Commissions of inquiry and Russell’s initial cross-party proposals

The 1831–2 boundary commission for England and Wales belongs to a group of investigative bodies of the British state called commissions of inquiry. Commissions of inquiry have a long lineage, originating in the Domesday Inquiry of 1086.¹¹ Having fallen into abeyance by the mid-eighteenth century, they were resurrected during the 1780s as part of the governmental drive for economic reform and increased in frequency from 1806 as part of a further push to streamline legal and military institutions, as well as the national finances.¹² Commissions of inquiry were also used as a tool for investigating episodic domestic and colonial issues that could not be solved by select committees at Westminster. An important forerunner of the boundary commission was the 1818 charity commission, which established a template for roving assistant commissioners, whose reports from across the country were overseen by a central cross-party committee of parliamentarians.¹³ In keeping with the push for economic reform, the vast majority of commissioners since 1780 had been unpaid parliamentarians, with assistant commissioners and clerks receiving remuneration. The majority of non-parliamentary appointments were usually barristers, but depending on the expertise required, financiers, engineers, chemists and physicists occasionally served as commissioners – such as on the 1819 investigation into the forgery of bank notes and the 1827 commission into London’s water supply.¹⁴

It is important to acknowledge that the 1831–2 boundary commissions (Irish and Scottish commissions were established on the template of the English and Welsh commission discussed here) inhabited a legal grey area. While referred to by contemporaries and in official reports as commissions, they were never accorded the formal status of a royal commission or commission of inquiry as their commissioners were never appointed by parliament or the crown. Instead, they worked from August 1831 on the somewhat dubious authority of the home secretary’s capacity to gather parliamentary returns from the localities. At the time, the government insisted it was necessary to exercise this legal loophole on the basis that reformed boundaries needed to be identified (and approved by parliament) as soon as possible prior to new elections taking place.¹⁵ If the government’s second reform bill had not been rejected in October 1831, the boundary commission’s preliminary reports would have been formally approved by a formal commission of inquiry (which would have included the commissioners entrusted with completing preliminary reports). However, by the time the government introduced its third reform bill in December 1831 the commission’s reports were almost complete. Instead of using the reform bill to establish a commission of inquiry, as had been intended in their second bill, the government opted to expedite the process by publishing the boundary commission’s reports as a parliamentary return and submitting their recommendations to parliamentary scrutiny via a separate boundary bill.¹⁶ This backstory helps, in part, to explain why the boundary commission has not been noticed by historians of public administration, as their analysis of commissions of inquiry has been rooted in parliamentary returns that list official commissions.¹⁷ It is also a reflection of the Grey government’s legal inexperience and initial lack of preparation over the fine details of reform from November 1830, the exigencies of parliamentary debate about reform throughout 1831 and the emergence of an increasingly bullish attitude among cabinet members towards implementing boundary reform from August 1831.

The government started planning for a boundary commission in May 1831, when it became clear that the ongoing general election would return a majority in favour of reform. On 22 May, Grey asked Russell to propose modifications to the reform bill that might make it more amenable to its opponents.¹⁸ In doing so, Russell mooted a cross-party committee of seven to oversee boundary reform. He also urged Grey to:

think of the [boundary] commissioners to be named. I should say that some of the ejected members, such as Knatchbull, Cartwright and Dickinson would do very well. With three friends, and one such man as Lord Rosslyn, who is neither Lib Tory, nor new Whig.¹⁹

Edward Knatchbull, William Cartwright and William Dickinson had all voted against the reform bill in April and lost their seats at the ensuing general election.²⁰ Lord Rosslyn had been lord privy seal under the previous administration, was an ‘old-Tory’ and a close friend of Wellington.²¹ By proposing a cross-party committee, Russell sought to address Tory and ultra-Tory complaints, which, as discussed in the previous chapter, had perceived boundary reform as an unconstitutional attempt to redefine the electoral system in favour of Whig interests. Russell’s suggestions also maintained the trend for cross-party parliamentary committees, containing active ‘committee men’ – Knatchbull and Rosslyn in this instance – that had been characteristic of the Wellington administration between 1828 and 1830.²²

Grey approved the suggestion for conventional, cross-party committees, prompting Russell’s submission of an extended list of commissioners to the cabinet by 17 July.²³ It identified nine potential county commissioners and eight borough commissioners (Table 3.1) – Knatchbull being the only surviving name from his original suggestions. These seventeen men comprised a combination of twelve former and current parliamentarians representing a broad spectrum of views over reform, as well as five parliamentary and legal officials. Both committees contained a combination of three Whig and three Tory committee men, and eleven of the proposed members had experience of sitting on, or providing evidence to, royal commissions of inquiry or select committees. Russell’s proposals suggested he was aware that some combination of scientific, parliamentary and legal expertise would be essential to the work of both commissions. Seven of his candidates were fellows of the Royal Society; four were privy counsellors; one was sergeant in arms to the Lords; and one was clerk assistant to the Lords. It was hoped that the scientific backgrounds of four of the Royal Society fellows – William Sturges Bourne, Knatchbull, Thomas Frankland Lewis and the marquess of Lansdowne (a member of the cabinet) – would counterbalance their moderate views respecting reform.²⁴ Aside from this, there is little evidence that Russell completed any planning for how the commissions would work in practice. It is likely that the legal experts and the less senior, retired or former parliamentarians were envisaged as active travelling commissioners, while the senior parliamentarians would have been based in London.²⁵ Edward Littleton’s remark upon being asked to be a commissioner on 22 July, ‘I accepted – so no Penkridge shooting this year’, suggests that Russell had only told potential commissioners to clear a considerable time in their autumn and winter schedules.²⁶

Table 3.1: Lord John Russell’s initial suggestions to Grey for boundary commissioners.

Ultimately, only four of Russell’s July suggestions appeared on the final list of thirty-one commissioners announced in parliament on 1 September 1831 – Francis Beaufort, Littleton, Henry Martin and William Courtenay (Table 3.2).²⁷ In a number of cases the candidates put forward by Russell were agreed to in cabinet on 17 July, but due to unavailability or unwillingness did not accept.²⁸ In keeping with Russell’s reasoning that the committee needed to appear politically bi-partisan, replacements were identified for the four moderate, but scientifically minded, reformers who had either turned down the opportunity to sit on the committee, or had been rejected in cabinet.²⁹ Notably, Davies Gilbert, Tory MP and president of the Royal Society, Henry Hallam, a fellow of the Royal Society and Whig historian known to be at odds with his party towards reform, and Sir James Willoughby Gordon, fellow of the Royal Society and MP who had to absent himself from the first reform bill debates due to his opposition to the bill.³⁰ Gordon’s selection, at least, was probably Grey’s handiwork.³¹ The identification of three further commissioners can also be attributed to the personal recommendations of cabinet ministers: Thomas Birch, Melbourne’s former private secretary; James Abercromby, chief baron of Scotland, who had asked Brougham to nominate him; and William Tallents, a bi-partisan political agent and returning officer for the borough of Newark, whom Brougham also recommended.³² The principal difference between Russell’s July committees and those announced in parliament on 1 September was that they contained fourteen men associated with the reform-minded mass education institution, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and seven officers from the royal engineers or royal artillery with close ties to the ongoing ordnance survey.

