Background

Joseph Henry Shorthouse was born on September 9, 1834, in Birmingham, England, United Kingdom. He was the son of Joseph Shorthouse and Mary Ann Hawker Shorthouse, both Quakers.

Education

Shorthouse was minimally schooled by the Society of Friends, but his studies were interrupted when he developed a nervous stutter which, as it turned out, helped him develop an ability to concentrate. He was also educated at Grove House, Tottenham, where he proved a promising and industrious pupil, and upon leaving school entered his father's chemical manufacturing business, in which he was actively engaged all his life.

Career

At age thirty-two, Shorthouse began work on the historical and psychological novel, that would eventually be published as John Inglesant: A Romance. As his opinions based on his scholarly readings slowly formed, he wrote them down, and on free evenings developed the habit of reading a paragraph or two of his writing to Sarah. Ten years later, in 1876, he finished his book and began offering it to publishers. They were reluctant. The manuscript spent several years untouched in the drawer of a cabinet until Shorthouse could afford a private printing. Several readers of this 1880 edition were impressed, but no publishers considered it until Alexander Macmillan saw a copy in 1881 and wrote to say he would be proud to publish it. He thought, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, that “John Inglesant [was] full of thought and power.” Macmillan’s first printing of a two-volume edition was a modest seven hundred and fifty copies, but it found a surprisingly strong readership, including British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone, whose high praise of the work resulted in several more printings. Lord Acton, in Letters to Mary Gladstone, said of the novel, there was “nothing more thoughtful and suggestive since Middlemarch. ” Almost ten thousand copies were sold the first year, and Shorthouse found himself suddenly and unexpectedly a prominent spokesman for Anglicanism.

In form, John Inglesant is a seventeenth-century religious quest story of an inquisitive, restless English soldier-diplomat with Catholic leanings; he ends up in Rome, attracted by church architecture and the elegance of church rituals, but at the same time put off by what he sees as tyrannical repression of free thought. Inglesant is expelled from Italy because of his politically unwise defense of a mystic tried for heresy; in England again, he finally finds his spiritual balance with Anglicanism, which allows independence of thought. In substance, John Inglesant consists of extended religious and philosophical discussions, historical tales, and aesthetic observations. Despite the thinness of the plot, the discontinuous narrative, and the absence of any humor, the book fits so well with the religious controversies of the day that it developed a cult following. Literary people were quite amazed that a man with no formal schooling, with no access to libraries, and with no experience more than two hundred miles from Birmingham could have written a work that, among other things, so well captured the flavor of seventeenth-century Italy. For a time, Shorthouse caused quite a stir in London.

Encouraged by his success, Shorthouse wrote book prefaces, essays, and four more novels, each of which returned to themes found in John Inglesant. The Little Schoolmaster Mark (1883-1884) was set in an eighteenth-century German court; Sir Percival (1886) in a nineteenth-century English manor; The Countess Eve (1888) in eighteenth-century Burgundy; and Blanche, Lady Falaise (1891) in Devonshire. None of these novels attracted much favorable attention. Later admirers of Shorthouse and even some of his contemporaries concluded that he really had only one book in him, and that had been his first - John Inglesant. In 1925, writing in the Quarterly Review, W. K. Fleming showed that Shorthouse had borrowed heavily from his seventeenth-century sources, much of it almost verbatim. Still, in the view of Joanne Shattock, in the Reference Guide to English Literature, John Inglesant “remains one of the most interesting of the religious novels of the Victorian period as well as a unique ‘literary curiosity.’"

He was also an author of prefaces to George Herbert’s The Temple, 1882, Golden Thoughts from the Spiritual Guide of Molinos, the Quietist, 1883, Arthur Gabon’s The Message and Position of the Church of England, 1899, and of the essays “The Agnostic at Church,” 1882, “The Humorous in Literature,” 1883, “Frederick Denison Maurice,” 1884, and “Of Restraining self-denial in Art,” 1888.

Achievements

• Shorthouse's work was always marked by high earnestness of purpose, a luxuriant style, and genuinely spiritual quality. He lacked dramatic faculty and the workmanlike conduct of narrative, but he had almost every other quality of the born novelist. His most famous book John Ingelsant, published in 1881 has been acclaimed as the greatest Anglo-Catholic novel in English Literature.

Works

More photos

• book

  • John Inglesant

    (John Inglesant is a celebrated historical novel by Joseph...)

    1881
  • The Temple 2003
  • Life, Letters, and Literary Remains 2014
  • Blanche, Lady Falaise 1891
  • Sir Percival 1886

Religion

Shorthouse was uncomfortable with the Quakers’ cultural and social restrictions. His extensive reading attracted him to Anglicanism, in which he and Sarah were baptized four years after their marriage. Shorthouse identified himself with "the new Oxford school of High Churchmen", but he preferred the freedom and reason of the Anglican church to the authority over the private judgment that he saw exercised by Roman Catholicism.

Views

Quotations: "The enthusiastic and pleasing illusions of youth."

"All creeds and opinions are nothing but the mere result of chance and temperament."

"Nothing but the infinite Pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life."

Connections

Shorthouse married a childhood friend, Sarah Scott, eldest daughter of John and Elizabeth Scott, at the Friends' meeting-house in Warwick on 19 August 1857. They had no children.

Father:

Joseph Shorthouse

Mother:

Mary Ann Hawker Shorthouse

Spouse:

Sarah Scott

Sarah Scott was born in 1832 and died in 1909.

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 164
  1998