APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA: BEING A REPLY TO A PAMPHLET... BY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 1864
Regular priceSale price
£1,200.00
Unit price/ per
Tax included.
[NEWMAN, John Henry]. Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a Reply to a Pamphlet entitled "What, Then, Does Dr Newman Mean?". London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864.
First edition - the eight original parts (including Appendix) bound together in one volume. Leather-bound; hardcover; octavo (22cm x 13cm x 4cm); pp. iv, 430, 127. English text. Eight original parts including the original printed paper wrappers bound together here in modern quarter leather gilt, with marbled boards. Condition: GOOD. The binding is tight and secure. Covers bright and clean. Just a few leaves with light spotting. Part VI is lacking the front printed wrapper, else the contents are complete. Bookplate to front endpaper. Scarce.
Notes: Newman's 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua' emerged out of a squabble in print with Charles Kingsley, priest, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, and author (most famously of 'The Water Babies'). In a review of J. A. Froude's (notably anti-Catholic) 'History of England' appearing in the January 1864 number of 'Macmillan's Magazine', Kingsley included the remark: "Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy", and that "Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage". With its cliché of Catholic cunning, its sarcastic swipe at clerical celibacy, as well as its personal slighting of Newman (who had left the Church of England for the Catholic Church in 1845), Kingsley's review prompted a heated correspondence between Kingsley, Newman, and the magazine's editor. Newman published this correspondence (with concluding comments) in pamphlet form, Kingsley quickly responding with his own pamphlet entitled 'What, Then, Does Mr. Newman Mean?' (in March). The spat with Kingsley encouraged Newman to write something more substantial, "a survey of my whole course", no less, "which I should not be sorry for, tho' I dread the wear and tear of it" (he wrote in a letter). The 'Apologia', the most personal thing he would ever write, was written at remarkable speed ("My fingers have been walking nearly 20 miles a day") and published in weekly pamphlet form by Longman, Roberts and Green. In keeping with the speed of composition, the eight pamphlets were issued in book-form (with minor corrections) the same year, also by Longman. The work, which has been in print ever since, is now recognised as one of the great nineteenth century English autobiographies (along with those by, among others, Carlyle, Mill, Darwin, and Ruskin), as well as an addition to the tradition of English spiritual biography going back to Julian of Norwich and Bunyan (not to speak of a wider tradition reaching back to Augustine's 'Confessions'). While relatively common in book-form, this work is scarce in the original parts. [Ian Ker, 'John Henry Newman: A Biography', Oxford: 1988; Blehl A1b].
