The book I'm tackling this month is Gladstone by Roy Jenkins. A thick, incredibly dense and remarkable one volume biography of one of the great British Prime Ministers of the 19th Century. Jenkins is also notable for having produced an equally, if not more detailed and dense one volume biography of Winston Churchill, which I'm going to have to try and tackle at some point this summer as well. (Don't worry, I'll try and mix this up a bit and not inflict the really boring stuff on everyone.)
But Gladstone. Why him? Other than the obvious reason that I'm a huge dork, (I am) it occured to me that I had a few gaps in my knowledge of British Politics. The Premiership in Britain is an incredibly detailed and complex office and each holder of the office from Walpole to Gordon Brown today has put their own spin and style on it- some with more impact than others. On the list of Prime Ministers, Gladstone is far and away considered one of the top 5, if not number 2 just behind Churchill himself. He was Prime Minister about 4 separate times, lived an incredibly long time and Queen Victoria couldn't stand him- yet even as she was the Victoria of the Victorian Age, he is indisputably the Prime Minister of the Victorian Age.
As biographies go, Jenkins is a good master of the art. He's fully aware that he's producing mind-bogglingly dense books on titanically large historical figures and throughout, self-deprecating flashes of wit spring out at you, even as you struggle to wrestle with the sheer enormity of the subject himself. As for Gladstone, well, I'm only about half-way through, so I haven't gotten to the meat of his life yet, but so far he seems a bit erratic and odd. He was very religious, almost Evangelical in bent- (technically he was, but not really of the sort we think of here in America) so the first part of the book delves far too much into the theological disputes within the Anglican Church for my liking. He also had a fascination with trying to make prostitutes see the error of their ways (the implication being that he might have had another purpose with his visits...) I have to say, however, that so far Gladstone is unimpressive, yet I can see that the oddities and eccentricities of his life could probably mould him into something great.
And I get ahead of myself. He hasn't even been made Prime Minister yet.
By the by, Roy Jenkins was quite the bad-ass in British politics himself (he died in 2003), having a ludicrously long resume and being one of the infamous 'Gang of Four' that broke with the Labour Party to form the Social Democratic Party in the early 80s. The fact that there is an active and influential third party in Britain in the Liberal Democrats today is due in no small part to him. A fascinating, fascinating man.
The other puzzling thing about Gladstone is that he's reckoned to be one of the master orators of the English language and yet there is a paucity of his speeches out there on the internet. (Yes, I just said 'paucity.' Deal with it. Or look it up in a dictionary.) This surprises me somewhat, but then again, I assume he's a PM whose greatness is hidden behind a cover of a book.
Hopefully I'll find it.
No comments:
Post a Comment