The boundary commission and local opinion

The English borough boundary commission was established in August 1831 under the auspices of Lord Brougham and the royal engineer, Thomas Drummond. By early September, seven teams containing two commissioners and at least one surveyor had been assigned to different regions across England to report on, and propose boundaries for, every parliamentary borough due to return MPs under the government’s reform bill. A separate team of mapmakers and clerks based at the privy council office in Westminster assisted Drummond in co-ordinating this work from London. Table 4.1 provides an itinerary of the initial visits completed to each borough in District G (Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland) by commissioners Tancred and Wrottesley between 12 September and 1 November 1831. Each team of commissioners maintained a similar schedule between September and November 1831, usually spending no more than three days in each borough. The commissioners continued their work following the rejection of the second reform bill by the Lords on 7 October, and by January 1832 boundaries had been proposed for all 186 boroughs that the Grey ministry intended to constitute England’s reformed electoral map.

Contrary to initial expectations, the boundary commission completed its work in little over four months. As discussed in Chapter 3, Drummond’s ‘scientific’ framework for the commission deliberately eschewed a consideration of local opinion in the boundary setting process, relying instead on a ‘disinterested’ survey of a borough’s geographic, demographic and socio-economic circumstances. There were no public forums for the discussion of boundary proposals, and the commissioners arrived in each borough without any warning to the press or local officials. As well as being a key element in Drummond’s strategy of bureaucratic impartiality, keeping a low public profile increased the feasibility that the commissioners might gather the requisite data required to propose boundaries within the brief time allotted to visit each borough. It was also intended as a means of preventing local officials from evading the commissioners or preparing embellished returns.

Table 4.1: Boroughs visited by commissioners Tancred and Wrottesley in District G.

This is not to say that the public was not kept abreast of the commission’s work. Coverage of the commissioners’ activities did appear in some provincial and national newspapers, following information sharing between local officials and newspaper editors. Reports could take the form of a single sentence, such as the following from the Hampshire Telegraph: ‘Henry Gawler, Esq. and Colonel Ansley, the commissioners under the reform bill, arrived at Lymington on Wednesday last, and have this day departed for Christchurch’.⁹ Some extended to a lengthier paragraph that detailed the commissioners and their activities, provided some speculation as to their proposed boundaries and offered an indication of their itinerary.¹⁰ One of the most extensive concerned commissioners Ord and Chapman’s visit to Birmingham. On 26 September the Birmingham Gazette reported that:

The commissioners [Ord and Chapman] are acting under instructions from the home office, and have official letters requesting all overseers, churchwardens, and municipal officers to furnish them with any necessary information for the purposes of the commission. The above two gentlemen we believe have completed their labours in Gloucester, Worcester, Droitwich, Warwick, Coventry, and other places in their circuit. They will finish their inquiries in this town in the course of a day or two, and proceed to Bridgnorth, Kidderminster, Walsall, Dudley, Wolverhampton, and other towns in Worcestershire and Staffordshire on which the elective franchise is conferred by the bill. The commissioners are at the Hen and Chickens, attended by a government surveyor, with the ordnance survey, &c. They have been in communication with the high and low bailiffs, the town surveyor, Mr Kempson, the steward of the manor, and other official persons of the several districts added to Birmingham in the [reform] bill.¹¹

Most reports were somewhere between the two in length and were initially published in the local news sections of provincial papers, before sometimes being reprinted by the national press.

Editorial comment about the commissioners’ activities was rare and tended to be made in the anti-reform press. On 10 September the Tory Leeds Intelligencer commented that: ‘we really think there is no necessity to saddle the country with the expenses of these commissioners before the reform bill becomes the law of the land.’¹² Similar concerns about the cost of an unsanctioned commission were raised in the ultra-Tory John Bull following the news that the commission had continued its work after the Lords’ rejection of the second reform bill.¹³ The Tory Essex Standard expressed a more localised concern following the commissioners’ visit to Colchester, which they warned might lead to an increase in taxation. It transpired that the commissioners had discovered 1,200 £10 householders in the borough, but that only 630 houses were rated at £10 or above for the inhabited house duty. This signalled a potential increase, the paper argued, in assessed rates for undervalued houses when the surveyor of taxes next visited the borough.¹⁴ The only actively supportive comments about the commissioners tended to refer to the thoroughness of their work. The pro-reform Worcester Herald congratulated commissioners Ord and Chapman for being ‘fully competent to the important task assigned to them’ and ‘indefatigable in their exertions’ at Tewkesbury.¹⁵ The rare occurrence of negative editorial comment among pro-reform editors indicates that they did not necessarily see the commission’s arrival in a borough as an intrusion. Rather, their presence was probably seen as a welcome indication of the progress of the reform bill – a stance taken by The Times when the commission commenced its work.¹⁶

The commissioners’ low public profile reflected the disinterested attitude towards local opinion that they had been advised to assume when commencing their work. However, in contradiction to his initial framework for setting boundaries, and the government’s Commons announcement in September 1831 that the commission would pay no attention to local opinion, Drummond briefly explored establishing covert methods for gauging local reception. This followed informal advice from cabinet members in mid-September that a full commission in London might want to consider the likely public response to boundary proposals when evaluating borderline, or less straightforward cases.¹⁷ Following this advice, Drummond surprised commissioners Ord and Chapman by informing them it would be ‘very desirable to know the opinion of the most respectable of the inhabitants [of Worcester]’ regarding their boundary recommendation for the borough (the full details of which are discussed in the following chapter). Drummond, at the behest of ministers, also offered to procure ‘an introduction to some of the inhabitants, whose opinions it might be desirable to ascertain’.¹⁸

The commissioners’ guarded response reaffirmed to Drummond that any attempt to obtain local opinion was fraught with danger. Ord argued that even if a convenient means of deducing local opinion were available, which he doubted, the process would prove futile. He warned Drummond that:

It is hardly necessary to observe upon the great variety … of views and interests which must exist, not only among classes, but amongst individuals, upon the subject of these boundaries … the discordance of those opinions, and wishes would make it utterly impossible to draw any boundary.

Ord quoted a local official who had observed that if the commissioners quizzed inhabitants over their proposed boundaries they ‘would never have had any peace in Worcester’. He also questioned the propriety of Drummond’s proposal that the state of local opinion should be ascertained by questioning a few individuals through private introductions. Ord argued that it was important that the commissioners ‘keep up the appearance as well as the reality of judging [future boundaries] for ourselves’. It was inevitable, he stated that ‘one or two will probably coincide with us as in the boundary we propose’ and ‘immediately be taken to have influenced our decision’. Those that did not agree with their proposals, Ord argued, would claim their opinions had been disregarded for partisan reasons. The easiest way to avoid charges of political favouritism, Ord contended, was to propose boundaries, as Drummond had initially requested, with no recourse to local opinion.¹⁹

This stance was supported by the subsequent discovery that in order to appease local opinion, in some boroughs, the commissioners would have had to propose boundaries in contravention to their scientific principles for establishing boundaries in other boroughs. In Banbury the commissioners discovered a strong feeling among the town’s inhabitants that the borough should not be extended to encompass an area of the town owned by the marquess of Bute. In cases such as Banbury, which contained more than 300 £10 householders, the commissioners had not been instructed to design boundaries that neutralised any single political influence. Rather, they were required to propose limits that encompassed the modern town settlement, even if this potentially led to an increase in the power of a particular landowner. Drummond conceded that given their wider instructions, satisfying local opinion was outside the commission’s remit. When discussing the case of Banbury he recognised that ‘we have no business in our present work with politics, no matter to whom the ground belongs, if the houses belong properly to the town they should be included even though by so doing it becomes a close borough’.²⁰

The experiences of Banbury and Worcester confirmed to Drummond that seeking local opinion over boundaries raised questions of an inherently political nature; questions that the commission had not been entrusted with answering. If the government, or a full commission subsequently wanted to ascertain such information to inform decision making they would have to do so via a separate process. The benefit of such a position was that when the commission’s reports were published, they were able to argue with conviction that their proposals were based on a set of disinterested principles that paid no attention to local opinion. This was in line with Drummond’s original ‘scientific’ framework for proposing boundaries, which was seen as the best means of avoiding charges of partiality on a borough-by-borough basis and increased the likelihood of parliament’s future approval of their proposals. As subsequent chapters demonstrate, the commission found it impossible to maintain complete ignorance of local opinion in their day-to-day work, but by early October 1831 any pretence that it should be actively courted had been dismissed. Fortuitously, this guarded approach towards the public did little to restrict the commission’s work.

Collecting boundary data

The first task of the commissioners when they arrived in a borough was to ascertain its parliamentary boundary. As no central repository containing this information existed, constituency responses to a parliamentary return, requested in December 1830, provided the only preliminary indication as to the extent of each borough. The responses to this return provided by seventy-seven constituencies stated that their parliamentary limits were coextensive with the definition of the town or borough provided in the 1821 census. Sixty-three boroughs reported that their parliamentary limits were different to those recorded in the 1821 census and provided a brief description of the parishes or townships thought to be within their boundaries. Five boroughs did not provide any information as to their boundaries.²¹ The data afforded by the 1821 census and the December 1830 returns offered no cartographic illustration of a borough’s boundaries, only a list of the parishes or townships that were supposed to be contained in each constituency. To supplement this preliminary boundary data, the commissioners liaised with either borough officials (usually town clerks, overseers of the poor, bailiffs and collectors of taxes), persons deemed of intelligence within each locality (usually local surveyors or solicitors) and occasionally local patrons. In order to facilitate the sharing of information, the commissioners arrived in each locality armed with letters signed by the home secretary and addressed to known local officials.²² Once the commissioners had demonstrated they were acting in an official capacity, they verified the legal areas already known to be within each constituency. They then confirmed the geographic extent of each parliamentary boundary by reference to official documents, boundary stones or collective local knowledge maintained by the custom of perambulation.

