The War of Words: The Language of British Elections, 1880-1914

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century have been widely eulogised as a golden age of popular platform oratory. This book considers the language of British elections - especially stump speeches - during this period. It employs a big data methodology inspired by computational linguistics, using text-mining to analyse over five million words delivered by Conservative, Liberal and Labour candidates in the nine elections that took place in this period. It systematically and authoritatively quantifies how and how far key issues, values, traditions and personalities manifested themselves in wider party discourse.
The author reassesses a number of central historical debates, arguing that historians have considerably underestimated the transformative impact of the 1883-5 reforms on rural party language, and the purchase of Joseph Chamberlain’s Unauthorized Programme; that the centrality of Home Rule and Imperialism in the late 1880s and 1890s have been exaggerated; and that the New Liberalism’s linguistic impact was relatively weak, failing to contain the message of the emerging Labour alternative.