William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), four times Prime Minister of Great Britain, dominated the Liberal Party for thirty years, but ultimately divided it over the issue of Irish Home Rule, which he unsuccessfully championed. He brought to parliamentary politics a moral fervor which made him the personification of the Victorian Age, but which also challenged the complacency of its imperialistic assumptions. In this 1897 biography, the Liberal Irish member of Parliament, Justin McCarthy, presents a Gladstone still vividly remembered, rising to speak in the House of Commons among a host of illustrious contemporaries, including Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Palmerston, and Sir Robert Peel, or expounding his views to a bored and baffled Queen Victoria, who called him a "ridiculous, wild, and incomprehensible old fanatic." (Pamela Nagami)