Once agreement as to the parliamentary limits of a borough had been ascertained, a borough’s boundary was drawn onto the traced town plan of the constituency that Drummond’s team of mapmakers in London had prepared and distributed to the commissioners. For most boroughs south of the midlands these maps were usually enlarged tracings at a 2:1 scale of published or unpublished ordnance survey maps (Map 5.1). For the midland boroughs northwards, these tracings tended to be made from maps published by independent mapmakers. The commission discovered that in 116 of the 145 existing boroughs they visited, the parliamentary boundary was either well known or undisputed within the locality, or had been accurately defined in the December 1830 parliamentary return.²³ In a few cases it was found that a map of the town with the boundary detailed on it was in the possession either of officials or a local resident. In Tewkesbury, for instance, perambulation to ascertain the exact limits of the parliamentary borough was not required as ‘an exceedingly good parish map [was] kept in the parish work house’.²⁴ Where no map existed, a written description of the borough’s boundaries combined with local memory and convention (developed through ‘beating the bounds’ and the placing of boundary stones) had to be relied on.

In most boroughs the commissioners and their surveyors were required to confirm a boundary, or parts of it, through perambulation with local officials. A sizeable majority could be perambulated – 92 of the 145 boroughs (Table 4.2) were less than three square miles in size, and 60 of these were less than one square mile. The following letter from Robison Wright, a surveyor on the commission, detailed how the boundaries of five boroughs in Wiltshire had been confirmed with local officials – Calne being the largest of these at 1.6 square miles:

Calne – An excellent map of the borough in the possession of the vestry clerk – also partially proved by perambulation.

Marlborough – Perambulated and sketched with a guide, and others.

Devizes – an old engraved map of the town; other M.S. maps in the possession of the town clerk – and perambulation.

Shaftesbury – an engraved map of the town, and perambulation with an overseer.

Wilton – perambulation with two overseers.²⁵

Likewise, in Gloucester, which was 0.5 square miles, after consulting with local officials, commissioners Chapman and Ord reported that the boundaries of the ancient borough drawn onto the map by their surveyor were ‘very well and accurately defined; [and that] boundary stones are placed at intervals and a perambulation is made every year’.²⁶ In the larger boroughs, the commissioners relied on maps and resorted to partial perambulation – as was the case in Colchester, which consisted of sixteen parishes and had a 68.8-mile perimeter.²⁷ In this instance Drummond proposed that the commissioners and their surveyors build a composite boundary based on the individual parish boundaries of Colchester detailed in Greenwood’s county plan of Essex.²⁸

In twenty-nine boroughs the commissioners discovered that there were either local disputes over parliamentary boundaries, or that the limits of a constituency were unknown. In a number of these cases it was eventually found that some boroughs did not possess a parliamentary boundary. At Banbury, Winchester, Leominster, Hertford and Taunton, the commissioners discovered that minor disputes had arisen during recent elections due to the development of walls or gardens that overlapped the borough’s parliamentary boundaries.²⁹ Aside from the extra time expended in recording these disputes, they had little impact on the commissioners’ decision-making process – their power to propose future boundaries, including what they regarded as the modern limits of the town, allowed them to circumvent such disagreements. At Plymouth, Weymouth, Cirencester, Andover, Canterbury, Sandwich and Lincoln issues arose as to whether geographically anomalous areas of local government formed part of the parliamentary borough. After consulting with the town clerk, the assessor of the taxes, the overseers of the poor and a local surveyor in Andover, for instance, the commissioners discovered that two areas contained within the parish limits existed under distinct corporate jurisdictions. In order to remove confusion over the borough’s boundaries, Drummond and the commissioners agreed to move forward on the basis that the entire geographical area contained within the parish of Andover had to be included within the constituency’s future limits.³⁰ In seven cases the commissioners were unable to discover any officially recorded confirmation of a constituency boundary. The commissioners reported that they could not rely on the information of local officials in Bridgwater, Honiton and the City of London.³¹ And in Ashburton, Lyme Regis, York and Westbury, the commissioners discovered that due to poor record keeping and a lack of recent perambulation the parliamentary boundary had been erased from local collective memory.³²

In the remaining ten cases the commissioners were unable to define a borough’s existing boundary because its ancient franchise had never required fixed geographical limits. Durham was found to possess a unique elastic boundary. Local custom granted all apprentices in the borough the freedom of the city (and thus the franchise) if they served their master ‘in the suburbs of the city, as well as in the city itself’. This meant that the parliamentary boundary of Durham had expanded as new streets and houses were added to the city.³³ The remaining nine boroughs found not to possess a boundary (Truro, Liskeard, Ludlow, East Grinstead, Ripon, Thirsk, Northallerton, Richmond and Wells) were all burgage boroughs, where voting rights had been granted to tenants of specific burgage tenure properties that had historically provided certain services to the monarch.³⁴ In these cases the experience of commissioners Drinkwater and Saunders in East Grinstead, which had originally stood in Schedule B but was later disfranchised completely, was broadly representative. The commissioners consulted the parish officers, the current and historic bailiffs and ‘the agent for the noblemen, to whom the town chiefly belong[ed]’. To their disbelief, they discovered that each person ‘agreed in disclaiming all knowledge of any line round the borough’.³⁵ This confusion had resulted from the fact that the parliamentary borough of East Grinstead had always been defined by its thirty-two burgage tenure properties, rather than a boundary. Given the political reputation of burgage boroughs, the commissioners had originally viewed the information provided by their officials with suspicion. But, after being informed by Drummond that several similar cases had been discovered, their evidence was accepted. In these ten cases, and the seven where the borough’s boundary was unknown, the commissioners used their discretion to define the town’s existing geographical extent.

Collecting £10 householder data

After collecting the requisite boundary data, the commissioners were required to identify how many potential £10 householders lived within a borough’s existing limits. As with boundaries, the commissioners were afforded a preliminary indication of these figures by a parliamentary return. This was the parliamentary return detailing the £10, £20 and £40 houses assessed to the inhabited house duty in each existing borough (discussed in Chapter 2), which had forced the government to raise their proposed borough franchise to £10 in February 1831.³⁶ The return proved a flawed dataset, however, as houses worth £10 throughout England were frequently assessed and exempted from paying the inhabited house duty by being rated below £10. Commissioner Tallents suggested to Drummond that if the assessed tax return recorded 300 £10 householders within a borough it was ‘a pretty sure sign that there were twice the number of £10 houses’.³⁷ Furthermore, the boundary information already gathered by the commissioners had confirmed that the geographical areas referred to in the February 1831 return could not be relied on to correspond with parliamentary boroughs of the same name. For these reasons, Drummond reprimanded any team of commissioners who relied solely on these figures in their reports.³⁸

As with boundaries, specific data relating to £10 householders had to be collected from local officials. The primary means of doing this was through interviews with overseers of the poor. Although the poor law system was implemented in a heavily localised manner, every parish in the country could be relied on to levy a poor rate based on some form of locally agreed property valuation and maintain records relating to the value of each property within their jurisdiction. This meant that when a parliamentary boundary was found to include only parts of a parish, the commissioners could request returns specific to the parliamentary borough. Most parishes assessed their houses at a proportion of their actual value and then collected a percentage of this annual value from each householder, which constituted the poor rate. In a few cases, parishes based their rates on regular revaluations. In South Lynn (which formed part of King’s Lynn) a committee of fifteen examined the poor rates every three months. Property was recorded at one-third of its actual value, which meant that all houses assessed at £2 10s. 9d. in the rate books had an actual annual rental value of £10.³⁹ In the majority of England’s parishes, however, such as the three contained in Evesham (St Lawrence, All Saints, and St. Peter’s), parish rates were based on outdated valuations that had to be adjusted by local officials. All houses in Evesham were recorded in the poor rate books at seven-tenths of their 1811 value (a house with an annual value of £10 in 1811 was still recorded at £7 in 1831). Despite only 201 houses being recorded at £7 in the rate books, the overseers of Evesham’s three separate parishes advised the commissioners that, according to contemporary valuations, 318 houses within the borough had an annual value of £10.⁴⁰

Over time the commissioners developed strategies for either verifying or increasing the reliability of returns provided by parish officials. If available, local records of assessed taxes broken down by individual householder could be consulted in the same manner as the poor rate returns. Some boroughs had also been granted powers under permissive legislation to levy paving, watch and lighting rates for municipal purposes. The local collectors of these taxes had been required to make their own valuation of property, and as most Paving, Watching and Lighting Acts had been passed during the 1820s these valuations were relatively up to date. Evesham and Arundel were cases in point, and in both boroughs this data was used to verify the overseers’ estimates of £10 householders.⁴¹

The interview process was also used as a means of verifying information. Commissioners Tancred and Wrottesley described their method for consulting overseers and their rate books:

We have always recommended the parish officers to make their estimates such, that, if hereafter called upon they could verify them upon oath; and we have required them to sign certificates of the numbers of houses and of houses with land attached; and this has been done by them openly, and usually in the presence of the churchwardens and overseers of the other parishes interested.⁴²

If the threat of being questioned by a neighbouring official was not sufficient, the commissioners could personally inspect houses, or consult with local inhabitants regarding the houses that parish officials had reported stood on the margin of being worth £10 a year. This was the case in Calne where Ansley and Gawler (along with their surveyors) personally inspected each household reported to be of £10 value, before ensuring that their lists were ‘confirmed by other inhabitants of the parish’.⁴³

During the first few weeks of the commission, the extent to which the commissioners were required to verify data relating to £10 householders was dictated by an ancient borough’s proximity to the 300 £10 householder threshold. If it was clear that a borough contained over 300 £10 householders, the commissioners moved straight on to the task of identifying a future parliamentary boundary that encompassed the modern town.⁴⁴ Following the rejection of the second reform bill on 7 October 1831, the commissioners were placed under increasing pressure by Drummond, at the behest of the government, to obtain precise data relating to £10 householders in these boroughs.⁴⁵ In reply to his initial report on Hull (which contained 2,136 houses assessed to the house duty at £10) Drummond informed Tancred on 13 October that it was:

much regretted that you have not entered into the question of the number of qualifying houses … the present enquiry furnishes the only means of obtaining this information for towns as they are recommended to be now defined … [this] has now become essential.⁴⁶

Table 4.3: £10 householders in boroughs due to retain franchise in second reform bill.1

Sixty of the 145 ancient boroughs (Table 4.3) were found to contain over 500 £10 householders, and by October 1831 a more thorough approach to valuing houses within these boroughs was expected by Drummond.

