This impressive study of Victorian politics is built around a challenging thesis: that Gladstone, far from being the creator of the Liberal Party, was in fact a maverick who stumbled into the leadership of an already flourishing Liberal Party and, through his zealotry, restless ambition and ignorance, single-handedly proceeded to destroy it. Jonathan Parry also provides a forceful celebration of a particular kind of political system, which he sees as achieving perfection under the 'propertied but unsnobbish' Whig Ministers who ruled the country in early and mid-Victorian Britain.

LRB 24 February 1994 | PDF Download