(DOWNLOAD) "Tollemache's Talks with Mr. Gladstone." by Nineteenth-Century Prose * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Tollemache's Talks with Mr. Gladstone.
- Author : Nineteenth-Century Prose
- Release Date : January 22, 1989
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 172 KB
Description
William Gladstone was by the 1890s a legend to most Englishmen, the "almost superhuman" embodiment of the highest middle-class ideals, preaching politics in the least common denominator to the masses. We now know of course that the myth and the man were not the same, (1) but unraveling the complexities of Gladstone's character will necessarily be a long process. As a non-political author, for instance, he significantly influenced the literary, religious, and historical landscape of late-Victorian England, (2) yet historians are just beginning to come to terms with that compulsion to analyze which marked his character throughout life, and which frequently led to the publication of articles, reviews, pamphlets, and books, including at least 180 non-political items. (3) This prodigious written commentary on Victorian intellectual life is made the more telling by Gladstone's own admission that it was "so easy to write, but to write honestly nearly impossible." (4) One means of discovering a more honest, if less rigorous, Gladstone is through the study of his conversations with Lionel Tollemache, Biarritz acquaintance and fellow author. And while it is clear that Gladstone's "stories and comments were well-honed by the 1890s" when most of the conversations took place, (5) it is equally plain that they contain an aspect of truth either edited out of published works or ignored in print. Thus it was with enthusiasm that Gladstone scholars learned that Harvester Press and St. Martin's Press were in 1984 to jointly re-issue the third revised edition of Lionel A. Tollemache's Talks with Mr. Gladstone, along with an introduction by Asa Briggs, and a selection of biographical documents, under the title Gladstone's Boswell, Late Victorian Conversations. A happier choice scarcely could have been made for either the Gladstonian or the Victorianist generally, for Talks is a model of late Victorian anecdotal portraiture. Already Tollemache (1838-1919) was a man of letters in his own right, having published numerous articles in the Spectator, Fortnightly Review, and Journal of Education; two volumes of essays, Safe Studies and Stones of Stumbling; and his Memoir of Jowett. He was unparalleled, according to the Daily Chronicle, in "recollecting or connecting the characteristic sayings and doings of a distinguished man, and piecing them together in a finished mosaic" (xiii). His conversations with Gladstone are "packed with significant allusions and assessments" (xv) referring to more than three hundred people and almost a hundred literary works, ranging from Virgil and Aristotle in antiquity to Bagehot, Disraeli, and George Eliot in their own day. Politics and poetry, theology, criticism, the novel, and biography each find substantive room in Tollemache's record.
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