A Friend in Deed: The Life of Henry Stanley Newman

By Maggie Waldman. Orphans Publishing, 2023. 260 pages. £30 (about $39)/hardcover; $20.99/eBook.

If your first reaction to this title is wondering who Henry Stanley Newman is, you’re not alone. Biographer Maggie Waldman admits how little known Newman is even in his native Leominster, a market town on the western side of England, despite a lifetime spent bettering the lives of its people. However, many Friends Journal readers may be familiar with another Quaker publication for which Newman served as editor: The Friend, not to be confused with the preexisting U.S.-based publication of the same name which merged with a rival in 1955 to become Friends Journal. Newman’s Friend was founded in 1843 and continues to this day as the only Quaker weekly in the world; and he holds the title for its longest-serving editor.

Newman was born in 1837 into a Religious Society of Friends that was decidedly insular and set in its ways. Generations of sons were expected to apprentice young, join their fathers in the family business, marry into a respectable Quaker family, and keep the cycle turning. But as an early teen, before the apprenticeship, Newman took advantage of an increased Quaker appreciation for education and studied at two Quaker boarding schools, where he developed a thirst for international adventure, current events, and a new evangelical spirit sweeping the land. He considered a career in teaching, but ever the dutiful son, he put aside these dreams and joined his father as a respectable Leominster grocer and staid Quaker.

Only he didn’t, quite. Henry Stanley Newman had a remarkable ability to create a rich, parallel life that combined passions. Committed to the family business but possessed by an evangelical zeal that wanted to reform the world, he founded a trio of interrelated missionary institutions in Leominster: an adult Bible-based literacy program, an orphans home and training center, and a printing business that cleverly employed the orphans to produce the literacy program’s tracts.

I was amazed at how he also created a parallel spiritual life. The tradition-bound Leominster Friends discouraged singing and wouldn’t have encouraged a young man like him to minister. Newman would dutifully worship with them on Sunday morning, then worship again at his mission meetings on Sunday afternoon, where he would give sermons and help lead hymn singing.

As time progressed, his interests expanded to foreign missions, but with the same class lines in place: these were programs designed and run by middle-class, interrelated families of Quakers but serving needy non-Quakers. The traditionalist Quakers leading the yearly meeting were suspicious of the activity but allowed it as long as it was formally separated from the yearly meeting. There was a finely negotiated balancing act at play that kept traditionalist and evangelical Quakers from splintering (as they did in the United States).

As Newman’s generation of evangelicals aged, their viewpoints became more accepted. Newman’s oldest son joined the family grocery business, and the middle-aged man who had dreamed of world travel as a youth could take breaks to tour the world in ministry and mission work, with trips to places like the United States, Egypt, and India, while his lectures and books were well-received by audiences back home.

But generational change can have a funny way of coming back on you and Maggie Waldman does a good job explaining the next irony: the even-better educated children of these evangelicals were excited to forge a new spiritual synthesis, one rooted in science, biblical criticism, and a return to early Quaker concepts such as the Inward Light.

Newman was the perfect person to bridge this new generational turmoil. His evangelical credentials were unquestioned, yet he had maintained an interest in wider religious thought and was sympathetic to new ideas. In his mid-50s, he finally left the grocery business to his son and became editor of The Friend, a pillar of institutional Quakers. His professional life finally aligned with his passions.

The magazine had an upstart rival in The British Friend, run by the liberal faction, and Newman wasted no time retooling his magazine to appeal to all strands of Quaker thought. He changed it from a monthly to a weekly format and introduced sections on science and Bible studies. Just a few years later, young Friends at the 1895 Manchester Conference openly challenged the evangelicals, and Newman immediately understood both the danger and promise: he gave an address at the conference that tried to square the generational divide, and he devoted a special double issue of The Friend to the proceedings. Newman continued to lead The Friend until his death in 1912, a total of 20 years.

Some of Newman’s accomplishments live on. The Leominster printing business continues as a private, family-owned company. It produced this handsome volume as part of its 150th anniversary. Waldman has done a commendable job digging through archives to give a fuller picture of Newman’s family, with generous and insightful attention to his remarkable wife, Mary Anna Newman; her brother (and his childhood best friend) Stanley Pumphrey; and the extended families. In an age of digital downloads and shoddy print-on-demand, I was pleasantly surprised at just how well-produced this volume is, with great attention to detail—even the endpapers are a beautiful reproduction of a design Newman himself drew for a book about Pumphrey.

Most of us have never heard the story of Henry Stanley Newman, but his curiosity and knack for creative compromise kept British Friends together through two existential sea changes and helped us bridge the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Martin Kelley has been senior editor of Friends Journal for only 13 years. He lives with his family in the South Jersey pine barrens and is a member of Cropwell Meeting in Marlton, N.J.