Conclusion

As electioneering commenced across England’s reformed electoral map in September 1832, Thomas Drummond remained at the boundary commission headquarters in London. ‘Still at the council office’, he informed Littleton, ‘our end approaches, and there are now strong symptoms of departure: bales of boundary reports and plans ready for delivery, and our rooms looking very much like a warehouse’. Drummond wrote in the hope of obtaining ‘subordinate situations in a government office’ for his clerks, Malcolm Douglas Crosbie and George Sheldrick. Both, he regretted, looked ‘adrift in the world … like a secretary of state going out of office’. He was also writing to confirm the commission’s final accounts, stating that in addition to 1,850 copies of the commission’s twelve-volume initial report, thirty copies on ‘large paper’ and ‘corrected according to the [1832 Boundary] Act[s]’ had just been completed.¹ Even with the commissioners only claiming expenses, Drummond reported that for the English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish boundary commissions, the overall labour cost of ‘placing the information on the table of the House of Commons’ was £11,320. In relative labour values in 2024 that equates to around £10,600,000.² Engraving and printing the commission’s maps and reports proved more expensive, costing £15,297. In total, the commission produced 2,000 copies of its initial boundary maps – of which there were 454 in each full report. Staggeringly, this amounted to over 900,000 maps. The commission’s official reports and plans were circulated to MPs and peers, distributed to local municipal offices and reference libraries, and sold by booksellers for up to £6 6s. a set.³

Drummond’s personal recommendations ensured both Crosbie and Sheldrick enjoyed long civil service careers.⁴ Drummond remained at Westminster for the following two years, serving as private secretary to the chancellor of the exchequer, Viscount Althorp. In 1835 he was appointed under-secretary of Ireland. As Jay Roszman has observed, Drummond ‘assumed a central position in the machinery of Dublin Castle, where he touched nearly every paper that entered or exited the building’.⁵ Alongside his enforcement and defence of Whig coercive policies, he pursued an ‘unprecedented’ concessionary policy of amelioration that sought to introduce Catholics to every level of judicial and law enforcement.⁶ He also opposed the forced payment of the Anglican Church tithe by the majority Catholic population, and sparked controversy at Westminster for his contentious warning to Irish landlords in 1838 that ‘property has its duties as well as its rights’.⁷ During the home rule debates in 1886, William Gladstone cited this statement as a formative moment in Liberal Irish policy.⁸ Drummond also found an avenue for his surveying and statistical skills, via his increasingly complex analysis and public exposition of the Outrage Reports and as chairman of the 1836–8 Irish railway commission. The latter produced two remarkably wide-ranging reports. However, Drummond’s proposals for massive state intervention to develop Ireland’s railways were rejected by an increasingly hostile Westminster, as the Whig majority in the Commons dwindled by the end of the decade. With his thoughts turning towards a parliamentary career, Drummond died of erysipelas in April 1840, aged forty-two. Having worked day and night for the previous five years, he was in effect killed by his tireless commitment to administration and bureaucracy.⁹

The boundary commission proved equally formative for Drummond’s fellow commissioners, most of whom remained active in Westminster life for the following four decades. Five became MPs, including Henry Tancred, who represented Banbury for over two decades as a radical Whig between 1832 and 1858, and John Romilly, who during his second stint as a Whig MP was appointed attorney general in the 1847 Russell administration, before serving as master of the rolls for the rest of his career.¹⁰ After sitting briefly for Petersfield as a reformer in 1832, John Shaw Lefevre served as under-secretary for the colonies from 1833, where he was appointed to the slavery compensation commission before securing full-time employment as a poor law commissioner between 1834 and 1841.¹¹ He later acted as deputy clerk, and then clerk of the parliaments from 1848 until his retirement in 1875.¹² By September 1832, John Chapman, William Wylde and John Wrottesley had transferred to the 1832–4 commission on the poor laws.¹³ John Drinkwater worked as a factory commissioner from 1833, following which he was appointed to the 1833–5 municipal corporations commission alongside Thomas Flower Ellis.¹⁴ Robert Saunders served as a factory inspector between 1833 and his death in 1852.¹⁵ Robert Kearsley Dawson reassembled the boundary commission’s network of surveyors and map-makers for the municipal corporations commission and the 1836 tithes commission.¹⁶ While Dawson’s ambitions for a cadastral survey of Britain were rejected by parliament, his oversight of the tithe commission over the following decade led to the production of over 11,000 tithe district maps, which provide a remarkably accurate picture of mid-nineteenth-century land ownership in England and Wales.¹⁷ Henry Bellenden Ker was appointed to successive royal commissions on the criminal law between 1833 and 1849, where he channelled Drummond’s influence as a ‘tireless organizer’ of ‘data, papers, articles, reports, and draft legislation’.¹⁸ And the outspoken Sheepshanks, who found his way to the 1838 and 1843 commissions on weights and measures, spent ‘eleven laborious years’ from 1844 in a basement in Somerset House, where he registered ‘nearly 90,000 micrometrical readings’ during his oversight of the commission for standards of length and weight.¹⁹

