On the Reform Act of 1832

Virtual Representation

For a full appreciation of the advantages of a private seat in the House of Commons let us always go to those great Whig families who were mainly instrumental in carrying the Reform Bill. The house of Omnium had been very great on that occasion. It had given up much, and had retained for family use simply the single seat at Silverbridge. But that that seat should be seriously disputed hardly suggested itself as possible to the mind of any Palliser. The Pallisers and the other great Whig families have been right in this. They have kept in their hands, as rewards for their own services to the country, no more than the country is manifestly willing to give them. — Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (ch. 69)

Yet the people were still, in practice, confined to the eaves–literally as well as figuratively. As the Parliamentary Review noted with regard to the House of Commons, "It has no respectable provision for the admission of strangers. It excludes ladies altogether from the pleasure of being witnesses of its proceedings, unless by secreting themselves in a miserably confined spot above the ceiling, called the ventilator" ("Opening" 5).

This miserable accommodation might be a useful figure for the limits of the Reform Act of 1832, as it neither enfranchised the majority of British citizens nor rooted out the most common forms of electoral or governmental corruption. The extension of the franchise was modest, as the percentage of the adult male population entitled to vote in England and Wales increased from 13 to 18 percent (Cunningham 162).[12]

Widespread disappointment with this limited increase ensured that parliamentary reform would remain a live issue in subsequent decades, with the rise of Chartism (a mass movement promoting universal male suffrage and other electoral reforms in the "People's Charter") as well as Liberalism.[13] (See Chris R. Vanden Bossche, "On Chartism").

As Buckingham complained in the 1840s, "the avowed principle of this Bill was to substitute actual for virtual representation. . . . Yet what is the fact? Why, that out of a collective population of twenty-eight millions of persons in the United Kingdom, the total number of the electoral body . . . is less than a million – or less than one in thirty of the entire population!" (National Evils 436).

The gap between actual and virtual representation remained visible and compelling, as families like the house of Omnium in Trollope's novel held on tight to "a single seat" in the House of Commons, until the Representation of the People Act of 1867 (or the "Second Reform Act") and subsequent reforms.

Figure 2: The House of Commons, 1833 by Sir George Hayter (used with permission; this portrait is on display and belongs to the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London; copyright ©, National Portrait Gallery)

While historians agree that the Reform Act of 1832 did not significantly extend the franchise, they continue to debate what the act did accomplish. Many now contend that the Reform Act successfully shored up the power of the hereditary landowners, as, for example, the strategic concession of additional seats in populous districts consolidated the power of surrounding rural areas and the advocacy of reform reinvigorated the leadership of major Whig landowners. Conceived as a means to salvage the status quo of aristocratic power, the Reform Act may have succeeded better at this task than many had imagined.[14]

Although it was intended by legislators to remedy and reinforce the existing political system, however, the Reform Act did result in some major changes. First of all, as George Macaulay Trevelyan later declared, "the sovereignty of the people had been established in fact, if not in law" (242). The Reform Act was a "turning point in the history of the aristocracy," as Lawrence James explains, since the events of 1832 had "proved beyond question that the Lords veto could not override the will of the Commons" (274). It also gutted the powerful coalition of corn and West Indian sugar growers, which had depended upon the malapportioned House (Holt 29).

As Henry Taylor later recalled, popular support for the abolition of slavery, expressed in petitions to Parliament, had "waxed louder every year," inspiring a rebellion in Jamaica. "This terrible event . . . was indirectly a death-blow to slavery. The reform of Parliament was almost simultaneous with it, and might have been sufficient of itself" (1:123). (See Sarah Winter, "On the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the Governor Eyre-George William Gordon Controversy, 1865-70").

Furthermore, as John Phillips and Charles Wetherell have shown, the frenzy over Reform "unleashed a wave of political modernization" which "destroyed the political system that had prevailed during the long reign of George III and replaced it with an essentially modern electoral system based on rigid partisanship and clearly articulated political principles" (412).

Even as it shored up aristocratic power, paradoxically, the Reform Act of 1832 altered the political landscape in fundamental ways by establishing new channels between members of Parliament and their fellow-subjects. In particular, the Reform Act of 1832 launched the so-called Age of Reform, in which parliament undertook a broad review of institutions affecting the lives of "the people"–particularly those who could not vote. As Peter Mandler has argued, this reform movement affected the disenfranchised more than it did the enfranchised. With the proliferation of political journalism and petitions, the "aristocratic coquetting with outdoor forces" under Whig leadership produced a "chain of agitations" in which Parliament became "the national cynosure, the center of a whirlpool of demands and pressures from without" (Mandler 2).

The ensuing decades of reform witnessed "an appeal to Parliament to reconnect itself to the people, not only by enfranchising them but also by protecting them, by legislating for them" (Mandler 2). With this in mind, the reformed parliament quickly undertook to examine factory working hours and pauper institutions, along with colonial slavery. Even Sir Robert Peel declared his "willingness to adopt and enforce" the "spirit of the Reform Bill" as a "rule of government" through the "careful review of institutions" and the "correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances," while decrying the "perpetual vortex of agitation" in which "public men can only support themselves in public estimation by adopting every popular impression of the day" (qtd. in Brantlinger 4-5).

In this sense, the Tory Charles Greville was right to note in 1833 that "the public appetite for discussion and legislation has been whetted and is insatiable," even as he exaggerated the consequences, fearing that "Reform in Parliament . . . has opened a door to anything" (qtd. in Mandler 151). The partial opening afforded by this event would reverberate in the British national imagination for many decades to come.