Conservative History Journal

With all the various court cases going on and complaints about nasty things being said on twitter, it might be worth looking at certain aspects of censorship as practised in 1703. On July 31 of that year Daniel Defoe, the writer, journalist, merchant, probable royal spy and political muckraker was placed in the stocks as punishment for writing a curious pamphlet entitled The Shortest Way With Dissenters. It is written in the style of existing...

The results of the 1945 General Election, in which votes took a long time to count because of the numbers that were still overseas, were declared on July 26: an astonishing though not altogether surprising (if I may use such a paradox) landslide victory for the Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee who, as Deputy Prime Minister during the war, managed to spread many of the party's ideas and create the necessary structures even before he withdrew from the Coalition and demanded and election. This blog has referred to this in a...

The Conservative History Journal blog is very pleased to be publishing this article about an unjustly neglected Conservative politician and personality. The first Lord Hailsham played an important part in the Conservative Party in the twenties and thirties but has suffered the fate of so many politicians of that period in that attention has been concentrated on the Second World War and the events leading up to it with too many important...

Last autumn I attended a conference (as I do from time to time) on Dickens and Russia, parts of which were fascinating. Others, mostly profound academic analyses of Dostoyevsky's debt to Dickens considerably less so. However, one astonishing account to emerge was the story of Dickens's supposed meeting with Dostoyevsky in 1862, first written about by Stephanie Harvey in the The Dickensian in 2002. The story was picked up by the two most recent biographers of Dickens, Michael Slater in 2009 and Claire Tomalin in 2011. However,...

Tory Historian finds on Londonist's excellent blog that the British Library will be celebrating the anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta in excellent style next year: the four surviving copies of Magna Carta will be united for the first time, marking the 800th anniversary of the landmark legal document’s signing. During a three-day event at the British Library, visitors and scholars will get to see the quartet in one room. Currently, the Library holds two copies, while the others are at Salisbury and Lincoln Cathedrals. Sadly,...

A new double biography of those two nineteenth century giants, Gladstone and Disraeli. The Great Rivalry by Dick Leonard is published by I. B. Tauris and concentrates on the rivalry that shaped British politics for several decades. It is not, by any means, the first time the rivalry has been written about and the two men's differing personalities and backgrounds have been covered before. To be fair to the author, Dick Leonard, he says this in the Introduction; why the publisher needs to produce such inaccurate hype is unclear. My...

And here, just to make a change and have a break from all the rejoicing is the text of Dr Johnson's response to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress, entitled Taxation is No Tyranny. The great sage, incidentally, was unimpressed by the yearning for liberty by a group of slave owners....

Legislation that gave women the right to vote on the same terms as men received its Royal Assent on July 2, 1928. Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 is sometimes referred to as the Fifth Reform Act or the Equal Suffrage Act but that is its proper tit...

Or so I was reminded by Mike Paterson of London Historians. Two of them died on this day, Spencer Compton, the Earl of Wilmington in 1743 and Sir Robert Peel in 1850 as well as the man who, according to some, should have been Prime Minister, Joseph Chamberlain in 1914 (a good time to go). As against that, one, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Home of the Hirsel, was born on this day in 1903. You win some and you lose so...