In 1917 Shane Leslie published a general article in The Dublin Review, quoting extensive passages from the extant correspondence between Florence Nightingale and Henry Edward Manning, the bulk of it written in 1852 when Nightingale was considering conversion to Roman Catholicism. The letters are of great importance for understanding her character and eventual theological position. Although only Nightingale’s part of the correspondence is extant, it is of value, as well, to students of Manning and is of particular interest for the background it provides to disagreements between the Nightingale and Mary Stanley nursing contingents in the Crimea, 1854–1855.

However strongly some authors may oppose the adjective ‘Catholic’ as limiting their vocation, a recognisable body of British Catholic literature does exist from the mid-nineteenth century. Its boundaries are not always easily definable since its origins are mixed. It was moulded initially by pre- and post-Emancipation renewals, the number and energy of the new converts from the Oxford Movement, the effects of Irish immigration, and the anti-Catholic rhetoric in both Protestant revivals and rising liberal secular thought. As a result British Catholicism formed a distinctive apologetic, which marked its literature from the beginning. Thus, Newman’s Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848) made the case for Catholicism against Elizabeth Harris’s novel, From Oxford to Rome, and in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics (1851) he defended the faith during the ‘Papal Aggression’ fury. Similarly, both Wiseman and Newman responded to anti-Catholic caricatures in Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1851) with their own fictional depictions of the early Church, Fabiola (1854) and Callista (1856) respectively.

When the subject of German Liberal Catholicism is raised alongside Gladstone's name, one is initially directed to the Munich historian and theologian, Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890). Few biographies of Gladstone omit a description of his first meeting with the German historian on September 30, 1845. The initial contact between the two men was certainly significant in Gladstone's career, but what is often not related is the full context of that meeting. Too often the incident is framed by their later meeting and correspondence, the Vaticanism controversies, and Döllinger's own opposition to the declaration of papal infallibility. At the end of his career, Gladstone himself interpreted their relationship in light of their later association, writing: ‘Nothing ever so much made me anglican versus Roman as reading in Döllinger over forty years ago the history of the fourth century and Athanasius contra mundum.’