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This intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain accesses a trove of unpublished archival material that reveals how the daughter of a long serving prime minister (W.E. Gladstone) acted as a leader in the musical community (supporting the new Royal College of Music) and in literature (working closely with Tennyson). In the process, Mary Gladstone assisted political aspects of her father's work. This study sheds important new light on Tennyson's poetry, the founding of the Royal College of Music, Edward Burne-Jones's painting, and a broad plane of British culture generally, including political liberalism and women, sociability, musical diplomacy and aesthetic democracy. The published monograph will reconfigure scholars' views of Victorian literary salons and political culture by explicating the transformative role of music. A wide range of sources and critical frameworks (musical, literary, theoretical) suggests synergies among disciplines and opens up further areas of research.