Gladstone (review)

Although the publication of this volume coincided with the centennial of William Ewart Gladstone’s death, the temporal origin of its constituent parts ranges from 1967 to 1996. All but two of the essays were first delivered as Founder’s Day Lectures at St. Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden. Peter J. Jagger, recently retired from his position as Warden and Chief Librarian of St. Deiniol’s, reckoned that a gathering of these essays would serve as a worthy commemoration of Gladstone’s life and work. Given the distinction of many of the contributors, Jagger’s prima facie case looks strong. Yet the conversion of a lecture into scholarship of enduring value may call for some modification in tone and a notable expansion in analytical density. From the quality of the essays assembled here it can be inferred that some of the authors sought to make the necessary adaptations.

For cautionary tales of what can happen when the adaptations are not made, one need look no further than the first two essays. Glynne Wickham’s “Gladstone, Oratory and the Theatre” provides some interesting commentary on Gladstone’s recommendation of a knighthood for the actor Henry Irving in 1883, but the employment of this event to explore the role of oratory in the shifting cultural and political landscape of nineteenth-century England goes badly awry. He seriously underestimates the influence of print by the early part of the century. His judgments on a host of matters seem unsound. Want of knowledge and understanding leads Wickham to commit some egregious blunders. Substantively flawed, stylistically an irritating amalgam of the grandiloquent and the familiar, this essay scarcely gets the volume off to a promising start. Deformities of this kind never blight the work of Asa Briggs. An agreeable enough essay in its way, Briggs’s “Victorian Images of Gladstone” reads very much as a lecture intended for a predominantly non-scholarly audience. His ruminations on contemporary visual representations of Gladstone—cartoons, photographs, engravings, pottery, and so on—do not seem deeply considered. A search for the objects is one thing; a searching inquiry into their significance another. The second is not visible here.

The two essays that follow, “Gladstone and Disraeli” by Robert Blake and “Gladstone and the Working Man” by Simon Peaple and John Vincent, can be viewed as the offspring of projects dating from the 1960s. Blake’s contribution emanates from a St. Deiniol’s lecture of 1967, the year after he brought out his magisterial biography of Disraeli. This same piece formed part of a previous volume edited by Jagger, Gladstone, Politics and Religion (1985). Although Blake’s percipience and admirable balance retain the power to impress, it is difficult to see what has been gained by reprinting the essay. That Blake himself thought his composition of insufficient weight to stand in need of documentation is perhaps telling. John Vincent’s Formation of the British Liberal Party appeared in 1966, the same year as Blake’s Disraeli. This always creative and sometimes compelling study brilliantly examined the means by which Gladstone fastened the forces of extra-parliamentary Liberalism to the parliamentary party during the 1860s. Simon Peaple collaborates with his mentor in presenting a fruitful addendum to the latter’s landmark study. Their essay blends an incisive investigation of Gladstone’s conception of “the Working Man” with a felicitous analysis of his capacity to inspire the devotion of many laborers. They contend that “making the working man feel that he belonged was Gladstone’s own special and greatest work” (83). A moot point, I think, but one worth pondering.

There is much to mull over in three essays that take up Gladstone’s relation to issues American, Irish, and Welsh. Peter J. Parish’s “Gladstone and America” offers a judicious and probing inquiry into Gladstone’s response to the American Civil War. He explains the factors shaping Gladstone’s defective understanding of the conflict. He also observes Gladstone’s remorseful retrospective acknowledgment that he had misconceived essential aspects of the struggle...