On 20 March 1874, Rebecca Abraham, Hannah Taylor, Harriet Mary Harris, and over 1,200 ‘Women of Manchester’ petitioned the House of Commons for the removal of the legal disabilities that prevented women from voting in parliamentary elections.Footnote 1 This was one of eighty-five petitions in favour of women’s suffrage presented that week from across the four nations of the United Kingdom.Footnote 2 The simultaneous presentation of petitions from different places was key to the strategy of the suffrage movement. As Lydia Becker, the Mancunian architect of the suffragist petitioning campaign, urged supporters in one of the many circulars she sent during the same decade: ‘the air of the House of Commons should be filled with swarms of small Petitions, which, like a cloud of buzzing flies, will effectually arouse the attention of members to the subject that has called them forth.’Footnote 3
Suffragists were not the only petitioners to appeal to MPs that week. The Women of Worfield, Shropshire, petitioned against a bill to legalise marriage with a deceased wife’s sister; numerous highway boards requested amendment of the laws regarding turnpike roads; the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce lobbied for the repeal of income tax; the Working Women of Leeds petitioned against any restriction on their labour; the inhabitants of Cork, and a series of Wesleyan Methodist congregations from York, were among the many petitioners who supported a bill that sought to protect girls over twelve from ‘seduction’, meaning sexual exploitation and abuse.Footnote 4 The herring fishermen of Cumlodden, Argyll, complained that the practice of trawling was ‘ruining’ their trade.Footnote 5 Over the course of the 1874 session, the House received over 19,000 petitions, containing 2.1 million signatures, addressing some 326 different issues, ranging from individual demands from former soldiers in the East Indian army, calls for the suppression of slavery in the Gold Coast, mass protests on a number of religious and moral questions, including Scottish church patronage, to more technical interventions relating to commercial and legal issues, such as the Irish court system.Footnote 6 As this brief survey suggests, the almost continuous presentation of petitions to Parliament was a mechanism that enabled diverse groups of petitioners to raise their grievances at the very heart of a political system that was far from democratic.
The petition of the ‘Women of Manchester’ was just one of the million or so public petitions received by the Commons from the UK and the empire between 1780 and 1918. The bulk of these petitions – over 950,000 – were presented between 1833 and 1918, and they contained almost 165 million signatures. In terms of their content, public petitions to the Commons addressed a diverse range of issues and were typically short. The text of public petitions began by formally addressing the Commons and stating the collective identity of the petitioners. Petitions closed with a request (or prayer) and finished with the customary line, ‘And your petitioners will ever pray, &c’, before the signatory list. In terms of the process and procedure, petitions, even for national campaigns, usually came from a specific place, and signatures were gathered locally, as in the case of the petition from the ‘Women of Manchester’. They were then sent to an MP or peer to present. After 1833, procedural reforms curtailed the ability of MPs to initiate debate through the presentation of public petitions. The Select Committee on Public Petitions (SCPP), established in the same year, formally recorded and classified every single public petition received by the Commons and published this information in their Reports.Footnote 7
However, petitioners did not just address the Commons or Parliament: hundreds of thousands of petitions were sent to monarchs, government, magistrates, and every imaginable form of authority. Famous examples of mass petitioning, such as the 1848 Chartist petition for democratic rights, signed by at least 2 million people and perhaps by as many as 5.7 million, were merely the tip of an iceberg of petitioning activity.Footnote 8 The colossal scale of the UK nineteenth-century experience was historically exceptional by comparison with earlier periods and to other contemporary polities. Examining this unique phenomenon restores petitions and petitioning to their central place in UK political culture as the most common form of interaction between people and politics. These practices enabled a vibrant, performative political culture, creating a dynamic, and ever-more popular politics even before most men and women had the vote.
A Nation of Petitioners is the first book to examine the heyday of petitions and petitioning in the UK. Its significance lies in three areas. First and foremost, the book alters existing understandings of UK political culture by restoring the importance of petitions and petitioning to the history of the period. Second, placing the UK experience within a broader chronological and geographical context and within the growing interdisciplinary literature on petitioning reveals that the nineteenth century was the key period for the transformation of petitions into their modern form. Third, a historical study of petitioning is important to a series of major debates within social and political science regarding representation, collective action, and democratisation.
