As a young man, Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843 1911), the Cambridge-educated Radical politician, spent two years touring the English-speaking world. This two-volume illustrated account of his travels was published in 1868, the year in which he first became a member of Parliament. Volume 2 opens as he leaves America in late 1866 for Australia and South Asia in search of British influences. This second leg of his journey confirmed for Dilke that England not only existed elsewhere beyond Great Britain, but that it spoke to the whole world through its cultural and societal offshoots across the...

The liberal Radical MP Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843 1911) campaigned for (among many other causes) votes for women and labourers, legalisation of trade unions, and universal education. His republican sentiments damaged his political reputation, and earned him the hostility of Queen Victoria. However, despite his views on the monarchy he was an imperialist, and his early work, Greater Britain (1868; also available in this series), was widely read. In the 1890s he became known as a parliamentary expert on military, colonial and foreign affairs. This 1892 work, co-written with Spenser...

C. Wentworth Dilke (1810 69), an influential figure at the Society of Arts, was one of the key organisers of the Great Exhibition of 1851. He played a leading part in planning the event and the catalogue, overseeing the installation of exhibits and managing the PR. The exhibition generated an enormous number of publications, official and unofficial, both in Britain and abroad, ranging from vistors' guides to London and descriptions of individual exhibits to discussions about the long-term future of the Crystal Palace, together with essays, sermons and poems. Dilke acquired several hundred...