By the last decades of the nineteenth century, more people were making more speeches to greater numbers in a wider variety of venues than at any previous time. This book argues that a recognizably modern public life was created in Victorian Britain largely through the instrumentality of public speech. Shedding new light on the careers of many of the most important figures of the Victorian era and beyond, including Gladstone, Disraeli, Sir Robert Peel, John Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Canon Liddon, the book traces the ways in which oratory came to occupy a central position in the conception and practice of Victorian public life. Not a study of rhetoric or a celebration of great oratory, the book stresses the social developments that led to the production and consumption of these speeches.

Sir Robert Peel - paragon or pariah? Peel was the greatest statesman and political leader of mid-Victorian Britain, a titan of Conservative politics, whose legacy has inspired generations in his party and in British political life. In a career spanning forty years he held the greatest offices of state including Chief Secretary to Ireland, Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and was twice Prime Minister. He was the first acknowledged leader of the Conservative Party and the Founder of Modern Conservatism. Yet Peel's seemingly peerless reputation has never been secure. The Repeal of the Corn Laws split his party, his 'Peelite' supporters joined the Liberals and the Conservatives remained in opposition for thirty years. Richard Gaunt, drawing on a huge archive of state papers, contemporary writings including Peel's own Memoirs and the latest historiography, paints a convincing picture of Peel as an exponent of effective government in the modern industrial state and a calculating practitioner, supremely self-confident, who dominated both his Party and the House of Commons. Gaunt's revisionist life of Peel will be essential reading and the standard work for students and general readers interested in Conservative and mid-Victorian political history and historical biography.