Early and mid-Victorian Britain

Whig reforms

Whig interest in parliamentary reform went back to the 18th century, and Grey himself provided a link between two separate periods of public agitation. Yet, in the country as a whole, there were at least three approaches to the reform question. Middle-class reformers were anxious to secure representation for commercial and industrial interests and for towns and cities such as Birmingham and Manchester that had no direct voice in Parliament. “Popular radicals,” of both middle-class and working-class origin, were concerned with asserting rights as well as with relieving distress. “Philosophic radicals,” the followers of the utilitarianism of philosopher Jeremy Bentham, were strong ideological protagonists of parliamentary reform but were deeply hostile to both the arguments and the tactics of the popular radicals, except when confident that they were in a position to deploy or control them. Agitation in the country kept the reform question on the boil between 1830 and 1832, while an aloof Grey faced unprecedented constitutional difficulties with both the king and Parliament.

The Reform Act of 1832 (see Reform Bill) was in no sense a democratic measure. It defined more clearly than ever before the distinction between those who were and those who were not sanctioned to wield power, and it did so entirely in terms of property ownership, entrenching the power of landed wealth as well as acknowledging new sources of power in the middle classes and the consequent claims upon the rights and virtues of their new political identity. The bill entailed a substantial redistribution of parliamentary constituencies and a change in the franchise. The total electorate was increased by 57 percent to 217,000, but artisans, labourers, and large sections of the lower middle classes still remained disenfranchised. No radical demands were met, even though the manner of passing the bill had demonstrated the force of organized opinion in the country, particularly in the large cities, which were also now given representation.

Returned with a huge majority in the general election of December 1832, the Whigs carried out a number of other important reforms. A statute in 1833 ended slavery in the British colonies; in that same year the East India Company lost its monopoly of the China trade and became a purely governing body with no commercial functions.

The new Poor Law of 1834 turned out to be an unpopular measure in many parts of the country, however, and led to violent outbreaks of disorder. Its basic principle—that “outdoor poor relief” (i.e., outside the workhouse) should cease and that conditions in workhouses should be “less eligible” (i.e., less inviting) than the worst conditions in the labour market outside—was as bitterly attacked by writers such as Thomas Carlyle as it was by the workingmen themselves.

All of these contentious issues multiplied after 1836, when a financial crisis ushered in a period of economic depression accompanied by a series of bad harvests. Social conflict, never far from the surface, became more open and dramatic. Grey’s successor, William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, proved incapable of finding effective answers to any of the pressing financial, economic, and social questions of the day, but he did prove adept in his dealings with Queen Victoria, who ascended the throne in 1837.

Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League

As the economic skies darkened after 1836 and prophets such as Carlyle anticipated cataclysmic upheaval, the two most disgruntled groups in society were the industrial workers and their employers. Each group developed new forms of organization, and each turned from local to national extra-parliamentary action. The two most important organizations were the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League. Chartism drew on a multiplicity of workers’ grievances, extending working-class consciousness as it grew. The Anti-Corn Law League, founded as a national organization in Manchester in 1839, was the spearhead of middle-class energies, and it enjoyed the advantage not only of lavish funds but also of a single-point program—the repeal of the restrictive Corn Laws.

Taking its name from the People’s Charter published in London in May 1838, Chartism aimed at parliamentary reform. The charter contained six points, all of them political and all with a radical pedigree: (1) annual parliaments, (2) universal male suffrage, (3) the ballot, (4) no property qualifications for members of Parliament, (5) payment of members of Parliament, and (6) equal electoral districts. These were old demands that would have been supported by 18th-century radicals. Localized Poor Law and factory reform agitations centring on such grievances were subsumed in Chartism because of its commitment to national political action. However, for a variety of reasons—not least that the politicians had been able again to convey the sense that the state was benign and neutral and not, as Chartists perceived it, repressive and sectional—the mass movement of Chartism ultimately failed.

By contrast, the Anti-Corn Law League, led by Richard Cobden and John Bright, met with success. It employed every device of propaganda, including the use of new media of communication, such as the Penny Post, which was introduced in 1840. The formula of the league was a simple one designed to secure working-class as well as middle-class support. Repeal of the Corn Laws, it was argued, would settle the two great issues that faced Britain in the “hungry forties”—securing the prosperity of industry and guaranteeing the livelihood of the poor. So enormous was religion’s influence on the league that when it identified the landlord as the only barrier to salvation, it meant religious as well economic salvation. Most Chartists were unconvinced by this logic, but, in a landed Parliament, Peel carried the measure against his own party.