Table 3.2: Proposed county and borough boundary committee, 1 September 1831.

The march of Brougham, Drummond and the SDUK

Born and raised in Edinburgh and heir to a ‘modest paternal estate’ near Penrith, Henry Brougham was educated at the University of Edinburgh. As a member of the ‘Edinburgh Literati’ of the 1790s he attended classes on moral philosophy under Dugald Stewart, mathematics under John Playfair, chemistry under Joseph Black and law under John Millar and David Hume.³³ His ‘complex mind and indomitable ego’ were evident from an early age, publishing two articles on optics and light in the Transactions of the Royal Society by 1797. A prolific polymath, over the following decade he wrote with unabashed self-assuredness on mathematics, physical and natural sciences, political economy and the law, particularly in the Edinburgh Review that he helped launch in 1802 with his friends Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner and Sydney Smith.³⁴ He trained as a barrister in London from 1803 and secured a seat in the Commons in 1810, where he associated initially with the radical Whigs. He was noted for his debating talent but also skill at fuelling the mistrust of Tory ministerialists and much of the Whig aristocracy. Having acted as the high-profile attorney general to Queen Caroline during 1820, his election for Yorkshire in 1830 affirmed his position as one of the country’s most popular politicians. On the formation of the Grey ministry in November 1830, he eventually accepted the post of lord chancellor, when he was elevated to the peerage as first Baron Brougham and Vaux. Importantly, for many Whigs who distrusted him, Brougham’s appointment removed him from the Commons.³⁵

As a reformer, Brougham’s most enduring efforts prior to 1830 were made in the cause of popular education. He was closely involved in the British and Foreign School Society during the 1810s and established the 1816 select committee on education that ultimately prompted the formation of the 1818 charity commission. He was closely involved with Birkbeck London Mechanics Institute from 1824 and founded the London University (now University College London) in 1826. The most innovative outlet for Brougham’s educational reform ambitions was the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK). He established the society in 1826 with a number of reform-minded lawyers, educators and politicians (including the future cabinet members Russell, Althorp and Denman) to use new printing and distribution technologies to mass-publish affordable educational material. By 1831 the Society comprised an extensive national network of progressive intellectuals and reformers, who contributed to its considerable publishing output of cheap treatises respecting science, history, art, ancient scholarship and modern literature.³⁶

The SDUK professed to be operating above party politics but was frequently linked in contemporary Tory discourse with the recently established London University (which shared many founding members). Both institutions were seen by reactionaries as part of a secular, radical movement responsible for the oft-mocked ‘march of intellect’ – which allowed satirists such as William Heath to envision a Brougham-inspired dystopian future of literate street sellers, chess-playing butchers, steam-powered flying ships and bridges across the Channel (Figure 3.1).³⁷ In reality the politically active members of the SDUK varied in their ideological outlook. Its council represented a mixture of Benthamites, philosophic Whigs and radicals associated with the Edinburgh Review, young Whigs with a more ‘rural’ outlook such as Althorp, and some moderate Canningites or liberal Tories more frequently associated with the Political Economy Club.³⁸ What the SDUK, under Brougham’s active supervision, and its association with the avowedly secular London University did represent, however, was an active challenge to the established Anglican institutional order. As Rosemary Ashton has demonstrated, the SDUK’s geographic association with the progressive or ‘godless’ area of Bloomsbury in north London further encouraged this perception, by physically distancing itself from London’s traditional power base of Westminster, as well as England’s ancient Anglican universities of Oxford and Cambridge.³⁹

Russell was also an active member of the SDUK, but, probably conscious of the society’s political reputation, had made little recourse to its members when nominating his original committee.⁴⁰ Francis Beaufort, hydrographer of the navy since 1829, and John George Shaw Lefevre, a member of the Political Economy Club as well as Althorp’s land conveyancer, were the only SDUK members on Russell’s original list – and Lefevre, who later chaired the county commission, was removed from the list of commissioners announced on 1 September.⁴¹ The selection of Beaufort does indicate that Russell was aware any boundary commission would require geographic expertise. As well as co-ordinating the mapping of the world’s oceans, Beaufort was an active member of the Royal Society, Royal Geographical Society, Royal Astronomical Society and the SDUK’s map committee.⁴² His biographer has suggested that Sir James Graham, first lord of the admiralty, secured his nomination to the boundary commission.⁴³ However, it seems probable that Russell would have known of Beaufort through the SDUK, and that Beaufort’s multiple professional affiliations meant that Russell saw him as the perfect apolitical ‘scientific’ expert required for the commission.

It was Brougham and his discussions with his friend Charles Henry Bellenden Ker that initiated the major changes in the commission’s personnel by September 1831. Ker was a conveyancing barrister and active SDUK member who had established the SDUK map committee with Beaufort in 1828 – an ambitious project to print an affordable world atlas, that Ker hoped would ‘find its way into every house in the empire’.⁴⁴ In contrast with Beaufort, Ker was an active philosophic-Whig reformer, closely associated with Brougham in Westminster’s reforming circles since his 1819 publication of a pamphlet highlighting the deficiencies of the 1818 charity commission. He had provided evidence to the select committees on property law during the 1820s and was Brougham’s nominee for the 1828 real property commission, but was rejected by Peel.⁴⁵ He had stood unsuccessfully as a reformer at St. Mawes in 1831.⁴⁶ In July 1831, Ker reportedly recommended that Brougham discuss the boundary commission with their SDUK colleague Thomas Drummond.⁴⁷

Thomas Drummond was born in Edinburgh, one of four siblings in a debt-laden Whig family. He grew up in Musselburgh under the care of his mother and attended a local grammar school where he received private tutoring during the summers from George Jardine, professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of Glasgow. Following a resettlement of the family’s debts, Drummond commenced the study of mathematics, natural philosophy and chemistry at Edinburgh University, aged thirteen, under John Leslie and Brougham’s favourite mathematics tutor, John Playfair. Drummond left Scotland, aged fifteen, following his appointment to a cadetship at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. A gifted mathematician, he quickly worked his way through the academy’s ranks, and by July 1815 had secured a position with the royal engineers. Over the next five years he assumed various roles before joining the board of ordnance’s survey of Scotland and England in 1820.⁴⁸ Drummond remained with the board of ordnance when the survey of Ireland commenced in 1824, working closely with Thomas Colby, superintendent of the ordnance, until 1829. While in Ireland, Drummond rose to prominence after combining his inventive mind, engineering skills and scientific knowledge to modify the heliostat, compensation bars and limelight for the specific purposes of surveying in Ireland’s treacherous conditions.⁴⁹ His modifications to Gurney’s limelight, which became known as ‘the Drummond light’, brought him to London by 1829, where he was commissioned by the Trinity House Corporation with developing limelight for use in lighthouses. His demonstrations of the light at Trinity House and in Purfleet excited considerable public attention during 1830. These experiments also brought him to the attention of scientific society. He became a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in May 1830, gave a lecture on limelight to the Royal Society in June 1830 and dined with William IV at the Royal Pavilion in January 1831.⁵⁰

