Abstract
Historians of early and mid-Victorian politics have tended to characterize London as city dominated by an independent, artisanal, anti-statist, and anti-aristocratic radical political culture.1 Whiggery’s role in the construction of London’s Victorian political culture, meanwhile, has been almost entirely ignored.2 Yet, while it is true that elements of ‘old radicalism’ were central to London’s early Victorian political culture, it is equally true that Whiggery wielded significant influence over metropolitan politics during this same period. In fact, it can be argued that the anti-statist and anti-aristocratic agenda promoted so successfully by what Patrick Joyce describes as ‘Reynolds’;s-style’ radicalism in the 1850s remained resonant in London precisely because the Whig aristocracy, and the Russellite vision of an enlarged state, remained such prominent influences on metropolitan political culture in the 1840s and 1850s.3 Although metropolitan radicalism was by no means merely reactive to Whig policy, Whiggery did exert a powerful ‘negative influence’ over the construction of the early Victorian metropolitan radical identity. The decline of Toryism in the metropolitan boroughs after 1832, and Whiggery’s simultaneous elevation into a creed of government, enhanced and ensured this influence.
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Notes
M. Taylor The Decline of British Radicalism (Oxford, 1995), p. 71.
I. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and his Times (Hassocks, 1979).
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P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform, Whigs and Liberals 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990) emphasizes connections between Whiggery and popular support.
L. Mitchell, Holland House (London, 1980).
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© 2005 Ben Weinstein
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Weinstein, B. (2005). Metropolitan Whiggery, 1832–55. In: Cragoe, M., Taylor, A. (eds) London Politics, 1760–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522794_4
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