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Wordsworth worked over The Prelude once more in 1832. This chapter discusses the major revisions which, reflecting the poet’s anxiety over Reform, involved revisiting his earlier radicalism and rejection of Burke. The complexity of this revisiting is brought out by analysis of earlier positions to establish what continuities remained. The final revision of 1839 is discussed in the second half of the chapter. Wordsworth had outlived his closest friends and this revision, particularly with Coleridge and the years of Lyrical Ballads in mind, provoked more than usual intensity of retrospection. The poem’s social vision, however, was not to belated. It links Wordsworth, it is suggested, to the emergent generation of Dickens and Carlyle.

This chapter looks at Macaulay's short political career in order to shed some light upon its bearing on the History of England. Of the younger Whigs, Macaulay stands out as an intellect as powerful in abstract argument as in historical learning. Macaulay went to India to escape from politics. He was not so Whig as to want to take part in the contests of faction which would break up the Grey ministry, but neither was he so radical as to want to blame the Whig leadership. Macaulay professed a Whiggism of a very conservative cast. Soon after this Macaulay published his Critical and Historical Essays in three volumes, he included a review of Croker's Boswell. In November 1844, Murray proposed to reissue Boswell in a single volume, and Croker agreed to do it. This meant reconsidering Macaulay's charges.

The epilogue considers how the rhetorical culture of the House, and the image of its speakers, began to change at the end of the period covered by the book. It discusses the role played by Charles James Fox in redefining the role of the public orator and in reaching new audiences for oratory, and shows how two of Fox's most prominent successors, George Canning and Henry Brougham, followed his example in their famous election contest at Liverpool in 1812. The heirs of Pitt and Fox, in whose shadow they still spoke, Canning and Brougham are identified as pioneering and transitional figures, parliamentarians who extended the possibilities of public address, and early contributors to the development of the extra-parliamentary platform that was to become such a feature of nineteenth-century political life.

The contribution of key Scots in England to the abolition movement has been little recognised. James Ramsay from Aberdeenshire, chaplain and physician in St.Kitts was driven out by the planters because of his humane attitude to slaves. From a vicarage in Kent he provided evidence on the slave trade for William Wilberforce and inspired the young Thomas Clarkson to dedicate his life to the cause. In addition to his 1792 tour, William Dickson wrote detailed books on slavery from his time as Secretary to the Governor of Barbados. James Stephen was inspired as a student in Aberdeen by the anti-slavery lectures of James Beattie and went on to draft the legislation for the abolition of the trade in 1807. Zachary Macaulay, after experiencing a slave plantation in Jamaica in his youth, became Governor of the free settlement of Sierra Leone and edited the highly influential Anti-Slavery Reporter which provided both ammunition for Wilberforce's parliamentary campaign and news for the growing anti-slavery societies throughout Britain. Henry Brougham, the Edinburgh lawyer and MP who was to become Lord Chancellor of England, worked with Macaulay and Stephen in the anti-slavery cause.

This chapter is addressed to the special problem of the young offender. The risk of course is that children and adolescents committing not very serious crimes may grow up into experienced criminals committing much more serious crimes. Prevention is better than cure; but cure where possible is preferable to most of the alternatives. The problem is not an academic one, since more and worse crimes seem now to be committed by ever younger offenders. In 1835, Britain established a government penitentiary for young offenders sentenced to transportation, and in due course a disused barracks at Parkhurst was chosen as the site. In 1847 a House of Lords Select Committee, under the influence of Lord Brougham, enquired into the treatment of juvenile offenders. The judges were consulted and the great majority favoured imprisonment with hard labour and whipping rather than transportation. Some of the sentences imposed at this time make disturbing reading.

This chapter traces the origin of Cannes as a resort, particularly for English visitors, to a chance visit in 1834 by Lord Brougham, ex-Lord Chancellor in Lord Grey’s reforming parliament of 1830 to 1834. It charts the progress and prosperity of Cannes through Brougham’s adoption of the place and his attracting members of the British political and social elite. Brougham’s relations with French politics and culture are a little-known element of his extraordinarily busy career as a politician, lawyer, educational reformer and inventor. The progress of both Brougham and Cannes is discussed by means of memoirs, letters and diaries written by Brougham himself, and by some of the many observers of his career and personality – as well as numerous Punch cartoons, poems and articles of the 1840s and 1850s.

The enactment and implementation of the Prisoners' Counsel Act was followed almost immediately by controversy. The public and the press did not share the unqualified enthusiasm of the Act's promoters for adversarialism, and condemned some of the more zealous displays of defence advocacy under the new procedure as distasteful, deceptive, and immoral. The recurring criticisms in the press of forensic morality prompted an examination in legal literature of the duties of counsel. Some lawyers, particularly Lord Brougham, advocated an uncompromisingly adversarial conception of the duties of counsel which made commitment to the client the first forensic virtue and demanded that counsel exploit all expedient means to obtain the verdict. The predominant view was that there were moral qualifications on counsel's duty to his client, but the limits of adversarialism under this view were difficult to identify with precision.

