corollary

Listening to:

Brahms, piano concerto #2.

Just read:

Roy Jenkins, Gladstone.

This is a big fat biography of one the 19th century’s pre-eminent statesmen. Gladstone was Prime Minister four times, and came to dominate the British political scene for roughly 30 years, from the 1860s to the 1890s. He left Parliament just four years before he died, in his late eighties, and began his Parliamentary career in his early thirties. If Tony Blair were to do as well, he’d still be with us in 2020. The fact that this seems so inconceivable is perhaps a comment about modern age-ism more than anything else.

Jenkins is (was) a politician of the late 20th century, so it’s not surprising that his biography should concentrate on Gladstone as a politician. We don’t, for example, hear much about his relationship with his wife, nor what he liked to eat for breakfast (though there is a very interesting discussion about 19th century meal habits in general, dealing with, for example, how “lunch” gained its modern status as a meal of the day). On the other hand, Jenkins does describe many aspects of Gladstone’s more public life. In addition to his political career, Gladstone had a very busy life in other areas. He read approximately 20000 books, and wrote journal articles and books on a variety of often non-political subjects. Jenkins describes a number of occasions when one might have expected Gladstone to be giving all this time to political work (the night before presenting the Budget, for example), but when Gladstone took time off this to write poetry reviews and the like.

I had high hopes for this biography, and on the whole they were not disappointed. I found much of it quite fascinating. Jenkins is not stylistically perfect, and there were times when I couldn’t help but wonder if he was attempting to imitate Gladstone’s supposedly tortuous prose style. He also refuses to provide translations for his Latin quotations. Again this mirrors an aspect of Gladstone’s life: Jenkins has it that Gladstone was only comfortable with those politicians that shared a similar classical education, and with whom he could exchange Latin and Greek quotations. But these are relatively minor points. The biography brings a very interesting political period to life, and does it well. Parts I found particularly interesting were the discussion of Gladstone’s (increasingly bad) relations with Queen Victoria, his diary habits, and introductions to other significant people of the period (Disraeli, Palmerston, Peel, Parnell). For all his failings, Gladstone also comes across as quite a sympathetic subject, and this always helps.