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Victorian Studies 45.3 (2003) 558-559



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Lord Salisbury's World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain, by Michael Bentley, pp. v + 334. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, £29.95, $45.00.

Of late we have had two important biographies of Robert Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury: Andrew Roberts's Salisbury: Victorian Titan (1999) and David Steele's Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography (1999). And now we have Michael Bentley's treatment of Salisbury which, as he says, "should not be seen as a commentary on them" (325). By situating Salisbury in his world and showing how Salisbury sought to shape that world, Bentley performs an obbligato whose merry arpeggios provide glittering insights as they lilt over the deep rhythms and harmonies of Salisbury's life. Unfettered from the restrictions and discipline of a biographical narrative, Bentley raises interesting questions of historical theory and practice. By exposing the structures and processes that act on character and by dealing with the inner world of character he sheds light on the nature of historical agency. Its nature is this: inner and outer worlds of thought and action cannot be reduced to one another; nor can they be treated (or thought about) separately. And thus we are treated here to the work of contingency. The Hatfield archive, unfortunately, was closed to Bentley as he prepared this study, but he was able to take advantage of copies of Salisbury material left behind when these materials were at Christ Church, Oxford. Additionally, he makes assiduous use of thirty-three collections of unpublished manuscripts to open, expose, and reveal Lord Salisbury's world from the many different angles of Torydom. And what is revealed is a dark, skeptical, suspicious Salisbury in a dark, skeptical, suspicious Conservative world.

Bounded by Hatfield, the House of Lords, the cabinet, the Foreign Office, and France (where Salisbury built two homes), it was a world of isolation, and, therefore, a world of anxiety. Salisbury disliked "society," and he found club life tiresome, except for, perhaps, THE CLUB when men of science dined there. Tory grandees shielded themselves from the wider world of liberal opinion as much as they could. Salisbury, with his powerful intellect, thought deeply about many things, but then he thought carefully to conceal his brooding musings. Even a daughter-in-law misunderstood the mental powers [End Page 558] of the Cecils when she called Hatfield Gaza, the capital of Philistria. Yet such a misunderstanding is also revealing because it shows how far Salisbury and his associates were prepared to conceal what they wished to know about the larger world of thought and action. In Salisbury's case, perhaps enhanced by an unsatisfactory youth and an unsatisfactory relationship with his father, it was a kind of emotional isolation. When Francis Balfour, the Professor of Animal Morphology in the University of Cambridge and Salisbury's nephew, died climbing Mont Blanc Salisbury consoled himself with the thought that science, like all forms of Truth, never suffers from the loss of a single individual.

Feelings of social, political, and emotional isolation then translated themselves into anxieties about property, the church, and Ireland. By the end of the century much of landed property's importance was emotional and symbolic. Symbols are important, but the Tories' failure to assess the real importance of land may have had more significance than the values inculcated in the public schools and the ancient university for the question of Britain's economic decline at the turn of the twentieth century. And then there was the wider world of electoral politics. Salisbury did not so much fear the mob as he feared the unwillingness and the inability of the governing classes to face and deal with the urgencies of mass politics. The church had to be protected from the Ritualists within and the dissenters from without. The overlapping spheres of church and state had to be safeguarded because the dominance of either over the other would be fatal to both. Ireland, after William Gladstone's conversion to home rule, was a policy morass for...

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