J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian

by Julia Markus

Overview

Acclaimed biographer Julia Markus has written an unprecedented and illuminating portrait of the brilliant, tortured, and controversial James Anthony Froude—the quintessential Victorian, father of modern biography, historian, diplomat, and prodigal son.

J. Anthony Froude expertly captures the roiling cultural history of a century through one man’s dynamic life. From his birth in 1818 to his death in 1894, J. Anthony Froude embodied the issues and complexities of his time. Through the story of his life, Markus elucidates the major ideological issues of the nineteenth century—sexuality, colonialism, and the widespread challenges to religion’s long-held cultural primacy.

In beautifully crafted prose, Markus reveals the compelling life of one of the most important thinkers of the Victorian age—the brutality of his early education, his troubled relationship with his father, his expulsion from Oxford, his dramatic and dazzling literary career, his delicious political incorrectness, his two marriages, his relationships with his children, his friendships with such disparate luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Cardinal Newman, his diplomatic work for Prime Minister Disraeli, and his complex relationship with Thomas Carlyle, his spiritual father and the subject of his most famous biography.

A. L. Rowse, historian and author, called Froude the “last great Victorian awaiting revival.” No life of the period is more poignant, no destiny more fascinating, than that of this man whom in his books and his actions reflected the triumphs and the errors of his society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416589211
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	12/01/2007
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Julia Markus is the author of several books, including the award-winning novel Uncle and two previous biographies, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and Across an Untried Sea, which dealt with women of genius in the nineteenth century. She is professor of English and director of Creative Writing at Hofstra University.

Read an Excerpt

J. Anthony Froude

The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian

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By Julia Markus

Scribner

Copyright © 2005 Julia Markus
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0743245555

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Chapter One: Sliding Toward Tasmania

Character is a Victory, not a gift.

-- J.A.F.

He had been nothing but trouble for his father, a thorn in the archdeacon's side. Now he sat alone at the Exeter College high table, after the other diners left, listening to the crackle in the fireplace and staring at nothing in front of his eyes. He had taken off his scholar's gown, which lay in the chair next to him. He wore good worsted trousers that emphasized his long, lanky, athletic legs, and a dark gray jacket of a softer material that fit well and hung fine from his shoulders. It was the understated elegance of Oxford tailoring that proclaimed him a young man of some importance while discreetly draping the fire in his belly. He was tall, almost six feet, quite good-looking, with a long, pale face, strong nose, and cleft chin. His black hair was rather long and parted on the left side and his eyebrows emphasized his large dark eyes, which glowed with intellect and vivacity. Missing was the signature smile on his lips, commented upon by those who knew him through his life. Mysterious, that smile. The fact that it was missing while he sat there alone was proof, perhaps, that it was a smile used to reflect the smiles he met or to defend himself when people around him were far from smiling.

James Anthony Froude was thirty years old that February of 1849, and Anthony -- as he was called -- had just destroyed the future that fronted him. He had not dined at the hall, nor been there the afternoon when his newly published book, The Nemesis of Faith, was thrown into the flames -- hellfire presumably meant for its author.

It was all over. His career, his life in Oxford, any chance of reconciliation with his father. Ashes. He knew his rebellious novel -- about a Church of England cleric who doubted the divinity of Jesus Christ and had an affair with a sad married woman -- would cause an uproar at Oxford. But Anthony could have no idea that the book would burst past the small, inbred community that nurtured him for the last twelve years and become a cause celebre in the world at large -- read in the English-speaking world, debated in France, admired in Germany. It would make him famous in forward-thinking communities, and infamous everywhere else. Everyone who was anyone would talk about it, write about it to friends, or pen an opinion for the newspapers. The Nemesis of Faith would become the most relevant book of its day, speaking out to the wrenching religious doubts of an entire generation.

This would be Anthony's last night at Exeter College, sitting alone and dejected at the high table. A few years before at the same table he had stirring conversations with the visiting American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson -- a man who had long since given up his ministry in the Second Church Boston and set out on a spiritual quest. In Emerson, Anthony met a truly original thinker. Added to that, the American was a close personal friend of the author whose works were indelibly altering Anthony's views: Thomas Carlyle, by the 1840s an increasingly world-famous figure. In these men Anthony discovered a power and earnestness at least equal to that of the most brilliant of the Oxford churchmen: "With this difference: that I was no longer referred to books and distant centuries but to present facts and the world in which I lived and breathed."

The emotional and intellectual kinship that Anthony felt for Emerson was enhanced by Emerson's face, which so resembled John Henry Newman's, who had attempted to bring Anthony to a different light: "Lead kindly Light, amid the enduring gloom, Lead thou me on." The future Cardinal Newman's poem is still sung, but Newman was no longer leading Anthony on. Emerson encouraged the doubt-ridden, emotionally torn Anthony in a new direction. Inspired him to go into the wilderness over his long vacation from his students, his Oxford, to go back to Ireland, not as a tutor or a traveler this time, but in a Thoreau-like manner, just to write. Which he did. After all, it was 1848, the year of revolution all through Europe, and Anthony was a radical, a Red, thoroughly believing that everything was wrong and on the eve of great change.

Well, now it was 1849, and after all the Sturm und Drang and European bloodletting of the previous year, nothing much had changed, except Anthony was true to his own inclinations, wrote down exactly how he felt for everyone to read, and for that, in Oxford in 1849, one must face the consequences.

He thought he was ready. Had written offhandedly, debonairly, of his coming downfall to his friends the poets Arthur Clough and "Matt" Arnold. And to that Cambridge man, Charles Kingsley, the Low Church cleric who (unlike Anthony and his friends) stuck to his religious calling. Anthony knew what the future would bring. Exile and cunning. He would leave England; after many inquiries he'd found a post directing a school in Tasmania -- a new British colony then called Van Diemen's Land. His disappointed father was willing to finance his youngest child one last time, with the vague hope that immigration to the colonies might make a man of Anthony yet. All this before The Nemesis of Faith was published.

Anthony considered himself more than ready to give up his fellowship, the possibility of a church living, England itself. Though he was steady -- and quite witty -- in anticipation, his bravado buckled when the rector of Exeter College did not want to shake his hand, even if it was only to say good-bye. Couldn't Rector Richards appreciate his honesty -- an honesty the rector himself urged of Anthony?

As usual, Anthony was callow when it came to consequences -- half naive, half devil-may-care -- a youngest son in this as in everything. He purposely published The Nemesis of Faith not only under his own name but with his title: J. A. Froude, M.A., Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. The rector, who had protected Anthony two years earlier when Anthony published his autobiographical Shadows of the Clouds, under the pseudonym Zeta, now had more explaining to do, more irate letters to answer, other hands to shake.

Not for the first time in his life, Anthony brooded over his fate.

The father Anthony could not please was the Archdeacon Robert Hurrell Froude (1769-1859), a well-to-do, landed clergyman and important Devonshire church administrator who was fifty years old when Anthony, his youngest child, was born at Dartington Parsonage. There are no memorials to the Venerable Archdeacon of Totnes. His marble or bronze bust cannot be found among other Devonshire archdeacons commemorated at Exeter Cathedral. No mention, either, that he fathered three sons of genius, each of whom brought something new to the nineteenth century before receding into its very texture: Hurrell, the theologian who along with John Henry Newman rocked the Church of England; controversial Anthony, the prose artist and historian who, at great expense to his self-worth, would raise the art of biography to the modern standard; and William, the scientist, engineer, and first naval architect, who invented the bilge keel, used to steady every commercial and warring ship in the seas, and who was considered "the greatest of experimenters and investigators in hydrodynamics" well into the twentieth century.

The parsonage of Anthony's birth was among the calm and beautiful rolling hills of Dartington, above the thriving town of Totnes, the highest navigable point of the River Dart. Age-old Totnes came into its own in Elizabethan times, when this charming inland port was the center for exporting cloth to France and importing wine. Anthony's father was raised there. Should he take a stroll along the high street today, the Venerable Archdeacon of Totnes would certainly be astounded by the life-size Buddha in the window of the Eclectic Englishman. Small shops thrive on both sides of the winding hill of a main road, selling crystals and incense and herbal cures and the best fudge, as a later generation searches for organic truth and variations of sixteenth-century fruit still flourishing in the trees behind Totnes's picturesque church. The Old Forge, across the bridge above the River Dart, no longer uses its dungeons as the temporary prison for Puritans caught on their way to Plymouth, the resident blacksmith ready and able to custom-make their shackles. Instead it is an inn serving an excellent breakfast and sporting a hot tub for its guests.

Nineteenth-century Totnes and environs, squeezed in between Henry VIII and the New Age, was a less emphatic place, though quite vulnerable to the power struggles between church and state ripe at the time, keeping the archdeacon busy both as church administrator and advisor to the famous High Church Archbishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts.

Anthony was born long past the days when his tall, distinguished father was a snappy dresser and renowned horseman. At Oxford he had leapt the turnpike gate on Abingdon Road without displacing one of the pennies placed strategically between his limbs, his seat, and his horse. But the archdeacon had no fond memories of his youth. "Those were the days when I was an ass," he cautioned his youngest son. Though he never fell into debt or other irregularities he did have a weakness for his appearance. "I laugh when I think of it," Anthony wrote, for the old man he knew was completely indifferent to such things.

Still, the archdeacon retained the good bearing and good looks of the Froude men -- if not an interest in fashion. He had married Margaret Spedding, a beautiful and brilliant woman from a very good, intellectually distinguished family -- particularly in the area of science. A remarkably handsome couple, they balanced one another. Margaret, a born writer, mingled a love of virtue with psychological insight in her daily journal. The archdeacon prided himself on duty, practicality, horse sense, stables. He was the first to admit that he was not a man of theory, not that he downplayed a philosophical mind like that of his wife or the Oxford men who at times sought his advice. Although he wasn't a man to show his feelings, one can see them in the sketchbooks he left behind, vital drawings and washes of churches, churchyards, tracery, trees, and the surrounding sea. The couple were quite happy in those early days, before they realized Margaret Spedding brought tuberculosis to the marriage.

There was nothing but joy when their first son was born on March 25, 1803. Richard Hurrell (known as Hurrell) and thirteen months later, Robert. "Hurrell and Robert, being my father's eldest children and therefore nearer to him in age, were his companions in the sense which the rest of us never were. They were both interesting boys, tall, handsome, and brilliant. They shared my father's leisure, and went with him into the hunting field, to which he still gave such time as he could afford. They had my mother's influence to moderate and guide them and keep open the affectionate understanding between father and children." These two oldest were sent to Eton. "They were not particularly studious, but they were light, bright, and popular, Hurrell showing signs of real genius. The relations between them and my father and mother were of unbroken affection and confidence, a confidence which from the difference of age, especially after my mother's death, could not be extended to the rest of us."

There was a space of four years in which the couple enjoyed their first two sons before four more children arrived -- John, Margaret, Phillis, William -- one a year, then a breathing space of four years before the birth of daughter Mary. Finally, after another four years, on Shakespeare's birthdate, April 23, Anthony was born in 1818. As a child he wondered if his white-bearded father knew the patriarch Abraham in biblical days.

His old and remote paterfamilias had never known a father himself and was raised in a household of women. Anthony recalled:

"My grandmother who had country blood in her veins, considered of later years that she had made a rash mesalliance. I have heard her say that she was a fool to marry. She had everything a young woman could desire; a kind father, an ample property. Her picture had been painted by Sir Joshua. What could have possessed her? It can be alleged only in her excuse that she was very young, scarcely turned sixteen when she so committed herself. In five or six years, she was left a widow with four children, three girls and a son the Archdeacon my father, who was born after my grandfather's death. She survived her husband more than sixty years, and lived, as she used to tell us children with pride, to be a great grandmother. She removed in her widowhood to Totnes, where she brought up her family on a narrow income with care and thrift, care so excessive that in her later years it developed into a disease. On her death, my father found hoards of gold secreted about the house in which she lived -- goold she called it -- and was rather ashamed of the sack of sovereigns which he was obliged to carry to the bank."

