John Wilson Croker: Irish Ideas and the Invention of Modern Conservatism 1800-1835

John Wilson Croker, forgotten man of nineteenth-century politics and letters, is given new life here. Drawing on previously unpublished Croker archives held in US universities, contemporary press and other sources, Robert Portsmouth provides a substantial re-interpretation of the life and times of Croker. As a parliamentarian, early ‘spin-doctor’ and close advisor to Sir Robert Peel, George Canning and the Duke of Wellington, Croker probably had greater influence on ministerial policy and popular opinion than all but a handful of his contemporaries. He was a friend of famous literary figures like Walter Scott, but his work as a popular critic won him the enduring enmity of Shelley, Lady Morgan, T.B. Macaulay and others, whose vilification of him as a ‘slashing’ reviewer and bigoted Tory opponent of all reform has concealed his much more significant political work and ideas. In fact Croker was a keen advocate of moderate parliamentary, social and economic reforms. He had been since he was a Dublin student campaigning for ‘conciliatory Catholic Emancipation’ in opposition to both ‘ultra-Protestants’ as well as sectarian ‘ultra-Catholics’, and viewed his political philosophy for a unitary via media of opposition to extremes as something of a tradition of enlightened Irish thought stretching from Swift to Burke. While his ambition to improve the state of his homeland and unite its people would end in failure, Croker and his predominantly Irish press circle saw essentially the same philosophy succeed in Britain after 1830 when they laid the foundations for modern parliamentary Conservatism by ‘inventing’ the new Conservative party as a moderate reforming and conciliatory alternative to both ‘ultra Tories’ and ‘ultra-Whigs’.