Philip Salmon. Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832-1841. Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2002. x + 302 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-86193-261-0.
Reviewed by Philip Harling (Department of History, University of Kentucky)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2004)
Reading the Fine Print of Reform
Philip Salmon's excellent book is further confirmation of the fact that there is still no discounting the importance of the 1832 Reform Act. Why it is important has of course been open to a number of interpretations over the last several decades: as the means through which a responsible aristocratic party sought to prevent unprecedented agitation from turning into revolution; as a way of perpetuating landed influence within the new electoral system by cordoning it off from the new borough constituencies;[1] as a way to 'attach numbers to property and good order', in the words of the earl of Durham, i.e. to reconcile the middle classes to the existing political system by giving them a more obvious stake in it.[2] Recent studies have tended to stress the narrowness of the Act, with Frank O'Gorman emphasizing that it increased the national electorate from a mere fourteen to an only slightly less paltry eighteen percent,[3] and James Vernon arguing that in many ways it marked the end of the Georgian notion that electioneering was an inclusive community activity in which even the unenfranchised had a significant role to play.[4] The Reform Act was sexist as well as elitist, according to Catherine Hall, Anna Clark, and Susan Kingsley Kent, who stress that the terms of the Act for England and Wales (though not the separate Act for Scotland) defined the parliamentary franchise as the exclusive privilege of propertied men.[5]
One can nevertheless still make a pretty compelling case for the Act's breadth rather than its narrowness. Not only the Tories but even a good many self-styled supporters of earl Grey's Whig-Liberal government were shocked by its audacity in partially or totally disenfranchising almost 150 burgage-tenure and corporation boroughs, and without any compensation at all to their proprietors. A good many of these seats were then redistributed to large towns that had never enjoyed direct representation in the past. The idea that the second quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a "bourgeois revolution" in British government is of course long dead. Still, with the burghers of Manchester and Sheffield now armed with the vote, contemporaries understandably interpreted the Act as a "middle-class" triumph, and Dror Wahrman has memorably depicted it as the event that turned the idea of "middle-class" social power into a commonplace assumption.[6] Qualified electors, particularly in the boroughs, were more often given the opportunity to vote after 1832, as the number of contested elections rose considerably.[7] As John Phillips showed, those borough elections witnessed scenes of unprecedented party combat, as Whig-Liberals and Tories fought for the support of an electorate that was far more partisan in its voting patterns than it had been before 1832.[8]
Philip Salmon offers us several more compelling reasons for emphasizing the breadth over the restrictiveness of the 1832 Reform Act. A diligent student of the practical workings of the reformed electoral system, Salmon follows Phillips in stressing that the Act greatly changed the political landscape, making it much more noticeably partisan. What makes his contribution unique is its focus not so much on voter behavior per se as on the oft-neglected fine print of the Reform Act that created the new context in which voting took place. Most notable in this respect was the new voter registration process it initiated, which not only provided the crucial battleground between Whig-Liberals and Conservatives in the constituencies but helped to introduce partisan rivalry into many areas of local parochial, municipal, and administrative life. It was also the key to "an important shift in the popular conception of the vote," from "a privilege conferred only at election time and then only in the event of contest, often on a highly localized basis" to "a far more permanent and personal possession, which was defined on a national basis by law" and predicated on an annual registration system that "encouraged those who qualified each year to regard themselves as voters, irrespective of whether or not there was an actual election" (p. 7).
While annual registration fostered the perception of the franchise as an individual rather than a corporate right, it was a right whose exercise was often rendered difficult by the complexities of the registration system itself. In the county constituencies, the onus of the burden of claiming inclusion on the annual register lay on the voter himself, and change of residence necessitated the making of a fresh claim. Borough voters were disqualified for receipt of poor relief, had to meet a six-month residency qualification, and those enfranchised under the 10 clause of the Reform Act were obliged promptly to pay poor rates and other assessed taxes in order to avoid disqualification. County and borough registration lists were subject to public display, and any claimant had the right to challenge any published entry on those lists, without having to state specific grounds for the challenge. Any person whose claim to the franchise was challenged was obliged to "prove" his claim in open court before a revising barrister. In sum, this was a tedious and complicated business that prompted a good many who were eligible to refrain from claiming the franchise. This registration-driven voter apathy, in turn, fostered the mushroom growth of local party organizations, whose job it was to register sympathizers and to challenge the claims of would-be voters in the other camp. Thus the very restrictiveness of the Reform Act's registration system served to broaden political participation by stimulating vigorous and continuous grassroots registration efforts.
