Ok, I'm out. DNF @ p. 138.

After another way-too-long section about the love lives of both Disraeli and Gladstone, I got a description about how Disraeli became a favourite of Queen Vic's. 

Then we have this:

1862 Exhibition

The parliamentary delegation stood together gossiping in a close gaggle only occasionally bothering to glance at the exhibits that surrounded them. Throughout the hall were great shows of armaments – uneasy symbols of British military prowess following a below-par war in the Crimea – and more crassly commercial merchandise that would soon earn this showcase the unkind popular nickname ‘the Palace of Puffs’. This was the follow-up to the Great Exhibition of 1851, now moved to a venue (later the Natural History Museum) just off Cromwell Road. The Queen had insisted that this new exhibition must still go ahead despite the death of Albert, but she did not bother to attend. With the energising patronage of the Prince Consort gone, and the Queen absent, this grand opening seemed flat and routine. ‘This is not so fascinating a one as that you remember when you made me an assignation by the crystal [palace],’ Disraeli afterwards wrote disappointedly to Mrs Brydges Willyams of Torquay.

Now, I know for a fact that this is incorrect. The Natural History Museum was not designed until 1864, it was not opened until 1899.

The building that our author refers to as the Palace of Puffs is the building that is now the Victoria and Albert Museum, and which previously housed a museum dedicated to manufacturing. 

Given that the history of both museums are easy to verify - and the NHM was famously purpose-built as directed by Richard Owen to house the natural history section that was previously housed in the British Museum, I am doubtful about the veracity of other "facts" presented in this book.

I doubt that I am missing out on much.

115 pages in and this is getting a little more interesting. Well, ... sort of. The author is still basically throwing together lists of names and hopes that the reader knows all of them and can make some sense of it while forgetting that the author hasn't really relayed a lot of complex information at all. 

This was one of the better sections in the book, and I think it shows what I mean when saying that the book lacks depths:

"Willis’s Rooms, King St, St James’s, London, 6 June 1859

 

The burble of excited chatter came suddenly to an end. More than two hundred and seventy faces turned expectantly to look at the door through which two elderly gentlemen had entered. Both moved slowly towards a raised dais. The older of the two, cheerful and pugnacious in demeanour, was first up the steps. Following behind was his considerably shorter companion who, though younger, was less fleet of foot. When he stumbled, the first man put out his hand to assist him up on to the platform. All those watching burst spontaneously into enthusiastic cheering. In that moment of comradely thoughtfulness the Liberal party was born. It was, wrote a later grandee of the party, ‘[the] nineteenth-century equivalent of Martin Luther nailing his notice to the church door in Wittenberg or of the embattled farmers by the rood bridge at Lexington firing “the shot heard around the world”’. For the first man was Lord Palmerston, and the second was his rival for the premiership, Lord John Russell.

Both men delivered rousing speeches in which they called for unity and promised each to serve under the other. Next up was the great Radical, John Bright, who offered his ‘cordial support’. Then Sidney Herbert gave the proceedings a Peelite blessing by calling for ‘a decided movement’ to challenge the Conservative government. ‘The entente cordiale seemed perfect,’ wrote afterwards the new Radical MP for Tavistock, Sir John Trelawny. At the meeting’s end, a motion was proposed that the united party should seize power through a vote of no confidence in Derby’s administration. Amid raucous cheering and banging of chairs, the motion was carried. ‘On the whole,’ Herbert reported to his wife, ‘it was very successful, no one objecting who was not expected to do so and others concurring who had not been reckoned on.’

This new party was at first sight a curious alliance. On the one hand there were the parliamentary Radicals. For much of the century they had led the charge against the outdated pre-industrial system, particularly ‘land monopoly’ – the special legal, financial and political privileges given to landowners – and the Church of England. Although they were a small cabal within the Commons, and even within this new political union, the Radicals provided much of the flavour and individuality of the Liberal message. Most of their leading figures, such as Bright and Richard Cobden, were rich businessmen who wanted to modernise the nation’s political practices in line with its economic and trading base. They masked this capitalist purpose behind the egalitarian language of ‘progress’ and of promoting the interests of ‘the people’ against ‘monopoly’ and ‘privilege’. Yet at heart, their politics came down to redefining the place of wealth-generating industrialists in a modern political society. ‘They cannot endure,’ summed up the constitutionalist Walter Bagehot, ‘they ought not to endure, that a rich, able manufacturer should be a less man than a stupid small squire.’

The Whigs might have seemed strange bedfellows for these Radical capitalists. Their prominent families – the great houses of Russell, Cavendish and the rest – were, after all, England’s most privileged landowners. Self-immolation by ending the ‘land monopoly’ was hardly likely to attract those for whom it had brought eight hundred years of supremacy. Yet other aspects did appeal. The Whigs revelled in their tradition as framers of the constitution – the idea of reinterpreting the principles of 1688 for a new industrial age appealed to many, not least to Russell (who had already done the trick once in 1832). This Whig commitment to constitutional improvement, married to an inclination to meddle (‘what is, is wrong’) and a detestation of the countryside, offered enough hope that the new alliance might prove a capable organ for progressive, metropolitan politics.

The first test came soon enough.

[...]"

This is all there is about the formation of the Liberal Party. It goes on to describe how Gladstone became a persona non grata at the very first stand the newly formed Liberals took against the Tory government, but again without a lot of background or analysis as to why Gladstone chose to do what he did.

It's not that this is a bad book, but there seem to have been a lot of missed opportunities.

