Splendid Isolation - Origin of The Phrase

Origin of The Phrase

As descriptive of British foreign policy, the phrase was most famously used by Lord Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty, during a speech at Lewes, Sussex, on 26 February 1896, when he said: "We have stood here alone in what is called isolation – our splendid isolation, as one of our colonial friends was good enough to call it." The phrase had appeared in a headline in The Times a few weeks earlier, on 22 January 1896, paraphrasing a comment by Canadian Finance Minister George Eulas Foster (1847–1931) to the Parliament of Canada on 16 January 1896: "In these somewhat troublesome days when the great Mother Empire stands splendidly isolated in Europe..."

The ultimate origin of the phrase is suggested in Robert M. Hamilton's Canadian Quotations and Phrases: Literary and Historical (Hull, Que.: McClelland and Stewart, 1952), which places the Foster quotation beneath the following passage from the Introduction to Robert Cooney's Compendious History of New Brunswick, published in 1832: "Never did the 'Empress Island' appear so magnificently grand, – she stood by herself, and there was a peculiar splendour in the loneliness of her glory." Foster began his career as an educator in New Brunswick, where he would certainly have had access to Cooney's history. Thus, the elements of, and the sentiments underlying, the phrase appear to have originated in colonial New Brunswick during the reign of William IV, approximately 64 years before it became known as a catch-phrase for British foreign policy.