Lights in a Dark Town: A Story about John Henry Newman

By Meriol Trevor

In 1849 Emmeline Erle and her widowed mother move from sunny southern Europe to cold and grimy Birmingham, England. The town is one of great contrasts: progress and poverty, industrial expansion and murky slums, new villas and filthy streets. Darkness and light battle in the minds of its people: principles of freedom and tolerance struggle with ignorance and prejudice; deep doubt of religious truth coexists with fanaticism.

Emmeline quickly makes friends in her new home— Lizzie, the hardworking servant, and Daniel, the schoolboy living next door. For both Emmeline and Daniel, Father John Henry Newman, who runs a chapel in one of the worst sections town, becomes the most important person in Birmingham.

Daniel and Emmeline come to know and admire Father Newman as he tries to help poor factory workers and to enlighten citizens blinded by suspicion and bigotry. With him they experience the anxieties of a cholera outbreak and the dangers of anti-Catholic riots. Caught up in one excitement or trouble after another, the young people finally arrive at happier times, while the walls of Father Newman's new church, a symbol of light in a dark town, rise into the smoggy Birmingham sky.

This colorful and dramatic story for youth brilliantly unfolds the panorama of Victorian England—the Industrial Revolution, the Oxford movement, the Crystal Palace, and Prince Albert opening a new railway. But above all, this book portrays the character and wisdom of John Henry Newman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Jul 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781681497617

Book preview

LIGHTS IN A DARK TOWN

MERIOL TREVOR

Lights In a Dark Town

A Story about

John Henry Newman

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

Hilda Offen

IGNATIUS PRESS    SAN FRANCISCO

Copyright © Meriol Trevor, 1964

Macmillan and Company Limited, London

Cover art:

The Cross, looking towards Watergate Street

by Louise Rayner Chester (1832–1924)

Wikimedia Commons Image

and

Portrait of John Henry Newman

by George Richmond (1809–1896)

Wikimedia Commons Image

Cover design by Davin Carlson

© 2017 Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-58617-628-0 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-68149-761-7 (EB)

Library of Congress Control Number 2016941421

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

1.  1849: English, but Strangers

2.  In the Backstreets

3.  Daniel in Trouble

4.  The Doctor’s Children

5.  Midsummer in Birmingham

6.  August in the Slums

7.  The Cholera

8.  Midcentury Winter

9.  The Turning of the Year

10.  Ships Come Home

11.  No Popery!

12.  Bonfires and Candles

13.  A New Era Begins

Glossary

ONE

1849: English, but Strangers

DO YOU THINK winter goes on all the year round in Birmingham? Emmeline said to her mother as she stood by the window of their sitting-room, looking down into the dim, foggy street. Why, it’s March now, almost April! In Florence it would be spring, flowers coming out, the sun shining. I don’t believe the sun shines in England—it just gleams. It looks more like a shilling than the sun."

Mrs Erle was writing letters and said absently, Spring comes later in northern countries, don’t forget.

She was a small, neat woman, looking pale and fragile in the black dress and cap which she wore in mourning for her husband, Emmeline’s father, who had died last year in France. Edward Erle was an Englishman who had gone to Italy to study painting; in Florence he had met and married Marianne Marney, who was half French and half Irish. They had been back to England once, about ten years ago when Emmeline was barely three, and she could not remember it. They had lived in Florence and in the south of France, and Edward Erle painted a little and read a great deal and spent the rest of his time talking to his many friends, of many different nations. He was never really well, always coughing and thin; he grew weaker and at last died, to the grief of his wife and only child.

Some months after his death, Mrs Erle received a letter from his elderly mother in England inviting her to bring Emmeline to live with her in Worcestershire. She was a little doubtful of this invitation, for Mrs Erle senior had been unfriendly to her in the past, but they were very short of money, and she felt it was right that Emmeline should get to know her English relations. So she accepted; they packed up all their things and made the long journey north. But when they reached Southampton, there was a letter at their hotel which informed them that old Mrs Erle had died suddenly, of heart failure.

They went to the funeral, and there they met Edward’s elder sister Louisa, who was married to a Birmingham manufacturer, Jacob Aldwich. They were both stout, formidable people, dressed all in black, and Mrs Aldwich was the taller and more impressive of the two. It was soon plain that she had had no hand in inviting her brother’s widow and child to England and that she regarded their presence with disfavour. Old Mrs Erle had once changed her will, when she was angry with her son Edward, and had left all her money to her daughters—there was another besides Louisa, who could not come to the funeral because she was in India. So there was nothing for Marianne Erle and Emmeline, and although it seemed to them that Jacob Aldwich was already rich in comparison with themselves, there was no suggestion of his making over any money to the poor relations from abroad. He and his wife contrived to mention their numerous family often enough to give the impression that great wealth was necessary to bring them up; some of the younger Aldwiches were present. Emmeline disliked them, especially a pasty-faced boy who put out his tongue at her and a beady-eyed girl who criticized her clothes quite audibly to the lady’s maid.

