Brown University Library

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, more people were making more speeches to greater numbers in a wider variety of venues than at any previous time. This book argues that a recognizably modern public life was created in Victorian Britain largely through the instrumentality of public speech. Shedding new light on the careers of many of the most important figures of the Victorian era and beyond, including Gladstone, Disraeli, Sir Robert Peel, John Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Canon Liddon, the book traces the ways in which oratory came to occupy a central position in the conception and practice of Victorian public life. Not a study of rhetoric or a celebration of great oratory, the book stresses the social developments that led to the production and consumption of these speeches.

The extensive literature on Gladstone tends to perpetuate the view commonly held by his contemporaries that he had no sense of humour. This article examines Gladstone's humourlessness—real and perceived—not as a mere quirk of personality, but rather as an important and integral aspect of his public character. Beyond biographical considerations, the question of Gladstone's humourlessness serves as the basis for exploring the ways in which humour and seriousness functioned in the context of Victorian political culture—both in parliament and on the political platform. Public humour about Gladstone in high society, graphical satire and popular theatre underscored the fact that seriousness was Gladstone's predominant public characteristic. Paradoxically, although his seriousness inspired a great deal of derisive humour in politics and in public, it also proved to be one of his most important assets. Gladstone's seriousness enabled him not only to withstand the best attacks of his political enemies, but also to become the leading public figure of his time.

Knowledge and Power: The Parliamentary Representation of Universities and the Empire presents the first comprehensive account of how universities held seats in Britain's Parliament between the 17th and 20th centuries and how the idea of university representation spread throughout the British Empire.

- Represents the first systematic study of a significant but largely neglected institution which was part of the British constitution for 350 years

- Sheds new light on the uneven and paradoxical processes of British political modernization

- Features a detailed case study of the trans-imperial dissemination and adaptation of British constitutional ideas and practices

- Supplemented with detailed appendices on the representation of universities in Britain, Ireland, America, and India

Harry Furniss (1854–1925), a leading contributor to Punch and other important illustrated magazines, was arguably the most significant political caricaturist and illustrator of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. He was widely celebrated in his time, and his cartoons helped to define the political world in the public mind. The Humours of Parliament was Furniss’s hugely successful illustrated lecture that he staged throughout the U.K., North America, and Australia during the 1890s. Entertaining his audiences with anecdotes, mimicry, and jokes—along with the spectacle of more than 100 magic lantern slides—Furniss gave his audiences an insider’s view of the mysterious workings of Parliament and the leading political personalities of the day, such as Gladstone, Balfour, and Chamberlain.

Reproducing some 150 images drawn from Furniss’s extensive graphic work, The Humours of Parliament: Harry Furniss’s View of Late-Victorian Political Culture, edited and with an introduction by Gareth Cordery and Joseph S. Meisel, presents Furniss’s unpublished lecture text for the first time. The extensive introduction places the show in its biographical, political, and performative contexts. Cordery and Meisel’s volume therefore both documents a pivotal moment in British political and social history and provides a rare case study of an important yet little studied nineteenth-century performance genre: the illustrated platform lecture.

The present reviewer, being introduced, as a third-year undergraduate, to original sources, in Geoffrey Elton's special subject, was told that the greatest sin an archivist could commit was to break up an archive. This is what happened to medieval parliamentary petitions in the late 19th century, when they were shoved into the catch-all PRO 'Ancient Petitions' class, and it explains why they have never been given the systematic attention that they deserve right across the period. Gwilym Dodd has now filled this lacuna, providing the essential evidential supplement to the much smaller number of private petitions that feature on the parliament roll by making clever use of lists and transcriptions compiled before the class was broken up, and he has given us a significant and welcome addition to the history of the medieval parliament.The first part of the work covers the period from the 1270s to the 1330s, when private petitions loomed large in parliamentary business and when, as Dodd's study of the petitionary archive seems to show, it was in parliament that petitions were presented regardless of their subsequent fate. This is the best-known and best-studied period for parliamentary petitions but, if Dodd rather underestimates the extent to which parliament's judicial role at this time has been championed by earlier historians, notably Richardson and Sayles, he has much that is new and important. For example, he explains how and why Edward I began to invite petitions, traces the emergence and work of triers and compares parliament, as a forum for appeals, with the Paris parlement which, he shows, was one of Edward's models. Once he reaches the period from the 1330s, when the common petition became central to parliamentary business, and the private petition-always likely to be excluded if the king needed parliament's time for his own business-declined in importance, his work really comes into its own, in showing that the private petition remains more than worthy of study. Here we learn much about the relationship, of individual and common petitions, of Lords and Commons in petitionary matters, and of petitions and legislation. For example, we follow the emergence of enrolled private petitions, usually from major figures, concerning their lands and rights, of the petitions from particular counties and towns that were incorporated into the common petition, and of the unenrolled petitions from individual petitioners that began to be addressed to the Commons. The respective role of Lords and Commons regarding petitions in the 15th century is analysed and we can see how this was to develop into the Tudor 'bicameral' system. Good work on some of this exists but most of it is rather elderly and it is nothing like as full, systematic or chronologically precise. There are other significant insights on this later period, for instance on the effect of private petitions on the growth in