St.Thomas Church Seaforth built by Sir John Gladstone

1. St.Thomas Church Seaforth built by Sir John Gladstone Patron, Sir T. Gladstone. The church was built in 1815, and has an octagonal tower, with eight pinnacles.

2. 1812 Election – a duel between George Canning and Henry Brougham

3. Roscoe was twelve years older then Gladstone’s father, John Gladstone.John Gladstone supported the candidacy of Roscoe for Parliament in 1806 (when he won) but soon Checkland says:“John Gladstone was increasingly alienated from the intellectualism of Roscoe and others because it took so little account of the way in which politics really worked.” John Gladstone switched his support from Roscoe

4. William Roscoe’s 32-Page Letter of 1810 to Henry Brougham MP

5. Roscoe’s 1810 Letter set the scene for Liverpool’s most exciting parliamentary election • Roscoe insisted that Parliamentary reform was “essential to the safety and preservation of the country…. “The connection between a corrupt Parliament and bad measures is as certain as cause and effect in any other instance; feel the truth of that unalterable maxim that an evil tree cannot produce good fruit.”

6. Roscoe’s 1810 Letter “Every represetative should be fairly and impartially returned by the voice of the people; and, secondly, when returned he should not be palced in the way of being corrupted by the Crown…Men of good and independent character should be returned and these men should not have before them a continual tempatation to desert their duty…they must be free from partiality and corruption”

7. Roscoe’s 1810 Letter • He identified the corrupt as those who were “adverse to all reform whatsoever” and with them he grouped “the weak and timid”. He wanted to see an end to the “corrupt system of trafficking in Boroughs and bribery and intoxication.” • To the House of Commons he wanted “restored that degree of independence and integrity which is indispensably necessary to enable it to perform its functions and to maintain its proper dignity and influence in the State.” To that end there should be a “limit on the number of inferior placemen in Parliament.”

8. As a three-year-old Gladstone introduced George canning to the voters. Canning triumphed and served as a Liverpool MP until 1823; then as Prime Minister Until 1827. Liverpool’s Canning Street is named after him.

9. School at Eton

10. In the north transept of Westminster Abbey, or Statesmen’s Aisle, are three statues commemorating George Canning, Prime Minister, his son Charles John, Earl Canning, and George’s cousin Stratford Canning.

11. Christ Church Oxford Gladstone was elected President of the Oxford Union “Oxford on top, Liverpool below”

12. “I cannot marry a man who carries a bag like that” The Famous Gladstone Bag “…something in the tone of his voice and his way of coming into a room that is not aristocratic” – Emily Eden.

13. Gladstone’s first seat: the rotten borough of Newark Fifth Duke of Newcastle

14. The 1833 House of Commons, painted by Sir George Hayter: Gladstone and his brother, Tom, crowded together on the Opposition backbenches.

15. Gladstone’s father was described as “a murderer of slaves”

16. William Wilberforce and his son Henry, with his wife, Mary.

17. Gladstone’s transformative meeting with the dying Wilberforce “It brought me solemn thoughts, particularly about the slaves. This is a burdensome question” “I can see plainly enough the sad defects, the real illiberalism of my opinions on that subject”

18. Gladstone marries Catherine Glynne of Hawarden Castle

19. Sir Robert Peel and the Corn Laws

20. 1846: Gladstone becomes one of Oxford University’s two MPs. Keble College Oxford.

21. 1848: The Great Starvation-potato blight and famine in Ireland- 1 Million Irish people died 3 Million Irish people emigrated – most to America, many via Liverpool: “the gateway to America.”

22. Daniel O’Connell described Ireland as a country of Corpses and walking Skeletons… He begged the House of Commons to save the Starving.

23. “Ireland is in your hands….She is in your power…. If you do not save her she cannot save herself. And I solemnly call on you to recollect that I predict with the sincerest conviction that one quarter of her population will perish unless you come to her relief.”

24. Liverpool 1848:17,280 died;20,000 street children100,000 living in abject poverty 3,000 in the Brownlow Hill workhouse

25. Sarah Burns: one of many At the inquest it was revealed that in three days she had eaten only a scrap of bread. The Coroner said of her Liverpool home: “The floor was composed of mud; in that hovel there were seventeen human beings crowded together without even so much as a bit of straw to lie down on.”

26. Luke Brothers was aged 8. Luke’s post mortem revealed that there“was not the least particle of food in his stomach.”The typhus was followed by cholera. In just one week, in the St.Mary’s parish, just up the hill from St.George’s Hall, and close to LJMU’s Learning Resource Centre, there were 166 burials; 105 were children. Typhus was compounded by hunger.

27. November 1988: President Mary McAleese unveiled a memorial to the famine victims at St.Luke’s Church, Bold Street, and delivered the eighth Roscoe Lecture.

28. Elizabeth Gaskell1810-1865 Mrs.Gaskell : author of North and South, Mary Barton and Cranford

29. Chartist Meeting – 1848. “What thoughtful heart can look into this gulf that darkly yawns 'twixt rich and poor, And not find food for saddest meditation!” – Mrs.Gaskell in Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life