Did Gladstone arrive in Corfu a conservative and leave a liberal?

“The morning brought us the sight of the grand Acroceraunian range: with brilliant sun & mild air,” wrote William Ewart Gladstone in his diary of November 24, 1858 as he sailed into the Ionian Islands for his strange new job as the Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary of the tiny British colonies, an assignment that led to ridicule from enemies and embarrassment from friends. “Then Corfu: which I do not think is like a ῥινόν from the North: but Homer probably meant a mirage.” The footnotes to Gladstone’s diary explain that ῥινόν in The Odyssey is variously translated as “ox-skin, hence shield, or mist, hence, in Gladstone’s view, mirage.” Gladstone was thinking of Odysseus’s trip into what is now the island of Corfu in Book Five of The Odyssey:

“Full seventeen nights he cut the foaming way:
The distant land appear'd the following day:
Then swell'd to sight Phaeacia's dusky coast,
And woody mountains, half in vapours lost;
That lay before him indistinct and vast,
Like a broad shield amid the watery waste.”

That Gladstone had Homer on his mind while he sailed into the mist is not a big surprise. Corfu fascinated Gladstone, a sometime Homeric scholar, because it was believed to be the land where Homer’s Odysseus told his tall tales of battling a Cyclops, and a witch, sea monsters, and giants to an audience of Phaecians. Homer was no casual obsession for Gladstone. Just eight months before he had published a massive, three-volume, 1,600-page treatise entitled Studies of Homer and the Homeric Age (Magnus 122). Homeric scholars scoffed, with one Oxfordian calling it “a mere nonsense.” (Aldous 97-98) But Gladstone was besotted with Odysseus, and it was in his writings on Homer that he most clearly articulated an ideological transformation from conservative to liberal on some of the top issues of the day—an ideological transformation that was actualized just three months after his trip to Corfu ended, when he joined the ragtag coalition of radicals, liberals, and Whigs that would become the Liberal Party and eventually be led Gladstone for decades. In Corfu something changed in him that led Gladstone, previously labeled “the last hope of the stern unbending Tories” by Thomas Babington Macaulay, to become known widely as “The People’s William;” one of his era’s primary definitions of liberalism. Studies of Homer and the Homeric Age, said Gladstone scholar David Bebbington, “should be seen as the climax of his intellectual career as a Conservative” (Bebbington 177).

Historians have debated for more than a century why Gladstone made the decisions to go to Corfu and to join the liberals. But few have examined the impact of Corfu on his ideological transformation. This comic episode, coming as it did after four long years out of high office, was a major factor that resulted in his sudden decision just weeks later to leave the Tories. He arrived in Corfu a politically isolated conservative. He left it as a seedling of a new liberal.

Why did Gladstone, a singular young star on Britain’s parliamentary stage, accept this comically quixotic assignment 1,400 miles from the political scene in London? Both contemporaries and historians have speculated the whole thing was a set-up by his rival, Benjamin Disraeli, and Disraeli’s best friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton. “Now that we have got him down, let us keep him down,” Disraeli is reported to have declared, infuriating Gladstone and reportedly motivating his ire at the Conservative Party.

Gladstone’s friends thought the decision to go to Corfu was farcical. Richard Aldous in his 2006 double biography The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli reports that they viewed the incident as resembling something out of Gilbert and Sullivan (Aldous 110). Gladstone should have stayed home, they said, and built on his position as a star in the parliamentary scene. Former Prime Minister Lord John Russell called the mission to Corfu “a curious one” and even suggested Gladstone had accepted the assignment in order to be absent on discussions of electoral reform.  Gladstone friend and fellow Peelite Sir James Graham called the mission “a sad mess.” Some of his contemporaries believed Disraeli, then head of the House of Commons and a top leader in the Conservative Party, had trapped him into agreeing to make the trip. Another Peelite friend, Abraham Hayward, said the government prided itself on “having made a prize of Gladstone.” Graham said Gladstone “fancies he is not hooked.” However, if he were to break the line that connected him and Disraeli, Graham said, “Dizzy’s harpoon will be in him” (Hawkins 84).

