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William Gladstone
This volume is dedicated to Professor M.R.D.Foot,
Pioneer of modern Gladstone Studies
William Gladstone
New Studies and Perspectives
Edited by
ROLAND QUINAULT
University of London, UK
ROGER SWIFT
University of Chester, UK
RUTH CLAYTON WINDSCHEFFEL
The Open University, UK
© Roland Quinault, Roger Swift and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Roland Quinault, Roger Swift and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel have asserted their right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East Suite 420
Union Road 101 Cherry Street
Farnham Burlington
Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405
England USA
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

William Gladstone : new studies and perspectives.
1. Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart), 1809-1898. 2. Prime
ministers–Great Britain–Biography. 3. Great Britain–
Politics and government–1837-1901.
I. Quinault, Roland E. II. Swift, Roger. III. Windscheffel,
Ruth Clayton, 1973-
941'.081'092-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

William Gladstone : new studies and perspectives / edited by Roland
Quinault, Roger Swift, and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-2046-0 (hardcover) 1. Gladstone, W. E.
(William Ewart), 1809-1898. 2. Prime ministers–Great Britain–Biography.
3. Great Britain–Politics and government–1837-1901. I. Quinault, Roland
E. II. Swift, Roger. III. Windscheffel, Ruth Clayton, 1973-
DA563.4.W55 2012
941.081092–dc23
2012001652
ISBN 9781409420460 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409449348 (ebk)
V
Contents
List of Figures and Table vii

List of Contributors ix
Foreword by David Bebbington xv
Introduction 1
Ruth Clayton Windscheffel
Part i REPUTATIONS
1 Gladstone: A Political Not a Cultural Radical 15

Frank M. Turner
2 Gladstone and Peel’s Mantle 31

Richard A. Gaunt
3 Gladstone and Labour 51

Chris Wrigley
PART II IMAGES
4 Gladstone’s Visage: Problem and Performance 73

Joseph S. Meisel
5 Material Gladstones 99
Mark Nixon
PART III PERSONAL QUESTIONS
6 Gladstone as Friend 129

Denis Paz
vi William Gladstone
7 Gladstone as Woodsman 155

Peter Sewter
8 The Health of a Prime Minister: Gladstone, 1868–85 177

Jenny West
PART IV GLADSTONE AS AN OFFICIAL
9 Gladstone, Finance and the Problems of Ireland, 1853–66 199

Allen Warren
10 Gladstone and the Ionian Islands 219

C. Brad Faught
PART V ETHICS AND INTERNATIONALISM
11 Gladstone and War 235

Roland Quinault
12 Gladstone and the Suppression of the Slave Trade 253

Richard Huzzey
13 Gladstone’s ‘Greater World’: Free Trade, Empire and Liberal

Internationalism 267
Deryck M. Schreuder
Part VI EPILOGUE
14 Gladstone’s Legacy 293

Eugenio Biagini
A Selected Bibliography 313

Index 341
List of Figures and Table
Figures
4.1 Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890 88

4.5 Images of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890 90
4.6 Images of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890 90
4.7 Gladstone, Rupert Potter, albumen print, 1884 93
4.8 Gladstone, John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1885 93
4.9 Gladstone, Franz Seraph von Lenbach, oil on canvas, 1886 94
4.10 Harry Furniss, ‘Getting Gladstone’s Collar Up’, Punch, 8 April 1882 96
4.11 Gladstone, pen and ink sketch by Phil May, 1893 97
5.1 Portrait roundel above the front door of the Orton Liberal Club,
Cumbria. Photograph by Bethan Benwell 103
5.2 Double-page spread from the Glasgow magazine Quiz,
12 September 1884, depicting scenes from the previous Saturday’s
‘Grand Reform Demonstration’ in that city. Composite image
by Kevin Kerrigan 106
5.3a Reverse of medallion which on the obverse features a bust of
Gladstone in profile facing left, with the words ‘William Ewart
Gladstone’ and ‘Born 1809’. Private Collection 114
5.3b ‘Gladstone and the franchise for the two millions’ commemorative
medallion, 1884 obverse. Except for these words, the medallion is
identical to an 1865 Reform League medallion. Note the attached
ribbon bar. Private Collection 115
5.4a Commemorative medallion, 1884 obverse. Private Collection 116
5.4b Commemorative medallion, 1884 reverse. Private Collection 117
5.5a Commemorative medallion, Glasgow, 1884 obverse.
Private Collection 118
5.5b Commemorative medallion, Glasgow, 1884 reverse.
Private Collection 119
viii William Gladstone
5.6 Commemorative medallion, Dundee, 1884 reverse. Note the

attached metal pin in a ribbon design, of a different colour and
alloy to the medallion itself. Perth Museum and Art Gallery 120
7.1 ‘Cabinet-Making’, Punch, 8 May 1880 156

7.2 ‘Oh, Woodman, Pare that Tree’, Comic News, 23 April 1864 159
7.3 ‘Tree-Felling by Machinery – Mr Gladstone watching a trial
of the New Patent Steam Feller near Tulse Hill’, The Graphic,
16 February 1878 163
7.4 A Family Gathering at Hawarden, 1886 174
Table
7.1 Graph to show the frequency of axe work by William Gladstone

and his family 158
List of Contributors
David Bebbington is Professor of History at the University of Stirling,

where he has taught since 1976. He was an undergraduate at Jesus College,
Cambridge (1968–71), where he began his doctoral studies (1971–73) before
becoming a research fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (1973–76).
He has served several times as Visiting Distinguished Professor of History
at Baylor University, Texas. His many publications include William Ewart
Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (1993), Gladstone Centenary
Essays (co-editor, 2000) and The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and
Politics (2004). His most recent publication is Victorian Nonconformity (2nd
edn, 2011).
Eugenio Biagini is Professor of Modern British History and a Fellow of Sidney

Sussex College, Cambridge. His principal research interests are in the study of
democracy, liberalism and republicanism in nineteenth and twentieth-century
Britain and Ireland. Dr Biagini’s numerous publications include Currents
of Radicalism (editor, 1991), Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular
Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone (1992), Citizenship and Community: Liberals,
Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931 (editor, 1996),
Gladstone (2000) and British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906
(2007).
C. Brad Faught is Associate Professor of History and department chair at

Tyndale University College in Toronto. A graduate of the Universities of Oxford
and Toronto, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Fellow
of Massey College at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Oxford
Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and Their Times (2003),
Gordon: Victorian Hero (2008), The New A–Z of Empire: A Concise Handbook
of British Imperial History (2011) and Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery
Perham (forthcoming).
Richard A. Gaunt is Associate Professor in British History at the University

of Nottingham and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. A specialist in
late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century political history, his principal
x William Gladstone
publications include Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy (2010), Unrepentant
Tory: Political Selections from the Diaries of the Fourth Duke of Newcastle-
under-Lyne, 1827–38 (2006) and (co-editor, with Michael Partridge) Lives of
Victorian Political Figures I: Palmerston, Disraeli and Gladstone (4 vols, 2006).
From September 2012, Dr Gaunt will be co-editor of the journal, Parliamentary
History.
Richard Huzzey is Lecturer in British History at the University of Plymouth.

He was an undergraduate at St Anne’s College, Oxford, prior to completing his
doctoral research at St Catherine’s College, Oxford (where he was Light Senior
Scholar), and a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University. His first book, on
anti-slavery after British emancipation, will appear shortly.
Joseph S. Meisel is Deputy Provost at Brown University. He was previously a

programme officer for the humanities at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
and has taught history at Columbia University, Teacher’s College and Baruch
College of the City University of New York. His publications on the history of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain include the books Public Speech and
the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (2001), Knowledge and Power:
The Parliamentary Representation of Universities in Britain and the Empire
(2011) and (as co-author) Harry Furniss – ‘The Humours of Parliament’: A View
of Late Victorian Political Culture (2011).
Mark Nixon is an independent historian based in Scotland and a museum

and gallery exhibition designer for Scottish Independent Touring Exhibitions
(SITE), with particular curatorial expertise in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
popular culture. He has been involved in several initiatives which seek to develop
research networks which bring together museum and heritage professionals
and historians working in universities. His specialist research interests focus on
Victorian political culture and historiography and he is the author of Samuel
Rawson Gardiner and the Idea of History (2011).
Denis Paz is Professor of History at the University of North Texas. His research
interests lie primarily in modern British cultural, religious and political history
and his numerous publications include The Priesthoods and Apostasies of Pierce
Connelly: A Study in Victorian Conversion and Anti-Catholicism (1986),
Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (1992), Nineteenth-
century English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect (editor, 1995) and
Dickens and Barnaby Rudge: Anti-Catholicism and Chartism (2006).
List of Contributors xi
Roland Quinault is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical

Research, University of London. He was Honorary Secretary of the Royal
Historical Society from 1990 until 1998, Reader in History at London
Metropolitan University and, in 2010–11, the Fulbright-Robertson Visiting
Professor in British History at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri. His
primary research interests are in modern British history, with particular
reference to the growth of democracy and the character of political leadership.
Dr Quinault has co-edited five books and contributed numerous articles to
historical journals. He has written on various aspects of Gladstone’s career and
has regularly contributed to conferences on Gladstone over the last decade. His
latest publication is British Prime Ministers and Democracy: From Disraeli to
Blair (2011).
Deryck M. Schreuder is Emeritus Professor of History and Education at the

University of Sydney, where he was previously Challis Professor of History. A
former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Western Sydney, Vice-Chancellor
of the University of Western Australia and past-President of the Australian
Historical Association and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, his
principal research interests lie in modern British and international history,
with a special interest in empires and colonies. His many publications include
Gladstone and Kruger: Liberal Government and Colonial Home Rule, 1880–85
(1969), The Scramble for Southern Africa: the Politics of Partition Re-appraised
(1981), Imperialisms: Exploration In European Expansion and Empire (1991),
The Humanities and a Creative Nation: Jubilee Essays (1995) and, most recently,
Australia’s Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series,
co-editor, 2008).
Peter Sewter is former Deputy Headmaster of Kingsmead School, Hoylake.

