Distilling an extensive literature on the First and Second Great Reform Acts, Chapter 3 argues how the Whig view of the period – a view that still largely informs political science research today – overstates both the progressive ideology of reformers and the democratizing effects of the two bills. It also includes two periods that are difficult to fit into a reformist narrative and are subsequently downplayed in most accounts of the English democratization. The first is the several decades of political reaction marked by the crushing of the Luddite movement (1811–1813), the massacre at Peterloo (1819), and the passing of the Six Acts (1819). The second is the repression of the Chartist movement between 1834 and 1848. Both episodes reveal how the British state generally responded to mass protests demanding political change. Rather than conceding to the demands of would-be revolutionaries, the state developed its coercive forces – most notably the police and the Home Office – to meet the new challenge. Even after the Second Great Reform Bill of 1867, political elites still felt they had largely dodged democracy.

This chapter takes a fresh look at the way that the people were represented in visual illustrations of the Great Exhibition of 1851. This was the first event in modern history in which such large numbers of visitors were gathered in one single indoor space, and this created a unique opportunity – in both reality and representations – to experience the crowd as a spectating spectacle. The chapter argues that satirical images and illustrated periodicals played a vital role in promoting, probing, and parodying the utopian idea that the masses could be improved through the visual display of both superlative industrial artefacts and the crowd’s own behaviour as idealised consumers of culture. The post-1848, counter-revolutionary politics of the Great Exhibition are acknowledged, but the chapter concludes that this context does not nullify the positive aspects of this new concept of mass intellectual and social progress through aesthetic education and rational recreation.

This chapter considers the deployment of radical Orientalism as a mode of political critique in the popular fiction of the bestselling Chartist leader and author George W. M. Reynolds. It focuses on the structural congruences between the depictions of aristocratic debauchery in his two Mysteries series (1844–8; 1848–56) and the figuration of Old Corruption as in league with the Jewish sweater in ‘The Seamstress’ in Reynolds’s Miscellany (1850). Examination of this alignment permits a discussion of the mutable hierarchies within the category of the People at mid-nineteenth century, focused specifically on those groups excluded from full political rights: the working-class man, women, and Jews. It considers how Reynolds’s use of radical literary-political tropes positions Jews as Occidental in matters of parliamentary democracy, but designates them Oriental when the sweating system that they are understood to represent is figured as an atavistic, foreign, and unchristian form of economics.

Hume’s critique and English revulsion at the French Revolution dampened interest in social contract theorizing. The rise of utilitarianism was another factor. The cause of a universal franchise was taken up by Jeremy Bentham, a founding utilitarian who was dismissive of the social contract idea as an “anarchical fallacy.” The Chartists, who demanded universal manhood suffrage, held up both Bentham and Tom Paine as heroes. The Reform Act of 1832 expanded the power of the propertied in the burgeoning English manufacturing centers. The reformed Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which introduced the hated workhouse system. The Chartists’ million-plus petition for universal manhood suffrage was finally received by Parliament, but ignored. John Stuart Mill, another utilitarian, dismissed Locke’s theory as a fiction but found a truth in the social-contract idea: a principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity requires government to benefit all. Mill advocated votes for women and an expanded electorate but retention of the property qualification until workers could be educated sufficiently not to vote for unwise laws favoring their class. As a safeguard, he proposed plural votes for the educated. On the European continent the social contract tradition succumbed to the idealism of Hegel and the materialism of Marx.

In this chapter, evidence from past social movements highlights oracy education’s role in empowering marginalized communities in 19th-century Britain. Critics argue that oracy education diverts attention from socio-economic issues, exerting coercive control over the powerless. However, grassroots oracy within movements like Chartism and Suffragettes challenges these notions. The struggle for articulacy, I show, underpinned the struggle for the vote. These examples underscore grassroots oracy’s historical significance and potential implications for contemporary policy debates.

The radical, working-class political movements of the nineteenth century found Percy Shelley’s work quite useful. His poetry was quoted, reprinted, and set to song by Chartists in the 1840s and 1850s and by socialists near the century’s close. These activists selected a particular version of Shelley. They memorised, shared, and reprinted the poems – like Queen Mab, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, and ‘Song: To the Men of England’ – that were, on the one hand, most available and affordable, and, on the other hand, most conducive to collective political action. Chartist editors, political orators, and socialist songwriters all strategically excerpted these poems, avoiding Shelley’s profound reservations about revolutionary action and transforming his work to serve their own political purposes. Across the nineteenth century, working-class activists collaboratively constructed a Shelley of their own.