Anthony, the last of eight children, would never know mother love. "My mother was already in a decline when I was born. I was a sickly child and was christened privately at home as it was not supposed that I could live to be taken to church. My mother had nursed my brothers and sisters. Me she could not nurse. I was consigned to a healthy young woman of the parish who had lost her own baby, and to her I believe I owe it that I survived and still survive." About a month and a half before Anthony turned three, his mother died.

The archdeacon dealt with the grief of his wife's death, the burden of a last infant, and the tuberculosis poised to ravage his children, with the strongest resource in his arsenal -- silence. His wife's effects were all disposed of (perhaps he felt that could exterminate contagion) and Anthony never heard him speak of her again. The fact that the dreaded disease came from his wife's line was etched into that silence. The archdeacon became more severe and silent as circumstances turned his life into unrelenting duty, not the least responsibility for a weak, overly fearful infant son born long after the others, a son who would remember nothing of his mother, except, at times, a far-off whisper that might have been her voice.

Anthony's first memory was of being struck for dirtying his baby frock. "We were a Spartan family. Whipping was always resorted to as the prompt consequence of naughtiness." When Anthony's spinster aunt Mary, who had nursed her consumptive sister Margaret, stayed to take care of the motherless family, she woke the sickly toddler at dawn each day, brought him outdoors, and dipped him into a gravel pit filled with ice-cold water in order to toughen him, improve his health. His father approved, as did his oldest brother, Hurrell, fifteen years Anthony's senior, and the pride of the Froude name. Hurrell Froude -- tall, slender, with black curly hair and coal black eyes of bright intensity, Byronic in looks and repartee -- was a born leader, known for his romantic imagination and otherworldly piety. His brilliance lit up his pious nature, his words sparked thunderclaps.

"My father was infinitely proud of Hurrell and let him do as he pleased. I worshiped him, but I cannot say that I think his educational experiments were always successful. He thought that I wanted manliness. A small stream ran along the fence which enclosed our garden. I remember Hurrell once when I was very little taking me by the heels and stirring the mud at the bottom with my head. Another time I have a vivid recollection of being put overboard into deep water out of a boat in the river again to make me bold, which it didn't make me at all."

Young Anthony had an escape from early-morning baths in gravel pits, from a bullying, pious brother, and a remote, punishing father, when he was sent to Buckfastleigh School, hardly a five-mile stroll from his home. Even so, the eight-year-old was forbidden to return to the parsonage except during school holidays. His father had the peculiar idea that a child should not consider that he had a home. Perhaps banishment was a blessing. For the schoolmasters and the schoolchildren were not punishing. Better yet and quite uncharacteristically, at this school, "bullying was by common consent treated as a public crime." This was particularly helpful to Anthony, since he suffered from a hernia, which prevented him from fighting and "taking part in the rough games of the playing field."

At Buckfastleigh even the punishment meted out for bullying was considered tame -- for the times: "A lad who was guilty of persecuting any smaller boy was made to kneel with bare back on the schoolroom floor, and was flogged, buffeted we called it, every boy striking him one blow with a knotted handkerchief. I can see a poor boy now on his knees, with tears in his eyes, suffering more from the shame than the pain of the blows."

Of course, it was de rigueur that the teaching at the school was "quickened into effectiveness by the vigorous and frequent application of the cane," particularly since the more severe whippings, called birchings, were infrequent and resorted to only for such "disgraceful offences" as theft or lying. Canings, birchings, floggings, were all hallmarks of a young gentleman's education.

Away from the family, Anthony, who hadn't been a particularly accomplished toddler -- he was born to a household of brilliant siblings -- flourished intellectually, learned Latin rapidly, and found a special aptitude for Greek. His enthusiasm for classical study was boundless and he was soon in a class all his own. "Before I was eleven I had read all the Iliad and the Odyssey twice over."

The child could recite hundreds of lines of Greek, commit hundreds more to memory on short notice, a talent for which, at home on holiday, he was rewarded. But this precocity turned into a curse. A shilling did not compensate for the fact that he now had "the misfortune to be considered a genius," to be advanced beyond his age, and "to encourage expectations." During school vacations he "must work, work, work without pause or relief." It was drudgery year in and year out. "It did me no good. I was forced like a sickly plant in a hot-house: a bad preparation for the rough weather I was soon to face."

Even Hurrell, who had frightened the wits out of his baby brother with ghost stories and harsh teasing, wrote to their brother William when Anthony was nine: "I think I can explain to you the allusion Aunt Mary makes at Att's promotion. For a day or two before I left home news was brought us that he had been put up into the class above him. I am afraid he is being pushed on beyond his age so much that it will make him stupid, for I am sure it is not a good thing for boys in general to live so much among fellows much older than themselves."

The archdeacon, the "sensible, strong, practical" churchman who "never spoke even in private of feeling or sentiment, and never showed any in word or action," thought differently, and expected return on his shilling. His youngest son was the last of a large family and must pull his own weight in the world, make his own living. Anthony must study, study, study, in order to be eligible for early admission to public school (private school, in American parlance) and from there to early admission on scholarship to Oxford. With the expectation that Anthony would follow in his father's clerical profession, the boy was sent to Westminster at the age of eleven.

If the brutality of English public school education -- around the time Dr. Arnold (Matt's father) was reforming Rugby -- was to be described in one word, that word would be Westminster. It was an absolutely dreadful school in that respect, considered so at the time. Physical punishment was extreme, causing enrollment to drop year after year. To send a precocious eleven-year-old there, one who did so well on entrance exams that he was placed among boys sixteen and seventeen, was a terrible cruelty. His father was advised to allow Anthony to board at one of the many houses in the vicinity catering to younger students, but the archdeacon and Aunt Mary refused to shield the boy, deciding that being thrown in with the older set would be good for the child's character.

At eleven, physically frail and weak, intellectually overdeveloped, the boy was sent to live in one large and dismal dormitory room with thirty-nine boys much older and stronger than he, upperclassmen bred to systematic bullying: "The rule was that we were to learn by suffering." The dormitory was kept so cold that in the winter the boys put water on the stone floors so that they could slide on the ice that formed. The "fagging" system, in which the younger is servant/slave to the older, turned Anthony's young life into a living hell far worse than being plunged into gravel pits or having one's head used to stir mud at Dartington Parsonage: "I had my legs set on fire to make me dance. When I had crawled to bed, I have been woke many times by the hot points of cigars burning holes in my face." Simply put, he was brutalized and came to see himself as a victim of fate. In his first novella, Shadows of the Clouds, he wrote that his life was "as hard, and the treatment as barbarous as that of the negroes in Virginia," and he fleshed out the method of his torture, of how the older boys would stalk the college at midnight, stop by his bed as he slept, how one would hold him down while another burned him with his cigar until his face was scarred and blistered for weeks. He was not exaggerating. His own son, Ashley, would write way into the twentieth century that the best said of his father's education was that he survived it.

He was made to swallow brandy punch till he was drunk, and at meals the sixteen-year-olds kept the meat for themselves and gave this weak child the bones. He couldn't defend himself, either physically or emotionally. No father or older brother or friend had taught him how. Only a friendly cook at a nearby boardinghouse kept him from starving. The code of honor was never to tell on another boy. He took to lying, invented "excuses of illness" that were easily found out. The headmaster thought he was trying to escape lessons, "instead of the young tyrants up the college stairs." Anthony later wondered if the headmaster would have made any changes even if he knew the truth. As it was, his behavior was constantly complained of to his father.

After three years Anthony, fourteen and still frail for his age, could not return; he had suffered what we would consider a severe nervous breakdown. He could hardly speak at all, not to mention that he had lost his fluency in Greek and Latin along with his good clothes, sold to keep the bigger boys in stationery. Younger boys' buying the older boys school supplies was such a standard practice that most fathers opened accounts for their sons with local shops to facilitate the trade-off -- but not the archdeacon.

He could not tell his father the truth when he arrived at the parsonage mute and in tatters, that he sold his clothes for protection money. Of course his father knew his best clothes were gone, knew he spent all his money, no matter how Anthony equivocated. Both Hurrell and the archdeacon considered him a cowardly, unmanly boy, a liar and a cheat. And so he was -- to himself as well -- though a softer later era might allow for extenuating circumstances. Without putting too fine a point on it, by attempting to wiggle out of an unbearable situation, Anthony was learning how to survive. And a survival skill once learned is rarely forgotten.

His father did not leave it to Hurrell but beat him himself for his lies, his tattered state, and academic failure. Punishment not prevention was the "old-fashioned principle" he was raised by, described in Shadows of the Clouds: "If a boy goes wrong whip him. Teach him to be afraid of going wrong, by the pains and penalties to ensue -- just the principle on which gamekeepers used to try to break dogs." Don't attempt to talk to him, reason with him, offer him advice on how to control the impulses that boil up in all boys. Simply beat the boy out of him. Unfortunately, with the human animal the consequences could be disastrous, for untutored youths began to believe they deserved their whippings, "as if they could have helped doing what they did in a way dogs cannot."

The archdeacon envisioned an academic career and then a clerical living for his youngest son, and was bitterly disappointed by Anthony's failure at Westminster. As always he met adversity with silence. When his favorite daughter died of tuberculosis, his parishioners were amazed to find him at church as usual, conducting services, while she was laid out at home. He was in his midsixties, having to deal with the dreaded disease he never named, as well as with a wretched fourteen-year-old who was taciturn and told lies.

All Anthony saw was a distant father, a severe old man who despised him. At home under his father's roof, he was an outcast in the midst of plenty. The tailor was no longer allowed to make new clothes for him. His coat was refashioned out of his brothers' throwaways. No wonder his favorite Bible story was Joseph and his coat of many colors.

The father punished the wayward boy with silence. Anthony no longer seemed to have a tongue in his mouth, so no one was allowed to talk to Anthony, either. Daily he was made to feel worthless. Silence was lifted only to tell the boy time and again that he would not go to Oxford but instead would be apprenticed to a trade. Anthony considered that option good enough for such an unworthy son as himself. And in any case, it hardly mattered. He was broken. His self-worth had been beaten out of him and his chief consolation was that he was sure he would soon die. His exceedingly handsome and equally good-natured brother Robert, the next to oldest, who had treated him kindly, and whom he loved dearly and trusted, had died of tuberculosis when Anthony was ten, and signs of the dread disease were evident in Hurrell. "My complexion, my sickly body," Anthony wrote, "marked me for a certain victim." He looked forward to his death, adding yet another flaw to his character -- self-pity.

Yet at fourteen, stuck in Dartington Parsonage, waiting to die, he witnessed one of the most important religious movements of the nineteenth century. At Oxford, brother Hurrell had met classmate John Henry Newman, a young man from a more pedestrian background, who was using his highly developed intellect to find his way to God. They were both young churchmen at Oxford, both with brilliant clerical and scholarly careers ahead of them, and they became best friends. Much later in the century, a follower and biographer of Newman would have a dream that he was at a dinner party with a veiled woman beside him whose conversation was so enticing that he told her, "I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman at Oxford." She raised her veil: "I am John Henry Newman."

At Oxford, Hurrell and Newman were joined by Hurrell's former Oriel College tutor John Keble. Keble considered himself a country cleric, though he was also a distinguished don and author of the lauded book-length poem The Christian Year. Not a household in English-speaking Christendom lacked a copy of that celebrated work, in those days. The three, Hurrell, Newman, and Keble were writing a series of "Tracts for the Times." These tracts were intent on purging the Protestant elements of the Church of England, and thereby returning the church to its earlier authoritarian, Catholic roots. Particularly the tracts upheld the supremacy of church over state, as before Henry VIII. What had begun among the dons and fellows of Oxford, in a cloistered, clergy-ridden university town, would soon rock the Church of England to its foundations, altering perception and practice. The Oxford Movement, it would be called, and those churchmen, some young, some already eminent, became known as Tractarians.

