Tractarians and the 'Condition of England': The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement

Tractarians and the 'Condition of England': The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement. S.A. Skinner. Clarendon Press, Oxford. [pounds sterling]55.00. x + 330 pages. ISBN 0-19-927323-5. This is a study of the attitudes towards social and political problems held by the first generation of the 'Oxford Movement' and stops in 1845.

It is an exercise largely in intellectual history and draws mainly on the published word in articles, sermons and novels. It argues rightly that secondary figures must be studied to get a complete picture and that this shows that early Tractarians did have a full and highly developed set of social and political opinions which came from their religious views. Their insistence on the centrality of the Incarnation informed their politics. Theirs was 'a damning indictment of the "condition of England"'. They 'constantly collided with the consensus of the secular intelligentsia'. Whether it is accurate to say that 'tractarianism never recovered the confidence and iconoclasm' of the period before Newman left is a disputable point: those Anglo-Catholic priests who went to gaol would, perhaps, have disagreed. Likewise, whether the views held by Tractarians were in the end all that different from non-Tractarian clergymen is another question, one which this reviewer tackled thirty years ago albeit with reference to a later generation of the movement. (J.M.)

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