The Lost Imperialist review: the first Victorian celebrity

‘He is I suppose the most popular man in Europe, but what a bore it must be, having to keep up such a reputation.” This 1879 judgment of the first marquess of Dufferin and Ava suggests something of his contemporary glamour and fame, as well as their evanescence.

The man born Frederick Temple-Blackwood was an amateur explorer and bestselling author, successful governor-general of Canada (which he was credited with reconciling to the British Empire), legendary viceroy of India, and holder of the most influential and desirable of ambassadorships. He returned home to Clandeboye, his ancestral Ulster home, for what was expected to be a grand old age, surrounded by admiration (and loot). Operating at the summit of Victorian society, he achieved the sort of eminence enjoyed by Trollope’s Duke of Omnium.

But as this riveting, subtle and quizzical biography shows, there was another side to all this: what his descendant Caroline Blackwood, the novelist, called the “Sheridanish” side. Being great-grandson of the fabled playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan meant an inheritance that combined brilliance with racketiness and excess.

Dufferin's mother, with whom he sustained a lover-like relationship, was one of three slightly notorious sisters. His aunt Caroline Norton was scandalously famous: escaping from a disastrous marriage into a journalistic career, a campaign for married (and divorced) women's rights, and a penchant for writing "immoral" novels: the themes of Lost and Saved, she announced in the Times, were seduction, elopement and incest, which were "part of the understandings of the higher classes in Britain".

Marrying into the Sheridans was a tough call. Andrew Gailey’s tongue-in-cheek caption to a photograph of a family christening runs: “Missing is Brenda, wife of the third Marquess, who had just attempted to dash out the baby’s brains in order to exorcise the ‘bad Sheridan blood’.”

Dufferin’s paternal line, the land-owning Blackwoods of Co Down, were made of duller stuff, and his life was spent alternately glorifying and worrying about his antecedents. Gailey links this high-profile life to the dawning “age of celebrity”, and Dufferin’s manipulation of it. Ruling Canada, “his winning combination of ‘blarney, charm and gracefulness’ all hinted at the gentlemanly ideal that flourished in popular English novels” – to which Dufferin added a distinctly and consciously Irish take.

The landlord’s friend

Irishness declared itself in other ways as well. There are fascinating details on Dufferin’s attempts to act as the Irish landlords’ champion within Liberal political circles, as Gladstone evolved an interventionist approach towards landlord-tenant relations.

Like any landlord with an intelligent eye to the future, Dufferin would later endorse the policies of land purchase and a “peasant proprietary”. In fact he emerges here not as a lackadaisical politician who preferred proconsular tinsel and grand diplomacy but as someone too energetic and rebarbative for his colleagues’ liking.

Dufferin has previously featured only in an official biography and in Helen's Tower, a glancing, elegiac memoir by Harold Nicolson, his nephew. Gailey spent 20 years trawling in the vast family archive. (Among 40,000 catalogued letters he found the first was a laundry bill, the second from a prime minister and the third from Queen Victoria.)

Gailey's previous books include a seminal and debunking analysis of "constructive unionism" at the end of the 19th century, and many articles and essays on Ulster and Anglo-Irish relations. Well equipped to convey Dufferin's importance as an Ulster icon in the imperial age, he also handles the haut ton of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain with aplomb. He writes engagingly, a graceful turn of phrase leavened by the odd stiletto thrust, and he is an acute psychologist.

Gailey portrays an emotional, vain, uncertain man. Dufferin’s complex family history impelled him to take refuge behind a carapace of grandeur, but he wrote sharply about the roots of Russian nihilism, the future of Egyptian nationalism and the rise of the Indian bourgeoisie.

Of his time

Although Dufferin shared many of the prejudices of his era and class, he could also transcend them; he was infuriated by the casual racism shown by British administrators in India, and there is a fascinating treatment here of the ambitious and successful campaign to create a structure of women’s medical aid in the subcontinent, the brainchild of Dufferin’s formidable Ulster wife.

In 1896, surveying the late-imperial world he had done so much to make, Dufferin took a view that was both bleak and prescient. “The whole of Europe is little better than a standing camp numbering millions of armed men . . . Thanks to the telegraph, the globe itself has become a mere bundle of nerves . . . Force and not right is the dominant factor in public affairs.”

Dufferin’s life collapsed into financial scandal at the end. Always heavily in debt, and determined to turn Clandeboye into a kind of Gatherum Castle, he had accumulated directorships, including carelessly heading the London and Globe Finance Corportation. It crashed spectacularly in 1900 after its organiser was revealed as the author of a huge scam. Some £5 million was left owing, and dozens of bankruptcies resulted; in a conflation of Trollopian novels, the Duke of Omnium was undone by Melmotte.

Dufferin died in 1902, deeply tainted by the scandal. Gailey's masterly summing-up invokes Faust, adding: "His adult life was a series of inventions which grew into a public persona which he could barely control and against which in the end he would be cruelly judged." A Punch cartoon on his retirement shows Dufferin as a great actor taking his final bow. "For all his efforts, the Sheridans were players still." This book restores him to the limelight.

The Lost Imperialist by Andrew Gailey (John Murray, £30)

Roy Foster is Carroll professor of Irish history at Hertford College, Oxford