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Gladstone: God and Politics

God and the GOM

Richard Shannon
Hambledon Continuum, 550pp, £80,
Jane Ridley
Tuesday, 5th February 2008

Jane Ridley reviews Richard Shannon's latest book on Gladstone

The example of Robert Peel, Gladstone’s political mentor, was crucial. Peel’s fall over the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 taught Gladstone the dangers of relying solely on the support of party in the House of Commons. Gladstone’s great insight was to see the need to appeal beyond parliament to an external public — the ‘people’. Gladstone’s Liberalism, according to Shannon, was all too often a matter of using the ‘people’ as a weapon against his own Gladstonian Liberals in parliament, forcing the party to do what he wanted against its will. Over the three great missions of his later career — parliamentary reform in 1865, the Bulgarian Horrors in the 1870s and Home Rule in 1885 — he claimed that he followed divine inspiration in mobilising the people to force his party into line. In the end, Gladstone destroyed the Gladstonian Liberal party.

This is not an easy book to read. The problem is that biography is not the best vehicle for arguing a thesis. If Shannon had chosen to write a series of essays instead, he might have made his argument more accessible. Hambledon Continuum has done the author no favours at all by pricing the book at £80 and making it look like vanity publishing. All the same, this book is a major piece of historical revisionism and it most certainly deserves to be added to the academic reading list.

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John Verney

February 8th, 2008 2:03am

Dear Sir, These maddening moving advertisements are making the reading of the book reviews a sore test of one's concentration and sometimes an impossibility. Can it be the intention of either yourself or the advertisers to anger your readers? John Verney

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