We are proud to announce the online publication of The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot. By kind permission of the copyright holder, The Economist, we had the 15-volume set digitised and made freely available on our website. You can access them here.
The works were published in 15 volumes between 1967 and 1986 by The Economist, the publication which Bagehot edited with such acclaim in the mid-19th century. This ambitious project was commissioned by The Economist in 1959, under the editorship of Norman St John-Stevas, later Lord St John of Fawsley, (1929-2012), a writer, lawyer and prominent Conservative politician. Not only is it the most comprehensive collection of Bagehot’s writings – on government & politics, banking & finance and many other areas of history and society – it is an authoritative commentary on Bagehot’s life, work and legacy.
The 15 volumes were prepared and published in stages over 30 years, totalling almost 7,000 pages:
- Vols 1-2, The Literary Essays, 1965
- Vols 3-4, The Historical Essays, 1968
- Vols 5-8, The Political Essays, 1974
- Vols 9-11, The Economic Essays, 1978
- Vols 12-13, The Letters, 1986
- Vols 14-15, Miscellany, 1986
The whole project was an astonishing act of scholarship from St John-Stevas, a noted Bagehot enthusiast, who wrote and spoke about him over many years. The launch of the final volumes in April 1986 at The Economist offices was attended by the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and her two immediate predecessors, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. At the event, Margaret Thatcher said: “Bagehot was not just a constitutional commentator. He was, perhaps, the most distinguished of all financial journalists. His work illumined not only the problems of his time, but our time. His writings have been discussed, analysed, doubtless plagiarised, but they still remain fresh and apposite… I have no doubt that 100 years from now it will still be read.”
Each of the 15 volumes is available individually, and the site is designed to be easily accessible and functional, with a search facility. As a new online resource, the Society welcomes all constructive feedback from users, so as to improve it, and hopes that it will be credited as appropriate whenever the resource is used for research or other purposes. It requests all users of this digitised material to respect The Economist’s generosity, by adhering to the principles of fair use/dealing, such as non-commercial use (eg teaching, research and private study) and proper acknowledgement of the copyright.