Historiography

What was going on in Gladstone’s head? He had decided to accept his “Lilliputian” destiny, he told a friend. But why?  For their part, historians have debated why Gladstone took the assignment for almost two centuries. Travis L. Crosby in The Two Mr. Gladstones lays out the historiography of the question of why Gladstone went to Corfu more comprehensively than anyone else. The Disraeli quote that triggered Gladstone’s transition and a very important observation that gets relegated to a mere footnote also help make Crosby the right guide for this section of our tour:

“Even more surprising than the ministry’s invitation to Gladstone was his interest in the project. Historians have since tried to puzzle it out. Morley emphasizes the decline of Catherine Gladstone's health since the death of her sister Mary Lyttelton. Matthew believes that Gladstone understood the strategic importance of the islands within the context of the traditional European rivalries in the eastern Mediterranean and thus saw his role as a significant one. Pointon thinks Gladstone was intellectually intrigued with the visit to offshore classical Greece: he could continue his researches on the Homeric age in a most congenial atmosphere. Shannon, however, sees Gladstone as "frustrated, impatient, and restless"; Ionia offered an "opportunity for escape." It may be that all these reasons played a part in his decision to go. But above all, the lonian mission represented for Gladstone the ladder lowered to the bottom of his well. Ionia might provide a resolution to his political isolation, or it could become a kind of restful limbo. In any case, taking the position would be a revival of the strategy of avoidance--to the extent of removing himself entirely from the sources of stress in England” (Crosby 91).

But it was Aldous who suggested the most intriguing explanation. “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Gladstone’s Ionian adventure had been anything other than an elaborate setup,” Aldous writes (Aldous 110). This was a popular point of view among the moderate Peelite wing of the Conservative Party, which supported Gladstone because he was one of them. “Holding this office meant that Gladstone vacated his seat in the Commons,” HCG Matthew explains in a footnote in his Gladstone 1809-1898. “Some Peelites indeed see the whole lonian episode as a Disraelian plot to draw Gladstone into a by-election which he would probably lose.” (Matthew 165). Thus the motive for Disraeli to send Gladstone to Corfu was to get rid of him. 

The recollections of an undersecretary in Bulwer-Lytton’s Colonial Office, however, clinched the interpretation. As Crosby reports: “When Bulwer-Lytton asked Carnarvron's advice, he recommended Gladstone because of his abilities and because he was unconnected with any major party at that time. Disraeli agreed: The place with its classical aestheticism suits him [Gladstone] very well. But as Disraeli also added, in a remark closer to the truth, ‘Now that we have got him down, let us keep him down.’” In a telling footnote, Crosby adds: “These words were repeated to Gladstone, which infuriated him, and he returned to England with feelings of anger against the Conservative party. This was, Carnarvon believed, a turning point in Gladstone's relations with the Conservatives” (Crosby 90, 241).

Thus, one catty remark from Disraeli confirms two things at once via a first-hand witness: First, that Gladstone’s trip to Corfu was the result of Disraeli’s mischief, and second, that it resulted directly in Gladstone’s accepting a new home on the Left.

Ionian Politics

After seeing the “mirage” of mist on the horizon of Corfu, Gladstone launched into a busy day. His diary for that first day continues:

“Landed with military honours and other forms at one. Presented to the Senators & their Secretaries by my old friend Sir J. Young. Four hours with him on Ionian politics. We had a dinner party in the evening. Began to arrange & settle in our room: & to turn my address into Italian.”

We know what Gladstone was there to do, if not why he wanted the gig. Secretary of State for the Colonies Bulwer-Lytton offered Gladstone the job of Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary to advise Queen Victoria on what to do with its tiny colonial possessions while the locals clamored to be once again made part of Greece.  'To reconcile a race that speaks the Greek language to the science of practical liberty seemed to me a task that might be a noble episode in your career,' Bulwer-Lytton told Gladstone (Morley 594).

“My Lilliputian die is cast and I am going,” Gladstone wrote when he decided to go to Corfu. “I hope you will not disapprove of this proceeding … Only be assured of one thing: it is but the consequence of having become entangled unawares in such circumstances as left me no right to secede.” He had agonized over the move. “My circumspection, perhaps wretched in quality, has in mere amount been enormous.” (Shannon 365).

The assignment may have been Lilliputian, but the consequences were in some ways Brobdingnagian.

