-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Sophie Fuller, Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism. By Phyllis Weliver, Music and Letters, Volume 99, Issue 3, August 2018, Pages 493–495, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcy091
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Phyllis Weliver is a truly interdisciplinary scholar, who has deftly brought together musicology and literary studies, as well as other disciplines, to provide fascinating new understandings of Victorian society and culture. Her earlier publications include Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900 (Aldershot, 2000) and The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Basingstoke, 2006) as well as the important edited collections of essays The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry (Aldershot, 2005) and (with Katharine Ellis) Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2013). In her latest monograph, Weliver turns her attention to the under-explored phenomenon of the Victorian salon. Her focus is on the particular role in salon culture played by Mary Gladstone, daughter of the Liberal leader and prime minister William Gladstone, and the part played by musical performances at the Gladstone salons in promoting liberal political ideas.
Mary Gladstone (1847–1927) is an intriguing woman. One of eight children born to Catherine and William Gladstone, she was a talented pianist and avid music lover, as well as serving as one of her father’s five private secretaries (from 1881) during his second period as Prime Minister. As Weliver explains, Mary Gladstone applied for and was awarded this position, taking over from her brother Herbert. Her exact status is slightly unclear—she was not paid and, in a letter written in 1881, pointed out that the position was not to be ‘recognised officially’, but nevertheless she was her father’s Secretary of Ecclesiastical Affairs (which meant advising her father on ecclesiastical appointments), had her own office at Downing Street, and was widely known in political circles to be a person of influence with her father.
