Like its predecessor, this novel recalls Jane Austen , but this time the plot (at least the earlier part) is closer to that of Sense and Sensibility. Marcia, a sensible elder sister, makes a happy marriage to a politically radical Whig lawyer, Bernard Forbes, and hosts a salon which fosters reforming ideas. The more impulsive younger sister, Susan, first marries a corrupt Tory aristocrat, Augustus Hamilton, whose habit of adultery results in his being killed in a duel. Susan, however, goes on to make a happier second marriage, to a marquess who is also a Whig, so that in a different social rank she now supports the same political goals as her sister.

MC 's father, Lant Carpenter , was born on 2 September 1780 to Mary née Hooke and her husband, carpet manufacturer George Carpenter . His father left the family after his business failed, and Lant was adopted by his mother's guardian, Nicholas Pearsall . Pearsall had him educated to become a dissenting minister, at which time he also studied chemistry and anatomy. He held several jobs throughout the years of his life, including many in the ministry, librarianship, and teaching in various places. He moved to Exeter on 9 January 1805, when he succeeded to Timothy Kenrick 's position as co-pastor to his colleague James Manning (grandfather of the novelist Anne Manning ). It was here that he met and married his wife that same year, and earned his LLD in 1806. After he moved his family to Bristol to become pastor of his own congregation, he established a school and became a knowledgeable and sympathetic schoolmaster who was popular with his students. He was a Whig supporter, and although he did not associate with the more radical abolitionists of his time, he also supported anti-slavery endeavours in Bristol.

Her brother the Rev. James Ogle performed the ceremony. This late second marriage was apparently very happy. Tim Brand was a lawyer and in politics a strong Whig, who until he inherited the peerage had pursued an energetic career as a member of the House of Commons. When speaking he had the habit of waving his arms about with great vehemence. His support for Catholic emancipation made a parliamentary colleague's wife much afraid he has not much religion. He also supported reform of the parliamentary franchise and of the Poor Law and the Game Laws, and measures to combat rural poverty. According to Fanny Kemble , he had been about to emigrate to Canada with the idea of establishing a utopian colony there, when his mother's death changed his plans by giving him a peerage and estate. (His father, however, had left debts.) He was well-read in German philosophy, said Kemble, an enlightened liberal, not only in politics but in every domain of human thought . . . with a wide range of foreign as well as English literary knowledge. This middle-aged marriage was childless.

ES enjoyed the comforts of upper-middle-class life, in an English and presumably white family. Her father had Protestant (French Huguenot) roots. She grew up influenced by Whig principles. Shirreff confirmed her commitment to Christianity while she was living at Gibraltar, but advocated a mainly non-dogmatic, moderate approach to religion and religious education.

An engraving after Richard Cosway was published for the Whig Club depicting the Polish national hero Kościuszko with a quatrain in his praise contributed by AMP .

ML had strong political views, and she frequently addressed political subjects in her novels. She was critical of English governance, and presented the misery and poverty of Irish peasants as worse than that of their English counterparts. In Ismay's Children she writes that Irish rents are preposterous and no Englishman in his senses would give ten shillings an acre for land for which Irishmen paid thirty. Nonetheless, she did not favour the separation of Ireland from Britain, and was often highly critical of Irish politicians and of Irish people in general. Although she supported the Whig (or Liberal) party, she opposed the policies whereby its leader, William Gladstone , sought to redress the grievances of Ireland, and likened his government to the Gaderene swine (which rushed over a cliff and drowned). She was a Unionist, and strongly opposed violent nationalist movements such as the Fenians, whose activities she calls ignorant folly in Ismay's Children.

TBBM received his first public attention after publishing an essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review. He later sat for the Whig Party in Parliament . There he took a role in passing the 1832 Reform Bill (his two major speeches on parliamentary reform achieved the status of classics) and helped strengthen the terms of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1834. His subsequent work for the Supreme Council of India greatly influenced British colonial policy in India, where he thought future stability lay in creating a class of Indians thoroughly educated in English language and culture.

In 1834 HM published Letter to the Deaf in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine. Around 1837 she was asked to take charge of an Economical Magazine at a good salary, which she thought opened the prospect of setting women forward at once into the rank of men of business. She declined this offer, however, when her brother James expressed his disapproval. She claimed in her Autobiography that she considered herself ill-suited to writing for magazines, but although she declined most of the invitations to this kind of writing which flowed in after she became successful, she still published in a wide range of periodicals. She worked towards political stability during the Chartist fervour of April 1848 by contributing to a government-sponsored periodical managed by Charles Knight , The Voice of the People. This enterprise (which indeed failed after only two issues) was doomed, in her view, by the controlling hand of the Whig officials, who proposed to lecture to the working-classes, who were by far the wiser party of the two, in a jejune, coaxing, dull, religious-tract sort of tone.

He supported the Whig Party . These party sympathies were cemented through his friendship with Byron , an ardent Whig.

FN 's father, William Edward Nightingale , a banker's son and Cambridge-educated Whig party supporter, was a landowner, a highly cultured country gentleman of ample means. He was born William Edward Shore but later took his great-uncle's surname on inheriting his property. He worked for some time as a magistrate.

The Whig Party reformed under the leadership of Lord Palmerston , as the Liberal Party .

Her footnotes and illustrations, especially, address the private and domestic life of famous men. Cowley writes as a Whig , favouring American independence and tolerance for Dissenters .

The Duke of Wellington was appointed First Lord of the Treasury and Secretary of State after the dismissal of the Whig Party by King William IV .