Walter Bagehot

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Walter Bagehot, mezzotint by Norman Hirst, after a photograph.

Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.

Walter Bagehot was an economist, political analyst, and editor of The Economist who was one of the most influential journalists of the mid-Victorian period.

His father’s family had been general merchants for several generations, while his maternal uncle Vincent Stuckey was the head of the largest bank in the west of England. Bagehot’s relatives felt that his acute political sense derived from his father, whereas the sparkle and originality of his mind came from his mother.

Bagehot had the severe schooling of an early Victorian. As a child he went to Langport Grammar School, whose headmaster had been a friend of the poet William Wordsworth; at 13 he was sent to Bristol College, one of the best schools in Great Britain. There he received an intense grounding in philosophy, mathematics, literature, the classics, and the new natural sciences.

Because his father was a Unitarian, the obvious choice for Bagehot’s higher education was University College, London (at that time Oxford and Cambridge were decidedly Anglican). Bagehot 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. Bagehot’s somewhat sardonic manner 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; Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet; and, of an older generation, Henry Crabb Robinson, who had been the friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and who had served as a correspondent for The Times during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1846 Bagehot took his bachelor’s degree with first-class honours at University College, despite bad health, and in 1848 he earned his master’s degree with the university’s gold medal in moral and intellectual philosophy.

He studied law for three years after his graduation but never liked it, and it was chance that took him into literature. Bagehot happened to be in Paris at the end of 1851 when Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat took place. He wrote a series of articles in the leading Unitarian journal describing the coup and defending Napoleon and thereby stirred controversy among readers because the coup was widely condemned in England. This, however, convinced Bagehot that he could write, which he began to do while settling down to work in Stuckey’s bank. Over the next several years, he wrote a series of literary essays on John Milton, William Shakespeare, Edward Gibbon, Sir Walter Scott, and Pierre-Jean de Béranger, together with studies of leading political figures such as Henry St. John Bolingbroke, William Pitt, and Sir Robert Peel.

As a banker, Bagehot had written various economic articles that had attracted the attention of James Wilson, financial secretary to the treasury in Lord Palmerston’s government and an influential member of Parliament. Wilson had founded The Economist in 1843. Through this acquaintance, Bagehot met Wilson’s eldest daughter, Eliza. The two were married in April 1858.

The following year Wilson was asked to go to India to reorganize the finances of the Indian government, and he died in Calcutta in 1860, leaving Bagehot, then the manager of the Bristol branch of Stuckey’s bank, in charge of The Economist. For 17 years Bagehot wrote the main article, improved and expanded the statistical and financial sections, and transformed the journal into one of the world’s foremost business and political publications. More than that, he humanized its political approach by emphasising social problems.

Bagehot described himself as a conservative Liberal or “between size in politics.” Unlike many Liberals, he had grown up in the deep countryside and believed strongly that rapid industrialization and urbanization were creating social problems 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, about which he wrote nearly 20 articles; instinctively, like many of his British contemporaries, he sympathized with the Confederacy, yet he supported Abraham Lincoln. When the news of Lincoln’s assassination reached England, Bagehot wrote:

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 Bagehot published The English Constitution, an attempt to look behind the facade of the British system of government—crown, Lords, and Commons—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 the party that commanded an effective majority in the House of Commons. He cultivated many 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 stood for election to Parliament seats representing Manchester, then Bridgwater near his Somerset home (a district that had a notorious reputation for corruption), and finally London University in 1867. But he was a poor speaker and failed each time.

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 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.

Russell Barrington (Emilie Isabel Wilson 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.

Russell Barrington (Emilie Isabel Wilson 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; Norman St. John-Stevas (ed.), The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot (1965–86), a more comprehensive edition containing considerably more journalistic material.

John Maynard Keynes, “The Works of Bagehot,” The Economic Journal, 25:369–375 (1915), an estimate of Bagehot as an economic writer by the greatest economist of his day; “Bagehot,” chapter 8 in Herbert Read, The Sense of Glory: Essays in Criticism (1929, reprinted 1977), pp. 179–204, a sensitive critique of Bagehot as a litterateur; Woodrow Wilson, “A Wit and a Seer,” The Atlantic Monthly, 82:527–540 (1898), one of the earliest works drawing attention to Bagehot’s gifts and versatility by one of his greatest American admirers; “The Greatest Victorian,” in G.M. Young, Today and Yesterday: Collected Essays and Addresses (1948, reprinted 1978), pp. 237–243, an excellent brief portrait.