Commitment and Ideology: the Case of the Second Reform Act

Extract

Whatever our differences, I am grateful to F. B. Smith for what must surely be the best academic news of the year: that undergraduates somewhere, if only in Australia, can still find alluring such things as “style and footnote polemic”; our own undergraduates, alas, have headier tastes. In other respects, however, I must confess to finding Mr. Smith's communication disappointing. One of the longer footnotes in my essay in Victorian Minds is a rather detailed critique of his own book, The Making of the Second Reform Bill, a major work on the subject but one that seems to me – and I gave examples of this – to typify at several crucial points the standard “Whig interpretation.” The present discussion would be more fruitful had he addressed himself to those points instead of countering with a critique based on a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of my argument.

The extent of this misrepresentation is exemplified in his opening paragraph. The courteous critic to whom Mr. Smith refers (Robert Kelley) might be discomfited by the suggestion that the “substance” of his quarrel with me concerned my description of Gladstone as a utilitarian. This was only an “example,” as Kelley presented it, of one of his objections; his other objections involved nothing less than my interpretation of half a century of Tory history and of the relationship between intellectual and political history. In my response the issue of utilitarianism occupied one item out of six.