Resurrecting the 'Greatest Victorian'

Book review of Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

Walter Bagehot (1826-77) — the British literary critic, banker, journalist, political sociologist, analyst of finance, social psychologist and editor of The National Review and The Economist — has never lacked for admirers. His devoted friend George Eliot concurred with the verdict of another close friend, Lord Bryce, that his “was perhaps the most original mind of his generation.” Gladstone confided that both Liberal and Conservative governments so prized Bagehot’s financial acumen that they looked to him as a “supplementary chancellor of the Exchequer.” His posthumous idolaters have included Woodrow Wilson (who defined Bagehot’s role as nothing less than “to clarify