William Gladstone, Collector and Collectable: Objects, Networks and Symbols of Liberalism

Abstract

Victorian politician and four-times Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98) was active as a private and public collector, but his image was also the object of collecting. This article explores Gladstone as both subject and object of collecting, testing Bruno Latour’s Actor-network theory to explore the push and pull between the person and the objects, the person in object form, and the historical and social networks that this interaction generated. John Everett Millais’s 1879 portrait of Gladstone (National Portrait Gallery, London) and its reproductions in print are used as a distinctive case study of one such network.