Book description
Norman Gash's magnificent two-volume life of Sir Robert Peel - Mr
Secretary Peel (1961) and Sir Robert Peel (1972) - is the standard
work on the great statesman, and is widely considered one of the great
biographies of 19th-century prime ministers. Faber Finds is delighted
to return both to print, beginning with Mr Secretary Peel. As Gash
puts it memorably, 'Peel, born in 1788 in the world of Gibbon and
Joshua Reynolds, of stage-coaches, highwaymen and the judicial burning
of women, died in 1850 in the age of Faraday and Darwin, of Punch,
railway excursions, trade unions and income tax...' Over the course of
Peel's life Britain was remodeled, and it may be argued that Peel
himself did more than any other political figure in reconciling the
new forces in society with its older institutions. But as a politician
Peel could be a controversial figure, his pragmatism pressing him into
unpopular decisions. The son of an industrial millionaire, his
instincts were for the cause of good government over narrow party
interest. Norman Gash interpreted Peel as the intellectual founder of
the modern Conservative Party - an aristocratic administrator and
natural consensus politician who believed in courting the urban middle
class as well as landowners and farmers. Mr Secretary Peel carries its
subject's story from birth through his entry into politics in Ireland,
his early positions in Tory governments, his tenure as Home Secretary
from 1822 (which included his establishing of the Metropolitan Police
Force) and up to the struggles over the issue of Catholic
Emancipation. 'A rich and perceptive portrait of a statesman in the
making,' Philip Ziegler, Telegraph.
Norman Gash was born in India in 1912. In 1933 he took a First
in Modern History at St John's College, Oxford. During the Second
World War he served in military intelligence and rose to the rank of
major. In 1953 he published Politics in the Age of Peel, and after two
years at the University of Leeds he was appointed Professor of History
at St Andrews, a position he held until 1980. His other publications
included The Age of Peel (1968); Reaction and Reconstruction in
English Politics, 1832-1852 (1966); Lord Liverpool (1984); Pillars of
Government (1986); and Aristocracy and People: England 1815-1865
(1979). He was appointed CBE in 1989, and died in 2009.
