Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

by James Grant

Overview

“Excellent… and written in a gripping style.” —The Economist

During the upheavals of 2007–09, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had the name of one Victorian icon on the tip of his tongue: Walter Bagehot. Banker, man of letters, and inventor of the Treasury bill, Bagehot prescribed the doctrines that—decades later—inspired the radical responses to the world’s worst financial crises. Persuasive and precocious, he was also the esteemed editor of the Economist. He offered astute commentary on the financial issues of his day, held sway in political circles, made as many high-profile friends as enemies, and won the admiration of Matthew Arnold and Woodrow Wilson. Drawing on a wealth of historical documents, correspondence, and publications, James Grant paints a vivid portrait of the banker and his world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393609202
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/23/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

James Grant founded Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a financial markets journal, and authored Bagehot and The Forgotten Depression, which won the Hayek Prize. His writing has appeared in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Author's Note xiii

Prologue: "With devouring fury" xvii

Chapter 1 "Large, wild, fiery, black" 1

Chapter 2 "In mirth and refutation-in ridicule and laughter" 14

Chapter 3 "Vive la guillotine" 34

Chapter 4 The literary banker 46

Chapter 5 "The ruin inflicted on innocent creditors" 65

Chapter 6 "The young gentleman out of Miss Austen's novels" 82

Chapter 7 A death in India 95

Chapter 8 The "problem" of W. E. Gladstone 112

Chapter 9 "Therefore, we entirely approve" 137

Chapter 10 "The muddy slime of Bagehot's crotchets and heresies" 163

Chapter 11 The great scrum of reform 179

Chapter 12 A loser by seven bought votes 205

Chapter 13 By "influence and corruption" 220

Chapter 14 "In the first rank" 234

Chapter 15 Never a bullish word 246

Chapter 16 Government bears the cost 263

Chapter 17 "I wonder what my eminence is?" 283

Acknowledgments 295

Notes 297

Bibliography 315

Index 319

Editorial Reviews

06/01/2019

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in defending his lending practices during the 2008 financial crisis, cited for authority 19th-century banker Walter Bagehot (1826–77). In response, financial journalist Grant (Grant's Interest Rate Observer) offers this biography of Bagehot, asserting that his subjects' secure career at Stuckey's Bank, a large and successful English country bank, allowed him to be editor of the weekly Economist as well as to write prolifically on various subjects for other publications. Grant sketches influential events in Bagehot's career, including the Peel Banking Act of 1844, the Panic of 1857, the American Civil War, the Overend Gurney bankruptcy, electoral reform, and a foreign government debt crisis. Grant explains it was Bagehot's 1873 book Lombard Street that popularized the idea of having a lender of last resort to stem financial panic but adds that Bagehot also called for that lending to be at high interest rates and only against good collateral. VERDICT Grant's readable work both illuminates Bagehot's life and places his writings in the conservative gold standard context of his time. [See Prepub Alert, 1/7/19.]—Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA

Library Journal

05/27/2019

Financial journalist and historian Grant (The Forgotten Depression) gives a thoughtful, evenhanded, and frequently witty take on one of his professional forebears: Walter Bagehot (1826–1877), a 19th-century British banker, editor-in-chief of the Economist, and a skilled writer on political and economic subjects. The subtitle is misleading—an epigraph clarifies that Bagehot was labeled “the greatest,” as in quintessential, Victorian by historian G.M. Young, not by Grant. Grant’s view is much more down-to-earth; he passionately admires Bagehot as a “virtuoso writer on money and banking” whose output was “eclectic, fearless, aphoristic, prolific” and whose ideas remain respected today, but doesn’t hesitate to point out his flaws (among them “hauteur” and “studied forgetfulness about forecasting errors”) and failures (including three unsuccessful runs for political office). Bagehot was born into a provincial business and banking dynasty; he went into one of the family businesses, the regional bank Stuckey’s. He became influential among other prominent Victorians, corresponding with and counseling such luminaries as William Gladstone; succeeding brilliantly at the Economist; and accurately predicting and warning against the numerous banking panics and runs that plagued England in the 1800s. It is a measure of Grant’s talent as a biographer that Bagehot appears as scintillating and charismatic as he is reputed to have been in life. Even readers not normally drawn to economic subjects will find themselves enjoying this lively and erudite biography and guide to financial Victoriana. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Excellent—built on a lot of study...and written in a gripping style."

The Economist

"Excellent."

The New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Schwarz

"Lively....Entertaining."

The New Yorker - John Lanchester

"Very enjoyable...Grant demonstrates that he has the measure of a fascinating—and great—Victorian."

Financial Times - John Plender

"A gem of a book: entertaining, wry, and gloriously eccentric."

Foreign Affairs - Sebastian Mallaby

"Bagehot was a financial journalist with a love of English literature and a facility for clear and cogent prose. So is Mr. Grant.… Bagehot is a terrific and efficient survey of the political and economic disputations of mid-Victorian England."

The Wall Street Journal - Barton Swaim

"James Grant [is] one of the most influential contemporary commentators on Wall Street.… In Grant’s hands, Bagehot’s life and career provide a superb prism through which to observe the extraordinary revolution in the British economy during the 19th century."

The Times (London) - Simon Nixon

"The most perceptive and brilliant economic and political writer of his time deserves a biographer of equal literary merit. In James Grant, Walter Bagehot has found him."

Mervyn King

For those with a serious interest in the evolution of banking, this audiobook is a must-listen despite narrator Jonathan Cowley’s lack of engagement. Walter Bagehot (pronounced "badget") was one of those multitalented Victorians whose ideas have continued to echo in the present. Although he also wrote biography, literary criticism, and political analysis, this audiobook focuses on his work as a financial writer and editor of THE ECONOMIST. There is little of his personal life in the biography; instead the work focuses on the evolution of the modern British banking system. Cowley delivers every sentence with the same cadence and overprecise diction, reducing the interest of the average listener. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2019 - AudioFile

2019-04-28
Financial journalist Grant (The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself, 2014, etc.) pays homage to the founding genius of the genre, the pioneering Economist editor and capital Victorian chap.

Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)—as the author helpfully points out, it's pronounced "Badge-it"—was impossibly accomplished, devouring libraries of Latin literature as a child, writing literary essays as a teenager, insatiably learning, and, at his peak as a journalist, writing at least 5,000 meticulously arranged words per week. He was also largely self-taught in economics, a discipline that was then only beginning to shape itself. Grant recounts the prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer William Gladstone's remark, "The machinery of our financial administration is complicated, and Mr. Bagehot is the only outsider who had thoroughly mastered it. Indeed, he understood the machine almost as completely as we who had to work it." The author's account is not without its complications, from the opening discussion of the British monetary system in the two-metal years to repeated encounters with financial panics and depression brought on by wishful thinking, willful error, and the inevitable bubbles and busts of the business cycle. Born into both banking and journalism, Bagehot, as editor and principal columnist for the Economist, was in a position to admonish, correct, and suggest; by Grant's account, the treasury note is one result. He was also in a position, as Grant notes, to prognosticate and imagine: "To write about finance in a useful way," writes the author, "is to take an unconventional view of the future (there's not much demand for what everybody already knows)." Bagehot's imagination led to a publication that, in his own image, was politically somewhat liberal and fiscally conservative, learned without being ponderous, and able to adapt and to admit error, all qualities that lend credence to Grant's estimation of Bagehot as one whose "words live."

Essential for readers with an interest in the history of economics and, more important, how to write about and read the dismal science.

Kirkus Reviews