by E. P. Thompson (1966)
Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political agency of the people, whom historians had treated as anonymous masses.
Matthew Cragoe
This detailed, scholarly exploration of Welsh political culture in the 19th century offers a new interpretation of the rise of nationalism. The author shows how the focus of legitimate power in the community shifted from the aristocracy to the urban middle classes.
edited and translated by Cary J. Nederman
"This volume offers for the first time in English translation several important commentaries on the political scene in early fourteenth-century England. Walter de Milimete's On the Nobility, Wisdom, and Prudence of the King (1327), the two versions of William of Pagula's Mirror of King Edward III (1331 and 1332), and William of Ockham's Whether a Prince Can Receive the Goods of the Church for His Own Needs, namely, in Case of War, Even Against the Wishes of the Pope (1338). All of these treatises offer important insight into such matters as the extent of the king's power in the fourteenth century and earlier, the relationship between church and state, and the particular duties of the ruler toward various of his subjects."--BOOK JACKET.
Cornelia D. J. Pearsall
"In the wake of the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, a beloved friend and the subject of In Memoriam. Tennyson wrote a range of formally inventive and intricately connected poems, many of which feature pivotal scenes of rapture, or being carried away. Pearsall explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation - theological, social, political, and personal - and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics." "The book investigates the poet's previously unrecognized intimacy with theological movements in early Victorian Britain that propounded the innovative and highly influential belief in an oncoming rapture. Pearsall develops original readings of Tennyson's major classical poems by tracking his lifelong intellectual investment in philological scholarship and archaeological exploration, including Victorian debates over the historical verifiability of Homer's raptured Troy. Tennyson's attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, which are illuminated by Hallam's writings, and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall illustrates the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's long career."--Jacket.
E.A. Smith
This book is the only up-to-date survey of the history of the House of Lords, and its impact on British politics and society, in the period from Waterloo to the First World War. It shows how the Lords adapted to, and survived, the 'age of reform'; and traces their changing relationship with the House of Commons and the British people at large. It fills an important gap, for the peerage were, and contrived to remain, major actors in the politics of the age. This survey thus illuminates not only the parliamentary and constitutional history of the time, but also, much more widely, the changing character of nineteenth-century Britain itself. E.A. Smith begins his account with the House of Lords before the 'Great Reform Act' of 1832. Tracing the changing fortunes of the Lords through and after the passage of the Act, he explains how an institution founded on aristocratic privilege and landed wealth, and seeming to embody all that was anachronistic and reactionary, managed to survive into the new era of mass Parliamentary democracy and retain for itself a very substantial influence on, and voice in, the nation's political and social life. How was it done? This remarkable record of adaptation and survival is shown to have its origins in the period immediately after 1832 when, largely through the influence of the Duke of Wellington, the Lords were induced to accept the new conditions. Radical agitation for the abolition of the House declined accordingly. Moreover, as Dr Smith makes clear, Victorian politics and society remained aristocratic in character despite the extension of the franchise, and even the Liberal and Labour governments of the twentieth century have been reluctant to undertake fundamental reform. Even the Parliament Act of 1911, with the passage and implications of which the main part of the book closes, did not undermine the political foundations of the Lords in the way that is usually assumed; and the House has continued to exercise important functions as a restraining influence on policy and legislation down to our own time. As the only comprehensive treatment of this important subject, Dr Smith's book will immediately become necessary reading for scholars and students; but its lively and engaging style will also appeal to anyone interested in the development of the British Parliamentary constitution, the survival and adaptation of the British aristocracy, and the changing character of British politics and society before the First World War.