A stately progress

The bookshelves of any self-respecting library used to be weighed down with the monographs of the titans of 19th-century politics. The three volumes of John Morley’s masterly Life of Gladstone would jostle for space as each new volume of Moneypenny and Buckle’s six-volume Life of Benjamin Disrael was published. Yet one Victorian politician would have been conspicuous by his absence on the bookshelves.

Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, was hardly a bit-player in mid-Victorian politics. He was involved in the great battles over reform that dominated the period, both as leader of his party for 22 years and leader of his country. Yet the very title of this first ever full biography — The Forgotten Prime Minister — says it all. Even in his own lifetime his ambivalence about ambition and his ‘Newmarket style of life’ attracted sarcastic comment, but he was the first prime minister to hold the office three times and the only one to publish an English blank- verse translation of Homer. His leadership of the Conservative Party is seen as an interregnum between his rival Peel and his protégé Disraeli, yet he remains the longest serving party leader in modern British politics. And he is too often dismissed as the aristocratic reactionary who opposed Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the Corn Laws, when a closer examination of his story reveals the man who abolished slavery, introduced primary school education to Ireland and reformed Parliament.

Almost a century and a half after his death, Angus Hawkins sets out to rescue this clever, diffident politician from relative obscurity and give his life the full and proper treatment it deserves. It is an impressive and serious piece of work that reminds us of the value of the scholarly monograph.