By Rebecca Alaise.
For over ten years I worked in a building located mere metres away from the Gladstone statue that graces Manchester’s Albert square, seeing ‘him’ every time I popped out for coffee. There is a bust of him displayed in the Town Hall, and I’ve dined under the gaze of another Gladstone monument at a restaurant in what was once the Liberal Party’s Manchester club house. William Ewart Gladstone’s presence is entwined in the political and industrial fibre of Manchester. It’s safe to assume that anyone visiting the City Centre over the last hundred years or so has had a likeness of the four-time Prime Minister surveying their exploits from a plinth. After a lifetime with Gladstone as a somewhat stagnant background figure, the ‘Victorian Moments of Change’ conference was an opportunity to visit the library he founded and better understand the man behind the monuments.
Amazed to realise that the locus of all things Gladstone was only a fifty-five-minute drive out of town, my arrival at the library on a drizzly morning in September left me awed by the imposing neo-Gothic building. Glad (pun intended) to be at such a perfect site to hear a range of Victorian Studies papers, I was also excited to learn about the library’s collections and contextualise Gladstone’s complex legacy.
The approach to Gladstone’s Library
Gladstone’s Library is a residential library in Hawarden, Wales. Its staggering architectural beauty is matched by the cultural importance of its largely theological collection. Gladstone sought to share his books, believing works on theology would be valuable to all. The small building he initially relocated his personal collection to in 1894 was nicknamed the tin tabernacle, with the beautiful library visitors can access today opened in 1902 after a public appeal for funds.
The ‘Victorian Moments of Change’ conference, held on the 11th and 12th of September, was part of Event 2024, an experiment in flightless conferencing by BAVS, NAVSA, AVSA, VI, and DACH-V. The library was one of seventeen global hubs to host a sustainable Victorian Studies conference, engaging with academics, students, independent researchers, and heritage professionals. Papers were being presented from the chapel, so after enjoying a much-needed cup of coffee I found a seat and basked in the calm ambience of the room. A welcome speech from library warden, Andrea Russel outlined how the charity that manages the site honours Gladstone’s ethos in the twenty-first century.
The Chapel where the conference was hosted
Opening the day of papers, Michael Wheeler’s keynote speech was comprehensive in its coverage of Gladstone as a family man, Statesman, polymath and philanthropist. With the first panel discussing mourning and memorialisation, the library’s serene atmosphere seemed a fitting space in which to muse upon Victorian notions of loss, particularly with the knowledge of Gladstone’s own familial grief in mind (his daughter died of meningitis in 1850). Hannah Burden’s paper explored Queen Victoria’s reading choices in times of grief. Emma Liggins’ ‘Memorialising Female Death 1870-1910’ investigated Victorian mourning rituals, with aesthetics of death considered through grave monuments and examples of mourning cards borrowed from Manchester Metropolitans’ Special Collections Museum. After a break we reconvened for a panel on natural and political evolution, with Luciana Hermida’s cross-disciplinary presentation about an artistic process that seeks to reimagine visualisations of Darwin’s theories. Alice Cleave and Jade Arrowsmith then discussed political reform in the long nineteenth century, questioning the lifespan of Liberal Democracy.
As a residential library, Gladstone’s is a welcoming space that encourages individual refection. With lunch in the on-site restaurant imminent, I took a moment to explore the grounds, experiencing a sense of peace that was a little monastic in nature. After a delicious three-course lunch we sat down for the second keynote from Michael Sanders, which addressed the complexities of taxonomising Victorian and Edwardian working-class writings. Elizabeth Rawlinson-Mills’ paper examined newspaper poetry and ‘Imperial masculinities’ of the South African War (1899 -1902).
A woody wonder: the silent reading rooms
Having visited the reading rooms after lunch I felt satisfyingly sated with visual splendour, and Lucy Ella Rose’s exploration of women’s creative collaboration in ‘The Death of the Yellow Book: The Birth of the Fin de Siècle Sorority’ was perfectly in tune with the notions of visual beauty and social reform that the library’s shared spaces evoke. After a mid-afternoon break (and more delicious Welsh cakes), I was regretting my decision to only attend the first day of the conference, intrigued by the 26 bedrooms in the residential wing and a little downhearted that my day was almost over.
The fourth panel featured Joanna Knowles’ paper about the trend for Global flowers in British gardens, then Angela Kenny shared fascinating information about the inception of the Royal Commission and the Great Exhibition of 1851. Continuing the theme of Victorian Glass, Jim Cheshire’s ‘Stained Glass, Hawarden, and the Gladstone Family’ addressed the complex familial and artistic debates behind Edward Burne-Jones’ stained-glass design in the West Window of St Deiniol’s Church. Recalling ideas of Victorian memorial and thanksgiving that we considered in the morning, Cheshire’s discussion of art and legacy was a perfect conclusion.
Gladstone’s chair
Walking back to my car I reflected on all I had learned about Gladstone and the world that influenced, and was influenced, by him; the Statesman behind the statues and the real man – a husband, father, Victorian and reader.
Rebecca Alaise is a Part Time PhD candidate in her fifth year at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her project, ‘Ethereal Instruments: The Singing Voice in Literary Representations of Gothic Music in the Long Nineteenth Century’ explores the alterity of the singing voice by charting the development of representations of vocality in Gothic fiction published between 1820 and 1909.
