Writing about Marcel Proust's relation to the nineteenth century, Walter Benjamin once described how that author unexpectedly “snatched in passing the most astonishing confidences from a declining age.” Jonathan Rose's wide-ranging new biography shows how Winston Churchill received similarly astonishing confidences from the Victorian melodramatic theater, which profoundly shaped Churchill's writing, public speaking, and decision making as a politician. Rose brings together insights from the disciplines of history and literary studies to explore Churchill's early fascination with the autumn melodramas of London's Drury Lane Theatre as well as the politician's careful reading of a range of authors writing during his lifetime, including but not limited to Wilde, Shaw, Wells, and H. Rider Haggard. Yet this is no simple chronicle of Churchill's habits as a reader and theatergoer. Rose traces the influence of these literary works on Churchill's own budding career as a writer and journalist in the late 1800s and, even more provocatively, as a politician and military strategist during, between, and after the two world wars.

The result of Rose's careful scholarship is an absorbing account of the complicated overlap between aesthetics and politics. Churchill emerges as a figure largely unable to separate his reading, writing, political decisions, and political self-presentation, such that, to use Rose's closing words, Churchill's life “demonstrates that literature matters, more than we think and in more ways than we imagine” (450). The initial chapters examine the literary influences behind Churchill's early writings that made him popular during the late nineteenth century. Rose examines, for instance, the melodramatic attributes of the journalism that fed into Churchill's first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), his complicated representations of wars in the Sudan and South Africa in The River War (1899) and London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900), and the revolutionary melodrama of Savrola (1900), Churchill's work of literary fiction also modeled on Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda. Once he has provided a thoughtful account of these writings, Rose turns to Churchill's political career that followed, where he repeatedly shows how the forms of address, excessive emotion, coups de théâtre, and other characteristics of melodrama that shaped the early writings also directly or indirectly fed into Churchill's speeches and war strategy.

The aesthetics of melodrama come to influence the rapid changes in Churchill's political fortunes and drive his movements in and out of favor with the British public. Churchill adopted “a striking melodramatic gesture” when he tore up a pamphlet that quoted his earlier Tory views during the 1906 General Election (see 102), and this display helped him get reelected as a Liberal MP. Decades later, after V-E day, his flair for the dramatic that had proven so essential to his World War II speeches now harmed his political fortunes. The “mediocrity” of Clement Attlee's speeches “was a relief to a people worn out with reacting to great events and world-shaking announcements” frequently emphasized in Churchill's wartime addresses (389). Yet The Literary Churchill is at its most fascinating when it demonstrates how Churchill's appreciation for melodrama's surprising coups de théâtre influenced his military strategy. Rose sees Churchill's near addiction to melodramatic reversals in some of his worst failures, such as the Gallipoli Campaign, and in his more effective military decisions, such as the bombing of the French fleet at Oran in 1940.

Rose also contemplates how the Victorian stage's racist representations of colonized peoples shaped Churchill's views of Britain's colonial holdings, such that, though Churchill idolized the Mahdi in his early writings, he manifested a “benevolent paternalism” in his relations with India (216). The Victorian melodramatic stage continues to haunt Churchill's imperial politics late into his career. Discussing Churchill's reactions of the 1942 “Quit India” campaign, his views of Gandhi, and his handling of the Bengal Famine in 1943, Rose notes that Churchill was still drawing on Punch's racist cartoons about the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion and the figure of the treacherous Indian native from Victorian imperial melodrama. Churchill's literary interests and writing career are thus not simply used to illuminate the wartime struggle against fascism associated with Churchill in the popular imagination; they also help to explain his limitations and blind spots as a politician.

There are occasional minor missteps in Rose's volume, but the careful analysis and cohesiveness of the larger project more than make up for them. At times the book suffers from a lack of nuance in its opposition of melodrama to modernist literary writing; the author could have complicated this opposition. Some of the chapters could also be tied more firmly to the volume's larger structure. Those chapters titled “Revolutionaries” and “That Special Relationship,” while crucial to the overall portrait of Churchill, serve as sometimes unexpected detours from the largely chronological ordering of the book.

Yet the picture of Churchill that emerges here will prove essential to both scholars and students of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and history. The writing and reading of literature were crucial in shaping Churchill's career, such that he was criticized for consciously crafting wartime memos, telegrams, and speeches to serve as primary source documents for his later historical writings. This impressively capacious volume does justice to the sheer variety of Churchill's reading and writing and to his own sense of himself as simultaneously a politician and an actor. Churchill is a challenging figure because literary study and historical study, as disciplines, cannot do justice to him on their own, but Rose combines methods from both disciplines in this illuminating and engaging book.