Mr Gladstone, his Parents and his Siblings

Abstract

William Ewart Gladstone, like other great men, had in the formative years of his upbringing and early manhood to confront the influences brought to bear upon him. More dramatically than most, he was involved in a struggle of acceptance and escape, taking from his inheritance what he needed for political success and psychic stability and modifying or abandoning such parts of it that would be inhibitive on his development or damaging to it. He could not, of course, stand above himself making a cool and judicious selection of the parts that were to compose the finished whole: instead the struggle was a searing one, the effects of which were with him for the rest of his life, to be glimpsed now and then beneath his utterances and actions.