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Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act
Contemporary Review, June, 2004
Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act. Edward Pearce. Jonathan Cape. [pounds sterling]20.00. v + 343 pages. ISBN 0-224-06199-2. The first thing to be said about this study is that the author is a journalist, not an historian. His argument for this new history is that 'there was room for a fuller account of the debate, for the parliamentary side of parliamentary Reform'.
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He therefore concentrates on the debates in Parliament and has his heroes and villains. The former include Orator Hunt, 'a man of great truculent courage ...'; the latter group is led by the Duke of Wellington, 'squirming from absolutist pronouncement to a sidling manoeuvre in pursuit of government, sounds as furtive as he does brazen ... a startingly unpleasant man'. For good measure, Mrs Arbuthnot is 'shrill'. In addition to the published debates the author has recourse to newspaper reports, diaries and memoirs. There is no recourse to manuscript sources nor any new insight. The book adds little to, and will not replace, J.R.M. Butler's The Passing of the Great Reform Bill (1914) or Michael Brock's The Great Reform Act (1973). (T.B.)
COPYRIGHT 2004 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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