In the century between the battle of Waterloo and the outbreak of the World War I, Britain moved from being a mainly rural society, governed by a landed aristocracy of rank and title, to an urban and industrialized democracy dominated by a wealthy middle class. It's political power had shrunk to the ability only to delay or suggest amendments to bills passed by what was now only in a titular sense the Lower House. The story of this development in relation to the House of Lords and the peerage who composed it is the theme of this book. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 considers the physical environment and the forms of business in the House during the whole century. Part 2 concentrates on the period before the 1880s, the time when the Lords adjusted, successfully on the whole, to the changing conditions of political life between the first and the third Reform Acts. These central chapters illustrate the social and political composition of the House and its activities in relation to the Commons and the public at large.
Part 3 surveys the changes brought about in response to the economic, social, and political developments which ended the mid-Victorian "age of equipoise" after 1880. These changes gave rise to a number of attempts to make the House of Lords more acceptable as a continuing element in the political life of the nation, ending, after the failure of proposed reforms, in the Parliament Act of 1911 which left the House unchanged in its composition but modified its constitutional powers. The survival and, in some ways, the recovery of the House of Lords in the period down to the 1970s is the subject of the Conclusion.
- ISBN10 0582095395
- ISBN13 9780582095397
- Publish Date 12 October 1992
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 May 2000
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Pearson Education Limited
- Imprint Longman
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 224
- Language English