For the biographer, friends and family of the chosen biographical subject present perennial problems. The subject was almost certainly a public figure; the major elements of the biography will thus address public actions; but it would have been that private world of friends and family which occupied the vast majority of the subject’s life and shaped attitudes and public actions in a profound yet often elusive manner. To make matters more complicated, friendships and family ties rarely function with predictable tidiness; rather, they inject an irrationality into life which flows from the haphazard nature of emotional commitments.
In light of this, the biographer of John Henry Newman enjoys some remarkable advantages. Most notable is the historical evidence available for reconstructing his friendships and family relationships, for exploring that private space which exerted so much occult influence on his public life. For Newman was a prolific letter writer: His extant letters, along with his diaries, fill thirty-two volumes in the Oxford critical edition. Indeed, his passion for writing letters seems to have had an almost compulsive quality to it. And what a correspondent he was. The Victorian era produced some great letter writers but greatest of them all was the man once dubbed ‘the most dangerous man in England.’ His letters are literary, models of English prose, and of a kind which this age, sinking under the easy virtue of emails and the banality of tweets, will not see again.
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