Petitions, Petitioning, and UK Political Culture
Despite their ubiquity, petitions seemed marginal to the central research questions that preoccupied older scholarship. Post-war political historians focused on tracing the pre-history of the modern Westminster model that was then being delineated by contemporary social scientists, such as the roots of the two-party system.Footnote 9 Other historians studied nineteenth-century elections in the manner of post-war psephologists, while sociological explanations for Victorian voting behaviour were also developed.Footnote 10 The absence of the original petitions meant that this generation of historians could not quantitatively analyse signatories to petitions in the same way as pollbooks, which perhaps explains their neglect of this subject.Footnote 11 Scholars researching Victorian pressure groups documented petitioning within particular campaigns, but provided no broader analysis.Footnote 12 For pioneering social historians, like E. P. Thompson, seeking to recover working-class experiences, petitions were unpromising sources because they were deferential appeals to authority that frequently reflected other identities as much as class.Footnote 13
More recently, revisionist historians, sometimes termed the ‘new political history’, have shifted attention away from social structures towards the changing ideas and languages that have shaped modern British politics.Footnote 14 The close study of political discourses was central to the ground-breaking re-examinations of the transition from popular radicalism to popular liberalism.Footnote 15 Even historians of popular politics who have sought to retain a place for social class in their analysis have placed increasing weight on the culture and language of radicalism and Chartism.Footnote 16 Studies of late Victorian and Edwardian elections now stress the contested rhetoric that politicians and activists used to fashion coalitions of popular support.Footnote 17
In terms of this rich literature, A Nation of Petitioners makes four interventions. First, by focusing on petitions and petitioning as practices, this book offers a new way of understanding political culture beyond languages and ideas. The discourse of popular constitutionalism has been a central thread of the new political history and, it has been claimed, the ‘master narrative’ of nineteenth-century politics.Footnote 18 Yet the practices that above all else embodied this discourse – petitions and petitioning – have been curious blind spots in this literature.
Focusing on petitionary practices decentres the study of political culture away from the traditional historical focus on parties, politicians, activists, landmark electoral reforms, and elections. This approach provides a new way to understand and rethink the relationships between elite/high and popular/low politics; state and subjects; Parliament and people; and formal political institutions and a broader popular politics, within a coherent political culture that encompassed contestation and interaction in both Britain and Ireland. Using the lens of petitions and petitioning provides a new perspective on the interaction between the four nations and the UK state through Parliament.Footnote 19 The right of subjects to be represented in Parliament, and parliamentary authority over them, particularly when they were not formally represented by an MP, was challenged by American revolutionaries, later Irish parliamentarians and, later still, anti-colonial campaigners.Footnote 20 As we shall see, petitions remained a potentially subversive instrument that could be used by petitioners to challenge the authority and legitimacy of Parliament and the state. The book’s primary focus is on Britain and Ireland, rather than the wider empire, and the analysis suggests that petitions could be used by petitioners from across the four nations to contest but also engage with the parliamentary state.
Between the Act of Union of 1801 and Irish independence in 1922, Ireland was represented at Westminster. Yet while Irish issues loom large in accounts of elite politics,Footnote 21 there continues to be a separation in terms of popular politics.Footnote 22 Because petitions and petitioning were common practices across the four nations, placing them at the centre of the analysis provides a new way of assessing the extent to which Ireland was integrated (or not) into UK political culture. At a time when ‘four nations’ history is resurgent, petitions provide a new lens through which to understand how the UK became ‘unified but not uniform’ in Keith Robbins’s apt phrase.Footnote 23 Moreover, examining petitions and petitioning helps to explain the expansion of popular politics in Wales and Scotland. In the former case, the development of popular politics has typically been tied to the later nineteenth-century growth of national sentiment and the growing dominance of the Welsh Liberal parliamentary party, or electoral culture.Footnote 24 In the Scottish context, the expansion of popular politics has been linked with early nineteenth-century radicalism and post-reform electoral culture and party politics.Footnote 25 The long-term growth of petitioning was another important driver of popular politics in both Scotland and Wales, both before and after 1832.
