John K. Walton

The Reform Act of 1867 was highly controversial at the time and has remained so. Was it an inevitable step on the road to full democracy or an irresponsible gamble by a politician desperate to win a tactical victory?

Disraeli is a key figure for students of nineteenth-century Britain. He is indelibly identified with the unmaking of Peel's version of the Conservative Party, and with the re-creation of a durable and outstandingly successful new party which retained the loyalty of the squires and the shires while reaching out to newer forms of property ownership and cultivating the attachment of a significant proportion of the urban working class.John K. Walton here examines the major aspects of Disraeli's career and his legacy, asking how far his actions and policies were governed by principles and how far by expediency. He also enquires how far Disraeli set his own agenda and how far he was a rider of currents out of his control. Finally, Walton takes a careful look at his political, institutional and ideological legacy.

There is a powerful sense of place at the seaside. You know what to expect. Fishing villages usually have a pier, boats, lobster pots, and masses of seagulls while resort towns have esplanades, piers, grand hotels and gardens. Certain seaside towns have just about everything: Weymouth, for example, has a grand parade of hotels, a wide esplanade and a small fishing village. Blackpool has more of everything – three piers, miles of hotels, the Tower, Winter Gardens, trams, illuminations – but no fishing and no castle! There is something about the seaside that brings out the beating heart of John Bull in the English: doggedly erecting our wind-breaks to capture every vestige of a watery sun; wrestling with deckchairs; wrapping up against the determined wind on the verandas of our beach huts; accepting that ‘sand’ in ‘sandwich’ means just that! But we still love it and nowhere else in the world can match its myriad charms and eccentricities. For too long the English seaside has suffered from bad press, accused of being tatty, cold grey and windswept. Peter Williams’ evocative photographs in this fully revised edition of his acclaimed book will make you want to rediscover what a fantastic place the seaside is – full of character, charm and ‘Englishness’.

Awarded 2013 PROSE Honorable Mention in Media & Cultural Studies With the resurgent interest in his work today, this is a timely reevaluation of this foundational figure in Cultural Studies, a critical but friendly review of both Hoggart's work and reputation. Re-examines the reputation of one of the ‘inventors’ of Cultural StudiesUses new archival sources to critically evaluate Hoggart's contribution and influence, set his work in context, and determine its current relevanceAddresses detractors and their positions of Hoggart, delineating long-term ideological battles within academiaBrings cultural studies, literary criticism, and social history to bear on this figure whose interests spread across disciplines, to create a text which blends many threads into a coherent whole

This book is an interdisciplinary collaboration between a literary critic and cultural historian, which examines and recovers a radical and still urgent challenge to the industrialisation of cultural tourism from the work of John Ruskin. Ruskin exerted a formative influence on the definition and development of cultural tourism which was probably as significant as that, for example, of his contemporary Thomas Cook. The book assesses Ruskin’s overall influence on the development of national and international tourism in the context of pre-existing expectations about tourism flows and cultural capital and alongside parallel and intersecting trends of the time; examines Ruskin’s contribution to the tourist agenda at all social levels; and discusses Ruskin’s significance for current debates in tourism studies, especially questions of the place of the ‘canon’ of traditional European cultural tourism in a post-modern tourist setting, and the various incarnations of ‘heritage tourism’.

This book is an interdisciplinary collaboration between a literary critic and cultural historian, which examines and recovers a radical and still urgent challenge to the industrialisation of cultural tourism from the work of John Ruskin. Ruskin exerted a formative influence on the definition and development of cultural tourism which was probably as significant as that, for example, of his contemporary Thomas Cook. The book assesses Ruskin’s overall influence on the development of national and international tourism in the context of pre-existing expectations about tourism flows and cultural capital and alongside parallel and intersecting trends of the time; examines Ruskin’s contribution to the tourist agenda at all social levels; and discusses Ruskin’s significance for current debates in tourism studies, especially questions of the place of the ‘canon’ of traditional European cultural tourism in a post-modern tourist setting, and the various incarnations of ‘heritage tourism’.

