Gladstone: Volume II, 1865-1898 (Shannon, Richard//Gladstone)
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Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
EAN (European Article Number): 9780807824863
Number of Items: 1
Binding: Hardcover
Author: Richard Shannon
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.0810924
Publication Date: 1999-05-31
Reading Level: 704
Description: William Ewart Gladstone was perhaps the greatest colossus of the Victorian Age. Along with his formidable rival, Benjamin Disraeli, he dominated Britain's political scene from the moment of his appointment as chancellor of the exchequer in Aberdeen's famous coalition ministry until his resignation as prime minister in March 1894, four years before his death. In the intervening years, he held the office of prime minister four times.
With this volume, Richard Shannon completes his magisterial biography of Gladstone. Tracing Gladstone's career from his rise to eminence in 1865 until his death in 1898, Shannon documents his emergence as the dominant personality in the Liberal Party, his activities as a statesman, and his decades-long battle with Disraeli.
In his analysis, Shannon pays particular attention to Gladstone's attempts to integrate his religion with his career. Profoundly influenced by his Anglican Christianity, Gladstone approached his causes with a missionary fervor, Shannon argues. This tenacity is perhaps best illustrated by Gladstone's unyielding support of Irish home rule—a position so at odds with Liberal policies that it caused many Liberals to ally themselves with the Conservatives, thereby instigating the decline of Gladstone's own party.
Customer Reviews
Review Summary: Gladstone was a puffed up bore
Date: 2000-04-26
Details: Churchill wrote in 'The History of the English Speaking People' that Gladstone's contemporaries thought that he had no judgement, and that the Conservative Disreali government achieved more in five years than the Liberals (of whom Gladstone was prominant) did in nearly fifty. Churchill was being polite - Gladstone was a pious, pretentious windbag and a collosal hipercrite. He doesn't deserve to have two volumes in this detail writen about him - he never did anything to justify this amount of effort. Even Gladstone's wife said that he was a bore.
Gladstone comes across much like a Kennedy - a mediocrity carried aloft by the wealth of a ratbag father, convinced of his own importance, full of the teachings of the Lord and none of His spirit, only attractive when seen from a distance. His father made a fortune from slave plantations in the West Indies, and Gladstone did little to improve on daddy's efforts. He defended slavery in Parliament while writing pompous sermons about the responsibilities of the church. A mean, miserable specimen who never earnt a penny through his own efforts, he inherited and spent a fortune but went into a lather of shock and horror when discovering that his butler had been pilfering and selling partly used candles from his household. Gladstone never improved on these efforts, but then, considering his papal like view of his own infallibility, he never felt the need to.
Gladstone's younger sister took to dosing herself with opium and wiping her backside with religous tracts. Both behaviours are perfectly understandable for anybody who had to live with a specimen like Gladstone. I think the sister is far more deserving of a biography than the brother.
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