Lord John Russell

Stuart J. Reid opened his account of John Russell (1792-1878) with an admission of debt: the Dowager Countess Russell had given him her journals, her husband’s early notebooks, and hours of her own recollections. That access shapes the book. It follows Russell from an aristocratic boyhood and student years at Westminster and Edinburgh through the fight for the Reform Act of 1832, which he introduced in the Commons and saw thrown out before it carried, then on to two spells as Prime Minister, the Irish famine, the Crimean War, Italian unification, and the reform bill that wrecked his second ministry in 1866. Reid wrote as a Victorian for Victorians, contributing this volume to the series of political biographies he edited himself. The partiality is part of the value: it records how Russell looked to the men who worked beside him.