Introduction

The 1832 reform legislation and boundary reform

The electoral reforms of 1832 were a landmark moment in the development of modern British politics. As the first of six major packages of reform, which culminated in the establishment of a noticeably modern democracy in the United Kingdom by 1948, the legislation overhauled the country’s representative system, reshaped constitutional arrangements at Westminster, reinvigorated political relationships between the centre and the provinces, and established the political structures and precedents that both shaped and hindered electoral reform over the following century. This book demonstrates that the redrawing of England’s electoral map by the little-known 1831–2 boundary commission for England and Wales underpinned this turning point in the development of the British political nation.

Historical debate about the 1832 reform legislation has a long lineage, which has generally focused on explaining why the government of the second Earl Grey sought to reform the electoral system via the extension of the franchise and the redistribution of seats. Aside from some interesting early interjections from Karl Marx, the traditional Whig interpretation of the legislation, which celebrated 1832 as the first in a line of concessionary proto-democratic reforms, made in response to a nation transformed by industrial change and threatening revolution at regular intervals between 1830 and 1832, retained a position of dominance until the mid-twentieth century.¹⁰ From the 1950s a new generation of conservative historians – inspired largely by the historical approach of Lewis Namier – sought to establish the 1832 reform legislation (primarily the 1832 Reform Act for England and Wales) as a pragmatic and conservative, rather than proto-democratic, concession intended to incorporate the intelligent middle classes into the aristocratic constitution. This debate centred less on a defence of the old Whig interpretation, than on successive, largely successful, attempts to attack the separate claims of D. C. Moore, who discounted the threat of revolution between 1830 and 1832 and portrayed the legislation as a curative measure intended to restore the electoral power of the aristocracy.¹¹

Since the 1980s several distinct, but generally complementary, historical approaches have established the insufficiency of using either the concession or the cure framework for developing a coherent understanding of the 1832 reform legislation. A collective reassessment of the role of party and ideology in nineteenth-century Whiggery has led a number of historians to reframe 1832 as a concerted attempt by its framers, steeped in their own Whig conception of history, to restore the ancient representative function of the Commons within the constitution.¹² This focus on Whiggery has been accompanied by an emphasis on the influence of non-Whig and anti-reform thought on the 1832 reform legislation, and calls for a more nuanced understanding of how contemporary notions of gender, and women’s political claims, influenced the reform settlement.¹³ In addition, an examination of the reform legislation for Wales, Scotland and Ireland has underlined the considerable differences in how reform was perceived and developed throughout the UK, and the unique electoral structures that were established in each of the four nations after 1832.¹⁴ The extent to which extra-parliamentary forces influenced reform in 1832, be they structural, social or cultural, have also undergone reassessment. While the idea of a direct causal link between the industrial revolution and the 1832 reform legislation has now been severely muddied, recent research has revealed how startling anomalies in the electoral system caused by demographic growth were important in convincing legislators of the necessity of parliamentary reform by the late 1820s.¹⁵ And, while historians remain rightly sceptical about the threat of radical revolution in 1832, recent work has stressed the significance of the French Revolution of 1830, the widespread activities of the political unions, the extra-parliamentary role of women and the religious controversy that engulfed the reform debate between 1830 and 1832 for understanding why parliament and William IV eventually assented to the Grey ministry’s reform legislation.¹⁶

Despite its extent, this historiography has paid scant attention to the particulars of constituency reform and the boundary commissions that accompanied the reform legislation of 1832. The footnotes and occasional references in the more comprehensive histories of the Act have offered a basic indication of the key points at which boundary reform intersected with the reform process between 1830 and 1832. Michael Brock suggested that boundary changes were influential in appeasing parliamentary moderates over reform and afforded brief mention of Drummond’s re-organisation of seat redistribution in December 1831 – via what became known as ‘Drummond’s List’.¹⁷ Despite Gash’s observation in 1953 that the activities of the 1831–2 boundary commissions represented ‘an important, though neglected’ aspect of the 1832 reform legislation, discussion of their activities is equally sparse.¹⁸ In 1976, Moore briefly considered the unusual evolution of the English and Welsh commission between 1830 and 1832. Each reform bill, he observed, had made a different provision for how boundaries should be settled. He also noted the frequent changes in the commissioners’ guidelines between August and December 1831, and the bestowing of extra responsibility on the commission for the redefinition of the redistribution schedules in November 1831. While Moore remained vague over its particulars, boundary reform formed an integral part of his argument that the Grey ministry had intended to create reformed county electorates, and rural boroughs, that were likely to be deferential to the interests of large landowners. As this book demonstrates, his analysis made several flawed interpretive leaps based on a selective use of the commission’s published reports.¹⁹