This short conclusion sums up section one, arguing that the period between 1783-1843 can be characterized by multiple, generally unsuccessful attempts to establish new university institutions. The University of London is a rare exception, not least because of the state support it received. Its foundation made the Redbrick revolution possible.

After finishing Cambridge, De Morgan moved to London to study law. However, he was soon drawn into, and far more interested in the newly forming Astronomical Society. There he joined a group of committed mathematical astronomical thinkers, including William Stratford, Francis Baily, John Herschel, and Charles Babbage, who were struggling against the Royal Society for control of the Nautical Almanac. William Frend was an enthusiastic supporter of the group, who invited De Morgan to his home. Frend also supported the young man’s successful application to be Mathematics Professor at the newly formed London University. In an introductory lecture delivered before the first day of classes, De Morgan explained how learning reason through the study of mathematics would support the intellectual, and moral development of students.

In the late 1820s and 1830s, William Frend and his former pupil Lady Byron were deeply involved in efforts to improve the condition of the poorer people of England. Central to their efforts, were attempts to establish and support the development of Mechanics Institutes as envisioned by Henry Brougham. As she grew into adulthood, Sophia Frend was also drawn into Lady Byron’s philanthropic orbit and became active in the Children’s Frend Society. Joined by the literalist view reason they had each learned from Frend, the two women together examined the implications of the literalist view of reason for their world of early Victorian womanhood, and aspired to understand the nature of what they called ‘Truth with a capital T.” As they did so, both were deeply affected by the ideas of Ramouhan Roy, albeit in somewhat different ways.

In the early 1830s, Augustus De Morgan was deeply affected by the revolutionary changes that took place in the French political world and the English scientific one. In the summer of 1831 he resigned his position at the University of London, because he did not think the professoriate was being treated as gentlemen. He then turned his attention to educating his countrymen in reason by publishing with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) that had been established by Henry Brougham. As he was beginning to organize his ideas for publication in the Penny Cyclopædia he was converted to a radically new interpretation of the implications of the Literalist view of reason in mathematics. To Frend’s chagrin he followed the lead of his former tutor, George Peacock, and accepted the legitimacy of negative numbers in algebra.

This chapter focuses on the founding of the London University in Bloomsbury. It explains that the plan for the university started during a meeting in June 1825 chaired by Henry Brougham, and that the founders' most radical and contentious plan for the university was the exclusion of theological teaching. The chapter also mentions that the founders ensured that there was to be no barrier to the education of any sect among His Majesty's subjects, and describes the syllabus, which was expanded to include science, literature, and the arts.

The connections between aestheticism and earlier forms of dandyism are traced in chapter 6, notably in relation to ways in which coded references to same-sex desire can be detected in the political caricatures of John Doyle and other, lesser-known, artists and cartoonists. There is a particular focus on images of George Byron, Henry Brougham and Benjamin Disraeli.

In the beginning of the 19th century, the theory arose that biological tissues were composed of spherical “globules,” probably of uniform size, much as solid matter was composed of relatively uniform atoms. Where did this notion come from? Was it strictly an analogy with physical science? Is it possible that it came from an underlying philosophy of uniformity of constituents? Or did it have its origins in the limitations of the microscopes and other optical devices used in studying the tissues? There are and have been proponents of each of these views. The timing of the resolution of the conflict may say something about its origins.

This chapter looks at periodical publication as a third form of representation undergoing modernization in the 1830s, with a focus on Dickens’s first serial novel, The Pickwick Papers. First, it examines The Mirror of Parliament as a commercial enterprise from the perspective of its rivals like The Parliamentary Review and Family Magazine. Second, it considers how the Parliamentary Papers (or blue books) sought to re-present the People through new kinds of literature, combining numbers and words, derived from verbatim testimony. Third, it reveals the parliamentary subtexts of The Pickwick Papers, including its references to Henry Brougham, a major figure in the First Reformed Parliament. It does this in part by tracing Dickens’s debt to a previous pictorial series by Robert Seymour (the original Pickwick artist), a satire of Brougham called The Schoolmaster Abroad. Finally, it links the breach of privilege with which Pickwick begins to the breach of promise suit with which it ends. Throughout, it emphasizes the lulling qualities of verbatim reporting and the “hearing” of voices on paper.

This chapter examines the history of case-law, legislation, and equity, with particular reference to legal change. The common law was evidenced by judicial precedent, but single decisions were not binding until the nineteenth century. It was also rooted in professional understanding, the ‘common learning’ acquired in the inns of court. It was based on ‘reason’, operating within a rigid procedural framework. Legal change could be effected by fictions, equity, and legislation, but (except during the Interregnum) there was little systematic reform before the nineteenth century. Legislation was external to the common law, but it had to be interpreted by common-law judges and so there was a symbiotic relationship between statute-law and case-law. Codification has sometimes been proposed, but with limited effect.