Abstract
We start at the beginning by exploring the most obvious features of the undemocratised system — its closed and oligarchic characteristics, reinforced by an apparently undemanding political culture. We will then examine the implications of more recent research, suggesting a more popular and responsive side to both system and culture. Though massively advantaging the topmost socio-economic ranks, particularly if elevation rested upon landed property and heredity, the pre-1832 system contained points where other groups, even lowly ones, could achieve access and gain recognition for their needs and feelings. This is doubly evident if less formal channels of transmission, those involving ‘the moral economy’, are considered; still more if allowance is made for the crucial local governmental sector. These aspects are important to understanding why the old system was so extendedly tolerated in spite of accelerating socio-economic change; how demands for its popularisation eventually found effective expression; and how a degree of popularisation became supportable — both in terms of elite responsiveness and popular capacity for participation.
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Notes
John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1972), p. 30; also table 4.2, O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties p.179. O’Gorman does not accept these estimates.
K. Theodore Hoppen, ‘Roads to Democracy: Electioneering in Nineteenth-century England and Ireland’, History 81, October 1996, 555.
G. Holmes, The Electorate and the National Will in the First Age of Party (Lancaster, 1976), p. 15.
Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Social and Political History 1688–1832 (1997), p. 369.
Notably O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties; Nick Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989).
Also Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1990).
O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties ch. 4; John A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour 1818–41 (Oxford, 1992), p. 253.
O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties ch.4. For similar figures, see much older study by Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales 1832–85 (1915: Newton Abbott, 1970), p. 533.
Frank O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: the Social Meaning of Elections in England 1780–1860’, Past and Present 135, May 1992, 79–115.
Nossiter, Influence, Opinion and Political Opinion in Reformed England (Brighton, 1975).
O’Gorman, ‘Electoral Deference in Unreformed England 1760–1832’, Journal of Modern History 56, 3, September 1984.
LindsayJ. Proudfoot, Urban Patronage and Social Authority: The Management of the Duke of Devonshire’s Towns in Ireland 1764–1891 (Washington D.C.: 1995).
E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1991), p.305ff.
Michael Brock, The Great Reform Act (1973), p.88ff.
James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Provincial Culture 1815–67 (Cambridge, 1993).
On the open features of local government, see ibid; James Vernon (ed), Rereading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (New York: 1996)
John Garrard, Leadership and. Power in Victorian Industrial Towns 1830–1914 (Manchester, 1983); John A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill ch. 3; Nick Rogers, Whigs and Cities p.305ff.
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© 2002 John Garrard
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Garrard, J. (2002). The Old System. In: Democratisation in Britain. British Studies Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1938-0_2
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