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A Prime Minister who ‘did God’

Gladstone, unlike Blair,linked his private faith and his public office, says Michael Wheeler


A Victorian Titan: William Ewart Gladstone was both a complex, tortured personality and a committed and gifted public servant

Gladstone: God and politics
Richard Shannon

Hambledon Continuum £80 (978-1-84725-202-9)
Church Times Bookshop £72

RICHARD SHANNON, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Wales in Swansea, explains his aims very clearly. He wants to offer a general readership a “readily accessible account”, in a single volume, of “one of the most important and consequential political careers in modern British and Irish history”. He also wishes to emphasise Gladstone’s “striving to realise God’s purposes”, a theme, he says, too long marginalised by other historians, and to explain Gladston-ian Liberalism in relation to his discipleship of Sir Robert Peel.

As we already know from his massive two-volume biography of Gladstone, Shannon has read everything by and about him. He has a strong grasp of Victorian politics, and an abiding interest in the extraordinary, driven quality of the Grand Old Man of Victorian politics. Now we have a new offering which is largely a filleted version of the biography, and can therefore be ignored by the specialist; the cut-and-paste function comes to the fore here, with a final couple of paragraphs in the new book pasted verbatim from the old.

Will, however, the elusive, some say deceased, “general reader” be attracted to a 550-page book, handsomely got up, but without plates, at this price? Perhaps the paperback will follow in 2009, the centenary year.

Shannon’s treatment of Liberalism is fascinating, particularly where he portrays Gladstone as the nation’s headmaster, appealing to the boys over the heads of the masters, his colleagues in the Cabinet, and making decisions that went against Liberal Party policy. Shades of Blair, perhaps; but comparison turns to contrast with regard to Shannon’s other theme: “doing God” in politics. Whereas Blair was never allowed to say much about his faith, and only got into trouble when he did, Gladstone was forever explaining, in public as well as in those agonised diary entries, that he felt the hand of divine providence upon him at virtually every turn of his political career.

Some attention is paid by Shan-non to Gladstone’s ecclesiastical preferments, and to his defence of the Ritualists against Disraeli’s opportunist attacks, but much less is said about Gladstone’s spirituality here than in David Bebbington’s sympathetic study The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and politics (2004). Shannon often adopts a mocking tone when examining Gladstone’s religiosity, which he regards as an aspect of his strangeness. After all these years, he doesn’t seem to like Gladstone very much. But then neither did our dear Queen, who described him as a very dangerous man.

Gladstone’s almost superhuman energy, and his manic pursuit of politic goals on a national and international stage, are at once aspects of a complex and tortured personality, and features of a totally committed and remarkably gifted public servant. One comes away from this richly documented book with a sense that this was indeed a Victorian Titan, in an age when strangeness — think of Carlyle and Ruskin — was part of the package.

Professor Michael Wheeler is a Trustee of St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden, the national monument to Gladstone.

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