In the remaining eighty-five boroughs more initial care had been taken to ensure parish returns were accurate. This was because the number of £10 householders contained within the existing borough determined the extent to which it would have to be extended into its neighbouring towns or parishes. In these cases, Drummond was aware that £10 householder data formed the basis of potentially controversial boundary proposals and was scrupulous in demanding the commissioners’ figures could withstand future parliamentary scrutiny. He was also wary that local officials might embellish data to prevent the increase of a borough’s boundary. From the outset, in these boroughs the commissioners were instructed to cross-reference £10 householder data from as many sources as possible, data that Drummond reviewed closely. If Drummond was not satisfied with the commissioners’ initial reports, he requested that they either correspond with local officials, or complete additional visits to a borough to verify their information.

In several cases (Horsham, Christchurch, Shaftesbury, Malmesbury, Tavistock, Calne, Tamworth and Northallerton) the commissioners, or Drummond, suspected deception by local officials. However, it was usually found that incompetence rather than malicious intent was the cause of misinformation.⁴⁷ In Malmesbury, for instance, an illiterate alderman was found to be the cause of a suspicious parish return.⁴⁸ When clear discrepancies in £10 householder data did arise Drummond usually laid the blame on the commissioners. After receiving a report that contained a range of estimates as to the number of £10 householders in Northallerton, Drummond cautioned Tancred:

Amidst conflicting statements, amidst returns irreconcilable with each other and inconsistent with those from other places, if the government cannot rely with implicit confidence on the numbers given by the commissioners, upon whom can they depend?⁴⁹

In November 1831 the government requested that the commission gather additional data to redesign the disfranchisement schedules. This provided Drummond with another opportunity to enforce diligence in boroughs that either stood close to the 300 £10 householder mark, or had been on the cusp of disfranchisement or partial disfranchisement in the first two reform bills.⁵⁰ He also used the authority of the sitting committee of the commission, which from late October 1831 commenced a review of every borough report ahead of its publication, to request that where initial £10 household data was still unsatisfactory it was rechecked.⁵¹

Drummond’s insistence that the commissioners personally cross-referenced multiple data sources had the positive effect of suggesting to officials in factious parliamentary boroughs that information had been gathered impartially. Importantly, this helped to ensure the commissioners’ visits, in general, sparked little local controversy. The consequence of not maintaining a judicious approach was underlined when commissioner Ansley visited Wallingford in late November 1831. Ansley outsourced his data collection to a local solicitor, who, it transpired was the election agent for both of the borough’s Whig MPs.⁵² When the local Tory corporation discovered Ansley had not consulted them, they immediately aired their grievances with Westminster, questioning the authenticity of the boundary and £10 householder information provided to the commission.⁵³ These complaints found their way from the cabinet to Drummond and the sitting committee, who reprimanded Ansley and demanded he return to the borough to gather additional data.⁵⁴ Fortunately for the commissioners, Ansley’s experience in Wallingford was an exception. That similar disputes had not flared elsewhere revealed that Drummond’s diligence since August had paid dividends in terms of presenting the work of the commission in an independent, impartial light. In general, the commissioners tended to meet Drummond’s requirements. In doing so they discovered that local officials across England were, on the whole, compliant with their requests for reliable data.

The £10 householder in the new boroughs

The commissioners’ visits to the new boroughs provided the government with the opportunity to gain clarity over one of the most contentious aspects of its reform legislation – the £10 householder franchise. While the government had hoped the £10 franchise would enfranchise the respectable and intelligent portion of the political nation, since March 1831 anti-reformers had warned of its democratic tendencies, advanced reformers had argued it was not radical enough and politicians from across the spectrum had repeatedly identified pitfalls in the legal phrasing of the qualification.⁵⁵ As the commissioners travelled from borough to borough, their reports revealed a wide discrepancy in who was likely to qualify for a vote in the new boroughs. Commissioners Ord and Chapman, for instance, were taken aback by how few householders were likely to qualify for a vote in the west midlands. They found that Kidderminster’s population of 16,000 was unlikely to return more than 500 voters due to the ‘unusually large proportion of the labouring class amongst the other inhabitants’.⁵⁶ The likely enfranchisement rate was even lower in Stoke-on-Trent, whose population of 53,000 was predicted to return an electorate of around 1,500. This was not due to a scarcity of respectable voters. Rather, the commissioners discovered that an abundance of space, and the ready availability of inexpensive materials for house building, had led to very low property valuations in the locality. As a result, they reported that the ‘respectable … small capitalists’ of Stoke ‘such as retail tradesmen, workmen in possession of some stocks or machinery and employing apprentices, or clerks, foreman, [and] overseers’, who generally met the £10 franchise requirements elsewhere in England, were unlikely to qualify to vote.⁵⁷ Even fewer ‘small capitalists’ were found to qualify for a £10 vote in Blackburn, where the commissioners discovered that 2.3 per cent of the population (or 9.75 per cent of adult males) occupied houses worth £10 per annum.⁵⁸ According to the commissioners’ predictions, Blackburn had the lowest ratio of population to £10 electors of all the new boroughs, whereas the London borough of Finsbury, at 18.64 per cent (or 79.01 per cent of the adult male population) had the highest. For the majority of new boroughs this figure fell within a range of 3.5–6 per cent (or 15–25 per cent of the adult male population).⁵⁹

The government was also aware that it was not just the annual rental value of a house, but the manner in which a tenant paid his rent that would determine his ability to vote. This had led to extensive, and often highly confused, parliamentary debate over the £10 franchise since March 1831, particularly over the issues of how long prospective £10 voters needed to have been resident, how frequently they were required to pay rent, the valuation system that was to be used to identify £10 houses and whether tenants should qualify if they ‘compounded’ (i.e. their landlords assumed responsibility for paying their rates).⁶⁰ The final draft of the second reform bill that was rejected by the Lords in October 1831 had stipulated that all male householders whose house had an annual rental value of £10 according to the house duty, poor rate or landlord rental would qualify, so long as they had paid their rent and rates for an entire year, not received any parochial relief in the previous year and did not compound their rates.⁶¹

The commission provided the government with the opportunity to clarify who it was that these clauses would include within, and exclude from, the £10 franchise. Following the October 1831 rejection of the second reform bill, and due to the success of the commission’s data-gathering efforts thus far, the cabinet requested that Drummond organise an extensive survey of rental practice in Manchester, Salford, London and the existing borough of Liverpool. In Manchester, commissioner Romilly submitted questionnaires to parish overseers in every township in his proposed borough boundary. He inquired as to the type of families that were exempt from the payment of rates, the usual length of residence for tenants that paid rates and those who did not, and the extent to which landlords compounded with tenants.⁶²

Romilly discovered that those exempt from the payment of rates in the more industrial areas of Manchester had generally been exempted on account of ‘age, disease and accident’, whereas those in the more agricultural areas, consisting of ‘principally hand loom weavers’, were exempt on account of unemployment. He reported that across the ‘Lancashire manufacturing districts’ tenants who paid their rent weekly were usually factory operatives whose landlord was their employer, and who also paid their rates. These tenants, who ‘seem to move about very much’ dependent on ‘fluctuations in trade’, generally lived in a house divided into two flats, with two families paying separate rents to the same landlord. This meant that the annual rental value of houses with a weekly rental charge was almost double that of a similar sized house with a tenant who paid his rent annually, occupied the entire house and paid his own rates. Romilly provided Drummond with the following example:

[two] tenants [each] paid 7s 6p a week which amounts to 18l 18s per annum: while I saw many houses near which seemed to me to be as good, where the [single] tenant paid between 10l 7s and 11l per annum.

While both houses were worth £10 a year, only the property with a single tenant was likely to qualify for a vote. Neither tenant in the house which had an annual rental income for the landlord of almost £20 would qualify, because the rates were paid by the landlord.

In London, commissioner Drinkwater discovered that tenants who lived in houses of up to £20 rental value generally compounded their rates with their landlord (aside from in St. Giles in the Field and St. George’s, Bloomsbury where houses of up to £30 annual value usually compounded). These tenants had the right to demand to pay their own rates if they wanted to, but for most it was financially beneficial to compound.⁶³ Returns obtained from the three parishes that were proposed to be included in Marylebone suggested that tenants in up to 22.5 per cent of the borough’s 24,236 £10 houses did not pay their own rates, and in the parish of St. Luke in Finsbury this figure was 40 per cent.⁶⁴ Even before a tenant’s record of rental and rate payment was taken into account, as well as the question of whether he had been in receipt of parochial relief, the £10 franchise requirements, as they stood, were likely to prevent the enfranchisement of a significant number of householders whose annual rent was £10.

The cabinet was informed of these reports prior to the introduction of their third reform bill, leading to the simplification of their proposed £10 householder clause (which now made it necessary that householders rated to the poor rate, who lived in a house ‘of clear yearly value’ were entitled to be considered for the franchise). However, the government did not alter the provision requiring compound householders to ‘demand to be rated’ in order that they could be registered to vote.⁶⁵ They also showed no inclination to lower the franchise in new boroughs, such as Blackburn or Stoke, to account for the lower house valuations discovered by the commissioners.⁶⁶ In fact, when discussing the reform bill in April 1832, Earl Grey revelled in informing the Lords that the commission had confirmed anti-reformers’ democratic prognostications over the £10 franchise to be a ‘fallacy’.⁶⁷ He suggested that the low numbers of £10 houses discovered by the commissioners, combined with female householders, non-resident electors, those claiming relief, tardy ratepayers, compounders and the registration fee, would reduce the commissioners’ £10 predictions by at least 25 per cent.

