Leaving it

Rosemary Ashton

• John Henry Newman: A Biography by Ian Ker
  Oxford, 762 pp, £48.00, January 1989, ISBN 0 19 826451 8
• James Fitzjames Stephen: Portrait of a Victorian Rationalist by K.J.M. Smith
  Cambridge, 338 pp, £30.00, November 1988, ISBN 0 521 34029 2

If there can be said to be such a thing as a Victorian ‘frame of mind’, it must be a broad category indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James Fitzjames Stephen. They shared a distrust of reform and democracy, a love of England, and a penchant for getting into controversy in print. Otherwise, they strike one as chalk and cheese, or ‘dog and fish’, as Newman put it, à propos of their one encounter, in 1864, when Stephen attacked the ‘dangerous sophistry’ of Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua. These two biographies of the two men are also strikingly at opposite extremes of the genre’s possibilities. Ker’s life of Newman is massive, expansive, reverential towards its subject, while Smith’s life of Stephen is terse, matter-of-fact, and unblinkingly critical of its subject’s failings.