An independent scholar, he graduated in Classics at Exeter University and
subsequently gained an MA in Applied Theology at the University of Liverpool
and an MA (with Distinction) in Victorian Studies at the University of Chester,
where he developed a specific research interest in Gladstone’s private life.
Roger Swift is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Studies at the University of

Chester, where he was formerly Director of the Graduate School. His research
interests lie primarily in the social and political history of Britain and Ireland
during the Victorian period and his publications include The Irish in the
Victorian City (co-editor, 1985), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (co-editor,
1989), Victorian Chester: Essays in Social History (1996), The Irish In Victorian
Britain: The Local Dimension (co-editor, 1999), Gladstone Centenary Essays
xii William Gladstone
(co-editor, 2000), Irish Migrants in Britain, 1815–1914: A Documentary

History (2002), Problems and Perspectives in Irish History since 1800 (co-editor,
2004) and Politics and Power in Victorian Ireland (co-editor, 2006).
Frank M. Turner was the John Hay Whitney Professor of History and the
Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
His research interests lay primarily in British and European intellectual history
and his many publications included Between Science and Religion: The Reaction
to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (1974), The Greek Heritage
in Victorian Britain (1981), Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian
Intellectual Life (1993), John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical
Religion (2002), Reflections on the Revolution in France: Edmund Burke (editor,
2003) and The Western Heritage (co-editor, 2006). Professor Turner tragically
passed away during the making of this volume.
Allen Warren is Reader in History at the University of York. His research interests
focus on British and Irish political and social history during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. He has written on Gladstone, Disraeli and on Anglo-
Irish relations, and also on the history of youth movements in Britain from 1870
onwards. He has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to
many scholarly journals, including Parliamentary History, and is the author of
A Church for the Nation?: Essays on the Future of Anglicanism (1992) and Heroic
Reputations and Exemplary Lives (2000).
Jenny West is Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research,

where she is undertaking research on the subject of Gladstone’s health. Her
PhD was awarded by London University and she has worked at the Wellcome
Institute for the History of Medicine and the Society for the Protection of
Ancient Buildings. Her interest in Gladstone’s personal life resulted in a Visiting
Scholarship at St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden in 2005 and papers at that Library’s
annual Gladstone conference. Dr West’s publications include Gunpowder,
Government & War in the mid-eighteenth century (1991), ‘Gladstone and Laura
Thistlethwayte, 1865–75’, in Historical Research (2007) and contributions to N.
Harte and R. Quinault (eds), Land and Society in Britain 1700–1914 (1995)
and to Chris Miele, From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts &
Crafts Cult of Authenticity (2005).
Ruth Clayton Windscheffel is member of the Faculty of Arts at the Open

University. She has held research fellowships in both history and theology at the
University of Oxford and taught at the University of Strathclyde. Her research
List of Contributors xiii
interests lie in the modern history of Britain and its empire, with a particular
emphasis on the political, religious and print cultures of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. She has published extensively on the intellectual and
cultural life of W.E. Gladstone and her first book, Reading Gladstone (2008),
is an interdisciplinary study of Gladstone’s library, reading and intellectual
celebrity. Dr Windscheffel is completing a monograph on late nineteenth-
century sectarian culture and their transnational networks.
Chris Wrigley is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham.

His numerous publications include David Lloyd George and the British Labour
Movement (1976), Lloyd George and the Challenge of Labour (1990), Arthur
Henderson (1990), Lloyd George (1992), British Trade Unions since 1933 (2002),
Winston Churchill (2006), A.J.P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe (2006) and
A Companion to Early Twentieth Century British History, 1900–1939 (editor,
2003). He was also President of the Historical Association, 1996–99.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Foreword
David Bebbington
When John Morley composed his classic life of Gladstone, published only
five years after the statesman’s death, the biographer described his subject’s
childhood and education, recounted Gladstone’s early career and first book and
then paused. At that point Morley devoted a whole chapter, ‘Characteristics’,
to summarising Gladstone’s personality and achievements. The quality that he
singled out as most salient was adaptability. ‘We are dazzled’, Morley wrote, ‘by
the endless versatility of his mind and interests as man of action, scholar, and
controversial athlete’. Gladstone towered over his contemporaries, according to
Morley, because he displayed the same quality ‘as legislator, administrator, leader
of the people; as the strongest of his time in the main branches of executive
force, strongest in persuasive force; supreme in the exacting details of national
finance; master of the parliamentary arts’. Yet all these political skills were set in a
broader context because Gladstone was ‘always living in the noble visions of the
moral and spiritual idealist’.1 The diversity of the statesman’s attributes was what
struck Morley most.
The biographer contrived to bring home his message by the comparisons that
he distributed liberally through his chapter. Gladstone is naturally measured by
the yardstick of some of his contemporaries in public life: Cobden, Bright, Mill
and Aberdeen. He is also set in the company of men of letters: Burke, Butler,
Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle. But the net is cast wider. Wesley and Whitefield
are introduced as religious leaders whose evangelistic power he might have
emulated and Washington and Jefferson as great American statesmen whose
political achievements bore similarities to Gladstone’s. The comparisons do
not end there, for the ancient world is called into play. Gladstone is like Marcus
Aurelius, the stoic emperor of Rome, and, in his oratory, can be mentioned in
the same breath as Quintilian and Cicero. In an especially apt simile in view of
Gladstone’s Homeric interests, the statesman is said to recall ‘a fiery hero of the
Iliad’.2 More recent European history also yields its equivalents. Gladstone is like
1
J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols (London, 1903), vol. 1, p. 184.
2
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 187.
xvi William Gladstone
Fénelon, the tutor of the dauphin at the court of Louis XIV and Archbishop of
Cambrai from 1695, or a ‘grave and studious Benedictine’.3 He had the selective
courage of the great Condé, the French general of the seventeenth century, and
could be compared to Napoleon himself. ‘No Hohenzollern soldier held with
sterner regularity to the duties of his post.’4 The overall effect of the barrage
of similitude is to demonstrate exactly what Morley wished to convey: that
Gladstone’s greatness was the product of his immense versatility.
Historians, naturally preoccupied with the political evolution of Britain
under Queen Victoria, have tended to concentrate on Gladstone’s part in the
major developments of her reign – the shift to free trade, the enfranchisement
of a wider section of the population, the attempts to placate the Irish and so
on. They have often lost sight of the sheer variety of Gladstone’s roles in the life
of the nation. Even at the conference held at the University of Chester in 1998
to mark the centenary of Gladstone’s death, the papers were overwhelmingly
political in coverage. At that gathering, Colin Matthew predicted that in the
future there would be more attention to the statesman’s cultural significance.
Already there was a tool to hand to make that possible, the diaries that Michael
Foot had begun to publish in 1968 and that Colin Matthew had brought
to completion. In the pages of the diaries the versatility of Gladstone is very
much in evidence. The engagements, the correspondence and the reading all
bear witness to the many-sidedeness of the man. The importance of the diaries
makes it highly appropriate that this volume of essays should be dedicated to
their first editor, Michael Foot.
The chapters in this volume, while paying due attention to the political life
of Gladstone, attempt to place his public work in a wider setting. They come
from a further conference held at Chester in 2009, this time to commemorate
the bicentenary of the statesman’s birth. The themes of reputations, images,
personal questions, officialdom and ethics and internationalism give an
indication of the richness of the issues discussed here. The contributions engage
with topics of continuing debate – the ways in which politicians are projected,
the interplay between their private and public lives and their willingness to
intervene abroad for humanitarian reasons. The chapters therefore reveal
something of the enduring relevance of Gladstone for the twenty-first century.
The study of so adaptable a man could not fail to have value for subsequent
generations.
3
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 187.
4
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 186.
Foreword xvii
Acknowledgements
This collection of chapters emanate in part from some of the lectures and papers
delivered at the Gladstone Bicentenary International Conference held at the
University of Chester in July 2009 to commemorate the bicentenary of the
birth of William Ewart Gladstone. The conference represented a joint initiative
between Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, and the Centre for Victorian Studies
at the University of Chester and, in particular, we wish to thank Sir William
Gladstone, the great-grandson of the Prime Minister, the Very Reverend Dr
Peter Francis, Warden and Chief Librarian of Gladstone’s Library and Dr Keith
McClay, Head of History and Archaeology at the University of Chester, for their
endorsement and support. We also gratefully acknowledge the support provided
by the staff of the following repositories in the preparation of illustrations and
in granting permission for their reproduction in this volume: (for Chapter 4)
Bridgeman Art Library International, New York [Figure 4.9]; Christ Church
Picture Gallery, Oxford [Figure 4.8]; National Portrait Gallery, London [Figures
4.1–4.7, 4.11]; University of Canterbury, New Zealand [Figure 4.10]; (Chapter
5) Calderdale Museum; City of Edinburgh Museum and Galleries; McManus
Galleries and Museum, Dundee; Mitchell Library, Glasgow City Archives;
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Newark and Sherwood Museum
Service; North Lanarkshire Museums; Perth Museum and Art Gallery; Scottish
Borders Council Museum; (Chapter 7) Flintshire Record Office [Figures 7.1–
7.4]. Our greatest debt, however, is to the contributors themselves, for providing
these new studies of the public and private life of William Gladstone.
Introduction
Ruth Clayton Windscheffel
On 29 December 1909, the dark and somewhat sombre memorial to William