Brougham’s desire to see Drummond’s light led to their meeting at Ker’s house in March 1831. Drummond recorded that during his demonstration of the light in Ker’s greenhouse:

the chancellor [Brougham] seemed greatly afraid of his eye, and could hardly be persuaded to look at it [Drummond’s light]. I spied him, however, peeping at a corner, and immediately turned the reflector full upon him, but he fled instanter. He [Brougham] started immediately afterwards, at eleven o’clock, for Lord Grey’s.⁵¹

This demonstration was sufficient for Drummond to be welcomed into the SDUK. In April 1831, he dined with the SDUK council and started attending meetings of the map committee with Ker and Beaufort. Later that year he was formally proposed as an SDUK council member by Brougham and Ker.⁵² Brougham met Drummond several times during July 1831 to discuss the potential scope of a boundary commission. The latter’s experience working for the ordnance survey impressed Brougham sufficiently for him to recommend in cabinet that Drummond should supervise a preliminary working committee of the commission.⁵³ Following this, cabinet responsibility for organising the boundary commission shifted from Russell to Brougham.

From the first week of August 1831, Brougham, Ker and Drummond started contacting a network of friends, SDUK associates and engineers with sufficient time and finances to take up a non-salaried role on a working committee of the boundary commission (see Tables 3.2 and 3.3). John Wrottesley and Thomas Flower Ellis, two further members of the SDUK map committee, were appointed. Ker’s uncle, Henry Gawler, a barrister who had recently written an article on the operation of the poor laws for the SDUK, was nominated, as were George Barrett-Lennard and Benjamin Ansley, who along with Wrottesley had previously been directors of the Metropolitan Loan and Investment Company, for which Ker had acted as a legal counsel.⁵⁴ SDUK committee attendee William Ord, regular SDUK contributor John Elliot Drinkwater, and SDUK correspondent and reform pamphleteer Henry Tancred, also agreed to work for the commission.⁵⁵ John Romilly, council member of the London University and committee member alongside Ord on the ‘Loyal and Patriotic Fund for Assisting Reform’, was also appointed.⁵⁶

Brougham had also encouraged Drummond to nominate ‘gentlemen who would perhaps make an active and useful member of the reform commission’. This resulted in Richard Sheepshanks, astronomer and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Francis Baily, president of the Royal Astronomical Society, Colonel Frederick Page, who had recently written a treatise on the poor law, and John Chapman, royal artillery officer, being contacted. Sheepshanks accepted, but Page and Baily declined as they were ‘much occupied with their own private business’.⁵⁷ Chapman became one of seven royal artillery or royal engineers officers (including Drummond) recruited to the working committee. Chapman was working for the ordnance survey of Ireland when contacted by Drummond, as was Robert Kearsley Dawson, who Drummond enlisted to manage a separate team of surveyors who were to work alongside the commissioners.⁵⁸ The manner in which the four other officers were appointed remains unclear. It is likely that the SDUK map committee were aware of Henry Rowland Brandreth, a royal engineer who had completed a survey and report of the Ascension Islands for the navy during 1830.⁵⁹ However, the whereabouts of William Wylde, Robert Saunders and Richard Scott during 1830 and 1831 are uncertain. The SDUK map committee would have known of Scott, as he had recently published a topographical account of Hayling Island, and Wylde’s large private collection of maps makes it likely that the map committee also knew him. Saunders was a Waterloo veteran and retired royal artillery officer, who was later derided as a ‘poor aristocrat’ when serving as a factory inspector between 1833 until his death in 1852.⁶⁰

These recruits, along with Tallents and Birch (whom Brougham and Melbourne had already identified), formed the twenty-one-man working committee of the English and Welsh boundary commission that commenced operations by the end of August 1831. The close affiliation that most of these commissioners had with Brougham, the SDUK, and to a lesser extent the London University represented a distinct departure from Russell’s original intention that the boundary commissions be established on a conventional, cross-party basis. Furthermore, in comparison to Russell’s original nominations, the working committee had very little official government experience. The only member to have worked for the government at Westminster was Thomas Birch, Melbourne’s private secretary from 1827 to 1828.⁶¹ The only member with any experience attending parliamentary committees or commissions of inquiry was Ker. Four of the committee’s members – Wrottesley, Barrett-Lennard, Romilly and Ord – were linked to prominent Whig families. However, the political fortunes of their fathers had meant their legal expertise, and reforming ambitions, had only previously been put to use in the extra-parliamentary domain. And, while the royal engineers and royal artillery officers had experience working in an official capacity for the state, their work had never previously been directly linked to the legislative process. What these seven officers (including Drummond), and the four SDUK map committee members, did introduce to the committee was a considerable core of surveying and cartographical expertise. In contrast with the primarily legalistic outlook of Russell’s original nominations for commissioners, the working committee now contained a broad amalgam of legal and geographic experts. This synthesis of knowledge was crucial in terms of defining how the committee sought to reconstruct England’s electoral map.

Science, statistics and cartography: Drummond’s inductive method for boundary reform

The Grey government’s proposals for boundary reform had caused considerable controversy since their introduction in March 1831. As discussed in the previous chapter, one of the chief concerns of both anti-reformers and reformers had been that the Grey ministry would gerrymander the electoral system in favour of Whig or aristocratic electoral interests. The government needed to navigate boundary reform carefully, particularly if their proposals were to secure parliamentary approval. During June and July 1831, they provided repeated assurances and worked with opposition parliamentarians to identify some form of mutually agreeable framework for setting boundaries. By July these efforts had focused on securing a traditional cross-party commission to formulate proposals. However, once Brougham and Drummond took over planning for the commission by August 1831 this cross-party framework stood on thin ground. Instead, under Brougham and Drummond’s influence, focus was placed on the scientific personnel and methods of the commission as a means of assuring parliamentarians that boundaries could be proposed in an impartial manner.

In the early nineteenth century, ‘science’ was often used as a catch-all expression to denote knowledge that in one way or another had been reduced to a system. Contemporaries happily spoke of military science, the science of law, politics, finance and even religion, alongside what we would think of today as the natural sciences.⁶² By 1830 science as a practice and idea was also increasingly associated with the politics of reform. This was thanks largely to the rise of gentlemanly scientific society culture from the later 1790s, which promoted such disciplines as chemistry, geology and natural history; the influence of political economy on liberal-Tory ministries during the 1820s; and the establishment of mechanics’ institutes and the SDUK in the 1820s, which sought to expand scientific learning to the masses. For many Whigs in the Grey ministry, ‘the all conquering science’, as Lansdowne had termed it in 1824, and its proliferation and widespread application across society, explained their sense of a march of progress, and Britain’s continuing journey to a higher plane of civilisation, since the Napoleonic wars.⁶³

