The death in 2003 of Gerard Tracey, the keeper of the Newman archives at the Birmingham Oratory and editor of several previous volumes in the series of Newman's Letters and Diaries, was a great blow to Newman scholarship. Tracey's archival and editorial expertise promised to be hard to follow. However, on the evidence of this penultimate volume in the series (first initiated in 1961 by the late Stephen Dessain), Francis McGrath, with the aid of his editorial support team, has proved himself a worthy successor to Tracey. The present volume represents a magnificent achievement in textual editorial scholarship. McGrath has left ‘no stone unturned’ in his pursuit of additional editorial information on names and places, however minor or obscure; the scholarly apparatus is exemplary. However, sometimes the cardinal editorial virtues of conciseness and relevance have been sacrificed in pursuit of the tangential. If a criticism might be made it is that a lighter editorial touch might perhaps have been employed. The footnotes in places become overloaded with extraneous matter – an excess of quotation often from purely secondary and much later sources so that the reader cannot always ‘see the wood for the trees’. These sources can be revealing in providing illustrative material but sometimes they only represent subjective opinion and could have been omitted or not quoted so extensively. Moreover, space is taken up by several short accounts of major earlier episodes, covered in preceding volumes, such as the original Hampden controversy of 1836 (p. 11 n. 1). In such instances the reader could simply have been referred back to the appropriate earlier volume in the series.

The dominant episode covered in the volume ix, which deals with a key period in Newman's agonisingly slow ‘Anglican death bed’, is the Charges delivered by the Anglican bishops and the condemnation by the Oxford University authorities of a sermon by E. B. Pusey on the eucharist in 1843, and Newman's pained private responses to both episodes. The generous space allotted to extracts from the Charges in part of the sequence of no fewer than eight appendices at the end of this volume is to be welcomed. Readers can thereby see for themselves just what Newman was up against – or was he?

It is not appropriate to argue the point at length here (see P. Nockles, ‘Oxford, Tract 90 and the bishops’, in D. Nicholls and F. Kerr [eds], John Henry Newman: reason, rhetoric and romanticism, Bristol 1991), but this reviewer has reservations as to the extent to which the editor in his introductory note uncritically accepts Newman's presumption that he was the victim of a breach of understanding or bargain made with the bishop of Oxford, Richard Bagot, himself a High Churchman who personally admired and even venerated Newman. According to this apparent bargain, Bishop Bagot would somehow ensure that the bishops as a whole would not censure Tract 90 if it were withdrawn from sale, though this was clearly beyond his power and he was under acute suspicion himself for being too lenient with the Tractarians. More attempt might also have been made to differentiate between the episcopal Charges because by no means all were uniformly anti-Tractarian in tone or content, even if Newman (for whom a ‘bishop's lightest word’ was ‘ex cathedra’) read them as such. Gladstone clearly distinguished between those that were ‘Church’ and ‘Anti-Church’, and some Tractarians did not believe that they were being ill-treated by the bishops. As Frederick Oakeley, one of the more extreme among the Tractarian party, put it in January 1843, ‘Even by the admissions and very complaints of those persons who are most opposed to us, the general tenor of the charges delivered during the past year have been in an unprecedented degree in favour of Catholic views.’ Moreover, the presentation of the moves by the Oxford authorities against Pusey's sermon on the eucharist, resulting in his suspension from the pulpit for two years, are also somewhat one-sided. The complaint about Pusey's ‘Star Chamber’ treatment might have come straight from the literature of Tractarian partisans and ought to have been put into inverted commas. In truth, the lament that the Heads of Houses were exceeding their powers in forming a committee to censure Pusey's sermon came ill from those who would have been the first to insist on the reverence due to their role as theological policeman or at least guardians of university subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles in other contexts (as over successful moves to block the admission of Protestant Dissenters and in the attempted censure of the latitudinarian Dr Hampden for heterodoxy in 1836). It was a common refrain in Oxford at the time that ‘Dr Pusey was now made to wear the cap which in 1836 he had fitted on Dr Hampden's head.’ Newman is quoted (p. xxx) as complaining to Manning that if ‘ever there was a case in which an individual has been put aside, and virtually put away, by a community, mine is one. No decency has been observed in the attacks upon me from authority, no protests have appeared against them’. It is a pity that evidence from the other side that might qualify this impression of innocent victimhood does not get more recognition.

However, these minor interpretative cavils aside, this volume is to be commended for its scholarly exactness and erudition, and not least its detailed index. There are many choice pickings for enthusiasts of the Oxford Movement and of the history of the University of Oxford University during this period. This book will be a rich source of reference and study for Newman scholars and specialists as well as more general readers for generations to come.