Internationally best-selling historian Antonia Fraser's new audiobook brilliantly evokes one year of pre-Victorian political and social history - the passing of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. For our inconclusive times, there is an attractive resonance with 1832, with its ‘rotten boroughs’ of Old Sarum and the disappearing village of Dunwich, and its lines of most resistance to reform. This audiobook is character-driven - on the...
one hand, the reforming heroes are the Whig aristocrats Lord Grey, Lord Althorp and Lord John Russell, and the Irish orator Daniel O'Connell. They included members of the richest and most landed Cabinet in history, yet they were determined to bring liberty, which whittled away their own power, to the country.
The all-too-conservative opposition comprised Lord Londonderry, the Duke of Wellington, the intransigent Duchess of Kent and the consort of the Tory King William IV, Queen Adelaide. Finally, there were ‘revolutionaries’ and reformers, like William Cobbett, the author of ‘Rural Rides’.
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