This book is the first on the creation, development and influence of popular politics, specifically the role of Political Unions, on the Great Reform Act of 1832. Political Unions and the force of public opinion played a vital role in seeing the Reform Bill through Parliament and setting England on the path of peaceful, legislative reform. Their emphasis on representing the 'industrious' classes linked the Unions to the emerging debates - political and socio-economic - in later Victorian Britain and the evolution of British participatory democracy.

'It is a melancholy thought that as soon as reforms are put into practice, disillusionment enters the political scene...' Norman Gash's Ford Lectures, originally delivered at Oxford in 1964, address an era of reform that followed the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828, Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and the Reform Act of 1832. The history of this period has often focused on the conflicts that proved necessary before the Acts came to pass. But it was only after 1832 that the real crisis of reform emerged: the clash between what had actually been done, and what men thought should be the consequences of what had been done. As Gash notes of the arguments over the Reform Bill of 1831, "substantially the foundations for the Victorian two-party system were laid by the divisions of politicians into Reformers and Conservatives."