William Gladstone: New Studies and Perspectives, ed. Roland Quinault, Roger Swift and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel

Abstract

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently printed one of Helmut Schmidt’s lectures on contemporary Europe’s lack of a capable Führungsfigur. Schmidt’s lament made the case for what he called a ‘segensreichen Akt des Vergessens’, literally a useful act of forgetting. Schmidt was referring here to Gladstone’s peroration during the great Home Rule debate of 1886. Having treated the Commons to an electrifying rendition of the colonial version of Anglo-Irish history—the version Gladstone first absorbed in the 1830s via the polemics of Irish clerics such as William Patrick Palmer and Jeremy Taylor—the elderly First Lord called for ‘a blessed oblivion of the past’. Schmidt’s remarkable confidence in Gladstone’s enduring relevance suggests that he would enjoy these essays, a collection, edited by Roland Quinault, Roger Swift and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, that invites the GOM to stretch his legs in these tired times. Gladstone is compared variously to Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush (p. 27), to Churchill (p. 251), and even Paddy Ashdown (p. 301), while several recurring and more convincing parallels are also sketched with that other Confederate sympathiser, Woodrow Wilson (pp. 27, 306). These amusing asides occur within the context of essays analysing Gladstone’s ‘just war’ doctrine, as well as his attitudes towards chattel slavery, Irish finance, labour, the Ionian islands and international diplomacy. Three major issues emerge from this empirical mass; namely, the late Frank Turner’s distinction between Gladstone’s political radicalism and his cultural conservatism, Deryck Schreuder’s suggestive rendering of Gladstonian liberalism as method, and the problem of Burke.