In the burgeoning literature on the heroes of the Victorian Catholic revival, Wiseman, Newman, Manning, Faber, Ignatius Spenser, Herbert Vaughan, and many others, William Brownlow (1830-1901) remains a rather shadowy figure, barely obtaining a passing reference, with only a short biography, published in 1902 by his friend the Dominican, Vincent McNabb O.P., to supply the deficiency. Giles Mercer’s well researched and elegantly and engagingly written biography thus fills a serious lacuna, rescuing a significant figure in later Victorian Catholicism from an undeserved obscurity.

This magisterial study follows a well-structured and broadly chronological framework and method. Chapters focus on Brownlow’s family background and schooling at Rugby; undergraduate life at Trinity College Cambridge; Anglican clerical career in Staffordshire, London, Tetbury, and Torquay; conversion under Newman’s influence and at the Birmingham Oratory; time as a seminarian in Rome, Catholic clerical career in the Plymouth diocese (in which he became vicar-general), and last phase of his life as Bishop of Clifton (1894-1901). This structure is supported by thematic chapters exploring Brownlow’s formative pilgrimage travels to the East and the Holy Land in the early-1860s, interest in Christian archaeology, including publicising and interpreting discoveries of the Roman Catacombs from the 1860s onwards (culminating in his learned contributions to Giovanni Battista de Rossi’s Roma Sotterranea); his influential controversial as well as historical and devotional writings; his many series of lectures, and above all his spiritually fruitful friendships, notably with the layman and colonial judge, Sir James Marshall and Dominican sister, Mother Mary Rose Columba Adams OP.

Although Brownlow’s private correspondence was destroyed on his death, the author has uncovered a vast amount of primary material and engaged also with an impressive array of secondary literature. Much space is devoted to the roots of the reserved but amiable Brownlow’s inner and external spiritual life as an Anglican, including the role of his clerical father and his own relationship with his devout sister Melise who died of tuberculosis in 1857 at the age of twenty-three, and the progress and features of his own journey and final conversion to the Catholic Church in late 1863. The ongoing Catholic influences upon him, which included not only that of Newman (with whom he corresponded and met) but most notably, during his Roman seminary years, the charismatic Irish Dominican preacher, Fr Thomas Burke—it seemed to be a case of the attraction of shared principles but dissimilar personalities—are also well delineated and explained. It was Burke who helped draw Brownlow to the charism of the Dominicans and to his becoming a brother of the Third Order of St Dominic. No less revealing are the chapters detailing his historical scholarship, lectures and Catholic apologetic. Numerous learned articles on the medieval church in the South-West of England and on the missions of St Boniface and St Willibald in seventh-century Europe flowed from Brownlow’s pen with pride of place given to his Short History of the Catholic Church in England (1895), the broad conclusions of which fit well with the revisionist approach of the last fifty years pioneered by Philip Hughes, Jack Scarisbrick and Eamon Duffy. When it came to the First Vatican Council and Papal Infallibility, and the Vatican’s later condemnation of Anglican orders in Apostolicae Curae (1896), Brownlow’s approach was not to compromise an inch over doctrine but to remain sensitive over the way the Church presented itself in a local situation. Mercer also highlights Brownlow’s anti-slavery writings culminating in his Lectures and Serfdom in Europe (Burns and Oates, 1892, and republished by Negro Universities Press in New York in 1969) and strenuous efforts, in tandem with his friend Marshall, to draw attention to the iniquities of the West African slave trade in his own day. Above all, Brownlow’s historical writings are shown to have a modern feel and purchase in that he sought ‘to make scholarship easily comprehensible and relevant to the contemporary world’ (p. 355).

Brownlow’s path to Rome from an establishment Anglican clerical background was not entirely typical of that of others who made that journey in the era of the Oxford Movement. He wrote no Apologia Pro Vita Sua on the lines of Newman’s but in his own convert apologia published in that same year, How and Why I Became a Catholic, he described his personal religious odyssey in all its various stages. His life-long interest in the beliefs and conversions of others of all denominations, as evidenced in his Catholics and Nonconformists or Dialogues on Conversion (1898), was ahead of its time in its attempt to do justice to the spiritual experiences of Protestant Christians. Mercer convincingly explains the basis of the young Brownlow’s first personal conversion or re-conversion or renewal to Christian faith and commitment, and then the move from the Church of England into the Catholic Church, followed by an ongoing daily striving towards union with God: in short this was a three-dimensional conversion process. It becomes clear that Brownlow was ‘neither an Oxford Movement convert nor a Gorham Judgment convert, though both impinged upon him’ (p. 202). In his Advent Pastoral of 1899 as Bishop of Clifton, ‘Progress of a Century’, he praised the Oxford Movement’s return to early Catholic doctrine and practice. Yet, for all the evidence of interaction with Newman at the Oratory and what the author describes as Brownlow’s merging into and absorption by the Catholic Church, other more surprising influences were at work.