When viewed as practices petitions and petitioning provide a new way to rethink the relationship between politics and society. If, as James Thompson has written of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, ‘public opinion’ was the idea that connected the social and the political, then petitions and petitioning were the practices that linked the social and the political.Footnote 26 Scholars of twentieth-century Britain have recently turned to examining the politics of everyday experience.Footnote 27 Viewed from this perspective, thinking of petitions and petitioning as practices allows us to see how nineteenth-century political activity was embedded in everyday actions. Petitions and petitioning were widespread social and cultural practices at every level of society, and addressed everyday local concerns as well as national debates in Parliament, from complaints to local magistrates about brothel-keepers to mass subscription campaigns for political and social reform.Footnote 28 Petitionary practices existed within a cultural context in which name-signing and public lists of names were ubiquitous, whether in the ‘subscriber democracies’ of middle-class voluntary associations, electoral registers, published lists of directors of joint-stock companies, testimonials to public figures, or requisitions to hold public meetings, to give just a few examples.Footnote 29 Focusing on practices shifts attention away from languages and ideas to other ways of conceptualising political culture as a coherent field embracing regular interactions between people and politics, and connecting everyday lived experiences to formal politics.
Second, petitions and petitioning provide a pathway towards understanding the evolving ecosystem of popular participation and representation across the long nineteenth century beyond electoral culture. Moving away from quantitative analyses of voting behaviour, historians of popular politics have emphasised electoral culture as a key theatre for interactions between politicians and the people.Footnote 30 However, while important, elections and electoral culture provided a limited mechanism for regular interactions between politicians and the people. A majority of adult men only gained the right to vote after 1885, and before 1910 parliamentary elections could be up to seven years apart. In contrast to episodic election rituals, petitioning provided a much more regular form of interaction between Parliament and the people, not to mention with parts of the state that were not elected. Many more people signed petitions across the nineteenth century than voted in parliamentary elections.Footnote 31 The presentation of petitions at Westminster brought popular politics right to the physical heart of a political system that remained dominated by a hereditary landed class. Restoring the centrality of petitions and petitioning to the contemporary ecosystem of representation and participation accordingly offers a new way of understanding the shifting dynamics between politicians, institutions, and people.
Third, in emphasising the open, inclusive elements of political culture this book challenges accounts that have stressed the exclusionary nature of nineteenth-century politics. Shifting away from celebratory narratives of Britain’s peaceful evolution to democracy, scholars have re-read the Reform Acts and debates over the franchise to argue that they served to define the political nation in an exclusive way.Footnote 32 In defining the ‘official political subject’, the parliamentary franchise drew the boundaries of citizenship.Footnote 33 Extensions of the franchise were grounded on the exclusion of certain groups. The 1832 Reform Act, covering England and Wales, explicitly excluded women from voting for the first time, and this gendered franchise was not abolished until 1918.Footnote 34 The emphasis on masculinity within Victorian politics, as well as women’s status as ‘borderline citizens’ as Kathryn Gleadle has put it, stemmed from this statutory exclusion.Footnote 35 The debates around the Second Reform Act of 1867, it has been argued, were shaped by class, race, and gender. The respectable working man was to be enfranchised, but this was set against the denial of citizenship to ‘rough’ working men, women, and non-white colonial subjects.Footnote 36
While the granting of the franchise required positive sanction from the state, the right to petition was permissive and could thus be reshaped and expanded through the efforts of petitioners, much to the chagrin of some parliamentarians. As the Tory MP Charles Williams Wynn complained in 1818: ‘I verily believe that no one cause has been more conducive of evil, than the passive submission of the House to every species of indignity in the shape of petition, during the last eight years’.Footnote 37 All subjects possessed the formal right to petition, which was unlimited by gender, class, race, literacy, education, property, or the franchise. An overemphasis on citizenship, a term that only became more prevalent in political discourse in the later nineteenth century, has led historians to miss the significance of subjecthood as a category.Footnote 38 Subjecthood conferred rights, and one of the most important was the right to petition.
