Lord John Russell: A Biography (review)

Lord John Russell: A Biography, by Paul Scherer; pp. 427. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999, $57.50, £42.50.

It is hard to recapture the stature in his time of "our little Atlas Johnny" (115), as Lord Holland called Lord John Russell. The slow disintegration of his 1846 to 1852 ministry, followed by his worsting by Lord Palmerston and eclipse by William Ewart Gladstone in the leadership of Liberalism, have given his career the aspect of a progressive decline from the early heights of the relief of Dissenting and Catholic disabilities and the piloting of the first Reform Act. Yet Russell has a claim to be considered the outstanding Liberal leader of nineteenth-century Britain, and there is everything to be said for a fresh look at his achievement, assimilating work done since John Prest's fine 1972 study.

There are substantial merits to Paul Scherer's book. It is the product of extensive and painstaking research. It employs, especially on Russell's early life, some sources not used by Prest--though they do not seem to make a large difference. It is considerably fuller than Prest on the period after 1852, particularly on Russell's tenure in the Foreign Office from 1859 to 1865, when, Scherer endeavours to show, he was by no means the mere understrapper of Palmerston. Most of all, it makes by steady accumulation of instances a strong case for regarding Russell as the most consistent, persistent, and wide- ranging reforming politician of his day. If parliamentary reform was his trademark, he was a valiant proponent of rational improvement in many other fields: Ireland, colonial government, education, the Church, Jewish emancipation, police, municipal and penal reform, factories, and public health. He was often in advance of his time, which was one of his major political difficulties. His educational efforts, Scherer suggests, supplied much of the foundation for the Education Act of 1870; and he would have liked to drag Oxford and Cambridge into the modern world through the promotion of modern history, modern languages, and political economy. In good sections on Ireland, in many ways the litmus test of Liberalism, Scherer places Russell among the most sympathetic and imaginative of British politicians, for all that his improving aims were limited in both conception and prosecution by contemporary dogmas and prejudices. The words he spoke on Ireland in the 1830s were still echoing in Gladstone's mind thirty years later. "I know not why," he said in 1839 in a speech quoted by Prest, "if we conduct the government of England according to the wishes of the people of England and if we conduct the government of Scotland according to the wishes of the people of Scotland--I know not why in Ireland the opinions and wishes of a small minority only should be consulted" (Lord John Russell [1972] 99).

Scherer's book usefully complements Prest's, but does not supersede it. On domestic politics, Prest displays the easier familiarity with the way in which the political system and its personnel worked. An inability to stand back from the detail of the documents too frequently deprives Scherer's exposition and argument of boldness and clarity of outline. The book has been badly proofread. There is a steady drip of "literals." Various authorities appear under false names, "Olicer MacDanagh" (371) being the most egregious. The notes to Chapters Seven, Twenty, and Twenty-One fall out of key with the text. The Index turns Sir Robert Peel into "Sir Frederick" and leaves his son, the third baronet, out altogether, as it does the second Earl Grey. I doubt that Russell, in 1815, described renewal of the war against France as "impolite" (26), even if he thought it was. More disappointingly, Scherer does not seize the chance to attempt the reassessment of Russell's place in mid-nineteenth-century British Liberalism towards which much modern work has pointed. In a striking recent appreciation, Jonathan Parry has observed that Russell's achievement was "to...