Under the new rules of the game, the key to electoral success was to devote meticulous attention to the register, and Salmon shows that the Tories were far more attentive than the Whigs and Liberals. The waning of the Whig-Liberal coalition over the course of the 1830s is a familiar story, but Salmon adds an interesting new grassroots dimension to it. The Conservatives won the registration battle in a wide variety of constituencies because they were highly motivated to organize in the wake of the 1832 fiasco, because their uncomplicated "Church and Field" agenda was more likely to appeal to the ranks of the politically apathetic than the relatively cerebral and complicated whig-liberal agenda, and because Whig grandees (in contrast to Tory squires) were not the sort to devote much time and energy to mundane registration work.
Salmon devotes particularly close attention to electoral behavior and the politics of registration in the county constituencies, in a successful effort to show that, pace D. C. Moore, electoral deference counted for relatively little in the counties during the 1830s. He estimates that even in a county such as Westmorland, a huge chunk of which was the personal property of the earl of Lonsdale, roughly ninety percent of the electorate in the late 1830s were relatively free from proprietorial influence in the exercise of their franchise rights (p. 138). The measures he uses to gauge voter independence in the counties are admittedly rather crude--the degree of voter unanimity within sample constituencies, comparative turnout rates for the (ostensibly more easily manipulable) fifty occupiers and the (ostensibly more "independent") forty-shilling freeholders, and the relative preference of resident and non-resident voters--but their cumulative impact is indeed compelling. While the politics of deference was limited, the politics of registration was no less significant in the counties than it was in the boroughs. Salmon's detailed case studies of North Devon, South Lincolnshire, West Somerset, North Wiltshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire confirm his general argument that the Conservatives were better organized, more energetic, and more single-minded in their determination to register friends and challenge the claims of potential foes than were their Whig-Liberal counterparts.
If the new registration system was a fillip to partisanship in county elections, Salmon concludes, it had an even broader politicizing effect in the towns. Clause 27 of the Reform Act, in making possession of the new ten household franchise dependent on the prompt payment of all local rates and assessed taxes, effectively guaranteed that there would be "no representation without taxation" in the boroughs, and probably led to fairly broad disenfranchisement, at least in the short term. In vesting formidable powers of disenfranchisement in the hands of overseers and church wardens, moreover, the rate-paying clauses of the Reform Act turned these local offices into bones of partisan contention. With the borough franchise now closely tied to the structure of local taxation, "the politics of the parish ceased to be merely parochial and became an essential part of the broader battle for political control" (p. 209). Much the same can be said of the politics of the new town councils created by the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, Salmon convincingly argues. The three-year residency qualification meant that most municipal voters also qualified for the ten householder borough franchise, and for the remainder of the 1830s and well into the 1840s, municipal elections were no less bitterly partisan than their borough counterparts, and their outcomes no less dependent on the strength of grassroots party organization. In the municipalities as in the parliamentary constituencies, it was the Conservatives who tended to be better organized, which meant that despite the intentions of its more radical proponents, the 1835 Act actually bolstered Tory influence in the corporations rather than killing it off.
In sum, this is a thoughtful and well-crafted book that makes abundantly clear that the "fine print" of the Reform Act, particularly its registration clauses, had an immediate and significant impact on British electoral politics, making it considerably more uniform, partisan, and "recognizably modern" (p. 11) than ever before. As such, it is an important intervention in the grand debate on the question of whether the Act was chiefly a harbinger of change or a guarantor of continuity, and one that squarely places its author among the advocates of change. As I have already suggested, moreover, on the related historiographical question of whether the Act narrowed or broadened Britain's political culture, Salmon is an advocate of breadth, although his nuanced account also properly acknowledges the narrowing effect of the rate-paying and residency qualifications in the boroughs. My only criticism of this very fine book is that Salmon might have made even more clear where he stood on these very big questions, stepping back from the machinery of the Reform Act often enough to make it even more clear that his work is in dialogue not only with the likes of Frank O'Gorman and John Phillips, but with the very rich literature on the political culture of the reform era more generally.
[1]. D. C. Moore, The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Political System (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976).
[2]. e.g. Michael Brock, The Great Reform Act (London: Hutchinson, 1973).
[3]. Frank O?Gorman, _Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The unreformed electoral system of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
[4]. James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
[5]. Catherine Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 152; Anna Clark, "Gender, Class, and the Constitution: Franchise Reform in England, 1832-1928," in Re-Reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England?s Long Nineteenth Century, ed. James Vernon (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 239-253; Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 165-166.
[6]. Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. chs. 9-11.
[7]. D. E. D. Beales, "The Electorate Before and After 1832: The Right to Vote, and the Opportunity," Parliamentary History 11 (1992): pp. 139-150.
[8]. John Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour, 1818-1841 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also John Phillips and Charles Wetherell, "The Great Reform Bill of 1832 and the Rise of Partisanship," Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): pp. 621-646; idem, "The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England," American Historical Review 100 (1995): pp. 411-436.
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Citation:
Philip Harling. Review of Salmon, Philip, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832-1841.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9535
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