Of course not all petitioners were treated equally or had the same advantages, a point frequently evident in the case of colonial subjects appealing to the imperial Parliament.Footnote 39 But defining the political nation through the franchise ignores how people, including the unenfranchised, interacted with the formal political system and indeed challenged it. This was why petitioning became a vehicle for the mass political mobilisation of British women from early nineteenth-century abolitionism to the Edwardian women’s suffrage campaigns, and a potent weapon through which to challenge male political authority.Footnote 40
Fourth, examining petitions, petitioners, and petitioning restores a degree of popular agency to the relationship between state and people, calling into question the emphasis placed on ‘liberal governmentality’ as an instrument of rule by the state in governing a ‘society of strangers’.Footnote 41 Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality,Footnote 42 such accounts have argued that the state and its officials developed new mechanisms to regulate an emergent modern mass society and discipline the ‘liberal subject’. Whereas a dense historiography has examined liberalism as a parliamentary party, a popular movement, or a series of interlinked political traditions, scholars like Patrick Joyce define it as a technology of rule.Footnote 43 Viewed from this perspective, the state’s expansion of postal services to facilitate the flow of information is an example of the trend towards bureaucratic systems of control.Footnote 44 In the political realm, Joyce has argued that the ‘“rise” of so-called democratic government represented in many respects a closing down … of real democracy’ due to the growth of a ‘disciplined party system, the creation of a modern bureaucracy’ and other controlling mechanisms.Footnote 45
While the governmentality literature has emphasised the use of power by the state in everyday contexts to mould subjects, it has left little room for popular agency or resistance. Petitioning was increasingly bureaucratised in some respects: public petitions to the Commons were systematically recorded, counted, and classified after 1833, while petitioning was a key part of the shift towards greater organisation within Victorian political movements.Footnote 46 But the inherently unstable and double-edged nature of petitions as formal instruments of rule and informal mechanisms for popular activity meant that petitioning could never be fully controlled by the state. Indeed, in 1818, the Attorney General complained that radicals came forth with ‘a petition in one hand and a sword in the other!’Footnote 47 Moreover, petitions were a ‘weapon of the weak’ and of the dispossessed to seek redress from authority, which explains the stream of individual petitioners who appealed to Parliament, many of them women.Footnote 48 A rich body of scholarship has examined petitions and letters from paupers and others within disciplinary institutions to recover how they challenged authority.Footnote 49 However, petitions and petitioning were not just weapons of the weak: they became mighty instruments of popular politics and collective political agency from ordinary people that offer a powerful challenge to narratives of the rise of liberal governmentality.
A Nation of Petitioners offers a new interpretation of UK political culture as a coherent field that reveals the profound significance and effects of the most popular form of interaction between subjects and state, and people and politics. While emphasising the inclusivity of political culture and the importance of the participatory actions of ordinary people, we must acknowledge the inequalities of power, wealth, and status that shaped these practices and indeed the reception of petitions, as many examples of women or colonial petitioners attest.Footnote 50 Yet recovering the voices of millions of petitioners, insistent, rarely deferent, and often challenging the authorities to whom they appealed, remind us, as Selina Todd has argued in a powerful restatement of the agenda of the ‘history from below’, that ‘people matter’.Footnote 51
Petitions and Petitioning in Comparative Perspective
Petitions are universal phenomena that have taken different forms in different temporal, spatial, and political contexts, from classical antiquity,Footnote 52 medieval England,Footnote 53 early modern Europe,Footnote 54 the Ottoman empire,Footnote 55 colonial India,Footnote 56 revolutionary Russia,Footnote 57 or indeed the e-petition systems that have developed in the early twenty-first century.Footnote 58 As we shall see, placing the UK experience within this broader chronological and geographical perspective sharpens what was generic or distinctive about petitions and petitioning in Britain and Ireland. In doing so, this book advances the growing interdisciplinary literature on petitions and petitioning over the longue durée.
