Gladstone (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE was born in Liverpool at the end of 1809..." (more)
Key Phrases: tremendous projectile, hostile partnership, first premiership, Prime Minister, House of Commons, Christ Church (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lord Jenkins (Asquith) has held cabinet office and is chancellor of Oxford. His Gladstone has already earned the Whitbread Award in England. Yet for American readers, his biography will often be impenetrable. W.E. Gladstone (1809-1898) was prime minister four times. The extravagances of his quintessentially Victorian genius, which included religiosity, morbidity, hypocrisy, earnestness, priggishness and oratorical excesses that make Fidel Castro seem a paragon of reticence, kept him in politics for 63 years. Jenkins's idiosyncratic account of his life lingers over parliamentary minutiae, hardly mentions the Crimean War and ignores the Indian Mutiny. Jenkins wanders off into flippancies and Anglicisms that will exasperate a transatlantic audience. We learn of "tramlines logic," of a government that was a "holed hull," of statesmen who "went of a fever." Given to pompous language when simple words would do, he refers to "eleemosynary" (charitable) motives and "fissiparous issues" (divisive would have done nicely) and compares an elongated Gladstone peroration to the close of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Still, there are redeeming descriptive and narrative gems, as in Gladstone's famed speechifying (in which subordinate clauses "hung like candelabra"), and in the energy of the old man, who at 81, knocked down by a cab, "pursued the errant driver and held him until the police came." No prime minister was more sophistical or sanctimonious, and none dominated Parliament more ruthlessly. Jenkins's biography, while sweepingly admiring, deals with his hero blemishes and all.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

William E. Gladstone lived to be 89, spanning the 19th century almost as much as his queen, Victoria. As prime minister of Britain four times, he was involved in all the major political travails of the time, including the Crimean War, Irish Home Rule, and the expansion of British imperialism. He was energetic, a prodigious reader, a classicist who also read popular Victorian fiction, and a devoutly religious man who tortured himself with guilt over his taste for pornography. This work was first published in 1995 in England, where it was a best seller and an award-winning biography. Lord Jenkins (Life at the Center, LJ 3/1/93), a leader in the House of Lords and chancellor of Oxford University, has done a fine job of compiling a one-volume biography of a man he obviously admires. For libraries without H.C.G. Matthews's two-volume Gladstone (Oxford Univ., 1995), Jenkins's work will make a nice substitute.?Katherine E. Gillen, Luke AFB Lib., Goodyear, Ariz.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 698 pages
• Publisher: Random House; First Edition edition (February 4, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679451447
• ISBN-13: 978-0679451440
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.6 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,107,956 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Weighty Book for a Weighty Subject, December 4, 2002

By	"doctor_smith" (Rowland Heights, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gladstone: A Biography (Paperback)

Given the somewhat mixed reviews on Amazon of Roy Jenkins's biography of William Gladstone, the towering giant of Victorian politics, I thought I would throw in my two cents on the matter. Jenkins is an interesting biographer, and even though he is not a professional, academic historian (so he does not always follow the standards of the historical craft), much of his work has received celebratory responses, including his earlier biography of Asquith and his more recent one of Churchill. As a long-serving Labour MP and a member of the House of Lords, Jenkins understand British politics from the inside out, and, as a result, he brings a unique perspective to his subjects. Jenkins also has a lovely, fluid writing style and a penchant for the telling quotation; his biographies read extremely well, and this biography of Gladstone is no exception. Jenkins also offers a point of view, although he does not do so explicitly. His interpretations of his historic subjects tend to be subtlely placed within the rolling prose of his books. But he does not interpret the way a typical historian would, and so his biographies have a different effect upon the reader.

William Gladstone certainly requires a lengthy biography, and Jenkins gives him one. Gladstone was one of the premier figures of nineteenth-century British politics, four times prime minister, leading light of the Liberal party, defender of Christianity, and champion of the Irish. He transformed Victorian politics by taking issues to the masses and by bending policy and his party to his will. No prime minister during his long lifetime cut quite a historic and controversial figure, not even those who, in some ways, were better politicians, including Peel, Palmerston, and, above all, Russell (who truly deserves a great biography). No one, even Disraeli, seemed to dominate and define the age as much as Gladstone. But even then Gladstone was deeply flawed; his idiosyncratic, personalized Christianity and his pursuit of what were at the time questionable political policies alienated members of his party. And as right and humane as his demand for Irish Home Rule might have been, it was politically disastrous, dismembering the Liberal Party in 1886 and allowing room for the Conservative Party to acquire prominence, something it had not done for decades. Gladstone's budgets were legendary and perhaps his best accomplishments; his speeches were equally legendary as well, and his personal habits and adventures, in addition to his life in politics, make him undoubtedly one of the most fascinating subjects in British history.

