THE
P RTAL
May 2017
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Reading Lists:
How much reading
did JHN get through?
The Revd Dr Stephen Morgan enlightens us
H ere is
a saying you can rely on: as soon as you acquire new bookshelf space, you realise that you need
even more. I write these articles sitting in my study where the constant New Forest battle against dust
is hardly helped by the piles of books that have yet to get onto the shelves. In moments of self-delusion, I call
these piles my future reading.
The truth is that many of the books will simply make
their way on to shelves when I get around to having
more made. I ought to be rather shame-faced about
the excess but, as the title of the tenth of Anthony
Powell’s series of ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ novels
has it, books do furnish a room. I suspect that the
solution to these stacks, currently numbering some
137 volumes of one sort or another, would be to give
myself to reading them with the same dedication John
Henry Newman gave to his reading. What would John
Henry Newman do?
a sixteen-year-old boy. These days few would give
themselves with such dedication save in their pursuit
of a “high score” in some massively multi-player online
virtual reality game.
That is not to say that Newman’s contemporaries
were any different from modern teenagers: from the
entries in his diary, they seem to have spent much
of the time that he was reading running through the
contents of the college cellars – “I really think, if any
one should ask me what qualifications were necessary
for Trinity College, I should say there was only one
For a fourteen-month period at the beginning of his – Drink, drink, drink.”, he wrote to his, no doubt
time in Oxford, two hundred years ago now, Newman anxious, Father.
kept a very detailed diary of the works he was studying.
It leaves one with a dizzying sense of his industry. It
There was, Newman notes, 8 1/3% off the wine bill
was his practice to read for upwards of six hours a day for ready money (i.e. one and eight pence in the pound
– often reading for ten or twelve hours – and this at a – pre-decimal currency made such mathematics
time when his eyes were giving him no little trouble.
simple): hardly an encouragement to spare the liver!
Looking at Newman’s own college bills indicates that
He allowed himself short breaks but even these were he was no mean imbiber either.
often given over to industry: he records half an hour
At a time when his Father’s bank was in some
here and there for violin practice. His lifelong practice
of taking walks gave respite and it is clear that he found difficulty, being presented in correspondence with
listening to his sisters’ conversation for an hour or two bills for six bottles of the best sherry (£1:19:00),
eighteen bottles of port (£5:17:00) and eight shillings
particularly diverting.
for broken bottles, can hardly have eased the elder
The reading to which he dedicated so much time Newman’s worries and this at a time when an
was serious stuff. In his first full term at Oxford, from agricultural labourer would have earned no more
October 1817, he read the whole of the extant works than fifteen shillings a week.
of Sophocles, Heroditus, Xenophon’s Anabasis, three
The bottle of good burgundy (Gevrey Chambertin
of Cicero’s works, some Ovid, four of Juvenal’s Satires,
nearly the whole of Horace, Tacitus, the whole of Virgil Clos Tamisot 2005, with thanks to a generous
and five plays by Terence. The first three works he read benefactor) with which I marked being overcome with
Paschal joy is, it would seem, poor recompense for not
(naturally) in Greek, the others in Latin.
getting on with reading Fr Andrew Pinsent’s Second-
It is a quite staggering level of industry and this in Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics. WWJHND?