2 - Formation of a Critical Sensibility: The 1880s and 1890s

Summary

NEWMAN'S early reading and book-buying habits focused on musical history, literature, philosophy and fine arts. From a young age he developed a love of music, especially opera, and as a student at University College Liverpool in the 1880s, Newman immersed himself in studies of literature and languages. While living in Liverpool he encountered rationalism through his college lecturers as well as the speeches and literature by freethought radicals such as Charles Bradlaugh and John M. Robertson. The ways in which Newman's writings on music in particular reflect the rationalist agenda were complex, and they provided a critical framework that set Newman apart from most of his contemporaries. By the 1890s Newman had positioned himself as a key figure in an emerging new school of music criticism.

Childhood and Early Schooling

The only account of Newman's upbringing comes from his second wife, Vera:

He [William Roberts] was born on November 30th, 1868, at 16 Waterhouse Street, Lancaster. His father was a Welshman named Seth Roberts; a master tailor by trade, and his mother was born Harriet Sparks. He was the only child of a late second marriage by both his parents, and he was christened William. He had half-brothers and sisters, but he never spoke of them.

Newman's parents were Anglican although the extent to which they practised their religion is unknown. He wrote little about his life except for a series of articles he labelled ‘Confessions’ in the early 1920s, from which a portrait of his youth can be discerned.

Newman attended St Saviour's School in Everton, then the Middle School of Liverpool, in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In 1885, aged seventeen, he entered University College Liverpool on a scholarship and left the following year, without matriculating. Formal institutional instruction was not Newman's only avenue of learning: he taught himself musical composition until about 1889, aged twenty-one, when his first articles were published. He was a voracious reader: in his early twenties he had acquired a good knowledge of literature, philosophy and biology, and a working knowledge of many languages including German, Russian, Greek, Swedish and Hebrew.