Best-selling historian Antonia Fraser’s new book brilliantly evokes one year of pre-Victorian political and social history: the passing of the Great Reform Bill of 1832.
Few democratic institutions have been so rotten and corrupt as Britain’s parliament in the early years of the nineteenth century. Fraser tells of the battle between reformers and conservatives: on the one hand, the reforming Whig aristocrats Lord Grey, Lord Althorp and Lord John Russell, and the Irish orator Daniel O’Connell; on the other the all-too-conservative opposition comprising Lord Londonderry, the Duke of Wellington, the Duchess of Kent and Queen Adelaide, consort of King William IV.