William Gladstone
Gladstone, William Ewart - 1809–98, British statesman, the dominant personality of the Liberal party from 1868 until 1894. A great orator and a master of finance, he was deeply religious and brought a highly moralistic tone to politics. To many he represented the best qualities of Victorian England, but he was also passionately disliked, most notably by his sovereign, Queen Victoria, and Read More...
Gladstone, William Ewart - 1809–98, British statesman, the dominant personality of the Liberal party from 1868 until 1894. A great orator and a master of finance, he was deeply religious and brought a highly moralistic tone to politics. To many he represented the best qualities of Victorian England, but he was also passionately disliked, most notably by his sovereign, Queen Victoria, and by his chief political rival, Benjamin Disraeli. Early Career Entering Parliament (1833) as a Tory, he became a protégé of Sir Robert Peel, who made him undersecretary for war and the colonies (1835). In Peel's second ministry, he became vice president (1841) and president (1843) of the Board of Trade, introducing the first government regulation of the railroads, and then (1845) colonial secretary. A supporter of free trade, he resigned (1846) with Peel in the party split that followed repeal of the corn laws and gradually aligned himself more and more with the Liberals. As chancellor of the exchequer (1852–55, 1859–66), he eloquently proposed and secured measures for economic retrenchment and free trade. He also espoused the cause of parliamentary reform (see Reform Acts). Prime Minister Gladstone served as prime minister four times (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, and 1892–94). In his first ministry the Church of Ireland was disestablished (1869) to free Roman Catholics from the necessity of paying tithes to support the Anglican church, and an Irish land act was passed (see Irish Land Question) to protect the peasantry. He achieved important reforms—competitive admission to the civil service, the vote by secret ballot, abolition of the sale of commissions in the army, educational expansion, and court reorganization. Conservative reaction to reforms and a weak foreign policy defeated him in 1874. In 1876, Gladstone published a pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the Questions of the East, attacking the Disraeli government for its indifference to the brutal repression by the Turks of the Bulgarian rebellion. His renewed attack on Disraeli's pro-Turkish and generally aggressively imperialist policies in the Midlothian campaign of 1879–80 brought the Liberals back to power in 1880. During Gladstone's second ministry, a more effective Irish land act was passed (1881), and two parliamentary reform bills (1884, 1885) further extended the franchise and redistributed the seats in the House of Commons. The army's failure to relieve Charles George Gordon at Khartoum helped to bring this ministry to an end (1885). Gladstone's advocacy of Home Rule for Ireland was a notable recognition of Irish demands, but wrecked his third ministry (1886) after a few months. Many anti–Home Rule Liberals allied themselves with the Conservatives, and the slow decline of the Liberal party may be traced from this date. Gladstone also split with the Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell because of the divorce case in which Parnell was involved. Gladstone's last ministry followed the election of 1892 and continued the fight for Irish Home Rule. He retired in 1894 after the House of Lords defeated (1893) his bill. Bibliography Many of Gladstone's speeches and letters have been collected. See biographies by J. Morley (3 vol., 1903, repr. 1968), P. Stansky (1981), R. Shannon (1984), H. C. Matthew (1989), and R. Jenkins (1997). The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved. |
William Gladstone
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Gladstone is one of the most important political figures in modern British history. He held the office of Prime Minister four times during a turbulent and changing time in Britain's history.Michael Partridge provides a new survey of Gladstone's life and career, placing him firmly in the context of nineteenth-century Britain, and covering both his intriguing private life and his public career. Surveying a broad range of source material, Partridge begins by looking at Gladstone's early life, education and entry to Parliament, before looking at his marriage and service with Peel. He goes on to look in detail at Gladstone's terms as prime minister concluding with his fourth ministry, when Gladstone, by now in his eighties, returned to power. He tried and failed to resolve the problems of Ireland, which had become his great obsession, for the last time and eventually retired from politics in 1894 and died a few years later.
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William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) has been hailed as the most characteristic and extraordinary of Victorians. His expansive public career--in and out of office from 1834 to 1894 and four times Prime Minister--was consistently controversial and dramatic. This work, by a highly acclaimed Gladstone scholar, makes available in a single volume the story of one of the most powerful political personalities in British history. The book describes Gladstone's education, his political career from the early years as a Tory to his spectacular first administration from 1868 to 1874 and the remarkable private drama of sexual temptation and moral crisis, which from the 1840s underlay Gladstone's public life. Illuminating the keen ways in which Gladstone managed to keep himself at the "top of the greasy pole" and become one of the most successful political figures in Britain, the work shows how Gladstone's career and views helped shape parliamentary politics of the Victorian age.
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W. E. Gladstone towers over the politics of the nineteenth century. He is known for his policies of financial rectitude, his campaigns to settle the Irish question and his championship of the rights of small nations. He remains the only British Prime Minister to have served for four separate terms. In 1998 an international conference at Chester College brought together Gladstone scholars to mark the centenary of his death, and many of the papers presented on that occasion are published in this volume. Covering the whole of the statesman’s long political life from the first Reform Act to the last decade of the nineteenth century, they range over topics as diverse as parliamentary reform and free trade, Gladstone’s English Nonconformist supporters and his Irish Unionist opponents. A select bibliography, arranged by subject, supplies guidance for further research. The collection forms a tribute, appreciative but critical, to the Grand Old Man of British politics.
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By the last decades of the nineteenth century, more people were making more speeches to greater numbers in a wider variety of venues than at any previous time. This book argues that a recognizably modern public life was created in Victorian Britain largely through the instrumentality of public speech. Shedding new light on the careers of many of the most important figures of the Victorian era and beyond, including Gladstone, Disraeli, Sir Robert Peel, John Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Canon Liddon, the book traces the ways in which oratory came to occupy a central position in the conception and practice of Victorian public life. Not a study of rhetoric or a celebration of great oratory, the book stresses the social developments that led to the production and consumption of these speeches.
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The Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, 1876-1886, Vol. 1
by W. E. Gladstone, George Leveson-Gower Granville, Agatha Ramm. 486 pgs.