Ruth Clayton Windscheffel. Reading Gladstone.
Kent, Christopher
Ruth Clayton Windscheffel. Reading Gladstone. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008. 330 pp.; US $69.95 ISBN 9780230007659
Reading Gladstone raises interesting questions about books,
intellectuals, politics and power. With fully certified intellectuals
now occupying the White House and Stornoway, the Ottawa residence of the
leader of the opposition, and one of the United States' least
intellectual presidents busying himself with his memorial library, the
case of William E. Gladstone has a certain contemporary resonance.
Although the term "intellectual" had not yet entered the
English language, Gladstone was an unapologetic intellectual who served
four terms as Britain's prime minister, her greatest prime minister
during the century of Britain's greatest power, before finally
retiring from that office at age eighty-four. He devoted his last years
to building St. Deiniol's Library, which still exists as a
testament to his passion for books and his belief in their power. The
very numbers hold a certain fascination: Windscheffel's
bibliography lists twenty-eight books and pamphlets written by
Gladstone, and twenty-four articles and chapters. Not bad, even for a
modern academic career. We also know what Gladstone read, thanks to his
published diaries, where he carefully recorded some 17,500 book and
pamphlet tides, excluding his newspaper reading. We know, too, that he
bought some 35,000 books over the course of his life for his own
library. In addition, he was a book selector for the London Library,
bought books for the Carlton Club, and was honoured by the National
Liberal Club's naming its library after him. It was Gladstone who
persuaded Andrew Carnegie to buy the celebrated 60,000-volume library of
the great historian Lord Acton to prevent it from being auctioned off.
But the details Windscheffel gives us of Gladstone's own
library are of greatest interest. The Temple of Peace, as his library
and study was called, was significantly open to others even when he was
in it. Users had to remain silent and conventional rules of sociability,
particularly that it was rude for a gentleman to ignore a lady in his
presence, were suspended. Gladstone simply denied the existence of
others in this room when he was there, which made ir exempt from the
spatial gendering so prevalent in the Victorian world. This made it
easier for women to use his library, which in many houses was considered
a male space. The Temple of Peace was also a lending library. The only
condition was that users had to enter in the two-volume registry their
names, the book's title, and the dates of borrowing and return,
which reveal that the majority of borrowers were women, and a
significant number were neighbours and non-family members and even
lower-class women including household servants.
It was Gladstone's conviction that books were the "bonds
and rivets of the race" that led him to build and endow St.
Deiniol's Library, which remains unique in Britain as the only such
institution created by a prime minister. Unlike the presidential
libraries of the United States (and Saskatoon's unique Diefenbaker
Canada Centre), self-celebration was not its purpose. Though St.
Deiniol's eventually received Gladstone's library, his papers
are mostly in the British Library. It seems to have been chiefly
intended as a place of religious study for clergymen, in keeping with
Gladstone's own deeply religious nature and the content of much of
his library. Windscheffel devotes some attention to the contested
question of Gladstone's beliefs, arguing persuasively that he did
not become an embattled religious conservative, and that St.
Deiniol's was not intended as either a bastion of religious defence
or a place of unworldly retreat.
Not the least of the merits of Reading Gladstone is that it also
tells us how Gladstone read. For instance, he would often make an index
for a book, and he was a frequent annotator, annotating in a code (which
Windscheffel has unlocked) and to an extent usually in inverse
proportion to his approval. He also read three books at a time, rotating
light and heavy reading and refreshing his mind with fiction. He read
aloud, which was of course a common Victorian family practice, but even
on his wedding night Gladstone read aloud to his bride from Walter
Scott's Kenilworth and the Bible. He also read Tennyson aloud to
prostitutes whom he attempted to rescue. Being highly sexed he may also
have found in such situations an opportunity to exercise his will power;
this too, perhaps, in his reading (alone) of pornography.
Interesting too is the author's discussion of the political
implications of Gladstone as bookworm and of his overcoming some of the
negative, feminizing effects that his reputation as a scholar and
intellectual had on his career by recasting his public image. The later,
more populist Gladstone deliberately turned his hobby of chopping down
trees on his estate into a public theatre of virility by staging what we
now call photo opportunities in which he posed, axe in hand, without
jacket, tie, or even hat. But he never completely abandoned the book in
his image-making. Windscheffel provides several illustrations of him
reading, the most remarkable of which shows the older Gladstone reading
in his library, recumbent on a chaise longue. Despite this traditionally
feminine pose, he radiates masculine strength and dynamism. Current
intellectuals in politics might well take note of this portrait.
CHRISTOPHER KENT
University of Saskatchewan
