The Tracts for the Times were a series of 90 theological publications, varying in length from a few pages to book-length, produced by members of the English Oxford Movement, an Anglo-Catholic revival group, from 1833 to 1841.
In the words of Richard William Church, it was "Keble who inspired, Froude who gave the impetus, and Newman who took up the work"; but the first organisation of it was due to Hugh James Rose, editor of the British Magazine, who has been styled "the Cambridge originator of the Oxford Movement".
Rose met Oxford Movement figures on a visit to Oxford looking for magazine contributors, and it was in his rectory house at Hadleigh, Suffolk, that a meeting of High Church clergy was held over 25–26 July (Newman was not present, but Hurrell Froude, Arthur Philip Perceval, and William Palmer had gone to visit Rose),[1] at which it was resolved to fight for "the apostolical succession and the integrity of the Prayer Book."
[4] The series was brought to an end by the intervention of Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford, not unsympathetic to the Tractarians,[5] after the appearance of Newman's Tract 90, which suggested a heterodox reading of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, and caused controversy in the University.
[6] In the Preface he is concerned with arguing against the point of view that the Tracts were an attempt to introduce Roman Catholic beliefs; to place the Tracts in the context set up by the 1833 formation of the Association of Friends of the Church (set up by Hugh James Rose, Hurrell Froude and Palmer himself) that was the initial step in the Oxford Movement; and to distance his views from the editorial line of the British Critic.