Mapping the State has established that as well as acting as a nursery for a new generation of bureaucrats, the boundary commission, guided by Drummond, was pivotal in establishing the governing techniques and methods that underpinned the increasingly ambitious domestic social policy of the nineteenth-century British state. Conspicuous for his absence from previous accounts of late Hanoverian and early Victorian governance, Drummond’s development and successful application of a ‘scientific’ framework for the boundary commission initiated a major rhetorical and practical shift in the ambition of Whig and Liberal legislators and their expanding arsenal of administrators in the decades that followed. Within years, ‘system, method [and] science’ had been applied to the reform of local government, the poor law, factory employment, policing, public health and education via an array of commissions, committees and permanent inspectorates.²⁰ Over 220 commissions of inquiry alone were established between 1833 and 1868, leaving few areas of domestic or colonial policy untouched by legislative investigation.²¹ Commissions and commissioners quickly became synonymous with Whig rule among Conservative and radical critics. In 1835 a young Disraeli characterised commissioners as ‘unsavoury fungi’ polluting the country, the social commentator Sydney Smith remarked in 1838 that ‘the whole earth, is in fact, in commission’, and in 1849 the radical self-government advocate, Joshua Toulmin Smith, railed against the seemingly all-pervasive ‘illegal and pernicious’ system of ‘government by commissions’.²² While historians have been more forgiving in their analysis of this new generation of bureaucrats and their reforming endeavours, what started as a novel Whig attempt at applying scientific methods as a means of instituting reform, for many quickly morphed into a new form of unwarranted centralised intrusion and corruption.

In addition to revealing the long-term significance of the ‘Great Reform Act’ to the development of British domestic governance, prioritising the issue of boundary reform has shifted our understanding of the 1832 reform legislation in several key areas. Firstly, it has confirmed the fruitlessness of seeking to understand the electoral reforms of 1832 through an anachronistic lens of democratisation that prioritises franchise reform.²³ Instead, the 1832 reform legislation is better understood as an attempt to legitimise parliament’s claims to represent the political nation via the establishment of a diverse network of electoral interest communities.²⁴ A varied franchise across England’s electoral map was only one component of how this electoral ideal was expected to function. It also required boundary reform and seat redistribution that retained a massive variation in constituency sizes and types, alongside open voting, public hustings, double-member seats and a rigorous registration system. Far from democratic in any modern sense of the term, this parliamentary and electoral model was deeply rooted in contemporary understandings of political community, the Commons’ historic function as a representative body and a desire to ensure the electoral map reflected the social and economic reality of late Hanoverian England.

Secondly, Mapping the State has demonstrated that the 1831–2 boundary commission was central to how and why electoral reform was enacted by 1832. The previously unexplored working papers of the boundary commission have revealed how Drummond and his fellow commissioners worked behind the scenes at Westminster to create an innovative, technical framework for electoral reform that on one level became increasingly acceptable to parliament’s various stakeholders at Westminster and in the localities, and on another so intricate that few parliamentarians, if any, had the capacity to challenge it. The commission initiated a major shift in the reform legislation, which was entirely remodelled from August 1831 following an in-depth national survey of the electoral system. Their multi-volume reports provided the basis for a separate boundary bill that received parliamentary scrutiny; an innovative remodelling of the disfranchisement schedules via Drummond’s list; and a data-led defence of a newly refined £10 borough franchise. By early 1832 discussion over proposals for England’s reformed electoral map was no longer an abstract debate over parliamentary process or an imagined democratic, gerrymandered electoral system. Parliamentarians had been provided with boundary proposals based on a cartographic, demographic and socio-economic profile of their reformed constituencies, which for all but the most ardent of anti-reformers revealed that the reform legislation struck a comfortable balance between innovation and restoration in England’s electoral system. For the vast majority of boroughs and counties, parliament and the localities proved remarkably accommodating of Drummond and Lefevre’s claims to have defined England’s reformed electoral communities via an objective framework. And, when concerns were raised with individual proposals, the government’s concessionary stance ensured the passage of the 1832 Boundary Act after only a few hours of debate.

