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The Transition to Democracy in Victorian England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Trygve R. Tholfsen
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“The organization and the establishment of democracy in Christendom”, de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “is the great political problem of the time.” Nowhere was the problem more urgent than in England, whose industrial towns were soon to be torn by intense class conflict. Yet England resolved the tensions of the 1830's and 1840's, and went on to build a tough and supple political democracy in a massively undemocratic society.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , August 1961 , pp. 226 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1961

References

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page 248 note 1 Harrison, Royden, The British Working Class and the General Election of 1868, in: International Review of Social History, vol. V (1960), part 3, and vol. VI (1961), part 1Google Scholar. Harrison has shown the importance of Liberal money in inducing Howell to enter into these Lib-Lab arrangements, which did not spring spontaneously from the Liberal inclinations of the working-class leadership. On the other hand, the deal with Howell would not have worked had not the vast majority of the artisan class been very favorably disposed to the Liberal party.

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