Writing the Victorian Constitution, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018
Palgrave Modern Legal History Series

This book charts the writing of the English constitution through the work of four of the most influential jurists in the history of English constitutional thought?Edmund Burke, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Walter Bagehot and Albert Venn Dicey. Stretching from the French Revolution to the death of Queen Victoria, their writing is both representative of and formative to the Victorian constitution. Ian Ward traces how constitutional writing changed over the course of the long nineteenth century, from the poetics of Burke and the romance of Macaulay, to the pragmatism of Bagehot and the jurisprudence of Dicey. A century on, our perception of the English constitution is still shaped by this contested history.

1. The Written Constitution.- 2. The Revolution of Mr Burke.- 3. The Great Dramatist.- 4. The Greatest Victorian.- 5. Dicey's Law.

Ian Ward is Professor of Law at Newcastle University, UK. He has written a number of books on related areas of English legal and constitutional history, including most recently Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England (Hart, 2014) and Law and Brontës (Palgrave, 2012).

Revisits four key texts of English constitutional thought— Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Lord Macaulay’s History of England, Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution and Albert Venn Dicey’s Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution Offers a fresh study of the English constitution as it evolved over the course of the ‘long’ Victorian age Appeals to scholars and students of English political and legal history in the nineteenth century