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Arnold’s Boy Excellent Dr Stanley: The Life of Dean Stanley of Westminster
By John Witheridge (Michael Russell Publishing 400pp £24)
Who remembers Dean Stanley now? He is a rather wan figure among the noisy, disputatious, pugnacious clerics who bustle forward whenever 19th-century English Christianity is mentioned: men like his contemporaries Newman, Keble and Pusey, Soapy Sam Wilberforce and George Cornelius Gorham, whose views on baptism so outraged the Bishop of Exeter when he was appointed to the living of Brampford Speke in 1847 that he was subjected to 52 hours of interrogation.
Arthur Stanley was not like that. This latest – and perhaps last ever – biography, by the headmaster of Charterhouse, shows a man who could have fitted right in with the modern Church of England: broad in sympathies, if not particularly progressive, and, for the period, unusually tolerant of those with different views. At a time when such things caused apoplexy in the rectories of England, he was all in favour of ecumenical services and happy to meet Pope Pius IX:
I went in full decanal costume. He observed and took hold of the cassock which I wore. He said: ‘I have seen something of this kind before. It is the same as an English clergyman once wore in coming to see me. His name was Thompson.’ We spent one or two minutes in endeavouring to ascertain who Thompson could be. It turned out to be Townsend who had come in former years on a mission of converting the Pope. And he equally defended the evangelical Gorham’s baptismal heresy against the ‘inquisition of arbitrary prelates and of tumultuous synods’.
Stanley comes across as a good sort, a shy, frail intellectual subsisting on cups of tea and buttered toast, struggling to fasten buttons, which was why he never wore gaiters, and indeed incapable even of cracking the shell of a hard-boiled egg, which his wife, Augusta – formerly Queen Victoria’s favourite lady-inwaiting – usually did for him. It was perhaps just as well that, in a comfortable lifetime spent in English institutions – Rugby, Balliol and University College, Oxford, Canterbury Cathedral, then back to Oxford to become Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Christ Church and finally, in 1864, becoming Dean of Westminster Abbey, a position he held until his death in 1881 – Stanley really never needed to concern himself with such mundane matters. He had the space, time and affluence to devote himself to preaching, writing and travelling abroad, usually for several months a year.
He might have become a bishop – the sobriquet ‘Excellent’ was given to him by Queen Victoria, who perhaps surprisingly had a preference for liberal clergymen, and he was certainly well connected in academic, political and, of course, clerical circles: Benjamin Jowett, the formidable Master of Balliol, was a lifelong friend, as was Archibald Tait, the Archbishop of Canterbury; men like Gladstone and Disraeli came to tea – but somehow the timing was never quite right. He tended to be considered for a vacant see just when the government of the day could b o ok s hop
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0870 429 6608 literaryreview@bertrams.com All major credit and debit cards accepted not risk another liberal appointment. Instead, he performed a useful and significant task as the main writer of the commission report in the 1850s that finally set about reforming Oxford’s statutes, in the teeth of opposition from most of Stanley’s university colleagues. Later he initiated the renovation of Westminster Abbey, crawling about among the monuments to discover the long-lost tombs of monarchs such as James I and Charles II; Queen Elizabeth I’s coffin was found wedged on top of that of Mary Tudor.
The great influence on Stanley’s life was Thomas Arnold, the reforming headmaster of Rugby in the 1830s, when Stanley was a pupil there. He absorbed his churchmanship from Arnold, whose biography he wrote two years after Arnold’s death in 1842, setting his leadership on a pedestal more than a decade before Thomas Hughes popularised it in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. It is hard now, in the age of the iPad, to appreciate the rapture with which Arnold’s weekly sermons were received by his adolescent pupils: ‘Sunday after Sunday, they sat beneath that pulpit with their eyes fixed upon him and their attention strained to the utmost to catch every word that he uttered.’ They certainly left their mark upon Stanley for life. Perhaps, as John Witheridge suggests, you had to have been there.
Stanley’s faults – such as his snobbery, which was perhaps natural to one of his class and time – are slightly glossed over. But his greatest failing may have been naivety: there was a crisis over the sudden departure in 1859 of his brother-in-law and friend Charles Vaughan from the headmastership of Harrow, where he had been touching up the boys.The affair was hushed up. Vaughan was offered the bishopric of Rochester in compensation, a move probably supported by Stanley, though Vaughan eventually turned it down and became vicar of Doncaster instead.
Witheridge’s biography is as much a labour of love as Stanley’s life of Arnold was – it has taken him seven years, apparently – and he is admirably clear in both outlining the arcane implications of the passionate Anglican theological controversies of the mid-19th century and making them comprehensible to an age that has only to grapple with women bishops and gay marriage. As Stanley was keen on inclusiveness, who knows what he would have made of those ideas? To order this book for £24, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 10
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