Burke

This volume on Edmund Burke (1729-97), published in 1879 in the first series of English Men of Letters, was written by the general editor of the series, John Morley (1838-1923). Himself a politician as well as an author, Morley had previously published a ‘historical study’ of Burke in 1867, but emphasises in an introductory note that this book ‘is biographical rather than critical’ and is intended as a narrative life. Morley himself was a radical in politics, and his interest in Burke, who he does not hesitate to characterise on occasion as a narrow-minded reactionary, may seem surprising, but he greatly admired his subject’s independent political stance, which he describes as a mixture of utilitarian liberalism and historic conservatism, unfettered by abstract doctrine, and which he believed might again come to dominate political discourse in the last decades of the nineteenth century.