This chapter examines the ways in which Shelley’s works and reputation were mediated to Victorian audiences. It argues that the Victorians’ Shelley was to a large extent the Victorians’ creation; his reception in this period differed from both earlier and later understandings of his life and work. The chapter pays particular attention to the role of women such as Mary Shelley and Lady Jane Shelley in shaping the poet’s posthumous reception. It surveys several sites of reception, including editions, anthologies, sermons, statues, and Chartist meetings, to show how Shelley and his writings were appropriated, reimagined, and redeployed in a variety of new contexts by people with divergent aims and concerns. It briefly examines sculpted memorials to Shelley by Henry Weekes and Edward Onslow Ford. The chapter concludes that the Victorian understanding of Shelley was no more monolithic than the ‘Victorians’ themselves.

How, given the murder of those demanding a more representative political system at Peterloo in 1819, did more Britons, at home and in the colonies, get to vote by 1885?

How does an essay change when it appears in a newspaper, aimed at a mass reading public that includes people of varied class backgrounds? This chapter takes up how periodical publication shaped nineteenth-century essays, looking at the effects of serialisation, republication through excerpting, and the intertextual nature of Victorian journals and papers. It explores how the political journalism and social protest movements of the 1830s and 1840s influenced the essay, in contrast to the notion that political campaigning is opposed to the contemplative and reflective values associated with the genre. Focusing on Thomas Carlyle’s response to the social movements of his time, the chapter argues that not only did Carlyle engage ideologically with popular protest but that the writing he encountered in the radical press shaped his style by encouraging an oratorical mode, melodramatic language and rhetorical excesses.

This last chapter discusses two of Wordsworth’s last poems, written when he was seventy-five – poems about old, poor men in their last days, approaching death. Written in 1846, these poems echo the sea poems of the mid-1830s in that they depict people who have been left lonely and isolated, in this case by the death of loved ones. Wordsworth shows extreme old age as a time of alienation, even when the aged person lives where he has always lived. His family having died, he has no one with whom to practise the daily rituals and routines that renew love and secure identity. Memory and recollection do not suffice to restore the missing presence; the self cannot sustain itself by enshrining the spirit of the past. Expressing this bleak view about the limitations of memorialisation, the poems are in dialogue with Wordsworth’s past work: they depict the aged like the sailor of ‘Composed by the Sea Shore’ and the heroine of ‘The Somnambulist’, but unlike the Wordsworth of The Prelude. They are also in dialogue with a large and noisy public campaign, in which the life, and the death, of the elderly poor was a controversial topic.

Frederick Douglass was perhaps the most successful African American abolitionist to traverse the Atlantic and tour the British Isles. In town halls, churches, taverns, and private parlor rooms across the country he spoke to hundreds of thousands of people, sparking a wave of transatlantic abolition that had a deep impact on the British landscape. While he only traveled to Britain and Ireland three times, the friendships and networks he created, together with his transformative experiences there, shaped, supported and sustained his public antislavery work in the United States for the rest of his life.

This chapter analyzes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Oliver Twist, and Barnaby Rudge to show how the Dickensian novel includes animals in its political critiques, questions the belief that humans have access to animal subjectivity, and cultivates an alternate form of animal character. Although Dickens rarely removes himself from ideologies of pastoral power, his animals often function outside it. Dickens’s animal characters critique dominant notions of liberal character and the character of government, offering a way out from animalizing discourses of both animal and working-class character. This chapter engages with discourse surrounding the New Poor Law and Chartism, and shows how Dickens’s animal characters can be considered minor characters who reflect demands for democracy throughout the period. These three novels highlight the radical nature of Dickens’s animal politics, as they challenge larger constructions of liberal character and posit alternate animal subjectivities within a more democratic political community.

This chapter analyzes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Oliver Twist, and Barnaby Rudge to show how the Dickensian novel includes animals in its political critiques, questions the belief that humans have access to animal subjectivity, and cultivates an alternate form of animal character. Although Dickens rarely removes himself from ideologies of pastoral power, his animals often function outside it. Dickens’s animal characters critique dominant notions of liberal character and the character of government, offering a way out from animalizing discourses of both animal and working-class character. This chapter engages with discourse surrounding the New Poor Law and Chartism, and shows how Dickens’s animal characters can be considered minor characters who reflect demands for democracy throughout the period. These three novels highlight the radical nature of Dickens’s animal politics, as they challenge larger constructions of liberal character and posit alternate animal subjectivities within a more democratic political community.