In Our Time - The Great Reform Act

Episode Date: November 27, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Great Reform Act of 1832. The Act redrew the map of British politics in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and is a landmark in British political history.“We must get the suffrage, we must get votes, that we may send the men to Parliament who will do our work for us; …and we must have the country divided so that the little kings of the counties can't do as they like, but must be shaken up in one bag with us.” So declares a working class reformist in George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt: the Radical. It is set in 1832, the year of the so-called “Great Reform Act” which extended the vote and gave industrial cities such as Manchester and Birmingham political representation for the first time. But to what extent was Britain’s political system transformed by the Great Reform Act? What were the causes of reform in the first place and was the Act designed to encourage democracy in Britain or to head it off?

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, here's a quotation from a 19th century novel. We must get the suffrage. We must get votes that we may send the men to Parliament

who will do our work for us. And we must have the country divided so that the little kings of the counties can't do as they like, but must be shaken up in one bag with us. So declares a working-class reformist in George Eliot's novel, Felix Holt the Radical. It's set in 1832, the year of what became called the Great Reform Act, which extended the vote and gave industrial cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, political representation for the first time.

The acts often described as a landmark moment in British political history. But to what extent was Britain's political system transformed by the Great Reform Act? What were the causes of reform? and was the Act designed to encourage democracy in Britain or to head it off? With me to discuss the Great Reform Act at Catherine Hall, Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London,

Michael Bentley, Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Dina Birch, Professor of English at Liverpool University. Dina Birch, what was the situation with regard to political representation before the Reform Act of 1832? Well, as far as Parliament was concerned, the situation was really pretty chaotic.

There were two kinds of seats. There were the county seats and the borough seats. Counties each returned two members, but the size of the counties varied enormously. So Yorkshire had 20,000 voters, and Rutland had 1,000, but they were both returning two members. And as far as the borough seats were concerned,

the situation was even more wildly inconsistent. There were boroughs, with very, very few inhabitants, the rotten boroughs, as they were called, who for one reason or another, had lost most of their population. Notorious examples like Old Sarum, which was on the site where Salisbury had once flourished. Salisbury had moved, but Old Sarum was still returning its two members of Parliament. Or another... With about, from the back of about 30, about it was it?

I think it was fewer than two. About 13. About 13. 13. I got it's three in the wrong place. You're 13. Tiny numbers. And there was another scandalous example, Dunnich in East Anglia,

which had been a large and prosperous settlement in the Middle Ages. Dunnich had fallen into the sea. But it was still returning to members. I think it had about 20 voters. Meanwhile, hugely expanding industrial settlements of the Midlands and the North, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, had no parliamentary representation at all.

Manchester, for instance, had a quarter of a million inhabitants, and Manchester had no MPs. And there was an even more wildly inconsistent picture when it came to qualifications for voting in the boroughs, particularly. There was no consistency. There were some boroughs where, voting qualifications were very liberal, the open boroughs, as they were called. In Preston, for instance, which was an open borough, any adult male who happened to be in the constituency at the time of the election could vote.

So there was a very, very broad qualification there. And then there were the pot wallopers. And that meant that if you were a household, a male householder or a tenant able to boil a pot, hence the pot walloping, you could vote. And it went on, the pocket boroughs, people who like, the pocket boroughs were... William Pitt, the borough, Appleby was in the pocket of one other family. They had six pocket borough, so they just said who was going to be MP.

That's right. The MPs didn't even, often didn't even go to their place. So it was, and the number of people who could vote were about half a million, perhaps. Yes. And so it was all over the place. It was basically, controlled by the landed aristocracy, who had had an enormous grip on power in the country for a very long time,

despite the season that was going on around it. Now, Felix Held, from whom I quoted at the beginning of the programme, Felix Held the Radical, it was a novel by George L. It set around the time of the first reform. I can you briefly, and similarly, Middlemarch, part of Middlemarch, can you briefly tell us the picture she gives of the reform of a building to, towards reform movement in 1832?

