When Miss Himmelfarb published “The Politics of Democracy: the English Reform Act of 1867” in this journal in November 1966, she drew one courteous protest, the substance of which, on W. E. Gladstone as “Utilitarian,” she has silently admitted in the essay as republished in Victorian Minds.

Nevertheless, some important misinterpretations survive in the new text. It appears with several notable essays on Victorian thinkers, and the collection is likely to be widely read; given the confidence of Miss Himmelfarb's style and footnote polemic, both alluring to undergraduates, it seems worthwhile to correct four main props in her argument. Miss Himmelfarb is concerned to establish that Benjamin Disraeli (the Earl of Derby is virtually ignored with four minor references) throughout 1866 and 1867 believed in a “national” inclusive electorate and that this faith permitted him an ease of manoeuvre and a hardheaded realism in the power struggle denied to the “Utilitarian” Whigs, Liberals, and Radicals. This ideological difference, she insists, is the key to the Liberals' failure and the Conservatives' triumph in 1866-67. The argument may well be true, but at two central points the evidence she adduces does not establish it.

Her view involves Miss Himmelfarb in attempting to show that both parties were committed to reform in 1866 and had been so committed at least since 1858. One would never know from her account that between 1851 and 1864 these Disraelian Conservatives attacked and repulsed three unofficial motions for extension of the franchise and three Whig Government reform bills, apart from seven motions for the ballot.