The annual seaside holiday became a common experience in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and it has a central place in popular memory. Its recent decline has prompted nostalgia and gloom across the media, with a spate of newspaper features every summer bemoaning its decline. This is the first detailed academic cultural study of the rise and fall of the seaside holiday in Britain. This book offers an entertaining and broad interpretation of the holidays and resorts.

Unlike other institutions of central importance to working-class life, the fish-and-chip trade has not yet been rescued from what the author of this book regards as "the massive condescension of posterity". In attempting to begin this process, he traces the origins of what was by 1914 an important national industry, setting the economic, social and political context of the trade, charting its spread and analyzing its sources and methods of supply. The book explores themes like: recruitment patterns of decentralized, provincial trades; methods of working; the role of women in the food industry of the period; and the aim, and effectiveness, of trade organizations. It also provides a survey of the effect of convenient, cheap, ready-cooked food on working-class diet, health, lifestyle, economy and politics.

This book describes and explains the extraordinary wave of popular protest that swept across the so-called Third World and the countries of the former socialist bloc during the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, in response to the mounting debt crisis and the austerity measures widely adopted as part of economic "reform" and "adjustment". Explores this general proposition in a cross-national study of the austerity protests, or the 'IMF Riots' that have affected so many debtor nations since the mid-1970sArgues that modern austerity protests, like the classical "bread riots" in eighteenth-century Europe are political acts aimed at injustice, but acts that are an integral part of the process of international economic and political restructuringEvaluates how modern food riots are most important for what they reveal about global economic transformation and its social, and political, consequencesProvides a general framework (drawing on comparative and historical material) and then trace the cycle of uneven development, debt, neo-liberal reform, and protest in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern EuropeFocusses on the role of women in structural adjustment and protest politics and the features of seemingly anomalous cases which qualify the general argument

Aimed primarily at students of 19th-century history, this biography of Benjamin Disraeli examines the major aspects of his career and his political, institutional and ideological legacy. It asks how far his actions and policies were governed by principles and how far by expediency.

If England was 'the first industrial nation', Lancashire was emphatically the first industrial county the first to develop, over a wide area, the combination of steam-powered factory industry and urban sprawl which says 'Industrial Revolution' to most people. It was also one the first fully industrialised areas to experience catastrophic economic decline in the inter-war years. Much has been written about particular aspects of the Lancashire industrial experience, and the social causes and consequences of the changes that took place, but there is not full-length social history of the county as a whole, looking at developments in the long run and comparing and contrasting the patterns of change in the south-eastern textile district, on Merseyside and north of the Ribble. An explanation of Lancashire's unique social history since Elizabethan times is long overdue, and Lancashire a social history, 1558-1939 puts forward a distinctive point of view on the many areas of controversy. How did the 'Industrial Revolution' affect working-class living standards? Why did Lancashire become a stronghold both of Puritan activism and Roman Catholic survival, and what were the long-term consequences of this? Was the 'Industrial Revolution' really funded by the profits of the slave trade? Why was working-class Lancashire in the nineteenth century apparently first Chartist, then Conservative? Was Lancashire the original centre and true home of 'Victorian values', of a culture of thrift, enterprise and self-reliance?This is the first social history of an English county to span the centuries from the sixteenth to the twentieth, looking at all levels of society and analysing politics and the power structures as well as technological innovation and material wealth.More importantly, it studies a particular vital and controversial place and period, and takes account of continuities as well as changes. Aimed at the sixth former and general reader as well as the academic market, it should become essential reading for historians, and historical geographers, sociologists and economists.

The Reform Act of 1867 was highly controversial at the time and has remained so. Was it an inevitable step on the road to full democracy or an irresponsible gamble by a politician desperate to win a tactical victory?