Well, George Eliot writing about this period, which he does, as you say, more than once, gives a brilliant picture, I think, of the confusion and inconsistencies that existed in terms of what people wanted from reform. Of course, the landowners, the wealthy landowners, didn't want reform at all.

They had a great deal to lose, and they knew it. They were perfectly happy with the status quo. And there were others, and George Eliot writes about this. who are suspicious of change, cautious by nature, like Mr Chichley in Middlemarch, who says, you never hear of a reform, but it means some trick to put in new men. And there were large numbers of people who were not driving for radical reform

who didn't want to see a universal suffrage, certainly didn't want to see votes for women, but on the other hand, there was a growing feeling that things could not go on as there were. Michael Bentley, you've said that you're rather surprised it took so long. The political system had been much the same since the 15th century, and here we are in the 19th century, the beginning of the 19th century anyway. Why did you think, briefly, it took so long? I think because there's a value system built into the lack of system.

It's very odd that they thought that system was a bad thing in itself. The Constitution was not a piece of machinery, like a clock, but as Burke said, it was a tree. It was something that you could kill if you took a knife to it. And there's enormous reluctance intellectually and constitutionally to approach the issue of reform in any sort of systematic way. It is curious, in a way, because we had chopped off the head of a king, we'd had the glorious revolution in 1688,

and people are still saying, but we don't want reform. But you could construct all sorts of arguments to say, wasn't necessary. You see, you had the doctrine of virtual representation. You may not have a vote yourself, but many other people like you did. It was also possible to introduce into the House of Commons through the Rottenborough system, people who hadn't the means to get in by themselves. So you could construct a slightly Irish argument that having Rotten Boroughs was a democratic thing, because you could introduce people with no means. And so on. We better take away the slurfer on the word Irish, can you just...

I would draw it. The Irish argument being. Simply, I mean, it's a perverse argument seemingly that you can construct a more democratic system by having rotten boroughs, but some people actually argued that. So let's come to a mouton towards the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century.

The big events in the second half of the 18th century, big political events were the American Revolution, but more importantly, the French Revolution, the reign of terror, the Napoleonic Wars, which brought this country into direct opposition with France and stopped in its tracks a burgeoning movement towards a development which might have led to reform and set it back a great deal. Can you talk to that?

Well, the importance of the French Revolution cuts two ways. On the one hand, it's inspirational, and for people who have already moved down a reformist track, it can lend some impetus. But it also, of course, produces huge, huge fears that the guillotine might end up in London. And from a governmental point of view, it's very important to put the lid on the pan after 1815

when there's a great deal of social turbulence. And between 1815 and 1820, culminating in so-called Peterloo in 1890, the riot in not a riot, a meeting, a peaceful meeting in St Peter's Fields in Manchester, which was put down with great brutality. 19 people killed. Indeed.

And the Cato Street conspiracy, which fell through in a rather absurd way in 1820, but where there was a serious attempt actually to murder the cabinet, the feeling was that you had to introduce repression from a governmental point of view to hold things together. And that's what they did in 1820 in the so-called six acts, which stopped people combining. And through the 1820s,

some of that reformist or revolutionary legacy it really does seem to subside for a time. The 1820s, up to about 27-28, are fairly quiet. But then the panlid begins to come off, and you get a developing series of turbulences over Catholic emancipation, in particular in 1829. Catholic emancipation was put through, and given the state of things at that time,

that must have seemed to a lot of people as cataclysmic and immense surprise. People like Wellington said, let's put it through and so on. What's going on there? And did it seem like a Harminger at the time? It did. And particularly for, remember that you've got a Tory government solidly in place from 1812 all the way through to Wellington's departure in 1830. The last thing they wanted to do was to emancipate Catholics from an ideological and Protestant point of view. They were driven to it by events in Ireland in the first place in Daniel O'Connell's return for County Clare. in 1828. Catholics could not sit in the House of Commons, and it was the change in that that was thought to be symbolic of a broader change. The non-conformists had been given

extended civil rights in the previous year, 1828. It's as though there is a movement of foot, and I think Catholic emancipation is important symbolically rather than for what it actually did. Catherine Hall, we seem to have a gathering, an acceleration towards the end of the 1820s, We've talked about the French Revolution, talked about the very, very slow start over. So anyway, we are where we are. In 1820s, it's being quiet, and then the movement grows again.