Marianne Erle was too proud to make any complaint. She was determined to ask no help from people so plainly unwilling to offer it. But she was in a difficult position. She had not enough money to return to France, or to Florence, where her friends lived in the English colony. Besides, Italy in this year of 1849 was in a state of revolution.

Not knowing what else to do, she took rooms for herself and Emmeline in the nearest large town, which was Birmingham. They had the first floor to themselves of a tall, narrow lodging-house, at the end of a terrace. They had a sitting-room, which was also their dining-room, and two bedrooms, though Emmeline’s was really a dressing-room opening off her mother’s. The landlady, Mrs Purdy, cooked the meals for her lodgers, and they were carried up on trays by her formidable servant Martha Sanders or by a skinny girl known as Lizzie, who seemed always to be climbing up and down the narrow stairs with jugs of water or buckets of coal.

Mrs Erle decided that, to earn her living, she would give French and music lessons. She was pleased to discover that there was a school next door, but surprised when she found that, as it was a boys’ school, her services were not required. However, Mrs Thorpe, the headmaster’s wife, condescended to give her some addresses and introductions, and she soon had almost more work than she could manage, for there were plenty of manufacturers’ wives who wished their daughters to learn what were considered the social accomplishments of ladies.

"I wish I could do something to earn money," Emmeline often said. She said it now, coming away from the window and leaning on the back of her mother’s chair.

My dear, you must learn your own lessons, said Mrs Erle. I am only afraid I am neglecting you in teaching these dull girls. I hope I am doing the right thing. She leaned sideways on the arm of her chair, looking at her daughter.

Emmeline was almost as tall as she was, and much stronger. She was not a pretty girl, for she had what her father had called a crusader’s nose jutting from her thin face, and a wide mouth. But she had a high colour, and her eyes were both dark and bright. Her brown hair was very thick and reached well below her shoulders, but it was tied up in a tail, with black velvet ribbon. Emmeline was growing fast, and her bony arms and legs did not always dispose themselves tidily; she often knocked things over. Altogether she found it hard to fit herself into the right attitudes; she got fits of giggles at the wrong moments, shrieked when she was excited, and ran when she ought to have walked.

Perhaps because they were so different she and her mother got on well, though there were sometimes furious arguments about what Emmeline ought to do or to wear—furious on Emmeline’s part, exasperated on her mother’s. Oh, how impossibly English you are! cried Mrs Erle sometimes. Do you want to turn into a real Miss?

Emmeline did not want to be a Miss. In earlier years she had wanted, very much, to be a naval captain. Unfortunately that career was not open to her sex, and so she had had to content herself with learning the rigging of every ship that sailed the sea, and the history of all Nelson’s battles. Lately, however, the navy had paled somewhat before other enthusiasms, and Emmeline now thought she would be a great violinist. It was easy to imagine herself holding vast audiences under her spell—where there were no audiences. She was rather a slapdash player in fact: hit or miss in this as in everything else. Her mother could not persuade her that she was better at the piano, as she was, because it was the violin which seemed to her just now the more romantic instrument. In a way this was lucky, as there was no piano in the lodgings.

Lizzie, the skivvy, was impressed with Emmeline’s fiddle playing. It was gratifying to discover her, as Emmeline did once, sitting on the stairs listening.

Ooh, miss, don’t tell missis, she said nervously, jumping up. But you do play lovely.

Thank you, said Emmeline graciously. But would Mrs Purdy mind your listening?

I did ought to be brushing the stairs, said Lizzie, and so I am too, only I thought it was ever so pretty, so I stopped to hear better. She began brushing away at the worn stair-carpet.

What would Mrs Purdy do if she knew? Emmeline asked.

Oh miss, you wouldn’t tell her? I might lose my place.

Of course I won’t tell her, said Emmeline. But would you mind leaving this place so much? I wouldn’t like to do your work.

You gets good food—leastways, from a missis like Mrs Purdy, because she’s not hard—and proper coverings to your bed, and you’re let alone, said Lizzie. It’s better than my auntie’s, where I lived before. Water come in through the roof there, walls were cracked, boards was rotten and there wasn’t no gaslight. There’s some as likes the factories better because they gets more money—my cousin Rose does—but I don’t like them places. You gets so tired at it all day you can’t enjoy yourself when you do get out, that’s what I say. She began brushing again, bumping downwards on her knees, her skinny black-stockinged legs, encased in worn black boots, sticking out from under her print frock.

