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A case study of the great Victorian electoral realignment. Corrects existing claims about landslide elections, and tabulates the bias and responsiveness of the UK electoral system from 1868 to 1918. Examines the opportunities and problems for politicians in two‐dimensional space. A new account of the reasons for Gladstone's failure to achieve Home Rule for Ireland in 1886 and 1893 is offered, as is a solution to the puzzle of why politicians whose interest lay in widening the franchise after 1900, especially by introducing women's suffrage, failed to do so.

One of the most striking features of E. A. Freeman’s life and thought is the contrast between the young Tractarian student of architecture and the mature liberal, even radical, historian. This essay explains that the transition from the one to the other was not a process of sudden conversion or rupture, but rather a natural development. To understand the crucial years c.1846–50, when Freeman’s thought was most in ferment, a number of his early, hitherto unidentified, publications have been tracked down, including his earliest published study of the Norman Conquest. From these sources, among others, it has been possible to reconstruct how his early medievalism and anti-Erastianism evolved into a general commitment to liberty, democracy, and republicanism, without repudiating the High Anglicanism of his youth. Though apparently idiosyncratic, this intellectual development was shared to some extent by a number of prominent Victorian liberals, not least Gladstone himself.

Devolution was the first thing in mind of the Liberal leaders between 1886 and 1914 which caused the presence of a home rule for Ireland — ‘John Bull’s other island’. A majority of Liberals thought that there was a need to devolve. They also thought that home rule was a good idea. They feared that, unless Ireland were granted home rule, the government of the United Kingdom (UK) would be able to govern Ireland only by means of force. More positively, W. E. Gladstone and his successors believed that the granting of home rule would reconcile the people of Ireland to its remaining part of the UK.

This chapter centres on the debates over Home Rule between 1886 and 1893, when the issue exploded onto the British political scene. It examines the Gladstonian argument for Home Rule with reference to Burke, as well as the subsequent Liberal Unionist response. Both sides made significant intellectual bids for Burke’s mantle: the Gladstonians sought to establish voluntary political ties (‘the union of hearts’) between Britain and Ireland in an array of parliamentary speeches, periodical articles, edited books, and popular pamphlet literature. The Liberal Unionists looked to Burke’s wider work to show their adherence to the Liberal tradition. The Home Rule debates re-imagined Burke as a proto-Liberal Unionist, agreeable to and allied with Conservatives. The ‘spirit of Burke’ was, therefore, eventually seen to be embodied best of all in the Liberal Unionists who resurrected an anti-Jacobin vocabulary and styled themselves as Old Whigs defending the constitution.

The theological dimension to Bram Stoker’s work is totally neglected and yet, like Maturin, Stoker can be shown to be seeking a mediation between Catholic and Protestant, and Irish and English, with The Snake’s Pass an allegory of this proto-ecumenism. The influence of the Anglican idea of the via media, central to Victorian theology, is traced in his work, and compared with the influence of Walt Whitman’s model of comradeship and nation. In particular, F. D. Maurice’s inclusive ecclesiology is at work in Dracula, where the vampire acts as an Antichrist whose economy of substitutionary sacrifice is opposed by a union of Protestant word (diaries, typing) and Catholic sacramentals (Eucharistic host, etc.) and acts of mutual self-sacrifice and reciprocity such as the blood-transfusions. Maurice’s questioning of eternal damnation and Gladstone’s idea of immortal life as a gift are also important in a novel that aims to redeem even Dracula himself.