A great deal of agitation around the country. Things are going towards reforming slavery, for instance, that's moving with the abolition of slavery, not just the slave trade, and so on and so forth. Can you give us some picture of what happened when the reform bill was rejected in 1831 for the Lords, by the Lords, for the second time?

Well, it was a very dramatic, moment and it was dramatic because there was so much debate and discussion going on across the country. So Westminster was the seat of political power, but these issues were being discussed all around the country. And for example, in 1830, Thomas Atwood, the banker in Birmingham, had formed the Birmingham Political Union, which was an alliance of middle and working class people in Birmingham to demand financial reform. And increasingly, people came to believe that the only way to get the kinds of changes they wanted was through parliamentary reform. So there's already a strong popular movement, Atwood deliberately built on the example of O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation. He

wanted an army just as O'Connell had had an army in Ireland. And at the same time, there is... I mean he wanted a literal army? Well, he didn't want to actually fight, but he wanted the sense of power, the sense to mobilize people to present a case and to put pressure on Parliament. So there is pressure from without, both from the new political unions that are set up. Then there's very serious agricultural rioting to do with deprivation and want in the South and East, in Kent, particularly in 1830. And there's a revolution in Paris.

So revolution is in the air in a very frightening. lightning way. And when Wellington says in 1830, you know, I'm not interested our constitution is perfect. All hell is let loose. And people fear for revolution.

So that's the kind of atmosphere there is. And let's just be a little bit more specific. There's a riot in Bristol which are brutally, in Bristol, for instance, which are brutally surprised. So I'm, I've backtracked just a little bit. So then. The first defeat, we're not on the second defeat. Okay. So then, so then,

Lington Falls and a weak government comes in for the first time for a very long time, committed to some version of reform, but a limited version of reform. And that goes through the Commons twice, though the second time only by one vote. And it's an incredible drama, wonderfully described by McCauley, the historian to be who says it's like the moment when Caesar is stabbed in the Senate. So it's terribly dramatic. and when they all walk out of Westminster after the vote, everybody's waiting on the streets to see what's happened. I mean, it's a real political event. So then, and then the lords throw it out in October.

And of course the lords, as was said, didn't want the reform at all. So then there really is trouble. There are riots in, serious riot in Bristol, with the rioters holding the city for three days, Nottingham people killed Darby people killed Nottingham the Duke of Newcastle's castle burnt down

and in London Francis Place the radical the leader calling his people to mobilize for the bill Daniel O'Connell making a great speech at Westminster saying you know remember remember the king Charles I first had his head cut off

because he listened to a foreign queen There's all kinds of worries about how the queen is having a bad influence on the king. So big, big political drama and excitement. Would you, E.P. Thompson in his history of the working classes, said that we're as close to revolution as we've ever been in this country in 1831. Would you now go along with that? Yes, I think I would. And certainly, that's what people believed.

People were very frightened. The army, the following year, the army was mobilised to deal with the demonstrators. demonstrations being held and this alliance between middle-class reformers and working-class reformers which meant that for a period there was a body of the people and you know it's always very complicated who's meant by the people but in 1830 1831 1832 for a moment it looks as if the people might be a very large electorate and this of course is a terrifying idea and so there's backtracking as fast as possible. Let's have reform in time, as McCauley puts it, you know, following Burke.

