Francis William Newman (27 June 1805 – 4 October 1897) was an English classical scholar and moral philosopher, prolific miscellaneous writer and activist for vegetarianism and other causes.

Thomas Carlyle in his life of John Sterling called him a "man of fine attainments, of the sharpest-cutting and most restlessly advancing intellect and of the mildest pious enthusiasm.

[3][4][5] During his undergraduate days, his father's bank having failed, he was able to complete his degree by relying on financial support from his older brother John Henry.

[4] Early in his student period, however, lodging as he did with his brother, he disagreed enough on established religion to feel, at least as he expressed it in a late autobiographical work, that there was a breach in their relationship.

An obituary of Edward Cronin, a Catholic convert widowed in 1829, suggests a Bible study group as origin of the sequel.

[9] Newman had recently been rejected by Maria Rosina Giberne, whom he had been courting for seven years, and had been helping his brother with parish work at Littlemore.

They intended to join the independent faith mission of Anthony Norris Groves, who was working there with John Kitto and Karl Gottlieb Pfander.

[4] He intended to find additional support for the mission: but rumours of unsoundness in his views on the doctrine of eternal punishment had preceded him.

[3] Finding himself looked upon with suspicion by erstwhile evangelical colleagues, including Darby, Newman gave up on his vocation of missionary.

"[16] Literary critic Lionel Trilling described Newman as a "militant vegetarian, an intransigent anti-vivisectionist, an enthusiastic anti-vaccinationist.

[25] The liberal theological movement to which Newman belonged was hailed by George Jacob Holyoake, founder of British secularism.

The Anglican Clerical Journal, edited by Henry Burgess, wrote in 1854 of the "openly destructive volumes" of Newman and Theodore Parker.

[28] The content is considered to reflect the influence on Newman at this time of Baden Powell, in the area of science and religion.

[29] With Martineau and others such as James Anthony Froude and Edward Lombe, he was one of the unorthodox but "respectable" backers when John Chapman took over the radical Westminster Review in 1851.

[31] He was supported in the Westminster Review by a sympathetic article of 1858, "F. W. Newman and his Evangelical Critics", by Wathen Mark Wilks Call, that classed him as an "honest doubter".

[32] Considering the reception of ten books by Newman from the 1850s, Call (writing anonymously) concluded that many of his opponents "failed in candour, courtesy, generosity, and conscientiousness.

[41] Newman was both a supporter of a radical individualism and opponent of a centralised state;[21][42] and an ethicist who opposed free love, and was concerned with urban libertinism and prostitution.

"[46] An opponent of birth control, Newman put a case that sexual excess was a danger to women's health.

He commented that "the number of dogmatic prohibitions against everything that makes food palatable will soon ruin our society if not firmly resisted."

In 1884, a hostile review of his book Essays on Diet commented that he "is no vegetarian himself in the strict acceptation of the word, for he takes milk, eggs, butter, and cheese.

[57] In 1869, an article in The Lancet journal criticized Newman for holding this opinion and tried to convince him to withdraw his support for the League.

[65] Francis's mother Jemima was at the end of her life — she died in spring 1836 — but welcomed Maria to the Newman family home.

[4] After his retirement from University College, Newman continued to live for some years in London, subsequently moving to Clifton, and eventually to Weston-super-Mare, where he died in 1897.

[77] Karl Marx quoted from Newman's "Lectures on Political Economy", given at Bedford College in Capital, Volume III, p. 595.