NORMAN, George Warde.
Papers on various subjects.
[London] Printed for private circulation by T. & W. Boone, 1869.
8vo, pp. iv, 261, [1 blank]; some very light spotting to the endpapers and title-page, otherwise a very clean copy; original green cloth, gilt lettering to spine; upper board a little marked; inscribed ‘From the author’ and ‘Belper’ on front free endpaper.
A nice association copy of this collection of fifty-two essays, letters and petitions by the financial writer and merchant banker George Warde Norman (1793-1882), from the library of Edward Strutt, first Baron Belper (1801-1880). The pieces collected here, many of which originally appeared in The Spectator, The Times, The Economist, and The South Eastern Gazette, date from 1821 to 1869 and represent the wide range of political, economic and social questions with which Norman engaged during his distinguished career.
Having cut his teeth in the timber trade, banking and insurance in his father’s firm, Norman became a founder member of the Political Economy Club and a director of the Bank of England in 1821. His advocacy of monetary reform foreshadowed the Bank Charter Act of 1844, which he actively defended in subsequent financial crises. He was interested in taxation and free trade too, and, as a friend of Nassau Senior, in the formulation of the new Poor Law. He was politically active in the City of London and in West Kent, presiding over the West Kent Agricultural Association.
The potpourri of papers printed here cover: market gardeners; arguments against the political economist Robert Torrens on the ‘condition of England question’; the Poor Laws; the Reform Bill; the export of silver to India; the money market; the Malt Tax; the 1866 monetary crisis (during which Norman disagreed strongly with Walter Bagehot’s views of the Bank of England as the lender of last resort); questions of nationality; the ownership of land in England; capital, labour, and the effect of Trade Unions on wages; the middle classes; Ireland; and democratic government. There are also papers on defence and the military, including the conduct of the Crimean War, in which Norman lost his eldest son.
Baron Belper, to whom this copy belonged, was close to Jeremy Bentham and to James and John Stuart Mill, and, like Norman, a friend of George Grote. ‘Belper became a recognized authority on questions of free trade, law reform, and education and earned the respect of many eminent contemporaries, including Macaulay, John Romilly, McCulloch, John and Charles Austen, George Grote, and Charles Buller’ (ODNB).
