the disenchanted whiggism of winston churchill’s my

Charles R. Sullivan, “The Disenchanted Whiggism of Winston Churchill’s My Early Life,” Journal of Historical Biography 7 (Spring 2010): 1-29, www.ufv.ca/jhb. © Journal of Historical Biography 2010. This work is li-censed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

The Disenchanted Whiggism of Winston Churchill’s

My Early Life

Charles R. Sullivan

HE PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY is to suggest that Winston Churchill’s autobiographical memoir My Early Life is a more complex work

than has often been appreciated. Published in the United Kingdom by Thornton Butterworth on 20 October 1930 and in the United States by Scribner’s a week later, My Early Life has always been the most popular of Churchill’s works. The first English edition sold out within a month, and there have been scores of re-printings, new edi-tions, and translations ever since.1 The popularity of My Early Life is not surprising, for Churchill had unusually good material with which to work. He had been born in 1874 at the grandest of all aristocratic houses in England, Blenheim Palace, Queen Anne’s gift to John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, and the country residence of his successors. Churchill’s parents were among the most glamor-ous couples of late Victorian England. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, the second son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough and recently elected Member of Parliament for the family’s traditional constituency at Woodstock. His mother was Jennie Jerome, an American heiress to a Wall Street and publishing fortune. The young Churchill himself, after having graduated from Harrow, one of Eng-

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2 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

land’s most exclusive public schools, and from the military academy at Sandhurst, saw action in the major colonial conflicts of the end of the nineteenth century—the 1895 war of Cuban independence, the punitive expeditions against the Afghan tribes along the northern In-dian frontier, the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan, and the Boer War in south Africa.

Churchill not only had a great story to tell, he told it with great style. At the turn of the century, Churchill had parlayed the story of his brief military career into four separate volumes—The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), The River War (1899), London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900), and Ian Hamilton’s March (1900). These volumes were now each distilled into a few vigorous chapters. Writing to Churchill from Cambridge, the historian G.M. Trevelyan lauded “his marvellous gift at writing.”2 Likewise, in 1953, the pres-entation speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature singled out My Early Life as the most striking example of Churchill’s ability to com-pose compelling prose.3 Paradoxically, the very excellence of the ma-terials and the very vitality of the narrative have tended to pre-empt any historical or literary analysis of the book. Indeed, most Churchill biographers treat My Early Life as an ephemeral work. They uni-formly praise its style and wit. They may mine it for anecdotal illus-tration or for purposes of amateur psychology. But they have little to say about how this memoir relates to the themes of Churchill’s other contemporary writings or to Churchill’s understanding of himself as a political actor. In the end, then, Churchill’s biographers present My Early Life as a “genial,” “charming,” “enchanting,” “sparkling,” “cavalier” “effusion”—scarcely more substantial than George Alfred Henty’s historical adventure stories from which Churchill took the title of the American edition, “A Roving Commission.”4

For those few commentators who do take My Early Life more seriously, it is at best a work of nostalgia, a kind of elegiac lament for a world we have lost. David Cannadine, for example, notes that Churchill composed My Early Life in the wake of Stanley Baldwin’s defeat in May 1929 and the election of the second Labour govern-ment of Ramsay MacDonald. Not only did Churchill lose his position

DISENCHANTED WHIGGISM 3

as Chancellor of the Exchequer, but increasingly bitter differences with the Conservative Party leadership over India and trade policy made it unlikely that he would ever hold office again. The response that Churchill fashioned in My Early Life to his rapid descent into po-litical isolation and even irrelevance was, according to Cannadine, “a classic piece of patrician reminiscence.” Churchill may have written his memoir with more flair than is seen in much of the literature of aristocratic decline. Still, all the elements of the genre were there: life in the big house, memories of devoted servants, the trials and tri-umphs of public school days, and election to Parliament. With these elements, Cannadine observed, came characteristic political attitudes. The author of My Early Life was like so many other members of the beleaguered British nobility. He was disillusioned with democracy, disoriented by mass politics, and, what was most disconcerting, more than a little enamoured of authoritarianism. Thus, in the final analy-sis, My Early Life recorded the passage of an aristocratic adventurer into an aristocratic anachronism whose reputation and relevance were saved only by the “miraculous transformation” of five days in May 1940.5

In this essay, I will argue, following Cannadine, that My Early Life was a far from ephemeral work. But I will also argue that Can-nadine has mistaken the significance of Churchill’s memoir. It was not a retreat into untimeliness or a consolation for failure. Indeed, an altogether different agenda begins to come into focus if we consider My Early Life’s relation to Churchill’s contemporary historical writ-ings—the six volumes of The World Crisis that Churchill published between 1923 and 1931, and the four volumes of Marlborough that he published between 1933 and 1938. Victor Feske has shown that Churchill used these two multi-volume works to stake out a complex position within the traditions of Liberal historiography.6 The first work responded to the increasing numbers of historians who, in the 1920s, followed J.M. Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace in questioning Britain’s decision to go to war with Imperial Germany and the wisdom of the Treaty of Versailles. Churchill repu-diated this revisionism and vindicated British participation in the


Great War in what, when all allowances are made for the new brutal-ity and scale of the conflict, were classically Whiggish terms of the defence of liberal institutions and the expansion of personal free-doms. The second work, Churchill’s biography of Marlborough, re-sponded to those Liberal historians like G.M. Trevelyan who, faced with the rise of totalitarian regimes, adopted an ever-more-critical view of political power and an ever-greater emphasis on scholarly detachment. Churchill also repudiated this detachment, and claimed a positive role for politics. John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlbor-ough, had set England on the path to great power status with his vic-tory over the French at the battle of Blenheim in 1704. The peril that Louis XIV’s insatiable ambitions posed to the “hearths and souls of all mankind” had been overcome, Churchill argued, because Marl-borough had sacrificed the seductions of private retirement to the call of public duty, and because Marlborough had been willing to wield military and diplomatic power with creative genius and intuitive in-sight.7