Science lay at the root of Whig identity and their ambitions for reform. As Joe Bord has demonstrated, experience of inter-partisan cooperation at scientific societies from the 1810s led to the belief among a new generation of Whigs that similar cooperation might be engendered in the political sphere.⁶⁴ For cabinet ministers such as Brougham this conviction was underpinned by a commitment to an ‘enlightenment ideal’ that believed ‘science was not confined to chemistry and optics’ but offered ‘a universally applicable method of arriving at knowledge’.⁶⁵ In particular, this marked out the 1820s as a period of growing enthusiasm for statistics among Whiggish and reforming legislators and helped give rise to the emerging social science movement. In September 1831, as the boundary commission commenced its work, the Whig MP for Northamptonshire and close friend of the cabinet Viscount Milton, presided over a ‘Festival of Science’ at York that led to the formation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS).⁶⁶ In his opening speech Milton spoke of ‘impressing on the government of this country … the necessity of affording it [science] due encouragement, and of giving every proper stimulus to its advancement’.⁶⁷

Within two years the BAAS had established a statistical section, whose secretary John Elliot Drinkwater had acted as a boundary commissioner, and whose leading advocates were the polymath William Whewell, the physicist and astronomer John Herschel, the mathematician Charles Babbage, and the political economist and future tithe commissioner Richard Jones. They had spent the previous decade at the University of Cambridge taking formative steps towards developing an inductive method of ‘social economy’ that embraced the statistical approaches of the Belgian astronomer and mathematician Adolphe Quetelet. Importantly, they rejected the ‘rigidly deductive’ approach of political economists such as David Ricardo in favour of ‘measuring, collecting, tabulating, and calculating … [and] reasoning on the basis of data collected’. By 1830, even the most cautious of this set, Herschel, was able to look forward to a time when ‘legislation and politics become gradually regarded as experimental sciences’.⁶⁸ In 1834 these figures were the driving force behind the foundation of the Statistical Society of London and were influential in the formation of the Manchester Statistical Society. As Theodore Porter has argued, both societies advocated the creation of a ‘science of government’ through ‘the accumulation of simple, irrefutable facts’.⁶⁹

It was in this intellectual context that Drummond worked with cabinet ministers to establish ‘general principles’ for identifying parliamentary boundaries.⁷⁰ The home secretary, Viscount Melbourne, provided Drummond with formal authorisation to commence making arrangements for a commission on 8 August, providing a skeletal outline of the government’s initial expectations for the commission.⁷¹ With the support of two draftsmen, Drummond began making technical arrangements for the boundary commission at its Westminster headquarters in the robing room in the privy council office on Whitehall.⁷² A typical working day lasted between 10:00 and 19:00, and during August consisted of ‘frequent communications and interviews’ with Brougham, Althorp and Russell, who acted as intermediaries between Drummond and the cabinet.⁷³ These meetings allowed Drummond to develop his more detailed 23 August guidelines, intended to standardise the commissioners’ approach to boundary setting across every English and Welsh borough.⁷⁴

Drummond sought to establish an inductive method for defining electoral communities based on observation and fact, which avoided partisan politics and allowed for boundaries to be defined with ‘as much uniformity, as the very irregular and occasionally difficult nature of the subject will admit’.⁷⁵ He proposed that the commission should complete an up-to-date cartographical survey of every English and Welsh borough and its surrounding areas, ascertain its ancient parliamentary and extra-parliamentary boundaries, and identify, from a variety of local sources, the number of £10 householders in the borough and surrounding areas. This data was to be complemented with a statistical and socio-economic survey of each borough that considered ‘the employment of the surrounding population, their connection with the town or with the country, [and] their municipal or rural character’. Each borough survey was required to evaluate ‘the direction in which a town is increasing’ in order that ‘the boundary determined to-day may not require alteration tomorrow’.⁷⁶

He established a strict set of criteria for identifying a borough’s future electoral community. No recourse to public opinion regarding local preference for, or the political implications of, potential boundaries was to be made. If a borough contained fewer than 300 £10 householders, the most suitable area with comparable social and economic interests within seven miles was to be found with which to increase the borough’s electorate. If a borough contained more than 300 £10 householders, reformed boundaries were to encompass the modern extent of the borough and allow for a century’s worth of town expansion.⁷⁷ Drummond organised the working committee around nine teams of two commissioners. Each team was assigned a district in England or Wales containing twenty to thirty boroughs – seven teams were assigned to England (Table 3.3).⁷⁸ The commissioners were to be supported by a centrally organised team of mostly locally based surveyors and draftsmen under the supervision of Dawson. The commissioners were to be provided with expenses only, while the surveyors and draftsmen were paid on an hourly basis. Drummond was authorised by the treasury to open an account with Greenwood, Cox & Co., banking agents, who financed the commission’s daily operations.⁷⁹

As well as containing ‘men of science’ associated with the ordnance survey and the SDUK, the substantive scientific claims of the boundary commission revolved around its mechanical application of cartographic and statistical data to arrive at a set of apparently disinterested proposals. Creating a map of each constituency was an integral aspect of the commission’s work, and Drummond enlisted a considerable body of surveying expertise from the ordnance survey, to ensure that accurate, up-to-date maps provided the foundation for reformed boundaries. When the commission started its work in August 1831 it did not have access to official maps containing town plans of each parliamentary borough or their existing boundaries. The ordnance survey of Britain – which had started in 1791 – was still incomplete and had ground to a halt by 1825. In that year, work began on the ordnance survey of Ireland, which was still underway in 1831. In 1831 official trigonometrical surveying remained to be completed on the north of England and Scotland. For areas where surveying had been completed by the ordnance survey, English and Welsh town plans were at best six years out of date. In some cases – such as for constituencies in Kent – the ordnance survey reflected the state of urban development prior to the Napoleonic wars. The unavailability of basic official maps was resolved by making use of commercially available maps produced by independent surveyors such as Christopher Greenwood and Andrew Bryant. By 1831 both had completed their own detailed triangulations of the north of England. Their maps of England’s southern counties also contained the most up-to-date basic town plans of most English boroughs.

Table 3.3: Working committee of the boundary commission (by district).1

To ensure that the boundary commissioners could complete their work, Drummond oversaw the creation of enlarged, up-to-date plans of every English and Welsh borough using official and unofficial maps at a scale of two inches to one mile. This was undertaken by a team of seventy surveyors, nine lithographers and ten colourers, that Drummond recruited to work in London, or locally with the commissioners in each borough. From late August 1831 the team of London-based surveyors completed at least one enlarged tracing of every constituency for England and Wales. These tracings were sent to the boundary commissioners ahead of their arrival in each constituency, who were accompanied by at least one or two surveyors. In each locality the commissioners and their surveyors refined and updated their basic town plans, documented local legal boundaries (many known only to local officials) and recorded their proposed parliamentary boundary. By creating an accurate bird’s eye view of a constituency, Drummond created the first building block with which a disinterested bureaucrat might be able to identify a parliamentary boundary.