If the tree needs to be trimmed, then let's trim the tree in order to stop the tree being chopped down. So they trim the tree down in Birch. The Great Reform Act, so called, well, I don't mean to be sarcastic, but that's what it became called, sorry, was finally passed in June 1832. Did it do the political business that they wanted it to do, i.e. put a stopper in the revolutionary ferment. You can put a stopper in a firmament. That's a bit ridiculous. No, mind. There you go. It certainly stabilised the situation and did so, of course, for a number of years. It wasn't, in fact, quite the far-reaching radical reform that people had begun to anticipate,

as Catherine has suggested. But it did. It was a disappointment in a way, wasn't it? In some ways. It was basically enfranchised about 500,000 voters. There became about 7,000. 58,000 voters, the extra 300,000 were exclusively, if we can use this word, which had come in just a few years earlier, the term middle class. There were middle class voters. The working class were humiliated by being left out of the entire equation, even though they put that, as Catherine said, they'd been part of the buildup just a few months before. But there it was, it was reform. And people thought, well, that's it, didn't they? They thought that will do. They did. The people in Parliament, that is to say, those in charge. That's right. There was a.

sense that there had been a reform produced at such cost and at such risk that that would serve for a number of years. But nevertheless, there were people who were, as you've suggested, disappointed. And there were people who had actively lost out, like the people of Preston who had lost the vote, or the pot wallopers of Northampton, who had lost a vote. And one of the interesting things about 1832 reform bill was that for the first time, women, were formally disqualified from voting. The term male enters the language of the bill, so that it began in a very kind of quiet way

to build the early years of the pressure for the female vote. But on the other hand, it should be said that some of the worst of the abuses had been swept away. Yes, 5 to 6, Rotten. boroughs were abolished. A lot of pocket boroughs were abolished. The big industrial cities were given to MPs and so there was that sort of beginning. And there was consistency in voting qualification and that I think did matter. It was a consistency that as you said ruled out the working classes but the £10 householder

a phrase much bandied about at the time which did rule out the working classes but nevertheless the £10 household was now introduced into the electorate. The middle classes felt that they had a presence. Michael Bentley, Catherine, I'll come to you in one second. Earl Grey, the Whig, who brought in the reform, described it as the most aristocratic bill ever introduced into this House. What do you mean by that? We need to take one step back and understand what you do when you attempt parliamentary reform in the 19th century. You do two things, not one. You change the qualifications that you're going to allow for your new voters. and the thrust of that through the 19th century was towards a more democratic or open system. But you do a second thing.

You redistribute all the seats within the system. You redraw the electoral map. And that was not at all democratically intended in much of the 19th century. Indeed, in many ways it was a countervailing force. Now, in 1832, they go to enormous pains to try to effect, particularly in their intentions in the first bill, a kind of rural apartheid in the sense that you're going to lock urban voters in the boroughs

and not let them vote in the counties. The beneficiary of 1832 is not the boroughs. It's not the middle classes. It's the counties. And what Gray meant when he was trying to reassure... The county is literally owned mostly by the aristocracy. Indeed. and they could control the seats within them.

And what Gray's trying to do, I think, is to reassure the people around him. Yes, we've brought Manchester and Birmingham and Liverpool into the system, and that was inevitable and is a good thing. But please take a good look at what we've done to the counties. Catherine, you wanted, Catherine, Hall, you want to do that? Well, just picking up immediately on that, just as you said earlier, Michael, that the real significance, of Catholic emancipation was symbolic

rather than that it opened up all kinds of possibilities for Catholics, which it didn't. So I would argue that the real significance of the Reform Act was symbolic, that although it's absolutely true that the land-owning classes held their control in the House of Commons

and of course in the House of Lords, something had been breached, the door had been opened to popular pressure in a way that had never happened before. The Reform Act would never have happened. in the form it did without pressure from outside. So that sense of the potential of people organized in a political movement for change, I think,

is tremendously significant. And if you take an example like in 1832, after Leeds is enfranchised for the first time, there's a huge popular election. And the Whigs invite McCauley to come and stand in Leeds as the Bright Yard. man of reform. And he stands against a well-established Tory radical Sadler. And in the context of that election, there are massive meetings and debating of questions of factory reform and what kinds of changes people want to take place in Parliament.