My Early Life, I contend, mediated the two parts of Chur-chill’s complex position in interwar Liberalism. It did so in what I will call the mode of disenchanted Whiggism. On the one hand, the stories that Churchill told of his early life, however much they may at times have lacked self-critical reflection, evoked again and again his identification with the central values of classical Whiggism. Take, for example, perhaps the single most memorable episode in My Early Life. On 15 November 1899, Churchill decided at the last minute to accompany an armoured train reconnoitring the area around the be-sieged British position at Ladysmith. When the train was ambushed, Churchill organized its escape under a hail of bullets, only to be cap-tured and held as a prisoner of war at the State Model School in Pre-toria. On December 12, however, Churchill escaped and made his way across Boer territory, reaching Durban on December 23. In My Early Life, Churchill confessed that after his capture by the Boers he had momentarily regretted “the sour rewards of virtue” and had re-flected that he might have “quite decently” gone off upon the train’s retreating engine. But, he added, the very misfortune that seemingly


cut him off from “the boundless possibilities of adventure and ad-vancement” unexpectedly transformed his prospects: it was this dra-matic capture and daring escape that established his public reputation and laid the foundation of his future political success. Thus, in My Early Life, “The Armoured Train” episode acquires considerable symbolic significance. Churchill made the experience of being “fenced in by railings and wire” at the State Model School in Preto-ria, "watched by armed men, and webbed about with a tangle of regu-lations and restrictions," the source of an enduring distaste for political tyranny and arbitrary authority. Likewise, Churchill made the experience of the long hours of enforced boredom and “the sense of constant humiliation” the source for two other central values of his Whiggism. “I ... hated every minute of my captivity,” Churchill wrote, “more than I have hated any other period of my whole life.... [I thought of] nothing else but freedom.” The only prisoner to get over the wall before the sentries’ suspicions were aroused, Churchill also described how, although entirely on his own, his sense of destiny and his optimism about his prospects for success quickly revived. “All my fears fell from me at once. To go back was impossible.... Fate pointed onward.”8

On the other hand, My Early Life could not entirely escape its own “anxious and dubious times.” As we shall see below, Churchill not only subverted the temptations of nostalgia, he registered the loss of natural assurance for ultimate ends that was an aspect of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world.9 To defend Whig val-ues in such times, therefore, Churchill moved toward what various intellectual historians have called the aesthetic turn in twentieth-century thought. The statement often attributed to Churchill that “his-tory shall be kind to me for I intend to write it” is far more than a clever quip. It was a fundamental methodological principle. To be sure, as Robin Prior and David Reynolds have shown for The World Crisis and The Second World War, Churchill choreographed his memoirs to ensure a reputation.10 But, as David Reynolds has eluci-dated with particular clarity with respect to The Second World War, Churchill also constructed his “histories” to project a possible future


in which the overlay between his irrepressible personality and Whig values remained relevant. Much of contemporary Liberal historiog-raphy, Victor Feske argued, could not see beyond unintended conse-quences. Churchill, too, had a robust sense of the prevalence of narrow motives and misguided benevolence. Nevertheless, he used “the technique of exploded irony” to vindicate the continuing poten-tial for progress and the continuing possibilities of action.11 If Whig-gism could no longer be confidently grounded in the push of an ineluctable progress and the structure of the world, it could still be reconstructed around the pull of an ideal and what Churchill called in My Early Life the “structure of self-confidence.” Accordingly, in My Early Life, Churchill returned to the events that shaped his entry into politics, not as memorial but as motivation.12 Indeed, we might say that My Early Life worked as a kind of hinge of fate. But this hinge did not turn inward to Cannadine’s self-infatuated and backward-looking egotist, but outward to Feske’s public historian, who throughout the 1930s looked forward and prepared both himself and his audience to respond to the call “Be Ye Men of Valour.”

There is no question that Churchill did leave My Early Life open to a nostalgic reading. Indeed, the manner in which Churchill sets up My Early Life in his author’s preface even invites such a reading. Re-peatedly Churchill offered that “sensuous apprehension of once vivid circumstances and states of mind” that characterizes what Sven Birk-erts calls the lyrical memoir.13 “I find,” Churchill reflected, that “I have drawn a picture of a vanished age.” He had been “a child of the Victorian era,” when British trade was unrivalled, when British naval supremacy was unchallenged, and when “the greatness of our Empire ... was ever growing stronger.”14 Churchill’s mother embodied this magical moment. “She always seemed to me a fairy princess, a radi-ant being possessed of limitless riches and power.” With her death in


1921 had gone “the old brilliant world of the eighties and nineties.”15 Now, Churchill reflected, “the character of society, the foundations of politics, the methods of war, the outlook of youth, the scale of val-ues, are all changed ... to an extent that I should not have believed possible.”16

Other passages in My Early Life employed the same lyrical mode. For example, as Churchill describes the preparation of his cavalry regiment, the Fourth Hussars, to go to India in the spring 1896, he returned to the theme of the “vanished world.” Stationed in the London suburb of Hounslow, Churchill momentarily devoted himself to the amusements of the London Season. In this “gay and splendid social circle,” Churchill recalled, moved “the few hundred great families” who had “governed England for so many genera-tions.” Yet here again everything had changed by 1930. Stafford House, Devonshire House, and Lansdowne House, once the setting of aristocratic magnificence and "glittering parties," had passed into the hands of the government or developers, and been transformed into dreary museums or conference centres or blocks of hotels, flats, and restaurants.17

The final chapters of My Early Life likewise looked back on “a vanished, light-hearted world.” The 1900 election that first re-turned Churchill to Parliament took place in a “real political democ-racy”: “statesmen, electors, and the press all played their part” in “a process of rugged argument” and the national decision was rendered “in measured steps” over a period of six weeks. The death of Lord Salisbury in 1903 signalled the demise of this structure and the be-ginning, Churchill wrote, of the “liquefaction of the British political system” into “a fluid mass” of voters all “distracted by newspapers” and all “voting blindly on one day.”18 An even more fundamental rupture took place in the years 1914-1918. In the “little” colonial wars of the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign, “a small number of well-trained professionals championed their country’s cause with an-cient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic manoeuvre.” Casualties were few, an acceptable “sporting element” in what re-mained a “magnificent” “gentleman’s game.” The Great War democ-


ratized, mechanized, and bureaucratized warfare. Now “death was the general expectation[,] ... whole brigades were shorn away under the steel flail of artillery and machine guns,” and “entire populations, including even women and children, [were] pitted against one an-other in a brutish mutual extermination, [with] only a set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher’s bill.”19 Upon a careful reading, however, these evocations of a world we have lost are not all that they may seem. Repeatedly Churchill sabotages his own apparent nostalgia.20 For example, Churchill’s ac-count of his time at Hounslow provided an opportunity to sample the theme of his 1906 biography of his father. In Lord Randolph Chur-chill, Churchill linked his father’s legacy of Tory Democracy to his own emerging position as an architect of the New Liberalism’s pro-gram of social reform. The common ground lay in a shared concern for “the social progress of the great mass of the people” and “the multiplying problems of modern life.”21 In My Early Life, this con-cern shaped Churchill’s description of the large crowds that milled about outside the Duchess of Devonshire’s Fancy Dress Ball for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. The scene, which might have been taken from Benjamin Disraeli’s celebrated passage on the “two na-tions” in the novel Sybil (1847), underscored that “in those days,” beneath the seeming brilliance of English Society, lay a “great gulf” separating the rulers and the ruled.22 Similarly, despite Churchill’s claim that an “earnest and searching” political discussion and “cere-monious personal courtesy and mutual respect” prevailed during Lord Salisbury’s lifetime, he disclosed the dark underside of 1900’s khaki election. The Conservative Party had appealed to the basest jingoism, Churchill charged, not a little disingenuously since his own campaign at Oldham was a prime example.23 And not only had the government impugned the patriotism of the Liberal opposition to the Boer War, it continued, in an “inept and arrogant” abuse of power, to intimidate the opposition press.24

