Despite the much vaunted claim that the British Parliament enjoys an 800-year history, much that is essential in the British understanding of how its Parliament works and what and who its Parliament represents is a relatively recent creation. Much indeed came into being in Anthony Trollope's lifetime. The Westminster Parliament had been ‘British’ only since the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707. Irish members sat in it only when a similar Act of Union in 1801 had abolished Ireland's separate legislative body. This ‘imperial’ Parliament became representative of the diversity of the British people as a whole only by means of a steady campaign of reform introduced as the nineteenth century advanced. Protestant Dissenters were given full civil rights in 1828, Roman Catholics in 1829. The great Reform Act of 1832 allotted seats to most of the new industrial cities of the Midlands and the north for the first time and extended the franchise to a new, and predominantly urban, section of the middle class. It had also, supposedly, abolished ‘rotten boroughs’ such as the fictional one which had formerly been sold ‘at every election to the highest bidder on his side’ (VB 3) by the Marquis of Trowbridge in The Vicar of Bullhampton. The further Reform Acts of 1867 and 1882 gradually brought most of the male working class into the democratic process. Finally, the pressure to extend the suffrage to women (granted partially in 1918 and fully only in 1922) formed one of the great political debates of the second half of the Victorian age (the debate figures, somewhat flippantly, in Is He Popenjoy?). Most of the old Palace of Westminster, the historic seat of the two Houses of Parliament, had burned to the ground in 1834 and had been replaced in the middle decades of the nineteenth century by the superb Gothic fantasy designed by Barry and Pugin. Although the medieval style and the complex scheme of decoration for its interiors stressed the idea of a long and continuous history for Parliament, the new building was also an emphatic statement of the Victorian concept of representative government, representative that is both of the Union and of the expanding and often disparate electorate of that Union.