Next, the work of the commission led to a vastly improved central understanding of England’s localities and electoral communities, which strengthened parliament’s authority and legitimised the House of Commons’ role as a representative body following 1832.²⁵ Along with the introduction of a £10 householder franchise across the boroughs, and a new system of voter registration, the work of the boundary commission and the 1832 Boundary Act for England and Wales introduced a level of structural uniformity to the electoral system that had not previously existed. For the first time every constituency had a boundary, and its details were publicly available – knowledge that was widely disseminated by the printing of election handbooks and gazetteers, such as Samuel Lewis’s A Topographical Dictionary of England.²⁶ This transfer of locally held knowledge was one step in a slow (but not inevitable) process that saw Westminster assume an increasing role in constituency politics in the years to come. In this respect, boundaries and bureaucracy are a new element in the story of what some historians have termed the political ‘modernisation’, or the standardisation of the nineteenth-century British state, which was technocratic, relied on demographic data and required a wide knowledge of the social, economic and geographic realities of England’s towns and counties.²⁷ With the exception of the boundary changes that accompanied the redistribution of seats to Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1861, every boundary identified by the 1832 Boundary Act remained in place until at least 1867.²⁸ Although calls for equal electoral districts formed part of the Chartist demands, the overarching structure of England’s electoral map faced little serious parliamentary challenge until the shift to predominantly single-member seats initiated by the electoral reforms of 1884–5.

Fourthly, an unprecedented, and previously underappreciated, engagement at all levels of the state in the processes of reform was integral to the longevity (and general acceptance) of England’s boundary reform settlement in 1832. It was not just MPs in interminable committee debates and behind the scenes high political manoeuvring that decided the details of reform, but the commissioners, parish officers, tax collectors, surveyors, returning officers and local petitioners who engaged with the boundary reform process during 1831 and 1832. This affirms, and allows for an extension of, Salmon’s interpretation of the 1832 reform legislation as a ‘consultation’. It is also in line with Miller’s recent claim that mass petitioning during 1831 and 1832 revealed a ‘dynamic interaction’ between politicians, bureaucrats and constituents at a central and local level over the wider reform process.²⁹ It is important to observe, however, that the consultation process that influenced the boundary settlement was not open to all. The terms of engagement were set by the executive which realised the necessity for consultation with electoral officials in the localities to implement the basic aspects of reform, following which information sharing took place via the formal channels of a boundary commission, parliamentary returns and petitioning, as well as private representations to ministers. Unlike future boundary reforms from 1867, non-official constituency involvement was limited to the latter two forms of engagement, rather than a more openly public ‘consultation’ via boundary commission hearings.

Fifthly, in contrast to theories of liberal governmentality that view the state within a top-down model, this book has confirmed the necessity of conceptualising the evolving nineteenth-century British state as a genuine nation state, that was as reliant on the local churchwarden to function as it was the civil servant or politician at Whitehall.³⁰ Mapping the State does indicate that aspects of the liberal governmentality interpretation hold weight, particularly Joyce’s contention that the collection of data and the production of maps and statistics served to support and reinforce reform and governmental institutions. In this regard, boundary reform, and its successful implementation and settlement for thirty-six years, demonstrated how the redefinition of public space could reinforce the institutional authority of parliament within a locality. However, simply ‘knowing’ what a space was did not allow an administrator or politician to control it.³¹ On one level, the electoral statistics and cartographic data generated by the boundary commission, and the masses of parliamentary returns that followed in their wake, were also available to the non-official public, who were able to utilise this improved knowledge about a constituency’s political geography to make their own political claims and challenges to the electoral status quo. On another, a locality’s continued acceptance of the institution of parliament (at the level of electoral politics) was always reliant on actors outside of formal officialdom. Even in the most electorally dormant of post-1832 constituencies, politicians, parties, patrons and agents had to work within the electoral communities identified by the 1832 reform legislation to develop some consensus about who represented those places at Westminster. And, if established elites or party organisations did not adapt, new sites of influence and power quickly developed.³² Contrary to Joyce’s suggestion that liberal governmentality led to an increased elite control of public space, ‘knowing the governed’ with new technologies and data such as maps and statistics actually encouraged the contestation of such space by helping to generate new political communities and providing the means for old political communities to adapt to challenge authority.³³

