'Shooting Niagara -- And After?'

Shooting Niagara – And After? is a wide-ranging examination of Britain’s Second Reform Act of 1867 and its impact, which doubled the electorate and propelled the country into the age of mass politics.

• Discusses the political world that the Second Reform Act created, as well as the intellectual forces which brought it into being
• Addresses issues and perspectives related to political history, imperial history, Irish history, the history of childhood, popular protest, political thought, class, age, and gender
• Contains contributions from distinguished scholars, such as Malcolm Chase, Kathryn Gleadle, Jonathan Parry and Gareth Stedman Jones, as well as from younger and emerging scholars
• Coincides with the 150th anniversary of the passing of the Second Reform Act, a landmark in the history of British democracy

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: ‘Shooting Niagara – and After?’
Robert Saunders

1. The Popular Movement for Parliamentary Reform in Provincial Britain during the 1860s
Malcolm Chase

2. Masculinity, Age and Life Cycle in the Age of Reform
Kathryn Gleadle

3. 1867 and the Rule of Wealth
Jonathan Parry

4. The Second Reform Act and the Problem of Electoral Corruption
Kathryn Rix

5. The Second Reform Act and the Politics of Empire
Alex Middleton

6. The Irish Reform Act of 1868
Colin Barr

7. ‘Pressure from Without’: Karl Marx and 1867
Gareth Stedman Jones

Index

Robert Saunders is a Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen Mary University of London, specialising in political history and the relationship between Britain and Europe. He is the author of Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848-67 and the co-editor, with Ben Jackson, of Making Thatcher’s Britain. He is currently writing a new history of the 1975 referendum on membership of the European Community. Dr Saunders has provided comment and analysis for a wide range of media outlets, including the BBC, CNN and NPR, and recently appeared in the BBC TV series The Victorian Slum.

The Second Reform Act of 1867 was a landmark in the history of British democracy. It doubled the electorate at a stroke, propelling the British state into the age of mass politics and creating for the first time a working-class predominance in the constituencies. This volume offers wide-ranging new approaches to the Second Reform Act and its world: both the political world it created and the intellectual world from which it emerged. It brings fresh perspectives from imperial history, Irish history, the history of childhood and the history of political thought, while showing how nationalists, colonialists, popular radicals and revolutionaries such as Karl Marx responded to the challenge and opportunity of reform.