Gladstone: A Biography by Roy Jenkins Page B

ineffective flutter towards a flame. And
that is all the romantic contact with ‘respectable’ females that is recorded before his approach to (very) serious wooing in 1835.
    Perhaps aided by his idealization of the pure and ethereal qualities of his sister Anne, and to a lesser extent (because she was not so close to him) of his mother, he found it difficult to
establish a bridge between his generalized sexual urge and individual women, particularly if they were of his own social class. Thus the temptations to which he referred so frequently and so darkly
were essentially those of fascination with sexas an abstract and generalized concept rather than the pursuit of specific girls: masturbation, about which he got into a
tremendous state, pouring post-indulgence abuse on to his own head in many diary passages; and pornography, the enticements of which were still making his visits to Munich bookshops, during the
intervals of his 1845 theological conversations with Dr Döllinger, into a wearing mixture of excitement and shame.
    There were also early traces of his later obsession, at once semi-innocent and self-indulgent, with ‘rescue’ work among prostitutes. Thus, on his first night of a preliminary visit
to Oxford in August 1828, at the age of eighteen and before he was even a member of the University (which might have been as well if the Proctors had been on a patrolling expedition), he went out,
encountered a lady of the night and had a long conversation with her. The following night he again met the ‘poor creature’. 6 Eleemosynary
though part of his motive may have been, and restrained although the outcome undoubtedly was, it is impossible to believe that frissons of excitement did not guide his steps on at least the second
evening and that he found it easier to talk to this girl redolent of sin and sexual mystery than to chatter to Miss Pocklington.
    None of these temptations, however, was conducive to finding Gladstone a wife. This he set about without guilt but also without guile. His first target was Caroline Farquhar, the sister of an
Eton friend and the daughter of a Surrey baronet of considerable and somewhat older wealth than that of the Gladstones. The family did not therefore regard Gladstone as a particularly good match,
but nor would they have been likely to be resistant had Miss Farquhar, who was considered by Gladstone and others to be a ‘beauty’, been responsive.
    She was exactly the reverse. Gladstone persuaded himself that her religious position was satisfactory, but may well have over-estimated the aphrodisiacal effect of telling her this. He also
mistakenly believed that appeals to her father and brother would advance his suit. He had no idea how to interest her. She had no insight to the qualities behind his awkwardness. Her main
contemporary comment (a little unreliably recorded in Farquhar family lore) was the exclamation, when she saw Gladstone walking across her family’s park at Polesden Lacey with a case in his
hand: ‘Mama, I cannot marry a man who carries his bag like that.’ What sort and size of a bag it was is not recorded – it was well before the days when he gave his name to that
somewhat commercial-traveller-like receptacle, the Gladstone bag. Nor is the fault of style (unless it was the mere fact of doing it at all) in his porterage. It waspresumably
akin to his alleged bourgeois stiffness, which provoked Emily Eden over twenty years later to complain to Lord Clarendon that there was ‘something in the tone of his voice and his way of
coming into a room that is not aristocratic’. 7
    Miss Farquhar was probably a fairly silly woman. She subsequently married (General) Charles Grey, a younger son of the Reform Bill Prime Minister, who became first the Prince Consort’s and
then Queen Victoria’s private secretary. General Grey always treated Gladstone with respect and friendliness, but Mrs Grey followed up 1830s unresponsiveness with 1880s sourness.