1859-1886
Gladstone’s Parliamentary Record 1868-1900
William Gladstone led the Liberal Party in four governments over a quarter of a century (1868-74, 1880-85, 1886, 1892-94) bringing to fruition a wide range of reforms and almost coming to define Liberalism.
Thomas Hill Green, 1836-1882
Thomas Hill Green was that rare combination, a high-powered philosopher and political theorist who also contributed effectively to practical politics. His friend, the Cambridge philosopher, Henry Sidgwick, said that while he could hold his own with Green in metaphysics and epistemology, when it came to politics, ‘I always felt the chances were that before long…
John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873
John Stuart Mill, philosopher, economist, journalist, political writer, social reformer, and, briefly, Liberal MP, is one of the most famous figures in the pantheon of Liberal theorists, and the greatest of the Victorian Liberal thinkers. Yet his relevance is not restricted to the nineteenth century; as L. T. Hobhouse wrote in 1911, in his single…
Sir Jerom Murch and the civic gospel in Victorian Bath
Analysis of the municipal record of the leader of Bath’s Victorian Liberals.
Land and nation in England
Review of Paul Readman, Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880-1914 (Royal Historical Society, 2008).
Celebrating 1859: Party, Patriotism and Liberal Values
On 6 June 1859, 280 Whig, Liberal, former Peelite and radical MPs met at Willis’s Rooms in King Street, St. James’s. They gathered to agree on a strategy to oust Lord Derby’s Conservative government from office. Angus Hawkins analyses the significance of this key event in Liberal history.
The high summer of Victorian Liberalism
Review of Ian Bradley, The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism (Faber & Faber, 1980).
‘The representative man’
Reviews of Kenneth Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years 1783-1841 (Allen Lane, 1982) and Donald Southgate, The Most English Minister (Macmillan, 1966).
Secular intellectuals
Review of William C. Lubenow, Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815-1914: Making Words Flesh (Boydell Press, 2010).