Gladstone: A Biography Read Online Free Page A

for the all-in expenditure of an Oxford undergraduate 120 years later.
    Robertson, who had been doing rather better at Eton than Tom but had acquired no affection for it, was then despatched to Glasgow College, as the 270-year-old university was known at the time.
It was still on its old High Street site around the cloisters of which Adam Smith had recently paced, and its curriculum, while far from narrowly commercial, was thought more suitable for Liverpool
trade than an almost exclusive diet of hexameters. Glasgow seemed to do well for Robertson, an effective and intelligent man of business, who became Mayor of Liverpool before he was forty. Like his
youngest brother but not many others, he moved across the political spectrum to the left as he got older, but his habits of thought and pattern of life were never remotely like those of William
Gladstone. He was an immense mountain of a man, over twenty stone in weight, and he aged early, leading a disorganized and even dishevelled life after the death of his wife in 1865 until he too
died in 1875.
    The third son, John Neilson Gladstone, just short of three years older than William, was also entered for Eton. But he was resolved to go into the navy, although it was a bad time to do so
– in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars when the south coastal counties were spattered with small Regency gentleman’s residences from which redundant naval officers looked out in vain
for ships to command. His determination however was great and he went to the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth in 1820. His career at sea was over at the age of twenty-eight, but although he could
not thereafter get a ship he got some promotion and ended as a captain RN. He lived the second half of his life as a Wiltshire country gentleman, settling at Bowden Park, near Chippenham, preceding
Lord Weinstock by a century and a quarter in the acquisition of that estate. He was also intermittently an MP, never tempted by his brother’s transition to fluctuate from his Tory faith.Although he appeared to have the most robust health and least neurotic temperament of all the Gladstone children, he died the first of the brothers, in 1863.
    On the day in September 1821 when William Gladstone for the first time accompanied his brother Tom to Eton, there was no reason for him to feel exhilarated. He had hitherto had only slight
schooling experience. He had been taught, but not very much or very skilfully, by the Evangelical vicar of St Thomas’s, Seaforth, the church which his father had built and entered in his
balance sheet. The Revd Mr Rawson was imported from Cambridge by John Gladstone and ran a school for about twelve boys in the parsonage.
    This instruction singularly failed to excite him: ‘To return to Mr Rawson,’ he wrote at the 1892 beginning of his unfinished autobiography. ‘Everything was unobjectionable
there. I suppose I learnt something there. But I have no recollection of being under any moral or personal influence whatever. . . .’ 4 But if he
thought little of Rawson he thought still less of himself as a child. He had a strong conviction, in retrospect at any rate, that he was neither a good nor an engaging child. ‘The best I can
say for it is that I do not think it was actually a vicious childhood,’ he continued in 1892. ‘. . . But truth obliges me to record this against myself. I have no recollection of being
a loving or a winning child.’ 5 The confluence of his lack of response to Rawson and lack of esteem for himself no doubt accounted for the
remarkable absence of any nostalgia for childhood when he paid a return visit to Seaforth Rectory and indeed to the Rawsons thirty-two years later. 2
    In these circumstances it was lucky that such a wide new window opened to him when he went to Eton in 1821. The journey to South Buckinghamshire was a formidable one for an eleven-year-old boy,
although he already had a remarkably wide geographical experience for a child of that