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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
The following preamble, though not a verbatim copy of the Reform Bill, gives, in my humble opinion, the spirit or true meaning of that bill. – Whereas the People which, according to the idea of our ancestors, means the middle classes, being from the decay of some towns, and the rapid prosperity of new ones that have started up, not sufficiently represented, though from their independence, honesty, and morality, they are one of the most respectable classes of society, a Reform Bill is much wanted, embracing the full and complete representation of the people, alias the middle classes.
(Thomas Lowndes, A Letter Addressed to the Wide-Spreading John Bull Family, 1833)Thomas Lowndes, esq., was no friend of reform. Writing in 1833, he believed that Britain had just taken a serious political turn for the worse. But his sarcastic imaginary preamble to a ‘mad-headed’ Bill captured one realization that was not in dispute: whether the Reform Act was seen as a cause for celebration or for grief, virtually everyone at this point came to perceive it as a ‘middle-class’ measure, driven by recent social transformations. ‘The great reform bill’, rejoiced one pamphlet, ‘has transferred the government of these kingdoms from the grasp of a greedy oligarchy, in effect, to the middling classes.’ ‘The middle classes’, echoed Richard Cobden, were those ‘in whom the government of this country is now vested.’
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