Hurrell and Newman were often at Dartington Parsonage to consult with the practical archdeacon, Keble often writing to him to make sure there was nothing heretical in their tracts before each was published. Anthony was privy to these conversations.

Anthony listened to Hurrell, who hated the very idea of marriage and would not have the word uttered in his presence, talk at home against the Anglican practice of allowing priests to marry. Reform was needed. Newman, as charismatic, delicate, and brilliant as the dream of him, would write in his autobiography that he had a revelation at the age of fifteen that he would never marry. Hurrell's radical opinion of returning the Anglican clergy to celibacy struck a chord with him, just as all of Hurrell's ideas on restoring earlier church practices influenced Newman. When Hurrell's youngest sister Mary became engaged, Hurrell wrote revealingly to Newman, "Mary is going to be married to a very nice fellow down here. If he was not a parson I should have no kind of objection to it, but as it is they will have trouble in the flesh."

It had been to the Protestant elements in the Church of England that Anthony was raised. His father had always been "an excellent parish priest of the old sort, with strong sense, a practical belief in the doctrines of the Church of England as by law established, which no person in his right mind would think of questioning." The archdeacon taught his children that their business in life was to work and to make honorable positions for themselves, that religion was the light to see their way along the road of duty.

That religion of Anthony's childhood, described nostalgically in The Nemesis of Faith, was no introduction to otherworldly theological speculation, but was a series of "healthy young Sundays; they were all bright." The walk to church in one's Sunday clothes through the woods and meadows, the sense of special meaning among the congregation, the prayers said together, the music, even the long sermons had a Sunday shine to them when recollected. "The sacredness of Sunday is stamped on the soil of England, and in the heart of every Englishman; and all this by the old Sundays we remember the first ten years of our lives." But then: "Just as I was leaving off being a boy, we fell under a strong Catholicising influence at home, and I used to hear things which were strange enough to my ear."

His father always left the theorizing to Hurrell and Newman, admitting readily that he was no philosopher, and maintaining his stance as a nuts-and-bolts church administrator. The archdeacon was a busy man, overseeing his lands, modernizing the roads of his district, advising the Archbishop of Exeter at a time when the politicians were keen to eliminate the sinecures of the churchmen. He was more than proud and justified when Hurrell, along with Newman and Keble, came together on a political matter and defeated the reelection of Robert Peel, at the time an odious radical member of Parliament, later the Conservative prime minister. To Anthony's father, the Oxford Movement, initiated by his son, his son's best friend, and his son's former tutor, offered the hope of something quite practical, a return to the church's authority over the ever-expanding liberalism of the state.

However, listening to brother Hurrell and Newman talk was a form of shock treatment to Anthony, who had a theoretical mind and realized how much of what they called a return to Anglo-Catholicism was dangerously close to Roman Catholicism. The thrilling, disconcerting conversations jolted him back to his books. He began reading once more in his father's library, and the archdeacon, remote but watchful, saw some hope for his wayward son: "If Anthony falls into good company I feel sure that his conduct will be everything a parent can wish, but he wants that manliness of character which enables a lad to steer a strait course if he meets clever lively companions that would lead him out of it," he wrote Keble. Carefully, and with more concern than Anthony was privy to, the archdeacon found a suitable tutor for his impressionable son in a town close to Oxford.

However, the archdeacon had greater concerns at the time. Advanced signs of tuberculosis -- cough, fevers, the extraordinary shine of the eyes -- were evident in Hurrell, as much as Hurrell and all who loved him wished to deny them. As soon as Anthony was sent off to be tutored, the archdeacon and John Henry Newman accompanied Hurrell to Italy in the hopes it would improve his health -- a trip immortalized in the later Cardinal Newman's spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua -- and in the inspired unpublished sketches of the archdeacon's.

For Hurrell there was Italy, and later Barbados, but in February 1836, in the dead cold of winter, he came home to Dartington Parsonage through a terrific snowstorm. "From day to day almost we could perceive that his body was wasting and his strength giving way," the archdeacon informed Keble. "Oxford and the friendships he had formed there, seemed to be always in his thoughts, but I cannot trust myself to say more. To me he was not only a most affectionate son, but my companion and familiar friend, entering into my pursuits and amusements, and guiding me by his advice when I needed it. I pray God Almighty to support me through this heaviest of earthly trials."

So weak had Hurrell become toward the end that he hadn't strength enough to clear his throat. On a cold winter Sunday the grieving father observed a sudden difficulty in Hurrell's breathing, a failed attempt to swallow, an attempt to speak, and then, after a slight struggle, suffering was over. At the age of thirty-three, Hurrell drowned in his father's arms. "My dear son died this day," the archdeacon wrote, describing the scene to Newman.

Then he swiftly moved on to practical matters. Son William, silent William who would always mediate family affairs, would be going up to collect things from Hurrell's rooms at Oxford. "It will be desirable perhaps if the rooms are not considered too good for an undergraduate that Anthony should be permitted to take them. But William will talk to you on the subject -- & if likely to succeed speak to the Provost." And, of course, Newman was to take anything he wished in order to remember Hurrell.

A week later the archdeacon explained to Newman why he wrote on practical matters the very evening of Hurrell's passing ("our separation," he called the death). We find in his spare words an essential glimpse into the character of the Archdeacon of Totnes, as revealing as the sketchbooks he left behind him, devoid of people, filled with a glorious -- yet exact -- rendering of place: "I could not trust myself nor can I now, to touch on my own sorrows."

Later, Anthony, too, would see beyond the paternal severity that so marked his childhood, to the suffering and anxiety for him and his siblings that lay beneath it. Discipline and horse sense marked the way that this "high and dry" church administrator and landed gentleman kept his sanity and did his duty as year after year God tested him the way he tested Job. "May God in his Mercy," the archdeacon prayed out loud to Newman, turn sufferings into spiritual profit.

"All the manuscripts I can find will be delivered to you by William," the Archdeacon continued. Hurrell's journal "is very interesting to myself as bringing to my recollection many passages of his life, and a progressive picture, as it were, of his mind, when his thoughts and pursuits began to shew promise of his advancement to everything that was good." Hurrell's memorial would be four volumes of his literary remains, a collection of journal entries, prayers, thoughts, letters, essays, sermons, partially financed by the archdeacon and edited by Newman with the help of John Keble. And so the archdeacon occupied himself, as Anthony entered Oxford: "It is one of my few consolations whenever his loss occurs to me, & it is hardly ever out of my mind -- to turn to letters & journals that almost bring back to me the reality of bygone days."

These religious daybooks of Hurrell's (the practice of keeping a journal he learned from his mother) are full of morbid self-examination. Hurrell describes how he humiliates his flesh, how he fasts -- painful to read, the relentless starving of his own tubercular body. He atones for nameless sins, among them an avalanche of confused feelings for one of the boys he tutors at Oxford. What should be included, what excluded, what might the public misinterpret? The archdeacon senses danger, but as always, leaves such decisions to the philosophic minds of Oxford. In unpublished letter after letter he tells Newman and Keble to decide. His role is to finance the publication of the Remains of the Reverend R. Hurrell Froude (and to wait anxiously for the reviews).

Newman committed Hurrell's fasts, his self-flagellations, his exaggerated sense of his own worthlessness to print, did not edit out the more startling practices (or the young boy). He had to be aware that such thoughts and practices seemed less those of a young and promising Church of England cleric who tragically died before his promise could be fulfilled than those of a Roman Catholic monk (circa the Middle Ages). To many, Hurrell Froude's Remains were scandalous. They called out, Beware! The Papists are coming!

The archdeacon was appalled by the criticism. To him Hurrell, in his self-enforced celibacy, his exaggerated sense of sin, his humiliation of the flesh, was simply the saintliest of Church of England clerics. There was nothing but piety in his avoidance of girls and his detestation of marriage. "I take shame to myself," he wrote to Keble, "for the little share I can claim in laying a foundation for such genuine piety as marked the latter years of his life." Whenever Anthony got in trouble (which was often) he was advised by his father, John Keble, and by scientifically minded brother William to reread the Remains. "We adored Hurrell," Anthony insisted. "He was sparkling brilliant, moved as a sort of king in the element which surrounded us."

The contrast between how the archdeacon fathered his oldest and his youngest son is quite remarkable. When Hurrell was an undergraduate and needed money at Oxford, he could write flippantly: "You might as well have answered my most agreeable & interesting letter at an earlier period, but to pass over any little cause of complaint which I may keep in store for a future occasion, hereby I give notice that I am safe arrived at Keble's [then his Oxford tutor] without a farthing, which may suggest to you the propriety of supplying that deficiency at any rate soon."

Hurrell could joke with his father, jolly him out of anything, even before he matured into a churchman. In that maturity, the archdeacon appears to have found the father, the "companion and familiar friend" he had never known. Arriving home from Oxford late one cold January night, thirty-year-old Hurrell "found on getting upstairs that my Father had got out of bed to receive me. I sat up with him till one -- & drank brandy & water -- no bad thing under such circumstances."

Newman, too, was devoted to Hurrell, never coming to grips with his dark side, even as he used the Remains to further radicalize the English church through Hurrell's monklike practices and confessions. Overlooked was the sadistic streak in Hurrell, a true cruelty that terrorized Anthony as a child. It had homoerotic nuances that appeared, judging by the Remains, to frighten Hurrell as well.

Anthony had been just two when Hurrell, a young man of seventeen, was forced by illness home from school to Dartington Parsonage. "A letter of my mother's at the beginning of his Remains described how he had terrified his baby brother by acting wolf to him," Anthony wrote. "The baby was myself, sufficiently inclined already to imaginative alarms, and he continued to amuse himself with playing half seriously upon my fancy. His own mind was distinctly inclined to believe in the supernatural. Perhaps he thought that we could not be too early imbued with the same disposition."

Hurrell caused grief not only to baby Anthony but to his other siblings and, most important, to his dying mother. The letter she wrote to an imaginary, impartial "Sir" was actually meant for Hurrell's eyes and was given to him. Later, as he matured into a churchman, that letter haunted him. He kept it with his journals, read it often as a repentance, a mortification, and Newman understood that it had to begin the Remains. It's worth a reading today, testifying as it does to Margaret Spedding's literary ability and psychological insight -- both passed on to Anthony -- and to Hurrell's problematic character. The lines that are not in italics in the last paragraphs are revealing lines that Newman silently excised:

Sir, I have a son who is giving me a good deal of uneasiness at this time, from causes which I persuade myself are not altogether common; and having used my best judgement about him for seventeen years, I at last begin to think it competent to the case, and apply to you for advice.

From his very birth his temper has been peculiar; pleasing, intelligent and attaching, when his mind was undisturbed, and he was in the company of people who treated him reasonably and kindly; but exceedingly impatient under vexatious circumstances; very much disposed to find his own amusements in teasing and vexing others; and almost entirely incorrigible when it was necessary to reprove him. I never could find a successful mode of treating him. Harshness made him obstinate and gloomy; calm and long displeasure made him stupid and sullen; and kind patience had not sufficient power over his feelings to force him to govern himself. His disposition to worry made his appearance the perpetual signal for noise and disturbance among his brothers and sisters; and this was impossible to stop, though a taste for quiet, and constant weak health, made it to me almost unsupportable. After the statement of such great faults, it may seem an inconsistency to say that he nevertheless still bore about him strong marks of a promising character. In all points of substantial principle his feelings were just and high. He had (for his age) an unusually deep feeling of admiration for everything which was good and noble; his relish was lively, his taste good, for all the pleasures of the imagination; and he was also quite conscious of his own faults, and (untempted) had a just dislike of them.

