Teaching Newman to undergraduates has yielded unexpected research rewards. Thanks in part to students in my St. John Henry Newman Seminar, the NINS Digital Collections has recently added a previously unknown letter, written 8 November 1845 from Newman to Rev. Joseph Oldknow, Perpetual Curate of Holy Trinity, Bordesley, Birmingham. My students and I may have been the first to examine the letter since its donation several years ago to the St. John the Evangelist Library of Christendom College, by William H. Marshner, Professor Emeritus of Theology. When the Director of the Library, Andrew V. Armstrong, learned of the course, he let me know about the manuscript and suggested that I examine it.
There are two letters from Charles Warren Adams included in the NINS Digital Collections, the first is dated 1862 and is addressed to Bishop Grant of Southwark. Adams (1833–1903) was a London journalist, who was an author in his spare time. Under the pseudonym Charles Felix, Adams wrote the detective novel The Notting Hill Mystery (1865), which is widely acknowledged as one of the earliest examples of detective fiction.
It is always exciting when a previously unknown Newman letter comes to light. When Oxford University Press’s Letters and Diaries were being compiled the editors scoured the globe for every piece of correspondence from the Cardinal that could be found. Despite this, letters they missed continue to appear. In January after cataloguing some letters written by the Right Reverend Patrick John Ryan, Archbishop of Philadelphia to Cardinal Newman, I contacted the Catholic Historical Research Centre at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to let them know that these letters were now online and to ask if they knew where Newman’s replies were.
During my internship for NINS, I took great pleasure in reading the letters of Richard Simpson, a former Anglican priest numbered among the prominent Catholic converts of the time. He was most known for his involvement in the Liberal Catholic movement through the Rambler, a periodical which served to allow the prominent lay converts of the time to express their views to the masses. We currently have a total of 64 letters penned by Richard Simpson in the Digital Collections, of which most were directed to St. John Henry Newman. Despite their often-mundane nature (as is often the case with historical letters), they provide a window into the man Richard Simpson, as well as into the unfolding of the Rambler situation in 1859 as it suffered attacks by the English Bishops.
The NINS Digital Collections contain twenty-nine letters from Sir James Marshall. Marshall grew up in Edinburgh, the son of the Rev. James Marshall, a Scottish Presbyterian minister. He received his degree at Exeter College, Oxford and was ordained in Anglican Orders in 1852. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1857, but due to the fact he had lost an arm in a childhood accident, was barred from being ordained a Catholic Priest.
The NINS Digital Collections contains one letter from Father Basil Maturin to Bishop Amigo discussing his attendance at Father Tyrrell’s funeral. Father Maturin was born February 15, 1847 at All Saints Vicarage, Grangegorman, Co. Dublin, the third of ten children of the Rev. William Maturin. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and originally took Anglican Orders in 1870.
