On the Reform Act of 1832

Reform, That You May Preserve

"And it is a remarkable example of the confusion into which the present age has fallen; of the obliteration of landmarks, the opening of floodgates, and the uprooting of distinction," says Sir Leicester with stately gloom; "that I have been informed, by Mr. Tulkinghorn, that Mrs. Rouncewell's son has been invited to go into Parliament. . . . He is called, I believe – an – Ironmaster". — Charles Dickens, Bleak House (ch. 28)

When the Whigs took office, almost 2,000 rural "Swing" rioters were awaiting trial. Punishments were severe: 252 people were given capital sentences, 19 were hanged, and about 500 were transported to Australia (Haywood 211).

The successful reform act sponsored by Lord Grey (and carried by Lord Russell) thus sought to forestall threats of revolution. As Lord Macaulay advised Parliament during the debates of 1831: "Reform, that you may preserve" (24).

While radicals like O'Connell and William Cobbett pressed for universal suffrage and a secret ballot, the Whigs offered only redistricting and more consistent property qualifications to vote.[8] In so doing, they acknowledged how the landscape of England had shifted. On the one hand, the cities of Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds did not have a single M.P. between them, even as their population approached half a million. On the other hand, eleven seaboard counties, parts of which were falling into the sea, still contained more than half the English borough seats (Brock 17-18).

The Reform Act responded to these shifts with a major redistribution of English and Welsh seats in the House of Commons, robbing existing boroughs of more than a hundred members, while adding more than a hundred members for major counties and unrepresented boroughs.[9]

In addition, the patchwork of voter eligibility in the boroughs was replaced by a uniform standard: all male householders living in property worth £10 a year were now eligible to vote. To remedy the most egregious practices of paying voters to travel to the polls, the act also introduced a registration system, increased the number of polling places, and shortened the poll to two days. The open ballot system, however, was retained, allowing landowners to continue monitoring the votes of their dependents.

Figure 1: Riots at Bristol by James Catnach, 1831 (used with permission, University of Bristol Library Special Collections)

As moderate as it may now seem, this reform was enacted only after mass protests and several interventions by the king. The first Reform Bill's second reading in April 1831 succeeded only by a single vote, and it was defeated two months later in the House of Commons. At Lord Grey's request, King William IV dissolved Parliament for the second time in two years in order to break this impasse, and the Whigs further consolidated their power in the resulting general election. Successful passage of the Second Reform Bill in the House of Commons in September was, however, followed by defeat in the House of Lords, prompting riots in nine cities and widespread hopes (or fears) of a revolution in October. In Bristol, several prisons were burned down, along with the Mansion House, the Custom House, and the Bishop's palace and its library.[10]

When a slightly altered Third Reform Bill was defeated once more in the Lords the following May, Lord Grey asked the king to threaten the Lords with the wholesale creation of new peers. When he refused, the Whig leaders resigned from Parliament in protest, and the country erupted in even greater tumult, with a run on the Bank of England (withdrawing £1.5 million), non-payment of taxes, and calls for abolition of the monarchy and nobility. Finally, the king agreed to threaten to pack the House of Lords with enough supporters to ensure the bill's passage, and the Lords reluctantly enacted the measure.[11]

Newly-elected Members of Parliament in the first reformed parliament included radical journalists like Cobbett and James Silk Buckingham, who represented the newly created borough of Sheffield. As Buckingham noted in the first issue of his Parliamentary Review and Family Magazine in 1833, "the intense interest manifested by all classes during the progress of Parliamentary Reform, justifies the belief that a corresponding degree of attention will be paid to its first official labours" ("Opening" 1). With this in mind, he promised to "place the reader as nearly as possible in the position of one entering the House himself, and witnessing in person all that is passing around him" (1).

Although readers' observation of the House through published reports was virtual, it was hardly meant to be passive. Describing the debates of 25 July 1833 on colonial slavery, for example, Buckingham's radical Parliamentary Review declared that "if the Country submits tamely to be . . . cheated out of that Immediate Emancipation which they demanded, by Petitions signed by 1,500,000 individuals in one single Session . . . then do they deserve to be enslaved themselves for ever" ("House of Commons" 326).

After all, "having been made, by the Reform Bill, the entire creators of the House of Commons, and by consequence, the choosers of those who are to make the laws," the people of England "will deserve universal scorn and contempt if they do not compel, by the overwhelming force of public opinion, all their representatives to perform their duty" (326). Petitioners, including the many who could not yet vote, had become in a manner of speaking the "creators of the House of Commons," and they were urged to exercise their "overwhelming" power over their representatives.