Chapter 13 - Reimagining Society

Summary

Although liberals and conservatives tended to disagree about the specific ways in which the franchise might be expanded, both parties accepted by 1860 that reform was inevitable. Yet to whom should the vote be extended and on what basis? These questions animated discussions within and outside the House of Commons. They also informed significant works of nonfiction in this decade, including several of John Stuart Mill’s most important writings, as well poetry and fiction, including many of Anthony Trollope’s parliamentary novels. This chapter constellates Mill’s speculative thought and Trollope’s fiction in order to consider the persistent tensions between thought and feeling that are constitutive features of Victorian liberalism itself.