Churchill’s apparent nostalgia was undercut even more thor-oughly by the larger narrative of My Early Life. Churchill’s “earliest memories,” for example, were of Ireland, where Lord Randolph had


taken the position of secretary to his own father, John Spencer-Churchill, the seventh Duke of Marlborough, whom Disraeli had ap-pointed Lord Lieutenant in 1876. What the first pages of My Early Life reveal, however, is not the preface’s “structure of our country ... firmly set.” Rather, the childhood impressions with which Churchill chose to fill these pages evoke a general sense of the imminence of danger: his most vivid memory was of the Dublin Theatre Royal go-ing up in flames just as he arrived with his family for an afternoon performance. At the same time, Churchill’s childhood impressions allude to the very Irish crucible in which the seeming stability of Vic-torian politics was beginning to dissolve. Thus, Churchill recollects a reference to Oliver Cromwell and conjures up the island’s long his-tory of sectarian conflict. He elicits a vague foreboding of black crowds, dark processions, and threatening “Fenians” and signals that the duke’s Lord-Lieutenancy corresponded to another great famine in the west of Ireland, the formation of the Irish Land League, and an upsurge in nationalist violence. And he creates the image of a young boy at play in the grounds of the Vice-Regal Lodge and anticipates the scene where in 1882 Irish nationalists assassinated the Irish Per-manent Undersecretary Thomas Henry Burke and the Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish in what became known as the Phoenix Park murders. 25 No wonder, then, that the phrase “gathering storm,” which Churchill would later use as the title of the first volume of his history of the Second World War, was taken from his father’s con-temporary assessment of the Irish situation.26 Even the simple fact that Churchill spent three years of his childhood in Ireland was itself far from innocent. The seventh Duke of Marlborough may have been “the complete Victorian,” but his eldest son, George Spencer Chur-chill, Lord Blandford, was a precocious Edwardian. In 1876, when an adulterous affair of Lord Blandford implicated the Prince of Wales, the Churchills found themselves social outcasts and political pari-ahs.27 In short, the Churchills were in Ireland because they were in exile.

The “structure of our country” was no more “firmly set” in Churchill’s “second foothold of memory”—Ventnor on the southern


coast of the Isle of Wight, where the sister of his governess Mrs. Ev-erest lived. Indeed, the very structures of commercial and naval su-premacy that Churchill had singled out in the preface to My Early Life seemed particularly precarious. Even fifty years later, Churchill continued to register the public shock when the newly constructed Tay Rail Bridge collapsed in gale force winds on 28 December1879, taking with it a train and all seventy-five passengers. At the time, the Tay Bridge was the world’s longest and an advertisement for Brit-ain’s technological prowess; its collapse was (and remains) the worst structural engineering failure in British history. And just the previous year the young Churchill himself witnessed one of Britain’s worst peace-time naval disasters when on 24 March 1878 the HMS Eury-dice capsized and sank in another terrible storm just off Ventnor.28

As if the curse of scandal, the spectre of assassination, and the shock of disaster with which Churchill filled his account of his earli-est years were not enough to dim the apparent brilliance of a van-ished world, a storm also gathered around Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Upon the Churchills’ return from Ireland with the Liberal party’s victory in the general election of 1880, Lord Randolph had quickly established himself as one of the most aggres-sive members of the Conservative opposition. In the years 1884-1886 in particular, Lord Randolph Churchill had played a significant role in bringing down two Gladstone governments over the issue of Irish Home Rule. Indeed, both Lord Randolph’s unprecedented use of party organization to advance his parliamentary career and his will-ingness to “play the Orange card” and incite Irish Protestant fears of Home Rule were defining features of an increasing political volatility in which the contemporary historian George Dangerfield had also claimed to discern “the strange death of liberal England.”29 But, in December 1886, Lord Randolph went too far, impetuously resigning his positions as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in an effort to force a showdown with Lord Salisbury over the Conservative Party leadership. The gambit failed, however, and Lord Randolph’s precipitous political and physical decline be-came both a painful memory for his son and also, given Churchill’s


own renewed break with the Conservative leadership in 1930, a wor-rying precedent. Lord Randolph was henceforth excluded from gov-ernment, his speeches were less and less well attended, and his momentary brilliance became just “a swiftly fading shadow.”30 When My Early Life turned to relate the young Churchill’s own adventures, it again invoked images of a “gathering storm” and a world always already in motion. In November 1895, as the new subaltern of the Fourth Hussars awaited his orders, he took advantage of a period of leave to go to Cuba. “In those days,” Churchill ob-served, the possibility that Liberal and democratic governments would usher in a new “age of Peace” had seemed very real. But, as he now looked back, the Cuban conflict showed this ideal to be “illu-sory.” Instead, as the Cuban War of Independence broadened into the Spanish-American War and ultimately into the birth of American im-perialism, Churchill perceived that it had foreshadowed “the deluge to come.”31

From his experiences along the northern Indian frontier in 1897 and in the Sudan in 1898 Churchill extracted similar conclu-sions. In the mountains of Afghanistan, all the laws, the technical knowledge and the networks of personal relationships among the governing classes that made the government of India so serenely “pa-tient” and restrained gave way to a “wild” and “murderous” world, where “every man is a warrior” and where “every family cultivates its vendetta, every clan its feud.”32 At the battle of Omdurman, “an-cient and modern” again collided. The “desperate valour” and “fa-naticism of the Middle Ages” met the disciplined organization and “machinery” of the nineteenth century.33 In these passages, Chur-chill’s intent was not to offer a simple and reassuring narrative that resolved the clash of civilizations into Britain’s civilizing mission. Quite to the contrary, he complicated just such a narrative. In north-ern India, for example, Churchill noted that the same “carnivorous forces” were at work among the soldiers of the British army as among the Pathan tribesmen. Moreover, as Churchill remarked with a more bitter irony than usual, that most “genial” product of Christian civilization, the breech-loading rifle, had only multiplied the scenes


of “savage brilliancy.” And in the Sudan, too, fanaticism was not confined to the “Dervishes.” Kitchener’s desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb, Churchill agreed with the contemporary Liberal opposition, was a “barbarous” act, worthy of “the Huns and Vandals.”34

