The Life of Thomas William Allies 1813-1903: “A soul temper’d with fire”
Michael Trott
Gracewing, £25, 480 pages
Thomas Allies died aged 90 in 1903, a survivor of the first generation of Tractarians and a Catholic convert of the same vintage as Manning, but as a married man ineligible for the Catholic priesthood, destined to spend the rest of his life running the Catholic Poor School Committee and engaging in ecclesiastical polemics. His daughter wrote an appealing and candid short biography of him in 1907, but both he and his writings disappeared into almost immediate obscurity, from which Michael Trott ventures to rescue them.
