Abstract
I want here to explore the character of British democratization, and try to explain its success. The term is rarely used to describe a process that lasted, in a formal sense, from 1832 to 1928. Clearly, there is some danger of anachronistic Whig history here, particularly given the implied comparison with more recent examples of democratization, where the label has been in place from the start. Thus the point should be made from the start that there is no implication that this early British version was a conscious process: few of the political elite seriously envisaged progress towards even manhood suffrage before the 1860s at the earliest. It can only be termed ‘democratization’ if viewed retrospectively. Indeed, as wiil be suggested later, the very unconsciousness of the process was itself a source of success.
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Notes and references
James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
For example, Salford in 1843–4. See John Garrard, Leaders and Politics in Nineteenth Century Salford: A Historical Analysis of Urban Political Power, Occasional Papers in Sociological and Political Studies (University of Salford, 1972).
Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (London: Merlin, 1972).
John Garrard, ‘The Mayoralty Since 1835’ in Alan O’Day (ed.), Government and Institutions in the Post-1832 United Kingdom (Lampeter: Edward Meilen, 1995), pp. 1–30. For a similar argument,
see Neville Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism in Mid-Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1985).
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1992).
Erich Strauss, Irish Nationalism and British Democracy (London: Methuen, 1951).
Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: the Unreformed Electoral System (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
Derek Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England (Leicester University Press, 1978).
Maurice Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1967). Not an uncontested argument.
John Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour 1818–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
For example, David Walsh, Working Class Political Integration and the Conservative Party: A Study in Class Relations and Party Political Development in the North West, 1800–70 (Unpublished PhD. thesis University of Salford, 1991).
John Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party 1857–68 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
Eugenio G. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone (Cambridge University Press, 1992);
D. A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli (Oxford University Press, 1972).
O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties; for Irish evidence, see Lindsay J. Proudfoot, Urban Patronage and Social Authority: The Management of the Duke of Devonshire’s Towns in Ireland 1764–1891) (Washington DC: Catholic University of America, 1995).
John Garrard, Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns, 1830–80 (Manchester University Press, 1983).
D. N. Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism; R. L. Greenall, ‘Popular Conservatism in Salford 1868–86’, in Northern History, vol. IX (1974), pp. 123–38.
J. H. Treble, Urban Poverty in Britain 1830–1914 (London: Batsford, 1979); see also Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism.
Also mobile professionals, hitherto disenfranchised by residential requirements. See Duncan Tanner, ‘The Parliamentary System, the “Fourth” Reform Act and the Rise of Labour in England and Wales’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, vol. 56 (1983) pp. 205–19.
Geoffrey Crossick, The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1977);
Geoffrey Crossick and Conrad Haupt, Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth Century Europe (London: Methuen, 1984).
G. Stedman Jones, ‘The Language of Chartism’, in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–60 (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 3–58.
Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian England (London: Macmillan, 1979) ch. 1. For counter-argument, not really undermining the argument here,
see Pat Thane, ‘The Working Class and State Welfare in Britain 1880–1914’, Historical Journal, vol. 27 (1984) pp. 877–900.
On suffrage organizations, see Andrew Rosen, Rise up Women: The Militant Campaign of the WSPU (London: Routledge, 1974); on working class interest in Lancashire and the reason for it,
see Jill Liddington, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London: Virago, 1978).
Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
John Garrard, ‘Parties, Members and Voters after 1867’, in T. R. Gourvish and Alan O’Day (eds), Later Victorian Britain 1867–1900 (London: Macmillan, 1988).
On housing regulations’ disastrous impact on slum dwellers, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study of the Relationship Between the Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
P. H. J. H. Gosden, Self-Help: Voluntary Associations in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Batsford, 1973) p. 74.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy, vol. 1. (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1897).
Mary Thale (ed). The Autobiography of Francis Place (Cambridge University Press, 1972) pp. 121 and 141.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1964) p. 673.
Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press 1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976).
This, rather than his arguments about the unimportance of class, seems to be the most important implication from Patrick Joyce’s Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1918 (Cambridge University Press 1991). For earlier arguments about the inclusive nature of the politics of British class relations, see Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism.
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Garrard, J. (2000). Democratization in Britain. In: Garrard, J., Tolz, V., White, R. (eds) European Democratization since 1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333983317_3
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