HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

The Second Reform Act (1867) raised in its own time and continues to raise in ours two deceptively simple questions, one of cause and the other of effect. How did a bill for which there was so little enthusiasm become law? To what extent did its passage grant Britain a genuinely representative government?

For many contemporary observers, the act was, for better or worse, an obviously liberalizing measure because it typically enfranchised a majority of working-class men living in the boroughs and cities of England and Wales. Thomas Carlyle, writing in his diatribe Shooting Niagara: And After? (1867), had no doubts that the Great Unwashed, as working men were often called, would soon be catastrophically ascendant: the country was about to take the "Niagara leap of democracy," after which the nation would be ruled by a "Swarmery" of men "buzzing, humming . . . tumbling in infinite noise and darkness"; all political questions would be determined by a simple "Count of Heads" (4, 10, 1).

The poet Coventry Patmore wrote in similar tones of despair, "the orgies of the multitude/ . . . now begin" (ll. 62-63). The number of potential new electors explains, at least in part, such hysteria. The Second Reform Act – more formally, An Act Further to Amend the Laws Relating to the Representation of the People in England and Wales (30 & 31 Vict., c. 102) – no doubt extended the work of the First Reform Act of 1832. While the earlier legislation increased the number of electors, largely middle-class men, by approximately 40% or 50%, an increase that yielded a proportion of one voter for every six or seven adult men, the act of 1867 enlarged the overall electorate by approximately 90%, to about one man in three.[1] Yet when measured against the realities of the numbers of men who could or would actually go to the polls, such figures may not be as definitive as they seem.

Why the act passed is similarly unclear. Any conventional Victorian political wisdom would have predicted that the Whigs or Liberals, as many Whigs were being called with increasing consistency, would have ushered in electoral reform, thereby confirming the widespread belief among workers that the Tories or Conservatives were indifferent to the interests and needs of the so-called people. Such a logical outcome was not to be.

In 1867 the Conservatives, led by Lord Derby as prime minister in the House of Lords and by Benjamin Disraeli as chancellor of the exchequer in Commons, sponsored a reform bill a year after the Liberals, led by Earl Russell as prime minister in Lords and W. E. Gladstone as chancellor in Commons, had failed to pass their own version of such a measure. Like the earlier repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), the Second Reform Act proved that conservative politicians can sometimes pull off a reform beyond the power of their more progressive opponents.

Most conservative thinkers, however, deplored that outcome. Even a moderately liberal political analyst like Walter Bagehot, looking back on the recent passage of the act, conjured up a vision of a political defeat that would lead inevitably to further defeats: "The Conservative party relinquished the citadel without a fight. . . .  After this triumph, innovators will believe that they can have what they wish, and they will attack with the vigour of men who have just won and who mean to win again; while the Conservatives will defend like men who have just lost, and lost not after an heroic struggle, but meanly and by surrender" (Works 6: 390-91).

Yet the metaphor of the state as a fallen citadel – a metaphor that appeared in many Victorian accounts of the Second Reform Act – is no more an adequate account of what caused that fall than a comparison of pre- and post-reform statistics is of its effects.

Traditional accounts of the 1867 act, including those published by Victorian witnesses, often tried to explain its passage by instancing a combination of party politics and strong personalities and public pressure.[2]

Added to such forces were a number of destabilizing events – war in Italy and between France and Prussia as well as a financial crisis in London – that made legislators anxious to settle the question of reform, as did the spread of poor economic conditions and a cholera epidemic, which, rightly or wrongly, increased fears of working-class unrest. Those supporting an extension of the franchise were cheered by the rise of Garibaldi in Italy and the Civil War in the United States, both of which were seen to be motivated by the ideals of freedom and political autonomy. In addition, after 1865, Gladstone emerged as an increasingly powerful, if cautious, advocate for reform.

More generally, the various explanations of the passage of the act that have been offered by historians since the nineteenth century accord with, not surprisingly, the changing nature of historical inquiry: the focus on the high politics of parliamentary maneuvers that was dominant through the 1960s has been replaced more recently by attempts to set the act in larger cultural contexts, the most important of which, I think, involves the nature and structure of British class relations.[3]

From such a perspective, the Second Reform Act reflects either the "persistence" of aristocratic power or the emergence of "class collaboration". Yet describing the passage of the 1867 bill as an "accident" was and still is typical: that formulation links Victorian writers as diverse as Bagehot and the art critic John Ruskin to historians like Jonathan Parry and Robert Saunders.[4]

The account offered here is in one sense retrograde: it returns to the arena of high politics, but it does so in a way, I hope, that recognizes the range of factors that contributed to the passage of the Second Reform Act and the "accidental" convergence of contingencies that seemed to make reform inexplicably inevitable.

The issues raised by electoral reform could be so dauntingly dense and detailed that they often perplexed Victorian onlookers and even rank-and-file MPs: one of the latter memorably complained about both the substance and the audibility of the speeches in the House by objecting that "it was quite impossible to know what was going on".[5] In fact, one of the reasons that the Conservative bill became law might have been that a number – perhaps a determinative number – of MPs voted for a measure whose implications they simply did not understand.

Yet the chief source that I draw upon in this essay is the archive of parliamentary debates that these bewildered MPs and their leaders created when they considered passing reform bills in 1866 and 1867 and, two years later, when they in effect amended the 1867 act. Speeches in Parliament were impressively long in the Victorian period, and one sitting often spanned from the afternoon into the wee hours of the next morning, thus typically yielding well over forty-thousand words when it was afterwards transcribed in Hansard.