Moving to the political implications of the 1832 boundary reforms at Westminster, Mapping the State has revealed that England’s reformed electoral map accentuated the urban–rural divide in the electoral system and entrenched political division over the corn laws and religion in the decades that followed. England’s reformed constituency structure provided a significant foothold for the forces of protectionism prior to 1846, and for the emerging Conservative party under the subsequent direction of Derby and Disraeli. If the commission’s plans for the grouping of English boroughs with fewer than 300 £10 householders had been favoured over the eventual proposal to throw those boroughs into their surrounding parishes, and the division of counties had not gone ahead (as was so nearly the case during November 1831), it is probable that Whig-Liberal candidates would have secured at least an additional thirty English seats at elections during the first reform era. Such small margins would have ensured three unbroken decades of Whig-Liberal governance after 1832, and relegated non-liberal Conservatives, and protectionists, to a position of long-term opposition. The boundary settlement elsewhere, which socio-economically defined the vast majority of England’s reformed boroughs around their associated town populations and reasserted the centrality of community to borough politics, proved remarkably beneficial to an emerging Liberal party that coalesced around free trade, Dissent and industry – particularly in the new boroughs and as the £10 householder started to completely dominate ancient franchise holders in the old boroughs.³⁴

The irony of this was that Russell and his emerging case for moderate Whig reform during the 1820s had sought to stop a combative Commons divided along such lines. To an extent it was unfortunate for Russell (but also short-sighted of him) that those attached to the landed, agricultural interest found their natural home under Peel, Derby and Disraeli in the years prior to, and following, 1846. Granted, if such a balance had not been maintained in 1832, it is hard to conceive that Conservative candidates would have been as eager to accept the finality of the reform settlement ahead of the 1835 election. However, by the 1850s the motivations behind Russell and Disraeli’s ambitions for further reform were telling. Disraeli professed in 1859 that the Derby government’s reform bill sought to ‘adapt the settlement of 1832 to the England of 1859’ through boundary changes and by seeking to accentuate the divide between urban and rural electorates.³⁵ Russell’s failed reform bills from 1849 sought to leave boundaries untouched so that large town electorates penetrated the counties, while disfranchising small boroughs. He hoped this would mitigate his great regret concerning 1832 – namely the distinct divide that the 1832 reform legislation had produced in the representation of rural and urban interests in the reformed Commons.³⁶ In fact, it was Disraeli’s close attention to the boundary issue during debate over the Liberal reform bill of 1866, and his presentation in the Commons of privately commissioned boundary maps, that one contemporary blamed for the downfall of the second Russell ministry.³⁷

Finally, the long-term legacy, and continued relevance, of the redrawing of England’s electoral map in 1832 needs to be recognised. The 1867, 1884 and 1918 Reform Acts were all accompanied by boundary commissions whose recommendations were enacted by separate acts of parliament. Each commission had to contend with preserving the representation of communities, while also having to ensure that constituencies represented an increasingly equitable number of electors. On each occasion the boundary commission’s initial report and proposals provided a vital opportunity for informal and formal negotiations between parties over the extent of reform.³⁸ While this precedent was broken in 1944, when a permanent independent boundary commission was established, parliamentary boundaries have continued to provide the primary means by which the electoral system has been, and continues to be, reformed. The efficiency of the 1831–2 commission’s work, and the speed of its enactment, is best demonstrated by contrasting it with the most recently completed review of English boundaries, which commenced in 2011 and following three separate reviews was not approved by parliament until 2023. As well as contending with a proposed reduction of Commons seats (as the Grey ministry had also initially done in 1831), the failure of the 2013 and 2018 reviews revealed the continued relevance of Drummond’s insistence that the boundary-setting process be based on the most up-to-date electoral data and anchored in a disinterested means of defining electoral communities. These debates were reopened in response to the 2023 boundary review, but failed to halt a review whose parameters were changed to allow for the retention of 650 MPs.³⁹ That twenty-first-century Westminster continues to reform itself in the shadow of, and according to the methods established by, the Grey ministry, Drummond and Lefevre is testament to the enduring significance and legacy of the 1831–2 boundary commission.