting the gentleman
as the highest result of education, Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a
University can be viewed as the converging point of a network of
issues regarding education, Christianity and masculinity.

2. The Idea of a University comprises ten lectures Newman

gave on the occasion of the establishment of the first Catholic
University of Ireland in 1852, and a series of discourses and articles
written during his rectorship at the same university from 1854 to
1858. In the Preface Newman defines the nature and aims of a
university. Resorting to etymology, he maintains that “it is a place
of teaching universal knowledge”7, a definition which immediately

6
Rowland Prothero, The Life and Correspondence of Dean Stanley, 2 vols, London,
Murray, 1893, I, p. 47.
7
J. H. Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Frank M. Turner, New Haven &
London, Yale University Press, 1996, p. 3. Further references to this edition are
given after quotations in the text together with page number.

72
 J. H. Newman

illuminates some crucial aspects of Victorianism. First, taking

Athens as its model, Newman’s university is largely defined by
a sense of place and shared community. In this regard, the civic
colleges and universities8 oriented to vocational and technical
subjects founded in the second half of the century missed, in
Newman’s opinion, the crucial role of college tutoring. Secondly,
the stress on the teaching function of university education chimes
with the Victorian divide between discovery and teaching. It is
worth noting that before the 1880s it was very uncommon to
define universities in terms of scholarship and research mission9,
activities that were demanded, as Newman reminds us, to
other institutions like the Royal Society, the British Association
and other academies. Newman makes clear that the object of a
university is not so much the advancement, as the diffusion of
human knowledge through teaching. Finally, Newman’s notion
of knowledge both coheres with and differs from contemporary
beliefs. On the one hand, viewed as the content of liberal education,
knowledge means a traditional curriculum including the
medieval liberal arts — grammar, rhetoric, logic and mathematics
— to which Newman adds science and theology. In practice, as
his experience in Dublin testifies, Newman is not excluding any
branch of knowledge. On the contrary, not only does he point out
the interdependence of different branches within what he calls
the “circle of knowledge”10, but he also asserts the advantages
of a comprehensive atmosphere of though where students of
specific subjects can profit by “living among those and under
those who represent the whole circle” (Idea, p. 77). On the other
hand, Newman foretells a modern conception of knowledge as
“a state or a condition of mind” (Idea, p. 85), at the same time the

8
See Keih Vernon, “Civic Collages and the Idea of the University”, in Martin
Hewitt (ed.), Scholarship in Victorian Britain, vol. 1, Leeds,Trinity and All Saints/
Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, 1998, pp. 41-52.
9
See M. Sanderson, The Universities in the Nineteenth Century, London, Routledge,
1975.
10
On Newman’s use of the images of the circle, see Ian Ker, “Theology at the Cen-
ter or the Margin?”, in Newman’s Idea of a University. The American Response, ed.
M. J. Stravinskas and Patrick J. Reilly, Falls Church, VA, Newman House Press,
2002, pp. 11-20.

73
Raffaella Antinucci

content, the means and the end of an education which is always

“in process”. More importantly, what differentiates university
from other educational institutions, including the Church, is its
practical pointlessness. In the fifth discourse Newman praises
liberal knowledge — that is a gentleman’s knowledge — as “an
end in itself”, not so much superior, as distinct from the class of
the Useful. Its sole aim is not to produce a good scholar, but the
creation of an “ethical character, which the cultivated intellect
will form, apart from religious principle” (Idea, p. 147). It follows
that, bringing the mind into form, “liberal education makes not
the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman” (Idea, p. 89).
In his personal battle against utilitarianism, Newman is
not alone. His assumptions regarding the objects of higher
education echo Ruskin’s deprecation of the materialistic vision
of education as a means to acquire practical skills or, even worse,
a higher social status. In Sesame and Lilies (1868) he advocates an
“education which, in itself, is advancement in life”11, claiming
that “a youth is sent to Universities not to be apprenticed to a
trade, nor even always to be advanced in a profession, but always
to be made a gentleman and a scholar”12. Moreover, both Newman
and Ruskin value accuracy as the first quality that characterizes
the gentleman. This is the reason why Newman names grammar
at the very top of his list of subjects. In fact, in the Idea he makes
extensive use of etymology to unfold his explanations, as when
deriving the inutility of university education from its “liberal”
nature as opposed to everything servile. Accuracy of speech and
expression, however, is a poor achievement if disconnected from
the more valuable precision of thought and moral conduct. Ruskin’s
recommendation of a scholarly approach to life translates into
the same steady “search after truth” which, drawn from Cicero,
lies at the heart of Newman’s Idea. Nevertheless, the two thinkers
diverge in their view of the preconditions of gentlemanliness.
In Ruskin’s opinion, the notion of gentlemanliness carries a

11
E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), The Works of John Ruskin: Library
Edition, London, George Allen, 1903-12, XVIII, p. 55.
12
Ibid., XX, p. 18, emphasis added.