These “carnivorous forces” and “barbarous acts” were not anomalies. With the British capture of Johannesburg and Pretoria in May and June 1900, the Boer War “degenerated” into the kind of partisan conflict that the Spanish had confronted in Cuba. As Boer guerrillas mingled with the local populations, the British responded by burning farms and creating concentration camps in which several thousand women and children died. In short, the war in south Africa had already come to manifest the “vindictive spirit” and “bitterness” that would be the hallmark of the total war of the years 1914-1918.35

My Early Life, therefore, exposes the limitations of the very nostalgia that it elicits. Not only do dissonant notes intrude again and again on the theme of a vanished world. Not only does the larger nar-rative reveal that the Victorian era never “rested” so “sedately” as it may have appeared. Perhaps most important, “irresistible tides” of circumstances on the one hand and the unpredictable contingencies of events on the other hand play repeatedly across the text of My Early Life and dissolve whatever remained of a nostalgic longing for a structure of the world that was “firmly set.”36 Indeed, for Churchill, the very existence of a knowable structure in the world was not just elusive. It was likely illusory. The world, Churchill proclaimed, was “an endless moving picture.” Chance and luck were ceaselessly at work and no fairy tale ending of “happily ever afterwards” could possibly avert “new struggles.” 37 In short, what Machiavelli called fortuna ruled the world.

As for Machiavelli so too for Churchill, an understanding that for-tuna ruled the world shaped the possibilities for action.38 To be sure,


to the extent that Churchill’s My Early Life invited a nostalgic read-ing, its pages seem to reveal a kind of Medicean world in which statesmen and diplomats, united by their courtly manners and their cosmopolitan outlook, exercised benevolent control over the world’s affairs. Yet no less than the works of Machiavelli, Churchill’s My Early Life raised its own questions about whether such a classically-informed political rationalism could master “the rushing, swirling torrent of events.” Indeed, for many readers of My Early Life, one of its most surprising features is its unrelenting criticism of the “per-verted pedantry” and “purposeless monotony” of the very classical education that formed the traditional British political and military el-ites.39 This theme lies behind one of My Early Life’s more amusing passages, in which Churchill recalled his first day of formal educa-tion at St. George’s boarding school. Presented by the headmaster with a Latin grammar and asked to learn the first declension of the noun mensa (table), the seven-year-old Churchill dutifully complied but then asked the headmaster about the vocative case. He recorded the ensuing exchange:

“What does it mean, sir?” “You would use it in speaking to a table.” “But I never do,” I blurted out in honest amazement. “If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished ... very severely,” was his conclusive reply.40

Churchill’s “honest amazement” was not (or at least not merely) the petulance of a spoiled child of the aristocracy. It had a deeper signifi-cance. Rhetorically Churchill was equating the failures of this tradi-tional classical education with failures in British leadership. Thus, for example, the language in which Churchill condemned the reliance on rote memorization in his education reappeared in the condemnations that he unleashed on the plodding and ponderous movements of Brit-ish war preparations in south Africa and the “purblind viciousness” of Sir Redvers Buller’s stubborn adherence to antiquated tactics.41 Much the same problem provided the subtext to Churchill’s “difficulty with Kitchener.” When Churchill presents Kitchener as a


“curmudgeon of red tape” blocking his application for a transfer from India to Egypt and wishing to consign him to a “long period of rou-tine and discipline,” he again recalls his old headmaster.42 And when Churchill observes with apparent generosity that the Sudan campaign was effected with the “swiftness, smoothness, and punctuality” that “in those days” (my emphasis) still characterized “Kitchener’s ar-rangements,” he is tacitly reminding his readers that he had just re-cently condemned Kitchener’s arrangements in the First World War as an example of just how utterly illusory were the aspirations to ra-tional control.43 Kitchener, Churchill argued in The World Crisis, had tried to meet the demands of the Great War by the centralization of all aspects of military operations, recruitment, and provisioning, and by the transformation of the General Staff into a mere machine for supplying information and implementing orders. But such centraliza-tion pre-empted any “resolute conviction” and the “ever accumulat-ing dangers and difficulties” had been, in Churchill’s view, beyond Kitchener’s capacity to control. The paradoxical result was that this “commanding” and “imperturbable” countenance oversaw the grad-ual “drift” into the “measureless ruin” of the war of attrition.44 At the same time, Churchill was no more comfortable with modern-day moral reformers like Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant. Dur-ing the 1880s and 1890s, the generally civil libertarian impulse be-hind earlier feminist movements, such as Josephine Butler’s campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act, began to wane. New groups such as the National Vigilance Association, of which Mrs. Ormiston Chant was a founding member, began to advocate government regulation to repress prostitution and insure the purity of public entertainments. In 1894, Mrs. Chant and her purity campaign took aim at the Empire Theatre of Varieties, a large and notorious music hall in Leicester Square (which cadets at Sandhurst fre-quented), and succeeded in convincing the London City Council to hold up the renewal of its operating licence until its “promenade” was closed and alcohol excluded from its auditorium.45 In the ensu-ing public outcry against “prudes on the prowl,” Churchill took a prominent role, even stirring up a “mob” that tore down the hastily


constructed barricades between the Empire and the promenade. To Churchill, writing some thirty-five years later, this youthful escapade also had a deeper significance. The Purity Campaign’s “intolerance,” he wrote in My Early Life, violated “the best traditions of British freedom” and the “inherent rights of British subjects.” At the same time, the Purity Campaign ignored the inherent “dangers of State in-terference with the social habits of law abiding persons.” By contrast, Churchill concluded, the manifold “frailties” of human nature were most safely dealt with by “moderation” and “good humour.”46

