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Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain. By G. R. Searle * New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. viii + 346 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $59.00. ISBN 0-19-820357-8.
Reviewed by Peter Botticelli
In this finely crafted work, G. R. Searle offers an insightful analysis of English politics from the perspective of the "entrepreneurial Radicals," that group of mid-Victorian politicians who managed to revolutionize the political discourse in Britain in favor of the industrial middle class.
Searle, a political historian, has broken new ground with the body of his work by exploring the modernization of British political life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book under review here takes the story roughly from the Great Reform of 1832 to the aftermath of the second landmark reform of Parliament in 1867. His earlier book, The Quest for National Efficiency (1971), charted the course of Liberalism and modern ideology from around 1900 up to the years just prior to the First World War and the spectacular collapse of the Liberal movement originally begun by the entrepreneurial Radicals after 1832.
As Searle notes, many historians have doubted whether the urban Radicals had much impact on political life in mid-Victorian England. Searle himself is a cautious revisionist on this point. He acknowledges that in the long run the Radicals suffered more defeats than triumphs. Even so, Searle makes it clear that while the phenomenon of...