BAGEHOT, WALTER

born Feb. 3, 1826, Langport, Somerset, Eng. died March 24, 1877, Langport economist, political analyst, and editor of The Economist, who was one of the most influential journalists of the mid-Victorian period. Bagehot's father's family had been general merchants for several generations, whereas his motherwho was a great beauty but was 10 years older than his father and had had a tragic first marriagewas a sister of Vincent Stuckey, the head of the largest bank in the west of England. It was the opinion of his relations that his acute political sense derived from his father, whereas the sparkle and originality of his mind came from his mother, even though she became partly insane as she grew older. Bagehot had the severe schooling of an early Victorian. As a child he went to Langport Grammar School, which had a famous headmaster who had been a friend of the poet Wordsworth; at 13 he was sent to Bristol College, one of the best schools in Great Britain. There he received a grounding in philosophy, mathematics, literature, the classics, and the new natural sciences, of an intensity that no English child today would be thought capable of assimilating. The obvious university to choose was University College, London, because his father was a Unitarian, and Oxford and Cambridge in those days were dogmatically Anglican. He was a lanky youth, rather thin and long in the legs with a countenance of remarkable vivacity and characterised by the large eyes that were always noticeable, wrote Sir Edward Fry, one of his friends at Bristol. He had a rather sardonic manner that did not endear him to all of his contemporaries, but he did make a number of lasting friends at University College, notably Richard Holt Hutton, who was for the latter part of the century the distinguished editor of The Spectator; William Roscoe, the grandson of the famous historian of the Medicis; Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet; and, of an older generation, Henry Crabb Robinson, who had been the friend of Goethe, Schiller, and Coleridge, and The Times correspondent in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1846 Bagehot took his bachelor's degree with first-class honours, despite bad health, and in 1848 his master's degree with the university's gold medal in moral and intellectual philosophy. For three years after graduation, he studied at the bar, but he never liked it, and it was chance that took him into literature. He happened to be in Paris at the end of 1851, when Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat took place, and he wrote a series of articles in the leading Unitarian weekly journal of the day describing the coup at firsthand and defending Napoleon. These articles caused much controversy because the coup was widely disapproved of in England. But they convinced Bagehot that he could write, and he settled down to work in his uncle Stuckey's bank, writing in the next six or seven years a series of literary essays on Milton, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Sir Walter Scott, Pierre-Jean de Branger, together with studies of leading political figures of the past centuryHenry St. John Bolingbroke, William Pitt, Sir Robert Peel, and othersthat are still widely quoted. His entry into professional journalism was also accidental. In his role as a banker, he had written various economic articles that had attracted the attention of James Wilson, the man who had founded The Economist in 1843 and who was then an influential member of Parliament and financial secretary to the treasury in Lord Palmerston's government. Wilson asked Bagehot to stay, and he immediately fell in love with Eliza, the eldest of Wilson's six daughters. They were married in April 1858, but they had no children, and it is doubtful if Eliza's rather cold personality really suited the warmth and vigour of her husband's. He went back to manage the Bristol branch of Stuckey's bank. But a year later Wilson was asked to go to India to reorganize the finances of the Indian government, and he died in Calcutta in 1860, leaving Bagehot in charge of The Economist. For 17 years he wrote the main article and improved and expanded the statistical and financial sections that have made it the leading business journal and one of the leading political journals of the world for more than 100 years. More than that, he humanized its political approach with a greater emphasis on social problems. As the American political scientist Walt Rostow has commented, The Economist was not simply the hard bitten advocate of the mid-Victorian capitalist. Bagehot described himself as a conservative Liberal or between size in politics. Unlike many Liberals, he had grown up in the deep countryside, and he had a strong feeling for the social problems that rapid industrialization and urbanization were creating in Britain. He was also an acute observer of international affairs, with an instinctive affection for France and an equal distrust of Otto von Bismarck's Germany. His early years at The Economist coincided with the American Civil War, on whose development he wrote nearly 20 articles; instinctively, he was a Confederate like many of his British contemporaries, but his reason made him a supporter of Abraham Lincoln, of whom he wrote on the day the news of his assassination reached England: We do not know in history such an example of the growth of a ruler in wisdom as was