The increasing availability of education was one of the most contentious political issues of the 1820s. Responding to the King's Speech after the Duke of Wellington was installed as Prime Minister in 1828, the leading Whig politician Henry Brougham asserted that the current age had definitively moved on from the period of conflict in which the new premier had made his name:

In this intervention, one much cited at the time, Brougham made an argument about historical progress that was fundamentally political. This was by no means an uncomplicated rejection of established systems of power or of British imperial ambitions – ideologically inflected instruction was, after all, a key element of Britain's national and global policies. Nevertheless, Brougham's assertion that large-scale education would promote liberal values made many commentators extremely uncomfortable. The Age – a conservative newspaper opposed to Catholic emancipation and Brougham's political agenda – made this obvious when it facetiously extended the encomium to the schoolmaster into a mock-heroic peroration on Brougham's ambitions for the March of Intellect:

Brougham's praise and The Age's mockery both speak to the currency and the imaginative power of the March of Intellect as a metaphor for cultural change. Technological innovation, economic development and demographic shifts were fundamentally redefining what knowledge was and what education meant. As Brian Maidment puts it, at its most expansive the March of Intellect can be taken as being the ‘set of socio-economic, cultural, and scientific changes that underpinned the transformations in the class structure and economic base of British society in the first half of the nineteenth century’.