This assessment proved remarkably accurate. In the new boroughs in 1832 on average 63.74 per cent of the £10 householders counted by the commissioners found their way on to the electoral register. This figure had risen to 78.78 per cent by 1836, which as Salmon has demonstrated was the most efficient annual registration year in the immediate aftermath of reform.⁶⁸ A lack of ancient franchise rights, and the large number of midland and northern boroughs enfranchised in 1832 (31 of 42), meant the new boroughs, as a group, had the lowest enfranchisement rates in England (Table 4.4). At the 1832 election on average, around 13.3 per cent of adult males qualified to vote in the new boroughs. This figure had increased to 16.8 per cent by the 1865 election. These figures mask considerable regional variations caused by house valuations. In 1832 a maximum of only 7.3 per cent (around one in fourteen) adult males qualified to vote in Halifax, while 30.6 per cent (over one in four) qualified to vote in Finsbury. On average between 1832 and 1865 around 20 per cent of adult males were enfranchised in new boroughs in the south-east, 17 per cent in the south-west and between 12 and 13 per cent in the north and the midlands. The average maximum rate of adult male enfranchisement in the new boroughs between 1832 and 1865 was around 15 per cent, the equivalent figure for boroughs with an ancient restrictive franchise was around 20 per cent, and for those with a popular franchise it was around 30 per cent. However, the latter figure, which masked a decline from around 35 per cent to 25 per cent between 1832 and 1865 needs to be understood as a maximum possible rate due to the prevalence of non-resident voters.

Drummond’s list

The efficiency of the boundary commission during the autumn of 1831 prompted one final extension of its data-gathering responsibilities. In November the government held secret negotiations with a number of Tory peers, known as ‘the Waverers’, to secure their support for their reform legislation. While the cabinet refused the Waverers’ request to send the commissioners back to every borough to ‘hear whether any well-founded objections’ existed to their boundary proposals, they did offer to reconsider the controversial use of census data as the basis for disfranchisement.⁶⁹ On 15 November, Grey, Althorp and Russell met Drummond to discuss the feasibility of compiling accurate tax and household data for every borough scheduled to be fully disfranchised, partially disfranchised, or that had stood on the margins of disfranchisement in the first two versions of the government’s reform bill.⁷⁰ Nine days later, on 24 November, the government issued Drummond with a formal instruction, requesting that he collect this data for all ninety-seven boroughs then in Schedules A and B, as well as ‘the ten or fifteen immediately above them in size and importance’.⁷¹ Drummond assumed the upper limit of the government’s formal request, and made immediate preparations to collect data for the 112 double-member boroughs with the lowest population according to the 1831 census.⁷²

Table 4.4: Average maximum adult male enfranchisement levels per category of borough franchise 1832–65.1

The government also requested that Drummond ‘make a scale’ ranking each of these boroughs in order of their ‘relative importance’.⁷³ Instead of just adding or multiplying together the number of houses and assessed taxes paid by each borough and compiling a list, Drummond developed a scaling method intended to afford ‘equal weight’ to the number of houses in, and the amount of assessed taxes (the house and window taxes) paid by, the modern town settlement of England’s smallest boroughs.⁷⁴ His method proposed to provide a score for each borough, by dividing the amount of assessed taxes paid by a borough against the total number of assessed taxes paid by every borough in the list, and likewise for the number of houses. These two figures were then to be added to each other for each borough and multiplied by 1,000 to give every borough a non-fractional ranking score.⁷⁵ For a mathematician like Drummond, developing this scaling method was easy. The ‘arduous part’ of his new responsibilities he complained, ‘consisted in obtaining correct data’ that would allow him to redesign the reform bill’s disfranchisement schedules with ‘certainty and with justice’.⁷⁶

Much to Drummond’s despair, the government proposed to announce these new disfranchisement schedules on 12 December, giving the commission three weeks to gather the requisite data. Even with his experience overseeing the commission’s operations thus far, this was a tall order. In the knowledge of his probable new responsibilities, on 21 November Drummond requested ‘as many surveyors as could be spared’ from the board of ordnance to help with compiling new reports.⁷⁷ On 24 November he issued an urgent circular to every boundary commissioner still at work in the vicinity of boroughs that ‘bordered upon partial or total disfranchisement’. He asked that they replicate his ‘scientific’ framework for defining a borough’s modern town settlement (see Chapter 5), before clarifying the tax and household data relative to this area.⁷⁸ On the same day he issued a questionnaire to every returning officer in every borough selected for the list.⁷⁹ The questionnaire asked officers whether the town associated with their borough had outgrown its parliamentary boundary, how many houses associated with the town were outside and inside its boundary, and the amount of assessed taxes paid by these houses. As with existing and new boroughs, Drummond’s team of surveyors at the council office prepared tracings of town plans from ordnance survey or privately available maps for twenty-four Schedule A boroughs (boroughs to be fully disfranchised) with the highest number of houses and tax receipts in order that the replies to Drummond’s questionnaire could be verified on the spot. As time and resources were thin, Drummond made the decision not to send commissioners to the thirty-two Schedule A boroughs with the lowest population, as it was felt that even slight discrepancies in their data would do little to save them from disfranchisement.⁸⁰ In addition, tracings of town plans were submitted to the commissioners, who ultimately re-visited a further forty-one Schedule B boroughs (boroughs to be partially disfranchised) and fifteen boroughs on the margins of partial disfranchisement.⁸¹

The Schedule A borough of Plympton Earle (Map 4.1) in Devon is illustrative of how complex this process proved. The local returning officers’ questionnaire was received in London in late November. It stated there were 313 houses in the modern town of Plympton Earle, paying £485 4s. 3d. in annual assessed taxes. On visiting the borough in early December, commissioners Birch and Dawson reported that the returning officers had overstated the extent of the modern town by including the adjoining villages of Ridgeway, Underwood and Colebrook. The commissioners discovered a detailed map of the borough’s boundaries, signed by a ‘numerous body of persons’ at the previous perambulation of the constituency in July 1817, which they contended included everything that could be considered the modern settlement of Plympton Earle. While several houses in the villages of Ridgeway and Underwood had been built within the limits of Plympton Earle’s parliamentary boundary, the commissioners contended that both were distinct villages ‘not to be considered part of the town’. While the commissioners were required to count those houses within the borough’s boundary, they refused to extend the definition of Plympton’s modern town to include any part of Ridgeway and Underwood that did not form ‘continuous portions of streets’ with Plympton’s central town settlement.⁸² Their definition of Plympton’s modern town (which consisted of every house within the borough’s ancient boundary) contained 182 houses worth £322 10s. 10d. in annual assessed taxes.

For Drummond the case was not as clear-cut. His concern was that as over time the villages of Ridgeway and Underwood had crossed into Plympton’s parliamentary boundary, an equally valid case could be made that they formed part of the ‘modern town’. To provide parliament with the ability to make a final decision, the commission contacted a local Plymouth surveyor, James Meadows Rendel. On 6 December Rendel was asked to complete an additional survey of Ridgeway, Underwood and Colebrook. On 10 December, two days before the government intended to introduce its third reform bill, Rendel submitted his report. With time being of the essence Rendel advised the commission that his survey had been hampered by the death of a local official. He recorded that he had:

laid down all additional houses, and corrected those that were wrong in the [original map] sketch. I have also crossed out such roads as are now stopped up, adding the new ones. We have had more difficulty than usual in this enquiry, from the circumstances of the parish officer having died the day I received your letter.

Rendel eventually obtained the data from another official, and after consulting local tax records confirmed that if Plympton Earle’s ‘modern town’ was assumed to include Ridgeway, Underwood, Earl Mills, Plympton St. Mary and Priory Mills it would lead to an additional 158 houses assessed at £178 4s. 8d.⁸³

Given that it took twenty-four hours of continuous travel for the mail coach to deliver a letter from Plymouth to London, it is likely that Rendel’s report was one of nine that reached London on the morning of 12 December. Later that evening the government introduced the third version of its reform bill containing Drummond’s revised disfranchisement schedules. The introduction of the bill was delayed by 45 minutes, while Drummond and his clerks recalculated which boroughs were to be disfranchised at the privy council office. The Staffordshire MP, Edward Littleton, who had been supporting Drummond, recorded the bureaucratic frenzy in his diary:

Lord John Russell introduced his reform bill for the third time this year. He was to have begun at 5 o’ clock, and the house waited for him, from that hour till 1/4 before 6 – some of the opposition began to laugh, to cry adjourn. They little suspected the real cause of Lord John’s absence, which was that he had not been able to settle which of the boroughs should be placed in the [disfranchisement] schedules – nine reports respecting as many different places came to town only this morning, and their contents altered the relative position of so many places on the list or scale that was made – in which each place [is] marked by a figure representing its exact importance – that it was all but impossible to complete the calculation in time for the debate.⁸⁴

Ultimately, Drummond decided to use the commissioners’ initial house and tax figures to identify Plympton Earle’s placement in his scale.⁸⁵ Given the last-minute nature of the data he was concerned that Rendel’s new definition of Plympton Earle had been too liberal, as no parts of Priory Mills, Earl Mills or Plympton St. Mary had spilt over into the borough’s existing boundary. Furthermore, while it was clearly one of the most borderline cases, Rendel’s last-minute definition of Plympton Earle was inconsistent with those of Brackley, Buckingham, Evesham, Eye, Huntingdon, Leominster, Lostwithiel, Malmesbury, Midhurst, Newton (Lancashire), Pontefract, Wallingford, Wareham and Wilton where nearby villages close to an existing boundary had not been taken into the ‘modern town’ simply as a matter of course.

