Abstract
London in 1815 was a city of excitements and contrasts. George III, King for fifty-five years, was mad. The Regent and his legal wife, both notoriously promiscuous (but with their promiscuities condoned by rival factions) were separated. Great aristocrats, with vast Palladian mansions in the counties, maintained town palaces of equal luxury. The City already dominated much of the world’s commerce, and its leaders owned substantial villas which demonstrated the wealth behind the social challenge to the gentry. And in the great docks, markets and business houses, in small factories and back-street sweat shops — unhygienic, unknown, unpoliced — worked the astonishing range of craftsmen, clerks and labourers who made up the varied hierarchies of the London working classes.
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Notes
The following account is mainly based on The Hull Advertiser and Exchange Gazette, 6, 13, 20, 27 June, 4, 11, 18, 25 July; The Rockingham and Hull Weekly Advertiser, 27 June, 4 July 1818; A Copy of the Poll … in the Town of Kingston-upon-Hull (Hull, 1818). Benjamin Tate, a local printer, published most of the election literature in Kingston Wit, Humour and Satire. An Impartial Record of the Spirit of Party (Hull, 1818). A less accurate account is given in W. A. Gunnell, Sketches of Hull Celebrities (1876). On the 18th-century background, see Namier and Brooke, op. cit., i. 434–5.
G. H. Jennings, An Anecdotal History of the British Parliament (1880 ed.), 252
Torrens, op. cit., i. 113–15. This period of Graham’s political career is detailed in A. B. Erickson, The Political Career of Sir James Graham (Oxford, 1952), 34 et seq.
Arthur Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries (1952), 288–9.
Graham and Hobhouse were members of the Select Vestry of St. George’s, Hanover Square, ‘by far the best-governed parish in the Metropolitan area’ [S. and B. Webb, The Parish and The County (1963 reprint), 241]. Hobhouse later thought Graham ‘a reformer who will go all lengths with me’ (Hobhouse to Place, 23 March 1830).
J. Hobson Matthews, The History of the Parishes of St. Ives, Lelant, Towednack and Zennor (1892), 358, 497, 503–4
See also Namier and Brooke, op. cit., i. 237–8, on the borough’s previous history, and J. H. Philbin, Parliamentary Representation, 1832, England and Wales (New Haven, 1965), 34, on subsequent elections.
For an individual Whig’s eye-witness account of the Queen’s proceedings, see John Gore (ed.), Creevey (1949 reprint), 183–216. See also Frances Hawes, Henry Brougham (1957), 115–61.
Matthews, op. cit., 359–60, 504. James Halse was elected Tory M.P.for the borough in 1826.
Lonsdale, op. cit., i. 217–83; David Spring, The English Landed Estate in the Nineteenth Century: Its Administration (Baltimore, 1963), 165–7; D.N.B., ii (1908), 654–6.
Ferguson, op. cit., 190, 198–213; W. Parson, W. White, History, Directory and Gazetteer of the Counties of Cumberland and Westmorland … (Leeds, 1829), 126–7, 184
W. W. Bean, The Parliamentary Representation of the Six Northern Counties … (Hull, 1890), 34–35, 70–72; Namier and Brooke, op. cit., i. 245–8.
Lonsdale, op. cit., ii. 75–88. See also S. and B. Webb, The Parish and The County (1963 reprint), 507, and Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes (1963 reprint), 385.
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© 1967 J. T. Ward
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Ward, J.T. (1967). The Making of a Whig. In: Sir James Graham. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00077-7_2
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