The Three Newmans: A Triumvirate of Secularity

The widely divergent religious reconversions of the two Newman brothers — John Henry to Roman Catholicism and Francis William to a ‘primitive Christianity’ — have intrigued and troubled commentators and historians since the mid-nineteenth-century, when their religious crises represented a national concern. With the publication of Francis William Newman’s The Soul (1849) and Phases of Faith (1850), at least one reviewer lamented the loss of two of the Church of England’s most talented scholars and brothers — the one to ‘superstition’ and the other to ‘unbelief’.1 The fascination with the religious lives of ‘the Newman brothers’ continued well into the twentieth century and became the title of a book.2 Even broader studies of the period included discussion of the two Newmans.