Ewart Gladstone in London’s Strand was garlanded with an extravagant mass of
flowers, ribbons and inscriptions in celebration of the centenary of his birth.1
Londoners revisited Gladstone’s grave in Westminster Abbey, where a special
commemorative service was held, and a host of official deputations, from across
Britain and throughout Europe, converged on the Strand carrying wreaths to lay
at the feet of Hamo Thornycroft’s commanding statue. The most extraordinary
of these, borne by a special delegation from Bulgaria, was fashioned from solid
silver and was intended, by its givers, to celebrate the life and promote the
memory of ‘a man whose large heart and humanitarian feeling deserved the
admiration of all the world’.2
In the month leading up to this first Gladstone centenary, man-of-letters
Frederic Harrison questioned the sense of marking the anniversary ‘within but
11 short years since he was buried in the Abbey by the nation, whilst the fires
that he lighted up are still blazing round us, and hot words are still bandied
about over his half-closed grave. ‘Were it not better’, Harrison entreated Times’
readers, ‘that the centenary should wait until 1998, when all that England,
Scotland, and Ireland owes to him can be recorded in the dry light of historic
time?’3 The same day’s editorial suggested a compromise: why not ‘begin by
celebrating only the centenary of the death of a great man’, and only ‘afterwards,
1
Sir W. Thornycroft, W.E. Gladstone (1900–1905; Strand, London). See M. Stocker,
‘Thornycroft, Sir (William) Hamo (1850–1925)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford, 2004; online edn, January 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36513].
2
‘The Gladstone Centenary’, Times, Thursday, 30 December, 1909; p. 9; issue 39156;
col C. The Bulgarian wreath remains in the possession of Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, and
features in the online collection of Welsh heritage and culture, Gathering the Jewels: www.gtj.
org.uk/en/large/GTJ77437.
3
F. Harrison, ‘Centenaries’, Times, Tuesday, 23 November, 1909; p. 14; issue 39124; col A.
2 William Gladstone
if his fame endured, celebrating the bicentenary of his birth’?4 In Gladstone’s

case, the cautious optimism of the editorial proved itself amply justified: in
1998, academics and others commemorated the centenary of Gladstone’s death
with a series of high profile events. And in 2009, the bicentenary of Gladstone’s
birth, an international conference convened at the University of Chester, with
speakers including Lord Briggs and Lord Bew, to reassess Gladstone’s life and
legacy in the light of recent scholarship.
II
Gladstone has rarely, if ever, been ‘out of print’ historically speaking. In

1903, John Morley’s authorised biography was, in all other respects, only one
amongst many estimations of the Grand Old Man to be published.5 Essays on
the lives of notable individual Liberals were amongst the earliest publications
in British liberal historiography and Gladstone attracted the earliest and
most widespread attention, in both Britain and Europe. Many of these works
dramatised Gladstone’s personal struggle to find his true vocation, narrating
his progression from high Toryism to radical liberalism, his long dominance
of the Liberal party, his gladiatorial contests with Disraeli; they paid tribute
to his fervent religious faith, trumpeted his commitment to his family and
finally revealed (in a melodramatic dénouement) his destined nemesis: the Irish
question.6 Whilst many of the early publications were reminiscences by those
who had known Gladstone,7 an impressive body of Gladstonian scholarship
rapidly accumulated.8 After more than a century of close scrutiny, with well
4
‘Centenaries’, Times, Tuesday, 23 November, 1909; p. 11; issue 39124; col F.
5
J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols (London, 1903). Notable biographies,
pre-Morley, included Sir T.W. Reid, (ed.), The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1899)
and D. Williamson, Gladstone the Man: a Non-Political Biography (London, 1898).
6
For a useful summary of Gladstone’s early ‘commemoration’, see M. Bentley, ‘Victorian
Prime Ministers: Changing Patterns of Commemoration’, in M. Taylor and M. Wolff, The
Victorians Since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions (Manchester, 2004), pp. 44–58.
7
L.A. Tollemache, Talks with Mr. Gladstone (London, 1898); G. Smith, My Memory of
Gladstone (London, 1904); H. Gladstone, After Thirty Years (London, 1928); I.M. Gordon,
Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, ‘Memories of Gladstone’, Contemporary Review, 148
(1935), pp. 405–15.
8
Spearheaded by figures such as A.T. Bassett, whose publications included Gladstone’s
Speeches (London, 1916); P. Knaplund, Gladstone’s Foreign Policy (New York, 1935); J.L.
Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938); P. Guedalla, The Queen and Mr
Gladstone: 1845–1879 (London, 1933); and E. Eyck, Gladstone (London, 1938).
Introduction 3
over 600 items published since 1898,9 scholarly interest in Gladstone remains
as intense as the public fascination – both popular and academic – devoted to
him during his life. That interest was particularly stimulated in the second half
of the twentieth century by the publication of Gladstone’s private diaries, which
he had kept from his schooldays until shortly before his death; an Herculean
editorial task undertaken by Michael Foot and Colin Matthew between 1968
and 1996.10
Up to this point, most studies of Gladstone had focused on his political
career.11 All Gladstone’s major biographers have recognised that there was a
great deal more to him than that: all have acknowledged and made good use
of non-political evidence and, as a result, extensive information about and
analysis of Gladstone’s personal, religious and intellectual life has been made
available. Nonetheless, specialist studies, especially of Gladstone’s intellectual
and spiritual life, lagged significantly behind those of his political career, both in
number and scope, and approaches from the field of cultural and gender history
made little impact on the way full-scale portraits of Gladstone were painted.
By contrast, the historiography of Gladstone’s great political ‘rival’, Benjamin
Disraeli, reflected an entirely different conceptualisation of him as an historical
individual, with coverage of his orientalism, Jewishness, romanticism and health
featuring prominently in the literature.12
When David Bebbington and Roger Swift reviewed the state of Gladstone
studies in Gladstone Centenary Essays in 2000,13 they demonstrated that the
historical focus was still very much on Gladstone’s political career. Bebbington
9
Key biographies published up to 1998 include those by P. Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography
(London, 1954); H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997); R. Jenkins, Gladstone
(London, 1995); and R. Shannon, Gladstone: Peel’s Inheritor 1809–1865 (London, 1982).
10
M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries: With Prime Ministerial
Correspondence, 14 vols, (Oxford, 1968–96).
11
An exception needs to be made here for T. Crosby’s The Two Mr Gladstones: A Study
in Psychology and History (New Haven, CT, 1997), which was innovative in its methodological
approach and, in many ways, prefigured a wider move within biographical writing more generally.
12
For example, C. Richmond and P. Smith (eds), The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli, 1818–
1851 (Cambridge, 1998); A.S. Wohl, ‘“Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi”: Disraeli as alien’, Journal of British
Studies, 34 (1995), pp. 375–411; B. Hilton, ‘Disraeli, English Culture, and the Decline of the
Industrial Spirit’ in L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities: the
British Isles, 1750–1850 (Manchester; New York, 1997), pp. 44–59; A.S. Wohl, ‘“Ben JuJu”:
Representations of Disraeli’s Jewishness in the Victorian Political Cartoon’, Jewish History, 10/2
(1996), pp. 89–134.
13
D. Bebbington, ‘Introduction’ and R. Swift, ‘William Ewart Gladstone: A Select
Bibliography’ in D. Bebbington and R. Swift, Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool, 2000),
pp. 1–9; 260–75.
4 William Gladstone
pointed to an ongoing debate between historians concerned with Gladstone’s

relationship with the sphere of popular politics and radicalism, and those whose
main interest was in the high politics of the Victorian elite. Another debate
focused on the influence of particular individuals on his career. Looking ahead to
the future direction of Gladstonian studies, Bebbington noted that a number of
full biographies published around the centenary of Gladstone’s death were to be
praised for ‘trying to see Gladstone whole’,14 and expressed the hope that future
work on Gladstone would seek to be more integrated than had historically been
the case. Indeed, the outputs from the 1998 Centenary Conference had been
themselves divided into two separately published volumes with distinctive content
profiles.15 These, if not divided along as strict political/personal lines as Gladstone’s
own papers had been in the early years of the twentieth century,16 still privileged
church and state in their presentation of his historical significance.17 In 2000, it
was also foreseen that Gladstone’s posthumous legacy would attract increasing
scholarly attention, and that the continued development of cultural history and
the impact of postmodernism would influence future approaches to Gladstone.18
If we survey the field now, the impact of the publication of Gladstone’s
diaries – with their evidences of the interconnectedness of Gladstone’s ‘public’
and ‘private’ worlds – is evident. Indeed, it is plain to see in the present volume.
In a letter of 1869, part of a carefully guarded correspondence preserved for
14
Bebbington, ‘Introduction’, Centenary Essays, p. 5. He cites in particular the biographies
by Matthew (1997), Jenkins (1995) and Crosby (1997).
15
Bebbington and Swift, Centenary Essays (2000) and P. Francis (ed.), The Gladstone
Umbrella: Papers Delivered at the Gladstone Centenary Conference 1998 (Hawarden, 2001). (A
third volume of sermons and speeches delivered at the Centenary was also published: P. Francis
(ed.), The Grand Old Man: Sermons and Speeches in Honour of W.E. Gladstone (1809–1898),
(Hawarden, 2000).
16
For an engaging narrative of this complex and fraught process, see R.J. Olney, ‘The
Gladstone Papers 1822–1977’ in J. Brooke and M. Sorensen (eds), W.E. Gladstone IV:
Autobigraphical Memoranda 1868–1894 (The Prime Ministers’ Papers Series) (London, 1981),
appendix 3, pp. 118–30. For further details of the exceptional treatment of the manuscript
diaries, see M.R.D. Foot, ‘Introduction’ in M.R.D. Foot (ed.) The Gladstone Diaries I 1825–1832
(Oxford, 1968), pp. xix–xlix.
17
Thus, the Centenary Essays contained chapters on politics and state religion, with only
David Bebbington’s chapter on ‘Gladstone and Homer’ (pp. 57–74) representative of Gladstone’s
intellectual concerns. The Gladstone Umbrella (2001) was also dominated by issues of church
and state, empire and Ireland but was also the place where the few papers on domestic issues and
Gladstone in a broader cultural context were placed: for instance, C. d’Haussy, ‘Gladstone, France
and His French Contemporaries’ (pp. 115–36), J.S. Meisel, ‘The Word in Man: Gladstone and the
Great Preachers’ (pp. 137–55) and L. Morris, ‘Catherine Gladstone and Victorian Philanthropy’
(pp. 35–49).
18
Bebbington, ‘Introduction’, Centenary Essays, p. 7.
Introduction 5
decades together with the manuscript diaries in Lambeth Palace, Gladstone

