On the Reform Act of 1832
Read this article about the Reform Act of 1832. Although the act itself did not achieve sweeping reform, it set the stage for further alteration of the political landscape.
Endnotes
[1]
It did so in tandem with similar acts for Scotland and Ireland; for the
sake of simplicity, this essay focuses on the passage of the English
legislation.
[2] The 1771 clash between a London mob and
Parliament involved the imprisonment by the House of printers for their
publishing of parliamentary debates concerning the contested election of
John Wilkes. The 1810 riots protested the House's imprisonment of Sir
Francis Burdett, M.P. and founder of the Society of the Friends of the
People as well as a radical advocate of universal suffrage and the
secret ballot, for publishing details of House debates concerning the
reporting of debates (Gratton 31-34; 73).
[3] In 1812, Cobbett
sold his Parliamentary Debates, a supplement to the weekly Political
Register, to the printer Thomas Curson Hansard, who renamed it Hansard's
Parliamentary Debates. Although he was related by family ties to the
publishers of the official Parliamentary Papers, T. C. Hansard's monthly
digest did not become an official parliamentary publication until the
1870s.
[4] Hereditary membership in the House of Lords was not abolished until 1999.
[5]
"Everyone has heard of what Camelford cost the Marquess of Cleveland
till the arrangement with the Marquess of Hertford. The Members who were
returned for the marquess paid the voters in ₤1 notes enclosed in a
deal box marked 'China'" (Morning Chronicle 26 July 1830, qtd. in Brock
26).
[6] "Part of an English nobleman's estates and 'interest'
might lie in Ireland; or an Englishman might hire an Irish borough seat.
Peel was given the seat at Cashel (Tipperary) by his father as a
twenty-first birthday present" (Brock 33).
[7] Whig Prime
Minister William Pitt had called borough representation (as opposed to
counties) "the rotten part of our Constitution" in the 1760s; he and his
son William Pitt the Younger failed in their efforts to diminish the
power of boroughs by giving more members to counties.
[8] By
"universal suffrage," Cobbett meant male suffrage (Brock 347n101), but
some advocates of reform in previous decades had made the case for
women's voting rights as well; see Bentham and Thompson. Sir Frances
Burdett's resolution for universal male suffrage and a secret ballot
attracted very little support in the 1780s. The Act of 1832 specified
voting rights for "male persons" only; women gained limited voting
rights in 1918 and equal franchise in 1928.
[9] As Elaine Hadley
notes, this legislation "did not privilege the individual or even
populations but aimed to address emergent economic interests, such as
the 'cotton interest' in Lancashire" (2); see her BRANCH essay for an
analysis of the emergence of "opinion politics" in subsequent decades.
[10] See Haywood 210-222 for descriptions and images of these riots.
[11] Phillips and Wetherell offer a concise summary of these events (412-13). For a full account, see Brock and Cannon.
[12]
According to Phillips and Wetherell, the "best-informed" estimates
suggest more than 400,000 Englishmen held "a franchise of some sort"
before the Reform of 1832, compared to 650,000 afterward (413-14).
[13] See Chris Vanden Bossche's BRANCH essay for a complete analysis of Chartism.
[14] See Hilton, Mandler, Parry, and Vernon on the aftermath of this Act.