| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Joseph S. Meisel. Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone. New York: Columbia University Press. 2001. Pp. xiv, 382. $50.00.

The mid and later Victorian era was the great age of public speaking. "England is a country governed mainly by labor and by speech," the political commentator Walter Bagehot wrote in 1860. From pulpit to platform, courtroom to town hall, the public life of Victorian Britain was buoyed up by a torrent of words. The notable figures of the period—the radical John Bright, the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, and above all, the Liberal statesman and prime minister W. E. Gladstone—were all celebrated public speakers; indeed, their public identity was indissoluble from their role as orators. Yet as Joseph S. Meisel points out in the introduction to this book, as an object of study public speech has curiously eluded the attention of historians. For all the turn to language and rhetoric in the study of nineteenth-century politics, the business of oratory has been largely overlooked. . . .

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