Statistical inquiry was the second technique applied by the commission. Prior to the commission’s commencement, the reform bill had prompted the creation of a plethora of electoral statistics that revealed that the demographic data contained in the 1821 and 1831 census was lacking in sufficient detail for boundary reform. This information included what was known centrally about the limits of existing parliamentary boroughs; data relating to recent elections and the specific franchise of each borough; copies of memorials and petitions submitted by individual boroughs relating to the reform bill; 1821 and 1831 census returns for each borough and its surrounds; the number of houses in each borough and their value according to the inhabited house duty; and the annual amount of assessed taxes contributed by each borough during the previous decade.⁸⁰

The commissioners were to build on these statistics and develop a body of personally verified electoral data, focused on population, household valuations and taxation data. To collect this information, Drummond instructed the commissioners to liaise with local officials in every borough – such as overseers of the poor, surveyors of taxes and clerks of the peace – as well as ‘intelligent men’ in each locality. If officials were not forthcoming with information, letters from the home office demanding information could be provided. Drummond warned the commissioners to be wary of local officials, and advised cross-referencing multiple data sources in each borough and, if necessary, a personal valuation of houses. Drummond was to complete a personal review of this data in London, demanding amendments and further investigation where inconsistencies appeared. As every step in the commissioners’ data collection process was to be completed by personal investigation, Drummond claimed that all boundaries would bypass the ‘ignorance and insolence’ of local officials, and the ‘deception’ of parties motivated to provide information for political ends.⁸¹

The commissioners met Drummond either in groups or individually in London during late August and early September 1831. At these meetings he advised each commissioner to keep a journal detailing every interaction in each borough, in order that they could substantiate their proposals in front of a planned parliamentary committee.⁸² The first commissioners to commence their work were Tallents and Sheepshanks, who had submitted their first report to Drummond by 31 August – a day before the government announced its boundary commissioners to parliament.⁸³ Unsurprisingly, the government’s claim to have identified an impartial scientific means of redrawing constituency boundaries was met with scepticism. The additional revelation that a secret committee of boundary commissioners had started work without parliamentary permission only further angered the reform bill’s opponents.

‘What in the world has science to do here?’

When the names of the commissioners were announced in parliament on 1 September 1831, MPs only recognised those of a few Whig sons – Ord, Wrottesley, Romilly and Barrett-Lennard – as well as that of Ker, who had achieved a degree of infamy in Westminster during the previous decade due to his links with Brougham.⁸⁴ Given the SDUK’s partisan reputation, anti-reformers missed an opportunity to embarrass the government by failing to connect the commissioners with the society. Although the Standard termed the commissioners ‘abject creatures of the cabinet’, the ultra-Tory John Bull conceded they were ‘wholly unexceptionable, for … they never were heard of before’.⁸⁵ It was Althorp’s wider claims regarding the impartial and scientific character of the commission that provoked most fury. For traditional Tories Althorp’s use of a language of science revealed the government’s desire to assimilate a new generation of liberal political economists into the administration of the British state.⁸⁶

The Morning Post led this charge, dismissing the commissioners as a new breed of ‘political architects’ trained on the mathematical teachings of ‘Cocker and a slate pencil’⁸⁷ and the trigonometrical techniques of ‘Colonel Colby and the Irish [ordnance] survey’.⁸⁸ It lamented that ‘England shall be squared and parcelled like a harlequin’s jacket’ and mocked the idea that Althorp had been ‘studying the rudiments of mathematical policy, and learning how to rule kingdoms by compasses and the quadrant’. Preferring any boundary commission to rely on the knowledge and oversight of local officials, it mockingly asked:

What in the world has science to do here? Is the division [of counties] to be geological according to minerals or strata? Or is it to be astronomical, by latitudes and transits? If not we had rather trust [boundary reform] to the fattest justice of the peace, who had grown old upon his district, than to the thinnest geometrician who ever measured the habitable globe.⁸⁹

Whether the announcement of the commissioners helped to convince more liberally minded Tories, such as Peel, is difficult to say, as he did not respond during the debate. It is unlikely, however, that his ‘strenuous opposition’ to ‘riding commissioners’ had changed. A month earlier he had reasoned that parliament had ‘details enough before them’ to decide on new boundaries, either during debate or in select committee, and that enfranchising 40s. freeholders in their respective boroughs, rather than counties, would remove the need for any significant changes to England’s borough constituencies.⁹⁰

The reform bill’s supporters were more positive. The Times (which had spent the previous three weeks violently criticising the government over their plans to divide the counties) welcomed the naming of commissioners on the basis that it made the bill’s passage ‘more certain’.⁹¹ The paper also signalled its approval of Althorp, Drummond and Brougham’s scientific ambitions for the commission. It viewed the commission’s task in grandiose terms, expressing hope that the commissioners would bring ‘order out of confusion’ to the electoral system, as the Court of Fire had done following the Great Fire of London, ‘when all boundaries of premises were obliterated, and all local rights and jurisdictions confounded’. While The Times acknowledged that the commission had ‘a difficult work to perform’, it expressed its full confidence that through effective management, ‘uniformity will undoubtedly be attained, and all anomalies made to disappear’.⁹² Such a glowing appraisal, in comparison to the paper’s editorial stance over the previous weeks is best explained by Brougham’s close relationship with the paper’s editor, Barnes.⁹³ As a further sign of Brougham’s influence, in the same editorial, The Times defended Brougham’s close friend and boundary commissioner, Ker, against the recriminations of the MP for Guildford, Charles Baring Wall. Wall had objected to Ker’s nomination on the basis that he was an ‘unaccommodating and unquiet individual’.⁹⁴

The Times’s endorsement did little to prevent mounting opposition anger over subsequent days, when reports of the commissioners’ activities trickled in from the localities. On 3 September the Standard reported that ‘the commissioners who were appointed, or rather named, on Thursday night … have already (whether prematurely or not remains to be proved) commenced their labours. They assemble with a great number of clerks every day at the council office’.⁹⁵ On 5 September opposition MPs sought to halt the commission, on the basis that it had commenced operations without statutory approval. Baring Wall shared some correspondence from a constituent with the Commons, which he had initially read with ‘unfeigned astonishment’.⁹⁶ It transpired that commissioners Drinkwater and Saunders together with Dawson, had been collecting information in Guildford since 26 August. Most alarmingly, they had compelled parish overseers and churchwardens to provide information under the authority of the home secretary. Opposition MPs were outraged – Baring Wall informed a political confidant he was ‘mad about this part of the bill’, and Charles Wetherell announced that it was a ‘monstrous infringement of the privileges of parliament’. Accordingly, Wetherell proposed a parliamentary motion to prevent the commissioners from completing any further work on the grounds of their illegality.⁹⁷

Opposition MPs were correct to point out that in contrast to a royal commission of inquiry, the working committee had not received the prior authorisation of an act of parliament. As a check on executive power, since 1688, non-emergency, administrative royal commissions had required statutory approval.⁹⁸ Althorp defended the government’s actions by arguing that the committee’s work represented an extension of the home secretary’s authority to demand legal documents from parishes or corporations.⁹⁹ He also tried to reassure the Commons that the working committee were only compiling preliminary reports, which were to be considered by a full commission of thirty-one after the reform bill had passed into law. He apologised for the fact that the committee had started their work prior to the naming of the commissioners but stated this had only occurred due to the unforeseen length of the reform bill’s committee stage. Decisively, the pro-reform majority in the Commons indicated that, while imperfect, they were willing to accept the government’s rationale. As well as putting an end to Wetherell’s proposed wrecking motion, this de facto parliamentary approval of the working committee was sufficient for Drummond to proceed at pace in implementing his scientific plans for redrawing England’s electoral map.