More recently, Stephen Thompson and Brian Robson have re-affirmed the importance of Drummond’s list to the electoral reforms of 1832. As well as drawing attention to the mass of demographic statistics produced for the purposes of parliamentary reform, Thompson has shown how Drummond’s list was developed as a concession to critics, who, during 1831, had argued that the government’s initial use of census data in modelling their disfranchisement schedules opened the door to the future implementation of equal electoral districts.²⁰ Robson has provided an instructive discussion of the use of ordnance survey and externally produced maps by the commission, and has drawn attention to how the commission identified the ‘formal and functional definitions of towns’ in the creation of Drummond’s list.²¹ This book expands on both arguments by contextualising Drummond’s list as a part of the boundary commission’s earlier work. In doing so, it reveals the broader significance of the surveying and statistical techniques used in Drummond’s list and their importance to Drummond’s ‘scientific’ framework for redrawing England’s electoral map.

The best existing source of information relating to the issue of parliamentary boundaries, and the 1831–2 boundary commissions, is the History of Parliament’s seven-volume House of Commons 1820–1832, which was published in 2009. The constituent parts of this study suggest that the commission and parliamentary boundaries were far more important to the processes of reform, at a central and local level, than had previously been acknowledged. Its collection of MP biographies and constituency histories are an invaluable research resource, indicating a range of reactions to individual boundary changes at a local level, and among individual MPs, that had not previously been documented.²² Furthermore, Philip Salmon’s survey of the 1832 English reform legislation for the volumes suggests that the commission and the issue of boundaries intersected with parliamentary debate over the reform bill at several key points between March 1831 and June 1832. Significantly, Salmon outlines several key research questions that defined the initial approach taken in researching this book. He identifies that very little is known about how the English borough and county boundary commissions were established, how the commissions completed their work within the localities and at Westminster, and how parliamentary and extra-parliamentary negotiations seemingly allowed for the passage of the 1832 Boundary Act with minimal opposition. He also provides some context regarding the frantic creation of Drummond’s list in the days before the third reform bill was introduced to parliament, and has alluded to the extraordinary public debate sparked by its announcement – factors both Thompson and Robson omitted from their accounts.²³

The consequences of the 1832 boundary reforms

Histories of reformed politics and the British state have paid negligible attention to the legacy of the 1831–2 boundary commissions and the striking changes that they made to England’s electoral map. This book addresses these issues by emphasising the impact of the 1832 boundary reforms in three key areas. First it argues that the 1831–2 boundary commissions (rather than those on the poor laws or factory reform) were the first of the Whig-established investigative commissions of the 1830s, and that their development of a ‘scientific’ method of parliamentary investigation proved a significant moment in the development of the bureaucratic and legislative practices of the British state. This should not be understood as an attempt to revive the ‘revolution in government’ argument of the 1960s and 1970s, which viewed the rapid increase in royal commissions and the influence of Benthamite utilitarianism over policy making after 1832 as a turning point in the development of a proto-collectivist legislative approach.²⁴ Rather, the work of the boundary commissions is better understood in the context of a revisionist school of thought, which has outlined significant continuities between the governmental approaches of the 1830s and the preceding decades. These historians have drawn attention to the work of an active group of parliamentarians (grounded in political economy and liberal Toryism, rather than proto-collectivism), who from 1815 developed a parliamentary culture that used debate, select committees (and some royal commissions), petitions and parliamentary returns as a means of ensuring the unreformed parliament was responsive to Britain’s economic and social needs.²⁵