74
 J. H. Newman

genetic and innate quality, linked to birth and breeding13 that can
neither be produced nor bought, but only developed through
formal education and self-learning. Conversely, a “man” in
Newman’s sense is made by the acquisition of that mental habit
which is the point of a liberal education. Natural bents and
mental endowments are counted among the several factors that,
although favouring the gentleman’s path towards refinement,
may prove fruitless without the harmonizing action of teaching
and social training:

All that goes to constitute a gentleman, — [...] the self-

possession, the courtesy, the power of conversing, the talent of not
offending; [...] the delicacy of thought, the happiness of expression;
[...] — these qualities, some of them come by nature, some of
them may be found in any rank, some of them are a direct
precept of Christianity; but the full assemblage of them, bound
up in the unity of an individual character, do we expect they
can be learned from books? are they not necessarily acquired
[...]? (Idea, p. 78, emphasis added).

Differently from Ruskin, Newman’s idea of a university posits

the primacy of nurture over nature.

3. Moving from these premises, in the eighth discourse,

“Knowledge viewed in relation to Religion”, Newman broaches
the thorny subject of the relationship between religion and
what he calls the “Religion of Reason”, or “Religion [...] of
the philosopher, scholar and gentleman” (Idea, p. 128). In the
preceding discourses Newman had already dealt with the place
of theology in relation to the other branches of knowledge, and
in the fifth discourse, as we have seen, had separated knowledge
from virtue, refinement from faith, envisaging for the university
and the Church two different tasks and purviews. Thus, as pointed
out by Ian Ker, what Newman is discussing in the most famous of
his discourses, is “not so much the relation between intellectual

13
See Elizabeth Hale, “Turning Away from Formal Education: John Ruskin and
the Scholar Within”, in Hewitt (ed.), op. cit., p. 116.

75
Raffaella Antinucci

culture and religion, as between the religion of intellectual culture

and religion itself”14. In other words, after having praised the
pursuit of knowledge and intellectual activities as useful human
means for staving off the evils of society, Newman, like Smiles,
warns his readers against the “sin of the intellect”, i.e. the perils
of conceiving culture in terms of mere erudition and refined
manners. Drawing from eighteenth-century sources, notably
Forrester’s The Polite Philosopher (1734) and Lord Shaftesbury’s
Characteristics (1711), the lecture underlines the human propensity
to confuse gentility with virtue, to loath sin on the ground of his
vulgarity and to consider courtesy as an end in itself. Quoting
lord Chesterfield’s letters, Newman shows how easily manners
can be misleading, or, as he puts it, how frequently “to seem
becomes to be” (Idea, p. 140). True gentility, which is the outcome
of university education, on the contrary, means the acquisition of
a “habit of mind which lasts through life”.
The tenth section of the lecture contains the long popular
passage describing what Newman considers the most “accurate”
definition of the gentleman as “one who never inflicts pain” (Idea,
p. 145). Among the first hallmarks of a gentleman, Newman
numbers his role of “social tuner”, a recurring feature of the
Victorian versions of gentlemanliness:

The true gentleman carefully avoids whatever may

cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he
is cast; all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all
restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great
concern being to make every one at their ease and at home
(Idea, pp. 145-146).

In spite of his manifold literary typifications, the figure of the

gentleman is often called into being to re-compose the legacy
of chaos and social ambiguity left by the industrial revolution,
offering the reassuring sight of the British keeper of tradition.
Newman’s ideal is no exception. His paragon of moral conduct

14
Ian Ker, John Henry Newman. A Biography, Oxford and New York, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, p. 388, emphasis in the text.

