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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832

Antonia Fraser

Duncan Minshull

Adrian Scarborough

Katrin Williams

Book of the Week: Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832: Episode 3

Factual: History

Factual: Politics

Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832

Episode 3

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832, Episode 3

In the summer of 1831, the mood for voting 'reform' feels revolutionary for some.

The bill to reform the voting system is blocked in the Lords. For some, events begin to feel like a revolution. Read by Adrian Scarborough. From May 2013.

'The struggle for the Great Reform Bill of 1832 took place a the crossroads of English history.' - so says the author in her lively and insightful account of the political change that took take place during this period.

Times were in flux. The Industrial Revolution was underway. The reverberations of the French Revolution were still being felt. And the country would be ruled by a new monarch, William IV.

And political change, who and how we would vote, was now in the spotlight. Put there mainly by the
Whigs - led by Earl Grey.

Age-old corruption, rotten boroughs, even hereditary peers would feel these winds of change. But how would the Bill be made law? Bumpily and dramatically, as it turned out, and its path is followed in five episodes, which are abridged by Katrin Williams:


3. The bill to reform our voting system goes through the House of Commons but its
passage in the Lords is spectacularly blocked.

Reader Adrian Scarborough.

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Antonia Fraser's account of a period of dramatic political change

Antonia Fraser's account of a period of dramatic political change, abridged by Katrin Williams. Read by Adrian Scarborough

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