Lived Liberalism: Current Scholarship
The title of the blog on this site, "Gladstone's Daughter: Living Liberalism," is not only an accurate description of Mary Gladstone's daily life, but "living liberalism" also communicates a belief system and lifestyle espoused by many individuals living in Victorian Britain. A community of today's scholars are currently exploring the idea of a lived liberalism.
The aptness of the term may be seen because the blog subtitle is shared with Elaine Hadley's excellent book, Living Liberalism : Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago, 2010) — a fact that I failed to recall when choosing the blog name. I highly recommend this study which, in Hadley's words, "focuses on the key concept of individuation — how it is embodied in politics and daily life and how it is expressed through opinion, discussion and sincerity."
Other monographs include: Amanda Anderson's Bleak Liberalism (Chicago, 2016); Tracy Davis's Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires: Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform (Cambridge, 2023): ; and my own Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism (Cambridge, 2017). Britain's only prime ministerial library, Gladstone's Library in Wales, regularly hosts events that investigate the nature of liberalism.