76
 J. H. Newman

appears to exert the Augustan practice of civility and the

golden mean (happy medium), careful not to cause any harm
or troubles to his fellow creatures, committed to the lay mission
of social cohesion. “Tender towards the bashful, gentle towards
the distant, and merciful towards the absurd” (Idea, p. 146),
Newman’s definition is attuned with the overall commendation of
a moral superiority emerging and trained within a social context.
Significantly, his model is built around actual examples drawn
from everyday life, aimed at showing the leading principles that
should govern the gentleman’s interaction with his fellowmen,
especially in conversation.
Nonetheless, by depicting the figure of a “patient, forbearing,
and resigned” human being, Newman has often been criticised
on account of the passive, almost effeminate, nature infused in
his creation and mirrored, on a syntactical level, in the negative
forms and verbs underpinning his narrative15. Still, Newman’s
portrayal is not an original one. His stress on the meek side of
gentlemanliness reveals the attempt to conjoin and refashion in
a personal way older and current convictions. One of the first
Victorian declarations about “the gentleness of the ungenteel”,
Francis Lieber’s The Character of a Gentleman (1846) offers itself as
Newman’s hypotext in defining the gentleman as that “character
[...] to which [...] self-respect, a studious avoidance of offending
others, and a liberality are habitual and have become natural”16.
At the same time, Newman’s discourse prefigures several of the
trends that were later developed by critics and writers of diverse
doctrines and schools of thought. The most striking example of
Newman’s great influence can be found in the fiction of his most
bitter opponent. Two years after the publication of the first part of
The Idea of a University, Charles Kingsley pokes gentle fun at the
current notion of gentlemanliness introducing the protagonist
of Westward Ho! (1855), Amyas Leigh, as an uneducated boy, by
any Victorian standard an “ignorant young savage”. Clearly, the
target of Kingsley’s irony and criticism is the specimen of the

15
See A. Dwight Culler, The Imperial Intellect: A Study of Newman’s Educational Ideal,
New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1955, p. 239.
16
Francis Lieber, The Character of a Gentleman, Cincinnati, J. A. James, 1846, p. 6.

77
Raffaella Antinucci

scholar gentleman. A decade before the celebrated disputation

with Newman, which led to the writing of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua
(1864), Kingsley is denouncing the philological and classicizing
education imparted in public schools and universities, openly
defended in The Idea of a University. Yet, when expounding
the traits that make Amyas “a young gentleman” in a more
comprehensive sense, Kingsley almost paraphrases the eighth
discourse:

[Amyas believes] it to be the finest thing in the world

to be a gentleman; by which word he had been taught to
understand the careful habit of causing needless pain to no
human being, poor or rich, and of taking pride in giving up
his own pleasure for the sake of those who were weaker
than himself17.

Following his Socialist and Muscular view of Christianity,

Kingsley enriches the docility and unselfishness of Newman’s
ideal with an as much important invigorating manliness, based
on physicality and body care. His idea of gentlemanliness is
accordingly incarnated in the figure of a “valiant” and “gallant”
Christian.
In this connection, the most prominent aspect that differentiates
Newman’s gentleman from Kingsley, Hughes and Thomas
Arnold’s variants of Christian masculinity resides, amazingly, in
his potential “non-Christian” nature. Whilst the newly convert
obviously sponsors a Catholic gentleman, stating that “he even
seems like a disciple of Christianity itself” (Idea, p. 147), he is forward-
looking in denying that he is necessarily one18. As a corollary, it
follows that, although not every gentleman is a Christian, every
Christian is a gentleman. The Irish lectures, therefore, shed light
on how, in its way of becoming a substitute for religion, the
ethical code of the gentleman derived from Christianity many

17
Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho!, London and New York, Macmillan, 1906, p. 9,
emphasis added.
18
Robert Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel, London, Allen &
Unwin, 1981, p. 92.

78
 J. H. Newman

of its finer points. Ultimately, being the creation of civilization,

rather than of Christianity, Newman’s educated gentleman is the
paragon of tolerance and ecumenism:

If he be an unbeliever, he will be too profound and

large-minded to ridicule religion or to act against it; he is
too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in his infidelity. [...]
He is a friend of religious toleration (Idea, p. 89).