Churchill questioned, therefore, whether either political ra-tionalism or moral reformation could successfully navigate a world ruled by fortuna. He made this point with particular emphasis in two important essays that bracket the publication of My Early Life. No philosophical vision, he maintained in “A Second Choice,” could see far into the “continually diverging skein of consequences” and the “ever multiplying paths of the labyrinth.” No absolute or natural law, he argued in “Consistency in Politics,” could contain the intricate in-terplay of an infinity of particulars.47 Instead, we can see Churchill in My Early Life turning, like Machiavelli, to subjective qualities and the faculty of will, and confronting fortuna with the elements of what he called the “structure of self-confidence.”48 Indeed, it was precisely Churchill’s point in his preface to My Early Life that the political and military elites of Victorian England had “seemed” more “sure” of themselves because they had chosen “conviction.” Put another way, Churchill was less a lyrical memoirist aiming at the restoration of or-der than he was a coming-of-age memoirist aiming at the recognition and renewal of purpose.49

The cornerstone of this “structure of self-confidence” was courage, or what Churchill called more frequently in My Early Life “audacity.” Once again like Machiavelli, Churchill believed that for-tuna was conquered by the bold—the man of pluck, “push,” and “perseverance”—not by the cold—the man of cares, cautions, and equivocations.50 If south Africa taught Churchill anything, it was that the best conceived plans were no more able than the most well-armoured trains to master fortuna. Action, not thought, shaped


events. “Who shall say,” Churchill asked, “what is possible or impos-sible? In these spheres,” he answered, “one cannot tell without a trial.”51 In emphasizing the place of courage in the structure of self-confidence, Churchill was recognizing a distinctly modern problem. As William Ian Miller has shown, the Great War transformed the Western conception of courage. In a traditional account such as Aris-totle’s Nicomachean Ethics, courage had been depicted as a disposi-tion that, if cultivated and exercised, was practically inexhaustible. With the experience of total war, however, courage was recast as a non-renewable resource that was always in danger of “running out” or being “used up” and “depleted.”52 The second element of Chur-chill’s structure of self-confidence—“persuasiveness”—also re-sponded to a distinctly modern problem. One aspect of persuasiveness was certainly “the habit of writing.” Virtually every Churchill biographer cites the passage in My Early Life where the young student at Harrow struggles to master the “noble” structure of the ordinary English sentence.53 But the more critical aspect of per-suasiveness was “the gift of oratory.” It was more critical because Churchill understood that with the fundamental democratization of politics and the rise of a mass society, the major challenge for leader-ship was no longer, as it had been in classical political thinking, tam-ing popular passions. Rather, it was overcoming popular “indifference,” or, as A.O. Hirschmann has put it, the preference for “exit” over “voice.”54 Thus Churchill had momentarily “despaired” as he prepared to challenge Mrs. Ormiston Chant and the National Vigilance Association: “The pavements [in London],” he observed, “were thronged with people hurrying to and fro engrossed upon their petty personal interests, oblivious ... to the larger issues of human government. I looked ... upon these trivial-minded passers-by. Evi-dently it was not going to be so easy to guide public opinion in the right direction as I had supposed.”55

This recognition of the difficulties of guiding public opinion shaped, in turn, how Churchill weighed the relative importance of the traditional means of persuasion in western rhetoric. In both Chur-


chill’s early draft of an essay on “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric” and in My Early Life’s account of his development as a public speaker, what Churchill calls “the accumulation of argument” is important, but decidedly less so than the speaker’s ability to attract attention by a “striking presence” or to capture the sentiments of the audience in a series of vivid impressions. In the end, then, where Aristotle’s rheto-rician is more akin to the dialectician, Churchill’s rhetorician is more akin to an “artist.” And, just as the modern education that Churchill recommended should appeal to the imagination and the interests, so a modern rhetoric, if it wished to counteract “the commonplace influ-ences and critical faculties” that left citizens unresponsive, must be willing to risk stirring the most elemental emotions and arousing the most convulsive passions by “a wild extravagance of language.”56 Undoubtedly, there were considerable dangers in such appeals to action and passion. Early in 1893, for example, the young Chur-chill illustrated the dangers of action for action’s sake when he im-petuously plunged from a bridge and ruptured a kidney while playing with younger relatives. Later the same year, while in Switzerland where he had gone to recuperate, the young Churchill illustrated the same point again when he decided with carefree abandon to go swimming in the centre of Lake Lausanne and nearly drowned when his boat drifted off.57 And, as the example of Lord Randolph Chur-chill’s charismatic politics made clear, these dangers were not just personal. They could also be public.58

For the Churchill of My Early Life, two other elements in the “structure of self-confidence” contained these dangers. One of these elements was what Churchill, using the language of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, described as “the religion of healthy-mindedness.”59 During his first months in India, Churchill recollected in My Early Life, he had read Winwood Reade’s mani-festo of secularism The Martyrdom of Man and W.E.H. Lecky’s His-tory of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism and History of European Morals. The result was “an aggressive and violent anti-religious phase” that consumed whatever remained of the faith he had “dutifully accepted” as a young child: for the rest of his life


Churchill’s relation with the Church of England was a complacent but very occasional conformity.60 But Churchill’s subsequent partici-pation in military campaigns along the north Indian frontier had also complicated a simple secularism. The relentless combination of posi-tivist rationality and Darwinian materialism in Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man reached the stark conclusion that “what we call men are not individuals” but merely “components” of the species and that “in all things there is cruel, profligate, and abandoned waste.”61 Confronted directly with the fact of human mortality, Churchill now decided that such “reasoning led nowhere.” Instead, he turned to what James called a “complex optimism” or "systematic healthy-mindedness”—a deliberate choice to set aside the brute facts for a poetic, but useful, fiction. As Churchill put it, “I did not worry about the inconsistency of thinking one way and believing the other. It seemed good to let the mind explore so far as it could the paths of thought and logic, and also good to pray for help and succour, and be thankful when they came.”62

This radical dualism between heart and head, feeling and intel-lect, faith and philosophy was every bit as modern as Churchill’s treatments of courage or persuasiveness, and, like his treatments of courage and persuasiveness, Churchill’s treatment of religion was intended to sustain action by providing a consoling sense of provi-dential purpose. Yet even as Churchill’s healthy-mindedness allowed him to believe that he was not a worm but a glow worm and that a “guiding hand” had preserved him for some great cause, it also repre-sented a recovery of “poise.”63 The radical dualism between faith and philosophy worked to resist the manner in which fanaticism incited divisive passions, be it in the way that his own “partiality for low church principles” had once led him to protest “Popish” practices, or be it in the way that the presence of “too much religion” fed the co-lonial conflicts of the late nineteenth century.64 And similarly the radical dualism between faith and philosophy also worked to resist the manner in which a simple secular optimism invited unrestrained activism and to encourage a modesty that was at once epistemologi-cal and political. Thus, Churchill attested of his own career that “no


exercise of my own feeble wit and strength could save me from my enemies, and … without the assistance of that High Power which in-terferes in the eternal sequence of causes and effects ... I could never succeed.”65

