George Joachim Goschen:The Transformation of a Victorian Liberal

The career of George Joachim Goschen, the man whom Lord Randolph Churchill forgot, illuminates many of the problems faced by the British ruling classes in the late nineteenth century: a Liberal in 1863, Goschen entered the twentieth century a Conservative. In examining his life and career, Professor Spinner shows how this transition took place and how it typified the reaction of many Victorian statesmen to the massive social and economic changes of the period. The son of a German immigrant merchant banker, thoroughly Anglicized by Rugby and Oxford, Goschen had no difficulty in rising to the highest positions of political and economic power. Elected to the Commons in 1863, he served successively in Lord Russell's Cabinet and at the Poor Law Board and the Admiralty during Gladstone's first Ministry.