‘Liberal Worlds’ by H.S. Jones review

Oh to be a British Victorian intellectual. Princes, prelates, and presidents sought your counsel and company. Newspapers carried your nostrums for global improvement with seriousness and numerous column inches. Gilded invitations flooded in to address learned bodies the world over and join their exclusive membership. Honours and grand appointments landed in gratitude not just for your intellect, but in recognition of your sagacious influence on the public good. Your scholarship and speeches were published, almost at whim, in multiple languages to an international audience. You were, of course, generously remunerated for your labours. Your administrative tasks, and many personal ones, were completed by a devoted secretary. Name recognition would be at a level where wider society awaited your views with admiration and awe. This was the life of James Bryce. Naturally, he had the requisite Victorian whiskers.

H.S. Jones’ finely researched Liberal Worlds gives a rich account of the full and diverse public intellectual life of a man once considered among Britain’s most famous scholars. Yet, as Jones acknowledges, few today in the academy or public would know of James Bryce, let alone be scrolling through his voluminous writings on their electronic devices. What is it about this figure, whom the Anglophile American president Woodrow Wilson labelled ‘the greatest living Englishman’, that makes him deserving of a new biography?

An Englishman he may well have been called, but he was born in Belfast in 1838, and was Scottish descended and reared, of which he was sincerely proud. He and his erudite family of educators of the United Presbyterian Church were wary of him going south to Oxford with its Anglican rites, but the allure of England’s opportunities, including a scholarship, was too great to ignore. Britain was then at the height of its power, and Bryce was active in the heart of it. Yet while Britain’s position may have given Bryce’s career a substantial boost, he was a highly credible intellectual in his own right. His first influential work The Holy Roman Empire (1864), published in his mid twenties, was seen as redolent of Gibbon in its persuasive and historiographical flair. It launched his intellectual and literary reputation. Navigating concepts and cultures of a complex political structure while seeing the lasting relevance for his own age would remain a recurrent analytical approach of Bryce’s, which he applied in diverse works including The American Commonwealth (1888), Impressions of South Africa (1897), and South America: Observations and Impressions (1912). While these books and others were given mainly to synthesis and personal assessment over archival or theoretical fixations, they were still infused with original analysis that brought growing readership and status.

Among Bryce’s common themes were the constitutional and political concerns that faced humanity. Education, race, nationalism, and constitutions were constant preoccupations and, then as now, compelled serious societal thought and debate. Politicians and public bodies often turned to Bryce’s insights for guidance due to his probity and knowledge, even when his ideas were not in alignment with theirs – universal suffrage campaigners, for example, who knew of Bryce’s reservations over increasing the electorate’s size too quickly before the ‘fitness’ of various groups had been tested. This was a symbiotic relationship since inhabiting the ivory towers was never enough for Bryce. He delayed work on a cherished biography of the emperor Justinian, never completed, in order to dedicate more time to politics. He later found time to write on Gladstone, who was not just his correspondent, but who had recommended him to the Regius Chair of Civil Law at Oxford at just 32. Inspired by his mentor, Bryce took up the Liberal cause, seeking a parliamentary seat, which he won in 1880 as MP for Tower Hamlets. Ministerial preferment came not long after, including the posts of president of the Board of Trade and chief secretary of Ireland. Not unusually for an intellectual, he was not a successful performer in the House of Commons. The ambassadorship to Washington (1907-13) was more suited to his talents. He was a welcome guest to the White House of Theodore Roosevelt, who reputedly enjoyed his rendition of Icelandic sagas. He was much in demand in the US where, in 1906, he met Booker T. Washington for a discussion of ways to ease the New World’s growing pains. Whatever his other achievements, he was judged to be successful in improving Anglo-American relations. In Britain he was called upon to chair major commissions into secondary education, second chambers, and German ‘outrages’, and was a founding figure of the British Academy, which later made him president. In his 80s he produced Modern Democracies (1921), a pioneering study of the varieties and accoutrements of Western democracy’s modern life. It would remain on university reading lists for decades after his death in 1922.

Bryce did not receive laurels from all. Joseph Chamberlain called him ‘just a snivelling professor’ for his interventions on the vexed question of Home Rule for Ireland. Others thought him a bore. While promoting female education his stance against women’s suffrage did not endear him to its supporters. His evaluations on race included ‘physical repulsion’ of miscegenation; he thought that Black men had been given premature enfranchisement after the American Civil War. Jones does not evade criticism of Bryce’s positions but is careful to see them in their contexts and examine how, and why, Bryce made such arguments. While this reviewer would have liked more on imperial matters, constitutional issues, and Bryce’s political life there can be no doubt that Jones has produced a definitive intellectual biography of Bryce, which makes a broader case for the forgotten Victorian intellectual as the key to understanding Britain and its once powerful influence on the world.

• Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect
  H.S. Jones
  Princeton University Press, 464pp, £38
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

H. Kumarasingham is Reader in Politics and History at the University of Edinburgh.