In this paper, the author looks at the concept of democracy as understood in Victorian England, showing that rather than referring simply to a Greek word or to a ‘universal’ Greek ideal, the term is part of a complex sociohistorical struggle, in which translation played an active role in the word’s cultural evolution. Writers such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold engaged in the political discourse of the period and helped to lead the way to a radical transformation of the meaning of the term ‘democracy’. After looking at negative interpretations of the term democracy by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translators including Thomas Hobbes, Lianeri then reviews a new conceptual landscape in the nineteenth century, one much influenced by liberal thought in France and the Americas. She documents how translators participated in constructing new definitions of democracy that were more in tune with newly emerging British cultural and economic goals.