Conclusion

The 1831–2 boundary commission for England and Wales established a pioneering bureaucratic model for the personnel, methods and ideas used to reform the British state during the 1830s and 1840s. Studies of state formation in the late Hanoverian and early Victorian period, which have not acknowledged the boundary commission, instead suggest that this transformative period of legislative inquiry commenced with the royal commissions on the poor laws (established in 1832), factories and municipal corporations (both established in 1833).¹⁰⁰ The detailed study of recruitment and planning for the 1831–2 boundary commission provided here revises this historiography, establishing Drummond (and to a lesser extent Brougham) as a major intellectual and practical influence for subsequent commissions and inspectorates. Importantly, instead of viewing the 1832 Reform Act as a convenient chronological marker for the social reforms that followed, the practical need to implement electoral reform during 1831 and 1832 needs to be understood as crucial in establishing a template for subsequent domestic inquiries and legislation. In this regard, the boundary commission was a key moment in the ‘slow and fitful process’ of British state growth during the nineteenth century, a process that historians have generally agreed owed more to individual impetus than any consistent strategy – let alone governing consensus – for how administrative reform should take place.¹⁰¹ If Drummond’s experiments with limelight had not brought him to Brougham’s attention during the early months of 1831, the future of electoral reform, and the wider evolution of the British state, might have looked very different.

As it transpired, the example set by Drummond and Brougham in establishing the boundary commission initiated a major shift in the governing attitudes of the Grey ministry during the summer of 1831. The experience was crucial in demonstrating to politicians like Russell – who was central to the Whig reform agenda for the next two decades – that ‘system, method, [and] science’ were practicable as a governmental strategy.¹⁰² In this regard, the difference in bureaucratic aspiration between Russell’s initial plans for a ‘cross-party’ committee in May 1831 and Drummond’s meticulously organised commission of August 1831 are startling. Having discarded a traditional cross-party approach, the government and Drummond resorted to science as a methodological and rhetorical device to assure opponents, and themselves, that England’s electoral map could be redrawn in a politically objective manner. To an extent this reflected a genuine belief among a number of leading Whigs in the virtues of science and its potential to underpin a new era of disinterested bureaucracy. As this and subsequent chapters demonstrate, this belief was best embodied by Drummond, who drew on his experience on the ordnance survey, and as a mathematician and chemist, to create an innovative, inductive framework for the identification of reformed parliamentary boundaries. The resort to a political rhetoric of science, as exemplified by Althorp’s announcement of the commissioners to the Commons in September 1831, was also in keeping with a wider cultural enthusiasm for science in Whig and progressive intellectual circles by the early 1830s. This enthusiasm – particularly that for the legislative possibility of statistics – encapsulated an emerging view that bureaucracy and political decision-making might be transformed into an apparently disinterested, mechanical model.

That said, Drummond’s bureaucratic model and its scientific trappings (both practical and rhetorical) afforded several clear political benefits to the Grey ministry. And, any claims that the boundary commission (and subsequent commissions and inspectorates) represented a form of literal bureaucratic impartiality have to be treated with scepticism. In terms of recruitment, the fears of anti-reformers during 1831 (see Chapter 2) proved well founded. Discarding a cross-party framework, and justifying their appointments on the basis of their status as men of science, allowed the Grey ministry to enlist a boundary commission staffed largely by their political allies. Second, the process of establishing boundaries was anything but transparent. The methods employed by Drummond remained shrouded in secrecy for several months, and as the next chapter will discuss, maintaining secrecy about the commission’s activities became an increasingly important aspect of Drummond’s scientific framework. And third, while Drummond established a mechanical model with which to consistently identify boundaries, the broader basis for what a borough constituency was supposed to encompass (either its modern town population or a town and its surrounding parishes), as well as authority for how the commission’s cartographic, statistical and qualitative data were to be applied, still rested with the government. If the data collected by Drummond led to a politically questionable boundary settlement, the government still had the power to change how that data was used. It is to Drummond and the commission’s attempts to collect data from the localities that this book turns next.

Notes

1. 1. B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, & Dangerous People?: England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), 589.

2. 2. Hilton, Mad, Bad, 599–602, 608–9.

3. 3. Hansard, 3, vi. (1 Sept. 1831), 982–6; Morning Herald, 2 Sept. 1831.

4. 4. The Times, 2 Sept. 1831; Globe, 2 Sept. 1831.

5. 5. Mirror of Parliament, i. (1 Sept. 1831), 1863; Stamford Mercury, 9 Sept. 1831.

6. 6. P. Salmon, ‘The English Reform Legislation, 1831–32’, in D. Fisher (ed.), The House of Commons, 1820–32, i. (Cambridge, 2009), 400.

7. 7. H. Clokie and J. Robinson, Royal Commissions of Inquiry (New York, 1937); A. Brundage, Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Inquiry, Enactment and Implementation (London, 1978); E. Higgs, Before The Information State: The Central Collection of Information on Citizens since 1500 (Basingstoke, 2004). The exception is Hilton, Mad, Bad, 603.

8. 8. U. R. W. Henriques, Before the Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Britain (London, 1979), 251; O. MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government 1830–1870 (London, 1977), 1–21, 197–205; Lubenow, The Politics of Government Growth (Plymouth, 1971), 15–29.

9. 9. P. Mandler (ed.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2006), 10; P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990); R. Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion, and Reform, 1830–1841 (Oxford, 1987); I. Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 1830–41: The Politics of Government (London, 1990).

10. 10. R. Ashton, Victorian Bloomsbury (London, 2012), 1–81.

11. 11. Clokie and Robinson, Royal Commissions, 26–53.

12. 12. R. Tompson, The Charity Commission and the Age of Reform (London, 1979), 50–54.

13. 13. Tompson, Charity Commission, 116–56.

14. 14. PP1819–20 (64), ii. 399; PP1828 (267), ix. 65.

15. 15. Hansard, 3, vi. (1 Sept. 1831), 982–6.

16. 16. Hansard, 3, ix. (12 Dec. 1831) 151.

17. 17. PP1834 (291), xli. 349; PP1836 (528), xxxvii. 492; PP1837 (290), xxxix. 205; PP1837–38 (346), xxxvi. 191; PP1847–48 (669), xxxix. 295. The exception is Hilton, Mad, Bad, 603.

18. 18. DSC, Grey, B6/3B/9, Durham to Grey, 25 Aug. 1831, 24.

19. 19. DSC, Grey, B50A/6/18, Russell to Grey, 23 May 1831, 1.

20. 20. T. Jenkins, ‘Dickinson, William’, in D. Fisher (ed.), The House of Commons, 1820–32 (Cambridge, 2009), iv. 919–22; S. Farrell, ‘Knatchbull, Sir Edward’, in Fisher, Commons, v. 922–33; M. Casey and P. Salmon, ‘Cartwright, William Ralph’, in Fisher, Commons, iv. 592–5.

21. 21. H. Stephens and J. Sweetman, ‘Erskine, James St Clair (1762–1837)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter ODNB], www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 6 Jun. 2022].

