Walter Bagehot

He studied law for three years after his graduation but never liked it, and it was chance that took him into literature. Bagehot happened to be in Paris at the end of 1851 when Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat took place. He wrote a series of articles in the leading Unitarian journal describing the coup and defending Napoleon and thereby stirred controversy among readers because the coup was widely condemned in England. This, however, convinced Bagehot that he could write, which he began to do while settling down to work in Stuckey’s bank. Over the next several years, he wrote a series of literary essays on John Milton, William Shakespeare, Edward Gibbon, Sir Walter Scott, and Pierre-Jean de Béranger, together with studies of leading political figures such as Henry St. John Bolingbroke, William Pitt, and Sir Robert Peel.

As a banker, Bagehot had written various economic articles that had attracted the attention of James Wilson, financial secretary to the treasury in Lord Palmerston’s government and an influential member of Parliament. Wilson had founded The Economist in 1843. Through this acquaintance, Bagehot met Wilson’s eldest daughter, Eliza. The two were married in April 1858.

The following year Wilson was asked to go to India to reorganize the finances of the Indian government, and he died in Calcutta in 1860, leaving Bagehot, then the manager of the Bristol branch of Stuckey’s bank, in charge of The Economist. For 17 years Bagehot wrote the main article, improved and expanded the statistical and financial sections, and transformed the journal into one of the world’s foremost business and political publications. More than that, he humanized its political approach by emphasising social problems.

In 1867 Bagehot published The English Constitution, an attempt to look behind the facade of the British system of government—crown, Lords, and Commons—to see how it really operated and where true power lay. He was one of the first to observe the overriding power of the Cabinet in the party that commanded an effective majority in the House of Commons. He cultivated many close political friendships, notably with William Ewart Gladstone, who became the first Liberal prime minister in 1868; with Lord Carnarvon among the Conservatives (the author of the British North America Act, the constitution of Canada); and with William Edward Forster (the author of the first public education act in Britain).