Shooting Niagara And After? The Second Reform Act And Its World

The Second Reform Act of 1867 was a landmark in the history of British democracy. It doubled the electorate at a stroke, propelling the British state into the age of mass politics and creating for the first time a working–class preponderance in the constituencies.  Shooting Niagara And After? offers wide–ranging new approaches to the Second Reform Act and its world; both the political world it created and the intellectual world from which it emerged. Published to mark the 150 th anniversary of the Second Reform Act, it brings together distinguished scholars, such as Malcolm Chase, Kathryn Gleadle, Jonathan Parry and Gareth Stedman Jones, with the voices of younger and emerging academics. It offers fresh perspectives from political history, imperial history, Irish history, the history of political thought and the history of childhood, exploring how nationalists, colonialists, popular radicals, and revolutionaries responded to the challenges and opportunities of reform.

Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Shooting Niagara and After? (Robert Saunders)
1. The Popular Movement for Parliamentary Reform in Provincial Britain during the 1860s (Malcolm Chase)
2. Masculinity, Age and Life Cycle in the Age of Reform (Kathryn Gleadle)
3. 1867 and the Rule of Wealth (Jonathan Parry)
4. The Second Reform Act and the Problem of Electoral Corruption (Kathryn Rix)
5. The Second Reform Act and the Politics of Empire (Alex Middleton)
6. The Irish Reform Act of 1868 (Colin Barr)
7. Pressure from Without : Karl Marx and 1867 (Gareth Stedman Jones)
Index 

Robert Saunders is Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen Mary University of London, UK, specializing in political history and the relationship between Britain and Europe. He is the author of Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–67 (2011) and the co–editor, with Ben Jackson, of Making Thatcher s Britain (2012). He is currently writing a new history of the 1975 referendum on membership of the European Community. He has provided commentary and analysis for a wide range of media outlets, including the BBC, CNN, and NPR, and recently appeared in the BBC TV series, The Victorian Slum.