So there's a sense of possibility which I think transforms the political landscape, that Parliament has become, Parliament can be breached and the land-owning classes do not still hold all the keys to political power. Nine and Burr. I think that you get a very strong sense in looking at how people viewed the Reform Act in retrospect, but certainly in literature,

but also more generally, that it was seen to be a turning point. George Eliot, say, for instance, in the great reform year, hope was mighty. And hope is not so easily distinguished. And though it did take a very long time to move forward to the next stage of reform, there's no doubt that without the events leading up to the 1832 Reform Act, that next stage wouldn't have happened.

It is a cumulative process. What we haven't mentioned yet, and we must mention, is the greatest revolution of all, perhaps the greatest revolution that has ever been, which was the Industrial Revolution, which was seething in this country, and we were on the way very soon to become Workshop of the World, or Birmingham was Workshop to the World. And that was a big factor. Although I've mentioned twice,

the landed aristocracy, that still was massively powerful and politically powerful. Financial power was moving towards the industrial part of the country. Now, and one of the, and that was finding its own voice in different ways. And John Wright, Michael Menthey, the Quaker politicians summed up the Reform Act as a good bill, not a good bill, but a great bill.

What did he mean by that? I think, you meant exactly. what we've just been hearing, that this is a culturally very significant moment, it's symbolically highly powerful. To have a bill at all, particularly given all these ideological resistance, as we were talking about earlier, was an astonishing thing to have happened. It wasn't a good bill from John Bright's point of view, or from the point of view of radicals generally, because it simply didn't go far enough. It was very modest in its actual outcome, and as you were saying at the beginning, there is, among the words,

working classes, not so much a feeling of hope when they see the terms of this bill, but a feeling of something akin to despair. Because we have to explain why it is that just a few years after the Reform Act, we get the development of a powerful proletarian movement in charterism, which seems very often to be reacting against a sense of betrayal in 1832. Can I just come back to this idea of the working class joining with the middle class? He's a very broad terms. I mean the middle class, the phrase middle class

had been introduced. I'm not sure that the phrase working class had been introduced in 1931. One of you can tell me, no, let's pass. It wasn't like, why do you use lower orders? Yes, E.P. Thompson appropriated it for his book, didn't either of it? So you have that, you have that going on there. But behind

this holding on to power for centuries, there is a theory, sort of just to a certain extent, justifying it which was that they, the on the whole, the brighter one, were classically trained, and they believed in Aristotle's categories of rule, in which they took, democracy was the worst possible outcome.

Democracy led to the mob, and the mob led to revolutions, riots, the destruction of the state. So that was hovering around as well, Catherine. Certainly, it was more than hovering around. It was terrifying people, which was why some measure of reform was necessary. You know, the public voice had to be quelled and the split. The splitting occurs between middle-class radicals and reformers and working-class radicals, so that, as we've been saying, you know, chartism comes out of the period after the Reform Act.

Can you develop, those of our listeners who don't know about Chartism, can you just say what he is? Well, Chartism was probably the first fully proletarian movement, Michael described it as, in Britain, and it argued for universal male suffrage. that's probably the most important thing about it. Michael, do you want to take it? It's a mixture of things. It's proletarian in some senses, it's middle class in some senses.

It depends which places you're talking about. It's powerful in Birmingham, the north-east in Glasgow. It's not at all powerful in London, which is one of its great problems in turning it into a force that would actually change things. And they thought they could achieve change by petitioning. And the three great charter's petitions are the things we talk about when we talk about the outcomes of this movement.

