The Oxford Movement began in the 1830s and developed afterward in response to shifts in the relationship between Parliament and the Church of England; a significant early stimulus was the passing of the 1833 Church Temporalities Act, in which Parliament peremptorily reorganized some dioceses of the Church of Ireland and shut down a source of ecclesiastical revenue in order to solve a broader political problem. The actual provisions were deliberately chosen to cause minimal disruption, and even greater efficiency and sustainability, but it unsettled a significant portion of the Church of England, to whom it brought home the point that Parliament could easily just disestablish the Church or overrule it or reorganize it for any purpose it pleased, despite this apparently being inconsistent with both the notion of a Church going back to Christ and the customs of England. John Keble's 1833 Assize sermon, "National Apostasy", touched a chord in a wide variety of people. Nor were they unjustified in this worry, and a series of other controversies, both small and large, expanded the movement. A number of figures, including Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey, began publishing polemical tracts to make their ecclesiology public; this Tractarian movement was the intellectual core of the movement, although there were many people involved with the Oxford Movement whose relationship with the Tractarians was rather loose and sometimes even critical. The Tractarian refusal to back down made the Oxford Movement one of the central intellectual disputes of the age, and their very 'High' notion of what was meant by the Creed in talking of the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church" led to people accusing them of being Romanizers. Indeed, while it is not by any means true of all, a significant portion of the movement, including some of its leading lights, eventually did leave the Church of England to join communion with Rome. Newman's conversion was the most explosive, happening in 1845.
One of those who converted relatively early on was Elizabeth Furlong Shipton Harris, who found, once she became Catholic, that she did not like it. She wrote a book, originally anonymous, From Oxford to Rome: And How It Fared with Some Who Lately Made the Journey, published in 1846. It was a dialogical novel that attempted to warn people about the dangers that led to the horrifying increase in conversions to Rome. I've skimmed through the book; it's actually quite intelligently, if perhaps idiosyncratically, written, and I suspect that Harris captures a great deal of the way in which the flourishing of Romanticism made the Oxford Movement attractive to people. Someone sent it to Newman in 1847 (Newman never mentions mentions the book by name, but from his references to it, it was almost certainly Harris's), and he was very unimpressed. He thought that its depiction of Oxford life was wrong ("wantonly and preposterously fanciful" was his phrase), that its characterization of those involved was generally implausible even given the diversity of views in the Oxford Movement, and that in particular it treated the movement as mired in a pompousness and pretentiousness that failed to grasp the sincerity of many of the people involved. (It is certainly true that the major figures in Harris's work speak and thinking in an over-heated, flowery way that goes beyond common Victorian novelistic conventions, even for a dialogical novel.) It perhaps also did not help his opinion that the novel can be read as implying that Newman was heavily to blame for turning an idealistic reform movement into a Roman-Catholic-generating machinery. However, it was substantive enough that it needed response. But responding to a novel with a treatise or a vigorous polemic seemed a poor choice, so Newman decided to write a better novel on the same subject. That novel was Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, which was published in 1848.
The novel was successful, being immediately a bestseller and (not unrelatedly) also a source of considerable controversy. Dialogical novels are not very popular today, but they were at the time, and it is generally considered one of the most brilliantly written examples. Newman seems to have suceeded in his attempt to capture what Oxford University life was actually like in his Oxford days, and his satire of English incoherence on religion have impressed more than a few people through the years. The novel was often read, and criticized, as an apologetic work, although Newman himself did not think that a novel was a good place for apologetics, and explicitly denied that it was ever intended to be such a work rather than what it was, an attempt to write a better novel. It's very likely that the fact that Newman was primarily focused on writing a novel with more truth, probability, and insight than an already existing novel, rather than making a specific argument, is one of the reasons it stands above so many other dialogical novels in the period.
In any case, for the next fortnightly book, I am re-reading Loss and Gain.
