Lord Randolph Churchill

1st One-Volume Edition 1907

On Monday, February 18th 1901, Winston Churchill made his maiden speech in the House of Commons. In his peroration he acknowledged the courtesy generally extended by the House on such an occasion. "I cannot sit down without saying how grateful I am for the kindness and patience with which the House has heard me, and which has been extended to me, I well know, not on my own account, but because of a certain memory which many honourable members still preserve". The reference was to Churchill's father, an erstwhile Chancellor of the Exchequor, who had died less than six years before.

The notion of Churchill being his father's biographer had first been mooted as early as 1898 when Nisbet and Co. had cautiously approached him on the subject. This came to nothing, but the next year Churchill was writing to his mother "The time has not yet come - but in six or seven years it will have arrived - and I shall insist upon undertaking the work...I have every right and can do it much better than anyone else likely to get hold of the papers [controlled by Lord Curzon, Randolph's literary executor]. Don't let them publish any rubbish now... From a financial point of view alone - the biography would be worth £2000 [the ultimate advance was actually £8000]".

To write the biography was, for Churchill, at the same time a filial duty and an enormous psychological challenge. All his life he was to be shadowed by the memory of the man whom he had idolised so deeply and yet who had done to little to return the sentiment. Like his mother, Randolph was a parent to be adored 'from afar'. Some forty years later in The Dream, a story that was not published until after his death, Churchill was still trying to earn his father's respect and approval.

The book was published to overall critical acclaim. Joseph Chamberlain wrote to him "It is extremely difficult for a son to write his father's life with sufficient impartiality & restraint, but you have succeeded & have allowed the facts and the letters to tell their own story while the necessary arguments are not open to any hostile criticism...". However, with the passage of time many might well be more in sympathy with the review that appeared in The Sun. "Mr Churchill leaves the real life still to be written, because he leaves the curtain still to be lifted on the real man. In this book the dead statesman is a tabernacle without a key". Sixty years later J.H. Plumb, in Four Faces and the Man, agreed. "Lord Randolph, as a human being and a politician, still awaits his biographer".

The first edition appeared as a two-volume set in England and America in 1906. In his recent bibliography Ron Cohen has dispelled the myth that the Times Book Club copies of that year consititute a second, and inferior, issue. They do not, being simply (re)binding variants of true first edition sheets.

However, today Lord Randolph Churchill is yet another entry on the list of Churchill's works which are much less readily available than one would wish. The first edition of 1906 was followed in 1907 by an unabridged single-volume edition. Nothing followed until the Odhams edition of 1952. Since then the work has appeared in the Collected Works edition and the Diner's Club Major Works edition but in both cases prices of these sets made the appearance little more than a practical technicality. Very recently, however, a mystery two-volume edition has appeared which is library bound and which appears to be an offprint of the American first edition. No publishers information appears.

Lord Randolph Churchill has been translated once, into Swedish, in 1941.

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