Why a new biography of W.E. Gladstone  Seminar

In Gladstone, God and Politics (2007), Richard Shannon pointed out that ‘the religious dimension for any practical interpretational effect simply does not exist’ in Roy Jenkins’s prize-winning biography of 1995.  (Jenkins thus followed in the tradition of John Morley in his official tombstone life (3 vols., 1903), the basis of all that followed.) 

David Bebbington’s The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics (2004), not a biography, fully delivers the promise of its title, focusing upon the statesman’s intellectual response to the theological and ecclesiological debates of his time.  In this talk Michael Wheeler reflects on the fact that academic treatments of Gladstone tend to focus upon the intellectual rather than the emotional and spiritual aspects of their subject:   intellectuals are interested in intellects. 

The clue to Michael’s new book project, a contribution to the Spiritual Lives series from OUP, is in the sub-title.  William Ewart Gladstone: the heart and soul of a statesman.