Abstract
The history of the Liberal Party during the second half of the nineteenth century might have been a great deal simpler if W. E. Gladstone had been born a Liberal. As the son of a successful Liverpool merchant — the Gladstone family were among the nouveaux riches created by the ‘industrial revolution’ — he would seem to have been ideally suited to lead a party that derived much of its support from the rapidly expanding towns and cities: he might, in fact, have been the first ‘businessman’ to hold the Liberal premiership. In reality, matters were tremendously complicated by the nature of Gladstone’s upbringing. So far from being a Liberal, Gladstone’s early politics were shaped by the Canningite Tory principles of his father, and, rather than training in the family business, he received a classic, aristocratic education at Eton and Oxford. His early, evangelical, religious beliefs were also overlaid with the then fashionable High Church doctrines of Oxford. Identified as a young man of obvious promise, Gladstone’s election to the House of Commons, at the age of only twenty-three, was facilitated by the patronage of one of the great Tory magnates, the Duke of Newcastle. The young Gladstone thus represented the antithesis of everything the Whig governments of the 1830s stood for, in terms of political reform and religious equality.
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Notes
John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London, 1903), vol. 1, pp. 195–208.
H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–74 (Oxford, 1986) pp. 66–8, 75–8.
See Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992) pp. 1–20.
J. R. Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, 1857–68 (2nd edn, Brighton, 1976) pp. 227–8.
Walter Bagehot, Biographical Studies, ed., R. H. Hutton (London, 1881).
J. R. Vincent, Pollbooks. How Victorians Voted (Cambridge, 1967) pp. 43–50.
H. C. G. Matthew (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, vol. ix (Oxford, 1986) p. lxix.
See Geraint L. Williams’s introduction to John Stuart Mill: On Politics and Society (London, 1976).
Gladstone to Granville, 19 May 1877, in Agatha Ramm (ed.), The Political Correspondence of Mr Gladstone and Lard Granville, 1876–1886 (Oxford, 1962) vol. 1, p. 40.
Boyd Hilton, ‘Gladstone’s Theological Politics’, in Michael Bentley and John Stevenson (eds), High and Low Politics in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1983) pp. 45, 51.
James Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–93 (Dublin, 1986) p. 288.
For example, D. A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery (Oxford, 1972) pp. 127–8.
James Winter, Robert Lowe (Toronto, 1976) pp. 195–226.
H. J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (2nd edn, Brighton, 1978) pp. 333–43;
I. G. C. Hutchison, A Political History of Scotland, 1832–1924 (Edinburgh, 1986) pp. 132–3.
J. P. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986) pp. 212–29 and note 189.
T. A. Jenkins (ed.), The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1868–1873 (Royal Historical Society, Camden Series, forthcoming 1994) entry for 5 April 1870.
Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Reform, 1860–86 (London, 1976) passim (quotation at p. 12).
Parry, Democracy and Religion, pp. 297–309; Bruce Kinzer, The Ballot Question in Nineteenth-Century English Politics (New York, 1982) pp. 98–103.
P. H. Bagenal, Ralph Bernal Osborne MP (privately printed, 1884) p. 325.
Paul McHugh, Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform (London, 1980).
The following account is based on Hanham, Elections and Party Management, pp. 218–27; Parry, Democracy and Religion, pp. 381–410; Richard Shannon, The Age of Disraeli, 1868–1881 (London, 1992) pp. 172–81.
This analysis represents a refinement of the figures given in my Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 1874–1886 (Oxford, 1988) pp. 5–6. I have tried to resolve the problem of individuals who overlap between one category and another. Some of those listed as ‘Gentlemen’ are those who, while not listed in Burke’s Landed Gentry (1875 and 1879 edns), nevertheless appear in John Bateman’s survey of The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (4th edn, London, 1883), meaning that they owned estates of at least 3000 acres.
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© 1994 T. A. Jenkins
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Jenkins, T.A. (1994). The Rise and Fall of Gladstonian Liberalism. In: The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830–1886. British Studies Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23483-7_4
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