exhibited by Mr. Lincoln. Power and responsibility visibly widened his mind and elevated his character. Difficulties, instead of irritating him as they do most men, only increased his reliance on patience; opposition, instead of ulcerating, only made him more tolerant and determined. In 1867 he published The English Constitution, which was an attempt to look behind the facade of the British system of governmentcrown, Lords, and Commonsin order to see how it really operated and where true power lay. He was one of the first to observe the overriding power of the Cabinet in a party that commanded an effective majority in the House of Commons. He cultivated a number of close political friendships, notably with William Ewart Gladstone, who became the first Liberal prime minister in 1868; with Lord Carnarvon among the Conservatives (the author of the British North America Act, the constitution of Canada); and with William Edward Forster (the author of the first public education act in Britain). Bagehot never succeeded, however, in entering politics himself. He tried at Manchester, at Bridgwater near his Somerset home (a district that had a notorious reputation for corruption), and in 1867 for London University. But he was a poor speaker and failed each time. In 1872 Bagehot published Physics and Politics, which was an attempt to apply the new discoveries in anthropology to the development of societies and nations themselves. It is largely forgotten by reason of the vigour acquired by sociological investigation in the 20th century, largely under the stimulus of Karl Marx and Max Weber. But one of its central points, the process of unconscious imitation as a molding force in the development of nationswhat Bagehot called the cake of customhad a considerable influence on such philosophical sociologists as William James and Graham Wallas. All this time, Bagehot and his wife were living in London, and he was editing a weekly of growing influence. In his 40s, he became increasingly frail, and such energy as he had was concentrated on professional economic studies. In 1873 he published Lombard Street, which, though really a tract arguing for a larger central reserve in the hands of the Bank of England, in fact contains the germ of the modern theory of central banking and exchange control. He was working on a major series of economic studies when pneumonia struck him down at the age of 51. The economist John Maynard Keynes, two generations later, paid tribute to his insight into business psychology. But the greatest tribute to Bagehot's lively style, humanity, and insight is that his books have been read, republished, and subjected to a continuous stream of critical essays ever since his death. He once made fun of Thomas Macaulay for seeking posthumous fame but has, nevertheless, received a good measure of it himself. Walter Bagehot has been described as Victorian England's most versatile genius. He wrote a series of literary essays that have been continually republished throughout the 20th century, a book on British politics that remains a widely read classic, and one of the earliest sociological studies to apply the concept of evolution to societies themselves; in addition, he made an important contribution to the theory of central banking. Had I command of the culture of men, wrote U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, I should wish to raise up for the instruction and stimulation of my nation more than one sane, sagacious critic of men and affairs like Walter Bagehot. Those who have the good fortune to know him still remember him as perhaps the most original mind of his generation, wrote Lord Bryce, British ambassador in Washington and the author of The American Commonwealth. The Hon. Alastair Francis Buchan Additional reading Biographies. Emilie I. Barrington (ed.), The Love-Letters of Walter Bagehot and Eliza Wilson, Written from 10 November, 1857 to 23 April, 1858 (1933); Alastair Buchan, The Spare Chancellor: The Life of Walter Bagehot (1959), a short, critical biography dealing with all aspects of Bagehot's life, work, and thought; Norman St. John-Stevas, Walter Bagehot (1959), a selection of Bagehot's political studies with a biographical introduction and a useful bibliography. Collected works. Emilie I. Barrington (ed.), The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot, 10 vol. (1915), series containing his books, most of his essays, and more than 50 of his Economist articles; The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. by Norman St. John-Stevas (196668), a more comprehensive edition containing considerably more journalistic material. Vol. 1 and 2, The Literary Essays, with an introduction by Sir William Haley, and vol. 3 and 4, The Historical Essays, with an introduction by Jacques Barzun. Critical works. John Maynard Keynes, The Works of Bagehot, Economic Journal, 25:369375 (1915), an estimate of Bagehot as an economic writer by the greatest economist of his day; Sir Herbert E. Read, Bagehot, in The Sense of Glory: Essays in Criticism (1929), a sensitive critique of Bagehot as a litterateur; Woodrow Wilson, A Wit and a Seer, Atlantic Monthly, 82:527540 (1898), one of the earliest works drawing attention to Bagehot's gifts and versatility by one of his greatest American admirers; George M. Young, The Greatest Victorian, in Today and Yesterday: Collected Essays and Addresses (1948), an excellent brief portrait.