A similar epistemological and political modesty emerged from the last element in his “structure of self-confidence”—the sense of history. Again during his first months in India, Churchill had deep-ened his acquaintance with the great Whig historians. To the works of Hume that he had encountered at Harrow, he now added Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Thomas Macau-lay’s History of England, and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.66 What this historical self-education taught, Churchill related in My Early Life, was that, in the words of Edmund Burke, “political ar-rangement, as it is a work for social ends, ought to be wrought by so-cial means.”67 This lesson emerged nicely from the story of the regimental polo team that Churchill weaves through the account of his time in India. The “prince of games,” polo embodied the “ups and downs,” the “thrill of motion,” the play of fortune that, for Churchill, was the essence of “the gift of existence.” And, in 1899, the Fourth Hussars won the India Inter-Regimental tournament. His own play limited by a dislocated shoulder, Churchill reflects in My Early Life that success in polo, and by implication in politics, depended in the final analysis on an “intricate, loyal team-work ... which renders a true combination so vastly superior to the individuals of which it is composed.”68

Churchill’s claim that his historical self-education also gave him an appreciation for “the idea that time played ... [a] vital part” in political and military affairs.69 Churchill had, of course, faulted the British war effort in south Africa, and General Buller in particular, for a lack of audacity. But he also praised Lord Cromer’s Egyptian administration after the Battle of Omdurman for its calm and compo-sure—for, in short, its ability to enlist time as an ally. “Lord Cromer was never in a hurry, never anxious to make an effort or a sensa-tion.... He watched events until their combination enabled him to in-tervene smoothly and decisively.”70 This same sense of the


complexity of events, of the unintended consequences of action, and of prudential accommodation to context lay behind his condemnation of Kitchener’s desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb and of British retalia-tion against Boer civilians. If “resolution” was the rule in war, “magnanimity” ought to be the rule in peace. “Here I must confess,” Churchill wrote toward the end of My Early Life, “that all my life I have found myself in disagreement alternately with both the historic English parties. I have always urged fighting wars and other conten-tions with might and main till overwhelming victory, and then offer-ing the hand of friendship to the vanquished.”71

In his 1953 essay “Churchill the Philosopher,” C.E.M. Joad identified two distinct strands in Churchill’s thinking. One strand Joad charac-terized as “pessimistic,” “cynical,” and even “fatalistic.” This was a Churchill, he explained, who prepared for the worst, who saw hidden motives everywhere, and who made the history of his own life and times turn on chance circumstances. Another strand in Churchill’s thinking Joad characterized as “optimistic,” “sanguine,” and “given to hope.” This was a Churchill who manifested an “extraordinary …zest … for living,” who was sublimely confident in his power to overcome adversity, and who was “sustained by a strong spiritual conviction of the rightness of his cause.” For Joad, context had had something to do with which strand in Churchill’s thinking was more prominent: Churchill’s cynicism was most profound in the late 1920s and early 1930s, at the very moment he published My Early Life. His optimism was most pronounced in the great wartime speeches of 1940. But ultimately, for Joad, the presence of these two strands in Churchill’s thinking was, at best, an unresolved ambivalence and, at worst, a fundamental incompatibility.72 The present essay on My Early Life has also discerned two strands in Churchill’s thinking, analogous in many ways to those that


Joad identified. But, contrary to Joad, this essay has argued that these two strands are conceptually united in a disenchanted Whiggism. To be sure, My Early Life did reveal a dark underside of hidden motives in the ostensibly “light-hearted world” of Victorian England. And it did dissolve the prospects of rational control or moral reform in the swirling torrents of unintended consequences. Yet these hidden mo-tives and unintended consequences do not necessarily add up to fatal-ism. Thus, for example, Machiavelli, no stranger to dark undersides and swirling torrents, conceived of the political problems of his time in terms of a malleable fortuna, rather than a deterministic fate, pre-cisely in order to leave room for a creative virtù. Churchill, it seems to me, is making much the same point in one of the more poetic, and obscure, passages in My Early Life:

The butterfly is the Fact—gleaming, fluttering, settling for an instant with wings fully spread to the sun, then vanishing in the shades of the forest. Whether you believe in Free Will or Predestination, all depends on the slanting glimpse you had of the colour of his wings—which are in fact at least two colours at the same time.73

Put more prosaically, what Joad called Churchill’s realism, or what this essay has called Churchill’s disenchantment, left open the possi-bility of a continuing commitment to the central values of the Whig tradition precisely because the very complexity of historical causa-tion made it amenable to the “man of action” and his “structure of self-confidence.”

It is this unity in Churchill’s thinking that Isaiah Berlin under-stood so well. Berlin maintained that the central role that imagination played in Churchill’s political thinking was often overlooked. Unlike the American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Churchill had a more-than-passing “acquaintance with darkness” and a well-developed “sense of tragic possibilities.” Favoured with more benign circumstances, Roosevelt acted as a “lens,” absorbing, concentrating, and reflecting the sentiments of his constituents. Facing what My Early Life called “anxious and dubious times,” Churchill, by contrast,


acted as an “artist” who “idealized” his fellow citizens “with such intensity that in the end they approached the ideal.”74

This same artistry is on display in Churchill’s My Early Life. It explains certain literary features of the work: Churchill’s quite ex-plicit reluctance to describe his memoir as an “autobiography,” his concern with inner consciousness and how consciousness can shape reality, the almost Joycean modernism of Churchill’s use of different voices for different stages in his development, and the manner in which he recasts many of the episodes of his youth into virtual Just William stories. To be sure, this artistry continues to invite criticism. To David Cannadine, it is part of Churchill’s effort to obscure his “precarious genealogy”; to Richard Holmes, it is just another exam-ple of the self-infatuation of a perennial child.75 But here again the critics misunderstand Churchill’s purpose and reduce the imaginative aspects of his work to an essentially private narcissism.

