James Grant...writes with a sympathy and grasp of detail that suggests a [deep] familiarity. Bagehot was a financial journalist with a love of English literature and a facility for clear and cogent prose. So is Mr. Grant ... But this is no hagiography. Mr. Grant is sometimes impatient with his subject. He has had his fill, he writes with remarkable frankness at the book’s outset ... But the author’s occasional impatience with his subject makes the book more readable, not less ... What Mr. Grant has produced isn’t so much a conventional 'life'...as a study of the political and economic ideas Bagehot spent the bulk of his energies thinking and writing about ... Bagehot is a terrific and efficient survey of the political and economic disputations of mid-Victorian England and a fine narrative of the life of the era’s most brilliant essayist. It is also, I think, a book meant for journalists: those wretched scribblers who string words together for a living in the vain hope that somebody may read them a year from now.
No rapt idolater of his subject, Grant never shies away from pointing out Bagehot’s personal failings, such as priggishness and a supercilious condescension toward the uneducated ... Throughout his book, Grant quotes abundantly from Bagehot’s economic thought but slightly shortchanges the essays and biographical sketches. These 'estimations' are a delight ... One detects a certain ambivalence ... In a superb, deliberately contrarian piece about Edward Gibbon, Bagehot neatly mocks English prejudice when he describes the future historian’s temporary conversion to Catholicism.
While a full appreciation of Bagehot has been hobbled by his polymathic attainments, he has nevertheless been fortunate in his devotees ... James Grant follows this pattern, burnishing his subject’s reputation but offering a somewhat limited appraisal of Bagehot’s achievements ... The characterization that the highbrow Labour Party politician Richard Crossman (another Bagehot devotee) bestowed on Bagehot’s writing — a 'mixture of rollicking cynicism and cool analysis' — applies to Grant’s own brilliantly contrarian criticism ... This biography, though, takes wing only when it treats Bagehot’s role as a banker and financial journalist. That these are the very aspects of Bagehot’s work that have been relatively neglected by most scholars, who have tended to concentrate on his literary, political and sociological oeuvre, might be reason enough to commend Grant’s excellent if uneven biography.
... thoughtful, evenhanded, and frequently witty ... The subtitle is misleading ... It is a measure of Grant’s talent as a biographer that Bagehot appears as scintillating and charismatic as he is reputed to have been in life. Even readers not normally drawn to economic subjects will find themselves enjoying this lively and erudite biography and guide to financial Victoriana.
Where should Walter Bagehot stand in the pantheon of political and economic thinkers? In one sense the legacy of this 19th-century monetary and political theorist is underwhelming ... Yet GM Young, pre-eminent historian of Victorian England, called Bagehot the greatest Victorian. Clearly there is a paradox here and James Grant in his engaging new biography of Bagehot...goes a long way towards explaining it ... In this very enjoyable book, Grant demonstrates that he has the measure of a fascinating — and great — Victorian.
As Grant concedes, Bagehot does not come across as particularly likeable, and in truth his life was not particularly eventful. There is a reason why they don’t build statues to financial journalists. But in Grant’s hands, Bagehot’s life and career provide a superb prism through which to observe the extraordinary revolution in the British economy during the 19th century ... Grant finds Bagehot to have been wrong on a lot of things: like much of the British establishment, he backed the slave-owning south in the American Civil War, he opposed extensions of the franchise to the working classes and was against votes for women. Even as a financial journalist, he was, says Grant, 'a middling seer'. How Grant thinks this record justifies the book’s subtitle The Greatest Victorian, is baffling. That said, in the guild of financial journalists, the fact that his work is still being discussed 150 years later makes him the greatest of all time.
In James Grant, it sometimes seems, the nineteenth century has been resuscitated. Towering, gaunt, bow-tied, and pinstriped, he writes with a sly wit that recalls the novels of William Thackeray ... Now, Grant has written a delightful biography of Walter Bagehot, the great nineteenth-century Englishman in whom Grant perhaps recognizes a grander version of himself: the would-be Victorian sage is paying tribute to the authentic one ... Grant has written a gem of a book: entertaining, wry, and gloriously eccentric. Readers learn that the mud in London was 57 parts horse dung and that Bagehot played 'zestful games of cup-and-ball' wearing—yes—a monocle. Along the way, they get a nasty feeling that even the greatest liberals have feet of clay and that the Victorian version of the radical center enjoyed a deference that is inconceivable today.
