John Bright: Statesman, Orator, Agitator, by Bill Cash

Abstract

John Bright is probably the least studied of the ‘great Victorians’. Unlike his close colleague Richard Cobden—who has attracted a substantial amount of scholarly attention in recent years—Bright has inspired only four major studies since 1946, including the one reviewed here. For Bill Cash, such comparative neglect is unjustifiable and almost incomprehensible in view of Bright’s contribution to the making of mid-Victorian Britain, and indeed of modern democratic politics. He was undoubtedly a celebrity in his day, the sort of politician watched closely by Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx and William Gladstone in order to divine the mood of the nation. Indeed, the book opens with a thought-provoking discussion of Karl Marx’s attitude to Bright. Their differences are presented as aspects of a ‘clash of titans’ (p. xxvii), but this is true only in a metaphorical sense. For the two never really ‘clashed’, as they had no opportunity to do so: Bright was no intellectual and Marx was not active in British politics. However, it is true that the models of social and political development that they stood for were radically alternative: while Marx was the prophet of a proletarian revolution which never happened, Bright was the tribune of a ‘bourgeois’ democracy which advanced gradually, but relentlessly, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.