Eric J. Evans - Britain before the Reform Act: Politics and Society 1815-1832

Britain Before the Reform Act

Britain Before the Reform Act, Politics and Society 18151832

Second edition

Eric J. Evans

First published 1989 by Pearson Education Limited

Second edition published in 2008

Published 2014 by Routledge

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Copyright 1989, 2008, Taylor & Francis.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-29908-5 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Evans, Eric J., 1945

Britain before the Reform Act : 18151832 / Eric J. Evans. 2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-582-29908-5 (pbk.)

1. Great BritainPolitics and government18001837. I. Title.

DA535.E86 2008

941.07dc22

2008001879

Typeset in 10/13.5pt Berkeley Book by 35

Introduction to the Series

History is a narrative constructed by historians from traces left by the past. Historical enquiry is often driven by contemporary issues and, in consequence, historical narratives are constantly reconsidered, reconstructed and reshaped. The fact that different historians have different perspectives on issues means that there is also often controversy and no universally agreed version of past events. Seminar Studies in History was designed to bridge the gap between current research and debate, and the broad, popular general surveys that often date rapidly.

The volumes in the series are written by historians who are not only familiar with the latest research and current debates concerning their topic, but who have themselves contributed to our understanding of the subject. The books are intended to provide the reader with a clear introduction to a major topic in history. They provide both a narrative of events and a critical analysis of contemporary interpretations. They include the kinds of tools generally omitted from specialist monographs: a chronology of events, a glossary of terms and brief biographies of whos who. They also include bibliographical essays in order to guide students to the literature on various aspects of the subject. Students and teachers alike will find that the selection of documents will stimulate discussion and offer insight into the raw materials used by historians in their attempt to understand the past.

Clive Emsley and Gordon Martel

Series Editors

Contents

It is nearly 20 years since the first edition of this book was published. A new edition is, therefore, overdue. I am grateful for the opportunity both to incorporate some of the results of the research done over the past two decades and, in doing so, to reflect on how far my own views have altered since 1989. As the further reading will indicate, I have continued to publish on the early nineteenth century in the interim, so this volume can be seen as a consolidating, rather than an undermining, enterprise. My views about the period have not fundamentally altered. However, perceptions have been sharpened and emphases changed. This edition is larger than its predecessor. Every section has been changed to a greater or lesser extent. Substantial revision is necessary to do justice to the findings of much first-rate work, particularly that by Boyd Hilton and Peter Jupp. Their work has shed important new light, both on the structure of politics and also on how economic ideology influenced the formation of policy. I am grateful to them for the excellence of their scholarship and the immense fruitfulness and originality of their insights. Many others, too numerous to mention here, have helped me reshape and refine my views. Whether or not they are aware of the influence they have had, I am immensely grateful to them.

Experts in the period 181532 are now much more likely to stress that contemporary politicians were not absorbed with the issue of parliamentary reform for much of the time. They were certainly not hanging about waiting for a Great Reform Act to drop from the sky! They were wrestling with other aspects of what might be called the pressures of modernity. It will surprise many readers to learn that religious controversies were generally seen as more fundamental to the way contemporaries saw their world than were those relating to representation in Parliament. Ordinary people or the lower orders, as contemporaries called them might come out on to the streets in support of reform but they were more exercised most of the time by the availability of jobs, by the level of wages and prices and, if they lived in the new industrial towns, by just how filthy they were and how many of their children disease and poor sanitation carried off long before their time. Radical politicians saw it as their job to alert people to the part played by taxation in determining the price and affordability of food and drink and to the extent to which legislation was fixed. A landowners parliament would pass laws which benefited landowners. All of this might heighten political consciousness, but threatening mass meetings could only be organized in times of poverty and deprivation. The huge political crisis of 183032, which was defused by parliamentary reform, should not colour our understanding of the whole period.

It is, I think, a matter of regret that so little serious work is now done on the foreign policy and diplomatic history of the period. Devotees of the linguistic turn stop short at deconstructing political treaties and diplomatic notes, it seems. It is difficult to understand why since so much attention has been directed towards what, in the great order of things, seems relatively trivial and, when written up as it so often is in exclusivist, lazy and ugly jargon, even less appealing. It is surely time for the research councils to institute a rigorous costbenefit analysis of post-structuralism and for research students to cast their nets somewhat wider. Whatever, there is little to change to reflect in the area of foreign policy, although we do have a more developed understanding now of the extent to which Britains overall strategy was influenced by formal or informal imperial objectives.