Tag Archives: slavery

‘A strenuous and able Reformer’: Dr Stephen Lushington (1782-1873)

Posted on September 17, 2020 by Martin Spychal

This month we take a look at Dr Stephen Lushington (1782-1873). One of six anti-slavery campaigners whose names are inscribed on the Buxton Memorial Fountain in London, Lushington famously served as Queen Caroline’s legal counsel in 1820. As MP for … Continue reading →

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MP of the Month: Thomas Barrett Lennard (1788-1856)

Posted on August 25, 2020 by salmonphilip

Thomas Barrett Lennard‘s career neatly captures some of the oddities and contradictions of early Victorian politics, especially the survival of older attitudes and beliefs alongside the emergence of more ‘modern’ progressive ideas. Lennard’s campaign to abolish the death penalty for … Continue reading →

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MP of the Month: George Donisthorpe Thompson (1804-1878)

Posted on December 12, 2017 by Martin Spychal

December’s MP of the Month blog charts the path into Parliament of George Thompson, a self-educated book-seller’s son. As one of Britain’s foremost platform orators he was a major figure in the abolition of slavery in the West Indies and … Continue reading →

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MP of the month: Rowland Alston (1782-1865)

Posted on January 25, 2016 by salmonphilip

Rowland Alston’s career provides a useful illustration of just how diverse (and to a modern eye incongruous) the political outlook of MPs in the same party could be before the development of more formal modern political allegiances. It also serves … Continue reading →

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MP of the month: William Pinney and another kind of ‘slavery election’

Posted on November 29, 2015 by salmonphilip

William Pinney’s career as an MP serves as an important reminder of the legacy of slave ownership in British public life and the very different attitudes to electoral corruption that existed in the nineteenth century, even among radically-inclined Liberals. In Pinney’s … Continue reading →

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