Burke

Burke Synopsis

This volume on Edmund Burke (1729–97), published in 1879 in the first series of English Men of Letters, was written by the general editor of the series, John Morley (1838–1923). Himself a politician as well as an author, Morley had previously published a 'historical study' of Burke in 1867, but emphasises in an introductory note that this book 'is biographical rather than critical' and is intended as a narrative life. Morley himself was a radical in politics, and his interest in Burke, who he does not hesitate to characterise on occasion as a narrow-minded reactionary, may seem surprising, but he greatly admired his subject's independent political stance, which he describes as a mixture of utilitarian liberalism and historic conservatism, unfettered by abstract doctrine, and which he believed might again come to dominate political discourse in the last decades of the nineteenth century.