Bedevilled by heroic narratives for many years, not to say hagiographical ones, only recently has the Oxford Movement begun to receive the critical attention from historians it has long demanded. Pioneering work by Owen Chadwick, Sheridan Gilley, and Geoffrey Rowell, amongst others, has been reinforced and revised above all by Peter Nockles, whose original and comprehensive 1994 monograph, The Oxford Movement in context, dominates the field so decisively that it seems as if no one else could add anything much to Nockles's account. Yet Simon Skinner has done just that, in a remarkable contribution to the Oxford Historical Monographs series.
Skinner has revisited the social commentary of the Tractarians, by looking closely at two neglected sources, the British Critic, a journal taken over by Newman and edited successively by him and Thomas Mozley, and novels written by minor luminaries of the movement such as William Gresley, Francis Paget, and Mozley himself. If this sounds a relatively narrow and obscure basis for revisionism, Skinner's thoughtful exploration of these and more familiar sources well justifies their selection. It seems extraordinary that the British Critic in particular has not been used more thoroughly by historians hitherto; it was, in effect, the Tractarian ‘house magazine’, and through it Skinner is able to synchronize the development of Tractarian thought with contemporary events across a wide range of subjects stretching well beyond the theological preoccupations of the tracts, sermons, and treatises conventionally used as a way into the ‘mind’ of the Oxford Movement. Five main chapters deal with Tractarian politics (including church–state relations and parish organization) and social criticism.
The significance of Skinner's conclusions surely goes beyond church history, into the area of British political and social thought in general. He points out, for example, that the scathing criticism Newman, Keble, Froude, Pusey, and others launched at the state in the 1830s and 1840s, and in particular at state interference in church affairs, did not mean – as some have assumed – that they were anti-establishment; on the contrary, they advocated essentially a unity of church and state secured through the state's recognition of ‘the church's historical antecedence to the state’ (p. 91). Theirs, in other words, was a reactionary, almost theocratic, conception that stands in marked contrast to the more utilitarian ideas of church–state relations expressed by many High Churchmen and Tories of their day. Again, Tractarian radicalism on social affairs – which, as Skinner shows decisively, went well beyond pious blandishments on duties to the poor – has to be seen in this broader context of a deep disillusionment with political economy, industrialism, and practically all the alternatives positions of the governing elite, including High Tories, Peelites, and ‘Young England’ as well as Whigs and Radicals. In forcing historians to take Tractarian social criticism much more seriously than they have done hitherto, Skinner refocuses attention on the intimate association of theological conviction and social and political ideology.
Based on a sophisticated engagement with primary source material, this book is very well written, and never dull. It is almost impossible to fault, as a work of research. I was surprised that Skinner seemed unaware of R. W. Franklin's 1997 book, Nineteenth-century churches: the history of a new Catholicism in Württemberg, England, and France, which would have underlined his account of Pusey's social radicalism. I also found the editorial practice here of using lower case for substantives (‘christian’, ‘tractarian’, ‘catholic’, for example) a little odd, and potentially misleading. Overall, however, this is an outstanding contribution to nineteenth-century British church history, and indispensable for historians of High Anglicanism.
