Reading Gladstone

This interdisciplinary study explores how book culture functioned in the life and milieu of one of the nineteenth century's most complex figures. Spanning the statesman's long life, it presents key case studies illuminating the constant and fundamental interplay between reading, life and politics which characterised Gladstone's world.

• art
• Case Studies
• culture
• drama
• drawing
• English literature
• history
• history of literature
• interdisciplinary
• literary studies
• literature
• peace
• play
• politics
• temple
• British and Irish Literature

'Reading Gladstone is a sophisticated study, written in a remarkably mature and accessible style...Windscheffel is not only good at reading Gladstone: she also has much to tell us about the Victorian Age and its Church.' - Professor Wheeler, The Church Times

'A splendid study...' - telegraph.co.uk

'Dr Windscheffel deserves to be congratulated on producing one of the most original and thought-provoking books to have appeared on this subject...In this superbly researched book...she has produced a perceptive, sympathetic and brilliant reconstruction of an intimately and yet publicly important dimension of the personality and career of one of the greatest Liberal leaders of all times.' Eugenio Biagini, Journal of Liberal History

'Historians and other scholars of Victorian culture are privileged to be able to benefit from Ruth Clayton Windscheffel's exploration of Gladstone's reading and the world that he created through that reading.' Reviews in History

RUTH CLAYTON WINDSCHEFFEL is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Theology at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie in the modern history of Britain and its empire, with a particular emphasis on the political, religious, and print cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently conducting research on the Jezreelites, a late nineteenth-century Southcottian sect, under the auspices of the Faculty of Theology's Prophecy Project. Reading Gladstone is her first book.