On these grounds I built my hope that his reason would gradually correct his temper, and do that for him which his friends could not accomplish. Such a hope was necessary to my peace of mind, for I will not say that he was dearer to me than my other children, but he was my first child, and certainly he could not be dearer. This expectation has been realized, gradually, though very slowly. The education his father chose for him agreed with him; his mind expanded and sweetened; and even some more material faults (which had grown out of circumstances uniting with his temper) entirely disappeared. His promising virtues became my most delightful hopes, and his company my greatest pleasure. At this time he had a dangerous illness, which he bore most admirably. The consequence of it obliged him to leave his school, submit for many months to the most troublesome restraints, and to be debarred from all the amusements and pleasures of his age, though he felt, at the same time, quite competent to them. All this he bore not only with patience and compliance, but with a cheerful sweetness which endeared him to all around him. He returned home for the confirmation of his health, and he appeared to me all I could desire. His manners were tender and kind, his conversation highly pleasing, and his occupations manly and rational. The promising parts of his character, like Aaron's rod, appeared to have swallowed up all the rest and to have left us nothing but his health to wish for.

After such an account, imagine the pain I must feel on being forced to acknowledge that the ease and indulgence of home is bringing on a relapse into his former habits. I view it with sincere alarm as well as grief, as he must remain here many many months, and a strong return, at his age, I do not think would ever be recovered.

I will mention some facts to show that my fears are not too forward. He has a near relation [Aunt Mary] who has attended him through his illness with extraordinary tenderness, and who never made a difference between night and day, if she could give him the smallest comfort; to whom he is very troublesome, and not always respectful. He told her, in an argument, the other day, that "she lied, and knew she did," without, ( I am ashamed to say) the smallest apology. I am in a wretched state of health, and quiet is important to my recovery, and quite essential to my comfort; yet he disturbs it, for what he calls "funny tormenting", without the slightest feeling, twenty times a day. I have not had a single meal today in peace, nor been long quiet even in my own room without being obliged to rouse myself to quell some disturbance made by him. At one time he kept one of his brothers screaming, from a sort of teasing play, for near an hour under my window. At another, he acted a wolf to his baby brother, whom he had promised never to frighten again & at another he revived a dirty practice at his first school which I am ashamed to mention & made his brother submit to a disgusting result which all the servants knew & talked of. All this worry has been kept up upon a day when I have been particularly unwell which I have pleaded many times in vain. He cannot think it pretense for I am to look at but a spectre whose days (whether to be passed in pain or peace) any one would say were not likely to be many. -- Light as my body is become he sees many times that I have hardly strength to drag it about. He also knows at the same time very well, that if his head does but ache, it is not only my occupation, but that of the whole family, to put an end to everything which can annoy him.

You will readily see, dear sir, that our situation is very difficult, and very distressing. He is too old for any correction, but that of his own reason; and how to influence that, I know not. Your advice will greatly oblige, a very anxious parent.

M.F.

P.S. I have complained to him seriously of this day, and I thought he must have been hurt; but I am sorry to say that he has whistled almost ever since. If he cannot be induced to keep peace around me I must leave the house -- but what a distress will that be from such a cause! -- So unfeeling & from such a quarter!

It could not have been easy for the seventeen-year-old Hurrell to watch his mother die, and confined at home, ill himself, see in her wasting his own future. When his brother Robert had died on Good Friday 1828, he wrote to friend Sam Wilberforce (the future Anglican bishop known as "Soapy Sam"): "My brother's death was indeed a great shock to me at first, & I believe affected me rather with fright than sorrow." In that very long letter, Hurrell switched to pencil in order to implore Sam not to "be vexed with me for suspecting you....Oh pray my truest love be as usual and believe how fondly...I love you. Wont you my own love write me a little note to tell me all you did and do feel."

Hurrell's anger and cruelty while his mother lay dying expressed his own fear of death, as well as revealing the blame his father buried: It was the mother's line that brought tuberculosis into the family. Still, even in the best of moods Hurrell teased his sisters unmercifully. There was a part of him he could not control. And the brothers he terrorized were bully's meat -- the youngest, Anthony, hardly two; scientifically minded William just ten; brother John, who became an alcoholic before succumbing to tuberculosis, thirteen. Perhaps it was John whom Hurrell exposed to the dirty practices and disgusting results mentioned in the mother's letter.

But that was then. Less than two months after Hurrell's death in 1836, Anthony entered Oxford. Newman was able to do what the archdeacon asked and in time procured for Anthony the rooms at Oriel once occupied by the archdeacon himself, in his horsy days, and so recently cleared -- if they ever could be -- of Hurrell's remains. Anthony refused them.

No doubt Hurrell's tragic death released something in Anthony. It was only at college, away from his former connections, that he was surprised to find: "I had grown from a boy to a young man. I was tall, not ill-looking, and fairly strong. I could talk. I, who had been always snubbed and kept down, found myself suddenly free." A passerby at Oxford would come upon him outside Oriel College, taller than those gathered around him, his wit and vivacity obviously placing him at the center of a circle of newfound friends who were enjoying his conversation.

Or as he phrased it in Shadows of the Clouds: "He was an acute observer and a ready talker, talents always valued and rewarded in life, and he passed at once with a bound into a person whose opinion was to be received, whose advice was often asked, on serious subjects." This remarkably sudden change "did him good and evil." For at the same time, letters came from home, his father constantly "reminding him of what he had been! suspecting him, threatening him," so that he experienced the same evil that injured him when he was a precocious child reciting half The Iliad by heart: "His talents were outrunning the rest of him."

Freedom had turned eighteen-year-old Anthony giddy; he "rode and boated and played tennis" with his lively newfound friends and they influenced him just as his father feared. His friends smiled at him. He smiled back. He drank and gambled with the best of them, became a very affable fellow. "I seemed just what everybody wished, hence it was all seem with me, I was nothing."

He certainly did not want to go home during his long vacations: "Home was still the place of discipline and authority; all the amusements were at college. At college there was no 'you must' or 'you must not:' at home there was nothing else."

He preferred joining a small group of students and a tutor and going on a reading party. "Reading party" was a euphemism, he wrote, a "courtesy" to render such summer trips respectable, an "honourary title" for unbridled fun. Anthony wished for as much fun as possible, as soon as possible, for should his father find out his youngest child was in debt again -- just a single debt, the archdeacon emphasized -- he would be taken out of Oxford immediately and apprenticed to a trade (the old threat). After his second year at Oxford, he went on a reading party that changed his life.

Anthony chose the one that would take up residence around Thirlmere in the Lake District, and not without reason, for he had already met the Bushes -- James Bush was a school friend and his father, the Reverend James Bush, was a man of singularly interesting character, at least to Anthony, who spent many a week happily at his home. Much younger than the archdeacon, this clergyman was a close friend to all his children. To Anthony he became "benevolence full, prompt, active, without a tinge of maudlin in it, yet so extensive that it could reach to sympathy even with a broken flower." What he found in the Reverend Bush was paternal kindness.

Empathetic understanding was not the Reverend Bush's only appeal. For the twenty-year-old Anthony was attracted to his daughter Harriet, three years Anthony's senior. Here again, Anthony was far from Hurrell, who abhorred girls and who in his undergraduate days went on reading parties supervised by the Reverend John Keble without a female's ever getting in striking distance of the boys' unbridled fun. Hurrell did, however, write home to tell his mother that John Keble reminded him of her. (Keble himself married a friend, his cousin, when he was in his forties, for the particular reason that marriage, which Hurrell and Newman opposed, was something he believed a Tractarian parson in the Church of England should support.)

Harriet was a beauty, with an oval face, long curls, full lips, and large eyes as compassionate as her father's actions. "Lakes, mountains, waterfalls, and moonlight on the water, produced their natural effects in a love affair," Anthony would write in Shadows of the Clouds. But this was not only first love in the romantic sense; it was the first time in his life that Anthony felt himself the object of love. Being loved opened him up to his own self-worth, as he humbly remembered more than a half century later:

"The details are of no consequence to anybody, yet every feature is photographed in my own memory, and forms and must always form while I continue myself an inseparable part of me. The sense of being valued by another made me set a value on my own life. I had something to care for, something which made it worth my while to distinguish myself. I had an object in the future. Every faculty that I had, brightened up as if the sun were suddenly shining."

A thunderbolt from the parsonage sent in the clouds. Anthony was making an ass of himself, his father wrote, and must cut off the attachment or else come home immediately, for there could be no engagement or marriage, ever. There was insanity in the Bush family, he informed his son. The archdeacon's reason shows how he was haunted by the shadow of hereditary illness. He was at the same time standing in the way of brother William's engagement because he was sure there was tuberculosis in that woman's family. And earlier, his hauntingly beautiful and rebellious daughter Phillis defied him by marrying John Spedding, her first cousin on her mother's side. She died of tuberculosis a year before Hurrell, who wrote to Newman that "Her fate has been a strange and melancholy one but it is no use talking," adding, her passing "seems to have been for the best." Twenty years later, the archdeacon would write of his favored grandson, Phillis's son Edward: "Just at the age of manhood & with every promise of his becoming a very valuable person he has been lost us, as his dear mother was...by a rapid decline." There was no end to the ravaging of his family.

It would take a dispassionate observer to realize that by thwarting his children's relationships, the stern father was thrusting about irrationally, attempting to save them -- and his grandchildren -- from his own life. All Anthony could think when ordered to disavow Harriet: Not again! Every time something good happened to him, a dreadful letter from home. He saw his father as a nemesis, an inescapable tragic fate, and he became once more what he had been in earlier years, the sacrificial victim. Terribly upset and confused by the letter, he had, at the same time, a profound fear of his father. At twenty he was as afraid of him as he had been when we was twelve -- and was deeply ashamed of his cowardice, as he confessed in Shadows of the Clouds. He was constantly being "over threatened." His father was so old that he forgot boys take things literally, that "the fear which is without love" was "the very worst, the very most fatal feeling a child can be brought to entertain towards his father." Distraught and confused, Anthony turned to his tutor in the reading party, who advised him to set the matter of hereditary insanity directly to the Reverend Bush.

The Reverend Bush assured the Archdeacon of Totnes in writing that insanity did not run in the family, giving an acceptable account of the uniqueness of Harriet's grandfather's illness. The archdeacon relented in a return letter, one which he expected Anthony to read and then personally deliver to the Reverend Bush. Yes, Anthony could continue to court Harriet, but the barb this time was that his father pointed out every one of his son's faults -- his gambling, his drinking, his lying, his unmanliness -- assuring Harriet's father that his son was an unsuitable suitor. Overjoyed at the permission to continue the relationship, Anthony managed to lose the letter as he rushed to the Bushes -- a self-serving accident he was the first to realize.

Returning to Oxford engaged to Harriet, he was a "new man." He got rid of his "expensive friends" -- there were no more wine parties, no gambling. He did have gambling debts as well as outstanding bills that came to over four hundred pounds. His generous yearly allowance -- worked out between his father and Newman -- was little more than half that. Rather than tell his father, who had threatened expulsion, he secretly asked to borrow money from a friend. Then he reluctantly returned to the parsonage for Christmas 1838, writing to Oxford scholar Mark Pattison -- five years his senior and the eventual prototype for George Eliot's pedant Casaubon -- that he envied his older friend's ability to spend the vacation at college. "There is nothing at all to do at home except read and that I might as well do at Oxford." The "Blue Devils" pursued him at Dartington Parsonage, as he sat there by the fire writing this letter. His "worthy brother" William was sitting next to him, grumpily.

