Nicholas Wiseman [Cardinal]

Life
1802-1865 [Nicholas Patrick Stephen]; b. Seville, 3 Aug. 1802, son of an Irish merchant established there since an earlier generation, with his second wife Xaveira (née Strange); early education in Waterford, and later at St. Cuthbert’s College, Ushaw, nr. Durham; English College, Rome; wrote part of Fabiola, A Tale of the Catacombs (1854) - a vivid description of worship in the Catacombs written in opposition to anti-Catholic feelings;

Wiseman met Gladstone, Macauley, and Froude when visiting in Rome; returned to England in 1836; appt President of St. Mary’s College, Oscott, 1840, and Bishop of Melipotamus in partibus exter. [titular bish. of Trepezus]; president of the ecclesastical district of London, succeeding Dr. Walsh, Vicar Apostolic of London, whose coadjudicator he was, in 1849; elevated to Cardinal, 1850; publ. Fabiola (1854) - which enjoyed a large success; invited John Henry Newman to write his Callista for the same series;

named Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, causing political repercussions in England; visited Ireland in 1859; left obliged to instruct Catholic parents not to send their children to Oxford or Cambridge; wrote against the acceptance of the bible as the unique authority on religion (viz., contra Protestant evangelism); gave is last public lecture, Royal Soc., Jan. 1863; d. 15 Feb. 1865, at Baker St. London; his writings include Recollections of the Last Four Popes [Pius VII, Leo XII, Pius VIII, Gregory XVI]; also The Hidden Gem, a play performed at St. Cuthbert’s and on Liverpool stages; essays reprinted from The Dublin Review, of which he was a founder. CAB ODNB JMC SUTH

[ Fabiola (1854) is available at Internet Archive - online. There is a substantial Wikipedia article. Both accessed 25.07.2023. ]

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Commentary
Maureen Wall, ‘John Keogh and the Catholic Committee’, in Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin: Geog. Publ. 1989), p.183, remarking that James Wiseman, grandfather of the cardinal, settled in Seville in the middle of the eighteenth century. Further notes that Sir James Caldwell wrote that ‘there is not a family in the island that had not a relative in the church, in the army, or in trade in France and Spain’ (A brief examination of the question whether it is expedient either in religious or a political view to pass an act to enable papists to take real securities for money which they may lend (Dublin 1764), p.27.)

Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork UP/Field Day 1996): ‘[... A]lmost until 1840 there was abundant evidence for some vague Oriental background in the ancient past of the national language, but little reason for Irish antiquarians to realize the paradoxical notion that this Oriental background, given its Indo-European nature, excluded the possibility of Hebrew, Phoenician or Semitic origins. The linguistic debates on the Continent took place with little active involvement from Irish scholars - the one exception being Nicholas (later Cardinal) Wiseman, who began his distinguished career with public lectures delivered in Rome in 1835 on recent scholarly developments. Wiseman’s lectures on the Connexion Between Science and Revealed Religion opened with two surveys “On the Comparative Study of Languages”. in the course of these lectures, Wiseman criticized the way in which British scholars had continued to work in an outdated fashion and had fallen behind the insights of recent German scholars; he only made a favourable exception for Pritchard, who he credited with the important discovery that the Celtic languages belonged to the Indo-European family. To Pritchard, Wiseman opposed the useless lucubrations of old-fashioned scholars like Sir William Betham, whose Phoenician speculations Wiseman demolishes. It was probably because of this [91] unflattering treatment of Betham that Betham’s adversary, George Petrie, took cognizance of Wiseman’s espousal of Indo-Europeanism and came to propound it himself. Petrie was later to quote Wiseman’s criticisms in a pamphlet against Betham published in 1840, and in early 1838 went on record as opposing the popular Druidic theories in favour of the scholarly investigation of “The history of the Indo-European Race”. (pp.90-91). Bibl. Nicholas Wiseman, Twelve Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Religion [new edn.] Dublin 1866). Leerssen adds in an endnote that ‘Wiseman’s strong endorsement of Pritchard may have had something to do with th fact that both men, as devout believers attempting to square biblical models and ethnographical data, held monogenist views of the origins of humanity.’ (p.253, n.63; see longer extract from New Developments: Linguistics and Ethnography’ [sect.], op. cit., 1996 - as attached.)

[ See also remarks on Orbis iudicat securum in James Joyce > Notes > Literary Figures > Augustine [infra] & J. H. Newman [infra]

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References
Charles Read, ed., A Cabinet of Irish Literature (3 vols., 1876-78), contains extracts on ‘Italian Gesticulation’ and ‘Shakespeare’. Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (1904) contains a biographical sketch [as in Life - supra].

De Burca Books (Cat. 18) lists The Sermons, Lectures and Sermons delivered during Cardinal Wiseman’s Tour of Ireland in 1858 (Duffy, 1859), pp vii, 416. Do., ... in Aug. & Sept. 1858, with a Connecting Narrative (1st edn. 1859), port., vii+416pp. [Hyland, 219; Oct. 1995].

Notes
Religion goes first: Cardinal Wiseman noted on his visit to Ireland in 1858 that ‘religious progress is far in advance of what is considered social improvement.’ (Quoted in Malcolm Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature, 1972, pp.132-33.)

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