The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics (review)

When, in his Modern England (1968), Robert K. Webb introduced American students of the 1960s and 1970s to the great Victorian rivalry, he observed that Benjamin Disraeli "brought an artistry to politics that our more objective and sophisticated age has learned to appreciate," whereas William Ewart Gladstone's approach was clouded "by a moral rhetoric for which we have lost our taste" (341). The plethora of new biographies, essays, and studies about Gladstone that has appeared in the course of the past generation strongly suggests that the public mood has shifted once more. A major catalyst, no doubt, was the appearance of the fourteen-volume edition of the Gladstone Diaries (1968–94; primarily the work of the late Colin Matthew).

Gladstone's political career was the most remarkable in British history in that he served (with one brief exception) as member of parliament from 1833 to 1895, as cabinet officer during six different decades, and as prime minister during four. In the course of that career, he also published twenty-four books and, for monthly journals such as the Contemporary Review and the Nineteenth Century, many articles—not only on politics, but also on religion, philosophy, literature, and classical studies. Bebbington's new work focuses on Gladstone's approach to religion, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and political philosophy even as it deliberately leaves out or takes for granted the statesman's involvement in parliamentary and electoral politics.

Making instructive use of Gladstone's own writings—including such little-used sources as the household sermons he gave as paterfamilias and texts of public speeches available only in The Times—as well as a vast number of secondary articles published in the past two decades, Bebbington provides an introduction, a conclusion, and eight substantive chapters, fruitfully arranged in approximate chronological order. Of the eight, two deal primarily with Gladstone's political principles, two with his books and articles about Homer, and four with the statesman's evolving attitudes toward religion. Few readers will be surprised to learn that in Gladstone's mind these subjects were closely interconnected.

Gladstone's youthful conservatism—based on Aristotle, the Bible, and Edmund Burke—insisted that wisdom lay not in the whims of popular majorities but in "subjection to paternal and patriarchal authority" (20), both in the family and in the state. During the 1830s the youthful evangelical also became an advocate of High Church Anglican principles for whom the Church of England became the most exemplary branch of a Universal Church of Christ that also encompassed Roman Catholics, Nonconformist Protestants, and the Eastern Orthodox churches. No wonder that in The State in Its Relations with the Church (1838) he assigned to the English state the task of serving "as handmaid of the Church" (54) and to the Church of England the task of serving as the conscience of the nation and the moral guide to its people.

By the mid-1840s Gladstone admitted that his ideal could no longer be realized. What Bebbington fails to explain is how—in the context of the formal legitimization of Protestant Nonconformity (1828), Catholic Emancipation (1829), and the secularizing legislation of the Whig ministries of 1835–41—Gladstone's dream could have seemed plausible to him even when he first set it forth. Gladstone never lost his High Church devotion to "the twin axis of eucharist and incarnation" (93), contends Bebbington, but in the course of the 1850s and 1860s his religious sympathies took on a Broad Church dimension that manifested itself in many of his writings and church appointments. Bebbington takes issue with Boyd Hilton's argument in The Age of Atonement (1988) that Gladstone reintegrated into his later religious thought much of the evangelicalism of his youth. What Bebbington does not deal with here—though he has dealt with it elsewhere—is the manner in which the evangelical flavor of Gladstone's political oratory helped bind the large Nonconformist constituency to the late-Victorian...