This diary not only provides the best source for gleaning the quotidian details of Gladstone's passionate affair with books but also reveals the motives behind much of Gladstone's bibliophilia, for the same forces that drove Gladstone the diarist--his fear of idleness, his sometimes morbid sense of sin, and his insistence on burdening the slightest acts with the heaviest spiritual consequences--drove Gladstone the reader and collector.
Born in Liverpool, William Ewart Gladstone was the fifth of six children of John and Anne Robertson Gladstone. John Gladstone was a Scottish merchant who made himself rich enough to give his sons the most fashionable English education, which meant that William went to Eton in 1821 and Christ Church, Oxford, in 1827. The first memorable bibliographic event in Gladstone's life occurred in 1815 when he was taken to see Hannah More, the Evangelical author. As Gladstone described the incident eighty-one years later, More presented him with a copy of her Sacred Dramas (1815), saying: "'As you have just come into this world, and I am just going out of it, allow me,' ... and so forth." The verbal preface to this gift was a reminder of the way of all flesh, and it is not surprising that Gladstone could not forget it, for his lifelong relationship with books was dominated by his faith that this worldly life was an act of preparation.
This is a free page. This page contains 180 words. This
biography contains 5,190 words (approx. 17 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our William Ewart Gladstone Access Pass.
