Politics and the People

This ambitious and provocative study provides a unique narrative of nineteenth-century English political history. Based on extensive research the book draws on critical theory to read and interpret a vast range of oral visual and printed sources in an attempt to expand our conception of the politics of the period. Read in the context of such sources nineteenth-century English politics becomes resolved into a story about the struggle to define the nation''s constitution past present and future. It suggests the existence of a popular strain of English libertarian politics albeit one whose radical and democratic potential was gradually closed down. In short despite the invention of a liberal constitution in this period politics became less (not more) democratic a lesson which the author sees as pertinent for many struggling to live in or establish liberal democratic constitutions in our own times.