Roger Swift

This book provides the first biographical study of Charles Pelham Villiers (1802-1898), whose long UK parliamentary career spanned numerous government administrations under twenty different prime ministers. An aristocrat from a privileged background, Villiers was elected to Parliament as a Radical in 1835 and subsequently served the constituency of Wolverhampton for sixty-three years until his death in 1898. A staunch Liberal free trader throughout his life, Villiers played a pre-eminent role in the Anti-Corn Law League as its parliamentary champion, introduced an important series of Poor Law reforms and later split with William Gladstone over the issue of Irish Home Rule, turning thereafter to Liberal Unionism. Hence Villiers, who remains the longest-serving MP in British parliamentary history, was intimately involved with many of the great issues of the Victorian Age in Britain.

Charles Pelham Villiers: Aristocratic Victorian Radical

Sheridan Gilley

This work is a sequel to The Irish Victorian City. As a collection of national and regional studies, it reflected the consensus view of the subject by describing both the degree of the demoralization of the Irish immigrants into Britain for the early and mid-Victorian period, when they figured so largely in the official parliamentary and social reportage of the day; and then, in spite of every obvious difficulty posed by poverty, crime, disease, and prejudice, the positive aspect of the Irish Catholic achievement in the creation of enduring religious and political communities towards the end of the nineteenth century.

The Irish in Britain, 1815-1939

David Bebbington

Academics in history, politics, and ecclesiastical history in Wales, Scotland and England have contributed a dozen essays to this collection celebrating the centenary of Gladstone's death (many of the papers were first presented at a conference at Chester College in 1998). Individual topics consider the PM and the disruption of the Church of Scotland, his relationship with Peel, how Gladstone coped with parliamentary reform, the issue of Irish nationalism, his views and policies regarding empire, and the influence on him of Richard Cobden. Distributed by ISBS. c. Book News Inc.

Roger Swift

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