Peel and the Peelite heritage

Peel was the presiding genius of a powerful administration, strictly supervising the business of each separate branch of government; nevertheless, a substantial section of the squirearchy rebelled, roused by the brilliant speeches of a young politician, Benjamin Disraeli, who in his writings had already approached the “condition of England question” in a totally different style than that of Peel. The results of repeal were important politically as well as economically. As a result of the split, party boundaries remained blurred until 1859, with the “Peelites” retaining a sense of identity even after Peel’s premature death following a riding accident in 1850. Some of them, particularly Gladstone, eventually became leaders of the late 19th-century Liberal Party, which emerged from the mid-century confusion. The protectionists, most of whom abandoned protection after 1852, formed the nucleus (around Edward Stanley, earl of Derby, and Disraeli) of the later Conservative Party, but they were unable to secure a majority in any election until 1874. The minority governments they formed in 1852, 1858, and 1866 lacked any secure sense of authority. The Whigs, themselves divided into factions, returned to office in 1847 and held it for most of the mid-century years, but they were often dependent on support from radical and Irish colleagues. There was no time between 1846 and 1866, however, when extra-parliamentary agitation assumed the dimensions it had between 1838 and 1846.

Matters of religion helped divide the limited mid-Victorian electorate, with the Nonconformists (Dissenters) encouraging, from their local bases, the development of liberalism and with the Anglican churchmen often—but by no means universally—supporting the Conservative Party. Nonelectors’ associations (representing the disenfranchised) tried with varying degrees of success to keep radical issues alive, but party divisions remained based on customary allegiance as much as on careful scrutiny of issues, and there was still considerable scope for bribery at election times. The civil service might be pure, but the electors often were not. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1854 provided a more exact definition of bribery than there had been before, but it was not until a further act of 1883 that election expenses were rigorously controlled. It was then that, quite emphatically, parliamentary representation became not a matter of communities but of individuals, a process taken a considerable step further in 1872 with institution of electoral secrecy by the Ballot Act.

The prestige of the individual members of Parliament was high, and the fragmentation of parties after 1846 allowed them considerable independence. Groups of members supporting particular economic interests, especially the railways, could often determine parliamentary strategies. Nevertheless, contemporaries feared such interests less than they feared what was often called the most dangerous of all interests, executive government. Powerful government and large-scale “organic” reform were considered dangerous, and even those radicals who supported organic reform, like Cobden and Bright, were suspicious of powerful government.

Palmerston

Lord Palmerston, who became prime minister for the first time in 1855, stood out as the dominant political personality of mid-Victorian Britain precisely because he was opposed to dramatic change and because he knew through long experience how to maneuver politics within the half-reformed constitution. In a period when it was difficult to collect parliamentary majorities, he often forced decisions, as in the general election of 1857, on the simple question “Are you for or against me?” He also was skillful in using the growing power of the press to reinforce his influence. At a time of party confusion, when the queen might well have played a key part in politics, Palmerston found the answer to royal opposition in popular prestige, carefully stage-managed. His chief preoccupation was with foreign affairs, and his approach was, on several occasions, diametrically opposed to that of the court.

There was no contradiction between his views on domestic and foreign policy. He preferred the British system of constitutional government, resting on secure social foundations, to Continental absolutism, but, like Canning, his predecessor as foreign secretary, Palmerston was anxious above all else to advance the interests of Britain as he saw them. The supremacy of British sea power, British economic ascendancy, and political divisions inside each of the main countries of Europe before and after the Revolutions of 1848 gave him his opportunity.

His interventions were not confined to Europe. In 1840–41 he had forced the Chinese ports open to foreign trade, and, by the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), he had acquired Hong Kong for Britain. In 1857 he went to war in China again and, when defeated in Parliament, appealed triumphantly to the country. He also intervened in Russia. The Crimean War (1853–56) was designed to curb what were interpreted as Russian designs on the Ottoman Empire and a Russian threat to British power in the eastern Mediterranean. The outcome greatly favoured the British and their main allies, the French and the Ottoman Empire. Although Palmerston’s government was defeated in 1858, he was back again as prime minister, for the last time, a year later.

During Palmerston’s remarkable ministry of 1859–65, which included Peel’s successor as prime minister, Lord John Russell, as foreign secretary and the Peelite Gladstone as chancellor of the Exchequer, it was impossible for Britain to dominate the international scene as effectively as in previous periods of Palmerstonian power. With efficient military power at his disposal, the Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, proved more than a match for Palmerston. The union of modern Italy, which Palmerston supported, the American Civil War, in which his sympathies were with the Confederacy, and the rise of Bismarck’s Germany, which he did not understand, were developments that reshaped the world in which he had been able to achieve so much by forceful opportunism. When Palmerston died, in October 1865, it was clear that in foreign relations as well as in home politics there would have to be what Gladstone described as “a new commencement.”