Politics and the people

This ambitious and provocative study provides a new narrative of nineteenth-century English political history. Based on extensive research the book draws on recent 'postmodern' critical theory to read a vast range of hitherto neglected oral, visual and printed sources, in an attempt to expand our conception of the politics of the period. Read in this way, nineteenth-century English politics resolved itself 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 t...