Anthony couldn't imagine what William had to be upset about. He was having a successful engineering career, his mentor the great cigar-chomping and audacious Victorian visionary I. K. Brunel. He had just returned from seeing his fiancee, his father finally allowing the match: "My impression was that you had heard something of the love affair that hung heavily about William for two years," the archdeacon wrote to Keble. "With a hope that the disappointment might wear away, I have carefully avoided noticing in him the occasional depressions of spirits that I could not fail to observe, and for which I was at no loss for a cause. In herself the Lady is everything a father could approve, and my consent would not have been wanting for a moment but for fears that the malady so sadly manifested in my family, was constitutionally prevalent in hers." But carefully ignoring his son's condition hadn't remedied William's despondency: "My opposition will be withdrawn -- all this I have told William in the last few days."

Like his father, William kept his feelings to himself. When he was seventeen, Hurrell, eight years his senior, cautioned: "You know one of the things with which we have always found fault, has been your great closeness about your pursuits, so that we are quite in the dark about you and hardly know you at all."

"I can't get anything out of him," Anthony complained of William to Pattison. Of course he realized "he and my Governor are more or less sulky with me for having spent rather more money than I should have done at Oxford, and accordingly wanting my bills paid." In fact, the archdeacon had found out that behind his back his son had secretly attempted to borrow money from a friend, but Anthony did not confide this: "I am sure I don't wonder at my Governor. Wouldn't I have a rage if a son of mine was to come upon me to pay his bills, but I don't quite consider that brothers have an equal claim to be sulky with one." Actually, William had attempted to mediate: "He is a good fellow, for though he may be rather cool to me, he has talked over my father, and made no end of excuses. Poor me, I was trying what I could do to clear myself last term, but found the attempt hopeless. I don't think any one gains wisdom except by experience, and that is often dearly bought; however, if the Archdeacon will clear me, I shan't do the like again in a hurry, I know."

He could not wait to get back to Oxford: "For here I am the youngest of the family and always shall be if I live to be a hundred." Only in his postscript does a hint of his fear surface beyond the bravado of his tone: "By the bye I heard you had taken your father in hand; how do you get on with the Old Man, is he tough?"

Anthony's Old Man was. Once returned to Oxford, he received the full impact of his father's silent fury, recorded vividly in Shadows of the Clouds. One need only take the liberty of changing back the fictive names -- that's how close to the skin Anthony's first novella was: "The Archdeacon Froude throughout the Christmas vacation was gloomy and reserved. Except in the common interchange of morning and evening greetings, he never spoke to Anthony at all, and even the rest of the family could only conjecture what he intended to do....He reserved the expression of his anger till Anthony had returned again to college, and then it began to stream down upon him in letters. Still Anthony went on, kept to his resolution and worked harder and harder....But letter came after letter, each darker than the one before."

The threatening letters might have gone on for a series of months until "came one containing an enclosed copy of what he believed it would be his duty to send," a letter in which he made Harriet's father privy to all of his son's faults. Anthony was sure denunciation was inevitable. Naively and at the same time self-destructively, Anthony copied out his father's harsh letter and then wrote a longer one to the humane Reverend Bush. This remarkably kind man, who saved kittens from drowning no matter the jeers of neighborhood boys, could be approached. To him Anthony was able to reveal his former weaknesses: his gambling, his cowardly lies, his drinking, his lack of purpose, and how he had changed all of that since he met Harriet. The empathetic clergyman was shocked into a severity that equaled the archdeacon's. Harriet was forced not only to break the engagement but swear to her father she would not speak another word to Anthony Froude until she herself was a respectably married woman.

"I am not exaggerating when I say that I was stunned and stupefied almost as if I had been struck by lightening," Anthony wrote a full fifty years later. He suffered a more perplexing breakdown than he had at fourteen when he returned home in tatters from Westminster. Being deprived of Harriet's love left him bitter, self-pitying, and passive: "Months passed by before I could collect myself to throw off the leaden torpor into which I had been plunged."

He fled Oxford. His father sent William after him, and William, eight years older than Anthony and recently married, found him sulking in a small room in Jersey: "One thing which by all accounts seems to dwell much in Anthony's mind," William explained to the archdeacon, "and which probably encourages him in his want of openness, is the notion that he is treated by us all as a child; and this notion makes him stuffy at home and break out into wildness elsewhere -- perhaps a younger son is a little liable to be thus treated, and especially one who like Anthony has never done much in proof of manliness -- and indeed one hardly knows how to treat him as a man."

Anthony himself was deeply conscious that his outward amiability among his friends -- such as his nonchalant letter to Pattison -- did not disclose what he thought was "perhaps" his "real self," reflected in his shameful fear of his father.

William reported to Keble that Anthony refused to return to his father's home and would battle it out in his own way. "He seems indeed sorry; & aware that he is not what he must acknowledge he ought to be, but he seems more sorry about the discomfort of being under a cloud, than as the cause of it."

Both Keble and William advised him to read his brother's Remains: "He tells me, he has read Hurrell's journal, sometime ago. I trust that when he does so again it may be with more seriousness & attention -- but it seems to me that every time one reads ineffectually what ought to stir one to exertion, one's mind becomes less capable of being acted upon by it."

Anthony's refusal to return to Dartington Parsonage ended in a compromise. He went instead to Bristol, where William, chief engineer on the Bristol and Exeter Railway, was living with his new wife. There he made a decision to find solitary quarters somewhere, study hard, and eventually become independent of his family by taking pupils. William found there were many things Anthony said that showed he wished to improve his character, but he was shocked by his brother's resolution to cut completely from their father. Deliverance came in the form of a letter -- not from Keble, or anyone in his family, but from a friend, one who Anthony had assumed would agree with him and offer him support. William supposed:

"The writer must be a very clever manly sort of fellow, who however has not lived as he felt he ought, but who has lately been thinking more seriously of his own position -- He seemed to think A's resolution so shocking -- & his ways of thinking of himself so unmanly, & expressed his thoughts so well & kindly, that coming as it did from an unexpected quarter his reproof produced a very remarkable effect & as far as one can judge, a most happy one -- And in consequence A. immediately began by doing that which was the first thing to be done -- he wrote a very proper letter to my Father making full submission; & stating his intention, with full mistrust of his power of adequately performing it, to do whatever he should order."

Within the week the archdeacon abruptly replied to Anthony's long letter: "Return thither next Friday."

"He showed me the letter," William commented. "My Father appeared to speak -- more roughly -- less kindly rather, than I know he feels." But that was always the case between the archdeacon and youngest son.

If Hurrell's Remains did nothing to engage Anthony, the advice of Hurrell's former tutor John Keble was silently resented. He would never see in Keble the brilliance he found in Hurrell and Newman. In his classic memoir of the Oxford Movement, "The Oxford Counter-Reformation," written years later, in 1881, Anthony would record: "I remember an instance of Keble's narrowness extremely characteristic of him. A member of a family with which he had been intimate had adopted Liberal opinions in theology. Keble probably did not know what those opinions were but regarded this person as an apostate who had sinned against light. He came to call one day when the erring brother happened to be at home; and learning that he was in the house, he refused to enter, and remained sitting in the porch." The insult was not erased by the passing of time.

But return thither to his father Anthony did in the late 1830s. At Dartington Parsonage one cold night, "I went out into the wood and in the darkness walked up and down, reviewing my past life, observing where I had laid myself open to the enemy, and determined to defy him." (Lest we forget, "the enemy" in the nineteenth-century sense was the devil.) While still feeling the leaden effects of the loss of Harriet's love, which led to suicidal urges, that night in the woods he came to his resolution. "I had trifled with life. I would trifle with it no longer. I would not be a slave, a pipe for Fortune's finger to sound what note she pleased upon. There may have been something stilted in this, but it was real, too, for it did represent a definite turning point in my small history."

Anthony's rebellion from his father made him lose precious time at Oxford. The first-class degree that he had "faintly" dreamed of while courting Harriet was beyond hope, but he did better than the authorities expected and "got a fair second, and was made to feel that in future competitions I might still recover my place." In Shadows he recorded, "He was learning, not for college honours, but to know; to make himself a man, and to raise himself above the beings whose play thing he had been so long."

Except for William with a first in mathematics, Hurrell and Anthony, like the archdeacon himself, placed a fair second. Still, Anthony's promise was noted and Newman, spokesperson for his father, encouraged him to wait on at Oxford after graduation, until a fellowship opened.

The whole system Anthony was born to presupposed he would become a clergyman, as his father and Hurrell before him. To enter Oxford in those days one must be a member of the Church of England and must subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of that church. To stay on after graduation as a fellow, one must eventually take deacon's orders, for a fellowship at Oxford was the first step in a clerical career.

For an educated man who had to make his own living, there were, as Anthony phrased it in The Nemesis of Faith, only three professions, "the three black Graces": A man could become a lawyer, a doctor, or a professional clergyman. It was a man's world Anthony was born into, but when gender determines destiny, not only women are thwarted. Gentlemen, too, had their options narrowly channeled.

It was usual for aspirants to fellowship to stay at the university until a vacancy opened up, supporting themselves by tutoring, but as Anthony phrased it, an accident threw a tutorship in Ireland his way, which he preferred. As he prepared to travel, brother John, who hated the practice of law and was threatening to follow his drinking buddy, famed animal painter Edwin Henry Landseer, into a life of art, lay dying.

John was the third son, but as usual it was the fourth son, William, who acted as the conciliator in the family. William Froude inherited from his father not only silence in adversity, but a defined sense of duty. It was he who obtained a leave from his work to return to Dartington Parsonage, and as his father wrote to Keble, "by his unremitting and affectionate attention he did all that could be done to spare me from fatigue and give ease to his brother." John died in March 1841, leaving the archdeacon with only his two youngest sons and his oldest daughter: "Dear Margaret too took her share of nursing & bore all with her usual fortitude." Even after Margaret married, she stayed by her father, while bringing yet another writer into the family, her son, William Hurrell Mallock, born in 1849, the year his uncle Anthony published The Nemesis of Faith.

With the loss of his fifth child to tuberculosis, the archdeacon did express his grief, admitting to more than an ordinary share of afflictions: "Each successive blow reviving the recollection and suffering of former ones have indeed borne heavily upon me, but I thank God that I have learnt in this severe school to bow to his will. To me the day is fast approaching when all that has given joy here will be as nothing."

In the same letter to Keble, the old man's thoughts, characteristically, turned to Anthony, who he wrote had the good fortune to be recommended to the Reverend Cleaver in Ireland as a tutor to his son, preparing for Oxford. It was a prestigious position in a very good family; the Reverend Cleaver's father was the Lord Archbishop of Dublin: "My fear is that they may overrate him & so feed the conceit that wants to be subdued."

Off Anthony sailed to Ireland. The archdeacon perhaps would have been less approving had he known how evangelical the Cleavers' household was. In this happy family, religion spoke to the individual heart -- directly! Revelation was accepted as personal reality. "Christ was with us and about us," benevolently present. "There was no narrowness."

Anthony, personally, had never been in contact with a man like Cleaver, knowing evangelicals only through Hurrell's ridicule, and through the itinerant representatives of Bible societies that occasionally knocked at the parsonage door. There was no copy of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in his father's library, and Anthony, future author of Bunyan, didn't read him until he was grown. Evangelical Protestants were regarded as amiable but silly people without learning, judgment, or accurate knowledge -- "generally ridiculous." For Anglicans the practical commands of religion were accepted as rules of life, but religion itself was seldom spoken of directly. Tract 80 itself reiterated that religious subjects ought not to be generally talked about.

Now for the first time Anthony was exposed to what he considered "a purely spiritual religion," where the teachings of the New Testament were adopted as principles of life that were carried into the everyday details, into ordinary thoughts and actions. The Bible itself was openly discussed and was interpreted according to individual understanding. "My residence with Mr. Cleaver produced an indelible effect upon me." Anthony, though still basically a Tractarian, would never again believe that "the grace of God was confined to the ministrations of the Catholic Church," as his brother and Newman taught.

