On 4 March 1856, during a debate in the House of Lords on a motion to form a ‘Gallery of National Portraits', the Conservative peer Earl Stanhope quoted Thomas Carlyle's view that ‘one of the most primary wants [of the historian is] to secure a bodily likeness of the personage inquired after - a good portrait if such exists; failing that, even an indifferent, if sincere one'. Carlyle's views might be regarded as unsurprising. As the author of On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, first published in 1841, Carlyle was widely regarded as having inaugurated ‘the great man' theory of history during the nineteenth century, with its stress on the role of the individual. However, the timing, the speaker and the authority were more than usually significant. 1856 saw the publication, under Stanhope's co-editorship, of the first of two volumes of Memoirs by the early-nineteenth century politician and statesman Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850). Peel, who died...