22. 22. P. Jupp, British Politics on the Eve of Reform: The Duke of Wellington’s Administration, 1828–30 (Basingstoke, 1998), 210–16, 233.

23. 23. TNA, PRO 30/22/1B, ‘Russell to Grey’, undated, 157–8; A. Kriegel (ed.), The Holland House Diaries, 1831–1840 (London, 1977), 5; UCL, Brougham, 3, Abercromby to Brougham, undated, 39,600.

24. 24. Kriegel, Holland House, 6.

25. 25. Tompson, Charity Commission, 116–30; J. M. Collinge, Office Holders in Modern Britain, Volume 9, Officials of Royal Commissions of Inquiry 1815–1870 (London, 1984), 9–16.

26. 26. SRO, Hatherton, D260/M/F/5/26/7, 22 July 1831, 78.

27. 27. Hansard, 3, vi. (1 Sept. 1831), 982–6.

28. 28. Kriegel, Holland House, 5–6, 42; SRO, Hatherton, D260/M/F/5/26/7, 21–22 July 1831, 78–80.

29. 29. Hansard, 3, vi. (13 Sept. 1831), 1399–403; Kriegel, Holland House, 5–6.

30. 30. T. Lang, ‘Hallam, Henry (1777–1859)’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 6 June 2022]; D. Miller, ‘Gilbert, Davies (1767–1839)’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 6 June 2022]; T. Jenkins, ‘Gordon, Sir James Willougby’, in Fisher, Commons, v. 308–11.

31. 31. T. Jenkins, ‘Gordon, Sir James Willougby’, in Fisher, Commons, v. 311.

32. 32. PP1830–31 (338) x. 36; ‘Thomas Bernard Birch’, Legacies of British Slavery, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/15128 [accessed 6 June 2022]; UCL, Brougham, 3, Abercromby to Brougham, undated, 39,600; Kriegel, Holland House, 6; R. Gaunt and P. O’Malley, ‘Tallents, William Edward (1780–1837)’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 6 June 2022]; R. Gaunt, Politics, Law and Society in Nottinghamshire: The Diaries of Godfrey Tallents of Newark 1829–1839 (Nottingham, 2010), 26; E. Smith, ‘The Election Agent in English Politics, 1734–1832’, EHR, 134 (1969), 12–35.

33. 33. H. Brougham, The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham (London, 1871), i. 47, 56–7.

34. 34. Brougham, Life and Times, 59; A. Aspinall, Lord Brougham and the Whig Party (Stroud, 2005), 16; W. D. Stockwell, ‘Contributions of Henry Brougham to Classical Political Economy’, History of Political Economy, 23, 4 (1991), 645–73.

35. 35. M. Lobban, ‘Brougham, Henry Peter, first Baron Brougham and Vaux’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 6 June 2022]

36. 36. C. Knight, Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century (London, 1864), 113; M. J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Victorian Britain (Hassocks, 1976), 21, 80.

37. 37. R. Ashton, ‘Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (act. 1826–1846)’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 6 June 2022]; M. C. Grobel, ‘The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1826–1846’ (unpublished University of London MA thesis, 1933).

38. 38. P. Mandler, ‘Tories and Paupers: Christian Political Economy and the Making of the New Poor Law’, Historical Journal, 33, 1 (1990), 94; Mandler, Aristocratic Government, 91, 100, 113; Anonymous, Political Economy Club, Names of Members 1821–1860 (London, 1860); Ashton, Victorian Bloomsbury, 58–81.

39. 39. Ashton, Victorian Bloomsbury, 1–81; A. Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality and the March of Intellect (Durham, N.C., 2001); V. Gray, Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher and Writer (Aldershot, 2006).

40. 40. Kriegel, Holland House, 5–6,

41. 41. M. Curthoys, ‘Lefevre, Sir John George Shaw (1797–1879)’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 6 June 2022].

42. 42. J. Laughton and N. Rodger, ‘Beaufort, Sir Francis (1774–1857)’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 6 June 2022].

43. 43. A. Friendly, Beaufort of the Admiralty (London, 1977), 267.

44. 44. M. Cain, ‘The Maps of the Society of the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: A Publishing History’, Imago Mundi, 46 (1994), 151; M. Brown, ‘How Not to “Regain Paradise”: Henry Bellenden Ker, F.R.S. from 1819 to 1831’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, l (1996), 211–15; C. Carr, A Victorian Law Reformers Correspondence (London, 1955).

45. 45. J. Vaizey, ‘No. 67 “Charles Henry Bellenden Ker”’, The Institute: A Club of Conveyancing Counsel. Memoirs of Former Members, i. (London, 1907), 218–42.

46. 46. D. Fisher, ‘St Mawes’, in Fisher, Commons, ii. 192–3.

47. 47. National Library of Ireland, Drummond Papers, Ker to Dawson, 9 Nov. 1840, 75–6; Captain Larcom, ‘Memoir of the Professional Life of the late Captain Drummond’, Royal Engineers Professional Papers, 4 (1841), xviii–xxii; J. Mclennan, Memoir of Thomas Drummond (Edinburgh, 1867), 142; Brougham, Life and Times, iii. 379.

48. 48. McLennan, Thomas Drummond, 1–36; R. B. O’Brien, Thomas Drummond: Under-Secretary in Ireland 1835–40: Life and Letters (London, 1889), 3–20.

49. 49. C. Close, The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey (Newton Abbot, 1969), 71–6.

50. 50. T. Drummond, ‘On the Illumination of Lighthouses’, Philosophical Trans. Royal Soc. London, 120 (1830), 383–98; McLennan, Thomas Drummond, 113–37; Close, Ordnance Survey, 74.

51. 51. Mclennan, Thomas Drummond, 135–7.

52. 52. UCL Special Collections, Papers of the SDUK [hereafter UCL, SDUK], In-papers, 24, Drummond to Coates, 27 Apr. 1831; UCL, SDUK Map Committee minutes, 6, 16 Apr. 1831; Knight, Passages of a Working Life, 118; Grobel, ‘SDUK’, iv. Appendix, ‘SDUK Committee list’.

53. 53. Larcom, ‘Captain Drummond’, xviii–xxii; Brougham, Life and Times, iii. 379; Mclennan, Thomas Drummond, 142; PP1831–32 (141), xxxviii. 5.

54. 54. UCL, SDUK, In-papers, 29, Gawler to Coates, 25 May 1831; The Times, 14 Apr. 1824, 2.

55. 55. UCL, SDUK, Out-papers 1830–1833, 19, Coates to Ord, 12 Nov. 1831; SDUK, In-papers 24, Drinkwater, John Elliot, 1828–1835; M. Spychal, ‘Tancred, Henry William (1782–1860)’, in P. Salmon and K. Rix (eds.), The House of Commons 1832–1868 (forthcoming).

56. 56. The Times, 31 May, 21 June 1830.