Drawing on this wider scholarship enables us to define what a petition is more sharply. A simple definition would be that petitions are written requests to authority.Footnote 59 A more elaborate definition would be that petitions are ‘deferent, formalised, ritualised written requests to an established authority signed by one or more people’.Footnote 60 Yet each of these characteristics can be questioned. In medieval and early modern contexts, petitions were as much oral supplications as written texts.Footnote 61 While petitions have often reflected and constituted hierarchical relationships between petitioners and addressees, there are examples of petitions between equals.Footnote 62 As we shall see, nineteenth-century petitioners were seldom deferent. Indeed, the Irish judge, Baron Smith lamented in 1834 the ‘turbulent abuse of the right to petition, making it a channel for the conveyance, not of submissive prayer, but of refractory invective and insolent dictation’.Footnote 63
While a formal definition of petitions is essential it cannot capture all the characteristics of this protean form, on which scholars remain divided. Many social historians such as Lex Heerma van Voss have portrayed petitions as an instrument of protest for the dispossessed, but David Zaret, in a wide-ranging survey of pre-modern Europe and Asia, has argued that such a view is anachronistic because petitions were above all ‘an instrument of state’.Footnote 64 This seeming contradiction can be resolved once we recognise that petitions have an inherent duality: they are at once formal and fixed, regulated by the processes and procedures prescribed by authority to receive them, but are also informal and unfixed, linked to practices that can mutate into other more defiant or subversive forms of activity.Footnote 65 Once grasped, this duality explains the openness of various rulers to petitions, but also the recurrent anxieties they had about petitioners assembling close to the centre of state power.Footnote 66 For this reason, the authors of many constitutions of European states granted in the wake of revolutions thought it prudent, while codifying the right to petition, to restrict petitioners’ physical access to legislatures.Footnote 67 This duality explains why the expansion of petitioning was co-extensive with the imposition of imperial rule in India as a mechanism to incorporate subjects, but also why it remained ‘a potent vehicle for unpredictably creative forms of protest, dissent, and political agency’.Footnote 68 This duality explains why petitions in early modern Europe were as much a ‘powder keg’ likely to blow up in rulers’ faces as a safety valve.Footnote 69 The dual nature of petitions and petitioning means that they were and are inherently ambiguous, unstable, and mutable forms of interaction between people and authority.
We might define petitions in two further ways that distinguish them from, for example, letters to the powerful or ‘writing upwards’.Footnote 70 Petitions were and are almost always multi-directional in appealing to a range of audiences. The growth of printed petitions from the mid-seventeenth century onwards meant that petitions became a way of constituting and appealing to a broader public.Footnote 71 At the same time, individuals with private grievances circulated printed petitions discretely at Westminster.Footnote 72 As this reminds us, between their genesis and their final reception, petitions passed through various intermediaries, sponsors, and officials. A final important audience was and is potential signatories; indeed, the leading scholar of American petitioning has argued that ‘the most important readers of a petition are those asked to sign it’.Footnote 73 We can, then, define petitions as: ritualised formal/informal requests to an established authority, and other audiences, written and signed by one or more persons. Petitioning may be more straightforwardly defined as the practices associated with the drafting, signing, presentation, and reception of petitions.
This book makes three further contributions to the expanding interdisciplinary scholarship on petitioning. First, it emphasises the continuity within the uniquely long and continuous history of parliamentary petitioning in Britain. Medievalists have traced the development of a distinct petitioning culture in Britain to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. During this time, petitions seeking the exercise of the king’s power (grace), or expressing grievances against officials, became regularised, essentially appealing to the English Parliament in a judicial capacity.Footnote 74 As the English Parliament was reconceived as a public institution in the fourteenth century, petitions increasingly made requests and expressed grievances.Footnote 75 ‘Common’ petitions, addressing wider issues of concern to the realm and typically coming from communities rather than individuals, subsequently became the basis of ‘statutory legislation’.Footnote 76 Petitioners and parliamentary officials were fond of regarding the right to petition as the ‘sacred Inheritance of Magna Charta’, as the inhabitants of Sheffield protested in their petition against the 1795 seditious meetings bill.Footnote 77 Scottish petitioners could also invoke the seventeenth-century example of the National Covenant as a distinct subscriptional tradition.Footnote 78 The ancient lineage of petitioning was an important element in preserving the right to petition in periods of repressive legislation and framing it as part of a tradition of popular constitutionalism.Footnote 79
Second, while acknowledging the importance of such historical continuities, this study reveals the transformation of petitioning in terms of its scale and as a form of mass mobilisation and participation. There was a growth of mass petitioning across North America and Europe in the long nineteenth century, yet even within such a context, the scale of UK petitioning to Parliament was historically exceptional by comparison with other contemporary polities, and with earlier periods.Footnote 80 There was a similar explosion of popular political petitioning during the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution, and in the period leading up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688.Footnote 81 Recent work has revealed the pervasiveness of petitioning at all levels in early modern England and Scotland.Footnote 82 However, petitions to early modern Parliaments remained episodic and were not sustained on public issues outside exceptional moments of political crisis. The Victorian heyday of petitioning was distinguished by an intensification and institutionalisation of mass petitioning to the Commons that was sustained over a long period. The UK exemplified the massive growth of petitions and petitioning that occurred across many polities during the course of the nineteenth century.
