Gladstone

St Deniol’s Library—the unique residential study facility at Hawarden, established and maintained by the Gladstone Memorial Fund—is a vibrant academic hub. It is located as much on the intellectual border between academic and popular discussion of Gladstone and his legacy as it is on the geographical frontier between Flintshire and Cheshire. The library hosts an annual Gladstone conference, which is certainly the most hospitable in my academic year, and special events—such as the conference marking the bicentenary of Gladstone’s birth, funded by the Irish government, of which this volume is effectively the conference proceedings. The range of scholars contributing to the collection, who range from senior professors to current Ph.D. students, epitomises the inclusive approach to scholarship which St Deniol’s encourages. The work of up-and-coming scholars such as John-Paul McCarthy, who studies the religious and legal influences on Gladstone’s framing of the Government of Ireland Bill of 1886, is as valuable in its insights as is the analysis of the contrasts between the Irish and Scottish Unions by Alvin Jackson, who has emerged as the leading Irish political historian of the last decade. In many ways this book is a worthy successor to a fine earlier collection edited by Bebbington and Swift (Gladstone Centenary Essays [2000]; rev. ante, cxvii [2002], 136–7), in that it is as focused on Gladstone’s intellectual development and lasting political legacy as it is on the extraordinary career which the ‘old Parliamentary hand’ enjoyed

Archaeology · Framing (construction · Frontier · Government (linguistics · Irish · Library science · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · History · Irish and British Studies · Law