Corfu was, and still is, a 35-by-11-mile island with a population of 100,000. It, like the rest of the Ionian Islands, is now part of Greece, having been ceded to that nation by Britain in 1864. The islands had become part of the British empire in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. However, Greece won its independence in 1830, after which the people of the Ionian Islands began campaigning for what they called Enosis, or union with Greece. The situation was similar to that of Italy, which at the time was a group of nation-states with different monarchical rulers, including some under the thumb of the Austrian empire. (This comparison was surely not lost on the people of the Ionian Islands when, for example, Verdi’s opera Nabucco, a symbol of Italian unification, was performed on Corfu in 1844.) Gladstone arrived with limited sympathy for Italian independence, and an ambivalence about the Ionian Islands’ desire to join Greece. Writing in The Irish Times, journalist Richard Pine explained in September 2014, “As a British politician he had to support Britain’s continued role; as a passionate Philhelene he could see an unanswerable case for union with Greece. His eventual report was typically ambiguous and ambivalent, and was rejected by both sides. Perhaps his experience moved him towards the concept of Home Rule for Island twenty years later.” It’s my contention that the experience also moved him towards supporting self-government for the Italian peoples, and therefore to the Liberal Party.

Initially, the Ionians greeted Gladstone as their means to rally for union with Greece. John Morley, Gladstone’s first major biographer and still today one of the key biographers, writes of his trip to another of the islands, Cephalonia:

In Cephalonia he was received by a tumultuous mob of a thousand persons, whom neither the drenching rains nor the unexpected manner of his approach across the hills could baffle. They greeted him with incessant cries for union with Greece, thrust disaffected papers into his carriage, and here and there indulged in cries of … down with the protectorate, down with the tyranny of fifty years. This exceptional disrespect he ascribed to what he leniently called the history of Cephalonia, meaning the savage dose of martial law nine years before. He justly took it for a marked symbol of the state of excitement at which under various influences the popular mind had arrived. Age and infirmity prevented the archbishop from coming to offer his respects, so after his levee Mr. Gladstone with his suite repaired to the archbishop. 'We found him,' says [Gladstone’s private secretary Arthur Gordon, the son of Lord Aberdeen] 'seated on a sofa dressed in his most gorgeous robes of gold and purple, over which flowed down a long white beard.... Behind him stood a little court of black-robed, black-bearded, black-capped, dark-faced priests. He is eighty-six years old, and his manners and appearance were dignified in the extreme. Speaking slowly and distinctly he began to tell Gladstone that the sole wish of Cephalonia was to be united to Greece, and there was something very exciting and affecting in the tremulous tones of the old man saying over and over again, “questa infelice isola, questa isola infelice,” [“this unhappy island, this unhappy island”] as the tears streamed down his cheeks and long silvery beard. It was like a scene in a play.'” (Morley 604).

Mr. Gladstone condemned the existing system as bad for Britain and bad for the Islands, Morley continues: “Circumstances made it impossible for him to suggest amendment by throwing the burden bodily off [British] shoulders, and at that time he undoubtedly regarded union with Greece as in itself undesirable for the Ionians. Circumstances and his own love of freedom made it equally impossible to recommend the violent suppression of the constitution. The only course left open was to turn the mockery of free government into a reality, and this operation he proposed to carry out with a bold hand.” (Morley 611).

But Gladstone was not long for the islands. He discovered that keeping the post in Corfu meant he would have to surrender his seat in parliament, representing Oxford. Having just been granted the commission by Queen Victoria, he then had to turn around and ask her to rescind it. He was not going to give up that seat. He stood for re-election unopposed and kept his job. 

Gladstone returned to London on March 8, but not before a stop in Italy that he would eventually credit with his switch to the Liberal Party. His anger at Disraeli apparently combined with a newfound sensitivity to the plight of oppressed nations to drive him to join the Liberals. Corfu started him on that path.

Italy changes everything

Wrestling with the people demanding self-government and a union with Greece seems to have changed Gladstone. When he arrived in Corfu, he was negative about Italy’s goal of unity. After he left, he headed straight to Italy and announced he would support it. Corfu had changed his mind. While in Italy he met with the prime minister of the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the Count of Cavour, who had modernized the northern Italian states’ economies and would go on to become the leading architect of Italian unification. Historians agree that the meeting led to his support for Italy. “During previous visits he had been skeptical about the uniting of the Italian peninsula, but by the spring of 1859 the combination of the tide of excitement sweeping the north and Cavour's assured persuasiveness not only stilled his doubts but kindled his enthusiasm,” writes Roy Jenkins in his biography Gladstone.  

