Read The Younger Pitt: Volume I, The Years of Acclaim

The Younger Pitt: Volume I, The Years of Acclaim

John Ehrman

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Description:Ten years of work have gone into the writing of John Ehrman's powerful biography of the younger William Pitt, Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Treasury in England during the supremely important period of political transition, parliamentary reform, and war against France that marked the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the nineteenth. With incisive scholarship, this authoritative life recounts the story of how a great Prime Minister rescued his country from the brink of bankruptcy and helped set it on the path to a century of greatness.More than fifty years have passed since the last full-scale biography of the second William Pitt based upon original sources was undertaken. Since then the Namier revolution in the field of political history and other work which has been under way on the study of the late eighteenth-century government, have enlarged our knowledge of Pitt's times and made necessary a fresh interpretation of his life and achievements. John Ehrman throws new light on the complex political power structure of the period, when the two-party system had not yet crystallized and individual Members of Parliament, with their shifting loyalties and diverse interests, were a real factor to be reckoned with. He shows engrossingly the working of a notable ministry in one of the great periods of British expansion, and the effects of an intense public life on a highly unusual public character.A precocious youth, the younger Pitt was born in 1759 and educated at Cambridge. The present volume describes his auspicious origins and traces his meteoric career--Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-three, Prime Minister at twenty-four--to an apex of success. These were the years of acclaim. Walter Bagehot has written that one of the most important things about the young Minister was that 'he came to power with a fresh mind. . . . An old man of the world has no great objects, no telling enthusiasm, no large proposals, no noble reforms.' Pitt took office at the end of the American Revolution, when Britain's finances seemed precarious and its morale was shaken. It is a measure of his achievement that when Gibbon visited England in 1787 after a lapse of four years, he 'rejoyced in the apparent increase of wealth and prosperity which might be fairly divided between the spirit of the nation and the wisdom of the Minister.'The next volume, after describing Pitt's first great reverse in foreign affairs, the Ochakov crisis with Russia, will move to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars: the conduct of the war itself, and the troubles at home. It will show the young Minister of a successful peacetime decade grappling, at a turning point in history, with one of the most prolonged crises that his country had ever known.Brilliantly detailed and consistently engrossing, the biography re-creates the great Prime Minister's career against the intricate political, social, and economic background of his era.We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Younger Pitt: Volume I, The Years of Acclaim. To get started finding The Younger Pitt: Volume I, The Years of Acclaim, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Pages: 710

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: Constable

Release: 1969

ISBN

Description: Ten years of work have gone into the writing of John Ehrman's powerful biography of the younger William Pitt, Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Treasury in England during the supremely important period of political transition, parliamentary reform, and war against France that marked the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the nineteenth. With incisive scholarship, this authoritative life recounts the story of how a great Prime Minister rescued his country from the brink of bankruptcy and helped set it on the path to a century of greatness.More than fifty years have passed since the last full-scale biography of the second William Pitt based upon original sources was undertaken. Since then the Namier revolution in the field of political history and other work which has been under way on the study of the late eighteenth-century government, have enlarged our knowledge of Pitt's times and made necessary a fresh interpretation of his life and achievements. John Ehrman throws new light on the complex political power structure of the period, when the two-party system had not yet crystallized and individual Members of Parliament, with their shifting loyalties and diverse interests, were a real factor to be reckoned with. He shows engrossingly the working of a notable ministry in one of the great periods of British expansion, and the effects of an intense public life on a highly unusual public character.A precocious youth, the younger Pitt was born in 1759 and educated at Cambridge. The present volume describes his auspicious origins and traces his meteoric career--Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-three, Prime Minister at twenty-four--to an apex of success. These were the years of acclaim. Walter Bagehot has written that one of the most important things about the young Minister was that 'he came to power with a fresh mind. . . . An old man of the world has no great objects, no telling enthusiasm, no large proposals, no noble reforms.' Pitt took office at the end of the American Revolution, when Britain's finances seemed precarious and its morale was shaken. It is a measure of his achievement that when Gibbon visited England in 1787 after a lapse of four years, he 'rejoyced in the apparent increase of wealth and prosperity which might be fairly divided between the spirit of the nation and the wisdom of the Minister.'The next volume, after describing Pitt's first great reverse in foreign affairs, the Ochakov crisis with Russia, will move to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars: the conduct of the war itself, and the troubles at home. It will show the young Minister of a successful peacetime decade grappling, at a turning point in history, with one of the most prolonged crises that his country had ever known.Brilliantly detailed and consistently engrossing, the biography re-creates the great Prime Minister's career against the intricate political, social, and economic background of his era.We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Younger Pitt: Volume I, The Years of Acclaim. To get started finding The Younger Pitt: Volume I, The Years of Acclaim, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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The Younger Pitt: Volume I, The Years of Acclaim

The Younger Pitt: Volume I, The Years of Acclaim

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