Reflections – Page 3 – Gladstone's Library.

11 October 2017

Humanising Gladstone

This is an account of an intern, fresh off the back of her first month working at Gladstone’s Library…

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24 August 2017

Musical Mary Drew

The contents of Mary Drew’s diaries have been something of a surprise to me! But the daughter of a four-times Prime Minister, whom later acquired the position of Private Secretary to William Gladstone, did not hide her love of music. So much so, she wrote reviews about the music she listened to, the orchestras she went to see, and her own public and private performances.

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23 June 2017

“It’s a mere nonsense”: Gladstone’s Homeric Age

‘Looked into my papers on Homer: & I am strongly tempted to undertake something…’ wrote Gladstone on 7^th July 1855, unaware that that ‘something’ would occupy his thoughts for much of the next three years. What began as a small project to be completed while out of office grew to a three volume work: Homer and the Homeric Age (1858).

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30 May 2017

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Interns at Gladstone’s Library are encouraged to contribute periodic blogs on aspects of William Gladstone, the Library and its collections which really spark their interest or tie in with their own areas of expertise.

With the acquisition of the British Crime Writing Archives at Gladstone’s Library and our first ever Alibis in the Archive event taking place to launch that archive (now SOLD OUT!), Intern Danielle set about coming up with a murder mystery of her own to really get into the criminal spirit of things to come…

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20 March 2017

The Swiss Intern

My name is Jennifer, I’m 22 years old and I’m the current Swiss intern at Gladstone’s Library. But how did somebody from Switzerland get to work here? Long story…

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31 January 2017

‘Words, words, words': William Gladstone, 1859 and All That

1859 saw the publication of many literary works. Charles Dickens, for example, began to publish his journal All The Year Round in which Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White would be serialised in the same year.

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13 December 2016

‘Read Rossetti’s Shadow of Dante’: William Gladstone’s diary reference to Maria Francesca Rossetti

Most people have heard of the poet Christina Rossetti, sister of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but fewer readers may be aware there was another sister, Maria. Fewer still may know that she was also a published author.

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7 October 2016

Thomas Pennant: Welsh Naturalist, Explorer, another man before his time!

Our founder, William Ewart Gladstone, was not the only famous figure connected to Flintshire. Thomas Pennant, a famous polymath, naturalist and traveller of the Eighteenth Century, was born and lived in Flintshire.

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17 July 2016

A book list with a difference

‘Books are a delightful society. If you go into a room filled with books, even without taking them down from their shelves they seem to speak to you, to welcome you.’

With the wisdom of William Gladstone ringing in our ears, we asked the ‘delightful society’ of Gladstone’s Library staff to tell us about a book that they love.

A book-list with a difference.

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16 June 2016

A translation of Gladstone’s German annotations

William Ewart Gladstone, the founder of Gladstone’s Library, was a diligent and intelligent man. Apart from being Britain’s longest serving Prime Minister to this day, he also managed to read 22,000 books and even found the time to annotate 11,000 of them. And not just in his native language, English; he also annotated his books in at least five other languages: Latin, Italian, Greek, French and German.

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