In this concise, and readable new study, T. A. Jenkins explains in full how political parties operated within the Victorian political arena, and how this gradually changed in response to the enormous demands being made upon parliament by a rapidly changing society and an expanding electorate.

This book is a comprehensive review of the political career of Benjamin Disraeli, providing a thorough critical analysis of one of the most ambitious and controversial leaders in British history. ‘Disraeli and the Art of Victorian Politics’ is a major addition to our understanding of the dynamics of nineteenth-century politics.

Modernity and the Victorians diagnoses a disorder in the scholarship on Victorian Britain, and proposes an interpretative remedy. It argues that the 'modernization theory' beloved of twentieth-century social scientists cannot be made to fit the facts of nineteenth-century British history. Inits place, the book lays out in sweeping terms an alternative conception of the political and social dynamics of the period, centred on the past, morality, and community. Intended in part as a companion volume to Angus Hawkins' previous synthetic study Victorian Political Culture: "Habits of Heartand Mind" (2015), the book offers a deliberately bracing challenge to a swathe of received wisdoms which, it asserts, have misled students of modern Britain. Modernity and the Victorians is at once a piece of twentieth-century intellectual history, a contribution to the history of scholarship, acommentary on more recent historiography, and an attempt to intervene in current debates about the practice and future of political history. It is a mature and humane essay by a historian who devoted the whole of his career to making sense of the Victorians. A preface by Alex Middleton sets the bookin context with Hawkins' earlier scholarship, and reflects on his wider contribution to the historiography of modern Britain. The volume will be of interest not only to students of nineteenth-century Britain, but also to intellectual historians, historiographers, historically-minded socialscientists, and anyone interested in how present preoccupations can distort readings of the past.

This book is a study of the relationships between social thought, social policy and politics in Victorian Britain. Goldman focuses on the activity of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, known as the Social Science Association. For three decades this served as a forum for the discussion of Victorian social questions and as an influential adviser to governments, and its history discloses how social policy was made in these years. The Association, which attracted many powerful contributors, including politicians, civil servants, intellectuals and reformers, had influence over policy and legislation on matters as diverse as public health and women's legal and social emancipation. The SSA reveals the complex roots of social science and sociology buried in the non-academic milieu of nineteenth-century reform. And its influence in the United States and Europe allows for a comparative approach to political and intellectual development in this period.

Peace, war and party politics examines the mid-Victorian Conservative Party’s significant but overlooked role in British foreign policy and in contemporary debate about Britain’s relations with Europe. The book considers the Conservatives’ response – in opposition and government – to the tumultuous era of Napoleon III, the Crimean war and Italian unification. Within a clear chronological framework, it focuses on ‘high’ politics, and offers a detailed account of the party’s foreign policy in government under its longest-serving but forgotten leader, the fourteenth Earl of Derby. It attaches equal significance to domestic politics, and incorporates a provocative new analysis of Disraeli’s role in internal tussles over policy, illuminating the roots of the power struggle he would later win against Derby’s son in the 1870s. Overall, it helps to provide us with a fuller picture of mid-Victorian Britain’s engagement with the world. This book will be of use to those teaching and studying Victorian politics and foreign policy at all levels in higher education.