The Life of Richard Waldo Sibthorp: Evangelical, Catholic and Ritual Revivalism in the Nineteenth-Century Church (review)

This is an excellent biography of a minor figure in nineteenth-century church history. Michael Trott has done both industrious and impressive research in manuscript sources: the Sibthorp Family Papers and other collections at the Lincoln Archives, material relating to Richard Sibthorp at Magdalen College, Pusey House, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and various other archives. The only other full biography of Sibthorp appeared a year after his death in 1879. He emerges from Trott's study as a sympathetic figure: good-hearted and honest, although his journey in life was "erratic" (viii). Though one possible improvement to the book's readability may have been to divide the long final chapter that treats the years 1843 to 1879, the book is generally well-written.

A theme of Trott's book is Sibthorp's life-long search for "holiness." Baptized an Anglican a month after his birth just outside Lincoln in 1792, he began this quest in adolescence, inspired by the piety of his tutor, an émigré Roman Catholic priest. As a youth he had been "brought up in luxury—accustomed from a child to every gratification [he] could desire" (7). But by his mid-teens a gloom had settled on his family: his brother Henry died tragically, his father suffered a stroke, and the family finances were insecure. As an undergraduate at Magdalen College he almost converted to Roman Catholicism but ultimately remained in the Church of England. He became an Evangelical through Methodism after he witnessed holiness among Methodists of Lincolnshire. Once ordained an Anglican minister he became a fervent Gospel preacher, but eventually he became disillusioned with Evangelicalism. At his chapel on the Isle of Wight, Sibthorp was influenced by Samuel Wilberforce and he accepted High Church views. There he redesigned his chapel, St. James, Ryde, and its ceremonial, attracting many visitors. The redesigned chapel and ceremonial became very controversial, leaving Sibthorp unhappy at Ryde and prompting him to depart. He went to Oxford in 1841 and in October to Oscott, where he underwent a sudden conversion to the Roman Catholic Church.

In his classical lectures on the psychology of conversion in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James suggested three factors necessary for a sudden conversion. First, the individual must be a person of emotional sensibility. Second, he or she must be subject to incursions from the unconscious. Third, he or she must have a permeable consciousness. These three conditions appear to be applicable to Sibthorp. James's insights perhaps throw additional light on his sudden conversion.

A spring of his conversion had been his never-extinguished admiration for Catholic sanctity as well as a feeling that only the Roman Church could satisfy his heart's devotional longings. As he had with Evangelicalism, however, Sibthorp eventually became somewhat disillusioned with Roman Catholicism. The honor given to Mary became a stumbling-block. Then in 1842, Sibthorp was thrown from a horse-drawn gig and injured his spine and head. Although Trott indicates we do not know whether the trauma affected Sibthorp's judgment, Sibthorp's anxieties increased in the months after the accident: he read and re-read the prophetic scriptures and his unease about Marian devotion deepened. Was Marian devotion so extensive that the Roman Church had become "the harlot and Babylon," "the Antichrist" (145–46)? In autumn 1843 he renounced Roman Catholicism.

Sibthorp's renunciation of Roman Catholicism after his sudden conversion two years earlier created a brief sensation in the press, but after 1843 he was largely forgotten. Sadness touched the remainder of his life as he searched for holiness and truth in a world of human imperfection. A friend from earlier days, Sarah Hawkes, had detected in him a tendency to seek "greater degrees of spirituality and elevation" than can be expected (86). In 1847 he was reinstated as an Anglican clergyman in Lincoln, where he...