While Anthony was tutoring in Ireland, Newman published Tract 90, in which he ascertained that the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England could be reconciled with Roman Catholic doctrine. It was vehemently censured as popery. Newman's audacious leaps of logic caused even more controversy than the publication of Hurrell's Remains. "It was considered dishonest, and its author was spoken of in terms which I could not bear to hear. I ventured to say that Newman was incapable of dishonesty, that whatever his opinions he was a pure and saintly person."

Anthony went further, explaining to the Reverend Cleaver that it was a historical fact that during Henry VIII's reign, the liturgy and the articles were constructed in a way that would allow both Catholics and Protestants to attend the same church services. Though he was historically correct, it was too dangerous a view to be accepted in Ireland, where Protestants and Catholics stood as irreconcilable antagonists. It was considered a great threat in England as well, and those who said Newman was a Roman Catholic in disguise now had their proof, considering Tract 90 the most blatant sophistry. Newman would soon be forced to step down from the ministry of St. Mary's Church, Oxford.

Although Anthony's Tractarian beliefs were modified through his exposure to the Reverend Cleaver and his evangelical household, he rigorously defended Newman's position. This is a good example of why he never could escape controversy. Froude was as capable of explaining the benefits of evangelical Protestantism to Newman (who had fled it), as he was of defending John Henry Newman's radical Anglo-Catholicism to Cleaver. His Oxford-trained mind constantly incorporated or shifted among the many sides of the same issue, which in itself might not be considered a character flaw. But to defend Tract 90 to Irish Protestants showed an almost constitutional inability to look ahead to consequences. "Mr. Cleaver very naturally was unwilling to leave his son in my hands, and it was decided, though I believe with mutual regret, that we should part."

Characteristic of Anthony to believe he and Mr. Cleaver parted with mutual regret. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Amiable Anthony, always careless of the effect of his words on others, went merrily on his way, making a short tour of Ireland before returning to the Cleavers, packing up, and going home. He was not about to leave Ireland ahead of his ward, for then his father would know he'd been sacked. As it was, his tour allowed the archdeacon to remain in the dark, the archdeacon informing Keble that his son was returning to England with the Cleaver boy, who was about to enter Oxford.

Right before leaving Ireland, Anthony described what he called a memorable incident. At Bray, a few miles from the Cleavers', Dr. Edward Pusey and his children were vacationing. Pusey, Newman, and Keble were the three most prominent Tractarians, "the triumvirs who became a national force, and gave its real character to the Oxford movement." Hurrell, of course, had been at the start of the movement, "the foremost of the party; the flame." Dr. Pusey had known Mr. Cleaver years ago when both were undergraduates at Christ Church. Anthony called on the vacationing Pusey. "I begged him in Mr. Cleaver's name to come over and dine with him. He came rather unwillingly."

At the dinner there was another guest, Robert Daly, who used Pusey's presence as an occasion to thunder out vehemently against the Tractarians.

Pusey said little and let the storm roll by. Anthony helped out by amiably directing Daly's wrath toward himself and his own Anglo-Catholic position. But when Daly extolled Martin Luther's break from the Roman Catholic priesthood, Pusey could no longer contain himself and said he could not submit his judgment to Martin Luther, a man who had not only broken his own vows but had induced a nun to break hers! With that Daly thumped his fist down hard enough to make the dinner table jump. "Sir, I declare before Heaven it was a vow more honoured in breach than in the observance."

Pusey had just about enough and fled as soon as he could, probably regretting that he had allowed the young Froude to convince him to attend. Daly followed, and at the head of the stairs shouted out after him, "We are glad to see you here, Dr. Pusey. We respect your learning and your character, but we want no more Popery, Dr. Pusey, no more Popery. We have enough of our own."

Anthony returned to Oxford in 1842 to find that Tract 90 -- Newman's bold attempt to reunite the Anglican Church with earlier Catholic practice -- had filled the air with electricity. Still, the Oxford Movement by then had its own head of steam and was sweeping with it the most brilliant of Anthony's generation -- Anthony included. His own impulse was still to go along with it, and Newman's personality would have recovered its complete hold over him had not the evangelical Protestantism that he experienced in Ireland held him back -- somewhat.

As he recalled so many years later in his remarkable "The Oxford Counter-Reformation," it was Newman the man who was so attractive to him and to so many of Anthony's generation. In Newman they met a human being whose mind was all-encompassing. He was interested in everything that went on in science, politics, literature. There was nothing narrow about him, and he had a genius when it came to relating to young men. At St. Mary's, Anthony and his classmates had heard him preach in that gentle, low voice, Sunday after Sunday. He would take a character from scripture and through him speak to the students "about ourselves, our temptations, our experiences." He seemed to address the most secret consciousness of all his listeners. When he spoke of Christ on the cross, the Crucifixion itself was as palatable to the congregation as it was to the priest who evoked it. Newman never exaggerated, he never was "unreal," he never talked just to be smart or witty. "He was lightness itself -- the lightness of elastic strength." He told the students what he believed. "He did not know where it would carry him." It eventually carried him over to Rome. But before Newman left the Church of England, Credo in Newmannum -- belief in Newman -- had been the call of Anthony's generation. Anthony was convinced that as a young man he had been more a Newmanite than a Tractarian.

By the time he returned from Ireland another mind was influencing him as well. By then he was reading Thomas Carlyle: History of the French Revolution; On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History; Past and Present. "Emerson followed and I found myself addressed by thinkers of a power and earnestness at least equal to the most brilliant of the Churchmen, with this difference: that I was no longer referred to books and distant centuries but to present facts and the world in which I lived and breathed."

The old ways were obsolete. One could not rely on the outdated, outward forms of traditional Christianity, Carlyle wrote. New clothes were needed for old truths. The great gifted men of every generation had the ability to see the truth manifest in the life around them and speak of it in their own terms, dressed in the garb of their times. "The natural, Carlyle said, was the supernatural; the supernatural, the natural."

"The question which Carlyle asked of every institution, secular or religious, was not, Is it true? but Is it alive? Truth can be but one." But truth is clothed differently at different times and in different places; one could find it "in the Norse Gods, in Mahomet, in Luther and Knox." No one institution encompasses it for all times.

Carlyle was writing about transcendental thought, about German literature, but "Oxford knew nothing of Goethe, knew nothing of modern languages outside of England. Even of English literature it was in almost absolute ignorance." Oxford was completely invested in theology, and to Oxford, Anthony returned. In the spring he won the highly prestigious Chancellor's Prize for an English essay -- he wrote about the influence of political economy on the development of nations. In the summer he was elected (Devonshire) Fellow of Exeter. If he had been wise enough to continue where this path led, he later recalled, he would have had an easy road before him.

For of the "three black Graces," the clerical profession was still the most compatible, especially for someone like Anthony, who was now a fellow and preferred no other way of life. The caveat was that to maintain a fellowship at Oxford, one had eventually to take deacon's orders. He knew that his Carlylean ideas and doubts made him an unlikely candidate for eventual priesthood, yet he was able to rationalize. The established Church of England was a national institution, as well as being a "profession" for many a young man. A voluntary religious community might expect its members and clergy to agree with all its doctrines. But a church established by law, like the Church of England, could not expect universal agreement with a specific and narrow interpretation of its tenets. It intentionally demanded "latitude." Many of his fellows had the same religious doubts as he but accepted ordination in that spirit. These fortunate men "never repented at all, and rose to deaneries and bishoprics."

However, by starting out on that convenient road without real conviction, in order to become an Oxford scholar, Anthony made what he considered -- and which was -- the great mistake of his life. Rationalizing that the extreme broadness of the Anglican Church would allow him his increasing religious doubts, he took deacon's orders and became the Reverend J. A. Froude. He remained a fellow, tutoring students, reading, thinking, and assisting Newman in researching and writing Lives of the English Saints.

As he proved in Ireland, Anthony had an enormous respect for Newman, whom he would always consider one of the two great geniuses of his century -- Carlyle the other. And, indelible for Anthony, Newman had been kind to him. Anthony later understood that the concern was offhanded -- a debt to the archdeacon, a testimony to his undying love of Hurrell, a token of his abiding friendship with William. Still, it remained significant for Anthony, who knew no kindness in his early years, and as a result he would always be able to separate his great admiration for the man from his growing disagreement with almost everything Newman came to represent. Newman could not return the favor. To him Anthony would become as reprehensible in the future as he was irksome during the Oxford years.

Anthony was to write on Saint Patrick and Saint Neot for Lives of the English Saints. By then, Newman was living in nearby Littlemore among a group of young male acolytes. Mark Pattison described the scene in his Memoirs: "Newman had bought some land at Littlemore, and turned a row of single-roomed cottages into cells connected by a sort of cloister; had built a library for his very considerable collection of patristic literature, and got some of his young disciples to join him in a kind of semi-monastic life." The place came to be nicknamed the Monastery. Froude could have gone to speak with Newman there or spoken with him when he came to Oxford, but in many ways he remained shy of the great man, though he certainly spoke his mind in many a letter.

He wrote that he despaired of making a historical case either for Saint Neot or any of the Alfred legends connected with him. What he proposed doing was to throw all the legends together. He would state the truth, that all anyone knew of Saint Neot and his miracles (including his sweet-smelling corpse) was the tradition of his monastery, recorded a hundred years after the saint's death. What he planned to do was to bring the accounts at his disposal together in a way that gave a sort of "poetical justification rather than an historical one." Which in fact he did.

"I suppose now," Froude wrote in his memoir of the movement forty years later, that the object of Lives of the English Saints was "to recommend asceticism, and perhaps to show that the power of working miracles had been continued in the Church until its unity was broken. But no such intention was communicated to us." For Anthony, joining the project was an opportunity to throw himself into a study of medieval literature and to glean from the monks' accounts what human life had really been like in England during a period only visible to the contemporary in what remained of medieval churches and monastic ruins. No doubt Carlyle's Past and Present, with its dynamically imaginative presentation of that lost world, was also an inspiration to him.

His study of the saints' lives quickly led him to a tangle of perplexities. The accounts of miracles were recorded gravely as real facts, without grace or imagination. "The sublime and ridiculous mixed together indiscriminately, with the ridiculous largely predominating. Was it possible that such stuff could be true? or even intended to be taken for truth? Was it not rather mere edifying reading for the monks' refectories; the puerile absurdities thrown in to amuse innocently their dreary hours?"

He could only justify these accounts by realizing that "There is a class of composition which is not history, and is not conscious fiction -- it was produced in old times; it is produced in our times; it will be produced wherever and as long as society exists -- something which honestly believes itself to be fact, and is created, nevertheless, by the imagination." These stories were actually legends, never examined carefully because it would be sin to doubt them. "For an intending biographer this was a serious discovery."

He couldn't repeat what he found in the saints' lives, for he hadn't the faith to believe these stories. Many years later a spiritualist would tell him that he himself could work a miracle if he had faith. "But, alas! I had none." The life of Saint Patrick caused him inner turmoil as it presented unsurmountable obstacles. He could not believe that Saint Patrick once lit a fire with icicles, changed a Welsh man into a wolf, or floated to Ireland on an altar stone. "I thought it nonsense." He wondered if there really was a Saint Patrick or if "Patricius" was actually a medieval title rather than the name of a single man. Although he did complete the life of Saint Neot, he soon realized Newman's project would have to go on without him. Still, having come in contact with the actual primary records intensified his religious doubts. "I was compelled to see that in certain conditions of mind the distinction between objective and subjective truth has no existence."

It brought him to a clear understanding that there were several kinds of truth. The abstract truth of pure mathematics, the psychological truth of a drama like Hamlet, the edifying truth of a moral tale. He also presaged the truth that Jung would elucidate, "of a legend which has sprung up involuntarily out of the hearts of a number of people, and therefore represents something in their own minds."

