What is Gladstone trying to tell us? Through the matted undergrowth of his prose, with its vatic pronouncements, its interminable subordinate clauses, its ponderous hesitations and protestations, its sudden whimsical excursions and conjectures, something - not a message exactly but not a philosophy either, perhaps the only word would be a mind - is struggling to declare itself. A mind, moreover, that insists on its continuing vivacity, and claims our attention not merely as a brilliant relic of its own time but as an unstilled voice in the conversation of ours. We may explore and even admire the minds of Gladstone's mentors and contemporaries: Peel's earnest reforming zeal, Palmerston's gung-ho gunboat liberalism, Disraeli's sugar castles of empire - though each is splendid in its way, they do not speak to us directly. But Gladstone haunts us still; he is the greatest of the undead.

LRB 17 February 2005 | PDF Download