Lives of Victorian Political Figures I. Palmerston, Disraeli and Gladstone (review)

This set of four volumes is the first in an ambitious new series. When deciding whether to allow the high price to deter them potential readers will need to consider the claims made for the series, and the underlying principles on which the contents have been selected. The chosen extracts, reproduced in facsimile, represent printed material (from books, pamphlets and periodical articles) published at the time of the events concerned or soon afterwards. The declared aim is to avoid 'all of the pitfalls associated with hindsight', and to rescue from oblivion contemporary sources which 'might have been passed over by later biographers'. However certain important categories of primary material are not included. There are no manuscript sources, in the shape of letters, diaries and memoirs, unless these were published at the time; no speeches, except those reproduced in pamphlet form; and no writings by any of the three statesmen themselves. The four volumes provide a conveniently accessible anthology of more or less contemporary printed documents that many students of the period will welcome. Nevertheless the selection (only 27 extracts relating to Gladstone's long career, for instance) is necessarily arbitrary, with some important periods inadequately covered; and the documents chosen vary considerably in weight and significance. These considerations seriously qualify any suggestion that the chosen extracts provide an authoritative contemporary picture, and one must be wary of allowing them to weigh too heavily in the balance against the considered assessment of all the available source material contained in modern biographies. For each of the three statesmen an introduction is provided in which recent scholarly work is summarized, and each of the chosen extracts is given a concise introduction describing the author, where known, and the context. There are also end notes, although these are not easy to use in the absence of reference numbers in the facsimile text, and sometimes the notes fail to draw attention to elementary factual errors in the documents (e.g., the misstatements that Disraeli was 'somewhat younger than Gladstone', and that Gladstone was three times prime minister).

Palmerston

The volume devoted to Palmerston begins unpromisingly with a 34-page pamphlet devoted to two wild and repetitive speeches delivered in 1840 by the Chartist Charles Attwood in which he denounced Palmerston as a traitor in the pay of Russia. The editor suggests that although the reality of Attwood's allegations has 'of course' been downplayed by historians, it is nevertheless interesting to see 'how much use was made of it by Palmerston's opponents at the time'. The second document is a 32-page compilation of Hansard extracts, published in 1863 in support of Cobden's charge that Palmerston had made conflicting statements to parliament on a number of subjects. The next five items continue to illustrate the sort of charges that were made against Palmerston in relation to particular aspects of his foreign policy, and then there follows a single item in his defence. This consists of a series of letters addressed in January 1854 to the editor of the Morning Advertiser, together with the text of a 'suppressed pamphlet' attacking Russell for his dismissal of Palmerston in December 1851. Palmerston had expressed unauthorized approval of Louis Napoleon's coup, but according to the pamphlet the real reason for his removal was that he had antagonized some of the crowned heads of Europe, and also members of the British court, particularly Prince Albert.

The articles in the second half of the book are grouped under the heading 'General Overviews and Obituaries', but this is misleading. Although the section begins with two general items, in the shape of extracts from the journal of Speaker Denison and a collection of random anecdotes about Palmerston's electioneering activities in the borough of Tiverton, these are followed by articles reverting to particular incidents in Palmerston's earlier career. Two of the longest extracts are an anonymous article from...