The four volumes here under review are a small, if indispensable, part of an ambitious scholarly project overseen by the indefatigable Michael Middeke and the publishing firm of Pickering & Chatto to make available to undergraduates, graduate students, and interested readers alike contemporary attitudes toward what Disraeli would have called English Worthies. Beginning in 1996, Ralph Pite and John Mullan oversaw the production of twelve volumes, with more promised, centered about Lives of Victorian Literary Figures as seen by their contemporaries and, with Mullan alone, nine volumes on the Lives of the Great Romantics as seen by their contemporaries. This essentially literary project has now, under the resourceful editorship of Nancy LoPatin-Lummis and Michael Partridge, been extended to nineteenth-century male and female English and Irish figures that made a contribution to the political arena. The first four volumes of what will initially be a twelve-volume set have appeared in 2006 and contain contemporary views of three Victorian prime ministers, Henry, third Viscount Palmerston; Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield; and William Ewart Gladstone. The overall point of the series, as the Pickering & Chatto Web site makes clear, is to “show what people thought about these men before historians were able to provide more objective biographies and other assessments of their careers.” Michael Partridge, one of the series editors, has furnished the material on both Palmerston and Gladstone and Richard A. Gaunt that on Disraeli. Partridge also produced a superb general introduction to the four volumes, attempting to access the general careers of the three politicians. He also has written a twelve-page specific introduction to the lives of both Pam and Gladstone. Gaunt gives us an equally impressive ten-page one for Disraeli. All three figures also get up-to-date bibliographies of the most relevant primary and secondary texts available on their respective careers. A lengthy chronology of relevant dates is also attached to each figure. The contemporary assessments are found in printed sources such as pamphlets, newspapers, books, periodical literature, and poems. The editors made no attempt to trot off to the archives to check, for example, what Gladstone himself, in his correspondence in the British Library, may have to say about his two contemporaries. It also appears that in general the visual presentation of these contemporary views adhere as much as possible to the original page layouts.

The content, of course, varies as to taste. Perhaps one could have done with less emphasis on Palmerston as a possible Russian agent. But the inclusion of James Bryce's character study of “Lord Beaconsfield” in Century Magazine (1882), fully equal to Thomas Macaulay on Machiavelli or Maynard Keynes on David Lloyd George, more than lives up to Norman Gash's estimate of it as the best available essay on Disraeli. This reviewer, reflecting on the cult of celebrity in twenty-first-century America, was struck by how much the Victorians interested themselves in their own version of gossip. Hence, two members of parliament strained in February 1865 to see exactly how much the aged Palmerston ate at a dinner party and reported on it: “Turtle soup, fish, patties, fricandeau … a slice of roast mutton … a slice of hard-looking ham … pheasant, pudding, jelly … dressed oranges and half a large pear … one glass of sweet champagne and … a glass of sherry” (1:208). And the seven excruciating pages on the exact medical details of Beaconsfield's long death struggle equals anything published recently on the final days of the unfortunate Mrs. Schiavo. More uplifting, and full of sage advice our own self-help gurus would heartily endorse, was W. T. Stead's account in Temple Magazine (1897) of why the Grand Old Man was so vigorous at eighty-seven. Gladstone went to church with regularity, experienced a happy marriage, got a good night's sleep, never touched tobacco but drank wine moderately, and walked three to four miles a day! It is, however, odd that in the Gladstone volumes all the articles on the Eastern Crisis and the Home Rule question are written from an anti-Gladstone point of view.

There are a few errors and mistakes in these four volumes that might be attributable to too many general editors, series editors, and so forth. Titles are sometimes mangled, for example, “Lady Augusta Gregory” (2:49) is far too grand for the daughter of an Irish gentry family and the wife of a mere knight. Edward Bouverie Pusey was not exactly “suspended from the Church of England” in the 1840s (3:277). Did the orthodox Midlothian Campaign occur after the dissolution of parliament in March 1880 (4:5)? Canning's 1827 ministry was not longer lasting than Goderich's 1827–28 one (1:xxix). Disraeli did not enter parliament in 1837 as an “independent, with some radical views, rather than as a Tory” (1:xxxi). The statement that Disraeli was “keenly involved” (2:xxxi) in the Press newspaper from 1853 to 1858 is directly contradicted by the evidence presented by his official biographer, George Earle Buckle. The Hawarden Kite came after, not before, the General Election of 1885 (3:190). It would have taken little trouble to discover the dates of T. E. Kebbel as 1827–1917 as opposed to fl. 1862–1900 (3:115). Most distracting for a series so heavily involved in journal and magazine articles is the apparent lack of familiarity with the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. Partridge finds it impossible to identify the author of a Westminster Review article from 1855 and of an obituary of Palmerston in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1865. A cursory glance at the Wellesley Index would have identified the former as T. C. Grattan and the latter as G. R. Gleig.