Jenkins's biography is certainly worthwhile as a life of Gladstone, and it leaves almost no stone unturned. Most of all, it truly conveys a direct sense of the grandness of its subject, even if, as some have pointed out here, it does not reveal enough of the individuals who surrounded Gladstone. Jenkins adequately covers Gladstone's early life and adventures, as well as his entry into politics, and then provides relatively substantial discussion of Gladstone's political activity in the middle and end of the century.

As a "popular biography" (meaning not one written by a professionally-trained historian) Jenkins's Gladstone is the best available, even with its flaws. It is not, however, the only biography of the Grand Old Man. H.C.G. Matthew, who edited the Gladstone diaries, took all of the essays he wrote for the volumes of those diaries and compiled them in a single biography for Oxford University Press. It does not read as fluidly, but it is an excellent piece of work. Richard Shannon's two volume biography of Gladstone is longer than the one by Jenkins (it is too long) and benefits from a solid historian's lifetime of reflection. Many years ago, Peter Stansky wrote a small assessment of Gladstone called Gladstone: A Progress in Politics. And Eugenio Biagini has written a brief political biography for St. Martin's Press. It's the best small biography of Gladstone available. All of these works are by professional historians and provide some of the assessments and evaluations missing from Jenkins's biography.

All in all, few in modern history, whether prime ministers or presidents, are as fruitful subjects for biography as Gladstone. He kept a diary for 70 years, lived for most of the nineteenth century, worked incessantly because of his hyperactivity, and transformed British politics. If you have any interest in British history, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not reading at least one biography of the Victorian statesman.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very British biography of a very British subject, May 6, 1998

By	[e-mail] (New York) - See all my reviews

When my company was acquired by a British corporation in 1996, one of the new managers purchased the original edition in Britain and forwarded it to me. I had read a review in the Economist and was dying to read it, especially after reading a fine biography of Disraeli.

I will admit that it was not the easiest book I have ever read, however I think some of the other reviews quoted here are unjustifiably harsh.

Gladstone was a man of his time and reflected the values and concerns of the Victorian era. Probably, neither Gladstone nor Disraeli would be remotely electable today, and having read excellent biographies of Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, I have begun to truely understand the adage, "the past is another planet."

I believe Roy Jenkins achieved the goal of capturing the essence of Gladstone as it related to the values of his time. Albeit, Jenkins has a very dry, British sense of humor, and that can throw off American readers and made certain passages harder to read for me.

(Incidently, the original British edition had a timeline at the top of the page to make the chronology easier to follow.)

In summary, I feel the this is an eloquent biography that, perhaps, is a little more difficult to read and fully understand. But I believe that is more do to the amazing complexity of the subject than Roy Jenkins' prose.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enchanting - An absolutely exceptional book., April 22, 2003

By	Mr. Cormac J. Flynn (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gladstone: A Biography (Paperback)

Gladstone was a remarkable, complicated, even enigmatic man and Jenkins does not waste our time with the sort of pop-psychology projection and junk theories that ruin so much contemporary biography. Instead, Jenkins lets the facts speak for themselves, weighting them based on their demonstrable impact on Gladstone's own life and on British society viewed from the vantage point of 100 years or more of subsequent history. Gladstone emerges through records of his actions, the memoirs of his contemporaries, and his own diary. Jenkins resists the too-common modern conceit of pretending intimate knowledge of Gladstone as if through some astral mind-meld. Although he admits his own affection for the man, Jenkins lets readers decide for themselves what they think of this stubborn, courageous, long-winded, sanctimonious, and usually dead right -- even prophetic -- dynamo.

Along the way there are delightful, balanced, spot-on portraits of some of Gladstone's contemporaries. The often-deified Disraeli comes out as a man of great talent, imagination, and political genius who was a self-absorbed, underhanded lightweight. (A portrayal such as that some modern critics have applied to Bill Clinton.) The slow intellectual and emotional curdling of Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert is as eloquent a meditation on the corruptions of isolation and power as I've read in some time. Spencer, Parnell, Hartington, Rosebery, Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain, Manning, Wilberforce, Palmerston -- all are here drawn with flavor and economy and no trace of bitterness or partisanship.

One of the great strengths of this biography is that it never talks down to the reader. Jenkins is clearly an almost frighteningly literate individual, and his vocabulary occasionally sent me to the dictionary, but I consulted it in delight as every rare word was clearly used unselfconsciously by an author who knew it well and knew exactly what he was trying to say. (As Simon Winchester has noted, there are very few true synonyms in English.) More challenging in this regard may be the fact that the book, having been written for a British audience, assumes an elementary knowledge of the outlines of British history, which many American readers don't have. Just as a book about a prominent American nineteenth-century figure would not feel it necessary to produce extensive background on, say, the industrial revolution, the transcontinental railroad, or abolition, so Gladstone assumes the reader's familiarity with the Indian Raj, the expansion of the franchise, Britain's own industrial progress, and other subjects. My advice is to just jump right in anyway -- I myself was not well versed in these topics yet found the narrative so strong that the author's insights were easy to follow.