William Ewart Gladstone

Abstract The leading statesman of nineteenth-century Britain, a figure who bestrode the political world like a Colossus, is ‘Gladstone’ to modern biographers. In order to signal the difference between Wheeler’s approach and those of earlier biographers, the subject of this book is known as ‘William’, his baptismal name. His autobiographical fragments of 1892 included a disclaimer: ‘I do not indeed intend in these notes to give a history of the inner life, which I think has with me been extraordinarily dubious, vacillating, and (above all) complex.’ This book is about the spiritual dimension of his complex inner life. In tracing the movements of his heart and soul, the book works from the inner to the outer aspects of a rich and varied life, from William’s daily disciplines of prayer and reflection to his earnest attempts to follow the precepts of Christianity through action in the public realm and in private philanthropy, and in the writing of numerous reviews, articles, and books. He remained an independent intellectual, eschewing party labels within the Church of England and working out his own stance in relation to specific Liberal Party policies in politics. He was as much a man of letters as he was a politician. Later in his political career, ‘the people’s William’ appealed to public opinion through a series of national moral campaigns. His fiercest battles, however, were spiritual, as he castigated himself for falling short of the ideals set out in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, particularly with regard to sexual desire as he sought to rescue women from a life of prostitution and became obsessed with a former courtesan. His longest crusade was against the enemy within.