With his figures for the 12 December draft of the reform bill agreed, Drummond placed Plympton Earle in his scale by dividing 182 (the number of houses in the borough) by the average number of houses for all boroughs in the list, which was 452. This gave a figure of 0.4027. He then divided 322 (the amount of assessed taxes paid by the borough) by the average amount of assessed taxes paid by all boroughs in the list, which was 545. This gave a figure of 0.5908. He added both of those figures together (0.9935) and multiplied the total by 1,000. This gave Plympton Earle a ranking number of 993, which placed it at number 40 in his list.⁸⁶ If Rendel’s last-minute figures for Plympton had been used, the borough would have been ranked at number 60, placing it in Schedule B and relegating Petersfield to Schedule A. This made it even more important that Plympton’s ‘modern town’ was defined as accurately as possible. In the knowledge that the 12 December version of the list would not be final, Drummond requested that Rendel provide a further assessment of the borough’s houses and taxes that excluded Plympton St. Mary, Earl Mills and Priory Mills, in order that the Commons could be given as many options as possible if they were required to make a final decision as to what constituted the borough’s ‘modern town’.⁸⁷

Ultimately, all boroughs placed either 56 or below in Drummond’s list – which included Plympton Earle – were marked for total disfranchisement. All boroughs between 57 and 86 were scheduled to be partially disfranchised and return one MP. Drummond’s list and the reduction in Schedule B from forty-one to thirty boroughs in the third reform bill, transferred five boroughs from Schedule B to A; five from Schedule A to B; placed seven boroughs in Schedule B that had not previously been scheduled to lose any seats; and spared eighteen boroughs from partial disfranchisement.⁸⁸

The response to Drummond’s list

When Russell announced Drummond’s list on 12 December Peel and John Croker welcomed the government’s concession that census data was unsuitable for settling the question of disfranchisement. However, these supportive opposition comments proved short-lived. After repeated requests from Croker in the days that followed, the initial data, workings and rationale for Drummond’s list were published on 17 December.⁸⁹ This opened several new avenues of complaint for anti-reformers, who over the next two months developed an increasingly wide-ranging, if at times specious, critique of the methods and data behind Drummond’s list. Drummond’s method for ranking the boroughs was the first aspect to come under fire. Croker claimed in the Commons that simply adding together the number of houses and amount of assessed taxes for each borough offered a simpler and more effective way of ranking England’s smallest boroughs. His complaint was supported by the Tory Morning Post but immediately dismissed by Russell who suggested that ‘no schoolmaster of any science’ would accept Croker’s method.⁹⁰ The Times agreed with Russell, considering Drummond’s formula ‘true in principle, and therefore just in application’.⁹¹ Drummond, who from a mathematical point of view had assumed his methods would be accepted, was taken aback. After watching Croker dismiss his methods in the Commons, Drummond rode straight to Woolwich to meet his former mathematics master at the royal military academy, Peter Barlow, who offered his ‘authoritative approval’ to his methods prior to parliament breaking up for Christmas.⁹²

During the recess the pro-reform Courier surprised the government and the commissioners by publishing a letter in support of Croker’s alternative method.⁹³ This prompted the boundary commissioner, Francis Beaufort, to contact the Cambridge mathematician (and his and Drummond’s friend), John Herschel, asking for his views on Drummond’s methods ‘purely as a mathematical question’. Beaufort advised Herschel that his response would be used to inform peers and MPs over the merits of Drummond’s methods as ‘ninety-nine out of every hundred of its [parliament’s] members have no means of deciding such a question’.⁹⁴ Herschel approved of Drummond’s ‘rules of computation’ but raised issue with the decision to only rank 110 boroughs, instead of every English borough, as well as the exclusion of Welsh boroughs. As the list was for boroughs susceptible to total and partial disfranchisement, it only included double-member boroughs, which was why Welsh boroughs (which all returned a single member) had been excluded.⁹⁵ The decision to only rank 110 boroughs had been made partly due to time constraints, and partly because Drummond had estimated that the house and tax data already collected for every other borough as part of the commission’s primary work would place them ‘beyond the limits of the schedules [A & B]’.⁹⁶

Herschel conceded the final point, stating that even if every borough was placed in Drummond’s list it would require house and tax data containing ‘violently improbable suppositions’ to alter the order of those close to the disfranchisement schedules. Herschel also proposed that the government redraft their request to Drummond in more mathematically accurate terms. He stated that Drummond’s method was the most accurate means of identifying:

the relative importance of a borough – weighted to the houses which it contains and to the assessed taxes which it pays, proportional to their respective numbers – and such that the whole weight of all the houses shall be equal to the whole weight of all the taxes in the mass of boroughs considered.

On this basis, Herschel admitted that ‘every algebraist will at once admit’ to ‘conclusions identical with those which follow from Lieutenant Drummond’s rules’.⁹⁷ In addition, the government approached the Cambridge mathematician and astronomer George Biddell Airy, who rejected any alternative method that used simple addition or multiplication and accepted that Drummond’s ‘method alone, or one equivalent to it, is the only one that can be used’.⁹⁸ The chair of mathematics at Edinburgh University, William Wallace, also endorsed Drummond’s formula, stating that if houses and taxes were to be considered of equal importance, ‘so simple a question’ could be answered in ‘no other way’.⁹⁹

When parliament resumed on 17 January anti-reformers continued to question Drummond’s formula, but also started to challenge the data underpinning his list. The government had previously offered MPs private assurances that ‘400 sets of explanatory documents’ of maps and reports for each borough in Drummond’s list would be published by 26 December.¹⁰⁰ By mid-January these reports had still not appeared, prompting Croker to demand that debate on the entire reform bill be postponed until all documentary evidence relating to Drummond’s list was published.¹⁰¹ Opposition MPs were given further cause to question the commission’s data when a revised version of Drummond’s list was published on 20 January, the day the government proposed to go into committee on the reform bill. This new document contained revised house and tax data for several boroughs whose returns had been incomplete when the government initially announced Drummond’s list. It also contained an explanation of the data sources used in each borough, that Drummond hoped would help parliamentarians ‘account for certain differences in the returns received from different authorities’.¹⁰² Much to the opposition’s surprise, the document directed readers at several points to the still unpublished ‘[boundary] commissioners’ report’.¹⁰³

Although Drummond’s revised list led to no changes in the proposed disfranchisement schedules, the government’s acknowledgement that its original list had been based on tentative data, and its apparent unwillingness to publish the commission’s reports caused Peel to accuse the cabinet of seeking to effect constitutional reform via ‘blind and hurried legislation’ and Croker to accuse the ministry of a ‘premeditated design to delude, perplex, and insult the house [of Commons]’. It was not just anti-reformers complaining about a lack of information. The radical MP for Preston, Henry Hunt, called it a matter of ‘common decency’ that the commission’s reports were published prior to debate progressing any further. Although Croker failed to delay discussion on the entire reform bill, the lack of published data caused the government to postpone the committee debate on whether Schedules A and B had been ‘properly made’ until the full report on Drummond’s list had been published.¹⁰⁴

The first copies of the report began publication on 10 February 1832. The report included the returning officers’ questionnaire for every borough, and a commissioners’ report and map for sixty-eight boroughs where questions had arisen surrounding house and tax data.¹⁰⁵ In the interim, editorials and pamphleteers continued to offer their opinion on Drummond’s methods. The Scotsman deemed Drummond’s list ‘perfectly fair and unobjectionable’, mocking Croker for failing to grasp a problem of ‘common arithmetic, which every boy can solve’ and defending Drummond’s reputation as a ‘man of science’ and a ‘mathematician of no mean rank’ who was ‘equally skilled in surveying and calculating’.¹⁰⁶ The anonymous mathematician, ‘Spoon’, of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, called for a ‘stop to the nonsense which is nightly uttered in a certain assembly whenever the principle of Mr Drummond’s list of boroughs is alluded to’, and the pro-reform Globe and Sun confirmed their support for Drummond’s methods.¹⁰⁷

By contrast, the anti-reform Standard and St James’s Chronicle railed against Drummond’s ‘abstruse algebraic calculus’, and an anonymous pamphlet on the Classification of Boroughs to Lord John Russell published on 9 February complained that by giving equal weight to houses and taxes Drummond’s formula unfairly rewarded boroughs whose wealth was distributed widely among a large population, over more deserving boroughs where the same amount of wealth was distributed among fewer, more respectable inhabitants.¹⁰⁸ Following the lead of this pamphlet, a Hackney lawyer and amateur mathematician, Dr Eneas McIntyre, proposed an alternative method that entailed dividing the product of a borough’s houses and assessed taxes by the total number of houses and assessed taxes in the list. Doing so would have saved Amersham from complete disfranchisement at the expense of Westbury, and saved Helston from partial disfranchisement at the expense of Totnes.¹⁰⁹ This method enjoyed the support of Croker, who introduced a petition to the Commons from McIntyre complaining that Drummond’s list was based on ‘an erroneous principle’.¹¹⁰ Having had a chance to examine the returns in full, on 20 February Croker also raised concern with inconsistencies in the tax data in Drummond’s list. In some cases, he had discovered that returns omitted tax exemptions enjoyed by certain boroughs for stabling cavalry horses, and in others failed to include some boroughs’ tax contributions under the game duties. The government conceded these errors and promised to recalculate Drummond’s list using revised figures, but correctly assured Croker that any changes would be so minor that they would not affect the disfranchisement schedules.¹¹¹

When the disfranchisement schedules were eventually debated in committee on 20 February, opposition to Drummond’s list was led by the MP for Huntingdon and former senior wrangler at Cambridge University, Frederick Pollock. He reiterated the complaints of McIntyre, Croker and the anonymous pamphleteer, but instead proposed to recalculate Drummond’s list by simply multiplying the number of assessed taxes and houses in each borough. He claimed that doing so would be consistent with how a merchant would calculate the relative value of ‘a large number of bales of merchandise’ by ‘multiply[ing] the quantity of each bale by the price’ to ‘bring out their relative value’. This method was simpler than McIntyre’s proposed alternative, and according to Pollock’s own calculations would have saved Amersham from total disfranchisement and Helston from partial disfranchisement.¹¹² Pollock recommended that Schedule A be reduced to 55 boroughs, which was where the greatest ‘chasm’ in the scores assigned to each borough by his and Drummond’s lists existed. In Drummond’s list, Lostwithiel ranked 54 with a score of 1,339, Brackley ranked number 55 with a score of 1,389, Amersham ranked 56 with a score of 1,585 and Petersfield ranked 57 with a score of 1,611. According to Drummond’s calculations, Pollock argued, Amersham was closer in terms of importance to Petersfield, which was to return a single MP, than Brackley, which was to be fully disfranchised.

