Abstract
In 1897, the publishing house Blackie and Son launched a series of volumes on ‘The Victorian Era’.1 Promising to assess ‘the chief movements of our age’, its inaugural volume was dedicated to ‘The Rise of Democracy’.2 The theme was well chosen. As Erskine May had written in 1877, ‘no political question of the present time excites more profound interest than the progress of Democracy’, or the forms it might take in decades to come.3 Democracy was the spectre haunting Europe, a ‘great and unwieldy force which is advancing upon us in so many shapes, and of which we are all asking whence it came, whither it is taking us, and what we are to do with it’.4
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Notes
J. Holland Rose, The Rise of Democracy (London, 1897), p. v.
G.C. Lewis, Remarks on the Use and Abuse of Some Political Terms (London, 1832), pp. 84–5.
D. Lieberman, ‘The Mixed Constitution and the Common Law’, in M. Goldie and R. Wokler, eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 340.
J.A. Langford, English Democracy: Its History and Principles (London, 1853), pp. 81.
Edward Cox, Representative Reform. Proposal for a Constitutional Reform Bill (London, 1866), pp. 5–6.
C. Rallings and M. Thrasher, British Electoral Facts, 1832–2006 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 9–12.
R. Quinault, ‘Lord Randolph Churchill and Tory Democracy, 1880–1885’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 141–65.
L. Barrow and I. Bullock, Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 164–5.
G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (London, 1903), p. 203.
Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 123.
R. Saunders, ‘Tory Rebels and Tory Democrats: The Ulster Crisis, 1910–14’ in R. Carr and B. Hart, eds., The Foundations of the Modern British Conservative Party (London, 2013).
A.V. Dicey, A Fool’s Paradise: Being a Constitutionalist’s Criticism on the Home Rule Bill of 1912 (London, 1913), p. 123.
Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics II: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge, 2002), p. 367.
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© 2013 Robert Saunders
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Saunders, R. (2013). Democracy. In: Craig, D., Thompson, J. (eds) Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312891_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312891_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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