admitted that: ‘Friendships with women have constituted no small part of
my existence’.19 Evidence from the unexpurgated diaries and this associated
private correspondence showed how varied and how historically important
his relationships with women had been, ranging as they had done from
influential aristocrats, such as the Duchess of Sutherland, to the prostitutes that
he encountered during his ‘rescue work’. Over the last ten years, Gladstone’s
relations with women have received serious scholarly attention.20
Recent studies of Gladstone have also been facilitated and enriched by the
interrogation of other previously ignored or underused sources. These include
his personal book collection, part of which he used to establish a residential
library in his home village at Hawarden in Flintshire, North Wales, just before
his death.21 Many of the works in that collection were annotated by Gladstone
and thus provide other myriad entry points into his complex mental world and
intellectual outlook. As such, it has provided much material for new perspectives
on Gladstone. Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, for example, in Reading Gladstone
(2008), has investigated Gladstone’s life, activity and reputation as a reader,
book collector and humanitarian scholar.22
The ‘linguistic turn’, with its attendant privileging of discourse-constructed
identity, has also laid its mark on Gladstonian studies and has fundamentally
challenged many of the previously accepted frames of references common to
studies of Gladstonian liberalism, principally the undergirding operations
19
W.E. Gladstone to Laura Thistlethwayte, 25 October 1869, reproduced in Gladstone
Diaries, vol. 8, p. 570. The surviving Gladstone–Thistlethwayte correspondence was deemed
sensitive enough to be lodged with the manuscript diaries under the care of successive Archbishops
of Canterbury.
20
See, especially, A. Isba, Gladstone and Women (London, 2006) and her ‘Trouble with
Helen: the Gladstone Family Crisis, 1846–1848’, History, 88/290 (2003), pp. 249–61; R.
Aitken, ‘A Tender Tyranny: William and Catherine Gladstone as Victorian Parents’, Flintshire
Historical Society Journal, 38 (2010), pp. 155–81; J. West, ‘Gladstone and Laura Thistlethwayte,
1865–75’, Historical Research, 80/209 (2007), pp. 368–92; L. Davidoff, ‘Kinship as a
Categorical Concept: A Case Study of Nineteenth Century English Siblings’, Journal of Social
History, 39/2 (2005), pp. 411–28.
21
St Deiniol’s Library was renamed Gladstone’s Library in 2010.
22
R.C. Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone (Basingstoke, 2008). For other work which has
particularly benefited from the evidences of Gladstone’s book collection and his literary writings,
see R.C. Windscheffel, ‘Gladstone and Scott: Family, Identity, and Nation’, Scottish Historical
Review, 86/1/221 (2007), pp. 69–95; W.R. McKelvy, The English Cult of Literature: Devoted
Readers, 1774–1880 (Charlottesville, VA; London, 2007); A. Isba, Gladstone and Dante:
Victorian Statesman, Medieval Poet (Woodbridge, 2006).
6 William Gladstone
of class as a personal and tribal identifier and electoral motivator.23 Notable

amongst this body of scholarship has been the work of Joseph Meisel, whose
monograph, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone,24
examines in great depth the intermingling linguistic and rhetorical worlds of
the key constituencies of Victorian public life: politics, the law and the church,
underlining – as literary scholar David Wayne Thomas has emphasised – the
all–round interests and shared languages of elite Victorians.25
Gladstone studies have also been influenced by a growing interest in the
visual and material culture of the Victorian period.26 With the exception of
Queen Victoria and other members of the Royal Family, Gladstone was the
most represented public figure in Victorian Britain and yet, until recently, little
had been done by historians to interrogate these images to uncover evidence
of Victorian codes of masculinity both hegemonic and apostate. There is now
a growing literature, also bolstered by important advances in gender history
and, especially, studies of masculinity, to which the present volume contributes
further, offering important insights into the role and political significance of
representation in Victorian culture.27
23
Spearheaded by historians such as James Vernon, Patrick Joyce and Jon Lawrence, whose
influential book Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–
1914 (Cambridge, 1998) was published in Gladstone’s centenary year.
24
J.S. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New
York, 2001). Other recent studies featuring analysis of Gladstone from a linguistic or rhetorical
perspective include: K. Campbell, ‘W.E. Gladstone, W.T. Stead, Matthew Arnold and a New
Journalism: Cultural Politics in the 1880s’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 36/1 (2003), pp. 20–
40; H. Hoekstra, ‘De kracht van het gesproken woord: politieke mobilisatie en natievorming
bij Kuyper en Gladstone’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 116 (2003), pp. 494–511 [‘The Power
of the Spoken Word: Political Mobilization and Nation Building by Kuyper and Gladstone’]; I.
McLean, Rational Choice and British Politics: An Analysis of Rhetoric and Manipulation from Peel
to Blair (Oxford, 2001).
25
D.W. Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia,
PA, 2004).
26
For a rapid summary of historians’ and others’ engagements with visual culture, see
P. Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London, 2001), and for a
deployment of the ‘material turn’ in history and cognate disciplines, see T. Bennett and P. Joyce
(eds) Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (Routledge, 2010).
27
See, in particular, D. Mares, ‘Die visuelle Inszenierung des modernen Politikers: William
Ewart Gladstone in der “Illustrated London News”’, in U. Schneider, L. Raphael, S. Hillerich (eds),
Dimensionen der Moderne: Festschrift für Christof Dipper (Frankfurt; Berlin; Berne, 2008), pp.
309–30 [‘The Visual Representation of the Modern Politician. William Ewart Gladstone in the
“Illustrated London News”’]; R.C. Windscheffel, ‘Politics, Portraiture and Power: Reassessing
the Public Image of William Ewart Gladstone’ in M. McCormack, (ed.), Public Men: Political
Masculinities in Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 93–122.
Introduction 7
Several recent studies have reassessed Gladstone’s relationships with his

political contemporaries and focused on him as part of a wider politico-cultural
grouping. For instance, in The Rule of Freedom, Patrick Joyce considered how
Gladstone played a facilitating role, ‘linking Oxbridge to a new sort of governing
class’ in his civil service reforms,28 whilst Roland Quinault has reassessed
Gladstone’s relationship with Disraeli.29 Both, in their different ways, have
successfully problematised any simplistic understanding of Gladstone’s relations
with his political contemporaries by revealing complex webs of shifting alliances
and dense interplays between personal feelings and professional agendas.
Equally important insights have been gained by looking at Gladstone as
an agent of ideological and doctrinal transmission within his wider social and
cultural framework. In his seminal study of the Grand Old Man, The Mind of
Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics,30 David Bebbington traces the ways in
which myriad intellectual influences worked on creating – and changing – the
mind of Gladstone and how he, in turn, transmitted these ideas and conclusions
to those around him. Bebbington constructs a persuasive chronology which
charts Gladstone’s (often apparently bizarre) developments whilst making
us believe that there was a serious and organic rationale behind them. His
interpretation elucidates how Gladstone prioritised and integrated his diverse
interests and managed to negotiate the private and public aspects of his life. The
book undermines the stubborn view that Gladstone’s mature liberalism was
shaped principally by one obdurate old man’s desire to hold on to power, whilst
possessing no discernable motivating philosophy.31 That view has also been
undermined by a number of recent studies of Gladstone’s dealings with Ireland
and the long gestation of his ‘conversion’ to Irish Home Rule, most notably
in Eugenio Biagini’s British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906
(2007),32 and in key essays presented in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day’s
28
P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003), pp. 30,
122ff.
29
R. Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Disraeli: A Reappraisal of their Relationship’, History,
91/304 (2006), pp. 557–76.
30
D. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (Oxford, 2004).
31
See, for example, A. Cooke and J. Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government
and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–86 (Brighton, 1974); D.A. Hamer, ‘Gladstone: the Making of
a Political Myth’, Victorian Studies, 22 (1978), pp. 29–50; R. Shannon, Gladstone: Peel’s Inheritor
1809–1865 (London, 1982), Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865–1898 (London, 1999) and, most
recently, Gladstone: God and Politics (London; New York, 2007); D.J. Dutton, A History of the
Liberal Party in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, 2004).
32
E.F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007).
8 William Gladstone
edited collection, Gladstone and Ireland (2010).33 Equally questionable, as the

late Michael Partridge observed in his 2003 biography of Gladstone, is the thesis
that Gladstone bore significant responsibility for the subsequent problems faced
by the Liberal Party after his death.34
Gladstone’s standing as an international statesman has remained a touchstone
for modern politicians and his reputation in this field continues to receive
significant attention from historians. This key aspect of his legacy was initially
acknowledged by J.L. Hammond in an essay entitled ‘Gladstone and the League
of Nations Mind’ in a festschrift for Gilbert Murray in 1936.35 Far from being
simply a British prime minister, Gladstone had achieved a global reputation
during his lifetime, and interest in Gladstone the international statesman has
regularly been revived by a succession of international crises ranging from the
First World War to the recent western interventions in the Middle East. At the
2001 Labour Party Conference, for example, Prime Minister Tony Blair invoked
the words and the memory of his predecessor when he called for a new world
order based on interdependent community, social justice and the moral duty to
act in the interests of those ‘living in want and squalor’ in ‘the mountain ranges of
Afghanistan’.36 Historians, journalists and cartoonists were quick to identify the
overt Gladstonian parallels and Blair was swiftly rebranded ‘Tony Gladstone’.37
33
See, especially, J.P. McCarthy, ‘History and Pluralism: Gladstone and the Maynooth
Grant Controversy’ and . Sheehy ‘“A Deplorable Narrative”: Gladstone, R. Barry O’Brien and the
“Historical Argument” for Home Rule, 1880–90’ in D.G. Boyce and A. O’Day, Gladstone and
Ireland: Politics, Religion and Nationality in the Victorian Age (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 13–40,
110–39. See also, A. O’Day, ‘Gladstone and Irish Nationalism: Achievement and Reputation’ and
D.G. Boyce, ‘In the Front Rank of the Nation: Gladstone and the Unionists of Ireland, 1868–
1893’, in D. Bebbington and R. Swift, Centenary Essays, pp. 163–83, 184–201.
34
M. Partridge, Gladstone (London, 2003), pp. 250–1. The ‘crisis’ of Edwardian Liberalism
was famously delineated in G. Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1936).
35
J.L. Hammond, ‘Gladstone and the League of Nations Mind’ in J.A.K. Thomson and
A.J. Toynbee (eds) Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray (London, 1936), pp. 95–118.
36
‘Tony Blair’s Speech to the Labour Party Conference, Brighton 2001 (Part Two)’,
The Guardian, Tuesday 2 October 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/oct/02/
labourconference.labour7. Accessed 20 May, 2011. On 26 November, 1879, at the Foresters’ Hall,
Dalkeith, Gladstone had implored his audience to ‘remember that the sanctity of life in the hill
villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as
can be your own’. W.E. Gladstone, Political Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879
(Edinburgh, 1879), pp. 92–4.
37
See ‘Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour party conference in Blackpool 2002’, The Guardian,
Tuesday 1 October, 2002; R. Shannon, ‘History lessons’, The Guardian, Thursday 4 October,
2001, p. A2; and T.G. Ash, ‘Gambling on America’, The Guardian, Thursday 3 October, 2002, p.
19 (illustrated with a caricature of Blair as Gladstone by Nicola Jennings). For further discussion
Introduction 9
The continued relevance of Gladstone as a political influence and international

