ABSTRACT
‘Read Dilke’s Greater World’, W.E. Gladstone noted in his diary on Wednesday 11 November 1868, while wintering at Hawarden Castle, his country estate near Chester in North Wales. 1 It is one of the few significant mistranscriptions in that extraordinary life-journal of recording books read and time spent, both public and private. 2 In Charles Dilke’s best-selling travel volumes of that season, the young radical imperialist had, of course, only explored ‘Greater Britain’ when recording his global circumnavigation of the Anglo-world – across the Americas and the wider British Empire of migrant settlement in the southern hemisphere. 3 Gladstone’s mistake is surprising because his marginalia comments in the book show how closely he had read it. Yet Gladstone’s simple slip of the pen also reveals the new British prime minister’s presumptions about the international status, suasion and influence of his ‘England’ (Gladstone rarely spoke of ‘Britain’). The Victorians indeed lived at the centre of a pax Britannica. 4 Writing in The North American Review (in 1878), Gladstone himself could memorably describe his own society as ‘the head servant in the great household of the world’.
