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The Introduction situates the nineteenth-century heyday of petitions and petitioning within a series of literatures. First, it places the book in the context of existing understandings of British political culture and debates about popular politics that have hitherto focused primarily on political languages and electoral culture, whereas the book redirects attention to practice and forms of political activity outside of voting. A study of petitions and petitioning furthermore challenges revisionist accounts that have emphasised the ‘closing down’ of popular politics or the growing regulation of subjects by the Victorian state. Second, it traces the tracing the genealogy of petitions within British history over the longue durée. While the was part of a common trend towards mass, collective, public petitioning across Europe and North America, the UK experience was exceptional. Third, the Introduction underlines the book’s intervention into a number of important debates within social and political science concerning collective action and social movements, theories and practices of representation, and trajectories of democratisation. Finally, the Introduction provides a chronological overview of petitions and petitioning during the long nineteenth century and an outline of the book’s structure.
The conclusion summarises the key findings of the book. Not only were petitions and petitioning a central, and hitherto, missing component of our understanding of UK political culture, but these practices contributed to the transformation of political culture. The remainder of the conclusion considers how a study of petitionary culture reconnects and pushes forward the currently fragmented field of nineteenth-century political history, before considering three major implications of the book for the wider historiography. First, it demonstrates that UK political culture was even more inclusive than previously thought, thereby qualifying the emphasis on the exclusivity of the political nation. Second, it charts how the authority and legitimacy of the Commons in particular, and Parliament more generally, was renewed by petitions, although it could also, on occasion, be challenged by petitioners. Third, it shows how the UK state was transformed by the continuous interaction with petitioners, and restores the place of the people within accounts of the relationship between state and subjects. Ultimately, petitions and petitioning were part of a broader social phenomenon that decisively reshaped the modern political culture of the UK.
Nineteenth-century MPs spent a significant proportion of their time presenting petitions and corresponding with petitioners. Petitioning and the interactions between petitioners and parliamentarians was an important component of how representation worked in practice. This chapter first examines the shift in how parliamentarians conceived petitions from an eighteenth-century system of ‘virtual representation’ to embodying aggregated popular opinion. The chapter then examines petitioning and the practice of representation. While not everyone had the right to vote, parliamentarians believed that all subjects had the right to be represented through the presentation of their petitions. The correspondence between MPs and petitioners provided a forum to negotiate the meaning of representation. Parliamentarians sought to uphold their independence in the face of petitioners demands to present and support their requests. Finally, the presentation of petitioning was a mechanism for geographic but also issue-based representation. Overall, the interaction between parliamentarians and petitioners provides new insights into the shifting relationship between politicians and the people. More broadly, it focuses attention away from theories of representation and electoral or formal representation to a wider concept of the culture of representation within a given polity.
The right to petition was the ‘cornerstone’ of all other liberties, petitioners frequently argued. In the UK the right to petition was based on precedent, conventions and popular constitutionalism and was not, as in polities established in revolutionary contexts, a codified constitutional right derived from the idea of popular sovereignty. The right to petition was a contested right formed through a continuous, dynamic struggle between petitioners and Parliament. The right to petition was open to all subjects, and not limited by class, gender, race, literary, property or the franchise. There was little restriction of the content, as opposed to the form, of petitions to Parliament, and the decreasing limitations on petitioning in relation to association and assembly, ensured it became the key mode in connecting, legitimating and underpinning other political activities. Finally, petitioners successfully pressed for a popular, open right to petition, but politicians were able to resist attempts to expand the right of petition into a right of presence or audience. The contest over the right to petition was one of the ways in which politicians sought to retain their discretion and uphold parliamentary sovereignty while acknowledging popular rights.
Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the context for petitioning changed. The number of public petitions addressed to the House of Commons declined, and commentators and politicians increasingly regarded petitioning as redundant in an era of mass electoral politics ushered in by the Third Reform Act (1884–85). Yet, as this chapter shows, petitioning did not decline but was rather reinvented in this period. Campaigners increasingly addressed singular mass petitions to a range of different authorities, including the monarch and Downing Street, in ways that emphasised the performative presentation of petitions to maximise coverage in the mass media. High-profile examples, such as petitions organised by the militant suffragettes or the Ulster Covenant and Declaration (1912) associated with Unionist opposition to Irish Home Rule, were part of a broader reimagining of petitioning with the UK’s nascent democracy. Finally, contemporaries also considered petitions to be a mechanism for calling referendums, as shown in a number of bills of the time, and also in the numerous mass petitions from Unionists and others to the king calling for Home Rule to be referred to the people via referendum or general election. As this chapter shows, while the practice of petitioning changed during an era of rapid democratisation it retained an important place within UK popular politics and political culture.
