the Economist first to Greg, and then to Bagehot’s best friend, Graham Hutton, who stayed on as editor during his absence in Calcutta. In reality, the paper served the ambitions of its founder and owner till the end. When controversy arose over his first budget, Hutton and Bagehot leapt to defend it, attacking Charles Trevelyan, now Governor of Madras, who publicly objected to its steep spending cuts, tax rises and large procurements for the army.160 Wilson was outraged at this attempt to undermine his authority, but he scolded his surrogates, accusing them in one of his last letters of hurting his chances by going overboard in the dispute.
Trevelyan was recalled for insubordination, yet the budget was swept further into the political storm. In London, Bright and Sir Charles Wood, secretary of state for India, backed the recalled governor. All three put some blame for the mutiny on an overly centralized bureaucracy and in Wilson’s budget they saw those tendencies exacerbated. Trevelyan had been the official most in charge of ‘relief efforts’ during the Irish famine, and later Wilson’s colleague at the Treasury, where both had preached the purest laissez-faire. Yet personally they did not get along. To Trevelyan, Wilson was an unscrupulous climber whose sole aim in India was to become Chancellor of the Exchequer back in Britain. ‘Ordering a salute and giving him a sort of public reception would be funny’, he wrote to Wood, anticipating Wilson’s arrival in Madras. Wilson saw Trevelyan as impulsive and vain, ‘thinking himself able equally to command a squadron, lead an army, or regenerate the civil government of a country’.161 Obituaries for Wilson strongly implied that this last administrative quarrel, and the advent of the rainy season, caused a fever-gripped Wilson, murmuring to Canning about ‘his income tax’ and in early August arranging his will, to go to ‘bed never to rise from it again’.162
Walter Bagehot’s Dashed Doubts
Founder, owner, editor, political high-flyer – no other leader of the Economist wore as many hats as James Wilson. But the name most associated with the paper he started is not his, which faded after his death in India in 1860. Lasting fame instead awaited his son-in-law and successor, Walter Bagehot, who remains not only the best-known editor of the Economist, but a totemic figure in and beyond its pages. Drawn as much to religion, literature, art, history and political gossip as the effect of tariffs on the price of salt, Bagehot forms a vivid contrast to Wilson, with far broader interests. In addition to money market summaries, Bagehot wrote two and often three or four leading articles a week on current events for sixteen years; in 1861 he wrote at least thirty-one just on the American Civil War. From these anonymous articles, as well as signed essays in the National Review, Fortnightly Review and other journals, Bagehot spun three major works between 1865 and 1873: The English Constitution and Physics and Politics, describing the subtle and secret evolution of government in England, and the world; and Lombard Street, on the causes and management of financial crises. Economic Studies, a guide to political economy and the lives of its most famous theorists, was unfinished at his death in 1877.
This prospectus has landed Bagehot on the reading lists of the Anglo-American ruling class since the late Victorian period. The jurist James Bryce called Bagehot ‘one of the greatest minds of his generation’ and ranked his constitutional insights above those of Tocqueville and on a level with Montesquieu.1 ‘The greatest Victorian’ pronounced the historian G. M. Young, after scanning a list that included Eliot, Tennyson, Arnold, Darwin and Ruskin.2 While John Maynard Keynes had some doubts about his art criticism, he warmly recommended Bagehot’s behavioural studies of the middle-class men who flourished in nineteenth-century Britain. ‘Bagehot’, Keynes noted in 1915, ‘was a psychological analyser, not of the great or of genius, but of those of a middle position, and primarily of business men, financiers, and politicians.’3 More fulsome praise came from across the Atlantic, where Woodrow Wilson was a devoted reader. In 1895 and again in 1898 the future president enthused about Bagehot in the Atlantic as a sheer pleasure to read: witty, prophetic, and the basis for his own analysis of the flawed American Constitution. Wilson kept a portrait of Bagehot on his study wall at Princeton, deriving from it ‘much inspiration’.4
As the twentieth century progressed, so did Bagehot’s reputation. In 1967, Labour prime minister Harold Wilson fondly recalled his student days at Oxford, preparing for a prize essay, reading Economist articles on state regulation of the railways by Bagehot – ‘the most acute observer of the political and economic society in which he lived’.5 In 1978, Harold Macmillan addressed the staff of the Economist on the subject of Bagehot. The former Tory prime minister, now eighty-four, mulled over Bagehot’s virtues: ‘gifted amateur’, ‘solid, sensible, perfectly straightforward’ – ‘because if you want to become the editor of a newspaper what can you do better than marry the daughter of the proprietor’ – who didn’t go in for ‘theories and dreams’ or ‘extraordinary doctrines’. After losing the thread in a long complaint against the BBC, which had falsely reported Macmillan’s death the summer before, prompting a daydream about withdrawing his money from Coutts and disappearing to ‘a nice little estaminet’ in the south of France to play boules, Macmillan concluded: Bagehot was ‘the kind of man we’d awfully like to have known’.6
Today the picture is much as the elderly Macmillan left it. In 1992, the writer Ferdinand Mount still found Bagehot ‘full of manly common sense’ on the English Constitution; ‘often witty, very often charming, he is never silly’.7 A fictional memoir arrived in 2013 that was so true to life, the reviewers had trouble discerning its real author: historian Frank Prochaska, who presented Bagehot as ‘the Victorian with whom you’d most like to have dinner’.8 Bagehot’s biographers have seen him in the same candlelit glow, with one searing exception, and have generally had a personal or professional interest in doing so, usually connected to the Economist.9 That is hardly surprising. The Economist cannot be understood without Bagehot; neither can he, without it. Fifteen volumes of Collected Works make attributing authorship easier than for any other editor, and reveal three broad ways in which he changed the Economist, and through it, liberalism. The first was a sharper focus on the changing facets of finance; second, a comparative approach to political systems and institutions, with the explicit aim of discovering the ones best adapted to sustaining the phenomenal growth of finance – both at home, where the defeat or neutralization of the democratic demands of the working class was his top priority; and, finally, abroad, where he assessed the costs and benefits of empire.
Walter Bagehot: Born Banker
Bagehot was born into a prosperous, well-connected provincial banking family in 1826. Vincent Stuckey, his maternal uncle, ran the bank, and Thomas Bagehot, his father, was a partner whose marriage to the widow Edith Stuckey had merged the leading shipping, mercantile and financial families of Langport in Somerset. Banking formed a backdrop to their lives, but for their son and ‘greatest treasure’ the Bagehots hoped for even wider vistas. His father, a plainspoken Unitarian, assigned history and philosophy in English and French. When Walter turned five, a governess introduced novels and Latin. His Anglican mother took up his moral education, bringing him to church on Sunday afternoons, though she inadvertently taught him about ‘darker realities’ too, during ‘attacks of delirium’.10 Little Walter was unruly, rode a pony named Medora, and climbed trees and would not come down.
His formal schooling built upon this liberal home life. In 1839 he left Langport Grammar School for Bristol College, where he studied classics, math, German and Hebrew. Three years later, at sixteen, he enrolled at University College, London, where nonconformists sent their sons (unlike Oxford or Cambridge it had no doctrinal test). He chased down still more subjects: after history, poetry and math, he took a first in classics, followed by political economy, metaphysics and, two years later, a gold medal in philosophy. He and his friends started a debating society, wrote each other sonnets, and went to meetings of the Anti-Corn Law League.11 At one gathering the biggest stars of the movement