Publisher's Synopsis
"Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest, and uncertainty; there were attempts to assassinate the queen and her prime minister, and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s, it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialization but by new attitudes to politics, education, women, and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people--politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers--who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, inx institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society. [This book] explores this process of transformation as it traces the evolution of British democracy and shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the fate of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospe
