A historical account of how leading evangelicals in the late nineteenth century fused a passion for evangelism with social service, cultural engagement and political activism.

John Bright was one of the greatest British statesmen of the nineteenth century. In a series of Punch cartoons in 1878, Bright featured alongside Disraeli and Gladstone as among the most influential politicians of the age. However, his profound contribution to British politics and society has been virtually forgotten in the modern world. Bright played a critical role in many of the most important political movements of the Victorian era, from the repeal of the Corn Laws to Home Rule. In his great campaign leading up to the Reform Act 1867, he fought for parliamentary reform on behalf of the working class and for the abolition of newspaper taxes. Internationally renowned as an orator, he was a dedicated opponent of slavery and champion of the North in the American Civil War. His testimonial for Abraham Lincoln's re-election was found in the President's pocket on his assassination. He was vigorously opposed to the Crimean War and campaigned against the oppression of the Irish tenantry and colonial subjects throughout the Empire. Fiercely independent, he eventually split from the Liberal Party over Home Rule, becoming a Liberal Unionist. In this new biography, the first for over 30 years, Bill Cash provides an incisive and engaging portrait of a man who influenced the politics of his generation more than virtually any other, with important implications for the present day.

Formed in 1839, the Anti-Corn Law League was one of the most important campaigns to introduce the ideas of economic liberalism into mainstream political discourse in Britain. Its aspiration for free trade played a crucial role in defining the agenda of nineteenth-century liberalism and shaping the modern British state. Its faith in the free market still resonates in Britain's public policy debates today. This is the first comprehensive study of the League which makes use of recent methodological developments in social history.

This title was first published in 2001. The eminent historian of Victorian Britain, Walter L. Arnstein has, over the course of a career spanning more than 40 years, arguably introduced more students to British history than any other American historian. This collection of essays by some of his former students celebrates Arnstein's inspirational teaching and writing with surveys and analyses of various aspects of the social, cultural, economic and political history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Nineteenth-century topics covered in the volume include early Victorian caricatures and the thin legal lines that they often trod; British Army fashion and its contribution to Royal spectacles; Free Trade Radicals and how they viewed educational reform and moral progress; the persistence of Chartist ideology following the failure of the movement in 1848; Disraeli and Derby's involvement with the Navy's administration; religious periodicals and their influence; the myth of Bismarck as an honest broker of peace and the subsequent collapse of the myth as a later source of enmity in Anglo-German relations; the powerful mystique evoked back in England by the London missionary societies Mongolian; missions; Victorian urban planning and the re-introduction of the market place.

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was the most unconventional and influential leader of the Victorian women's movement. Enormously talented, energetic and original, she was a feminist, law-reformer, painter, journalist, the close friend of George Eliot and a cousin of Florence Nightingale. As a painter, Barbara is now recognised as a vital figure among Pre-Raphaelite women artists. As a feminist she led four great campaigns: for married women's legal status, for the right to work, the right to vote and to education. Making brilliant use of unpublished journals and letters, Pam Hirsch has written a biography that is as lively and powerful as its subject, recreating the woman in all her moods, and placing her firmly in the context of women's struggle for equality.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 The making of a Radical -- 2 The Member for Wolverhampton -- 3 The young Parliamentarian -- 4 The campaign against the Corn Laws -- 5 Interlude -- 6 The Cabinet Minister -- 7 The view from the backbenches -- 8 Gladstone and the Home Rule crisis -- 9 The Father of the House -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index

Nineteenth-century England witnessed the birth of capitalist consumerism. Early department stores, shopping arcades and provision shops of all kinds proliferated from the start of the Victorian period, testimony to greater diffusion of consumer goods. However, while the better off enjoyed having more material things, masses of the population were wanting even the basic necessities of life during the ‘Hungry Forties’ and well beyond. Based on a wealth of contemporary evidence and adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Wanting and having focuses particularly on the making of the working-class consumer in order to shed new light on key areas of major historical interest, including Chartism, the Anti-Corn Law League, the New Poor Law, popular liberalism and humanitarianism. It will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in the origins and significance of consumerism across a range of disciplines, including social and cultural history, literary studies, historical sociology and politics.