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The British Whigs on America: 1820–1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2011

D. P. Crook
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Extract

There has been a tendency among historians of the Anglo-American connection to suggest that there was a fairly rigid dichotomy in English opinion about America in the first half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it is suggested, there were the Radicals, who, by tradition and in principle, favoured the United States and its institutions. This group - the Left of that period - comprised the excluded classes of society, the dissenters, the artisans and labourers, the Chartists and democrats, the utilitarians. Confronting them was the Establishment, opposed to innovation, and especially democratic innovation, embittered by memories of 1776 and 1812, and therefore thoroughly anti-American.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies , Volume 3 , December 1961 , pp. 4 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © British Association for American Studies 1961

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References

REFERENCES

1.See, e.g., Lillibridge, G.D., Beacon of Freedom: The Impact of American Democracy upon Great Britain 1830–1870 (Pennsylvania, 1954); Henry Pelling, America and the British Left (London, 1956), pp. 1–4; Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1959), ch. 2, and his “America and Two Nations of Englishmen”, Virginia Quarterly Review, XXXI (Autumn, 1955), pp. 505 – 525.Google Scholar
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5.ER, no. 188, October 1850, p. 371 (Lyell's Second Visit to the United States).Google Scholar
6.ER, no. 66, May 1820, pp. 400, 401, 405.Google Scholar
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