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The era, beginning with the accession of William IV, is evoked in the novels of Trollope and Thackeray, and described by the young Charles Dickens as a cub reporter. It is lit with notable characters. The reforming heroes are the Whig aristocrats led by Lord Grey, members of the richest and most landed cabinet in history yet determined to bring liberty, which would whittle away their own power, to the country. The all-too-conservative opposition was headed by the Duke of Wellington, supported by the intransigent Queen Adelaide, with hereditary memories of the French Revolution. Finally, there were revolutionaries, like William Cobbett, the author of Rural Rides, the radical tailor Francis Place, and Thomas Attwood of Birmingham, the charismatic orator. The contest often grew violent. There were urban riots put down by soldiers and agricultural riots led by the mythical Captain Swing.
The underlying grievance was the fate of the many disfranchised people. They were ignored by a medieval system of electoral representation that gave, for example, no votes to those who lived in the new industrial cities of Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and Birmingham, while allocating two parliamentary representatives to a village long since fallen into the sea and, most notoriously, Old Sarum, a green mound in a field. Lord John Russell, a Whig minister, said long afterwards that it was the only period when he genuinely felt popular revolution threatened the country. The Duke of Wellington declared intractably in November 1830 that "The beginning of reform is the beginning of revolution." So it seemed that disaster must fall on the British Parliament, or the monarchy, or both.
The question was: Could a rotten system reform itself in time? On June 7, 1832, the date of the extremely reluctant royal assent by William IV to the Great Reform Bill, it did. These events led to a total change in the way Britain was governed, and set the stage for its growth as the world's most successful industrial power; admired, among other things, for its traditions of good governance — a two-year revolution that Antonia Fraser brings to vivid dramatic life.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 7, 2013 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781610393324
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781610393324
- File size: 7531 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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June 1, 2013
In Fraser's latest work on British history, she deviates from biography (Mary, Queen of Scots; The Six Wives of Henry VIII) to tackle the "perilous question" of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, seeking to get at the personalities involved in this historical moment and the reactions of people at the time. A confluence of events, including the ascension of William IV to the throne in 1830, led to an environment ripe for a major change to the still-medieval system of government. Apportioning of parliamentary representation had not changed in hundreds of years, completely ignoring population growth and the Industrial Revolution, so that, for example, extinct villages had more members of Parliament than major cities. By focusing on the short period between 1830 and 1832, Fraser moves the narrative along at a quick pace in order to give, as she says, "a flavour of the times," reminding the reader that the people who lived through the period could not have known how it would all turn out. American readers unfamiliar with the major figures of the era may find this work hard to follow initially; the illustrations will help to ground them as to who was who, but a dramatis personae would have been helpful. VERDICT The subject will not necessarily draw readers in as much as a royal biography, but the book is recommended for Fraser's fans and for British history enthusiasts.--Megan H. Fraser, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, Libs.
Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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April 1, 2013
The dame of British historical biography picks her way gingerly through the cluttered details of Parliamentary reform. Biographer and novelist Fraser (Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter, 2011, etc.) has so thoroughly enmeshed herself in the machinations and personalities of the leaders surrounding the debate for the first great Reform Act of 1832 that she often neglects to see the forest for the trees. She does convey the sense of national urgency compelling leaders like the Whig Lord Grey to pursue the bill, which was a long-running attempt to reform Parliament by addressing the medieval, unequal distribution of seats, eliminating "rotten boroughs," or defunct areas with decreased population, and expanding enfranchisement--at least somewhat. Fraser views England at a crucial "crossroads" during this period, beset by the convergence of historical forces that would play out in the heated two-year debate over the bill. The nation was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, creating newly populous towns like Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds and a prosperous new middle class. As the horrors of the French Revolution were receding from memory, another revolution in France carried off the latest Bourbon king, Charles X, and installed the populist Louis-Philippe, thus demonstrating yet again the power of the masses, delighting the Whigs while alarming the Tories. In England, the bloated, ailing George IV died in June 1830, ushering in his more people-friendly younger brother William IV. Moreover, the recently passed Act for Catholic Emancipation, which gave Catholics the right to vote in elections and stand for Parliament, had riven the Tory government. Consequently, reform was in the air, and the author masterfully evokes the arguments propounded over the several sessions of Parliament by the patricians of the day. Fraser's study of the "reasonable" confrontation between Commons, Lords and Crown is engaging, elaborate and elegantly wrought.COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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