Abstract

This book offers an account of politics in the principality between the first and third reform acts. Based on a wealth of unused sources in both English and Welsh, and grounded in recent scholarship on electioneering elsewhere in Britain, the book challenges the existing narrative of political history in the principality. There was more to politics in Victorian Wales, the book suggests, than the current focus on nonconformity and radical liberalism after 1860 allows. The book's focus on elections and election culture creates a natural context within which a wider spectrum of political opinion can be sampled. The book examines the differing ideologies of the major political parties — Tory, Liberal, and Radical — and then explores how these ideas were carried into the electoral arena through party organisation, campaigning, and propaganda. Later chapters examine some of the ways in which individuals were prevented from recording their true political opinions and the relationship between the unenfranchised and the political process. Throughout, politics is presented as a highly participatory process, one in which ideals and principles played a key role for both candidates and voters alike. It was into this world that the typically ‘Welsh’ style of radical politics, imbued with the values of militant dissent and armed with new conception of national identity, was born in the 1860s.