Lord Melbourne, 1779-1848

by L.G. Mitchell

Lord Melbourne was Prime Minister of England from 1834-1841. As mentor and father-figure to the young Queen Victoria, he exerted considerable influence over the first few years of her reign. In this, the first biography in twenty years, Leslie Mitchell uses the Melbourne family papers to
explore the man behind the politician at the heart of early Victorian politics.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198205929
• ISBN13: 9780198205920
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 1.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Queen Victoria's First Prime Minister

Melbourne's life story is simply amazing. From his outrageously popular mother (a Whig noblewoman whose multitude of sons each had different--perhaps royal--fathers) and crazily intense wife, Caroline Lamb (a woman who once bit a chunk out of a wine glass when she spied her lover speaking to another woman) to Melbourne's "sexual rivalry" with that poetical superstar of the nineteenth-century, Lord Byron ("mad, bad, and dangerous to know") to, yes, a political career that shone brightly on the world stage (the city of Melbourne, Australia is named for him) this man was the first Prime Minister of Victoria's long reign, and in some ways the one with whom she was closest. The tidbits of Melbourne's personal life and the (ahem) affairs of those around him are here in pleasing detail, but there is no skimping on his political career, or on the world of his times. I found this to be an enjoyable biography of a remarkable man who had the good fortune to dwell in an interesting period and know most of the great figures (of which he was certainly one) of his age.

scholarly, and absorbing for even the non-academic

Simply, I read this book because Dr. Mitchell's earlier book on Charles James Fox was so fascinating. While the personalities of the two great men must have made writng about Melbourne a bit harder to enliven, it is a fascinating biography of a man I previously knew very little about.