ABSTRACT
The industrial north of England, had hardly any political representation as boroughs had not been changed to reflect the huge shifts and growths in population over the latter half of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. For over a third of the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria was not even on the throne, and the largely rural, unindustrialised, provincial Britain of 1800 had become a cosmopolitan, metropolitan centre of the world’s largest empire by 1900. After the Napoleonic wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was much dissent amongst the working classes, who had been hit badly by rising unemployment, famine and the introduction of the Corn Laws, which raised the price of food by restricting imports to benefit British producers. The Crimean war itself is most significant to students of the nineteenth century due to its depiction in the press and literature. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