One factor we mustn't forget here is that after the upheavals of 1848 in Chartism, there was a long period of a more prosperous and stable nation. And in that period, the working classes, the lower orders, whatever you want to call them, were gradually acquiring education, acquiring a new sense of the role that they could play in the national economy. A bit far ahead really, because I'm just to want to hover around 1882.83, sorry, 1832. You're even furthering. Catherine, just for a moment. Can we back track a bit?

Because I did want to say that, you know, okay, the effects of 1832 are limited in some ways, but there are some very important effects. So, for example, the anti-slavery movement, which was certainly as powerful a movement as the movement for parliamentary reform, was able to give. gather huge numbers of people in vast arrays of organization, women included. They organized themselves after the election, after the passing the Reform Act for the election of 1832 to attempt to ensure that only MPs would be elected who would vote for the abolition of slavery. And this was a new development, the idea that you could challenge MPs to say, you know, will you go for

abolition and we're not going to vote for you if you won't. And even William Cobbitt, the great radical leader who had always been opposed to abolition of slavery because he thought that the slavery of white people at home was much more, should be much more in people's minds than the slavery of other people elsewhere. Even he was driven in 1832 in his parliamentary election to declare for abolition. So then, after the election, you know, a new range of MPs in the House of Commons. And the government did not ask for the King in his, the King's speech, to speak on the question of slavery.

Again, a huge mobilisation, huge popular mobilisation, and the government are forced to push through abolition, albeit with all kinds of qualifications, but nevertheless, I would say that, again, that act would not have happened without popular pressure. Sorry, Michael Bentley. Catherine is quite right to draw attention to all these things that are going on as it were outside Parliament, but also very important changes taking place there,

not in the way that some people expected. They thought there'd be an enormous inrush of middle-class MPs, and one thing that we know for sure is that that didn't happen. But what you do get is a development in the way that this new electorate has to be managed. We can distinguish between what, in a sense, actually happened in 32, and what they thought might have happened. They didn't know this new electorate. Who's the they you're talking about?

The politicians, the people at the Senate. who are trying to run things. And one thing they feel they must do is to start having a much better communication between the centre and their constituencies. So the very primitive beginnings of party organisation really begin to get off the ground, the development of the Carlton Club and the Reform Club,

and having people like Francis Bonham, whose job it is actually to keep in touch with voters and to register them on the new registers. Diana? But alongside those developments was a lot of continuing corruption. and it is quite shocking when you hear accounts of contemporary elections to discover the extent to which money had to be spent. And we must remember at this stage there was no secret ballot.

Exactly, it didn't come until 1872. And so you were supervised with your voter and if you're in working for someone, you could lose your job. Anyway, we know what that means, yeah. So there was a sense in which, and this was often remarked on the period immediately following the Act, that more voters meant that more money had to be spent. Before we move forward, Catherine, can I ask you quite a difficult question?

If you've seen the act through very reluctantly, you'd had to agree to it in some cases. Other people had anticipated, who went home that night feeling we've done a good job here? Because from what Gray said, and from what Russell said in the Commons, finality, Jack, this is it. We will never go any further. It seems one way to look at it is that there's been a very clever move

to give a bit to bring in what we keep calling middle class which is... And to appropriate them and say, well, there we are. We haven't moved all that much because we've got these guys and they're under our thumb, really, and there's a lot of deference around still. So we've done okay, now we'll sit in it.

We're not going to do anything else. So that's one way. Is that right? What's your way? I think people were very pleased. I mean, I think the governing classes, apart from those who were just utterly horrified that such a thing had happened,

I think the Whigs were extremely pleased with themselves and felt they had affected a very clever move and they saw it as, I think they thought about it, as they thought about 1688. I mean, there's an awful lot of looking back and thinking historically about this and thinking at certain points, huge changes take place in society

and you have to take account of this. That's okay, you know, Burke argues for continuity, we can see that there are ways, what's special about England, what's special about England, what's special about England, England is that we have reform without revolution. Look at what happens in France. Look at the mess they made of it. Look how well we managed this. Hardly anybody hurt, you know. A good job done and that's the end of it. Would you go along with that, Michael Mentally? Yes, I think within

broad limits I would. There were, of course, still those who were deeply disaffected by what had happened. It's not just a tiny minority. And let's remember that the government that passed this thing was not Whig. It was a Whig coalition. All governments in this period had that flavour. It's a combination of factions. And that group calling themselves the ultra-tourists might not have been at all enthusiastic about this.