Robert Aitken, Vicar of Pendeen, Cornwall, who Mercer shows to have been a crucial influence on Brownlow (who stayed at Pendeen for many months during 1855), is a name rarely mentioned in the church history of the period. Mercer draws attention to what is too often perceived as a rare combination of ‘High Church’ and evangelical revivalist elements in not only Aitken’s religious services but in his overall spirituality. However, the author here is inclined to overstate and oversimplify and his argument needs nuancing and qualification. Mercer argues that Aitken ‘largely resolved the problem for Brownlow (and others) by demonstrating that both the evangelical emphasis on personal conversion and the high-church emphasis on sacraments were vital, mutually reinforcing. Each was necessary for the other, not in any way opposed or at odds, as so much of the religious polemic of that time suggested’ (p. 84). Of course examples of this fusion can be found and it undoubtedly existed in Brownlow’s case—it applied to some extent to Henry Edward Manning while Alexander Knox was another example—and it is well known that hymnody as well as spirituality could bring together doctrinal disputants. The quest for holiness often proved a source of common ground and the number of Tractarians and Tractarian converts to Rome from evangelical families or households is well known. Nonetheless the normal pattern was less one of amicable synthesis but of repudiation and conflict. A crucial link intertwining doctrine, soteriology and spirituality on the principle of lex orandi lex credendi was claimed by both sides and this informed and explains the basis of the odium theologicum which undoubtedly existed within the Victorian Church of England. Differences in the way in which conversion was conceived and constituted between evangelicals and high churchmen were real and ran deep.

These comments point to a rare weakness in Mercer’s study. The bibliography and sources utilised could hardly be richer but yet much of the recent revisionist literature on the history of Hanoverian and Victorian Anglicanism and of the Oxford Movement is surprisingly absent. This lacuna occasionally becomes apparent in the text, as in the conjecture that Brownlow’s father’s high church orientation and contact with the then Tractarian Newman helped explain his lack of opposition to his son’s conversion to Rome (p. 32), It has been shown that the early Oxford Movement and its appeal to Apostolical Succession was directed as much against Rome as against Geneva, Protestant Dissent, and latitudinarianism. Nor is it clear why the ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1851—which actually alarmed high churchmen as much as it did Anglican Evangelicals—should have helped turn Brownlow’s sympathies towards Roman Catholicism (p. 55). A more egregious example occurs with the claim that the ‘torch’ of Richard Hooker’s teaching on the importance of the sacraments in book five of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was only picked up in the early-1850s by the advanced Tractarian Robert Wilberforce (1802-57), as if the intervening period in which a high church Anglican tradition flourished or revived, and notably during that of the preceding half century, had not existed. This also overlooks the wide gulf which separated Wilberforce’s advanced and developed Eucharistic doctrine from that of Hooker, old high churchmen and early Tractarians alike. On the other hand, Mercer does rightly show the importance of the Gorham Judgment in 1850 in shaking high churchmen of Brownlow’s generation (notoriously Manning included) into realising the stark extent of the Church of England’s subordination to the State, even in doctrinal matters (p. 198).

One remaining slight criticism, and not a mere cavil, is the length of this volume, at just over six hundred pages. Its readability and interest is not in doubt. Moreover, comparisons and interactions with contemporary figures who influenced Brownlow makes for a fuller and more rounded study than an approach merely content to view the biographical subject in isolation from historical context and circumstances. Nonetheless, editorial pruning of some of the excessive detail on some of the key figures, such as Sir James Marshall and Sister Rose Columba with whom Brownlow was associated—they become primarily descriptive mini-biographies in themselves—would have improved and sharpened the focus of the volume overall. Downside Abbey Press has done a splendid job in terms of production with an attractive typeface, quality paper, decent print size, interesting illustrations, and a full and informative index, particularly useful in a volume where themes and chronology can be in tension.

In the final analysis, the above criticisms must remain minor caveats against what is otherwise a work of meticulous scholarship and also an engaging and enjoyable read. Brownlow was more than a man of just his own time but his interest and involvement in issues which remain topical and relevant today—social teaching, the labour question, the missions, slavery, and child poverty—are all brought to light in this highly informative study. It will surely stand for a long time as the definitive work on the subject, with the name of Brownlow becoming if not a household one for informed readers then at least a much less obscure one than was hitherto the case.