Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism by Phyllis Weliver, and: Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture by Bennett Zon (review)

Phyllis Weliver's Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism and Bennett Zon's Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture both deploy interdisciplinary approaches to interrogate Victorian cultures. Both authors approach their work thematically and utilize detailed case studies. Weliver's monograph is partly conceived as a case study of Elaine Hadley's "living liberalism" concept, elucidated in her 2010 monograph of that name. Mary Gladstone is divided into two sections. The first, "Intellectual History," argues that the middle daughter of British Liberal Prime Minister, W. E. Gladstone, was a leading liberal in her own right through her work as her father's private secretary. It also contends that she was a significant cultural influencer in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British society as hostess of both political and musical salons. Part 2 presents a series of "Musical and Literary Case Studies," which attend to Gladstone's role in the establishment of the Royal College of Music, her family's reception of Alfred Tennyson's salon readings of his oeuvre, and her reading of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876).

By contrast, the structure of Zon's Evolution neatly mirrors one of the central concepts discussed in his book: the "Great Chain of Being" (3). His seven chapters discuss zoo-, ethno-, and folk musicologies; music pedagogy; biography; history; and, finally, theology. The chapters, framed by a wide-ranging introduction and a less-satisfying epilogue (which introduces too much new material), investigate the role of developmental and evolutionary ideas in shaping Victorian musical theory, performance, and reception.

Some aspects of Weliver's book are admirable, not least its self-assured and ambitious cross-disciplinarity (encompassing discussions of political, cultural, and ecclesiastical history; Christian theology; and musicology as well as English literature) and its aim to further our understanding of Hadley's thesis. The book is strongest and most engaging when Weliver elucidates Mary Gladstone's musical circles. Likewise, the close reading of Eliot through the lens of Gladstone's reading experience is accomplished and is in many ways the strongest evidence for the significance of her politico-cultural agency.

Citing Stephen Banfield, Joanne Shattock, and Martin Hewitt in support, Zon espouses the view that rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship results from hard work; it does not simply evolve. This is shown immediately by Zon's rewarding introduction, which establishes his project's aims, objectives, and rationale, and articulates his methodological approach. He takes pains to explain, to an audience likely to be diverse, key concepts such as development, and musicological categories such as folk music. Zon's familiarity with an eclectic range of literature, and the detailed research that underpins the main chapters, give his broad, thematic conclusions their authority. Chapter 3 on "Folk Musicology" show-cases Zon's thesis that this period was a transitional and not a dialectical one, and provides an excellent exploration of how evolutionary frames of reference influenced individual scholars, scholarly trends, as well as more popular antiquarianism.

Weliver's monograph draws on a more limited range of literature. Hadley's 2010 work and Amanda Anderson's Bleak Liberalism (2016) are the principal published sources for the political thesis. There is little or no explicit engagement with the work of David Bebbington, Eugenio Biagini, Stefan Collini, or Deryck Schreuder, scholars who have helped define Gladstonian liberalism and internationalism. The lack of reference to Bebbington's work when seeking to explain W. E. Gladstone's religious conception of politics is particularly neglectful. With regards to Mary Gladstone's connection with the Lux Mundi group associated with Keble College, Oxford, large swathes of the argument in chapter 1 derive from Victoria Houseman's unpublished 2004 doctoral thesis on this topic. In addition...