HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

[1] These numbers combine estimates offered by Hilton, 424; Evans, 483; Wright, 160; Hoppen, 50-51, 253. The question of whether the Second Reform Act was liberalizing or the reverse is often debated: see, for example, Hoppen 252-59; Parry 216-17; Saunders 1; Seymour, ch. 10; Vernon 21-24. This sentence and the substance of a few of the paragraphs in this essay are drawn from my Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain, which offers fuller references to the secondary literature on the Second Reform Act.

[2] The standard treatments of the 1866 and 1867 bills include those by Cox, Seymour, Smith, and Cowling; to which have been added more recently those by Vernon; Hall, McClelland, and Rendall; and Saunders. See Hoppen, ch. 8, for an excellent brief account.

[3] For the historiography of the act, see Hall, McClelland, and Rendall, 7-29.

[4] Bagehot, Works 6: 375; Ruskin, Works 17: 541; Parry 216; Saunders, ch. 8.

[5] Hansard 187: 1189. Subsequent references in the text are, like this one, to the third series of Hansard, and they are designated by an "H" before volume- and column-numbers.

[6] See Robson; Mill, Collected Works (28: lxvi-lxx).

[7] My account therefore confirms the conclusion of Saunders's recent study, which credits Disraeli with having had the relatively high-minded goal of "reimagining . . . Toryism on a national and popular foundation" (278).

[8] See the Report of the Select Committee on Poor Rates Assessment, iii; Smith 194.  For a full account of rate-paying and the 1832 franchise, see Salmon, ch. 1 and 6.

[9] The changes in the country franchise legislated by the 1867 act involved lowering the occupation franchise to £12, and the leaseholder and copyholder franchise to £5. One historian called these reforms "almost aristocratic" in relation to the "radical characteristics of the new borough franchise" (Seymour 272).

[10] For the fullest recent account of this period, see Saunders, ch. 1-4.

[11] For this argument, see McClelland; Carlisle 134-83; Smith, ch. 1; Saunders 6-7, 180-83.

[12] My thanks to Timothy Robinson for these alternate translations and for his version of a line from the Aeneid that I later quote. For commentary on this exchange, see Meisel 100-102.

[13] Collected Works 28: 62. In this paragraph, I cite this edition rather than Hansard because the former collates at least one more source than the latter does, thereby offering a fuller transcript of the responses of Mill's colleagues to his speeches. See Robson, 37-38.

[14] The explanatory footnotes in the election returns from 1865 for the borough of map iconFinsbury, for instance, reveal that its six parishes followed six different schemes for setting poor rates, and they were based on six different acts from the reign of George III through that of Victoria (Electoral Returns 125).

[15] Cox in his 1868 account explained the difference between these two values (68-79) by referring to the last two columns of the form in the rate book that was mandated by the 1862 Union Assessment Committee Act: the sixth column is labeled "Gross Estimated Rental" and the seventh, "Rateable Value". He also cited the statute law that defines gross estimated rental as rent minus rates and taxes and "tithe commutation charges, if any" (25 & 26 Vict., c. 103) and rateable value as the gross estimated rental minus additional and "various deductions," such as those for repairs or insurance (6 & 7 Will. 4, c. 96) (Cox 69, 74 note). Despite Cox's clarity on this issue, the many varying definitions of these terms among MPs and onlookers often made it seem that those debating franchise reform were speaking in different languages.

[16] See 8 [18] June 1866, H 184: 639, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers. This crucial debate seems to be missing from the Historic Hansard; in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, it is misdated 8 June (it is the second Commons debate so dated), and it therefore appears before other debates that it actually followed. Gladstone's references to the vote taken at the end of the sitting of 18 June early on the morning of 19 June (H 184: 648) make evident these errors in the digital records.

[17] Daily Telegraph, 28 July 1866: 4; Marx quoted by Briggs, 195-96. See Carlisle (ch. 3) for scholarship on the events in Hyde Park and for a range of responses, some of the most compelling of which, I think, appeared in illustrated newspapers.

[18] Derby, H 189: 952; cf. H 188: 1834; 184: 400.

[19] Disraeli, qtd. Smith 232; H 188: 1114; Smith 159.