"All the Men of Great Affairs": The Barnard Statue, Manchester Liberalism, and Lincoln Intellectual History

Abstract

The years immediately following World War I saw the unveiling of two significant statues of Abraham Lincoln in Britain. The first, which took place in Platt Fields, Manchester, in September 1919, presented a replica of George Grey Barnard's controversial depiction of a distinctly pre-presidential Lincoln, the original of which had been presented to the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, two years earlier (see Figures 1 and 2). Barnard's Lincoln was a stomach-clutching, somewhat anemic looking figure who, according to Lord Charnwood, the British author of the pre-eminent Lincoln biography of the age, resembled nothing so much as “a minor poet who had gone under” (qtd in Moffat 117). The second ceremony took place the following summer in Parliament Square, Westminster, where Prime Minister David Lloyd George, himself something of a Lincoln obsessive, accepted Augustus Saint-Gaudens's second cast of the by then famous standing figure (see Figure 3), the original of which had been unveiled in Chicago in 1887. Saint-Gaudens's solemn, lapel-clutching statesman mounted on a much grander base and situated at the very heart of the imperial capital, was in marked contrast to the scruffy frontier everyman tucked away in the industrial provinces.

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