Third, this transformation was linked to an equally significant shift in the character of petitions and petitioning. The nineteenth century was the key period for the mutation of petitions from being generic requests to power to their more specific modern character as expressive, participatory practices linked to representative institutions.Footnote 83 The comparison with the eighteenth century is telling in this respect. As a consequence of the tumultuous role of petitioning during the 1640s, ‘political’ petitioning during the long eighteenth century was discouraged by the authorities; instead, petitions to Parliament focused on promoting sectional and economic interests, particularly through securing private or local acts to facilitate improvement or economic development.Footnote 84 In this context, petitions were a valuable source of information for legislators about local interests, an important medium for bargaining between interest groups and the state, and for debates between interested publics.Footnote 85 Within the wider trend across Europe and North America towards collective, mass petitioning on public issues, the UK was a pioneer in reinventing petitioning as a modern mechanism for mass popular politics connected to legislative action.Footnote 86
Employing a comparative perspective not only reveals what was exceptional and what was not about the UK experience, but redefines how we think about petitions and the evolution of petitioning over the longue durée.
Rethinking Representation, Collective Action, and Democratisation
Examining the heyday of petitions and petitioning within the UK addresses important debates within social and political science about representation, collective action, and democratisation from a historical perspective.
First, we need to rethink representation as a historically rooted practice rather than a normative, static concept. There has recently been a revived interest among political theorists in the concept of representation.Footnote 87 Scholars have restored the importance of representation as a concept in its own right, rather than as a secondary element of democracy.Footnote 88 Much of the so-called representative turn has focused on defining normative theories.Footnote 89 In a stimulating critique, Michael Saward has argued that the prevailing approaches are ‘too static, inflexible, dryly taxonomic, too exclusively built around electoral legitimacy and somewhat one-dimensional in that the character of the represented is taken to be fixed and unproblematic’.Footnote 90 In advancing the concept of the ‘representative claim’, Saward argues that representation happens whenever someone makes a claim on behalf of a subject that stands for an object to an audience.Footnote 91 This concept enables us to rethink representation as a ‘dynamic process of claim-making and the reception of claims’ that exists outside as well as within electoral and institutional settings.Footnote 92 As Knights has written of early modern petitioning: ‘representation did not end at the moment of parliamentary electoral authorization’ because there was, crucially, an ‘ongoing, creative, and dynamic interaction between the represented and their elected representatives’ carried on through subscriptional forms.Footnote 93
A historical study of petitioning reveals representation as a dynamic practice that connects formal and informal politics, and emphasises the importance of informal and non-electoral forms of representation. Moreover, examining petitioning shows how representative claims and contests over them were historically embedded within political cultures.Footnote 94 As a practice, petitioning was and is unusual in containing two sets of representative claims: first, when petitioners claimed that a signatory list represented a wider collective, and second, when MPs or officials claimed to represent petitioners through the act of presentation.Footnote 95 Because the stakes were so high, the representativeness of petitions were endlessly contested by rival petitioners and authorities. This was why, when the merchants, manufacturers, and tradesmen of Wakefield met to petition for peace in 1801, opponents issued a signed protest complaining that the meeting excluded the ‘Clergy, Land Owners, and General and Commercial Trading Interests of the Town’.Footnote 96 Parliamentarians too contested the representative claims of petitions with which they disagreed. In dismissing suffrage petitions in 1872, one MP argued that ‘a large proportion of those signatures were not the signatures of women, and the Petitions themselves, instead of being the spontaneous outcome of the feelings of the signatories, were sent down to the localities ready drawn.’Footnote 97 The intensification and institutionalisation of petitioning, then, was part of a historical process in which representative claims and contests over them were embedded within a modern political culture.