**edit***

Three pages later, Gladstone is suddenly a Liberal. How did this happen? I re-read the last few pages and there is no explanation how the author suddenly jumped from Gladstone voting for and with the Tory government to Gladstone being a member of the Liberals.

Holy narrative jump, Batman!

Wtf?

The alliance that defeated the Derby administration had quickly formed a coalition government under George Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen. He was the first Scottish prime minister since Lord Bute in 1763, and had been the acknowledged leader of the Peelites since the death of Sir Robert in 1850. The life of this clever and handsome sixty-eight-year-old had been dominated by personal loss and suffering. Both his parents died before he was eleven, and his grandfather, the 3rd earl, took no interest in him. His bereavements continued when, aged only twenty-eight, his beloved wife died. She left him with three daughters, all of whom died before reaching twenty-one. Although he wore mourning for his first wife all his life, he married again; this second wife died before he was fifty, followed the next year by their fifteen-year-old daughter. In the face of this escalating tribulation, it was hardly surprising that Aberdeen became an increasingly reclusive character. He liked nothing better than to retreat to Haddo, his Scottish castle, to dwell on his misfortunes. ‘I have had enough of the world,’ he explained to a friend, ‘and would willingly have as little to do with it as is decent.’

This would have mattered less had he not been brilliant. He had been a classmate of Lord Palmerston at Harrow, but offered the mirror image of Pam’s belligerent style on the world stage. As foreign minister under Peel, Aberdeen’s shrewd and conciliatory diplomacy had produced a relationship with France that turned out to be happier than at almost any other time in the nineteenth century.

While there is a little more political content now, there is hardly any analysis, which is really disappointing. 

However, I'm at least now inspired to visit Haddo House at the weekend. It's very close by and I haven't been in years. 

This is an interesting book, but I'm not sure I'm going to enjoy the writing all the way through. Sure, the tone is light and it is interesting to learn about the two very different characters, but I feel this will erode into a "oh, gee, why am I reading this?" pretty soon if the author doesn't add some depth to it. 

I.e. it is fair enough to describe Disraeli's dress sense and his huge admiration for Byron:

Disraeli had lived his whole life under the influence of Byron. Now in 1835, the year he met Gladstone, he was dismissed by society as a sensationalist without either temperament or prospects. He was, at best, an amusement, or, at worst, an ostentatious Jewish upstart. He was famous, but greatness seemed beyond him. Disraeli had stretched every sinew of his character to emulate his hero.

Instead most dismissed him as mad, bad and dangerous to no one.

The descriptions of Gladstone are even more detailed ... and don't put him in a great light at all. The descriptions of his attempts to woo several women made him look rather pathetic in fact. 

So, what I am saying is that I am really not that interested in the social aspects of the relatioship between Disraeli and Gladstone and that I would like to see more about the political debate and more background to the issues that were discussed. 

For example, so far, the Corn Laws, the Copy Right Bill, and the 1832 Reform Act have all been mentioned, but without any detail or background at all, whereas Disraeli's and Gladstone's "home life" have been scrutinised in great detail.

No sooner had Gladstone left Oxford than he plunged into London’s political milieu with its masculine bastions of the Commons, the clubs of St James’s, and high-church Anglicanism. He became almost inseparable from James Hope, a university friend and fellow Anglo-Catholic. Whatever sexual frustrations he had were satisfied, according to his diary, by ‘vigorous’ masturbation, ‘which returns upon me again & again like a flood’. This was not a lifestyle into which women intruded. It certainly was not one to which many were attracted.

Although Gladstone knew very little about women, he was fairly sure that he wanted one of his own. Early marriage was part of the Evangelical tradition from which he came. Even after he determined to find himself a wife, beginning in 1835, his initial attempts ended in disaster. First he courted Caroline Farquhar, the sister of Walter, an Eton and Christ Church friend. The project was embarked upon rather as one might buy a house or a horse. Many letters were sent and visits paid, but most of them were to Miss Farquhar’s father and brother. How to interest the lady herself was beyond him. ‘The barrier you have to overcome is the obtaining of my sister’s affections,’ the frustrated Walter told him after eight months of courtship. ‘No Mama!’ Caroline had exclaimed on seeing Gladstone walking across her family’s park at Polesden Lacey, ‘I cannot marry a man who carries his bag like that.’

Fifty years later, finding herself at the communion rail of the Savoy chapel next to Gladstone, she immediately stood up and left.

Rejected by Caroline, Gladstone immediately turned his attentions to Lady Frances Douglas, teenaged daughter of the Earl of Morton. Here the humiliation was even greater. He courted her during a short trip to her father’s estate near Edinburgh in 1837. She found him earnest and dull. When he persisted in the chase, the Earl of Morton was forced to deliver a ‘crushing’ rejection along with an instruction to end all correspondence.

Much as with popular science reads where I prefer more science than fluff, I definitely need more history and/or politics in this book.

Having finished Snare of the Hunter, it is time to roll again!

You rolled 2 dice:

Timestamp: 2019-07-21 12:46:21 UTC

...which takes me to:

Excellent! The only problem with non-fiction is that it is difficult to choose, but given that I've only just finished a science-related read and that all the way through that book I longed to read a history book, this narrows the field. But not much. 

However, since the UK is getting a new PM on Tuesday this week ... (oh, gee, do we have to?) ... I'm going to be inspired by current affairs and read about a story of competitiveness, jealousy, and power. Tho, my book choice will be set at the height of the British Empire. To be fair, that probably also falls into the category of "relevant to current affairs". 

Ugh,...

Previous book choices & rolls after the page break.