The events of 1846 to 1854 affirmed for some generations to come ...

The events of 1846 to 1854 affirmed for some generations to come the character of the new monarchy, just at the time when events abroad-Australian gold discoveries, India, and the Crimea-were giving the nation an aggressive, imperial self-consciousness. From 1815 to the Revolution of '48 foreign affairs had engaged but a small share of the public attention.

First came the depression after Waterloo and the slow recovery, with a terrible set-back in 1825. Then Ireland and Catholic emancipation took the stage, then Reform and the Poor Law, and Ireland again with O'Connell; then come the Oxford, the Chartist, and the Free Trade movements, the depression of the first years of Victoria, Ireland once more, and the Repeal of the Corn Laws. But from 1850 onwards the focus of interest is overseas; the soldier, the emigrant, and the explorer, the plots of Napoleon III and the red shirt of Garibaldi, take and fill the imagination.

Domestic politics are languid. Once, if not twice, in twenty years, the franchise had brought England in sight of civil war: in the fifties a Franchise Bill was four times Introduced Quater ipso in limine portae substitit, atque utero sonitum quater arma dedere,' and was forgotten; the annual motion on the ballot became an annual joke.