Second, a study of petitioning complicates and qualifies existing theories of collective action. The historical sociologist Charles Tilly famously argued that the modern social movement originated in early nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote 98 Between the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, Tilly argued, a new ‘modern’ repertoire of collective action emerged in Britain: popular claim-making became organised on a larger scale rather than being localised, became more transferrable, and was increasingly directed at the central state, above all Parliament.Footnote 99 For Tilly, petitioning was one political activity within this new modern repertoire of collective action, which also included demonstrations, public meetings, and single-issue associations.Footnote 100 While historians of the period have rarely engaged with Tilly’s study, his thesis has been influential among social scientists. As a consequence, within this dense, wider literature, petitioning is typically presented as merely one type of collective action.Footnote 101
Yet the historical record suggests a different interpretation: far from being one type of activity among others, petitioning enabled and made possible other forms of collective action, and underpinned much of Tilly’s modern repertoire. Public meetings were typically called to petition Parliament or other authorities.Footnote 102 Many high-profile demonstrations, such as the march of 260,000 through Westminster in support of the ‘Tolpuddle martyrs’ who were transported to Australia in 1834 for forming a trade union, were linked to the presentation of petitions.Footnote 103 Single issue-associations, as we shall see, spent much of their time, energy, and money in directing mass petitioning campaigns. The Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was expressing a commonplace among nineteenth-century social movements when it argued in 1876 that ‘it is of great importance to continue the work of petitioning with unabated force’.Footnote 104 Campaigners remained indefatigable petitioners, even when they had few illusions about Parliament’s receptiveness, because they recognised that petitions and petitioning constituted the connective tissue for mass popular politics. This in turn points back to the unique enabling qualities of the petition. The signatory list, whether in historic petitions or in contemporary e-petitions, acts as a ‘technology of recruitment’, as Carpenter has shown.Footnote 105 Simply by connecting a list of names (and sometimes addresses) to a cause, the petition is foundational to further forms of collective action.
Third, an examination of petitioning has important implications in terms of reinterpreting the trajectory of democratisation. The nineteenth century was the ‘century of democratization’ if not democracy.Footnote 106 Democratisation in this period has often been linked to the development of liberal constitutionalism, revolutions and regime change, electoral expansion, and the emergence of social democratic parties representing the working class.Footnote 107 More recently, a ‘historical turn’ has prompted social scientists to focus on the role of political actors at critical junctures, such as in Daniel Ziblatt’s work on conservative parties and European democratisation, or Roger Congleton’s research on institutions and constitutional bargaining in European countries.Footnote 108 In this vein, political scientists have reappraised the 1832 Reform Act as a key episode in British democratisation, whatever historians might say about the limited enfranchisement it enacted.Footnote 109
Yet if we think more broadly beyond a focus on institutions, electoral reforms, and political elites, then it is clear that petitions and petitioning were essential elements of the UK story of democratisation. Petitions were a key tactic for all the campaigns for democratic reforms from Regency radicals through to Edwardian suffragettes.Footnote 110 Moreover, petitioning enabled the inclusion of unenfranchised groups – such as Irish Catholics, women, and working-class men – and stimulated mass political participation linked to representative institutions on an unprecedented and sustained scale. Finally, petitioning enabled new forms of political activity, opened up new spaces for politics, and contributed to the growth of civil society.
The example of the USA suggests that the UK case was not unique, and points to a wider relationship between petitioning and democratisation. The growth of mass public petitioning in nineteenth-century America was crucial, in the case of women, to their mobilisation as collective political actors, and the development of democratic behaviours and skills, including network-building, advocacy, and organisation.Footnote 111 For these reasons, Carpenter has spoken of a process of ‘democracy by petition’.Footnote 112 Building on these insights, this book contributes to shifting existing understandings of the trajectories of democratisation by looking beyond franchise extensions, transitional moments, and constitutional developments to other ways in which political culture was democratised.
