Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867-1914 (review)

Abstract

Speaking for the People focuses on the ways in which, in the wake of the greatly widened franchise after the Reform Act of 1867, British politicians of all parties addressed "the people" as a means of garnering their share of the increased electorate. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which examines theoretical preconceptions underlying existing accounts of late-Victorian popular politics. Here class-based accounts are Lawrence's special target, with their central assumption that the growth of democracy in the late- nineteenth century automatically triggered a working-class politics, or at least a competition amongst the traditional parties for policies which would appeal to the new constituency. Such a conception relies at least initially on the assumption that, in this period, an increasingly urban, homogeneous working class emerged, whose political behaviour could be deduced from its social and economic context. Lawrence instead stresses intra- class segregation, while downplaying traditional emphasis on the caste divide between manual and skilled labour. Lawrence offers a useful overview of the three main revisionist [End Page 538] schools respecting popular politics (sociological, empirical, and postmodern), contending that recent studies have failed to focus adequately on the relationship between political activists of all stripes and those they sought to, or claimed to, represent. Such a focus displaces analysis from what organisations do to what people do, and to how representation becomes the subject of continual negotiation, and a constant process of exclusion and denial as well as inclusion and recognition. This in turn aims to avoid an overly easy reliance on commonplace dualisms such as "high" versus "popular" politics, "elite" versus "popular" culture, and so on.