57. 57. UCL, Brougham, 225, Drummond to Brougham, 5 Aug. 1831, 33,076, Drummond to Brougham, 12 Aug. 1831, 39468; The Times, 11 Mar. 1830, 10 Oct. 1863; F. Page, The Principle of the English Poor Laws (London, 1830); Hansard, 3, i. (11 Nov. 1830), 417; W. Ashworth, ‘Baily, Francis (1774–1844)’, ODNB, www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 6 June 2022].

58. 58. McLennan, Thomas Drummond, 143; Close, Early Years, 73, 82.

59. 59. G. Lewis, ‘Memoir of Henry Rowland Brandreth’, Papers on Subjects Connected with the Duties of the Corps of Royal Engineers, 10 (1849), 1–36; M. Brandreth, Some Family and Friendly Recollections of 70 Years, of Mary Elizabeth Brandreth (1888, privately printed), 10–13; L. Dawson, Memoirs of Hydrography Part One 1750–1830 (Eastbourne, 1883), 101–4; Cain, ‘The Maps of the Society of the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’, 151–67.

60. 60. I. Cawood ‘Corruption and the Public Service Ethos in Mid-Victorian Administration: The Case of Leonard Horner and the Factory Office’, EHR, 135 (2020), 869; P. Clamp, ‘Robert J. Saunders, Factory Inspector, and his National Factory Schools Experiment 1841–1843’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 18, 1 (1986), 23–33; Close, Early Years, 99–118; R. Scott, A Topographical and Historical Account of Hayling Island (Skelton, 1826); TNA, T72/43, ‘Ledger of the commission’, 65–6; ‘Wylde Family’, Durham University Special Collections Catalogue, http://reed.dur.ac.uk/xtf/view?docId=ead/pol/wylde.xml [accessed 6 June 2022].

61. 61. C. Dod, The Parliamentary Companion (London, 1848), 131.

62. 62. Hansard, 1, xiv. (2 June 1809), 876; Hansard, 2, xix. (7 July 1828), 1638; Morning Advertiser, 4 Nov. 1829; Morning Post, 4 Nov. 1829; H. Brougham, The Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science (London, 1827).

63. 63. Hansard, 3, ii. (15 Mar. 1824), 991; Hilton, Mad, Bad, 169–74.

64. 64. J. Bord, Science and Whig Manners: Science and Political Style in Britain, c. 1790–1850 (Basingstoke, 2009), 64–72.

65. 65. J. A. Dwyer, ‘An Enlightened Scot and English Reform: A Study of Henry Brougham’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Univ. British Columbia, 1975), 18–22.

66. 66. York Herald, 1 Oct. 1831.

67. 67. Anonymous, Report of the First and Second Meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London, 1833), 16.

68. 68. L. Goldman, Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford, 2022), 36–9.

69. 69. T. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, 1986), 36.

70. 70. PP1831–32 (141), xxxviii, 6.

71. 71. PP1831–32 (141), xxxviii. 5; Collinge, Office Holders, 1–8; UCL, Brougham, 457, Brougham to Lamb, 8 Aug. 1831, 24761.

72. 72. UCL, SDUK, In-papers 19, Coates to Parrat, 9 or 10 Sept. 1831; TNA, T72/8/56, ‘Christchurch’, Ansley to Drummond, 16 Nov. 1831.

73. 73. UCL, Brougham, 39,468, Drummond to Brougham, 5 Aug. 1831, 12 Aug. 1831; Brougham, Life and Times, iii, 379; McLennan, Thomas Drummond, 143.

74. 74. PP1831–32 (141), xxxviii. 6–10.

75. 75. PP1831–32 (141), xxxviii. 6.

76. 76. PP1831–32 (141), xxxviii. 7.

77. 77. TNA, T72/11/25, ‘Stamford’, ‘Observations on Stamford Report’, Drummond to Tallents and Sheepshanks, 6 Sept. 1831.

78. 78. Hereford was assigned to District F (south Wales).

79. 79. TNA, T72/43, ‘Ledger of the commissioners’, 1–2; McLennan, Thomas Drummond, 143.

80. 80. S. J. Thompson, ‘ “Population Combined with Wealth and Taxation”: Statistics Representation and the Making of the 1832 Reform Act’, in Tom Crook and Glen O’Hara (eds.), Statistics and the Public Sphere, Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000 (New York, 2011), 205–23.

81. 81. PP1831–32 (141), xxxviii, 9.

82. 82. I have not located these journals. TNA, T72/10/68, ‘Preston’, Drummond to Romilly and Allen, 24 Sept. 1831; T72/11/46, ‘Truro’, Drummond to Birch, 27 Sept. 1831; T72/11/49, ‘Wakefield’, Drummond to Wrottesley, undated; T72/11/34 ‘Sudbury’, Drummond to Tallents, 30 Sept. 1831.

83. 83. TNA, T72/10/43, ‘Newark’, Drummond to Sheepshanks and Tallents, 1 Sept. 1831.

84. 84. Hansard, 3, vi. (1 Sept. 1831), 982–1017; Vaizey, ‘Bellenden Ker’, 218–42.

85. 85. Standard, 14 Sept. 1831; John Bull, 5 Sept. 1831.

86. 86. B. Hilton, ‘The Political Arts of Lord Liverpool’, TRHS, 38 (1998), 147–70; B. Hilton, ‘Peel: A Reappraisal’ HJ, 22 (1979), 585–614; D. Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism’, EHR, 104, 411 (1989), 308–31.

87. 87. A reference to Cocker’s Arithmetick, first published in 1677.

88. 88. Morning Post, 3 Sept. 1831.

89. 89. Morning Post, 5 Sept. 1831.

90. 90. Hansard, 3, v. (11 Aug. 1831), 1232–6.

91. 91. The Times, 3 Sept. 1831.

92. 92. The Times, 3 Sept. 1831.

93. 93. Anonymous, The History of The Times: “The Thunderer” in the Making 1785–1841 (London, 1935), 271–2; D. Maclise, The Editor of “The Times” (1830), British Museum, London.

94. 94. Hansard, 3, vi. (1 Sept. 1831), 1007.

95. 95. Standard, 3 Sept. 1831, 3; Morning Post, 5 Sept. 1831, 3; John Bull, 5 Sept. 1831, 3.

96. 96. Hansard, 3, vi. (5 Sept. 1831), 1147–9.

97. 97. H. Spencer, ‘Wall, Charles Baring’, in Fisher, Commons, vii. 613; Hansard, 3, vi. (5 Sept. 1831), 1150.

98. 98. Clokie and Robinson, Royal Commissions, 82–3.

99. 99. Hansard, 3, vi. (5 Sept. 1831), 1149–50.

100. 100. Henriques, Before the Welfare State, 26, 83–4; Mandler, Aristocratic Government, 135–6; Cawood ‘Corruption and the Public Service Ethos’, 867–8; Collinge, Office Holders, ix. 16–28.

101. 101. P. Harling, ‘The Powers of the Victorian State’, in P. Mandler (ed.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2006), 25–50; Mandler, Liberty and Authority, 26; Lubenow, Government Growth, 26–7; MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government, 5, 9–10; Cawood, ‘Corruption and the Public Service Ethos’, 889–90; Goldman, Victorians and Numbers, 24–5, 99–100.

102. 102. Mandler, Aristocratic Government, 123–282.