Gladstone and Ireland: Politics, Religion and Nationality in the Victorian Age (review)

This is a welcome collection of essays on W. E. Gladstone and Ireland, from the editors of a number of previous collections on topics in nineteenth-century Ireland. The essays are laid out in broadly chronological order but also fall within a number of methodological and thematic categories. Both John-Paul McCarthy and Ian Sheehy address Gladstone’s thought. Earlier versions of Gladstone saw him as undergoing a number of conversions during his career, most notably over Home Rule in 1885 and 1886. Recently, the trend has been to trace a greater degree of continuity, as when McCarthy seeks to show that Gladstone’s support for Robert Peel’s policy on the grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth in 1845 was in fact in line with his earlier thought. As he writes, “in elaborating the abstract ideal of a confessional state in his first book, Gladstone had rather lucidly conceded its impossibility” (31). Sheehy traces the uses to which Gladstone put the writings of R. Barry O’Brien in developing his historical arguments in favour of Home Rule in the 1880s and the way in which he subsequently recruited O’Brien to the literary campaign in its favour.

Gladstone’s freezing out both anti- and pro-Home Rule Ulster Liberals is N. C. Fleming’s topic, while Patrick Maume charts the disillusion that Thomas McKnight, the Ulster Liberal editor and civic Unionist, felt for the Liberal leader. The dismayed attitudes of British Liberals to Gladstone’s espousal of Home Rule and the importance of the poor relations between him and his younger colleagues, Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Hartington, are the subjects of essays by Graham Goodlad and Timothy Moore. Two essays, those by Alan Megahey on Gladstone’s developing thought on disestablishment and by D. George Boyce on the four nations, offer broad surveys, while essays by D. W. Bebbington on images of Gladstone in the Parnellite paper United Ireland and by Martin Maguire on Gladstone and the Irish Civil Service (he hoped Home Rule would cut imperial costs) present case studies. Finally, Fleming and Alan O’Day, in their joint article, look at Gladstone’s influence on the cooperation politics espoused by the likes of Horace Plunkett and Lord Dunraven at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The essays in this book also offer the reader the opportunity to reflect on the historiography of Gladstone and Ireland as an overall topic; indeed, Boyce’s introduction seems to invite this. In essence, the study of Gladstone and Ireland has developed as a function of a British biographical tradition concerning the People’s William. Thought of as a great man in the work of John Morley and J. L. Hammond, he was brought down to earth as a political opportunist by A. B. Cooke and J. R. Vincent. Recent decades have seen contributions from H. C. G. Matthew, Richard Shannon, Eugenio F. Biagini, and others who have sought to untangle the dense web of intellectual, cultural, and political traditions that influenced Gladstone’s thought and from which his views and policies on Ireland emerged.

There have been disadvantages as well as benefits to this approach and two major points could be made in this regard. Firstly, Gladstone is seen as a figure over against everything and everyone else. Secondly, the emphasis in studying him in relation to Ireland is on his views and policies rather than on their results in Ireland.

Seeing Gladstone in isolation from, for example, the governments of which he was a part, produces the strange result that Gladstone is treated as if he were the government. This can be illustrated in an oddity of interpretation concerning the post-Kilmainham Treaty period of his second government from 1882 to 1885. It is often asserted—and, indeed, a number of the contributors to Gladstone and Ireland hold this view—that relations between the Liberals...