The government dismissed Pollock’s reasoning on both fronts, citing the mathematicians who had vouched for Drummond’s method and insisting that the number of Schedule A boroughs had to remain at 56 as this had been accepted by the Commons during debate over the second reform bill. Pollock was further embarrassed by the Tory president of the Royal Society, Davies Gilbert, who maintained that Drummond’s methods were ‘perfectly correct’ and the radical MP for Bridport and amateur scientist, Henry Warburton, who forced Pollock to admit that he had forgotten to apply the square root when calculating the relative scores assigned to each borough in his version of the list. Sensing that Pollock had ruined anti-reformers’ chances of leading a successful division to replace Drummond’s formula, Croker sought instead to delay discussion on the disfranchisement schedules by calling for every borough in England to be included in the list.

This prolonged debate appears to have bemused and baffled most MPs, one of whom complained that the Commons was ‘involved in a maze of figures, which appeared to puzzle the heads of the wisest among them’.¹¹³ For the ardent anti-reformer, Charles Wetherell, it was all too much. He interjected ‘away with the mathematicians, away with speculative arguments … let us look at the question [of disfranchisement] as members of parliament’. In doing so he reiterated the traditional Tory complaint about science and reform, discussed in the previous chapter, namely that MPs needed to dispense with their algebra and data and discuss the relative merits of each borough on a case-by-case basis as gentlemen legislators.¹¹⁴ Pollock and Croker’s efforts at forcing a recalculation of Drummond’s list via a different method ended later that day when the Commons approved each Schedule A borough in the order assigned to them in the reform bill. Drummond who watched the debate with several other commissioners from ‘under the [Commons] gallery’ viewed proceedings as ‘a complete triumph’ and ‘vindication from all the previous attacks’ on his method.¹¹⁵

Once his formula had been accepted by parliament, anti-reformers turned to critiquing the data that placed individual boroughs in either schedule A or B as each was debated. MPs used a close reading of the commissioners’ recently published reports to raise apparent inconsistencies in the methods by which the modern town of several boroughs had been defined, or their assessed taxes counted. Complaints were raised that the primarily anti-reform Tory boroughs of Minehead, Appleby, Plympton, Lostwithiel, Amersham, Petersfield, Helston and Dartmouth had been unfairly ascribed confined modern limits, either by erroneous assumptions about the borough’s associated town settlements or its ancient boundaries. The methods in these boroughs were contrasted with those employed in the largely pro-reform Whig Schedule B boroughs of Westbury, Midhurst and Morpeth, as well as Tavistock and Ripon, which were due to escape total disfranchisement.

These boroughs, anti-reformers argued, appeared to have been afforded a more liberal treatment in terms of how their modern town had been defined or their taxes counted. In response, ministers pursued a blanket tactic of defending every proposal of the commissioners, reiterating the inherent difficulty of the task and the lengths the commission had gone to in borderline cases to verify inconsistent data, investigate the particularities of local charters and boundaries, and define a borough’s modern town settlement.¹¹⁶ Opposition MPs forced a vote over the cases of Appleby, Amersham, Helston and Dartmouth but the government secured comfortable majorities in every instance. Once the disfranchisement schedules had been approved in committee, Drummond’s list faced little serious challenge. Significantly, in the Lords during May 1832, a motion in favour of maintaining Schedule A in its entirety by key opposition peer Lord Ellenborough distanced moderates from hard-liners, reducing considerably the chance of a successful Tory-led administration during the ‘days of May’.¹¹⁷ National debate about Drummond’s list also quickly subsided, as what was left to discuss about the rights and wrongs of his formula played out in scientific journals rather than the national press.¹¹⁸

In the individual boroughs in which anti-reformers had complained about partisan figures, the government was justified in arguing that the commission had acted with consistency. Ministers were also justified in arguing that the commissioners had gone to considerable lengths to verify their geographic, house and tax data, which in many instances was completed via several return visits to a borough. As will be seen in the following chapters, this work ethic was thanks largely to Drummond’s meticulous oversight of the commission and his efforts to ensure it adhered to his ‘scientific’ framework. In the borderline cases of Plympton Earle, Appleby and Midhurst, Drummond and his commissioners acknowledged the inevitability that their framework for establishing what constituted a modern town settlement still left some room for interpretation. In this knowledge they provided parliament with sufficient data to overturn their recommendations.¹¹⁹

It is evident, however, that electoral considerations influenced decision-making once discussion over the disfranchisement schedules and individual cases moved from the commission to the cabinet. As subsequent chapters discuss, this also proved to be the case with a handful of boundary proposals. The clearest case of gerrymandering with regard to the boroughs in Drummond’s list was Appleby. In late May 1832 the government was close to reconsidering Appleby’s case, after new tax returns and a local petition suggested there were genuine grounds to move it from Schedule A to B. Nevertheless, ministers decided against granting an extended definition of Appleby’s modern town and thus saving it from disfranchisement. They did so after advice from local agents that any reformed borough (however its boundaries were defined) would probably fall into Tory hands, while also removing Whig voters from the county constituency of Westmorland. Interestingly, Appleby is one of the few boroughs for which draft reports and notes from cabinet ministers have not survived in the boundary commission’s archive.¹²⁰

Conclusion

The 1831–2 boundary commission for England and Wales was a formative Whig experiment in the collection and legislative application of local data, which had an enduring impact on the practices of the nineteenth-century British state. Given the scepticism that surrounded the commission at its commencement, its compilation of cartographic and demographic data relating to England’s parliamentary boroughs between August 1831 and February 1832 was remarkable. The only occasion on which the commissioners were unable to obtain information from local officials was when they visited Bristol during the reform disturbances there in late October 1831. However, with corporation and parish officials occupied with restoring public order the commission acquired the requisite information about Bristol’s boundaries and £10 householders from a local surveyor.¹²¹ The government, it transpired, had underestimated the competence of local officials and their willingness to co-operate with the boundary commission. The receipt of conflicting statements and irreconcilable returns, as Drummond had feared, did not characterise the commissioners’ experiences. And in no cases, as Macaulay had joked, did beadles resort to their whips.

If anything, the sheer volume of locally held information relating to boundaries and house valuations typified the commissioners’ day-to-day operations – which was compounded by Drummond’s eye for detail and the Grey ministry’s increased desire for data from October 1831. Throughout, the level of co-operation experienced from the localities defied Westminster’s expectations, with any difficulties tending to stem from oversights on behalf of the commissioners rather than local officials. This stood in stark contrast to the efforts of anti-corporation reformers during the 1820s, who had failed to secure the voluntary engagement of local officials when seeking similar data. Their efforts, however, had lacked official authority and targeted closed corporations, which were resistant to the idea of reforming themselves.¹²² By contrast, the 1831–2 boundary commission enjoyed government backing, had the support of the public, was incredibly diligent in its approach and developed a framework for its work that sought out, but did not rely on, the co-operation of local officials. The army of commissioners and surveyors that Drummond was able to mobilise was also significant, as they represented a marked difference to anything that had come before, in terms of the resources and tactics used to interrogate England’s unreformed electoral system. This entire process was prototypical of the subsequent collection and use of public health data in England throughout the nineteenth century, which Crook has observed ‘empowered all kinds of agents much beyond a central core of officials’ and reflected a British state whose ‘statistical eyes were many and multiperspectival, gazing bottom-up as much as top-down’.¹²³

The level of data collected by the commission, the national network of information sharing that it relied on and the increasing extent to which this data was used to reconstitute, and legitimise, the government’s reform legislation underlines the importance of conceptualising the electoral reforms of 1832 as a ‘consultation’ between the centre and the localities.¹²⁴ The benefits of this consultative model were made plain during November and December 1831, when the Grey ministry took a bold step in using Drummond’s data-gathering machine, and his personal mathematical expertise, to redefine its disfranchisement schedules. Until then, disfranchisement had proven one of the most controversial aspects of reform. As well as answering a year’s worth of parliamentary criticism over the inaccuracy of census data, Drummond’s list redefined the terms of debate over the issue. By placing disfranchisement in the hands of a supposedly disinterested bureaucrat, who had deployed mathematics and surveying to rationalise the issue, and using the secondary opinion of experts to legitimise Drummond’s work, the government effectively neutralised one of the most controversial aspects of its reform bill.

Discussion was no longer about whether disfranchisement should take place, but the manner in which disfranchisement should be calculated. Drummond’s response – his tireless efforts to ensure the commission gathered accurate data for every borough and his systematic attempts to verify his formula once it was questioned in parliament – revealed the extent to which he personally aspired to his principles for bureaucratic disinterestedness. The complexity of Drummond’s list, the volume of data that went into it and the government’s rationale for its use both impressed, and sidestepped, parliamentarians in equal measure, proving crucial to securing moderate parliamentary support for the reform bill. As discussed in the following chapters, the government’s strategy of forcing MPs to approve the general principles that underpinned Drummond’s list, and their relentless defence of the data that underpinned it, was replicated on a much larger scale when they sought parliamentary approval for the commission’s boundary proposals.