An examination of the practice of petitioning at the grassroots level shows how it stimulated a vibrant popular politics. Revisionist scholarship emphasising the supposed taming or disciplining of political culture has ignored the lively local culture of petitioning. The chapter first outlines the process and practice of petitioning: the drafting, signing, and presentation and reception of petitions. Of all these different stages in the process of petitioning, it was the practice of signing petitions that was most important to nineteenth-century popular politics. Not only did it underpin other forms of political activity, such as public meetings, but opened up new informal spaces for political activity and engendered new forms of political behaviour. The practice of petitioning stimulated a never-ending cycle of claim and counter-claim about the forging of signatures, the undue influence of landlords or employers, and outright misrepresentation. This endless contestation was intrinsic to the practice and process of petitioning and one of the most important ways in which it energised popular politics at the local level.
This chapter examines the self-descriptions used by petitioners when addressing Parliament. Through these labels, petitioners forged and asserted their collective identities and made claims on the state and the wider political community. Petitions did not merely reflect existing identities, but actively constituted them. The chapter first examines the broadening of the petitioning public. There was a shift from the typical mode of self-styling used by eighteenth century petitioners, which reflected perceived economic interests and the hierarchical structuring of local communities, to demotic, ostensibly egalitarian labels such as ‘inhabitants’ in the nineteenth century. The second half of the chapter examines how Catholics, Protestant Dissenters, and women, came forward as petitioners to claim rights and assert their collective identities. Supporters, opponents, and parliamentary advocates interpreted petitions in favour of Catholic emancipation as representing Irish Catholics as a collective force. Dissenters asserted their collective identity as petitioners claiming civil rights, but also in presenting themselves as moral authorities. Finally, women became more forthright in claiming rights as ‘women’ rather than limiting their interventions to moral and religious issues permitted by the norms of Victorian gender ideology.
Public petitions to the Commons encompassed a diverse range of political, religious, social, and economic topics. This chapter examines the 33,000 or so different issues that were raised by petitioners to the House of Commons. The initial expansion of petitioning in the late eighteenth century was associated with subjects relating to economic regulation and taxation. From the early nineteenth century, the volume of petitions (and signatures) on economic topics was outstripped by the surge of petitioning on religious and social issues. The analysis reveals that petitions were a crucial means for addressing religious issues across the four nations, as well as for debating the UK’s constitutional arrangements. The chapter then considers the different types of issue, from those linked to mass campaigns, to the ‘long’ tail of petitions concerning medium and small-scale topics. Petitions remained an important mechanism for raising individual grievances, particularly from women, in Parliament. Finally, one of the limitations of the petitions data is the relative absence of petitions concerning the empire or foreign policy, which is attributable to the clerks’ system of categorisation and the appeal of petitioning other authorities.
This chapter quantifies the emergence and institutionalisation of public petitioning on an unprecedented scale in terms of the numbers of issues, petitions, and signatures. The decisive breakthrough in terms of the volume of public petitions to the House of Commons occurred in the late 1820s and was driven by a series of mighty mobilisations including anti-slavery and parliamentary reform. The chronology of petitioning in the UK followed a similar pattern as elsewhere, but the volume of public petitions to the Commons was exceptional when placed in historical and comparative context. The data demonstrates that the volume of petitions and signatures was underpinned by organised mass campaigns, but also a ‘long tail’ of petitions on small and medium-scale issues. Comparing signatures with electoral data reveals that, for most nineteenth century, more people petitioned than voted in parliamentary elections. For all the well-documented vitality of episodic election rituals, this chapter demonstrates that petitions to Parliament were the most popular, regular means of interaction between subjects and politicians for much of this period.
Why did people petition and why did they continue to do so when petitions were rarely successful in securing immediate change? The point of petitioning was extensively discussed within nineteenth-century political and social movements. Critics questioned the wisdom of petitioning and argued in favour of electioneering or more direct forms of protest. Tellingly, however, many of these alternatives were either petitions by another name or were facilitated by subscriptional activity. Even if they were ignored or rejected by authorities, petitions were indispensable to political campaigns and social movements, including Chartism, anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, anti-Catholics, and the Anti-Corn Law League, for a variety of reasons. This explains why so many Victorian activists were indefatigable petitioners. Petitioning was the key method for mobilising popular support and pressuring Parliament; an important way of recruiting activists and developing formal political organisation, at both national and local level; raising public awareness and political consciousness; and finally, for forging valuable networks with elite politicians. Petitioning thus underpinned and made possible a broader repertoire of modern campaigning.