Aristocratic Government In The Age Of Reform

This book challenges the view that there was a smooth and inevitable progression towards liberalism in early nineteenth-century England. It examines the argument of the high whigs that the landed aristocracy still had a positive contribution to make to the welfare of the people. This argument gained significance as the laissez-faire state met with serious reverses in the 1830s and 1840s, when the bulk of the people proved unwilling to accept the "compromise" forged between the middle classes and other sections of the landed elite, and mass movements for political and social reform proliferated. Drawing on a rich variety of original sources, Mandler provides a vivid image of the high aristocracy at the peak of its wealth and power, and offers a provocative and unique analysis of how their rejection of middle-class manners helped them to govern Britain in two troubled decades of social unrest.

Volume 8 of The Royal Historical Society Transactions contains essays based around the theme 'identities and empires'.

Reveals how the British Empire's governing men enforced their ideas of freedom, civilization and liberalism around the world.

Aristocratic women flourished in the Victorian literary world, their combination of class privilege and gendered exclusion generating distinctively socialized modes of participation in cultural and political activity. Their writing offers an important trope through which to consider the nature of political, private and public spheres.

This collection offers the first detailed investigation of political life in nineteenth-century London. London politics did not share the free-trade and civil-equality preoccupations of the provinces which currently dominate scholarly literature. As these essays reveal, the capital remained more concerned with older struggles for political independence. By highlighting the inability of existing accounts to accommodate metropolitan distinctiveness, the collection aims to stimulate a major reappraisal not of London politics alone, but of Victorian political history more generally.

Modern relativism and postmodern thought in culture and language challenge the 'truth' of history. This book considers how historians, confined by argument of their own cultures, can still discover truths about the past.

The 1790s saw a lively `French Revolution Debate' in England, with much space and intellectual energy, in classic texts by men such as Burke and Paine, and ensuing pamphlet literature, devoted characterisations and representations of the aristocracy; yet this is the first full-scale survey of the subject. Dr Goodrich takes a fresh approach to the topic, illustrating the complexities of the bitter battle fought out in such texts between radicals and loyalists, and highlighting the persistent viciousness and vitriol of a radical anti-aristocratic rhetoric. However, she demonstrates that the loyalist response contained the more innovative campaign, bringing out in particular the development of a commercial loyalism which promoted a new model of society with a modern aristocracy and an open elite; what emerges are English defences of aristocracy which are not simply reducible to ideas of an ancien régime or a Gothic institution.

This study of gender and power in Victorian Britain is the first book to examine the contribution made by women to the public culture of the British aristocracy in the 19th century. Based on a wide range of archival sources, it explores the roles of aristocratic women in public life, from their country estates to the salons of Westminster and the royal court. Reynolds also shows that a partnership of authority between men and women was integral to aristocratic life, thus making an important contribution to the "separate spheres" debate. Moreover, she reveals in full the crucial role that these women played at all levels of political activity--from local communities to the national electoral process. The book is both a lively portrait of women's experiences in modern Britain and a corrective to the view of the upper-class Victorian woman as a passive social butterfly.