William Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone lived from 1809 to 1898 and spent more than six decades in Parliament. He served for many years as Chancellor of the Exchequer and held the office of Prime Minister on four separate occasions. Across three decades he led the Liberal Party, and his convictions and programmes came to define Liberalism in the later Victorian period.

His career reached well beyond party politics. He was a learned scholar and a committed member of the Church of England, and his wide-ranging interests and social connections place him among the most representative figures of his era. Historians have, however, paid comparatively little attention to some parts of his life in recent years.

This collection revisits him through five lenses: how his reputation has been shaped, how visual and material culture portrayed him, his private life, his work as a public official, and the moral and political reasoning behind his foreign policy. The essays are new, and many draw on several disciplines. Together they offer fresh views of his public and private worlds and show how varied, and how complicated, his character was.