Finally, however, there was the "dull truth of plain experienced fact, which has to be painfully sifted out by comparison of evidence, by observation, and, when possible, by experiment." These facts were not absolutes but at all times open to revision and correction. This was forgotten by the hagiologists. "It is forgotten, for that matter, by most historians." It would never be forgotten by J. A. Froude, who would pay a great price in late-Victorian England for not turning Thomas Carlyle's pilgrimage on this earth into a saint's life.

Not only was Saint Patrick giving Anthony pause, many strange reports about Newman were flying about Oxford. "I do not know whether I have any right to say what I am going to say. I am afraid you will think me impertinent," Anthony wrote to him. People were saying that Lives of the English Saints was intended to lead them away from the Church of England. Anthony assured these critics that "the Author of them" had no idea of leaving the Anglican faith. Still, he couldn't account for his own misgivings: "I have no wish to intrude where I have no business -- only am I at liberty in what I write to take my own line? I cannot write a Life of St Patrick without at best taking some notice of the present state of the work he has left behind him. Am I allowed to regard the question as I have always been taught to regard it? If not, I had rather not go on. I had rather avoid expressing a different opinion till I have a better right to have formed one. I cannot go straight unless I know the point to which I am bound. You have always been so very kind to me, that I am sure you will forgive me if I have said anything I ought not."

On the same day, November 9, 1844, Newman replied -- but not easily. The draft of the letter at the Birmingham Oratory is filled with scratched-out sentences and illegible reconsiderations, but it begins clearly enough: "My dear Anthony, You have no need to apologize for your note. I am an Editor, I have no direct control over the series of Lives of the Saints." Twenty years later Newman printed a clear draft of the letter in his Apologia pro Vita Sua, without disclosing to whom it was addressed. It stated, "I think the engagement between you and me should come to an end."

And twenty years after that he'd write in a private letter: "Froude I never took to." In "1844, he accused me of trying indirectly by means of the Lives of the Saints to hook him into the Tractarian party." Newman neither forgot nor forgave Anthony. Yet Anthony's concern was certainly not unfounded. For eleven months later, convinced the Church of England was in schism and that the Church of Rome was the only path to salvation, Newman did leave the Church of England. On October 9, 1845, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Fourteen months after that, in the Rome he once traveled to with Hurrell Froude and the Venerable Archdeacon of Totnes, John Henry Newman became a Roman Catholic priest.

The ensuing scandal appeared to justify those who accused Newman of being a Roman Catholic all along, and the Oxford Movement -- or at least the first wave of it -- collapsed around Newman's defection. Hurrell had once told Anthony and William that they would be free to go their own way on religious matters on that inconceivable day when Newman and Keble disagreed. When Newman went over to Rome, that day arrived.

Anthony thought of leaving Oxford. There were, after all, two black Graces left. Brother John had been a lawyer, but hated it. Perhaps medical school was an option; the new University College in London was nonsectarian. He spoke to his superiors but they told him it was impossible. Anthony had taken a fellowship, had "dipped his hand in Church ink" by becoming a deacon. The law of his country proclaimed that once a young man entered the Church of England, even before committing himself to priest's orders, all other learned professions were closed to him -- permanently.

The Victorian age is often characterized as the time of great religious doubt, a time when the best and brightest turned away from the church. What is ignored or perhaps not understood is that in giving up a clerical life, a young, talented man such as Anthony gave up the chance of a professional life as well. Taking a fellowship, which included deacon's orders, was a legal as well as a religious commitment. An educated young man who changed his mind about becoming a clergyman had a perilous road ahead of him, particularly if he had to earn his own living. Many folded, just relied on the broadness of the church, and went on to clerical positions though they did not believe. Others became wanderers, outsiders, condemned to the fringes of society, plagued by religious insecurities in the way later generations would be plagued by existential ones.

Others became authors. "The men that write books, Carlyle says, are now the world's priests, the spiritual directors of mankind." In The Nemesis of Faith, Anthony's protagonist will exclaim, "Oh! how I wish I could write. I try sometimes; for I seem to feel myself overflowing with thoughts, and I cry out to be relieved of them. But it is so stiff and miserable when I get anything done. What seemed so clear and liquid, comes out so thick, stupid, and frostbitten....Still, if there was a chance for me! To be an author -- to make my thoughts the law of other minds! -- to form a link, however humble, a real living link, in the electric chain which conducts the light of the ages!"

Staying on as fellow, Anthony tried his hand at writing essays. Then, at the age of twenty-seven, he wrote Shadows of the Clouds under the pseudonym Zeta. The brutal upbringing of Edward Fowler was narrated by an older and wiser tutor, and since Anthony looked at his life from this seemingly dispassionate point of view, he made the mistake of believing the moral and psychological overvoice he brought to his work turned the subjective into the universal. Canon Fowler could have been many a boy's severe, old-fashioned clergyman of a father. True enough. Yet he was also, without a shred of a doubt, the Venerable Archdeacon of Totnes.

Two things are extraordinary in Anthony's first fiction: its realistic depiction of physical punishment both at home and at school in the early Victorian period, and its plea to the fathers for psychological insight. Shadows of the Clouds contained Anthony's first love song to his distant father, perverse, perhaps, but still a plea for understanding.

For all its personal detail -- or perhaps because of all its personal detail -- it struck a chord in his society. It offered a startling reevaluation of the accustomed relationship between father and son: "If fathers could but know, or could but let themselves be taught, how many sleepless nights of anxiety they would save themselves -- how many a naturally well-intentioned child they would save from sorrow and suffering and guilt, by but taking the trouble now and then to find a few kind words to express the real kindness which in their hearts they feel!" One kind, hearty word and our hero, tears in his eyes, would throw himself at his father's feet, "and his pains would have been at an end forever." The book caused the future George Eliot "a sort of palpitation that one hardly knew whether to call wretched or delightful." Its author was one of the "greater ones."

The all-knowing Benjamin Jowett, a year older than Anthony and a Balliol tutor at the time, considered the book well worth reading and instructive. "The purport of the book is to show that although in sermons etc we speak of man as a responsible free agent, yet there is another side of this truth not to be forgotten that he is under the dominion of circumstances too e.g. his education, the misunderstanding of his disposition by his friends etc." Though the book gave him a great interest in its author, Jowett wished certain personal things had been left out. "It is so very obviously the life of Froude that there is no mistaking it -- the want of delicacy is certainly a great flaw in the book." If someone his own age considered the book indiscreet, one can only imagine the reaction of the archdeacon, who was cast as the severe, remote, threatening, punishing clergyman who sent his son to Westminster, where he was tortured, threatened to apprentice him to a trade, and did not allow him the woman he loved: "It is always the same, he cares for none of us. I believe he would think himself well rid of us if we were dead."

From a biographical point of view, the book is extraordinarily illuminating in that the upbringing of Ned Fowler differs from Anthony's lived life only in the characters' names. From a historical point of view, it pinpoints the abuses of public school education and the relationship of father and son with an accuracy and lack of restraint unparalleled at that time.

For years the archdeacon and William, as well as the ubiquitous Keble, kept urging Anthony to read and reread Hurrell's Remains. These journals of Hurrell's, which the archdeacon enthusiastically published, were a daily, uncensored, fluctuating account of a morbid young man's thoughts, sins, prayers, mistakes, fasts, feelings. The archdeacon considered the Remains a saint's life, though many in England were scandalized by Hurrell's unbridled, Romanish confessions. That unsparing psychological focus on one's flawed self, which Hurrell inherited from his mother, is evident all through the Remains, and one sees it as well in Shadows of the Clouds. Had Hurrell been a novelist, he probably would have been as confessional as Anthony.

Benjamin Jowett realized the connection between the brothers and quipped quite perceptively that he was actually reading a new edition of "Froude's remains." In a sense, that was what both of Anthony's early novels were. The self-revealing, confessional aspects of Shadows capture the whisper of the mother's voice as amplified through the unflinching consciousness of the oldest brother. One doubts Anthony's father read it that way. The archdeacon was as closemouthed and severe as ever, as he bought up every copy of Shadows of the Clouds he could find in order to get it off the market.

Meanwhile, at Oxford, Anthony's unpublished letters to the rector of Exeter College show him not as the hero of a new day but equivocating, denying, wiggling out from under the accusation that he was, in fact, the Zeta who wrote Shadows of the Clouds. Affable, smiling Anthony was reacting to the rector as if the head of the college were his father, one he did not want to lose. The rector had always been kind to him, had always appreciated his genius.

Anthony answered the accusations against him too cleverly by half, in an Oxford-speak that allowed him to deny authorship of Shadows at the same time as he wiggled out of taking further religious vows -- priest's orders -- because of the erroneous accusation. The italics are mine, added to pinpoint dancing angels.

"I have seen the Book to which you refer, & several reviews of it," he wrote to the rector. "I cannot say I think they have any of them given the true Idea of the Book and if I had written it I should not think it inconsistent in me to apply for Testimonials for the priest's orders."

However, "I could easily conceive an objection might be felt toward the author of such a book; and what I should do in case it was so, would be what I do now in the present instance, that is, withdraw the application [for priest's orders] which I made to you."

Somehow Rector Richards chose not to see through Anthony's lies -- that Anthony was Zeta (brother Hurrell and Newman had written poetry, Lyra Apostolica , together as Beta) was as plain as the nose on his face. He smoothed things over with letters to the more outraged former fellows, and Anthony, in his late twenties, was reprimanded yet allowed to stay at Oxford, as long as he denied authorship, which he had to do in writing:

"As I am not aware that anything in my conduct has been matter of scandal or prejudice to the college, I can only thank you for your admonition and trust it will always be as little necessary as it is at present. You have my full authority for saying that no Bookseller or other person has any right to give the authorship of the book you speak of to me."

The equivocations in these unpublished letters point to the fact that Anthony's first venture as an author did little to correct the moral cowardice that he portrayed so vividly in it. Instead, as Zeta, Anthony did somersaults on the head of a pin, retained his fellowship, and avoided taking the inevitable priest's orders.

"I had much talk with Emerson. I told him that he was in part responsible for my present state of mind, that I thought of giving up my profession and my fellowship. He did not advise. He did not dissuade, but characteristically he urged the propriety of doing nothing in a hurry. He recommended me to study the Vedas. I should find myself on a mountain peak from which I could look round and down on the turmoils and troubles of the lower world. I asked him if anything would grow on those mountain peaks. It did not seem to be of such importance to him whether anything would grow or not."

The mountain peak Froude chose was Killarney. He returned to southern Ireland and far from the locale of his discontent, like Thoreau (who sent him books); deeply inspired by conversations with Emerson and the writings of Carlyle, he obeyed the impulses of what both of these mentors called the inner man. Out of his moral morass came The Nemesis of Faith, or as Arthur Clough phrased it, "a new book of religious biography -- auto or otherwise." For Anthony, the writing of the book itself brought him extraordinary relief. With it came psychological clarity. "I had thrown off the weight under which I had been staggering. I was free, able to encounter the realities of life without vexing myself further over the unanswerable problems." The book presented an exact picture of his own mind. "It was a mood, not a treatise."

"When the manuscript was completed I left my Killarney hermitage and went back to Oxford, but I had by this time made up my mind that Oxford was no longer the place for me; not Oxford nor indeed England, for I could not go on with my profession. If I was to begin a new life, it must be in some freer country, where the then unpardonable stain of relinquishing orders was not held to be so heinous."

