Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wg55d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-04T17:42:17.877Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

III. Concession or Cure: the Sociological Premises of the First Reform Act

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2010

D. C. Moore
D. C. Moore
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Traditionally, the first English Reform Act has been conceived within the context of two discreet but overlapping models. Both separately and together these models have performed two important functions. They have provided a means of defining the nature and dynamics of the Act itself by relating certain of its crucial provisions to certain aspects of the pre-reform constituency structure. They have also provided a means of relating the Act as a whole—and as thus defined—to the general course of British history in the nineteenth century, to the general problems of explaining how Britain was transformed from an aristocracy to a democracy, from a rural and agri-cultural society to an urban and industrial one, from a Gemeinschaft to a Gesellschaft.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , 1966 , pp. 39 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1966

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Politics in the Age of Peel (London, 1953)Google Scholar , and ‘English Reform and French Revolution in the General Election of 1830’, Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, Pares, Richard and Taylor, A. J. P., eds. (London, 1956), pp. 258–88Google Scholar.

2 James Mill and the Art of Revolution (New Haven, 1964).Google Scholar

3 Politics in the Age of Peel, pp. 12-13.

4 Ibid. p. 23.

5 Ibid. pp. 3-4.

6 E.g. ibid. p. x.

7 Ibid. p. 9.

8 Ibid. p. 16.

9 See his comments on the constituency boundary scheme, ibid. p. 67.

10 Ibid. p. 16.

11 On this question, see below.

12 3 Hansard, 11 (1 03 1831), 1076.Google Scholar

13 On the relationship among these provisions see below.

14 Politics in the Age of Peel, p. 16.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid. p. 17.

17 Hansard, 11 (3 03 1831), 139.Google Scholar

18 3 Hansard, cxxx (13 02 1854), 498.Google Scholar

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid. 504.

21 Op. cit. p. 4.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid. p. 5.

24 ‘The Spirit of the Age.’ Essays on Politics and Culture, Himmelfarb, Gertrude, ed. (Garden City, New York, 1963), p. 36.Google Scholar

25 Ibid. p. 2.

26 Ibid. p. 36.

27 Burke, Edmund, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (Indianapolis, 1962), p. 104.Google Scholar

28 Certain of the following questions have been dealt with at greater length in the author's ‘The Other Face of Reform’, Victorian Studies, V, I (1961), 7–34Google Scholar.

29 3 Hansard, VII (4 10 1831), 1194.Google Scholar

30 ‘The Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Politics of the Forties’, The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., iv, 1 (1951), 8.Google Scholar

31 See, for example, the marquis of Blandford's reform scheme, Hansard, new ser., XXII (18 02 1830), 678–98Google Scholar , and scheme, David Robinson's, ‘The Reform of the House of Commons’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, XXXII (03 1830), 640–58Google Scholar . The attribution to Robinson was supplied by Professor Walter Houghton, general editor of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals.

32 3 Hansard, I (2 11 1830), 53.Google Scholar

33 E.g. , Robinson, op. cit. pp. 648 ffGoogle Scholar

34 27 July 1830.

35 This point is suggested by Turberville, Arthur Stanley and Beckwith, Frank, ‘Leeds and Parliamentary Reform, 1820–1832’, Thoresby Society Publications, XLI (1946), 17Google Scholar.

36 Politics in the Age of Peel, p. 13.

37 Parliamentary Papers, 1830-31, n, 199 emphasis added.

38 For Althorp's explanation why the ministers made an exception of these smaller free-holders see 3 Hansard, vi (17 08 1831), 162–3Google Scholar . For the reasons why this clause was amended see below.

39 3 Hansard, III (8 03 1831), 225.Google Scholar

40 See below.

41 Hansard, VI (20 08 1831), 339.Google Scholar

42 2 William iv, c. 45, s. 24.

43 Electoral Reform in England and Wales (New Haven, 1915), pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

44 See 3 Hansard, VI (18 05 1831), 272.Google Scholar

45 Ibid. 281.

46 Althorp's announcement of the Government's intent to amend the borough freeholder clause was made on 17 Aug., the night before the crucial vote on the Chandos clause. From various pieces of evidence it seems likely the decision to amend the clause was announced as soon as it was made. In any event, on 20 Aug., while answering the charge that by amending the borough freeholder clause he had broken a public promise he had made on some prior occasion, Althorp cited the Chandos clause to explain his behaviour. See 3 Hansard, vi (20 08 1831), 228–9Google Scholar . The same association between the amendment of the borough freeholder clause and the Chandos clause was later made by William Praed while introducing his motion that all borough freeholders vote in the places where their properties were located. See 3 Hansard, ix (1 02 1832), 1133Google Scholar.

47 3 Hansard, vi (19 05 1831), 289–99.Google Scholar

48 Lord Melbourne to Lieutenant Drummond, R.E., 8 Aug. 1831, Sessional Papers, 1831–32, xxxvi, 11. Drummond supervised the commissioner's work.

49 ‘Instructions transmitted by direction of Lord Melbourne’, 24 11 1831Google Scholar , ibid. p. 30.

50 Melbourne to Drummond, 8 Aug. 1831, ibid. p. 11.

51 ‘Instructions, etc…addressed to the Gentlemen engaged in collection Information respecting the Boundaries of the Cities and Boroughs of England and Wales’, 23 05 1831Google Scholar , ibid. p. 13.

52 For a further discussion of poll books, including examples of the influence they reflect, see the author's ‘The Other Face of Reform’, esp. pp. 10–17.

53 3 Hansard, XVII (25 04 1833), 610.Google Scholar

54 3 Hansard, xxxvn (7 03 1837), 26.Google Scholar

55 The Age of Reform (Oxford, 1949), p. 77.Google Scholar

56 I hope to publish soon a study of the subsequent efforts to handle the problem of electoral communities which culminated in the instructions to the boundary commissioners appointed in 1867, that they ‘include within the Area [of each borough] the Population properly belonging to [it]…’ (Bills, Public, 1867, v, 535).