Life
1809-98 [‘The Grand Old Man’]; MP Newark, 1832; opposed Irish
Church Temporalities Bill approp[riation] clause, 1833; submitted articles
to Dublin University Magazine in 1834; The State and Its Relations
with the Church (1838); Chf. Sec. of Ireland, 1841; resigned over
Maynooth grant issue, 1845; Colonial Sec., 1845-6; Chancellor, 1852-5;
59-66, 73-74, and 1880-82; Liberal P.M. 1868-74, 80-85, 1886, and 1892-94;
infuriated supports of the Union in the American Civil War by suggesting
that it looked as though Jefferson Davis would create a nation; converted
to pacification of Ireland through reform, Dec. 1868 (purportedly when
axing down a tree on his estate at Hawarden [var. Hawarthen]; disestablished
Church of Ireland, 1869; brought forward two land Acts, 1870 (giving a
tenant an interest in his holding but not yet fixity of tenure) and 1881
(awarding fixity of tenure and reducing rents by twenty percent); Compensation
and Coercion Acts, 1880-82; reading Burke in Matthew Arnold’s edition
of Irish Affairs (1881), nearly every day’ in late 1885 and
1886; wrote First Home Rule Bill, giving internal control with continuing
links to Britain, defeated, and lost election, 1886; failed to pass Land
Purchase Bill, 1886, and second Home Rule Bill, defeated overwhelmingly
in House of Lords, 1893; retired to Hawarden [sic DNB], 1894; d. May 1898;
Dublin Corporation refuses site for statue, in spite of remonstrations
of C. G. Duffy; W. T. Stead, campaigning ed. of the Northern Echo,
his favourite journalist. OCEL ODQ DIH FDA
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Works
Homer and the Homeric Age (1858); Juventus Mundi (1869);
Homeric Synchronism (1876); a firm believer in a personal Homer
and ‘a solid nucleus of fact in his account of the Trojan war; see
J. L. Myers, Homer and His Critics (1958); The State in its
Relations with the Church (1938) defends principle of single state
religion, later abandoned; Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the
East (1876); minor writings published as Gleanings of Past Years,
7 vols. (1879); see J. Morley’s Life of Gladstone, 3 vols.
(1903); Do., 2 vols. (1905), viii, 1026; viii, 948pp., ports. (Hyland
Catl. 214); life by R. Shannon (1982 ff.); The Gladstone Diaries,
ed. M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Mathew (1968-82) shed light on his preoccupation
with rescuing prostitutes and his habit of self-flagellation. QRY, Justin
McCarthy, The Story of Gladstone’s Life (Toronto 1898); H. C. G. Matthew, ed., The Gladstone Diaries, with Cabinet Minutes and prime-ministerial correspondence, Vol. 12: 1887-1891 (OUP 1994), 535pp.
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- J. L. Hamilton, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London: Longmans 1938; Hamden, CT: Archon Books 1964) [prominently cited as J. L. Hammond in J. J. Horgan, Parnell to Pearse, 1948];
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J. George Boyce [essay on Gladstone and Ireland], in Peter J. Jagger, ed., Gladstone (Hambledon 1998), 302pp.
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Notes
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry:
Field Day 1991), Vol. 2: notes and remarks at 197n, 276, 305, 306, 308,
310, 311, 313, 315, 317-35 passim, 342-48 passim, 356, 424, 475, 476,
506, 985, 1021, 1067n, 1069, 1213n; largely connected with the Parnell
Split. Persuaded by Sir William Harcourt to repudiate Parnell; Harcourt,
leader of Liberals, 1896-98; and chancellor of the exchequer at various
times (ftns 411, 319, [not indexed]).
Booksellers & Catalogues: W. E. H. Gladstone, MP, Vaticanism An Answer to Reproofs & Replies (London 1875) [Library Herbert Bell], W. E. Gladstone, The Irish Question (1st ed., 1886), 58pp [Carty 1070]; Frederic Harrison, Mr Gladstone! – or Anarchy! (1996) [Carty 1104; Hyland 214, 220]; also The Irish Question (1886), 58pp. [Carty 1070; Hyland 220, 1995]; W. E. G[ladstone], Historical Catechism Concerning Ireland and Her Church (1885) [printed in Ballymena; Hyland 220]; Lord Eversley, Gladstone and Ireland: The Irish Parliament 1850-1894 [1st edn.] (1912); Justin McCarthy, The Story of Gladstone’s Life (Toronto 1898); John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 2 vols. (1905), viii, 1026; viii, 948, ports. Also, Thomas E. Webb, Ipse Dixit: or the Gladstonian Settlement of Ireland [2nd edn.] (1886) [attrib. to Thomas Maguire as Carty 1289] [Hyland 224, Dec. 1996]
Belfast Public Library holds 8 Irish-related works incl. The Irish Question (1886); A Speech on the Irish Church (1869); The Treatment of Irish Members and the Irish Political Prisoners, A Speech (1888).
William Allingham: A. P. Graves writes: ‘Lionel Johnson [in Treasury, ed. Rolleston and Brooke] has not done him justice in the matter of his assistance to the Irish cause if, as seems almost certain, Lawrence Bloomfield first fired Gladstone’s imagination upon the Irish Land Question.’ (Graves, Irish Literature and Musical Studies, 1913, p. 80.)
G. B. Shaw, O'Flaherty, V.C.: SIR PEARCE [rising and planting himself firmly behind the garden seat]. Well [...] O’Flaherty, [... e]ven if your mother’s political sympathies are really what you represent them to be, I should think that her gratitude to Gladstone ought to cure her of such disloyal prejudices. O’FLAHERTY [over his shoulder]. She says Gladstone was an Irishman, Sir. What call would he have to meddle with Ireland as he did if he wasn’t? (See full text in Irish Classics Library, infra.)
Oscar Wilde wrote to Gladstone: ‘I, and all who have Celtic blood in their veins, must ever honour and revere [one] to whom our country is deeply indebted’; ‘[and who] will lead us to the grandest and justest political victory of this age’ (Letters, pp.218. 219.)
J. H. Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (OUP 1991), writes: James Loughlin sees Ulster politicians of the period as having expressed no contractarian ideas and a ‘high degree of ideological and emotional commitment to Britain and [to] what they say was British values and traditions.’ (Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882-93, 1986, p.156.) There was a counterchallenged by Jackson (1989) who finds his sample untypical and considers the Ulster commitment to Britain more qualified than Loughlin imagines. (Whyte, pp.128-29.)
Daniel O'Connell: Gladstone acknowledged the formative influence of O’Connell in the 1880s. (See Gladstone in debate, 16 April 1883, in Hansard 3rd ser., CCLXXVIII, pp.1190-91, and W. E. H. Gladstone, ‘Daniel O’Connell’, in The Nineteenth Century, XXV, 1889.)
“Grand Old Man”: The nick-name G.O.M., was coined by Lord Rosebery, and features in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)