There was, however, a public purpose for Churchill’s artistry. It was to provide what Isaiah Berlin called a “necessary illusion” around which a new generation of “troublesome young men” might rally to defend the hard-won liberties of the British constitution.76 For Churchill the politician, entering upon the “wilderness years,” My Early Life imagined a combination of the audacity that by itself had spelled disaster for his father with the prudence that had given Lord Cromer the strength “to wait” until “men came to him.”77 For a Brit-ain mired in the Great Depression and uncertain in its response to continental fascism, My Early Life gave persuasive form to a continu-ing confidence in the vitality and relevance of the constitutional and political history of the English-speaking peoples. As Churchill put it in a passage to which he would repeatedly return in the years 1940-1941,

Come on now all you young men .... You are needed more than ever.... You have not an hour to lose. You must take your place in Life’s fighting line.... [and] accept your re-sponsibilities..... Never submit to failure.... You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and


true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seri-ously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won.78

In the final analysis, then, My Early Life belongs not to a Churchill who alternated between a nostalgia for aristocracy and an enthusiasm for authoritarianism. It belongs not to a history of Churchill’s so-called “failure,” but rather to a history of Churchill’s, and Britain’s, “finest hour.” Indeed My Early Life constitutes a statement of Chur-chill’s faith that historically liberal societies still retained the capacity to generate the leadership and conviction to resist the totalitarian temptation.

Even the “charm” of My Early Life, which the book’s detrac-tors readily concede, is itself an embodiment of this faith. Just how Churchill’s charm could carry his liberal faith may be nicely illus-trated by an address on “Tradition and Novelty in Art” that he deliv-ered on 30 April 1938. Churchill, who had become an accomplished amateur painter, now stood before the Royal Academy Banquet. In attendance was the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and mem-bers of his cabinet, and Churchill used the opportunity to develop an allegory on the difference between liberal and totalitarian societies. “It is a broad question,” Churchill observed, “whether any measure of regimentation is compatible with art. In another country—which,” he added with his characteristic mixture of playful wit and serious purpose, “shall be nameless—an artist would be sent to a concentra-tion camp for putting too much green in his sky, or too much blue in his trees. Even more grievous penalties,” Churchill concluded amid appreciative laughter, “would be reserved for him if he should be suspected of preferring vermilion to madder brown.”79 The vivid writing and the bright colours of My Early Life, I think, made the same point.


Notes

1 Frederick Woods, A Bibliography of the Works of Sir Winston Churchill (Toron-to: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 60-62 on the publishing history of My Early Life.

2 G.M. Trevelyan to Winston S. Churchill, 22 October 1930, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, companion volume 5, part 2: The Wilderness Years (Bos-ton: Houghton-Mifflin, 1981), 207.

3 “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953 Presentation Speech,” http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1953/press.html.

4 My Early Life receives only the briefest analyses in the major biographies. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991), 496, for example, devotes one short paragraph to Churchill’s memoir. More recently, Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (London: Hambledon and Lon-don, 2001), 131 treats the work in a single line. For the characterizations of My Early Life, see respectively, Robert Rhodes James, Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900-1939 (New York: World Publishing Company, 1970), 344; Norman Rose, Churchill: The Unruly Giant (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 262, 230; Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 8; and Manfred Weidhorn, Sir Winston Churchill (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 156.

5 David Cannadine, “Winston Churchill as an Aristocratic Adventurer,” in Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1994), 151, 131-132, 158-160, 161; and David Cannadine, The De-cline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 234, 546, 618-619. See also Paul Addison, Churchill: The Unexpected He-ro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 133 on My Early Life as an elegiac lament.

6 Victor Feske, From Belloc to Churchill: Private Scholars, Public Culture, and the Crisis of British Liberalism, 1900-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroli-na Press, 1996), chapter 5.

7 Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002 [originally published 1933-1934]), I: 16, 228, 681, 740-741.

8 Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1874-1904 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996 [originally published 1930]), 259-261. Henceforth MEL. There is another sense in which “The Armoured Train” story is exemplary. Like many other epi-sodes in MEL, it was surrounded by ambiguity and controversy: had Churchill, as Aylmer Haldane and several other fellow prisoners maintained, “left them in the lurch?” On this controversy, Jenkins, Churchill, 52-60 provides a succinct sum-mary.


9 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds.,

From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 139 and passim.

10 David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Robin Prior, Churchill’s ‘World Crisis’ as History (London: Croom Helm, 1983); and generally for both The World Crisis and The Second World War, Tuvia Ben-Moshe, Churchill: Strategy and History (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992). Prior, Churchill’s ‘World Crisis’ as History, 275 pithily sums up Churchill’s skill as an apologist: “Churchill the historian protects Churchill the politician.”

11 For “the technique of exploded irony,” see Feske, Belloc to Churchill, 186-189, 196, 211-212.

12 Paul Addison, “Destiny, History, and Providence: The Religion of Winston Churchill,” in Michael Bentley, ed., Public and Private Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 243 puts this point particularly nicely: “if Churchill was a myth-maker, he was also a creature of myth.”

13 Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again (St. Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2008), 25-27.

14 MEL, xxi-xxii. 15 MEL, 4; Winston S. Churchill to Lady Islington, 1 July 1921, in Martin Gilbert,

Winston S. Churchill, companion volume 4, part 3: April 1921 - November 1922 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1978), 1532.

16 MEL, xxi. 17 MEL, 89-91. 18 MEL, 33-35, 357-359. 19 MEL, 180, 64-67. 20 Manfred Weidhorn, Sword and Pen: A Survey of the Writings of Sir Winston

Churchill (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), 101 notes that “trauma and disillusionment constantly hedge the narrative” of MEL.

21 Winston Spencer Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill (London: Macmillan and Co., 1907), 237 and MEL, 47.

22 MEL, 90. 23 For Churchill’s own contribution to the dark underside of 1900’s khaki election,

see his election addresses of 11 August and 23 August 1900, and his speeches to the Pall Mall Club, 25 October 1900, and the Midland Conservative Club, 14 No-vember 1900, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963, volume I: 1897-1908 (New York: Chelsea House, 1974), 55, 59, 60-62.

24 MEL, 371 refers specifically to the libel case of Albert Cartwright, editor of The South African News.

25 MEL, 1-3, 5-6, 7-8.


26 “Speech on the Compensation for Disturbances (Ireland) Bill,” Hansard’s Parlia-

mentary Debates, volume 253, (July 5, 1880): 1649. 27 A.L. Rowse, The Churchills from the Death of Marlborough to the Present (New

York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 201-202 for the Lady Aylesford scandal. It is Rowse, chapters 8 and 9, who contrasts the seventh and eighth dukes as “the complete Victorian” and the “Edwardian reaction.”

28 MEL, 6-7. 29 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York: G.P.

Putnam’s Sons, 1961 [originally published, 1935]), 88. 30 MEL, 32, 46-49. Churchill’s often poignant descriptions of his relationship with

his parents give MEL aspects of what Birkerts calls the “family romance” memoir and, in the case of his father’s rapid deterioration, the traumatic memoir. See Bir-kerts, The Art of Time in Memoir, chapters 3-5.

