By the last decades of the nineteenth century, more people were making more speeches to greater numbers in a wider variety of venues than at any previous time. This book argues that a recognizably modern public life was created in Victorian Britain largely through the instrumentality of public speech. Shedding new light on the careers of many of the most important figures of the Victorian era and beyond, including Gladstone, Disraeli, Sir Robert Peel, John Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Canon Liddon, the book traces the ways in which oratory came to occupy a central position in the conception and practice of Victorian public life. Not a study of rhetoric or a celebration of great oratory, the book stresses the social developments that led to the production and consumption of these speeches.

This study of ideological politics in Victorian and Edwardian England centers on a referendal theory promoted by the great Lord Salisbury when he opposed William Gladstone's Liberal gov'ts. It was subsequently carried forward in the form of the referendum by Salisbury's son-in-law and ideological heir, the second Lord Selborne. Salisbury is today recognized as the most successful electorally of Conservative leaders. Selborne, though not as well known to historians, had a high contemporary reputation as an imperial proconsul who had united S. Africa. According to the referendal theory, the House of Lords had a duty to refer disputed legislation to the electorate when the House of Commons, in the lords' judgment, lacked a mandate for the measure in question. That is, the lords' political barometer was not the commons, as Gladstone contended, but the nat. at large. If this proposition prevailed, the lords could freely exercise an independent legislative veto in an age of expanding democracy. Not until the Liberals passed the Parliament Act (1911) were they able to counter the theory effectively. But well before this, Selborne's advocacy of the referendum was challenged by another Conservative leader, Lord Curzon, who had served for a decade as viceroy of India. Their rivalry is one of this study's most provocative and illuminating themes.