In his portrayal of the gentleman Newman is negotiating

some of the competing elements of Victorian masculinities,
combining Mill’s “humanist” manliness and classless ideal with
Thomas Arnold’s figure of a Christian gentleman dedicated to
the service of society. It is no accident that Newman’s teaching
would exert a lasting influence on Matthew Arnold’s balanced
concept of masculinity as the perfect harmony between the moral
and intellectual sides of man, notably his Hebraic and Hellenic
components. From Newman’s lectures at Oxford Arnold derived
the “ruling ideas” of liberal learning and gentlemanliness19, as
well as a developing understanding of culture. Tellingly, both
Newman and Arnold tried to refute the charges of effeminacy
and “cultivated inaction” by proving the “practicability” of their
ideals of manliness. Throughout the Idea, Newman is overstressing
the “active” power engendered by university education as
the civilizing force able to fulfil the highest social goal, that of
forging gentlemen with the express “object of training them to
fill their respective posts in life better, and of making them more
intelligent, capable, active members of society. Its art is the art of

19
In a letter to Newman, Arnold wrote that he had especially learnt from him
“habits, methods, ruling ideas, which are constantly with me” (Unpublished Let-
ters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Arnold Whitridge, New Haven, Yale University Press,
1923, pp. 65-66). On the relationship between Newman and Arnold, see Henry
Tristram, “Newman and Matthew Arnold”, The Cornhill, n.s., LX (March 1926),
pp. 309-319; David J. DeLaura, “Arnold and Newman: Humanism and the Ox-
ford Tradition”, in Hebrew and Hellene, Austin and London, University of Texas
Press, 1969, pp. 5-80; and, more recently, James C. Livingstone, “Christiany and
Culture in Newman’s Idea of a University”, in Gerard Magill (ed.), Discourse and
Context. An Interdisciplinary Study of John Henry Newman, Carbondale and Ed-
wardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1993, pp. 95-108.

79
Raffaella Antinucci

social life, and its end is fitness for the world” (Idea, p. 5). This
facet of the question is the key to understanding why Newman
thought literature, and Greek literature in particular, should be
the core of university education and of the life of the mind20. In
the ninth discourse he distinguishes literature from both religion
and science on the basis of their different subjects, namely God
and nature. Literature, instead, is defined as “the book of man”
(Idea, p. 152). But, then, how can the sinful literature of sinful
man be at the centre of University teaching? Newman’s answer
appeals to the essential goal of university, that of preparing men
for this world. Given that university is neither a convent, nor
a seminary, but “a place to fit men of the world for the world”
(Idea, p. 160), the “pagan” food of civilization represented by the
classics seems to provide the best guide for the gentleman to
make his way on earth among his fellow mortals.
Concomitantly, the recurrence of Darwinian terms like “fit”
and “fitting” speaks of what I would call the “evolutionist
dialectics” that informs Newman’s view of culture and religion,
considered both in their mutual relationship, as well as in
themselves21. As the publication of An Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine (1845) testifies, Newman shared the evolutional
principle apparent in nature, applying it first to religion and
later to human knowledge. Since education means a progressive
coming to know, Newman’s gentleman is anything but a finished
product.
Inscribed in Newman’s style and narrative texture are the
lasting fascination and the multi-sided legacy of The Idea. On a
linguistic level, the industrial terminology Newman adopts to
define the gentleman — including expressions like “acquired”,
“fitting”, “product” — contributed toward the process of
“serialization” undergone by the Victorian gentleman, who,

20
See Joseph Walsh, “Newman’s Idea of a Classical University”, Renascence, 56
(Fall 2003), 1, pp. 21-41.
21
See Edward Jeremy Miller, “Newman’s Idea of a University: Is It Viable Today?”,
in Magill (ed.), op. cit., pp. 109-125, and Brian Martin, “Literature and Religion”,
in John Henry Newman. His Life & Work, New York and Mahwah, NS, Paulist
Press, 1990, pp. 142-157.

80
 J. H. Newman

ironically, ends by being absorbed into the set of values he had

so fiercely tried to oppose. Once academic education becomes
the new standard for gentlemanliness, the debate comes to an
end at the turn of the century. On the other hand, Newman’s
developing and organic vision of knowledge, the overemphasis
on methodology over content, Popper’s ante litteram notion of
error as “the way to truth, and the only way”, his dialogical and
dialectical view of education are the distinctive features that
make The Idea of a University a modern and challenging book for
Victorian and today’s readers alike.

81