Walter Bagehot, pronounced as ‘Bage-it’, – born 3rd February 1826 in Langport, an old-fashioned market town in the middle of Somerset – was never a household name.
Even during his lifetime, he appealed strongly only to a relatively small and intimate group of people; three times contested for parliament but failed each time.
His father Vice-chairman and Director of Stuckey’s Bank, the largest private bank of issue in England, fired his boyish imagination by telling him that one of his distant relatives was Sir Thomas Baghott, Master of the Buckhound of James I, and his mother, no doubt troubled by her tragedies from which she never fully recovered, was a remarkable woman with infectious humour and intellectual vivacity that infused life into those around her.
As a boy, he travelled to and fro between the different worlds of his parents. He was a....