He wrote to friend Charles Kingsley not to hold against him that he was thinking of retreating from England and hiding out in the colonies. There was a school being started at Hobart Town and he had applied for a position. If he was accepted, he'd teach for a few years and then quietly become a settler. He had few prospects in England, and he would eventually be glad of the change. He acknowledged that leaving England was cowardice and selfishness before Charles had a chance to make the accusation. Still, he wanted to give up his fellowship, he wanted to drop the Reverend from his name. He confessed to hating the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. He told the rector himself that he hated chapel. He had to make a living somehow and he couldn't do it at home because of his clerical disability.

Anthony was not the only doubt-ridden young man of his generation who looked to the colonies for a new path, who wished to "quietly slide into a settler." His friend the poet Arthur Clough dreamed of going off with him. And a few years later, Robert Browning, whose best friend Alfred Domett had abruptly left for New Zealand in 1842, would write Bishop Blougram's Apology, a long poem in which the cure for a self-conscious and doubting literary man would be to pick up his farming tools and emigrate. The colonies in the 1840s were perceived by many a young man as a way past the confines of the three black Graces and the dogmas of their national church toward a brave new world, where one would be able to find useful work and escape fruitless speculation.

During Christmas recess, Anthony was back at Dartington Parsonage, where he found the archdeacon willing to finance his emigration to Tasmania. "I sail in the middle of March for Van Diemen's Land, the land of green trees, and opossums, of kangaroos and cherry trees, whose fruit grows inside out."

Froude's break from Oxford was hardly the complete rebellion of a free mind that it has been made out to be. Unpublished letters, as well as the Yearly Register of Exeter College, point to Anthony's shifts and turns, the confusion and immaturity below his surface of certainty. There was a painful callowness that he, in certain moods, was the first to acknowledge. Even after The Nemesis of Faith was published, after he left the high table where we first found him watching the fire that earlier that day consumed his novel, he continued to write to the rector of Exeter, as one might to a father, explaining, edifying, always hoping that if enough ink flowed the older man would understand his book and the crises of faith rampant among the younger generation.

Still, The Nemesis of Faith was a farewell to the road he was expected to take. And he ensured himself against backtracking. This time he would not allow himself the temptation of signing himself Zeta; he would sign his name and his Oxford affiliation to it. The book was to be a revolution in itself, but such a book by a deacon of the church, by an archdeacon's son, by Hurrell Froude's brother!

The rector had a board and alumni to contend with. Word of Nemesis circulated before publication, and right after Ash Wednesday services in 1849, Edward Hawkins, provost of Oriel College, rushed to find it, read the first eighty pages and some pages at the end of the book, and breathlessly report its contents to the worried rector.

The big question was whether Froude held the ideas of his protagonist Markham Sutherland. Froude seemed to. But Hawkins had skimmed and still hoped it was not so. Sutherland denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. He disputed the goodness of a God cruel enough to subject man to an eternal hell. In fact, he denied eternal future punishment for man's sins, in the manner of Thomas Paine and Lord Byron. Hawkins thought it best to send the book to the rector without delay, before it was published. Whatever the rector decided to do would be wise and Christian.

The hero of the novel was indeed like Anthony, a man of the cloth who no longer believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ or the exclusivity of Christianity as the only way to salvation. But they differed in an essential respect. Sutherland, with all these doubts, went on to take priest's orders, and his ensuing tragedy was a cautionary tale. Anthony's novel of 1849 was a defining moment of the times, exposing and articulating the religious and professional doubts felt by an entire generation. It was also heresy.

"What I have written I have written," Anthony responded coolly at first to the rector's inquiry. But in the next line he equivocated, apparently leaving his fate in the rector's hands: "If you think it convenient now you are quite at liberty to say on Monday that I have ceased to be a Fellow of the College. Yours as much as you will let me be, J.A. Froude."

There were those in the college and among the alumni who would have refused Froude the privilege of resigning. Some would have had a public trial, prosecuted him for perjury, for willful violation of the terms of his oath. Lawyers were consulted. They advised that perjury would not be easy to prove. Letter after letter was written and received by the rector on the subject of legal prosecution. He informed Anthony that responsibility for resignation was Anthony's, not his. There was nothing the rector was "at liberty to say on Monday": "In regard to the act of resigning your fellowship, I do not feel that I can in my situation offer you any opinion."

"I am sorry my ignorance of the proper form to be observed should have caused you further inconvenience," Anthony replied tersely and handed in a formal resignation. The same day it was received, the rector responded in kind that Anthony had "ceased to be a Fellow of the Coll."

But the business still wasn't finished. Only eleven days later, on March 10, 1849, could the rector write: "I have removed your name, agreeably by your request from the book of the College. It is most painful to me not to be able to say that I regret severing the last of the ties that have connected us. I would add more, but I do not feel equal to writing more -- & saying all I wish to say to you."

By then the scandal had gone beyond Oxford. The British newspapers had picked it up and there was a media storm -- "dust storm," Anthony called it -- about such a blasphemer being allowed to teach in the colonies. On the same day on which the rector accepted his resignation, Anthony, about to clear out of Oxford, made the mistake of responding to press criticism, writing to the Morning Herald in a most indignant manner: "Sir, I have seen an article in your paper reflecting in no measured language on my appointment to a school in Van Diemen's Land. You have not read my book (at least I hope you have not); you have contented yourself with the extracts you have seen in a newspaper, and unwisely committed yourself to adopt its comments. My book is a book of pure fiction." He demanded an apology.

Fleet Street was not impressed. Froude's letter "proves very fully that he did not study casuistry under Mr. Newman for nothing." His words were nothing more than "the old Tractarian shuffle, taught and practiced in Mr. Newman's school." The book is not a fiction, it's a collection of fragments, impossible to read without realizing it as "a sketch of the author's own mind, a manual of infidelity."

The very integrity of the new University College, London, which sponsored Anthony's Tasmania appointment was questioned. The daily press allowed Anthony no wiggle room; the Hobart School offer was withdrawn. There was going to be no new home for the infidel in the land of opossums, kangaroos, and peculiarly constructed cherry trees.

Anthony was anxious to see the rector before quitting Oxford; in more than one letter he expressed his desire to return his keys and pick up his twenty-one-shilling deposit in person, so that he could shake the rector's hand before departing. He could not grasp the rector's refusal to see him. And once exiled from Oxford, Anthony still attempted to explain his work to him -- to enlighten the older man: "The Hero is evidently from his very first Introduction a weak, if amiable man, and I wished to paint such a man struggling in the element of scepticism which (however older men may be ignorant of it) is, since Carlyle has written, the element in which all young men have moved."

He wanted the rector of Exeter College to understand that faith in God existed in Carlyle's work, and in all the really powerful literature of the day. In fact this retailoring of old truths by contemporary authors was more inspiring and offered young men better solutions to spiritual difficulties than the Church of England.

In Nemesis, Sutherland's mind was destroyed because the Church of England gave him no solution to his intellectual difficulties concerning specific doctrine. The conclusion that could fairly be drawn from his book, Anthony informed the rector, was that either the Church of England must offer a "more comprehensive philosophy of the Bible" or its strict theory of "Infallibility" must be given up. Above all, human duty and faith in God must rest on a broader and deeper basis than that of authority and tradition. If not, "the fate of M Sutherland will be the fate of thousands."

Anthony's novel was a cautionary tale, written as he struggled with the possibility of taking priest's orders himself, though like the protagonist of his epistolary novel, he no longer believed in Christ's divinity or in the exclusivity of Anglican salvation.

He was quite aware of the responsibility of writing such a book -- and that the rector might consider it particularly presumptuous for a Froude to have written it. "But I felt what was in me, & I could not choose but say it. And nothing which has happened since & nothing which has been said has shaken my own conviction that I have done my duty. That it has given you pain I am most sorry -- yet I am sure of this -- that in a few years as you look back, and if God gives me life & strength you will see both this book and me, if not as I myself see them, yet in a very different light from that in which you now see them."

So used was the Oxford man to the debate of issues, so used was the Oxford man to being an Oxford man, that he could not realize the conversation was over. He had cut off a limb but still thought he could walk on it.

The archdeacon was disgraced by the book. His close associate, the Archbishop of Exeter, wrote to the rector with compassion for the "truly venerable" octogenarian. For he had suffered one of the heaviest afflictions of this world, "the consciousness of having given birth to one who perverts no ordinary endowments to the corruption of his fellow men -- and to the more presumptuous defiance of his God!"

His father was at the end of his rope and disinherited Anthony. "Perplexed as I believe he was, he came to the wisest resolution possible," Anthony wrote years later. "As I had persisted in declining the established roads and choosing a way of my own, he determined that I should be made to feel the meaning of what I was doing. As I would not do what he had wished, I must be left in the water to find bottom for myself where I could."

The archdeacon would not support him, would not talk to him, write to him, or allow Anthony to return home. So sharp and clean was this separation that Anthony, in the first throes of liberation, felt no pain, only release. Nor did it matter that his former friends dropped him, some out of fear for their reputations, others out of repulsion for his advanced religious views. Completely cut off from his past, he no longer felt himself victimized. "The worst that could befall me seemed light by the side of the burden which I had got rid of." He had relied on what he believed to be true, turned his back on what Carlyle would consider hypocrisy and cant, and acted decisively. It was only then that Anthony realized he was not fated to follow his older siblings to an early grave. He was going to live.

"Having thrown The Nemesis out of me, I had recovered my mental spirits and I was able to face the future without alarm or misgivings." He found himself half amused by the fuss so small a creature had been able to make, and it encouraged him to think that if he could produce such effect, there must be something in him after all.

In those heady days, left entirely on his own, Anthony was not thinking of what he lost but of what he had gained.

Copyright 2005 by Julia Markus

Continues...

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Excerpted from J. Anthony Froude by Julia Markus Copyright © 2005 by Julia Markus.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Sliding Toward Tasmania

Yes and No

The Perfect Marriage

Confronting the Labyrinth of Modern Confusion

The Hero as Biographer

The Unstrung Bow

The World According to the Muslim, the Irishman, and the Hebrew Conjurer

The Revolution in My Affairs

Afterword

Abbreviations

Notes

Selected books and articles

Index

Editorial Reviews

A microscopic look at the staid Victorian biographer and pupil of Thomas Carlyle, by novelist and 19th-century scholar Markus (Across an Untried Sea, 2000, etc.). Drawing on reams of material regarding the long life of J.A. Froude (1818-94), the author fails to extract its essence for the general reader. As a young man, Froude was a Tractarian, a member of the Oxford Movement, founded by his brother Hurrell and John Henry Newman, which sought to purge Protestant elements from the Church of England. But he grew disillusioned as the movement's leaders were subsumed into Roman Catholicism. In 1849 Froude wrote The Nemesis of Faith, a scandalous novel about a clergyman who doubts his calling; its publication cost him his Oxford fellowship. Excoriated ceaselessly by his father, a Devonshire archdeacon who believed he was profligate and professionally useless, Froude embarked on a literary career. He edited the influential review Fraser's and forged a name as the distinguished biographer of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Benjamin Disraeli and, most importantly, Scottish historian, essayist and "seer" Thomas Carlyle. Falling under the spell of Carlyle and his fierce, intelligent, long-suffering wife, Jane, changed the course of Froude's life. Carlyle convinced Froude that biography was "the only history"; he also, after Jane's sudden death in 1866, confided to his friend that their 40-year marriage had been sexless. When Carlyle himself died in 1881, Froude honored a promise and published both Thomas's frank Reminiscence of his wife and Jane's unexpurgated letters. These blunt portraits of a difficult marriage brought Froude condemnation within the literary world. Undaunted, he went on to writeseveral magisterial volumes on Carlyle's life and to travel the globe as an unofficial diplomat; he was even reinstated at Oxford in the last years of his life. Markus's depictions of the harsh treatment young Froude received from his sadistic family and of his sticky relationship with the Carlyles are most interesting, but her text grows cumbersome and disorganized under the weight of so much research material. Fascinating and useful, but exceedingly recherche.

Kirkus Reviews