A single speech could easily run to over eighteen thousand words, longer by half again than a monthly installment in a twenty-number Dickens novel. Reading the Historic Hansard, as it is called on the Web site of the UK Parliament, is, I hope to demonstrate, one of the pleasures of Victorian studies: both compelling ideas and vivid personalities emerge from its hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of words.  Victorian legislators, however, prided themselves more on the eloquence than on the amplitude of their speeches, the delivery of which one of them ironically described as strewing "flowers of speech" on the floor of the House of Commons (H 183: 124).

These characteristically Victorian feats of verbal prowess have come down to us in a form that is not a word-for-word recording of their contents,[6] but the record that we have does reveal the tenor of the major day-to-day deliberations over the possibility of expanding the electorate. Such a perspective on the Second Reform Act highlights both the forms of rhetoric that Members of Parliament used to address this issue and the predictable, if sometimes not very uplifting, personal concerns with which they often invested it.

Although it is well beyond the scope of this essay to analyze how parliamentary speeches in the late 1860s affected the wider realm of public opinion, examining the changing nature of the statements made by MPs of both parties demonstrates how those legislators wished that public to understand and to judge their support for reform or the lack thereof. In that sense, an account of the Second Reform Act drawn from the pages of Hansard illuminates the manner in which it was proposed, amended, and passed.

These debates testify to the extraordinary complexity not only of Victorian legislative procedures but also of Victorian election law, much of it based as it was on cases tried in courts specifically created to adjudicate rival claims about a man's eligibility to vote. So ornate were such precedents and their application that there emerged in the mid-Victorian period a specialized publishing industry devoted to the production of hefty and frequently revised handbooks for use by election officials and party agents.

Although I do not have recourse here to such guides as the tenth edition of Rogers on Elections, Election Committees, and Registration: With an Appendix of  Statutes and Forms (1865) and the twelfth edition of Cox and Grady's The New Law and Practice of Registration and Elections, Parliamentary and Municipal (1872), the reader should be warned that I do include a relatively ample amount of specificity, without which it would be impossible to communicate a sense of what was at stake in franchise reform. Similarly, only a detailed account of election law makes clear a point downplayed in some current treatments of the Second Reform Act: the question of whether a man did or did not have a vote in Victorian Britain, both pre- and post-1867, was a highly intricate matter of pounds and shillings and pence.

By extending the story beyond 1867 to the passage of the Assessed Rates Amendment Act in 1869, I hope to emphasize the importance of rate-paying as the basis for the Victorian franchise. Before the Second Reform Act, Conservatives lauded as a bulwark of the constitution the personal payment of the rates levied to support the aged, indigent, and unemployed. Yet in most parishes, the rates and taxes due on relatively inexpensive housing were not paid directly to the collectors of them; rather, they were added to – or "compounded" with – the rent paid to landlords.

Because the first version of the annual list of voters was copied from the list of men who had paid their rates directly – "personally" – to a collector, those whose payments were compounded and therefore made by their landlords faced almost insuperable challenges if they wanted to vote. When the Second Reform Act eliminated compounding, the adjective personal was removed from the phrase personal payment of rates, but the requirement that rates be paid, one way or another, remained inviolate even after compounding was reinstated in 1869.

However complex such matters were, one question stood out from all the others in 1866 and 1867 as the major issue of mid-Victorian franchise reform: how many men – for which read: how many working-class men – should be added to the electorate? MPs used many distinctive rhetorical strategies as they attempted to answer that question: apparently reasoned citation of statistics; invocations of classical allusions or religious language; calls to patriotism; virulent attacks on the opposing party or its individual members; and lengthy attempts at self-justification.

Yet the ways in which these ingredients were combined in 1866, when the failure of the Liberal bill led to the downfall of the Liberal government, and in 1867, when the Conservatives were triumphant, differ in surprising ways; and those differences make it possible both to confirm and to alter conventional characterizations of the high politics of the late 1860s. Disraeli in his time was often the object of anti-Semitic prejudices (see Fig. 1), as is evidenced by Carlyle's calling him a "superlative Hebrew Conjuror" in Shooting Niagara (12); but in the 1867 debates, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer does not emerge as the unprincipled manipulator that he is often still taken to be.[7]

Even more surprisingly, Gladstone, frequently praised for his ability to "govern by speaking" (Meisel 83), presided in 1866 over a House of Commons whose members often gave priority to the needs of their egos, perhaps because they were following his lead. Ethos, the time-honored method of basing one's argumentative appeals on one's character, was customarily treated with "indulgence" in Parliament: according to the chief Victorian authority on the practices of Commons, MPs had great "latitude" when it came to explaining or defending their own "character or conduct" (May 296-98).

Yet in 1866 ethos, often inflected with plenty of pathos, tended to overwhelm logos. In both sessions, verbal fireworks were as typical as incomprehension was widespread. By contrast, the 1869 parliamentary debates over assessed rates were fairly straightforward, even lackluster; and they indicate a significant waning of the fears that franchise reform had generated only two years earlier. Although I can focus here on only the major figures in these debates, their speeches demonstrate, I think, what a lively, if sometimes baffling, place the Victorian House of Commons could be.