ABSTRACT
Clever, articulate and cultured, Georgina Alderson was well known in Tractarian circles and might be described as a handsome, lively, Puseyite bluestocking. Lord Salisbury had married money himself and Georgina Alderson, in those days of substantial dowries, had very little from her family; moreover, she was older than his son, nearly thirty. But he chose to consider, from the abandonment of Denmark and from developments in domestic politics, that in his last couple of years Palmerston was no longer in effective control of his colleagues, and especially not of Gladstone. Foreign policy and empire held the attention of the public for much of Cecil’s time on the backbenches. Robert Cecil’s journalistic output between 1856 and 1866 has been put at over 1 500 000 words. The experience was good for him, and not only because it provided a foretaste of an activity that was to be indispensable to his political leadership.
