Bagehot
The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $41.99
Publisher Description
“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 Drawing on a wealth of historical documents, correspondence, and publications, James Grant paints a vivid portrait of the banker and his world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Gold Standard
Author
American finance journalist now aged 73. Founder and long time editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a much revered publication in US financial circles, he successfully predicted the 2008 financial crisis, has an abiding affection for the gold standard and the Victorian era, and has penned several financial history books.
Grant’s scepticism about modern financial methods is embodied in this quote. “To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation’s earnings is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defence of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed.”
Subject
Walter Bagehot (pronounced Badge-it), the third and most famous editor of The Economist (1861 until his death in 1877), was a close confidant of William Gladstone, the dominant liberal politician of the era. His weekly writings on finance and politics were so influential that he was regarded as an honorary cabinet minister by several governments
He was more than a journalist though. As a Unitarian, Bagehot was excluded from Oxford and Cambridge. He did mathematics at the fledgling University College London followed by a masters in moral philosophy. He was also a banker, inventor of the Treasury bill, and author of Lombard Street, the canonical guide to stopping a run on the banks. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, quoted him frequently between 2007 and 2009.
After Bagehot’s death, a contemporary remarked that he might have been the most fascinating conversationalist in London. The Economist, which persists in calling itself a newspaper not a magazine because Bagehot did, still runs a weekly commentary column on British politics named after him.
Content
Fascinating portrait of a towering but poorly remembered figure of the early to mid-Victorian era. Extremely enlightening about the political, financial and cultural basis of our society today.
Prose
Spare, restrained but engaging, and filled with the sly wit that has long characterised Grant’s style.
Bottom line
I’m not usually into biographies, largely because I find the style of most biographers a bit dull. Walter Isaacson (Ben Franklin, Kissinger, Einstein, da Vinci, Steve Jobs), is an exception. James Grant is another.