Victorian Churches and Churchmen: Essays Presented to Vincent Alan McClelland (review)

This volume of sixteen essays, honoring Vincent Alan McClelland, Emeritus Professor of Educational Studies at the University of Hull, who is internationally known for his writings on education, as well as on Victorians, especially Cardinal Manning, appropriately reflects these dual interests of the honoree.

The first four essays consider various aspects of Manning's life and ministry: his ambivalent attitude toward the Education Act of 1870 (Jeffrey von Arx), his pastoral attentiveness both to the sick, personified by Priscilla Maurice (1810-1854), sister of the Anglican theologian Frederick Denison Maurice (Peter Erb), and to the repentant in the person of Virginia Crawford (1862-1948), a socialite divorcée (Robin Gard), as well as Manning's promotion to the episcopate of a reluctant protégé, Henry O'Callaghan (1827-1904), who speedily resigned as Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle (Leo Gooch). The next two essays survey the work of religious communities: Randal Lythgoe (1793-1855) and the Jesuits in Victorian England and Wales (Maurice Whitehead) and the "partnership" of Benedictines with the British Empire and in the United States (Aidan Bellenger). An interlude is then provided by a well-documented, but rather stream-of-facts, account of "Varieties of Modern Scottish Catholic Conservatism" in the twentieth-century—the one essay that seems tangential to the Victorian theme (Bernard Aspinwall).

No collection of Victoriana would be complete without a bit of religious controversy—in this case the horrendous outcry over a reportedly "imprisoned" Polish nun, Sister Barbara Ubryk (1817-1891), who became a cause célèbre in the British press (Rene Kollar). More conventional studies are provided by the biographical sketch of the historian Bernard Ward (1857-1920), long-time president of St. Edmund's College, Ware, and short-time Bishop of Brentwood (Stewart Foster) and an examination of "conversion" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature (Joseph Pearce). Of special theological interest is an essay that proposes a thematic correlation between the "interdependence" of the sciences in Newman's Idea of a University with a similar ecclesiological "interdependence," first between the ecclesia docens and the ecclesia discens in his "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine" and secondly between the triple offices—Prophetical, Priestly, Regal—in his 1877 preface to the Via Media of the Anglican Church (Wulstan Peterburs).

A bicentenary appraisal of the educational work of Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), the well- known Headmaster of Rugby (David Newsome), is followed by a discussion of Tractarian involvement in national education (1838-1843), which provides an often overlooked background to Newman's "Tamworth Reading Room" (1841) and Idea of a University (James Pereiro). Two companion portraits of influential but lesser-known educators follow: the work of Henry Kingsmill Moore (1853-1943) on behalf of the schools of the Church of Ireland (Susan Parkes) and the role of John Scott (1792-1868) in the development of the Wesleyan educational system.

The finale is a lengthy and extensively documented discussion of "the controversial use of the Caroline Divines in the Victorian Church of England," which shows that both Tractarians and Evangelicals were prone to selectivity in their appeal to seventeenth-century Anglican theologians, whose theology in fact possessed a "deep-seated ambiguity" (Peter Nockles). A list of selected publications of the honoree and an index complete this testimonial collection that has a wide ambit of articles, which, while varied in content, have the merit of being well researched and well written and so help expand the horizon of Victorian studies.