You're my specialist on the long wait around this table. There was quite a long wait after the first Great Reform Act to the Second Great Reform Act, which was 1867. And that was driven as much by the political ambitions of the brilliant Benjamin Israeli as anything else. I think it was, though, I I'm sure we're going to discuss ways in which there were very genuine events going on in the country which provided the context for the thing.

But Disraeli had a genius for turning crisis into opportunity. And his situation in 1866-7 is remarkable. Just put yourself in his place. He's not party leader, that's the 14thal of Derby, but he is the party strategist. He has no majority in the House of Commons. It is clear from preceding governments since 64-5 really that reform of some sort has to happen, shades again of that feeling after 1830. Fear of the mob?

It's no longer a mob, and in a sense that's more dangerous. It's now got a very strong middle-class element. There's a great deal of wealth in the country. The economy is in a very different sort of state. But Disraeli turns brilliantly an impossible. situation to his own advantage. But the only way he can do that is by negotiating a

reform bill through the House of Commons which will not please him or his friends, but will please those people he has to attract in order to get the thing through and to remain in power. And what we have in 1867 is a bill that was necessary,

most people agreed that, but nobody wanted the bill that Disraeli produced, even Disraeli himself. he had to take amendment after amendment after amendment from radical people in order to get the thing through and to move onwards. It became an example of a Tory putting through a radical bill

and the electorate went up from about 800,000, another two and a half million. It's a very, very significant increase. Two and a half million added on. So in a sense, it's on its way now. And it's much more radical than the one Gladstone had tried and failed to get through the previous year.

I know. It is very remarkable, I think, that an act of that nature had been steered through by a Tory politician. And certainly people did feel that at the time and were quite bewildered by that. But as you've said, Melvin, I do think it's true that the 1867 Reform Act was a real turning point in the way that the 1832 Reform Act had almost been and hadn't quite managed to be. Because it was the 1867 Reform Act that gave the vote to the Male working class urban householders made a huge difference, and it did expand the electorate enormously.

It didn't, of course, get rid of those problems with corruption that we've been talking about. And it didn't get rid of the increasing problem that was going to become much more urgent, that half of the population were formerly disenfranchised, and again, I'm thinking of the women. Yes, and John Stuart Mill has written as a treaty by that time, Catherine, would you like to comment on the 18607? Yes, so Disraeli had to accept many amendments, but of course the amendment he didn't have to accept was John Stuart Mill's amendment

that male should become person. And this is really the beginning of the long, long, long struggle for women to become political citizens, which doesn't end until 1919 and 1929. So, you know, another door is open, but at the same time another door is shut. And this is, I think, the process we see all the way through the 19th and early 20th century, that significant elements of the population are brought in,

but other people are quite firmly excluded. So it's always a process of inclusion and exclusion. This is about the time that, I'm down in which I'm looking at you, and George Elliott is writing these great novels, going back to the reform, and so on. It's interesting that she is sturged to do this, 35, 40 years later and so it's a

67 bill, as I understand it, you're not only, thank goodness, that prompts this. Yes, I think that's true. I mean, it's also the case that she's looking back on her own girlhood. She had been a teenager when these things were happening. But when George Elliott writes about the 1832

Reform Act, she is thinking of the 1867 reforms. Felix Holt precedes the 1867 Act, Middle March comes after. And she is very eager to emphasize, you know, a forward motion. She's very eager to emphasize, particularly in Felix Holt, I think, that the education of the working men would qualify them for this power.

