Lived Liberalism: Current Scholarship
The title of the blog on this site, "Gladstone's Daughter: Living Liberalism," is not only an accurate description of Mary Gladstone's daily life, but "living liberalism" also communicates a belief system and lifestyle espoused by many individuals living in Victorian Britain. A community of today's scholars are currently exploring the idea of a lived liberalism.
The aptness of the term may be seen because the blog subtitle is shared with Elaine Hadley's excellent book, Living Liberalism : Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago, 2010) — a fact that I failed to recall when choosing the blog name. I highly recommend this study which, in Hadley's words, "focuses on the key concept of individuation — how it is embodied in politics and daily life and how it is expressed through opinion, discussion and sincerity."
Other monographs include: Amanda Anderson's Bleak Liberalism (Chicago, 2016); Tracy Davis's Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires: Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform (Cambridge, 2023): ; and my own Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism (Cambridge, 2017). Britain's only prime ministerial library, Gladstone's Library in Wales, regularly hosts events that investigate the nature of liberalism.
Photograph taken at Dalmeny House of a house party in 1879. Included in the photograph are W.E. Gladstone (holding his hat)and his wife Catherine (seated, front) and daughter Mary Gladstone (standing, center), the Earl and Countess of Rosebery (seated front right, and standing third from right), and the Countess's cousin Ferdinand James von Rothschild. This photograph is over 125 years old, thus in public domain by virtue of age.