British and Irish Modern History

This book offers an account of politics in the principality between the first and third reform acts. Based on a wealth of unused sources in both English and Welsh, and grounded in recent scholarship on electioneering elsewhere in Britain, the book challenges the existing narrative of political history in the principality. There was more to politics in Victorian Wales, the book suggests, than the current focus on nonconformity and radical liberalism after 1860 allows. The book's focus on elections and election culture creates a natural context within which a wider spectrum of political opinion can be sampled. The book examines the differing ideologies of the major political parties — Tory, Liberal, and Radical — and then explores how these ideas were carried into the electoral arena through party organisation, campaigning, and propaganda. Later chapters examine some of the ways in which individuals were prevented from recording their true political opinions and the relationship between the unenfranchised and the political process. Throughout, politics is presented as a highly participatory process, one in which ideals and principles played a key role for both candidates and voters alike. It was into this world that the typically ‘Welsh’ style of radical politics, imbued with the values of militant dissent and armed with new conception of national identity, was born in the 1860s.

This book explores family experiences of dying, death, grieving, and mourning between 1830 and 1920. Victorian letters and diaries reveal a deep preoccupation with death because of a shorter life expectancy, a high death rate for infants and children, and a dominant Christian culture. Using the private correspondence, diaries, and death memorials of fifty-five middle and upper-class British families, the book shows us how dying, death, and grieving were experienced by Victorian families and how the manner and rituals of death and mourning varied with age, gender, disease, religious belief, family size and class. It examines deathbed scenes, good and bad deaths, funerals and cremations, widowhood, and the roles of religion and medicine. Chapters on the deaths of children and old people demonstrate the importance of the stages of the life-cycle, as well as the failure of many actual deathbeds to achieve the Christian ideal of the good death. The consolations of Christian faith and private memory, and the transformation in the ideas and beliefs about heaven, hell, and immortality are analysed. The rise and decline of Evangelicalism, the influence of unbelief and secularism, falling mortality, and the trauma of the Great War are all key motors of change in this period. This study of death and bereavement in the past helps us to understand the present, especially in the context of the modern tendency to avoid the subject of dying, and to minimize the public expression of grief. In their practical and compassionate treatment of death, the Victorians have much to teach us today.

The expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity was one of the most important developments in English and Welsh history in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In eighty years the number of Nonconformist chapels increased ten-fold, and by 1851, nearly one person in five worshipped in such chapels. For millions of people the gospel preached and the religion practised in these chapels determined their choice of marriage partners, conditioned the upbringing of their children, and moulded their family life. Religion pervaded education, shaped morals, controlled leisure, provided music and literature, motivated philanthropy and decided political loyalties. This book argues that while the Quakers constituted an increasingly wealthy but numerically declining community of businessmen, farmers, and retailers, and that in many towns the Unitarians formed a vibrant, progressive, intellectual élite, the appeal of Nonconformity was primarily to the poor, the ill-educated, and the unsophisticated. The working-class adherents of Evangelical Nonconformity vastly outnumbered those of political radicalism, trade unionism, or Chartism, and Dissent was a major factor in making a section of the working class respectable, thus contributing to the social harmony of the 1850s and 1860s. The book argues that the history of late Georgian and Victorian England and Wales cannot be understood without a knowledge of Nonconformity.

This book offers a complete, archive-based account of the relationship between China and the British Left, from the rise of modern Chinese nationalism to the death of Mao Tse tung. Beginning with the ‘Hands Off China’ movement of the mid-1920s, the book charts the mobilisation of British opinion in defence of China against Japanese aggression, 1931–45, and the role of the British left in relations with the People's Republic of China after 1949. It shows how this relationship was placed under stress by the growing unpredictability of Communist China, above all by the Sino-Soviet dispute and the Cultural Revolution, which meant that by the 1960s China was actively supported only by a dwindling group of enthusiasts. The impact of the suppression of the student protests in Tiananmen Square (June 1989) is addressed as an epilogue. This book argues that the significance of the left's relationship with China has been unjustly overlooked. There were many occasions, such as the mid-1920s, the late 1930s and the early 1950s, when China demanded the full attention of the British left. The book also argues that there is nothing new in the current fascination with China's emergence as an economic power. Throughout these decades the British left was aware of the immense, unrealised potential of the Chinese economy, and of how China's economic growth could transform the world. In addition to analysing the role of the political parties and pressure groups of the left, the book sheds new light on the activities of many well-known figures in support of China, including intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, R H Tawney and Joseph Needham. Many other interesting stories emerge, concerning less well-known figures, which show the complexity of personal links between Britain and China during the 20th century. The book is based on many fascinating new archival sources, as well as a close reading of the left-wing press.