icon accurately reflects Gladstone’s political, cultural and historiographical
status, which has endured over the more than hundred years since his death.
In recent years the prominence given to Gladstone in this field has also been
stimulated by the veritable explosion of historical interest in international and
global history.38 The present volume reflects these preoccupations by investigating
the contemporary resonances of Gladstone’s contributions towards ethical
internationalism and humanitarianism in the complex, transnational world of
war, peace, empire and global trade in which he operated, and by emphasising
the long-standing character of Gladstone’s concern with international issues,
which was apparent earlier in his career than has previously been appreciated.
III
The following volume is composed of five thematic sections, which, whilst free-
standing, are nevertheless undergirded and informed by the book’s overarching
theme: Gladstone’s historical and ongoing reputation and legacy. This abiding
preoccupation is signalled by the opening and closing chapters, penned by the
late Frank Turner and Eugenio Biagini. The entire volume is supported by Roger
Swift’s extensive, thematic bibliography, which further testifies to the enduring
attraction and continuing historical relevance of William Ewart Gladstone.
‘Reputation’ is the subject with which Part One is crucially concerned. This
part offers a sophisticated and interlocking reading of Gladstone’s political
ideologies, affiliations and influences developed and established over a long and
eventful life. Frank Turner’s broad, culturally informed reading of Gladstone’s
relationship with liberalism tackles head-on many unhelpful assumptions which
persist about this relationship in both Gladstone Studies and Victorian Studies
more broadly. Turner’s chapter is followed by a reassessment, by Richard Gaunt,
of Blair’s representation of himself as Gladstonian, see the chapters by Quinault, Schreuder and
Wrigley in this volume.
38
See, with reference to Gladstone: W. Mulligan, ‘Gladstone and the Primacy of Foreign
Policy’, in W. Mulligan and B. Simms (eds), The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History,
1660–2000: How Strategic Concerns Shaped Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 181–96;
P.J. Cain, ‘Radicalism, Gladstone and the Liberal Critique of Disraelian “Imperialism” in D. Bell
(ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century
Political Thought (Ideas in Context, 86) (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 215–38; M. Ceadel, ‘Gladstone
and a Liberal Theory of International Relations’ in P. Ghosh and L. Goldman, (eds), Politics and
Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford, 2006), pp. 74–94;
C.B. Faught, ‘An Imperial Prime Minister? W.E. Gladstone and India, 1880–1885’, Journal of the
Historical Society, 6/4 (2006), pp. 555–78.
10 William Gladstone
of Gladstone’s long relationship with Conservatism through the lens of his

relationship with Robert Peel. A broad-ranging consideration of Gladstone and
Labour politics, from the days of Macdonald to Blair, follows from Chris Wrigley.
These contributions place Gladstone (and his legacy) firmly in a full political and
cultural context – something that his biographers have often failed to do.
Reputation and image are tightly intertwined concepts, and Part Two of this
collection has a pair of matched chapters analysing Gladstone’s image as perceived
by his Victorian contemporaries. The first of these, by Joseph Meisel, focuses on
representations and discussion of Gladstone’s face amongst artists, parliamentarians
and the public. It draws on a range of rarely-before-used iconographical source
material to produce a chapter which reveals fresh new insights into the phenomena
of Gladstone’s personal charisma and political celebrity. Meisel’s chapter is balanced
by Mark Nixon’s reading of an important and previously largely neglected corpus
of source material – the material culture artefacts produced and paraded by
political adherents during the Gladstonian era. His analysis of this material sheds
new light on the character and motivation of Gladstone’s supporters and admirers,
who ranged across the Victorian class divides.
Part III – Personal Questions – is composed of three chapters, each of
which contributes to an intricate picture of the reflexive relationship between
Gladstone’s private life and preoccupations and his public profile and
responsibilities. Gladstone’s friendships are the topic first under discussion by
Denis Paz. By focusing on a number of Gladstone’s most important and longest
enduring friendships, Paz demonstrates the tensions as well as the advantages of
having ‘friends in high places’. As Gladstone’s popular reputation grew in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, many ordinary people sought to see him in his
home environment at Hawarden. There his frequent engagement in tree-felling
attracted much public interest. Peter Sewter’s chapter shows that Gladstone’s
arboreal activities were not merely designed to produce press headlines, but were
also driven by his interest in conservation, his desire for opportunities to spend
time with his sons, as well as his commitment to remaining fit and healthy. In
recent years there has been an increasing interest in and study of the important
relationship between politicians’ public and private lives and their state of
health.39 In the final chapter in this section, Jenny West considers Gladstone’s
health at the height of his career, particularly in relation to his political activities.
West demonstrates that the connection between Gladstone’s health and his
39
See, for example, W.A. Speck, ‘“The end of all existence is debarred me”: Disraeli’s
depression 1826–30’, The Historian 102 (2009), pp. 6–10; D. Leach and J.A. Beckwith, ‘Dr.
John Mitchell Bruce’s notes relating to the last illness and death of Benjamin Disraeli’, Journal of
Medical Biography, 9/3 (2001), pp. 161–6.
Introduction 11
performance as a politician was far more complicated than historians have

previously acknowledged.
Part IV explores Gladstone’s life and career as an Official. From his earliest
days in public life, Gladstone was closely involved with the workings of the British
state, both at home and in the empire. He contributed largely to that unseen but
always felt ‘official mind’ detected by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher in
their seminal work on British imperialism.40 Allen Warren’s chapter looks at the
economic and financial aspects of Gladstone’s long-running relationship with
the government of Ireland, particularly with reference to his role as Chancellor
of the Exchequer in the 1850s. That experience greatly influenced his subsequent
approach to Irish issues, notably Home Rule. Brad Faught’s assessment of
Gladstone’s brief period as British Commissioner Extraordinary to the Ionian
Islands in the late 1850s demonstrates how he acquired first-hand experience
of nascent colonial nationalism on the margins of the European world, which
subsequently proved useful when he became embroiled in the international
crisis, which contemporaries termed the Eastern Question, in the late 1870s and
early 1880s.
The volume’s final section – Ethics and Internationalism – builds on two
important themes touched on in the preceding part. It begins by tackling
two aspects of Gladstone’s internationally engaged political life that, perhaps
more than any others, have up to now been surrounded by misconception and
lack of rigorous analysis: Gladstone’s attitudes to war and to the abolition of
slavery. Roland Quinault’s chapter challenges the long-standing assumption that
Gladstone’s international politics were consistently wedded to the ideas of ‘peace,
retrenchment, and reform’ and investigates Gladstone’s involvements with war
in both theory and practice. He concludes that Gladstone did not favour peace
at any price and thought that war, in certain circumstances, was morally justified.
Gladstone’s example in that respect, moreover, provided support for Britain’s
involvement in the two world wars of the twentieth century.
Gladstone’s support for internationalism still has contemporary resonance
but his attitude to slavery was much less enlightened by modern standards. His
initial reluctance to condemn slavery and his dependence on profits from it
has recently been pointed out by Roland Quinault.41 Richard Huzzey’s chapter
examines Gladstone’s opposition to the British government’s attempts to use the
Royal Navy to suppress the slave trade, illustrating the complexity of his stance,
which was influenced as much by pragmatic as by moral considerations. It also
provided a clear precedent for his policy as prime minister when he resisted
40
R. Robinson, J. Gallagher and A. Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of
Imperialism (London, 1961).
41
R. Quinault, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, The Historical Journal, 52/2 (2009), pp. 363–83.
humanitarian demands for military intervention and colonial annexation

both in Africa and the Pacific region. On this issue, Gladstone’s outlook –
commercial, political and moral – was that of a convinced internationalist, with
respect not only to the British Empire, but also to the nations of Europe and
indeed the worldwide cause of humanity. The final chapter in this section, by
Derek Schreuder, presents a survey of Gladstone’s international involvement and
legacy which recreates and explicates Gladstone’s global ‘world view’ through an
interrogation of three interlocking themes: his international ideas, his imperial
and foreign policies in action and – finally – the long-term influence of those
ideas and practices. It concludes with a consideration of why Gladstone remains
such a redolent source for idealist international theory in current debates – not
least over strategic but ethically responsible roles for major powers within the
international order.
The final chapter comprises an epilogue from Eugenio Biagini in which
Gladstone’s legacy from his death to the present day is considered. Touching
on many of the themes explored by other contributors to the volume, Biagini
explores key aspects of twentieth and early twenty-first century Gladstonianism,
focusing on the enduring significance of Gladstone’s attitudes to the relationship
between state and society and his ‘politics of humanitarianism’.
Contrary to the expectations of sceptics like Frederic Harrison, interest in
Gladstone shows no sign of diminishing, despite his ‘stormburst of centenaries’.42
The reluctance of such near contemporaries to believe that they could pass
enduring historical judgements upon the lives and reputations of their
fellow Victorians was understandable: ‘In such circumstances it is absolutely
impossible for any man to acquire the detachment and the perspective which
are indispensible if centenary essays are to be anything more than echoes of the
partial and prejudiced appraisements current during the hero’s lifetime.’43 As we
have seen, many of these early estimations were partial or over privileged the
importance of certain aspects of their subject’s life and experience. However,
some of these insights have stood the test of time: Gladstone, for good or ill,
remains the international icon his contemporaries deemed him to be and he
also remains resistant to any type of neat categorisation. These bicentenary
essays offer their series of fresh perspectives in a spirit which appreciates these
continuities as much as they celebrate the welcome breaking of new ground.
As such, it is hoped that this volume will act as a catalyst for further studies of a
man who, in so many ways, epitomised the diverse aspects of the Victorian age.
42
F. Harrison, ‘Centenaries’, Times, Tuesday, 23 November, 1909; p. 14; issue 39124;
col. A.
43
‘The Gladstone Centenary’, Times, Wednesday, 29 December, 1909; p. 7; issue 39155;
col D.
Part i
REPUTATIONS
Chapter 1
Gladstone: A Political Not a Cultural
Radical
Frank M. Turner
The year 2009 marked the bicentennial of three major nineteenth-century

