Jane Ridley

God and the GOM

Jane Ridley reviews Richard Shannon's latest book on Gladstone

Richard Shannon has been writing about Gladstone on and off for almost 50 years. His first book, a study of Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, was published in 1963. He is the author of a major biography of Gladstone in two exceptionally hefty volumes, which appeared to critical acclaim in 1982 and 1999. So why does he feel the need to hammer out another 200,000-odd words on the GOM? Well, the answer is really frustration. Shannon disarmingly admits that his two fat volumes of biography were ‘too dense for their own good’. Not enough people read them. Shannon had a view of Gladstone, but the message wasn’t getting across. The purpose of this (relatively) slim version is to drive home the Shannon thesis. Put briefly, this is that Gladstone, the founder of the Victorian Liberal party, was not really a Liberal at all, more a case of Gordon Brown meets Oliver Cromwell.

Ever since John Morley’s great biography of 1903 Gladstone’s life has been seen as a heroic political journey from the Tory darkness of his youth towards the Liberal light. Morley ignored Gladstone’s difficult and clotted religious thinking, and most biographers have followed him. Roy Jenkins and Professor Colin Matthew constructed Gladstone as the leader of an intellectual elite: the winner of Oxford’s glittering prizes, Gladstone matured into a razor-sharp Treasury mind, a man with enormous powers of work and an unfortunate but forgivable weakness for fallen women. Neither Jenkins nor Matthew had any time for Gladstone’s religious beliefs, but Shannon contends that you can’t really understand what made Gladstone tick without looking at his religion.

Shannon constructs Gladstone as the ‘great beast’ of the Victorian political jungle, a man of dark, unresolved tensions. His father, a dour Scottish patriarch and Liverpool merchant, made a fortune which derived largely from slave plantations in Demerara.

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