This book is a major historiographical review of “mass political movements that came of age in England between the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914” (1). Its author's objective is to look at the transformation of the historical depiction of the people's political action, from the perspective of the “informed political activist,” linking national political movements to the average Englishman (1). Matthew Roberts is very clear in his historical frame of reference: he wholly rejects the historical argument that popular politics was co-opted by political leaders in the nineteenth century and reflected particular interest groups rather than the popular opinion of the masses.

Roberts begins with a chapter defining citizenship and reviewing how the three reforms of the nineteenth century (1832, 1867, and 1884) created independent political actors from the old political world of obligation and dependence associated with client–patron and tenant-landlord relationships. In reviewing the literature on electoral culture as well as reform, Roberts rejects the argument that reforms to electoral registration, including conditions of rate-paying, were created to restrict political participation. Instead, he asserts that “a series of unintended structural factors” gave the new system the appearance of shutting out the newly enfranchised political masses (23).

As political citizenry expanded, ideological and party organization logically followed. Roberts devotes chapters on Radicalism and the Chartists and the creation of popular Liberalism to examine how successfully this work brought popular politics into mainstream political action. Radicalism sought to clean up Old Corruption in political practice and invest the franchise in persons rather than property. Chartism, in its political, rather than economic form, sought to do this with the demand for universal manhood suffrage. Economics and class were key components of identity and organization in these movements, Roberts argues. In contrast, the Liberals based their beliefs on the notion that individuals should be free to pursue their own interests without interference from the state. In combining popular organization with the expansion of the electorate, Liberalism, more than any other nineteenth-century popular movement, “eschewed class politics and sought to unite, though not always successfully, the productive classes (those who worked by hand and by brain) in opposition to the idle and selfish classes (72). Liberalism, he argues, “succeeded in harmonizing a wide variety of interest and social groups” and was, therefore, “arguably the most socially heterogeneous of all the popular movements of the nineteenth century” (69). Gladstone's party organization and the cooperation of local authority with national leadership went a long way toward that cooperation.

But popular organization cut in many directions, ideologically speaking, in the nineteenth century. Roberts devotes chapters to the research that has been done on popular Conservatism as well as on the rise of organized labor and the Labour Party. Trying to separate rural conservative or Tory political power from the urban popular politics that is the subject of this study, Roberts argues that the Conservative Party was able to use the popular press to bring together disparate anti-Liberal forces, utilize new electoral registration procedures, and moderate ideological opposition to democratization as ways to appeal to a broad spectrum of the voting population. Taking advantage of unpopular legislation, such as tariff reform or the 1909 Liberal budget, the Conservative Party broadened its popular base of support.

But economics and the concept of class reemerged at the same time. While Robert shows that the financial boom of the 1850s quelled popular Radical organization, the rising unemployment and economic depression of the late nineteenth century saw the growth of militant trade union organization and popular unrest. This “new unionism,” as many have labeled it, added social concerns to the demand for political representation to rectify grave injustices in wealth, economic security, and the standard of living between the socioeconomic classes. Roberts looks at growing unionism, socialism, and a number of populist organizations, such as the Labour Church. The key to popular politics at this time, he argues, was the role of political communication, gender inclusion in the popular political campaign, and the adoption of the secret ballot, all of which helped to achieve the original goal of popular politics: linking the individual political activist to a role in national politics.

This study successfully brings together many secondary studies from across the chronological and ideological spectrum of Victorian politics. There are some components missing from the study, however. The Political Union movement that campaigned on behalf of the 1832 Reform Act should have been noted, particularly as to how it linked the Radical campaigns of the late eighteenth century to the Philosophical Radicals of the 1820–30s. The studies of public space and the rituals of political culture might have been given more attention, even as they give way to the organization of the national party apparatus. That as well might have been examined more, particularly how the Reform League and Reform Club started to transform popular action into electoral action in the 1830s. Nonetheless, the book is a solid piece of scholarship, tremendously useful to the student of British political history, and readable and clear on the developments in the historiography of the subject over the past twenty-five years. Ultimately, Roberts wanted his book to show that “the intellectual insularity, empirical naivety and anti-theory” of a previous generation of historians could now be countered with solid evidence and strong historical writing (9). He has achieved his goal.