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Page 35 Liberal politics. Under the sobriquet “Q” he had earned his living as a journalist, popular novelist, and producer of belles lettres long before becoming an academic. Perhaps it shows. In the event, he would be only the second holder of the most prestigious—indeed, then, the sole—Chair of English at Cambridge, whose first incumbent, A.W.Verrall, a classicist, had died within months of his election. Modern academics can only peer wistfully at the Arden within whose leafy glades such an appointment was feasible. For, as John Gross points out, in 1912 Q effectively had no learned publications to his credit and no experience of university teaching. In fact, politics seems to have played the largest part in the matter. According to Gross and E.M.W.Tillyard, the Liberal Prime Minister Asquith had originally intended to offer the job to Sir Herbert Grierson, recent editor of the poems of John Donne, but had allowed Lloyd George to persuade him that a post of such eminence ought rather to be a Party appointment (Tillyard 1958:39; Gross 1973:205–09). Q filled that bill, without doubt. He had worked long and hard for the Liberal Party in his native Cornwall for many years, holding most of the major public offices: County Councillor, Alderman, Justice of the Peace and, ultimately, Mayor of Fowey. He was, it might be said, to the manner born. The Liberal Party had always felt itself to embody a kind of essential Englishness: something compounded of, and supported by, elements George Danger-field nominates as “Free Trade, a majority in Parliament, the ten commandments, and the illusion of Progress” (1961:viii). Successors, in the British political tradition, to the Whigs, groups of politicians began to refer to themselves as Liberals in the 1830s. However, the first truly Liberal administration was not formed until 1868, when Gladstone became Prime Minister. Under Gladstone, Liberalism flourished, combining a commitment to human “freedom” and “progress” — that is, Free Trade, private enterprise, and broad-based political reform—together with a belief in the value of individual personality and social justice, tempered by a mistrust of the powers of the state and the notion that wars should be “fought at a distance and if possible in the name of God’’ (7). Split in 1886 over Irish Home Rule, the Party nevertheless regrouped as a credible force and finally proved convincingly victorious in the election of 1906 when, under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith, it proceeded to place even greater emphasis on human rights and social and political reform than Gladstone had done. The Liberal Party remained the major party in opposition to the Conservatives until |
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