Gladstonesque

Adjective

Gladstonesque (comparative more Gladstonesque, superlative most Gladstonesque)

1. Characteristic or reminiscent of William Ewart Gladstone, especially as supportive of laissez-faire policies.
   • To assume that the "theory" of the results of confiding in professional law-breakers (whether Irishmen or London roughs) is for a moment worthy of being considered from the same standpoint as the belief that wìthout the restraints of the law the same gentry will commit excesses, is indeed to beg...1893, Vanity Fair
   • It was a Victorian concept and its life force perished with the Victorian Age. Victorian in pomp and grandeur, Victorian in the public-school code of its Government, its Philistinism, its middle-class standards of virtue, its creaming of the large Victorian families for its administrators and...1948, Henry Vincent Hodson, Twentieth-century Empire, page 102