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Nation 119extent to which the Germans have carried poetical translation”(Newman 1851:371). 8 This “acquaintance” with the German traditionapparently made Newman the first in a small group of Victoriantranslators who developed foreignizing strategies and opposed theEnglish regime of fluent domestication.A classical scholar who taught for many years, first atManchester New College, then University College, London,Newman was a prolific writer on a variety of topics, somescholarly, others religious, many of urgent social concern. Heproduced commentaries on classical texts (Aeschylus, Euripides)and dictionaries and vocabularies for oriental languages anddialects (Arabic, Libyan). He wrote a spiritual autobiography andmany religious treatises that reflected his own wavering belief inChristianity and the heterodox nature of that belief (e.g. HebrewTheism: The Common Basic of Judaism, Christianity andMohammedanism). And he issued a steady stream of lectures, essays,and pamphlets that demonstrated his intense involvement in awide range of political issues. Newman argued for decentralizedgovernment, land nationalization, women’s suffrage, the abolitionof slavery. He criticized English colonialism, recommendinggovernment reforms that would allow the colonized to enter thepolitical process. His Essays on Diet advocated vegetarianism, andon several occasions he supported state enforcement of sobriety,partly as a means of curbing prostitution.The ideological configuration of Newman’s writing uneasilycombined liberalism with a paternalistic investment in bourgeoismoral values, and this also played into his translation projects,which were fundamentally pedagogical and populist. Hepublished Latin versions of the popular literature he assigned hisstudents for class translation exercises: Henry WadsworthLongfellow’s narrative poem Hiawatha (1862) and Daniel Defoe’snovel Robinson Crusoe (1884). The readership he imagined for histranslations of Horace (1853) and the Iliad (1856) did not knowLatin and Greek or were too busy or bored to maintain languagesthey learned at university—in Newman’s words, “the unlearnedEnglish reader,” “those who seek solely for amusement,” including“men of business,” “commercial England,” but also the sociallydiverse audience of “Dickens and Thackeray” (Newman 1853:iii–v). Compared to Schleiermacher, Newman enlisted translation in amore democratic cultural politics, assigned a pedagogical functionbut pitched deliberately against an academic elite. For Newman,