transatlantic figures: Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and William Gladstone.
Enormous celebrations, numerous conferences, special courses and lectures, new
books and articles, as well as various museum exhibitions commemorated the
first two. Lincoln and Darwin remain widely recognised names, and their ideas
and lives are still debated in the media and among the broadly educated public,
and still touch public policy. Both figures adorn the currency of their respective
nations. By contrast, William Gladstone does not command such current
attention. Whether in Britain, Ireland, the United States or parts of the former
British Empire, only a few people, mostly professional historians, recall the name
Gladstone. His home, which drew thousands to political rallies in his lifetime or
to the sight of him felling trees, remains owned by his family and closed to the
public. His vast body of publications can be found only through channels for
acquiring rare books and pamphlets. Why does Gladstone command relatively
little attention today?
First, Gladstone’s personality, his values and some of his causes barely
resonate, or resonate badly, with many people today. As S.G. Checkland noted
in 1971:
To much of the modern mind Mr. Gladstone’s upbringing is unreal and his outlook
unsympathetic. There is a strong temptation to patronize him, with his appalling
burden of guilt, his sense of personal inadequacy, his masochism, his indulgence
in tortuous religious controversy, his awful moral clarity and his dedication that
seemed to critics to be mere self-righteousness. Yet few men have shown the same
power to break with earlier conditioning, making new terms with reality.1
1
S.G. Checkland, The Gladstones: A Family Biography 1764–1851 (Cambridge, 1971),
p. 403.
So much about Gladstone, personally and politically, is difficult to engage with

or to do so with any empathy. Those aspects include a family fortune built
largely on slavery and an invasion of Egypt which boosted the value of his large
investment in Egyptian bonds. Even when he did make ‘new terms with reality’,
Gladstone’s efforts in that direction always seemed pained, possibly hypocritical,
unpredictable, opportunistic and often hesitant. This was the case even with
respect to his support for Irish Home Rule and reform of the House of Lords.
Moreover, his political, religious and classical thinking retained (even indulged
in) so many of its own internal points of orientation, that it is difficult to follow
and explicate in a satisfactory fashion.
Second, Gladstone’s intellectual world, with its emphasis on the ancient
classics as modes of understanding the present, also belongs to a world of the
past. The ancient world no longer stands as a model for intellectual engagement
on political issues and, until the recent penetrating scholarship of David
Bebbington, Gladstone’s mind and ideas appeared to most scholars as simply
too difficult and idiosyncratic to try to penetrate or master.2
Third, the rapidly changing Victorian religious marketplace, in which
Gladstone played so important and fascinating a role, has also vanished. It is a
fine point of debate and judgment whether the Church of England remains a
genuinely national institution, while British Nonconformity is certainly no longer
a great political or religious force. In contemporary Ireland, many Catholics are
now alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, and Irish bishops and priests
stand accused of misbehaviour far more grievous than that perpetrated by Parnell
and Katherine O’Shea. At the same time, Gladstone’s fervent anti-Catholicism
seems anachronistic, as does much, though not everything, that he contributed
to the Victorian conflict over science and religion, while the secularism he feared
has largely triumphed in the British Isles.
Fourth, the Victorian Liberal Party represents very largely a political world
we have lost. The tasks and goals the Liberal Party addressed under Gladstone’s
leadership have either been accomplished or co-opted by others. In particular,
the Irish problem as Gladstone understood, experienced and eventually
redefined became radically and irreversibly transformed by the Easter Rising in
l9l6 and its aftermath. Likewise, the Europe of his time was altered and largely
destroyed by the rapaciously destructive ideologies of the twentieth century.
Lastly, the shifts in historiography of the past half century have made
Gladstone much less central to the concerns of Victorian historians. The
emphasis on social history over political history and on popular political
2
D. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics (Oxford, 2004).
Gladstone: A Political Not a Cultural Radical 17
movements rather than political leaders has shifted the focus of the modern
British historical enquiry.
Eschewing Cultural Apostasy
One of the key reasons why Gladstone now seems so elusive, irrelevant or difficult
to approach is that, unlike so many other Victorians, he was not a Victorian
cultural apostate. He became a political radical, but he was not a cultural radical.
Gladstone stood profoundly at one with his age, even as he sought throughout
much of his life to reform his world, often in the face of bitter partisan
opposition. He wanted to reform, not to transform in any Utopian manner. He
understood his was an age of transition, but thought it should not be one of
upheaval. Again and again he attempted to channel the exploding forces of the
day, often through reliance on religion, still more often through institutional
accommodation and, finally, by a careful, if increasingly enthusiastic, embrace
of freedom. Modern sympathies, by contrast, have come to reside with those
Victorians who challenged the values and ideals and social expectations of their
day. For this reason Gladstone has tended to elude us.
Historians of the Victorian era have thus tended to emphasise those
figures who were at odds with the prevailing thought and institutions of
their day and who were impatient with moderate reform in the areas of their
respective endeavours. Those whom I have previously denoted by the term
‘cultural apostates’,3 rebelled intellectually, morally or religiously against the
predominant Anglican culture from within. The cultural apostates rejected
those presuppositions about English culture in terms of Protestantism, natural
religion and neoclassicism that had marked the eighteenth century and early
nineteenth century. It was exactly these cultural presuppositions that Gladstone
never abandoned nor seriously questioned.
Gladstone, from at least his first troubled vote for the Maynooth Grant in
l845, entered upon a career of political rather than cultural reform. The trajectory
of his political development over the next half century led him into increasingly
radical and disruptive political positions that generated enormous controversy,
distrust and conservative enmity. But throughout his political crusades, he at
no time challenged the cultural presuppositions of British life. He remained a
supporter of the Bible and natural theology. He remained a firm supporter of
the Church of England. He eschewed virtually any changes in personal or sexual
3
F.M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life
(Cambridge, 1993), pp. 38–72.
morality including contraception. He remained firmly hostile to the Roman

Catholic Church, if not to individual Roman Catholics. But he did steadily, if
quite gradually, embrace the tenets of liberal democracy. He stood prepared to
rethink Ireland’s relationship to the United Kingdom and to imagine a radical
restructuring of the House of Lords. Like many great Victorian liberals, he
could engage in radical political reform because he believed the existing cultural
foundations of society would provide the bulwarks of stability in the face of
political restructuring. He believed in an expanding realm of political liberty
because he thought that the surrounding culture would preserve essential social
and moral order.
By contrast, figures such as Charles Darwin, John Ruskin and John Henry
Newman overturned the cultural presuppositions of early Victorian Anglican
religious and intellectual life from within. Darwin achieved his evolutionary
thinking less by assaulting the opponents of transmutation than by working
through those presuppositions of Paleyan natural theology that had so permeated
his thought aboard the Beagle and which had persisted until at least the l860s.
Ruskin worked towards a new, daring and expansive aesthetic that would
eventually pave the way towards the ‘modern’ through a profound rethinking
of aesthetic neoclassicism. John Henry Newman embodied a profound cultural
apostasy by overturning in his own mind and spirit the three pillars on which
the theology of the various parties in the Church of England rested. In his
sermons and theological publications of the l830s, he critically dissected – more
deeply than any other writer of his age – evangelical faith in the adequacy of the
Bible alone as providing the basis for faith, the role of emotions in validating
evangelical religious experience and the evangelical understanding of the
doctrine of justification by faith. In his ‘Tract 90’ of l841, as James Anthony
Froude commented, Newman broke ‘the back of the [Thirty-nine] Articles’ as
a device for defining the Church of England as something distinctly other than
the Roman Catholic faith.4 In his Tamworth Reading Room letters of the same
year, he produced a devastating critique of natural theology as a foundation for
the Anglican faith and Protestantism more generally, and of both as sustaining
contemporary British society. Finally, in his Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine of l845 he assaulted the High Church confidence in the
authority of Antiquity. His ever-polemical theological writings thus swept away
the intellectual foundations from all versions of Anglican Protestantism and the
cultural self-identity they fostered. What is important to note is that Newman
4
J.A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects (4 vols, London, l898), vol. 4, p. 308. See also
.M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, 2002) and
F.M. Turner, ‘Newman’, D.A. Fergusson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century
Theology (Oxford, 2010), pp. 119–38.
forged those sceptical conclusions from reasoning within the Anglican culture
and the theological world that he had long inhabited and came implicitly to
reject, hence his cultural apostasy.
Gladstone had initially shown sympathy for Newman and the Tractarians,
though never any kind of absolute identification with them. However, from
the late l830s onwards, he steadily (and with no little political opportunism)
separated himself from them. So long as he understood Newman and the
Tractarians to be reviving ancient church principles in order to give new
vitality to Anglican religious life, he lent them sympathy. But when he came to
understand that they had undertaken a genuinely radical experiment in their
own self-styled Catholic religion, he both abandoned and denounced them.
For all his capacity to evolve in his own religious faith and commitment over
the course of his life, Gladstone was no religious radical. He was not a religious
Utopian any more than he was a political Utopian.5
The cultural apostates are understandable and sympathetic figures to us
because we can interpret them in terms of modern science, modern aesthetics,
modern Roman Catholicism or modern secularist outlooks. That is to say,
we can interpret them outside the self-referential world of provincial English
culture and the religious provincialism of the Church of England. Such is
absolutely impossible in the case of Gladstone, who cannot be described in
these terms. Gladstone was a Victorian forger of modernity who did not seek
to overturn his society or Anglican culture, but rather sought to keep up with
contemporary change whilst at the same time retaining numerous traditional
intellectual and social outlooks that stood directly at odds with the modernising
efforts of the apostates.
Gladstone can only be understood strictly within the contours of the
Victorian age itself and not as one on the cultural or intellectual cutting edge
of that age. It is significant that Gladstone opposed, in one way or another,
the thought of Darwin, Newman and Ruskin, the leading cultural apostates
of his day. He was determined to make the Anglican institutions and most of
the Anglican cultural outlooks of his youth and early middle-age work, and he
resisted challenges to those institutions, whether they arose in his mind, from
modern science, reviving Roman Catholicism or modern aesthetic departures.
This sets him aside from many of the Victorians who now and traditionally have
commanded the attention of historians because we see them pointing toward
the modern.
5
P. Butler, Gladstone: Church, State, and Tractarianism; A Study of His Religious Ideas and
Attitudes, 1809–1859 (Oxford, 1982).
Reading, Writing and Education in the Classics
Gladstone’s Homeric scholarship marked a major motif in his temperamental

