Francis William Newman (27 June 1805 – 4 October 1897) was an English classical scholar and moral philosopher, prolific miscellaneous writer and activist for vegetarianism and other causes.
He was the younger brother of John Henry Newman. Thomas Carlyle in his life of John Sterling called him a "man of fine attainments, of the sharpest-cutting and most restlessly advancing intellect and of the mildest pious enthusiasm." George Eliot called him "our blessed St. Francis" and his soul "a blessed yea".
Early life
He was born in London, the third son of John Newman, a banker, and his wife Jemima Fourdrinier, sister of Henry Fourdrinier. With his brother John Henry, he was educated at Ealing School. He matriculated at Worcester College, Oxford in 1822, where he obtained a double first class and graduated B.A. in 1826. He was elected fellow of Balliol College in the same year.
During his undergraduate days, his father's bank having failed, he was able to complete his degree by relying on financial support from his older brother John Henry. Early in his student period, however, lodging as he did with his brother, he disagreed enough on established religion to feel, at least as he expressed it in a late autobiographical work, that there was a breach in their relationship. He never graduated M.A., normally at Oxford a pure formality, since he shortly acquired religious scruples about signing as required the 39 Articles.
In 1827, Newman went to Delgany, County Wicklow, where for a year he tutored the sons of Edward Pennefather, There he fell under the influence of Pennefather's brother-in-law, the Rev John Nelson Darby, one of the nascent group of Plymouth Brethren, who he describes in Phases of Faith as "the Irish Clergyman".
Conscientious scruples respecting the ceremony of infant baptism then led him to resign his fellowship in 1830.
Missionary
Newman then took another position, in the family of Henry Parnell, 4th Baronet Parnell. An obituary of Edward Cronin, a Catholic convert widowed in 1829, suggests a Bible study group as origin of the sequel. Newman had recently been rejected by Maria Rosina Giberne, whom he had been courting for seven years, and had been helping his brother with parish work at Littlemore.
Shortly, in September 1830, Newman left Ireland with a party bound for Baghdad. They intended to join the independent faith mission of Anthony Norris Groves, who was working there with John Kitto and Karl Gottlieb Pfander. The party included John Vesey Parnell, who was its financial backer with John Gifford Bellett, Edward Cronin, and others. The journey, guided by the early views of Darby, ended badly. Newman's letters written home during the period of his mission were collected and published in 1856. There are other accounts, by the Brethren historian William Blair Neatby, and by Henry Groves, son of Anthony Norris Groves.
In 1833, Newman returned to England, via Tehran, with Kitto, arriving in June. He intended to find additional support for the mission: but rumours of unsoundness in his views on the doctrine of eternal punishment had preceded him.
Academic
Finding himself looked upon with suspicion by erstwhile evangelical colleagues, including Darby, Newman gave up on his vocation of missionary. He became classical tutor at the non-sectarian Bristol College, which existed 1831–1841 at Park Row, Bristol.
In 1840, he became classics professor at Manchester New College, the dissenters' college lately returned from York, at the time linked to London University. In 1846 he moved to become a professor of Latin at University College, London, where he remained until 1869.
During his tenure there, Newman produced a translation of the Iliad in 1856 that was notable for having come under heavy criticism from English poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold, which infamously led to a bitter quarrel between the two in 1860 and resulted in Arnold's famous series of essays on translation, On Translating Homer.
Views
Newman once described himself as "anti-everything". Wilfrid Meynell commented that Newman was as a "deist, vegetarian, anti-vaccinationist, to whom a monastery is even as a madhouse." Literary critic Lionel Trilling described Newman as a "militant vegetarian, an intransigent anti-vivisectionist, an enthusiastic anti-vaccinationist."