A rowdy but good-humoured crowd gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to protest against electoral malpractice and Government cronyism.
As the Nineteenth Century opened, workers in England’s rapidly growing industrial centres were driving national prosperity. But they had few MPs to represent them, electoral malpractice was rife and most of them were not allowed to vote anyway. The feeling that Government was a hostile enemy from whom neither justice nor sympathy could be expected was only confirmed in August 1819.
Emmeline Pankhurst recalls how she brought some much-needed reason into the operations at Chorlton workhouse.
Emmeline Pankhurst’s campaign for women’s suffrage was not just about the right to vote: it was about the country’s desperate need for talented women actually in government. Her experiences as the only woman on the Board of the Chorlton-on-Medlock Workhouse in the 1890s rather proved her case.
Nineteenth-century Britain had busy industrial cities and a prosperous middle class, but no MPs to represent them.
The Industrial Revolution changed the face of Britain. It depopulated the countryside, spawned crowded cities, and gave real economic power to an ever-growing middle class. At last, Parliament realised that it had to represent these people to Government, and the Great Reform Act was passed.
The Princely State of Mysore (today in Karnataka) was hailed as an example of good governance to all the world.
The Indian Kingdom of Mysore is associated with two remarkable figures, Tipu Sultan (1750-1799), ‘the Tiger of Mysore’, and Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV (1884-1940). Tipu fought the British and anyone else for nearly twenty years of unrelenting bloodshed; Krishnaraja made Mysore a world leader in industrial, artistic and social advancement.