Petitions and Petitioning: A Chronology
This book is not organised chronologically, but a chronological overview is useful because it clears the ground for the following analysis. Briefly, from the late eighteenth century, but more forcefully, the first two decades of the nineteenth century, there was an unprecedented and sustained growth of collective petitions on public topics (rather than sectional, private, or individual questions) to the House of Commons. These public petitions contained larger and more inclusive signatory lists, and addressed a broader range of issues than hitherto (Chapters 1 and 2). Religious issues and religious communities were particularly important in sustaining the long boom of petitioning (Chapters 2 and 6). Parallel to the growth of petitions and signatures, there was a broadening of the petitioning public: petitioners increasingly adopted broad, inclusive, demotic identities, rather than hierarchical ones rooted in interests (Chapter 5). At the same time, petitioners expanded the right to petition (Chapter 4). The late eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century was a period of innovation in the practice of petitioning, as a series of mighty agitations formalised a repertoire of mass petitioning that underpinned collective action more broadly (Chapters 7 and 8). From being conceived as primarily facilitating the representation of interests, petitioning was regarded as standing for an aggregated, quantifiable public opinion. Linked to this, at times, particularly in the 1830s and 1840s, contemporaries perceived mass petitioning as representing ‘the people’ beyond and outside the enfranchised (Chapter 9).
The quantification of popular opinion and power of mass petitioning were neatly combined in a pro-reform print published in 1831–1832 (Figure 0.1). It depicts the premier, Earl Grey, presenting a reform petition to William IV from ‘Forty million’ subjects, that is the people, many of whom can be seen in the massed ranks of petitioners going back as far as the eye can see behind Grey and his ministers. The petition represents the irresistible force of the people, whose presence outside calls on the king to pass reform; with implications for authority if this is not done.
Figure 0.1 Orlando Hodgson, The Crisis (c. 1830–1832), coloured etching, Bolton Library and Museum Services, BOLMG.2008.61.289.
This print visualises two interlinked ideas implicit in much contemporary commentary about petitioning: that petitions could potentially be an alternative, even rival, form of popular representation to the formal electoral system, and, with overtones of the idea of popular sovereignty, petitioners might challenge the authority and legitimacy of Parliament, by representing a larger and broader public than that which elected the Commons. As Edmund Morgan has written in his study of popular sovereignty: ‘Petitioners were in a sense rivals of representatives, claiming to speak the voice of the people but unrestricted by the qualifications placed on voting and uninhibited by the responsibilities of being part of the government.’Footnote 113
The 1840s were the highpoint of the idea that petitioning might potentially be a rival form of popular representation. By the time of the next peak in petitions in the 1870s, the repertoire of mass petitioning had become standardised and institutionalised within Victorian pressure groups (Chapter 8). This meant that the increasingly sophisticated campaigns for the local prohibition of alcohol, women’s suffrage, or repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, could mobilise ever-greater numbers of petitions and signatures, attesting to the continued importance of numerical strength in petitioners’ representative claims. Yet while there remained compelling tactical imperatives for single-issue associations to mass petition Parliament, there was not quite the same belief in the power of petitioning to sweep all before it. While still producing mighty waves of signatures, mass petitioning became a ‘contained’ instead of a ‘transgressive’ form of contention.Footnote 114 The standardisation and eventual waning of parliamentary petitioning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was followed by a period of experimentation with subscriptional culture (Chapter 10).
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This book is divided into three parts – petitions, petitioners, and petitioning – to address three sets of questions. Part I reveals how many petitions were sent, to which authorities, and what were the subjects of these petitions. Part II demonstrates how petitioners reshaped the right to petition, and examines their collective identities. Part III examines the culture of petitioning and answers the question of how and why people petitioned? In turn, Part III considers the grassroots culture of petitioning, mass petitioning within national campaigns, and petitioning as a form of representation before studying the transformation of petitioning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Petitioning shifted away from the classic model of mass petitioning the Commons during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and mutated into new forms, while retaining an important place in popular politics and political culture.
