This collection offers the first detailed investigation of political life in nineteenth-century London. London politics did not share the free-trade and civil-equality preoccupations of the provinces which currently dominate scholarly literature. As these essays reveal, the capital remained more concerned with older struggles for political independence. By highlighting the inability of existing accounts to accommodate metropolitan distinctiveness, the collection aims to stimulate a major reappraisal not of London politics alone, but of Victorian political history more generally.

MARC BAER Professor of History, Hope College, Michigan, USADAVID CAMPION Assistant Professor of History, Lewis& Clark College, Portland, Oregon, USATIM COOPER Researcher, St Andrew's University, UKDETLEV MARES Lecturer, Institute of History, Darmstadt University of Technology, GermanyMATTHEW McCORMACK Lecturer in History, University College Northampton, UKDAVID NASH Reader in History, Oxford Brookes University, UKBEN WEINSTEIN ResearcherALEX WINDSCHEFFEL Lecturer in Modern British History, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

List of Tables List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations Notes on Contributors Introduction; M.Cragoe& A.Taylor Metropolitan 'Radicalism' and Electoral Independence, 1760-1820; M.McCormack 'Policing the Peelers': Parliament, the Public and the Metropolitan Police, 1829-33; D.Campion Metropolitan Whiggery, 1832-55; B.Weinstein Post-Chartism: Metropolitan Perspectives on the Chartist Movement in Decline, 1848-80; A.Taylor Secularism in the City: Geographies of Dissidence and the Importance of Radical Culture in the Metropolis; D.Nash Transcending the Metropolis: London and Provincial Popular Radicalism, 1860-75; D.Mares From 'First Constituency of the Empire' to 'Citadel of Reaction': Westminster, 1800-90; M.Baer Late Victorian and Edwardian 'Slum Conservatism': How Different were the Politics of the London Poor?; M.Brodie 'In Darkest Lambeth': Henry Morton Stanley and the Imperial Politics of London Unionism; A.Windscheffel London-over-the-border: Politics in Suburban Walthamstow, 1870-1914; T.Cooper Conclusion; M.Cragoe& A.Taylor