The Making of a Convert: John Henry Newman's Oriel and Littlemore Experience

‘The flood is round thee, but thy towers as yetAre safe, and clear as by a summer’s sea…Lo! On the top of each aerial spireWhat seems a star by day, so high and brightIt quivers from afar in golden light.But ‘tis a form of earth, though touched with fireCelestial, raised in other days, to tellHow, when they tired of prayer, Apostles fell’.John Henry Newman's poem ‘On Oxford’ published within a section called ‘Champions of the Truth’ in the verse collection, Lyra Apostolica, which he edited in 1836, encapsulates Newman's vision of Oxford and its colleges. Oxford was portrayed in the poem as an embattled but triumphant ‘city on a hill’ (in spite of its valley location surrounded by hills); a bulwark against contemporary forces, religious, and political, which for Newman, seemed to threaten it in the 1830s. The poem reminds us that the Oxford Movement, the great movement of religious revival within the Church of England commonly dated from 1833, the movement which Newman famously led and inspired, was rooted in Newman's keen and abiding sense of place (genius loci, as he put it), of memory, tradition, ethos, and association.