THE
P RTAL
February 2018
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Industry
Dr Stephen Morgan
I n the
first week of 2018 a report emerged from Sweden (it’s always Sweden, isn’t it?) suggesting that the
Swedish government were considering reducing the working day to six hours because research had shown
that after six hours work in a day, our efficiency falls off so quickly that we really ought not to bother. We are,
today, all very busy.
I know this is so because we tell one another
constantly how busy we are. Working life is hectic:
meetings, emails, appointments, telephone calls,
meetings, meetings, meetings – every minute of our
lives taken up with a seemingly accelerating avalanche
of things to do, people to see – oh and did I mention
meetings? first set of University-wide papers, the Responsions,
known as ‘the Little Go”: the remaining five books
of Herodotus, the Odes and Epodes of Horace and
Euclid’s Elements. He was also working through more
Virgil and the Roman Poet Terence.
Call me a sceptic, a cynic even, but I am far from
convinced by any of this talk of busy-ness and of
industrious efficiency. It isn’t only born of a growing
realisation of how little I seem to achieve – that, of
course, may be as much a comment on personal
inadequacy as on anything else – but of sheer
amazement at what our forebears managed to achieve
and to do so without any of the aids to productivity
(mobile phones, computers, motor cars) that are
supposed to enhance our performance. Lest we might be inclined to put this down to the
narrow industriousness of an exceptionally gifted
and focused young man, Newman, whose Oxford
college battels indicate that he led a highly sociable
existence, managed to keep up a fearsome pace for
most of his adult life – as the thirty three volumes of
his correspondence demonstrate, not to mention the
hundreds of sermons and forty one published books,
nor the establishment of schools, an unsuccessful
attempt to establish a University, editing journals,
founding the Oratory and nearly sixty years of parish
work.
Although suggesting to his father that same
month that, on top of the work for Collections and
Even when we have retired, we seem to be busy. It Responsions, sitting for a College Scholarship would be
is a frequently heard complaint of the newly retired more than he could manage, he did, in fact undertake
that they are so busy that they don’t know how they the four-day examinations that brought his election,
managed to find time for work. But are we really so on 18th May 1818, as a Scholar of Trinity College, with
busy, and if we are, are we achieving a very great deal the distinctive dimidiated sleeved gown and £60 per
year: nearly £3,000 in today’s terms.
for all our effort?
I can’t help wondering whether we haven’t simply
been seduced by our own propaganda, by the narrative
His near-contemporaries seem no less hard-working:
of ‘life’s so busy these days’ with which we console and
Gladstone’s library in North Wales contains nearly
excuse ourselves.
10,000 volumes which contain detailed marginal notes
Two hundred years ago this February, in the month in the man’s hand – the pace of reading appears to
that he turned seventeen, John Henry Newman was show no slackening during the periods when he was
preparing for Collections – informal, college-based simultaneously Prime Minister and Chancellor of the
examinations designed to establish whether any of the Exchequer.
reading and study was actually making an impression
What neither man had to contend with, though, were
on the intellect. In a letter to his mother, Newman lists
those triple thieves of time: the television, the wireless
the papers he was required to handin.
radio and the internet. How fortunate they were not to
He lists the first five books of Herodotus, Virgil’s be as busy as us.
Aeneid, Mechanics, the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges
and Ruth. Only six weeks later, he was preparing for his