loyalty to the world from which he emerged as a young adult and, if Gladstone’s
complicated religious commitments still puzzle but also illumine, his
commitment to classical study probably tends only to puzzle. However, even
if Gladstone’s analysis of Homer commanded – and still commands – virtually
no followers, the fact that he worked his way to new political outlooks through
an engagement with the classics marks him as a Victorian deeply at home in his
culture. Moreover, as both David Bebbington and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel
have demonstrated, that interest in the classics was part of Gladstone’s wider
engagement with the burgeoning print culture of his day.6
Gladstone’s career covered more major areas of political endeavour than that
of any other minister of his age. He made himself at home on issues of colonial
administration, taxation, finance, land reform, ecclesiastical disestablishment,
land reform, foreign policy and Irish Home Rule in such a manner as to dominate
the parliamentary debate called forth by such issues. In each and every case, he
would master the history and complexities of the subject by working his way
through a vast pile of books. He learned from reading rather than from listening
(he was never a great listener) or from being briefed. Reading was his path to
the mastery of his world and the exploration of his soul, and he thought this
would, or should be, the case for other people as well. Gladstone did not simply
devour books, consign them to their proper shelf and then move on to the next.
His private collection of books was a work-in-progress as he constructed it, but
also a work-in-progress as he consulted, understood and then later reacquainted
himself with and rethought particular authors. Gladstone was also concerned
at the end of his long life with the fate of his collection, hence his founding
and endowment of St Deiniol’s Library, to which institution he transferred
approximately 30,000 volumes.7 Gladstone’s library composed a universe of
personal intellectual and religious orientation. Just as in the therapeutic age of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries people revisit their early life, recollections,
memories and relationships to reframe their feelings and thoughts, Gladstone
rethought and reframed his earlier life and thoughts by re-reading books and
rethinking their contents.
Much of Gladstone’s political thinking, which emerges in the liberalism
of his late middle and old age, arose from his engagement with Homer. His
6
R.C. Windscheffel, Reading Gladstone (London, 2008).
7
To give some comparative idea of the size of such a personal library, it is well to recall that
when the United States Congress purchased the library of Thomas Jefferson early in the century,
the collection consisted of approximately 6,400 volumes.
thinking about Homer’s characters, narrative and age served as a vehicle for him
to explain how his thinking differed from those who would have carried politics
to more radical conclusions than he was willing to contemplate. It is worth
recalling that Gladstone wrote more about Homer than any other nineteenth-
century commentator in the English language. It was through his engagement
with Homer that he worked his way to a liberalism that differed from both
philosophic radicalism and Toryism. And it was through that liberalism that
Gladstone transformed the late Victorian political world.
Gladstone, like George Grote before him, understood that the classics
dominated English university education and that the particular interpretations
of the ancient world imparted to university students could, in large measure,
shape their political outlooks.8 The Tory interpretation of ancient Greece and
especially ancient Greek democracy had been enunciated by William Mitford’s
History of Greece (l784–1810). George Grote in his 12-volume History of
Greece (l846–l856), written from the standpoint of Benthamite philosophic
radicalism and Comtean intellectual history, had vigorously championed
Athenian democracy and shattered Mitford’s anti-democratic polemic. Grote’s
championing of Athenian democracy depended in large measure on his critique
of ancient Greek monarchy. Grote presented Homeric monarchy as lacking
the virtues he associated with Athenian democracy, including the capacity to
generate patriotism and personal self-sacrifice. He presented the Homeric kings
as absolute monarchs ruling in their own selfish interests at the expense of the
good of the many. He thought these monarchs permitted no role for criticism
or government by discussion. The later Athenian democracy in Grote’s eyes
displayed the political virtues absent in the Homeric monarchies. Moreover,
Grote ascribed the faults and turmoil of that later Greek democracy to the
ongoing presence of aristocratic and religious influences. In effect, Grote had
presented the Homeric monarchies as somewhat resembling the contemporary
conservative restored monarchies of the European continent, supported as they
were by conservative aristocracies and churches.
Gladstone wrote about Homer in the hope that he might introduce into
the Oxford curriculum, which he knew well from personal experience and his
participation in the reform of the universities, the conviction that the ancient
world had provided non-radical and non-democratic political models useful
to modern life. He wished to forestall both Mitford’s Toryism and Grote’s
8
For consideration of various aspects of the Victorian appropriation of ancient Greece
discussed in this section, see F.M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven,
1981), pp. 135–70, 187–244, 383–446; F.M. Turner, ‘Victorian Classics: Sustaining the Study
of the Ancient World’, in M. Daunton (ed.), The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain
(Oxford, 2005), pp. 159–72.
philosophical radicalism. Gladstone’s ancient monarchs were much more

moderate than the contemporary restored monarchies that he had come to
despise after visiting the prisons of Naples. In Studies on Homer and the Homeric
Age (l858), Gladstone contended that the Homeric monarchs had dwelled in
an age of transition between a patriarchal era and one of expanding commerce.
In both the Homeric age and the contemporary modern age there remained
affection for historic institutions in the process of change and accommodation.
Political actors in such moments must avoid both reaction and radicalism.
Gladstone’s Homeric monarchs, in contrast to Grote’s image of them, functioned
in just that wise tempering fashion. Gladstone presented the Homeric monarchs
as multi-talented, almost Peelite, officials who governed through ‘publicity and
persuasion’.9 Gladstone went so far as to declare:
The Homeric king reigns with the free assent of his subjects – an assent
indeterminate, but real, and in both points alike resembling his kingly power.
The relation between ruler and ruled is founded in the laws and conditions of
our nature. Born in a state of dependence, man, when he attains to freedom and
capacity for actions, finds himself the debtor both of his parents and of society at
large; and is justly liable to discharge his debt by rending service in return.10
Rather than viewing the Homeric kings as representing a selfish and sinister
Benthamite interest, Gladstone saw them as dedicated ‘to lead the common
counsels to common ends’.11 Gladstone turned the Homeric Council, which
the poet had only portrayed as a military institution, into a deliberative group
that later took matters to a more popular Assembly. In effect, the monarchs
provided executive leadership to the Council who in turn provided leadership
for the Assembly. Those Homeric political actors who became overly outspoken
rather than reasonable in deliberation were simply operating beyond the
rules and deserved to be discounted or disciplined. Gladstone also praised
the fact that the Homeric polity did not operate by majorities. At the same
time, Gladstone left no doubt that the power of the Homeric monarchs was
and should have been limited. He commented: ‘In heroic Greece the king,
venerable as was his title, was the fountainhead of the common life, but only
its exponent. The source lay in the community, and the community met in
the Agora’.12 The ancient Homeric monarchs had recognised something like
modern public opinion.
9
W.E. Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (3 vols, Oxford, l858), vol. 3, p. 7.
10
Gladstone, Studies on Homer, vol. 3, pp. 67–8.
11
Gladstone, Studies on Homer, vol. 3, p. 69.
12
Gladstone, Studies on Homer, vol. 3, p. 141.
Over ten years later, in l869 in Juventus Mundi, Gladstone abandoned his
assault on majorities and instead presented decision-by-majorities as a sign
of advancing social development. This was no doubt a realistic recognition of
the transformed political landscape following the Second Reform Act and also
following the rise of new political groups in the United Kingdom. As part of
his accommodation to decision-by-majorities, however, Gladstone introduced
the notion of reverence – ‘that powerful principle, the counter-agent to all
meanness and selfishness, which obliges a man to have regard to some law or
standard above that of force, and extrinsic to his own will, his own passion, or
his own propensities’.13 The emotion and habit of reverence represented to ‘the
Greek mind and life what the dykes in Holland are to the surface of the country;
shutting off passions as the angry sea, and securing a broad open surface for
the growth of every tender and genial product of the soil’.14 Grote had looked
to democracy to produce a form of politics that suffocated sinister interests. He
had furthermore championed Socrates as a rationalistic, critical philosopher who
had questioned the status quo without espousing much appreciation for it. Grote
had also associated religious reverence in Athens with both sinister and anti-
democratic political influences. Gladstone’s praise here and later in his life for
reverence thus stood in direct opposition to the questioning by Grote and other
philosophic radicals, such as J.S. Mill, of all things established. Gladstone, whether
as a middle-aged late Peelite or as an elderly democratic liberal seems never to
have seen government as transformative or Utopian. It was rather a vehicle for
(among other things) to channel the passions of a fallen creature, and reverence
for the past and for experience was one channel to contain those passions.
Gladstone’s interpretation of Homer aroused mostly curiosity and contempt
among professional scholars. However, his treatment of Homer was actually
indicative of where Oxford classical studies would go. They did not champion
democracy. Benjamin Jowett would be the major force in the next half century
of Greek studies at Oxford. Plato not Homer was his protagonist, but there
are curious parallels between the broad-church religiosity Jowett infused into
Plato and his elitist vision of a properly governed democracy led by statesmen
functioning above party, and the values that Gladstone had sought to inculcate
through Homer. Those values would shape several generations of Oxford
students who studied Literae Humaniores.
More importantly, one can argue that Gladstone’s Homeric studies represented
his own inner dialogue with himself. In these books, beyond providing his own
curious interpretation of Homer, Gladstone is persuading himself that the
13
W.E. Gladstone, Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age (London, l869),
p. 449.
14
Gladstone, Juventus Mundi, pp. 449–50.
traditional English political institutions of monarchy and aristocracy can, if made

