The bookshelves of any self-respecting library used to be weighed down with the monographs of the titans of 19th-century politics. The three volumes of John Morley’s masterly Life of Gladstone would jostle for space as each new volume of Moneypenny and Buckle’s six-volume Life of Benjamin Disrael was published. Yet one Victorian politician would have been conspicuous by his absence on the bookshelves.
Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, was hardly a bit-player in mid-Victorian politics. He was involved in the great battles over reform that dominated the period, both as leader of his party for 22 years and leader of his country. Yet the very title of this first ever full biography — The Forgotten Prime Minister — says it all. Even in his own lifetime his ambivalence about ambition and his ‘Newmarket style of life’ attracted sarcastic comment, but he was the first prime minister to hold the office three times and the only one to publish an English blank- verse translation of Homer.
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