Jenkins discounts the possibility that Corfu changed Gladstone’s mind, but his argument proves the opposite. “For his future, and that of British politics, Gladstone's three hours with Cavour were more important than his three months in Corfu,” Jenkins asserts. (Jenkins 198). But did Gladstone really make so major a transition in just three hours? This seems impossible. It's much more likely that Gladstone's perspective on Italy changed because the thousands of people lobbying him to unite the Ionian Islands with Greece changed his mind. Neither side in Corfu, natives or British, liked or trusted him as he tried to ride the middle road in his policy suggestions, and he must have known he had to pick a side. Gladstone’s enthusiastic embrace of all things Greek reportedly drove his British colleagues to distrust and ridicule him while he was in Corfu (Magnus 136). It’s that enthusiasm that transferred to his view of Italy.  

Regardless of what caused the switch, Gladstone himself said his enthusiasm for Italy led to his joining the new Liberal Party. He suddenly found common ground with Lord Palmerston, who was to be the prime minister in the new Liberal coalition after June 6 1859. Lord Stanmore writes in his biography of Sidney Herbert:

The position of affairs in Italy had an important influence on the working of party politics at home. During 1858, Mr. Gladstone had, step by step, drawn nearer to Lord Derby's Government. He had accepted from it a mission to Corfu, and was in that island at the beginning of 1859. He had no wish for a fresh measure of Parliamentary Reform, and he abhorred the system of election by ballot, which a few years later became law on his proposal. But he had a profound antipathy to Austria and the Austrians, and an equally profound sympathy with Italian aspirations for unity and freedom; and as the Conservative Ministry was strongly prejudiced against the Italian cause, and the Liberal leaders as strongly in its favour, this powerful attraction produced a great change in the attitude, and even in the opinions, of Mr. Gladstone. (Stanmore 180).

Previously Gladstone had been no fan of Palmerston. “There were broadly only two subjects on which Gladstone agreed with Palmerston,” Jenkins writes. “The first was Italy, and the second was their shared coolness (although differently expressed) to an extension of the franchise. It was the prominence of these two issues, the first still more than the second, in the three months following Gladstone's return from Corfu which made Palmerston temporarily less repugnant to him than was Disraeli and led him to make a choice of direction which had the most momentous permanent effects” (Jenkins 198).

One of those effects was that Gladstone’s sympathy for oppressed people abroad led to his changing his mind about expanding the vote at home. “There is no doubt that his sympathy with oppressed peoples abroad came first in order of time, and modified his domestic views,” writes W.E. Williams in the only book on Gladstone’s transition to liberalism, The Rise of Gladstone to the Leadership of the Liberal Party 1859 to 1868. Then he quotes Lord Stanmore: “Parliamentary reform when accompanied by a sympathetic attitude toward Sardinia (...or towards Greece or Italy...) seemed far more tolerable to him than it had appeared to be shortly before.” The parenthetical statement about Greece and Italy was added by Williams to Stanmore’s words. “[Gladstone] began to observe conditions at home with more sympathy.”

This transition to supporting domestic rights could not have happened in a mere three hour meeting with Cavour. More likely, Corfu opened the door of Gladstone’s sympathy for oppressed peoples, and Cavour had only to walk through it. 

Isolation breeds change

Gladstone’s decisions to go to Corfu, and to switch to the Liberal Party, were also motivated by a desperation for a home in a party. “For thirteen years, the middle space of my life, I have been cast out of party connection: severed from my old party and loath irrevocably to join a new one," Gladstone said by way of explaining why he switched to the Liberal Party in June of 1859 (Hawkins 261).

He had been out of high office for four years, since 1855 when he last resigned the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. But his isolation had really gone on longer than that. Gladstone had for all intents and purposes left the Conservative Party in 1846, after his mentor Sir Robert Peel had ended the so-called Corn Laws, which imposed tariffs on imported grain and therefore—according first to the liberal Whigs and then to Peel—raised the cost of bread and other food. Gladstone supported Peel, and when Disraeli successfully led a rebellion against Peel in support of the Corn Laws, Gladstone left the party. He was a Peelite, not aligned with any party, when the trip to Corfu happened, and it was that desperation in part that had led him to accept the gig. But when he was offered a position in the government by Disraeli in 1858, he rejected it vociferously.