But I think it's also worth remembering. And this is also true of Carlisle, of Dickens, of many writers of the period, that they were quite skeptical about parliamentary reform as the central lever for social progress. Well, Dickens and Carlin, to a certainly set, wrote it off. They didn't have a real effect on people's realise what these pompous people were doing in Parliament, and there were other social reforms which should be much more effective. Is that more or less what you're saying? That's broadly true.

I mean, Dickens had had experience of Parliament. He'd been a parliamentary reporter in his very early days as a writer, and that had left him, I think, quite sceptical of what Parliament could do. Trollope is a very interesting figure here. Now, he did believe in Parliament, believe very... strongly in what Parliament represented and said it should be the highest ambition of every educated Englishman to sit in Parliament.

But when he tried to become an MP, and Liberal MP was a Liberal, he found himself utterly defeated by the forces of corruption. Michael Bentley, you put up your... I just... Before you said that, I just think that Trullough actually stood for one of the rottenist constituencies

in 1868, Beverly, in East Yorkshire, which is a sink of corruption. And one of the things, just thinking in general terms, about the literary appreciation, I sometimes feel as someone who writes about political history at the centre, as it were, at the Westminster side of things, that they often don't quite appreciate the calculative element of politics. And that there's sometimes a view from beneath. Yes. Sorry, let me get that straight.

When they don't appreciate it, you mean right? When trouble writes about it. And what do you mean about that? Simply that, to my ear, there's a slightly idealized sense of how people talk. in cabinets, that they leave out some of the deep calculation that goes on there? I'm sure that's true, but of course that was also true of most of the British population, the electorate, you know, the refinements of political negotiations and manipulations, were entirely invisible to the people who had invested their hopes in parliamentary reform.

Catherine. But again, we've got to remember that there was a ferment of debate in 1867. And I think, you know, if we think about how people, have felt about Obama's campaign and election, I think that gives us some sense of both what 1832 were like and what 1867 was like. These things really, really mattered. And everybody is writing about it, talking about it.

You know, Carlisle just, he's horrified by the 1867 Reform Act. He thinks this is the opening of the way to mob rule, you know. Mob again? Yeah, terrified about what that means. and everybody in the society is, well that's an exaggeration, but an awful lot of people are thinking and talking about Parliament. Parliament is the centre of political power, and it engages people in a way that, of course, is simply not the case in our own times.

Michael Bentley, we get the secret ballot act of 1972. Was that a really significant difference? In one way you might expect it to lessen correct. those votes are still being sold on the open markets, you know, oddly, when you can't actually prove that the man's voting the way you've told him to vote, but it's the case. It's important for removing some of the leverage, but I suspect that the Corrupt Practices Act in 83 actually does more to remove the worst parts of corruption. Now, broadly and briefly, sorry, I've said briefly talking in this programme, I try to avoid it, but there we go, we nearly finished. Was it 67 that really pushed the thing forward, really got to... The impetus going.

Catherine, I'll just have to ask you alone. Yes, I think it did. But I think it's also worth remembering. I mean, we haven't had a chance to talk about the relation between nation and empire. It's worth remembering that very different things were happening in the empire. Just as the franchise was opening up at home, it was being closed down in other parts of the empire. That's another programme, Catherine. I know.

Just a depressing thought that as late as 1911, it's very likely that 40% even of adult males still did not have the vote. Nevertheless, I think we can be too cynical about this whole process. I mean, I think even the politicians, though they were thinking about party interests, did feel that they were promoting the progress of the people. Disraeli, Gladstone, were not wholly unprincipled. They believed in what they were doing. Thank you very much for that optimistic ending, Dina Perch. We needed it, Michael Bentley and Catherine Hall,

and next week we'll be talking about the history of the scientific ideas about heat. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this radio, podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.