31 MEL, 75, 92. 32 MEL, 132-136. 33 MEL, 186-187. 34 MEL, 132, 135, 228. 35 MEL, 355-356, 335-336, 329-330. 36 MEL, 9, 160, 232, 370 on “irresistible tides” and 27, 102, 168 on unpredictable

contingencies. 37 MEL, 59, 372. 38 I am adapting here the conceptualization of Machiavelli’s context in Felix Gil-

bert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), especially chapter 3, “The Crisis in the Assumptions about Political Thinking,” 129-130, 138-139, 149-151.

39 MEL, 23, 38. 40 MEL, 10-11. As Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, I: Youth, 1874-

1900 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1966), 46 points out, in My Early Life, Chur-chill “discretely camouflaged St. George’s as St. James’s.”

41 MEL, 234, 237, 308, 322. 42 MEL, 162, 165. Churchill does concede in MEL, 161 that his aggressive use of

political influence and his blatant flouting of military procedure to get from India to Egypt were open to “adverse” interpretations. But, as he wrote Lady Randolph, 10 January 1898, in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, I: Youth, 1874-1900, 371, “It is a pushing age and we must shove with the best.”

43 MEL, 168. 44 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918. Abridged and Revised

edition (New York: The Free Press, 1959 [originally published 1931]), 362-364, 376, 411-412. For a view of the Churchill-Kitchener relationship during the First World War that is equally critical of Churchill, see Ben-Moshe, Strategy and His-tory, 58-69.


45 Lucy Bland, “‘Purifying’ the Public World: Feminist Vigilantes in Late Victorian

England,” Women’s History Review 1, 3 (1992): 397-412 discusses the activities of Laura Ormiston Chant and the National Vigilance Association (NVA).

46 MEL, 50-59. The phrase “prudes on the prowl” came from a series of contempo-rary articles in The Daily Telegraph. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, companion volume 5, part 2: The Wilderness Years, 174, n. 2. Randolph S. Churchill, Wins-ton S. Churchill, I: Youth, 1874-1900, 224 uses the term “mob” to describe the two to three hundred protesters who “stormed the barricades” on 3 November 1894. Perhaps not for nothing was the first informal Parliamentary group that Churchill joined after his election in 1900 known as “the Hooligans.” See MEL, 370.

47 Winston Churchill, “A Second Choice,” in Thoughts and Adventures (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991; reprint 1932 edition), 3, 5, 6 and Winston Churchill, “Con-sistency in Politics,” in Ibid., 27. “A Second Choice” was originally published under the title “If I Lived My Life Again” in March 1931. “Consistency in Poli-tics” was originally published in July 1927.

48 MEL, 290. 49 Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir, 49 on the lyrical memoir as “a tool of

restoration” and 59-62 on the coming-of-age memoir as illuming the path of self-realization.

50 MEL, 157, 166. 51 MEL, 262. 52 William Ian Miller, The Mystery of Courage (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard

University Press, 2000), 59-62, 119-120, 247. For Miller, the classic statement of the new understanding of courage was Lord Moran’s The Anatomy of Courage (1946). Lord Moran was Churchill’s personal physician during the Second World War.

53 MEL, 153-155. 54 For the concepts of “exit” and “voice,” see Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and

Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1970), 3-5 and passim.

55 MEL, 54. 56 “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric,” in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill,

Companion Volume I, part 2: 1896-1900 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin & Company, 1967), 816-821 and MEL, 201-207.

57 MEL, 29-30, 36-38. 58 For the dangers of excessive audacity, see also Churchill’s account of the punitive

mission against the Pathan tribesmen, where Anglo-Indian detachments were “improvidently dispersed” in the Mamund valley. MEL, 136-147.

59 MEL, 114; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library, 1958), lectures IV and V, 76-111. James’s text was based


on the 1901-1902 Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion at the University of Edin-burgh.

60 MEL, 113-115. For a succinct summary of Churchill’s religious attitudes, see Addison, “Destiny, History, and Providence,” 236-250.

61 Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (London: Pemberton, 1968), 417, 419. For some sense of the extent of Reade’s influence on the young Churchill, see his youthful novel, Savrola: A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania (London: Library of Imperial History, 1974 [reprint 1900 edition]), 77-85 in particular.

62 James, Varieties, 83ff.; MEL, 116. 63 Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (London: Eyre &

Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965), 15-16 for Churchill’s belief that he was a “glow worm”; Addison, “Destiny, History, and Providence,” 248 for Churchill’s belief in a “guiding hand”; and MEL, 115 on the restoration of “poise.”

64 MEL, 13-14 on the “embarrassment” caused by the brief flirtation with Low Church principles and MEL, 115 on the connection between “too much religion” and rebellion in India.

65 MEL, 276. 66 MEL, 110-112. 67 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett,

1987), 148. Churchill’s formulation of the role of historical thinking in shaping political prudence often has Burkean resonances. See n.63 below.

68 MEL, 207-211. 69 MEL, 235. Churchill’s language here is nearly identical with Burke, Reflections,

148. 70 MEL, 216. 71 MEL, 330-331. 72 C.E.M Joad, “Churchill the Philosopher,” in Charles Eade, ed., Churchill by His

Contemporaries (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1953), 478-479, 484, 487. 73 MEL, 28. One possible source for this image is Reade, Martyrdom of Man, 419. 74 Isaiah Berlin, “Winston Churchill in 1940,” in The Proper Study of Humanity

(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 605-607, 613, 617, 618-620. For a similar understanding of Churchill’s significance, see the Lord Moran diaries, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 828-829.

75 David Cannadine, “Churchill and the Pitfalls of Family Piety,” in Churchill, ed. Robert Blake and Wm. Louis Rogers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 9-20; Ri-chard Holmes, In the Footsteps of Churchill: A Study in Character (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 20-22, 35.

76 Here I am also suggesting that one audience of young men to whom Churchill was writing in MEL was the group of Tory dissidents who were just beginning to develop their critique of appeasement. See Lynne Olson, Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England


(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), especially 40-50 on Churchill’s relationship with these young men in 1929-1930.

77 Cf. Churchill, Marlborough, I: 955 on the duke’s combination of “daring” and “prudence.”

78 MEL, 60. 79 “Tradition and Novelty in Art,” April 30, 1938, in James, ed., Complete Speeches,

VI: 1935-1942, 5947.

the disenchanted whiggism of winston churchill’s my

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