John K. Walton - The Second Reform Act

General Editors: Eric ]. Evans and P.D. King

First published in 1983 by
Methuen & Co. Ltd

Reprinted 1993, 1996 by

Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

1983 John K.Walton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,

mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter

invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any

information storage or retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Walton, John K.

The Second Reform Act. (Lancaster pamphlets)

1. Great Britain. Parliament - Reform

2. Representative government and representation

- Great Britain - History - 19th century

I. Title II. Series

328.4V 0734 JN543

ISBN 0-15-10432-7

I should like to thank those members of my special subject class on mid-Victorian England who have tolerated my interest in the Second Reform Act while (usually) asking for as much social history and as little political history as I was prepared to allow them. Thanks also to Eric Evans and David King for their editorial work, and to Mike Winstanley for characteristically useful and relevant suggestions. Thanks especially to Jenny Smith, who has read this pamphlet twice in typescript to check for fluency and comprehensibility, and as a result knows far more about the Second Reform Act than she can have imagined in her wildest nightmares. The results are nobodys fault but my own.

JKW

Lancaster Pamphlets offer concise and up-to-date accounts of major historical topics, primarily for the help of students preparing for Advanced Level examinations, though they should also be of value to those pursuing introductory courses in universities and other institutions of higher education. Without being all-embracing, their aims are to bring some of the central themes or problems confronting students and teachers into sharper focus than the textbook writer can hope to do; to provide the reader with some of the results of recent research which the textbook may not embody; and to stimulate thought about the whole interpretation of the topic under discussion.

At the end of this pamphlet is a list of works, most of them recent or fairly recent, which the writer considers most important for those who wish to study the subject further.

The Reform Act of 1867 was highly controversial at the time and has remained so ever since. However we look at the political history of nineteenth-century Britain, its importance in signposting and bringing about changes of direction, and in bringing new forces into play, is second only to that of its illustrious precursor of 1832. When we remember that the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872 followed hard on its heels, the mid-Victorian changes in the electoral system can be made to look potentially revolutionary; and we shall see that that is how many contemporaries saw them.

Reform in 1867 considerably increased the number of potential and actual voters; it enfranchised large numbers of urban working men; it redistributed seats in ways that had complex and important implications; and its detailed provisions stimulated the political parties into new systems of organization at the local level, as they tried to build bridges to the new voters and devise ways of satisfying and accommodating them. After 1867 significant changes took place in constitutional practice, in the working of the party system, in the content of legislative programmes and above all in the nature of the relationship between politicians and an expanded electorate. How far these changes were in some sense caused by the Second Reform Act, and how far they were responses to the deeper social and political currents which put a further measure of reform on the political agenda and helped it to come to pass, is a matter of debate. At a more superficial level, the banker, economic journalist and political commentator Walter Bagehot was able to argue at the time that the post-1867 change in the political climate had more to do with the death of Palmerston in 1865, and the advent of a new generation of political leaders, than with the Reform Act. It is one thing to say what the Reform Act did; it is quite another, more interesting and more difficult thing to say what its wider influence was.