Gladstone and Women (review)

As its title suggests, Gladstone and Women sets out to describe William Ewart Gladstone's most significant relationships with women. The story begins in 1809 with Anne Gladstone giving birth to her son, and it ends in 1898 with Queen Victoria pointedly refraining from any participation in the mass mourning elicited by the death of the Grand Old Man of Victorian Liberalism. The author's critical starting point, however, is the 1927 libel case in which Gladstone's sons challenged Peter Wright's claim that their father had been a hypocritical adulterer—that he had, in Wright's words, "set the tradition in public to speak the language of the highest and strictest principle, and in private to pursue and possess every sort of woman" (xi). The case was decided in Gladstone's favor, and Anne Isba's verdict is essentially the same. Her introduction states that Gladstone's denial of marital infidelity in 1896 "raised more questions than it answered" (xv), but this study does not challenge a technically conservative estimate of Gladstone's sexual history: that he entered matrimony a virgin and that his wife Catherine—pregnant nine times between 1839 and 1854—was his only sexual partner during their union of nearly sixty years. Rather, Gladstone and Women reconfirms a portion of the standard portrait that took shape in the course of the publication of The Gladstone Diaries (14 vols., 1968–94). Here, then, is another reminder that Gladstone had a strong libido that clashed with his religious conscience even as it was diverted into neo-chivalric defenses of idealized femininity. Surely Gladstone's much discussed work with female prostitutes was not "wholly innocent" (as the jacket to Gladstone and Women has it). But Gladstone himself was the chief skeptic on this topic: he recorded and passed on to posterity his belief that such work was both a pious attempt to redeem forlorn purity as well as an occasion for titillation and temptation.

Much like Roy Jenkins's 1995 biography of Gladstone, Isba's study is aimed at buyers in bookstores, not borrowers in academic libraries. But readers of Victorian Studies ought to take notice of it for the rewarding excursions into one of the massive Gladstone archives, the Glynne-Gladstone papers held in Hawarden. Isba's work there enriches our understanding of three important women in Gladstone's life: his sister Helen (1814–1880) and his daughters Mary (1847–1927) and Helen (1849–1935). Here too the author continues to address the opening theme of sexual scandal. But in these cases the issue at stake is the broader scandal of Victorian patriarchy and the demands it placed on women.

Following the work of G. S. Checkland (author of The Gladstones: A Family Biography, 1764–1851 [1971]) and Colin Matthew, sole editor of the Diaries starting in 1972, Isba brings to light new details in the life of Helen Gladstone. Like her elder sister and her mother—both named Anne—Helen Gladstone was beset with many health problems, but they didn't come with the evangelical piety and resignation that distinguished the lives of her sister and mother. With Anne (the daughter) dying of tuberculosis in 1829, and her mother following in 1835, Helen would embark on an alternative course of invalidism that was in part a form of rebellion against her own limited prospects. During the 1830s and 1840s, her habitual use of opium intensified; in 1842 she converted to Roman Catholicism. One of many crises came in 1846 when the Commissioners in Lunacy received a complaint that Helen was being held against her will in the house of her father. Kept in isolation and under the attendance of a housemaid—"the family's equivalent of Grace Poole" as Isba puts it (59)—Helen Gladstone's case "illustrates the relative ease with which wealthy Victorians were able to confine or constrain their relatives" (59). Isba also makes it clear how brother William was ready to diagnose [End Page...