Most significantly, the experience of the boundary commission instilled a new confidence within the Grey ministry in the potential of parliamentary investigation. In February 1832, as the boundary commission’s reports were being prepared and Drummond’s list was being debated, planning for a poor law commission commenced. By July that year, twenty-six assistant commissioners had been dispatched to 3,000 of England and Wales’s 15,000 parishes, with the expectation that their extensive questionnaires regarding poor law administration be completed in a timely manner.¹²⁵ By 1839 this process had culminated in permanent poor law commissioners reporting on the local specifics of crime, education, sanitary conditions, the causes of epidemics and employment conditions.¹²⁶

The poor law commission and its fellow commissions of inquiry and inspectorates of the 1830s and 1840s were built on the example set by Drummond and the boundary commission. All were supplied with reforming bureaucrats from the same networks; infused with a confidence (if not always the same rigour in application) in the merits of data collection as a basis and defence for reform; were highly ambitious in terms of what types of information they tried to extract from the localities; were characterised by strict instructions and oversight by centrally based commissioners; and were reliant on an increasing willingness among Whig legislators to place the oversight of investigation outside parliamentary control.¹²⁷ For every Joseph Parkes or Edwin Chadwick, who demonstrated how such a framework might be adapted, or provide a foil, for achieving personal or political ends, there were commissioners and assistant commissioners who ascribed to Drummond’s belief in the possibility, and benefits, of aspiring to a form of bureaucratic objectivity.¹²⁸ This might be seen in the example of Drummond’s ‘intimate friend’,¹²⁹ the diligent factory inspector Leonard Horner, or the ‘dogged persistence’ of a generation of assistant poor law commissioners who carefully navigated the limited terrain of their powers to effect ‘a higher standard of bureaucratic efficiency’.¹³⁰ While the commissions and commissioners that followed in his stead might not all have endorsed such principles, this should not detract from the innovative nature of Drummond’s bureaucratic approach, or diminish from the boundary commission’s influence over the ideas and practices of the late Hanoverian and early Victorian British state.

Notes

1. 1. G. O. Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London, 1876), 247–8.

2. 2. Bell’s New Weekly Messenger, 28 May 1843.

3. 3. P. Salmon, ‘ “Reform Should Begin at Home”: English Municipal and Parliamentary Reform, 1818–32’, in C. Jones, P. Salmon and R. Davis (eds.), Partisan Politics, Principles and Reform in Parliament and the Constituencies, 1689–1880 (Edinburgh, 2004), 93–113.

4. 4. H. Brougham, The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham (London, 1871), iii. 379.

5. 5. J. Innes, ‘Forms of “Government Growth”, 1780–1830’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence (eds.), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge, 2011), 90–92; J. Innes, ‘Seeing Like a Surveyor: Imagining Rural Reform in the Early Nineteenth-Century UK’, in B. Kinzer, M. Kramer and R. Trainor (eds.), Reform and Its Complexities in Modern Britain: Essays Inspired by Sir Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2022), 57–76.

6. 6. M. Brock, The Great Reform Act (London, 1973), 265; 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; B. Robson, ‘Maps and Mathematics: Ranking the English boroughs for the 1832 Reform Act’, Journal of Historical Geography, 46 (2014), 66–79; P. Salmon, ‘The English Reform Legislation, 1831–32’, in D. Fisher (ed.), The House of Commons, 1820–32, i. (Cambridge, 2009), 384–88.

7. 7. Salmon, ‘English Reform Legislation’, 411.

8. 8. D. Eastwood, ‘ “Amplifying the Province of the Legislature”: The Flow of Information and the English State in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Historical Research, 62, 149 (1989), 276–94; P. Harling, ‘The Power of Persuasion: Central Authority, Local Bureaucracy and the New Poor Law’, EHR, 107, 422 (1992), 30–53; P. Mandler; Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990), 157–99; C. Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick (Cambridge, 1998), 121–55.

9. 9. Hampshire Telegraph, 26 Sept. 1831.

10. 10. Cheltenham Chronicle, 15 Sept. 1831; Liverpool Mercury, 16 Sept. 1831.

11. 11. Birmingham Gazette, 26 Sept. 1831.

12. 12. Leeds Intelligencer, 15 Sept. 1831.

13. 13. John Bull, 10 Oct. 1831.

14. 14. Essex Standard, 1 Oct. 1831.

15. 15. Worcester Herald, 24 Sept. 1831.

16. 16. See Chapter 3.

17. 17. TNA, T72/11/66, ‘Winchester’, Drummond to Gawler, 13 Sept. 1831; T72/10/46, ‘Newport’, Drummond to Ansley, 22 Sept. 1831; T72/10/63, ‘Plymouth’, Drummond to Birch and Brandreth, 23 Sept. 1831; T72/10/68, ‘Preston’, Drummond to Allen and Romilly, 24 Sept. 1831; T72/11/72, ‘Worcester’, Drummond to Chapman, 24 Sept. 1831; T72/11/49, ‘Wakefield’, Drummond to Wrottesley, undated but before 27 Sept. 1831; T72/11/34, ‘Sudbury’, Drummond to Sheepshanks, 30 Sept. 1831.

18. 18. TNA, T72/11/72, ‘Worcester’, Drummond to Ord and Chapman, 24 Sept. 1831.

19. 19. TNA, T72/11/72, ‘Worcester’, Drummond to Ord and Chapman, Ord to Drummond, 25 Sept. 1831.

20. 20. TNA, T72/8/52, ‘Cheltenham’, Drummond to Chapman, 14 Sept. 1831.

21. 21. PP1830–31 (202), x. 9.

22. 22. Northampton Mercury, 1 Oct. 1831; Leamington Spa Courier, 1 Oct. 1831; Leeds Intelligencer, 15 Sept. 1831; The Times, 16 Sept. 1831; Hampshire Telegraph, 19 Sept. 1831; Newcastle Courant, 1 Oct. 1831; PP1831–2 (141), xxxviii. 7.

23. 23. Compiled from PP1831–2 (141), xxxviii–xli. and TNA, T72.

24. 24. TNA, T72/11/41, ‘Tewkesbury’, Ord to Drummond, 15 Sept. 1831.

25. 25. TNA, T72/8/41, ‘Calne’, Robison Wright to Lieutenant Dawson, 31 Jan. 1832.

26. 26. TNA, T72/9/20, ‘Gloucester’, Ord and Chapman to Drummond, 9 Sept. 1831.

27. 27. TNA, T72/9/31, ‘Hereford’, Ellis and Wylde to Drummond, 9 Sept. 1831.

28. 28. TNA, T72/8/61, ‘Colchester’, Report on Colchester received before 27 Sept. 1831; T72/11/34, ‘Sudbury’, Drummond to Tallents, 30 Sept. 1831.

29. 29. TNA, T72/8/15, ‘Banbury’, Chapman to Drummond, 23 Nov. 1831.

30. 30. TNA, T72/8/9, ‘Andover, Ansley and Gawler to Drummond, 8 Sept. 1831.

31. 31. TNA, T72/8/33, ‘Bridgewater’, undated note by Littleton and Beaufort; PP1831 (141), xxxix. 141, xl. 116.

32. 32. TNA, T72/10/20, ‘Lyme Regis’, and PP1831–2 (141), xxxviii, 113–14; xxxix. 141, xl. 117, 171.

33. 33. PP1831–2 (141), xxxix. 161; T72/9/11, ‘Durham’, Drummond to Tancred and Wrottesley, 17 Oct. 1831.

34. 34. C. Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales (Oxford, 1970), 26–8.

35. 35. TNA, T72/9/24, ‘East Grinstead’, Drinkwater and Saunders to Drummond, 12 Oct. 1831; T72/11/43, ‘Thirsk’; T72/10/51, ‘Northallerton’.

36. 36. PP1830–31 (202), x. 9.

37. 37. TNA, T72/10/43, ‘Newark’, Tallents to Drummond, 3 Nov. 1831.

38. 38. TNA, T72/10/63, ‘Plymouth’, Drummond to Birch & Brandreth, 7 Nov. 1831.

39. 39. TNA, T72/10/20, ‘King’s Lynn’, Sheepshanks and Tallents to Drummond, 26 Dec. 1831.

40. 40. PP1831–2 (141), xl. 133.

41. 41. T72/8/10, ‘Arundel’, Drinkwater and Saunders to Drummond, 29 Sept. 1831.

42. 42. TNA, T72/8/21, ‘Beverley’, Tancred to Drummond, 17 Oct. 1831.

43. 43. TNA, T72/8/41, ‘Calne’, Ansley and Gawler to Drummond, 19 Nov. 1831.

44. 44. TNA, T72/9/40, ‘Kingston upon Hull’, Wrottesley and Tancred to Drummond, 24 Sept. 1831.

45. 45. TNA, T72/9/11, ‘Durham’, Drummond to Wrottesley and Tancred, 17 Oct. 1831.

46. 46. TNA, T72/9/11, ‘Durham’, Drummond to Tancred, 13 Oct. 1831.

47. 47. See respective TNA, T72 folders, also T72/10/21, ‘Lymington’, undated note by Drummond.

48. 48. TNA, T72/10/27, ‘Malmesbury’, Drummond to Ansley, 14 Nov. 1831, Ansley to Drummond, 16 Nov. 1831; T72/9/38, ‘Horsham’, Drinkwater to Drummond, 2 Nov. 1831.

49. 49. TNA, T72/10/51, ‘Northallerton’, Drummond to Tancred, undated but between 24 Oct. and 2 Nov. 1831.

50. 50. PP1831–2 (141), xxxviii. 11.

51. 51. TNA, T72/8/41, ‘Calne’, Beaufort to Ansley and Gawler, Nov. 1831; T72/11/39, ‘Tavistock’, map drawn 17 Sept. 1831; SRO, Hatherton, D260/M/F/5/26/7, 28 Nov. 1831, 241; PP1831–2 (141), xxxviii. 129–30.

