are merchants, ship-owners, and bankers, etc., etc.’, he continued. How much better if they ‘would admit that sums are a matter of opinion’.21 Among number crunchers, he was a poet. When confronted by intellectuals, however, he played the practical, no-nonsense philistine. On a business trip he was invited to a dinner party, where an aged scholar declared his intention to get at ‘the kernel of all the machinery by which we were governed’. Bagehot piped up after a pause, ‘My impression is that the kernel is the consolidated fund, and I should like to get at that!’ If someone was taking too long constructing an elegant phrase, he would interrupt them, asking, ‘How much?’22
Bagehot’s articles from these years were mainly portraits of English writers: Cowper, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Macaulay, Shelley, Scott, Dickens, Milton and others. Aside from Bagehot’s interpretation of business success as a criterion of literary merit, what is striking is the relation of all these lives to his own. As an historian Scott was preferable to Macaulay, because the former gave the Cavalier his due: ‘a thrill of delight; exaltation in a daily event; zest in the “regular thing”.’ Shakespeare, meanwhile, was made to share in his view of common folk. It was fun to mix with the lowly, ‘the stupid players and the stupid door keepers’. But at the end of the day ‘it was enough if every man hitched well into his own place in life’, as in Much Ado About Nothing. For, ‘if every one were logical and literary, how could there be scavengers, or watchmen or caulkers, or coopers?’23
Essay-writing in his spare hours from the bank was not enough. It was as a banker, though, and not an intimate of artists, that Bagehot freed himself from the daily chores of the counting house. Richard Hutton, now co-editor of the National Review, wrote from London in 1856 to say he had received a tentative offer from William Rathbone Greg to edit the Economist. Hutton was unsure, and thought of visiting the tomb of his wife in the West Indies before deciding: what did Bagehot think? ‘Offers of this kind are not to be picked up in the street every day’, Bagehot replied. ‘You have an opportunity of fixing yourself in a post, likely to be useful and permanent, and give you a fulcrum and position in the world which is what you have always wanted and is quite necessary to comfort in England. I do not think you ought to risk it for the sake of a holiday.’24
Hutton set out for Barbados. Bagehot, however, wrote to their mutual friend James Martineau, who secured him an introduction to Greg, who in turn obtained an invitation to Claverton Manor, James Wilson’s pile in the country. After a visit in January 1857, Bagehot was asked to write a series of letters on banking. He also caught the eyes of the six girls in the house, for making fun of their German governess, ‘an egg’, and for his appearance: black wavy hair, long bushy beard, tall, thin, ‘very fine skin, very white’, a ‘high, hectic colour concentrated on the cheek bones … he would pace a room when talking and throw his head back as some animals do when sniffing air.’25 A year later he was engaged to the eldest daughter, Eliza.
Hutton got to work as editor after his return, but it was Bagehot who quickly imposed himself as the heir apparent. Wilson liked Bagehot, and was so thrilled with an essay of his in the National Review in 1859 – warning of the dangers of any but the most limited extension of the franchise to the top layers of the working class – he threw him a dinner party in April, inviting Lord Grey, Lord Granville, Sir Richard Bethell, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Edward Cardwell, Thackeray and Gladstone – ‘a very fine collection of political animals’, Bagehot observed contentedly.26 And it was to Bagehot that Wilson turned in 1859 ‘to interpret his great work in India to the public in England through the pages of the Economist’ – even as Hutton remained nominal editor for two more years.27 When Wilson died, Bagehot was offered his job in India. He declined, looking forward to greener and more pleasant political pastures at home. Though he resigned as bank manager, he stayed on as a director, and now oversaw all of Stuckey’s business in London.
Bagehot took after Wilson in another respect, with the clear intention to use the Economist as a springboard into politics. He stood for parliament four times as a Liberal: in Manchester in 1865, Bridgwater in 1866, and twice at London University, his alma mater, in 1860 and 1867. All were unsuccessful, but on his third try he came within a hair’s breadth – just seven votes behind his Tory opponent. Bagehot did not lose the Bridgwater by-election, however, as fable has it, ‘because he refused to bribe the electorate’. An 1869 investigative commission declared him ‘privy and assenting to some of the corrupt practices extensively prevailing’. Nor did he accept this censure with good grace. He blamed the voters, these rustics, and did a droll impersonation of them for the commissioners: ‘I won’t vote for gentlefolks unless they do something for I. Gentlefolks do not come to I unless they want something of I, and I won’t do nothing for gentlefolks, unless they do something for me.’28 After admitting he had paid out £1,533 10s. 2d. via his solicitor to cover ‘retrospective’ campaign expenses, he wrote to Hutton in triumph, with news that his reputation had been ‘much raised’ by his examination. ‘They say, “Ah! Mr. Bagehot was too many for them. They broke Westropp but they could not break him.” They regard it as a kind of skill independent of fact or truth. “You win if you are clever, and lose if you are stupid,” is their idea at bottom.’ It was an idea Bagehot seemed to share.29
While a seat in the Commons eluded him, Bagehot received ample confirmation of his standing outside it – elected to Wyndhams and Brooks’s, the Metaphysical Society, Political Economy Club and finally in 1875 the Athenaeum. As editor he was a trusted advisor to two Chancellors of the Exchequer. These varied and prominent roles in Victorian political, economic and cultural life came to an abrupt close in the spring of 1877. Bagehot, then fifty-one, came down with a cold. It was the last in a chain of respiratory ailments – caught, some believed, in the draughty drawing room at 8 Queens Gate Place in London, awaiting drapes custom-designed by William Morris. Bagehot returned to his family home at Herds Hill, where he died on 23 March, and was buried in the family vault beside his mother at All Saints Church.
Liberal Lines: Bagehot Steers the Economist
Bagehot became director of the Economist the year the Liberal Party emerged from its chrysalis among the Whigs in 1859. He was editor at the zenith of Victorian liberalism, with Liberals in power for thirteen out of seventeen years. At the Treasury, William Gladstone drafted one masterpiece of budgetary discipline after another – winning high praise from Bagehot for his ‘flowing eloquence and lofty heroism’, ‘acute intellect and endless knowledge’.30 In the country at large, trade and employment picked up briskly after the downturn of 1848, while the threat of revolution receded along with it. Liberal rule seemed the benign backdrop to this era, to such an extent that Bagehot was stunned when Conservatives interrupted it in 1874.31 This context helps to explain a marked shift in tone and outlook at the Economist. Bagehot displayed the knowing nonchalance of a young banker, without the solemnity veering into bombast that had characterized Wilson or William Rathbone Greg. As editor, he brought his literary and professional tastes and interests to bear on the look and feel of the Economist, with tangible results.
In 1861 Bagehot added a Banking Supplement and in 1863 a Budget Supplement. A year later he hired William Newmarch to compile an Annual Commercial History and Wholesale Price Index; and in 1868 he brought Robert Giffen on board to assist him in expanding coverage of the money market, including an Investors Manual, which cost an extra sixpence a month. By 1873, with the Economist itself at eightpence and circulation at 3,600, Bagehot could boast that the previous year ‘was the most profitable in the history of the paper’. He made the link between its financial health and that of the markets in a confidential memorandum to the Wilson family, who held the paper and other assets in trust. It was both a business plan and manifesto.
Since 1859 net income had increased from just under £2,000 to £2,765, with Bagehot’s salary at £400 plus half of all profits over £2,000 – giving him, on average, £780 since 1862. Yet trustees should never mistake this ‘delicate’ source of income for ‘funded