institutions of publicity and persuasion informed by reverence, lead an expanding
electorate. The values that he articulated in his Homeric volumes would shape
much of his political thought for the rest of his life as he moved steadily to the left.
Politics could and indeed must change, but reverence for traditional institutions
and traditional religion must provide the foundation for manners and morals of
an increasingly democratic polity. In that sense, Gladstone’s Homeric studies had
a profound influence on his political development.
The Complexity of Gladstonian Liberalism
Through his eschewing of cultural apostasy and political Utopianism, and his
extending and modifying the Peelite understanding of political reform through
his Homeric studies, Gladstone conjured into reality a political vision previously
articulated by idealistic, anglophile eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
French liberals. It is well known that French liberals from the time of Voltaire
and Montesquieu, through Madam de Staël, Constant and Guizot, idealised the
English constitution and many other aspects of English society, including its
commercialism, embrace of science and religious toleration.
Madame de Staël, in her posthumous Considerations on the Principal Events
of the French Revolution (l8l8), devoted the closing section to an analysis of
England. She pointed to England since l688 as embodying the kind of polity
to which the post-revolutionary French might aspire. She recalled her visit to
England in the summer of l8l3, when she was deeply impressed by ‘the extent of
the riches of a people who consent to what they give and consider public affairs
as their own’,15 and which she ascribed to:
Liberty, that is to the confidence of the nation in a government which makes the
first principle of its finances consist in publicity; in a government enlightened
by discussion and by liberty of the press … Thus everyone creates resources for
himself, and no man endowed with any activity can be in England without
finding the means of acquiring property by doing that, which contributes to the
good of the state.16
Madam de Staël was not blind to the desirability for parliamentary reform
although she embraced a gradualism in that sphere. Nevertheless, she had
15
G. de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (ed.), Aurelian
Craiutu (Indianapolis, 2008), p. 651.
16
de Staël, Considerations, pp. 652, 653.
confidence in the English future because, as she explained: ‘That which is

particularly characteristic of England is a mixture of chivalrous spirit with an
enthusiasm for liberty, the two most noble sentiments of which the human heart
is susceptible’.17 To this was added a respect for law over the authority of the
state and ‘the political miracle of a respect for the rights of everyone founded
on a sentiment of justice’, as well as ‘the union of equality under the law to
the advantages arising from the separation of ranks’.18 Finally, she praised the
liberty of the press and the general openness of English society and the manner
that English institutions ‘favour every kind of intellectual progress’.19 This
intellectual progress, however, was tied to and compatible with a widespread
spirit of Christian morality of which she, along with other French liberals, firmly
approved.
The image of English liberal freedom drawn by Madam de Staël in l8l8
resembles the English polity at the height of Gladstonian liberalism. Over the
course of his intellectual and political life, Gladstone moved toward policies and
outlooks that very much resembled those ascribed to England by French liberals
decades earlier. After abandoning his support for a confessional state in his
early adulthood, Gladstone, like those French liberals, had come to understand
the importance of religious freedom itself in creating loyalty. The policies that
Gladstone had followed since the mid-1840s steadily and expansively embraced
the ideals of religious toleration that de Staël associated with England. His
Budget of l853 marked the commencement of that ‘culture of fiscal rectitude’
in public expenditure and taxation. Thus, Gladstone carried to their full
fruition the Peelite initiatives of fiscal reform that brought both transparency
and accountability to the national budget.20 Gladstonian finance also left much
authority and initiative (not always taken) to local government in the manner de
Staël and, later, Alexis de Tocqueville had praised. By emphasising the position
of trust that possessors of property and the franchise must exercise on behalf
of those with little or no property and lacking the vote, Gladstone realised the
taxation policies that French liberals had seen already present in an earlier era
of British history. Furthermore, Gladstone’s repeal of the Paper Duty in l861
helped to create a cheaper and thus more representative press. The other major
reforms of Gladstone’s great first ministry also created a broader atmosphere of
civic trust among and between the classes and opened the society to even greater
17
de Staël, Considerations, p. 671.
18
19
20
M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914
(Cambridge, 2001), p. 385. Daunton argues that the stability of Gladstonian liberalism was based
on reality and not on false social assumptions or some mode of false consciousness. See pp. 375–90.
possibilities of social mobility based on merit rather than birth or confessional

affiliation. From the l850s onward, and with growing enthusiasm, Gladstone
might well have declared along with Madam de Staël: ‘Nothing but liberty
can arouse the soul to the interests of the social order’.21 This same sentiment
informed his public interventions against what he understood as contemporary
manifestations of arbitrary authority, whether in the policies of an increasingly
centralised papacy or the Ottoman Empire.
Nineteenth-century liberal politics became the object of remarkable
intellectual contempt on the part of its enemies. Conservatives condemned
liberalism from the beginning and along the way, even whilst adapting to its new
structures and values. Radicals, whether of the philosophic or economic variety,
thought liberals never went far enough in their reform. Socialists, and later the
Labour Party, considered that they had failed to create a just distribution of
goods and had evaded the fundamental problems of a class-ridden society. High
Churchmen thought liberalism had fostered the secular. Roman Catholics set
their face against liberalism from the time of Pius IX. In the twentieth century,
the continental parties of the right heaped contempt on liberalism as ineffective
in achieving great national goals. For all these groups, liberalism was a protean
creature upon which they projected their fears or hatred. Liberal society was
often the contemptible present against which cultural apostates and other
Utopians turned their ire.
Coming to grips with Gladstone requires that we understand Victorian
liberalism on its own terms and not through the gaze of its enemies. In this
respect, Gladstone and his career demand that we recognise the profound
religious element, overwhelmingly Protestant, present in the Victorian liberal
impulse. On the one hand, recognition of the religiosity of Victorian liberalism
seems a commonplace; on the other, coming to grips seriously with this fact
challenges much of the narrative of the emergence of modern Britain as the
tale of the rise of secularism. From the early nineteenth century to the present,
persons of liberal political disposition have had a hard time defending themselves
against accusations of being irreligious. The radicalisation of the French
Revolution forever associated even the principles of l789 with irreligion. High
Churchmen and others accused the Whigs of the Reform Bill era of irreligion.
By the twentieth century, many people of liberal political opinion were indeed
often secular in outlook and disposition. But in the early nineteenth century,
the Whigs and other liberals – including Peelite conservatives and (from
mid-century) the liberal Nonconformists – were deeply religious no matter
what conservative Anglicans and later Roman Catholics, such as Newman,
21
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William Gladstone New Studies and Perspectives 1st Edition Roland Quinault Editor Roger Swift Editor Ruth Clayton Windscheffel Editor

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List of Figures and Table  vii

1 Gladstone: A Political Not a Cultural Radical  15

2 Gladstone and Peel’s Mantle  31

3 Gladstone and Labour  51

4 Gladstone’s Visage: Problem and Performance  73

PART III PERSONAL QUESTIONS

6 Gladstone as Friend  129

7 Gladstone as Woodsman  155

8 The Health of a Prime Minister: Gladstone, 1868–85  177

PART IV GLADSTONE AS AN OFFICIAL

9 Gladstone, Finance and the Problems of Ireland, 1853–66  199

10 Gladstone and the Ionian Islands  219

PART V ETHICS AND INTERNATIONALISM

11 Gladstone and War  235

12 Gladstone and the Suppression of the Slave Trade  253

13 Gladstone’s ‘Greater World’: Free Trade, Empire and Liberal

Part VI EPILOGUE

14 Gladstone’s Legacy  293

A Selected Bibliography  313

4.1 Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890  88

5.6 Commemorative medallion, Dundee, 1884 reverse. Note the

7.1 ‘Cabinet-Making’, Punch, 8 May 1880  156

7.1 Graph to show the frequency of axe work by William Gladstone

David Bebbington is Professor of History at the University of Stirling,

Eugenio Biagini is Professor of Modern British History and a Fellow of Sidney

C. Brad Faught is Associate Professor of History and department chair at

Richard A. Gaunt is Associate Professor in British History at the University

Richard Huzzey is Lecturer in British History at the University of Plymouth.

Joseph S. Meisel is Deputy Provost at Brown University. He was previously a

Mark Nixon is an independent historian based in Scotland and a museum

Roland Quinault is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical

Deryck M. Schreuder is Emeritus Professor of History and Education at the

Peter Sewter is former Deputy Headmaster of Kingsmead School, Hoylake.

Roger Swift is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Studies at the University of

(co-editor, 2000), Irish Migrants in Britain, 1815–1914: A Documentary

Jenny West is Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research,

Ruth Clayton Windscheffel is member of the Faculty of Arts at the Open

Chris Wrigley is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham.

On 29 December 1909, the dark and somewhat sombre memorial to William

if his fame endured, celebrating the bicentenary of his birth’?4 In Gladstone’s

Gladstone has rarely, if ever, been ‘out of print’ historically speaking. In

pointed to an ongoing debate between historians concerned with Gladstone’s

decades together with the manuscript diaries in Lambeth Palace, Gladstone

of class as a personal and tribal identifier and electoral motivator.23 Notable

Several recent studies have reassessed Gladstone’s relationships with his

edited collection, Gladstone and Ireland (2010).33 Equally questionable, as the

List of Figures and Table vii

1 Gladstone: A Political Not a Cultural Radical 15

2 Gladstone and Peel’s Mantle 31

3 Gladstone and Labour 51

4 Gladstone’s Visage: Problem and Performance 73

6 Gladstone as Friend 129

7 Gladstone as Woodsman 155

8 The Health of a Prime Minister: Gladstone, 1868–85 177

9 Gladstone, Finance and the Problems of Ireland, 1853–66 199

10 Gladstone and the Ionian Islands 219

11 Gladstone and War 235

12 Gladstone and the Suppression of the Slave Trade 253

14 Gladstone’s Legacy 293

A Selected Bibliography 313

4.1 Image of Gladstone, Eveleen Myers, platinum prints, 1890 88

7.1 ‘Cabinet-Making’, Punch, 8 May 1880 156