52. 52. TNA, T72/11/50, ‘Wallingford’, Ansley to Drummond, 24 Nov. 1831, ‘Report’, undated.

53. 53. TNA, T72/11/50, John Joseph Allnatt to Russell, 28 Nov. 1831, Thomas Greenwood to Melbourne, 29 Nov. 1831.

54. 54. TNA, T72/11/50, note on Wallingford by Beaufort, Littleton and Ansley.

55. 55. Brock, Reform Act, 137–45; Salmon, ‘English Reform Legislation’, 374–81; R. W. Davis, ‘Deference and Aristocracy in the Time of the Great Reform Act’, American Historical Review, 81, 3 (1976), 532–9; N. Lopatin-Lummis, ‘The 1832 Reform Act Debate: Should the Suffrage Be Based on Property or Taxpaying?’, JBS, 46, 2 (2007), 320–45.

56. 56. TNA, T72/9/47, ‘Kidderminster’, ‘Report’.

57. 57. TNA, T72/11/31, ‘Stoke-upon-Trent’, ‘Report’, undated.

58. 58. TNA, T72/8/24, ‘Blackburn’, Allen to Drummond, 1 Nov. 1831.

59. 59. Compiled from PP1831–2 (141), xxxviii–xli. and T72.

60. 60. Salmon, ‘English Reform Legislation’, 374–81; P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832–1841 (Woodbridge, 2002) 186–8; R. Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–1867 (Farnham, 2011), 120, 243–58.

61. 61. PP1831 (244), iii. 139–40.

62. 62. TNA, T72/10/9, ‘Manchester’.

63. 63. PP1831–2 (141), xxxix. 111–12.

64. 64. PP1831–2 (141), xxxix. 130.

65. 65. PP1831 (244), iii. 7–8; 2 Gul. IV, c.45 (7 June 1832); Hansard, 3, ix. (12 Dec. 1831), 166–8.

66. 66. Lopatin, ‘Property or Taxpaying?’.

67. 67. Hansard, 3, xii. (9 Apr. 1832), 18–22; PP1831 (68) xvi. 58–9.

68. 68. Salmon, Reform at Work, 27–42.

69. 69. BL, Add MS. 79717, 67; A. Kriegel, The Holland House Diaries, 1831–1840 (London, 1977), 81, 445; H. Taylor (ed.), The Reform Act, 1832: The Correspondence of the Late Earl Grey (1867), i. 473; Brock, Reform Act, 260–65; Salmon, ‘English Reform Legislation’, 381–88; Thompson, ‘Population’; S. Thompson, ‘Census-Taking, Political Economy and State Formation in Britain, c. 1790–1840’, PhD diss. Cambridge (2010), 206–21; Robson, ‘Maps and Mathematics’; Brock, Reform Act, 264–65.

70. 70. PP1831–2 (20), xxxvii. 2–5; SRO, Hatherton, D260/M/F/5/26/7, 15 Nov. 1831, 209.

71. 71. PP1831–32 (17), xxxvi. 1.

72. 72. Aylesbury was excluded as its boundaries had been reformed prior to 1832.

73. 73. PP1831–32 (17), xxxvi, 1–3.

74. 74. Hansard, 3, x. (20 Feb. 1832), 533.

75. 75. PP1831–2 (20), xxxvii, 4; PP1831–2 (17), xxxvi, 1–3.

76. 76. PP1831–2 (17), xxxvi, 1.

77. 77. National Archives, War Office, 47/1555, Board of Ordnance Minute Book, 21 Nov. 1831, 10435–7; PP1831–2 (20), xxxvii, 1.

78. 78. See TNA, T72/10/33 ‘Midhurst’; T72/10/35 ‘Minehead’; T72/10/49, Newton, Lancashire’; T72/8/43 ‘Camelford’.

79. 79. PP1831 (208), xvi, 237; PP1831–2 (69), xxxvi, 205; Hansard, 3, ix. (17 Jan. 1832), 570–71.

80. 80. PP1831–2 (19), xxxvi, 95.

81. 81. Compiled from TNA, T72 and PP1831–2 (19) xxxvi. 95.

82. 82. PP1831–2 (20), xxxvii, 5.

83. 83. TNA, T72/10/64, ‘Plympton Earle’, Rendel to Dawson, 10 Dec. 1831, Rendel to Dawson, 11 Jan. 1832; PP1831–2 (222), xxxvi, 203.

84. 84. SRO, Hatherton, D260/M/F/5/26/7, 12 Dec. 1831, 263.

85. 85. PP1831–2 (19), xxxvi, 95.

86. 86. PP1831–2 (17), xxxvi, 24; PP1831–2 (18), xxxvi, 27.

87. 87. TNA, T72/10/64, ‘Plympton Earle’, Rendel to Dawson, 11 Jan. 1832; PP1831–2 (222), xxxvi, 203.

88. 88. PP1831 (244), iii, 133; 2 Gul. IV, c.45 (7 June 1832).

89. 89. Hansard, 3, ix. (12 Dec 1831), 178–84, (15 Dec. 1831), 257–8, (16 Dec. 1831), 392–419, (17 Dec. 1831), 429–547.

90. 90. Morning Advertiser, 17 Dec. 1831; Morning Post, 17, 19 Dec. 1831.

91. 91. The Times, 20 Dec. 1831.

92. 92. J. Mclennan, Memoir of Thomas Drummond (Edinburgh, 1867), 148; National Library of Ireland, Larcom papers, MS. 7511, Barlow to Larcom, 17 May 1840, 31–4.

93. 93. Mclennan, Thomas Drummond, 148; Globe, 24 Jan. 1832.

94. 94. RSA, Herschel papers, box 3, 326, Beaufort to Herschel, 10 Jan. 1832.

95. 95. RSA, Herschel papers, box 21, 100, Herschel to Beaufort, 12 Jan. 1832.

96. 96. PP1831–2 (19), xxxvi, 101.

97. 97. RSA, Herschel papers, box 21, 100, Herschel to Beaufort, 12 Jan. 1832.

98. 98. Hansard, 3, x. (20 Feb. 1832), 555.

99. 99. The Philosophical Magazine (London, 1832), xi. 218–23.

100. 100. Hansard, 3, ix. (17 Jan. 1832), 564.

101. 101. Hansard, 3, ix. (20 Jan. 1832), 657.

102. 102. PP1831–2 (44), xxxvi, 185.

103. 103. PP1831–2 (44), xxxvi, 189–6.

104. 104. Hansard, 3, ix. (20 Jan. 1832), 657, 660, 661, 675.

105. 105. Salmon, ‘Reform Legislation’, 399; Leeds Mercury, 11 Feb. 1832.

106. 106. Scotsman, 21 Dec. 1831.

107. 107. Globe, 24 Jan. 1832; Sun, 31 Jan. 1832.

108. 108. Anonymous, Two Letters to the Right Hon. Lord John Russell on the Classification of Boroughs (London, 1832); Standard, 25 Jan. 1832; St James’s Chronicle, 26 Jan. 1832.

109. 109. HCJ (1831–2), lxxxvii. 126; The Philosophical Magazine (London, 1832), xi. 360–62.

110. 110. Morning Chronicle, 21 Feb. 1832; HCJ (1831–2), lxxxvii. 126.

111. 111. Hansard, 3, x. (20 Feb. 1832), 536–39; PP1831–2 (222), xxxvi, 201–3; PP1831–2 (184), xxxvi. 267.

112. 112. Hansard, 3, x. (20 Feb. 1832), 545–53.

113. 113. Hansard, 3, x. (20 Feb. 1832), 553–64.

114. 114. Hansard, 3, x. (20 Feb. 1832), 566–7.

115. 115. McLennan, Thomas Drummond, 151.

116. 116. Hansard, 3, x. (20 Feb. 1832), 567–70, (21 Feb. 1832), 592–632, (23 Feb. 1832), 693–721, (2 Mar. 1832), 1098–103.

117. 117. Hansard, 3, xii. (7 May 1832), 729–30; Brock, Reform Act, 291.

118. 118. The Philosophical Magazine (London, 1832), xi. 360–62; London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (1832), i. 26–30; Mclennan, Thomas Drummond, 154–60.

119. 119. PP1831–2 (222), xxxvi, 203.

120. 120. M. Escott, ‘Appleby’, in D. Fisher, House of Commons, 1820–1832 (Cambridge, 2009), iii. 154–6; HLJ (1831–2), lxiv. 114, 221, 255.

121. 121. TNA, T72/8/35, ‘Bristol’, Gawler to Drummond, 5 Nov. 1831.

122. 122. Salmon, ‘Reform Should Begin at Home’, 93–113.

123. 123. T. Crook, Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, 1830–1910 (Oakland, CA, 2020), 67.

124. 124. Salmon, ‘English Reform Legislation’, 411.

125. 125. U. R. W. Henriques, Before the Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Britain (London, 1979), 26; Mandler, Aristocratic Government, 35–6.

126. 126. J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (London, 1993), 113–26.

127. 127. Henriques, Before the Welfare State, 246–55; O. Macdonagh, Early Victorian Government 1830–1870 (London, 1977); Eastwood, ‘Amplifying the Province’; Mandler, Aristocratic Government, 123–274; Hamlin, Public Health, 84–334; Crook, Governing Systems, 23–147.

128. 128. P. Salmon, ‘Parkes, Joseph (1796–1865)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography https://doi-org/10.1093/ref:odnb/21356 [accessed 13 Nov. 2023]; P. Mandler, ‘Chadwick, Edwin (1800–1890), ODNB https://doi-org/10.1093/ref:odnb/5013 [accessed 13 Nov. 2023].

129. 129. I. Cawood, ‘Corruption and Public Service Ethos in Mid-Victorian Administration: The Case of Leonard Horner and the Factory Office’, English Historical Review, 135 (2020), 860–91.

130. 130. Harling, ‘Power of Persuasion’, 50–51.