Ahead of the 2019 general election, we highlighted some of our most popular blogs on the theme of elections and electioneering between 1832 and 1868. With five more years of blogging behind us, and the 2024 general election campaign now underway, here is a follow-up to that post.
With voters across the country set to head to the polls next month, we are taking the opportunity to look back at some of the research on 19th century elections we have featured in our blogs over the past few years. These draw on our work for the History of Parliament’s House of Commons, 1832-68 project, which is producing biographical profiles of the 2,591 MPs who sat between the first and second Reform Acts and accounts of the 401 constituencies in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales across the nine general elections which took place during this period. More details about our project can be found here.
The 2024 general election will be taking place under new constituency boundaries and this was also true of the first election of our period, in 1832. This blog from our senior research fellow Dr Martin Spychal, whose book on boundary reform and its impact will be appearing later this year, looked at the extensive process of mapping which underpinned the 1832 boundary changes. Many of these maps were the first ever official state-sanctioned plans for the UK’s towns and cities and, as this blog emphasises, this reformed electoral map had significant consequences for electoral dynamics in the constituencies.
While changed constituency boundaries might be a common feature of the 2024 and 1832 elections, in many ways, 19th century elections were very different from today’s contests. One key feature of modern elections which was not introduced in Britain and Ireland until 1872 was the secret ballot. Before this, electors cast their votes in public. As this blog from our editor Dr Philip Salmon explains, open voting ‘was considered especially important at a time when only a limited number of people could vote’. Those excluded from the franchise still had the opportunity to see and judge how those entrusted with the vote had polled.
Non-electors were also able to witness and take part in some of the colourful election rituals. One particularly lavish ceremony which is no longer a customary part of elections is the ‘chairing’ of new MPs. As our assistant editor Dr Kathryn Rix outlines in this blog, this was essentially a victory parade, in which MPs were carried aloft on chairs by their supporters (hence the name) or processed around their constituency in a carriage. While some chairings were orderly civic events, they could also be a flashpoint for violence. Election disorder was often fuelled by the large amounts of alcohol consumed during the campaign, since as this blog shows, the pub played a pivotal role in Victorian elections.
Several of our blogs have focused on elections in particular constituencies, revealing the diversity of the Victorian representative system, but also its common features. Electoral corruption was a recurrent theme, perhaps nowhere more so than in the venal borough of Great Yarmouth, which saw secret deals by the party managers about disputed elections and a threatened duel between the rival candidates. Memories of the bitterly fought 1826 Northumberland contest, which spilled over into a duel on Bamburgh Sands, encouraged the rival parties to share the county’s seats between them for much of the period after 1832, keen to avoid the expense and acrimony of pre-Reform elections.
One notably expensive constituency to contest was Abingdon, where candidates needed deep pockets to win favour. Their wealth and local influence proved important for the Williams family in their control of Great Marlow which, contrary to expectations, became even more of a ‘pocket borough’ after 1832 than it had been before. It was not only in older constituencies such as Great Marlow where particular interests came to dominate. In the newly enfranchised silk manufacturing town of Macclesfield, the country’s largest silk manufacturer John Brocklehurst held one of the seats throughout this period. His influence as an employer was not the only factor in election victory, with the treating of voters with drink being rife at Macclesfield’s elections. There were also incidents of violence, such as the voter kidnapped by ‘roughs’ at the 1865 election as he was milking his cow.
One figure skilled in the art of electoral skulduggery was John Frail, a Conservative party agent whose successes in his home town of Shrewsbury (where he had previously been a barber) included helping Benjamin Disraeli to win one of the seats in 1841. Pursuing rather different electioneering tactics, Lord Ronald Gower worked hard at canvassing his Sutherland constituency at an 1867 by-election, as he recorded in his diary. Another assiduous election campaigner was Harriet Grote, who was active behind-the-scenes in support of her husband George’s candidature for the City of London in 1832, performing secretarial work and sewing rosettes of crimson satin for his election team. Among the other constituencies whose elections we have explored in our blogs are York, where Chartist candidates stood on two occasions; Glamorgan, where one seat was held by the long-serving Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot, who ended his parliamentary career as ‘Father of the House’; and Exeter, where franchise and boundary changes in 1832 had important and sometimes unintended consequences.
For more on the theme of 19th century elections, see https://victoriancommons.wordpress.com/category/elections/ and https://victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2019/12/02/elections-and-electioneering-1832-1868/
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