Gladstone’s acceptance of the new role with the Liberals was also probably motivated by the age of his new superiors. Palmerston and Russell were both near the end of their careers, and Disraeli as the potential head of the post-Peel Conservative Party was much younger. Thus his trip to prime minister was likely to be shorter with the Liberals. The new post he was offered with the Liberals was one of the top posts in the government, and was likely to make that transition easier. “The one condition Gladstone made in his acceptance of a post in Palmerston's cabinet was that he be given the Chancellorship of the Exchequer,” Hawkins writes (262). This peeved many of his colleagues in the new party, but Russell and Palmerston wanted Gladstone’s tongue on their side and not on the other side.

Some historians think Gladstone’s embrace of Italy was motivated by politics. But his ambivalence in Corfu shows he was already beginning to make an ideological switch, and the depth of his transition shows that it was not done for political expedience.  

The results of Corfu

Once the dam was broken, Gladstone began taking more liberal positions. The year after he returned from Corfu, he supported a free press by eliminating the “paper duties” that made political information available to the masses. Robert Kelly in The Transatlantic Persuasion says this was a breakthrough for Gladstone:

“He introduced his new directions in 1860 by repealing the paper duties, in a tumultuous struggle in which the Lords were humiliated, making cheap newspapers-and therefore political information—available to the masses. He also in this way won the lasting devotion of the new popular newspaper press that was revolutionizing British politics and becoming the voice of the rising Liberalism. Gladstone was afforded a clamorous reception in the North Country shortly after this victory, astonishing him and angering the aristocracy, who were now beginning to look upon him, as Lord Clarendon put it, as "an audacious innovator with an insatiable desire for popularity."

Not that tracking the change in Gladstone’s thought is always easy. He was cagey about political philosophy. David Bebbington in his excellent intellectual biography The Mind of Gladstone searches the documents Gladstone left behind for traces of what Gladstonian Liberalism is, and finds few hits. He even finds a quote from Gladstone saying political philosophy is not England’s thing: “We of this island are not great political philosophers,” Gladstone said. Bebbington says Gladstone found the “ancients” more “concerned than the moderns with the business of government ‘as an art and as a science.’” Christianity, he felt, replaced political philosophy with a “preoccupation with individual ethics,” Bebbington says.

Perhaps Gladstone's view of the ancient's comfort with political philosophy is one reason that the clearest articulation of his ideological change on the key issue of the day came in his writings on Homer, not politics. It is true that Gladstone once slipped up and stated his support of eventual democracy in a parliamentary debate. “I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger,” Gladstone declared, “is morally entitled to come within the pale of the constitution.” But Gladstone immediately backed off those words, reaching to rather silly depths to try to wiggle out of them.

Williams says this statement “was not a mere indiscretion. It was the result, though he did not admit it at the time, of a long process of development.” But Gladstone also would come eventually to describe himself as “an out-and-out inequalitarian,” as Morley chronicles:

“Something like a little amicable duel took place at one time between [Victorian polymath and writer John] Ruskin and Mr. G., when Ruskin directly attacked his host as a 'leveller.' 'You see you think one man is as good as another and all men equally competent to judge aright on political questions; whereas I am a believer in an aristocracy.' And straight came the answer from Mr. Gladstone, 'Oh dear, no! I am nothing of the sort. I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inequalitarian,' a confession which Ruskin treated with intense delight, clapping his hands triumphantly.”

A clearer view of Gladstone’s transition on the subject of democracy comes in his Homeric scholarship. A few months before he went to Corfu, in Gladstone’s Studies of Homer and the Homeric Age, he wrote disparagingly of the system of rule by majorities, or as he called it decision by “numbers.” Gladstone said Agammemnon’s forces in the Trojan War did not decide issues by majority rule—and he said that Britain doesn’t and shouldn’t, either.

“Decision by majorities is as much an expedient, as lighting by gas. In adopting it as a rule, we are not realizing perfection, but bowing to imperfection. We follow it as best for us, not as best in itself. The only right to command, as Burke has said, resides in wisdom and virtue. In their application to human affairs, these great powers have commonly been qualified, on the one hand by tradition and prepossession, on the other hand by force. Decision by majorities has the great merit of avoiding, and that by a test perfectly definite, the last resort to violence; and of making force itself the servant instead of the master of authority. But our country still rejoices in the belief, that she does not decide all things by majorities. The first Greeks neither knew the use of this numerical dogma, nor the abuse of it. They did not employ it as an instrument, and in that they lost: but they did not worship it as an idol, and in that they greatly gained. Votes were not polled in the Olympus of Homer; yet a minority of influential gods carry the day in favour of the Greeks against the majority, and against their Head” (Studies 116-117).