Emmeline retired with her violin, very thoughtful. Birmingham was quite unlike Florence or Nice. There were no factories there. Factories! What were they like? She would have liked to know, but one of the dull things about their new life was that she could get out so little. So that she could get some exercise, her mother sometimes took her to the big new stucco houses of the manufacturers in Edgbaston, where she was allowed to walk round the gardens while Mrs Erle gave the daughters lessons in French and music. There were not many houses as yet, but more were being built, because more and more men were getting rich in the Midlands at this time—England was leading the world in industrial invention and trade.

But often Emmeline was left alone, and when she had done her lessons, she sometimes took a book and sat on her bed by the window at the back, so that she could look out and see what was happening. It was a strategic position, for the boys’ school next door was on the corner of two streets, and the garden stretched down behind the smaller gardens of the row of tall terrace houses. The boys ran out into the garden as often as they could, and Emmeline could watch their games and fights—they seemed to fight a lot. It was not a big school, no more than twenty or thirty boys. Most of them came every morning with satchels, but a few boarded in the house—Emmeline occasionally saw them looking out of the top-floor windows. They seemed to range in age from about eight to fourteen.

Dr Thorpe, who kept the school, rarely appeared in the garden, but he employed a junior master, or usher as he was called, a Mr Pratt, who came out to summon the boys indoors, which he did by ringing a dinner bell. He was a thin, stringy man with a red nose and did not seem popular, or even respected. Emmeline once saw him chase a boy, waving his cane, with which he evidently wished to administer punishment, but the culprit eluded him and the other boys almost had hysterics with laughing. It was indeed a funny sight.

Pratty’s ratty! Pratty’s ratty! chanted the boys.

After a while Emmeline could pick out several of the boys by sight. There was one she called Ginger because of his red hair; she thought him a bully, though not a cowardly one, as he often started the fights. He was a bully with a purpose, for his object was to get other boys’ sweets and tarts, and he often succeeded. He had a raucous voice, and Emmeline did not like him.

There was also an angelic-looking little fair-haired boy, who was a sneak, always running to tell on someone, usually in favour of one of the bigger boys. Emmeline called him Chickie because of his fluffy hair.

A boy she often watched seemed to have little interest in what the others were doing. He generally had a book in his pocket, which did not look like a school book; he walked off to some corner and began reading eagerly—he was often so lost in it that he did not notice the bell. One of the others would shout or hurl a ball at him to make him wake up. Emmeline knew his name because it was shouted so often. "Craigie! Hi, Craigie! Come on!"

Once, Emmeline met this boy as she walked along with her mother to the post. She was so used to watching him in the school garden that she said Oh— andalmost spoke to him so that he stared at her in surprise, and she felt herself turning scarlet. But she felt better when the boy smiled, in a friendly way, as if he too had recognized her. And after that, if they met, they did exchange smiles.

The boy Craigie had very dark, close-growing hair coming over his forehead, and black thick eyebrows, as straight as ruled lines, which gave him a sullen look. His grey eyes, however, were not sullen, though they had a wary look in them, as if he did not quite trust everyone. He was evidently a boarder with Dr Thorpe, and Emmeline had a feeling he was not very happy there. He was certainly treated coldly by the Thorpe family, who were sometimes to be seen out with the boys on Sunday, going to church. Mrs Thorpe condescended to take little Chickie’s hand, and several others were allowed to escort the Thorpe girls, but Craigie seemed left to follow in the rear, yet was sharply admonished if he lagged behind.

On the other side of Mrs Purdy’s house lived a doctor, and Emmeline was just as interested in his family as in the school. He was called Dr Brent, a sturdy, brown-haired, stocky man, always busy, but cheerful—Emmeline often heard him whistling. His family seemed very fond of him; sometimes the little ones ran out to hug him on the doorstep.

There seemed to be a lot of little Brents. Two of the boys, one big and one small, went every day to Dr Thorpe’s school. There was a girl who seemed about Emmeline’s own age; she was slim and brown haired with a pale, gentle, rather serious face. She had a rabbit-fur muff which Emmeline envied her very much.

Mamma, I wish we knew those people next door, she said at once.

Yes, dear, said her mother absently, totting up accounts.

Perhaps I’ll be ill, and then we can call in Dr Brent, said Emmeline.

Don’t you dare be ill! cried her mother, laughing. We can’t afford doctor’s bills.

Emmeline in fact was never ill, except with colds, and of course one did not call in a doctor for a cold. She watched the girl next door going out with her mother, or with the stout young woman who looked after the babies, and wished they could be friends.

One Saturday afternoon when Mrs Erle was feeling very tired, she let Emmeline go to the post for her, alone. It was hardly any distance, and she would not have to go out of the respectable area where they lived. It was still light, though the air over the big town, heavy with smoke, made the