James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) is probably the most eminent Victorian intellectual whose life and work have never yet been satisfactorily assessed. There are good reasons for this historiographical lapse. Froude did everything in his power to evade prospective biographers, and his daughter made only selected papers available to one not very critical researcher, Waldo Hilary Dunn. After the publication of Dunn's two-volume biography (1961–63), the manuscripts on which it was based mysteriously disappeared. In this new book, Ciaran Brady has determined to circumvent the barriers that the Froudes so assiduously erected. Brady, a distinguished historian of early modern Ireland, has used his considerable investigative skills to penetrate the myths that Froude himself created as well as the reputation that has come to surround him in the century since his death. Brady's account is especially revealing in its first six chapters, which focus on the first thirty years of its subject's life. An extremely careful interrogation of Froude's own autobiographical fragment, combined with close readings of his early published works, has led to some new and illuminating conclusions that will alter the ways we understand the young Froude. Like everyone else who has considered the matter, Brady acknowledges the extraordinary harshness of Froude's early upbringing as a motherless child who was subject by his father, older brother, and schoolmasters and schoolfellows to years of physical, emotional, and possibly sexual, abuse. Yet Brady is wary of jumping to Freudian conclusions that these early experiences permanently disfigured his personality. The mature Froude was “remarkably well-balanced” and lived “a highly active life.” “He liked cigars, drank moderately, . . . was married twice, and had three children. . . . Both unions appear to have been happy—the second more intensely so than the first” (10).

Brady argues that previous biographers have exaggerated the extent to which Froude's early experiences resulted in youthful escapades of Oedipal revolt. From the very moment that Froude left home to matriculate at Oriel College, Oxford, he displayed a remarkable degree of self-possession that demonstrated his independence from the toxic atmosphere at home. Rejecting the Tractarian excesses that had consumed his older brother, Froude acknowledged the charismatic qualities of Francis Newman while resisting the casuistry that drove so many others either to atheism or to Rome. Brady also dissents from customary assessments of Froude's two early novels, which are often written off as adolescent effusions designed to embarrass his father and family. According to Brady, they were bold (albeit failed) literary experiments designed to probe the moral dangers into which an impressionable young man like Froude might have fallen, had he succumbed to mental inertness, indecision, or passivity.

While Brady's analysis is, in the main, convincing, its emphasis on young Froude's open-mindedness and inquisitiveness overcorrects against conventional wisdom. It therefore presses the author into a strategy of exculpation when addressing the most problematic features of Froude's later work and life. Brady's short chapter on Froude's multivolume History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada adds marginally to our understanding of this monumental project. Yet it also discounts any need for engagement with the celebration of authoritarianism and fascination with violence that runs through these volumes (and that troubled liberal critics in Froude's day). On the subject of Ireland, Brady presses his revisionism to greater effect. Here, he shows that Froude cared deeply for the island and its people, and that he was prepared to acknowledge the mismanagement of British authorities and even to depict unflinchingly the violence of their rule. But how then are we to explain Froude's equally incessant condemnation of the Irish character and his insistence on Ireland's inherent incapacity for self-government? Clearly, these are cognitive (even psychological) dissonances that Brady has chosen not to investigate.

Given Froude's reluctance to pull any punches, it is not surprising that his brief forays into imperial politics proved to be dismal failures. Brady offers a skillful account of his frustrated interventions into the maelstrom of South African politics during the early 1870s. He also notes that this very period, when Froude was aggressively rebranding himself as an imperialist, also saw the publication of a series of short historical studies that were among the most subtle and sophisticated of his entire career. Brady waxes eloquent over Froude's midlife “call to discipleship,” which propelled him onward to the thankless task of writing the biography of his mentor, Thomas Carlyle. This, Brady shows, was a “no-win” situation, in which the Carlylean injunction to engage in heroic truth telling stood in flat contradiction with the master's cowardice in having concealed his own personal inadequacies and flaws. By the time Froude had recovered from this wrenching diversion, he was finally in a position to travel to the colonies and to publish a series of popular travelogues that addressed contemporary issues such as emigration, imperial union, and race. Even Brady finds these writings to be slight and problematic, filled with “cumulative deficiencies and outright contradictions” (414).

Brady complains, at the end of his book, that Froude's “fate has been unjust” (470). During the twentieth century, “the troubled admonitions of the moralist were to be drowned out by the brazen assurance of the imperialist; and in consequence . . . Froude has now been cast into the obscurity of history's ash-heap” (470). Brady is right that one part of the historian's job is to rescue history's losers from the condescension of posterity. His book does an excellent job of serving its subject in this way. But if we are to judge Froude by his own lights, as a moralist, then I think we must weigh his ethnic bigotry, authoritarian politics, and hostility to democracy more heavily in the balance than Brady is inclined to do. If Froude is to be (partly) exempted from personal responsibility for these toxic attitudes, then the fault may be (partly) deflected onto those conditions of his early upbringing, which colored his most fundamental orientation to life. For, while Brady is correct that Froude transcended the experience of child abuse in his personal relations, I think that this experience left greater marks on his historical, fictional, and political writing than Brady's largely upbeat reading allows. Froude's fascination with official violence, his attraction to authoritarian leadership, and his contempt for “child races” with strong imaginations and poor work discipline might all be excused as the unfortunate consequence of having experienced these evils personally at an impressionable age. As a man of intelligence, perceptiveness, and intermittent compassion, however, Froude was surely in a position to discount these biases and to take responsibility for their potentially pernicious impact on the minds of his readers. Froude is, indeed, fortunate to have found a biographer in Brady, who seems better at understanding and defending him than he was himself. In focusing so skillfully on this side of the story, Brady has introduced much new material and offered fresh perspectives on the man and his work. Even those who think that they know Froude well are likely to learn much from this masterfully executed biography—even if they continue to believe that his fate has been just.