However, when Gladstone revised that work for a new book called Juventus Mundi, he reversed his verdict on decisions by numbers, saying that “the doctrine of majorities” is caused by “a more advanced social development” (Juventus 434). Historians Bebbington and Frank M. Turner have pointed out this marked change (Bebbington 179, Turner 242).This change of mind on the key issue of the day is a major transition. It came just after Britain’s Second Reform Act passed in 1867. While Disraeli was responsible for the passage of the final version of the act, Gladstone had fought for reform as well. And once the reforms were in effect, it was Gladstone who benefited, replacing Disraeli as prime minister on the strength of new working-class voters. 

In 1864 Gladstone voted for the Ionian Islands to rejoin Greece after all. This demonstrates that the ultimate consequence of his trip to Corfu was that it increased his sympathy for self-governing peoples. His vote was on the winning side, and the islands rejoined Greece and remain part of that nation today.

To interpret Gladstone's move to the left as stemming from Corfu appears to be wholly original. Most scholars emphasize the gradualness of Gladstone’s transformation. Morley finds Gladstone’s transformation to liberalism “protracted.” Jenkins calls his motion to the left in 1859 “crabwise,” meaning a sideways walk. Blake says that the differences between politicians like Gladstone and Disraeli in politics of the time appear small to us today. Woodrow Wilson is the only one who seems to think Gladstone’s transformation to liberalism was a speedy one. “As far as I can see [Gladstone’s] transition was a short one,” he said. “His liberalism matured and strengthened rapidly.” But Wilson saw the transition as having happened long before he joined the Liberal party, when Robert Peel was trying to take the Tories in a more moderate direction. So, the transition obviously took longer than Wilson implies.

That gradualness was not imagined by scholars, but it obscures the question of where the new path originated. What hasn’t been examined sufficiently is the answer to the question of whether Gladstone arrived in Corfu a conservative and left a liberal. The answer is clear: Gladstone was a Conservative at heart when he landed in the Ionian Islands, and began his path to what the world would come to know as Gladstonian Liberalism. Ironically, it was Disraeli who suffered for it. Like the hero of his first novel, Vivian Grey, Dizzy had concocted a Machiavellian gambit that backfired. Gladstone became his toughest rival for decades thereafter.

Select Bibliography

Aldous, Richard. The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli. New York: Random House, 2006.

Ashton, Rosemary. One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858. Yale University Press, 2017.

Beales, Derek. England and Italy 1859-60. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961.

Bebbington, David. The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Crosby, Travis L. The Two Mr. Gladstones: A Study in Psychology and History. Yale University Press, 1997.

Gladstone, William E. Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age. Oxford University Press, 1869.

Gladstone, William E. Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Volumes 1, 2 and 3. Oxford University Press. 1859.

Hawkins, Agnus. Parliament, Party and the Art of Politics in Britain, 1855-59. Stanford University Press, 1987.

Homer; Pope, Alexander, translator. The Odyssey. Project Gutenberg, 2002.

Jagger, Peter J., ed. Gladstone. London: Hambledon Press, 1998.

Jenkins, Roy. Gladstone. London: Macmillan, 1995.

Kelley, Robert. The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.

Magnus, Philip. Gladstone: A Biography. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1954.

Matthew, H.C.G. Gladstone 1809-1898. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Matthew, H.C.G., ed. The Gladstone Diaries Volumes 5: 1855-1860. Oxford University Press, 1985.

Morley, John. The Life of Gladstone, Volume 1. Project Gutenberg, 2007.

Parry, Jonathan. The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain. Yale University Press, 1993.

Pointon, Marcia. "W.E. Gladstone as an Art Patron and Collector," Victorian Studies 19, p. 73-98, 1975.

Pine, Richard. The Irish Times. September 2014. Reprinted at https://durrelllibrarycorfu.wordpress.com/2016/06/04/corfu/

Shannon, Richard. Gladstone Volume One 1809-1865. London: Methuen, 1982.

Southgate, Donald. The Passing of the Whigs 1832-1886. London: Macmillan, 1965.

Stanmore, Lord. Sidney Herbert, Lord Herbert of Lea: A Memoir. London: John Murray, 1906.

Turner, Frank M. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. Yale University Press, 1981.

Williams, W.E. The Rise of Gladstone to the Leadership of the Liberal Party 1859-1868. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1973.