The 1831–2 boundary commissions built on these precedents, but from a different ideological and practical outlook. Significantly, many of the Whigs who constituted the Grey ministry of 1830–32 – and several of the boundary commissioners – were connected to the emerging ‘useful knowledge’ and social science movements and their claims that a ‘science of government’, which removed partiality from politics, could be discovered through ‘the accumulation of simple, irrefutable facts’.²⁶ The boundary commission’s scientific method for accumulating ‘facts’ relied heavily on two practices: statistics and cartography. While histories of statistics – with the exception of the work of Stephen Thompson noted above – have afforded no attention to the boundary commissions, historians of cartography have long been aware of their important role in producing the state’s first official maps of England’s northern towns and enlarged scale town plans for every English parliamentary borough.²⁷ In this regard, this book builds on the recent work of Richard Oliver, who has demonstrated that the 1831–2 boundary commissions were significant in establishing the cartographic techniques and personnel utilised by subsequent royal commissions during the 1830s, particularly those that investigated municipal corporations and tithes.²⁸

By providing an empirically grounded account of a pioneering commission and its contribution to the evolution of the nineteenth-century British state, Mapping the State complicates Patrick Joyce’s Foucauldian-inspired theory of ‘liberal governmentality’. Embodied in this theory of the nineteenth-century British imperial state is the idea that the collection, and publication, of statistical and cartographic data turned previously fluid ‘local’ knowledge into fixed central knowledge. This knowledge, according to Joyce, allowed administrators, from India to Manchester, to ‘see’ the towns and cities they were governing in a rational, standardised form, while publicly reinforcing the ‘empirical’ nature of the institutional structures that governed these spaces.²⁹ As this book reveals, the work of the boundary commission represented a clear transference of knowledge from the peripheries to the centre that allowed officials to ‘see’ constituencies in a new light. However, following 1832 this new level of state knowledge did not result in official control, or even the peaceful governance, of electoral politics in England’s reformed constituencies. In practice, the statistical and cartographic data created by the commission (as well as the official electoral data published by parliament over the following three decades) was as available to non-officials as it was to official administrators and became crucial to an array of groups and actors seeking political influence over England’s reformed electoral map. In this regard, my analysis confirms the recent work of Katrina Navickas on England’s northern administrative units between 1832 and 1848, which has revealed the varied impact of the codification of new administrative areas after 1832, from the vestry to the parliamentary level. As well as becoming a point of political conflict in their own regard, newly formalised poor law, municipal and parliamentary boundaries (and the data they were based on) provided radicals, in addition to governing Liberal or Conservative officials, with significant intelligence with which to organise politics and play an active role in the processes of Victorian state formation.³⁰

A second theme this book considers is the impact of England’s reformed electoral map on constituency politics between 1832 and 1868. While there is some overlap between the two schools of thought, historians can generally be divided between those who emphasise the transformative nature of the 1832 reform legislation, and those who do not. The work of John Phillips, Philip Salmon and Matthew Cragoe best exemplifies the first category – all three have stressed the ‘modernising’ nature of the electoral reforms of 1832 by focusing on local political life in the decade following reform.³¹ Those who have sought to emphasise continuity following 1832, such as Frank O’Gorman, Miles Taylor, David Eastwood and Alan Heesom, have taken a longer-term view, stretching their horizons to the second Reform Act, by which time they contend that it is the similarities between pre-and post-reform electoral politics that are the most striking.³² In reality much of the disagreement between the two groups of historians is somewhat arbitrary. It is convincing that voter registration created a very new dynamic in electoral politics following 1832, but also that this new dynamic worked alongside older electioneering cultures in the constituencies. Locality clearly remained intrinsic to constituency politics after 1832, but voter registration and the development of local party associations demonstrated how the 1832 reform legislation prompted a new national, sometimes uniform, element to constituency politics. And, it is evident that while party existed as a notion – and was definitely present within some form of national framework – politicians appropriated party in a local context, not in a ‘national’ post-1868, or even post-1945 ‘modern’ two-party sense. At a constituency level, then, this book reveals how far the various English constituency types established by the 1832 reform legislation contributed to the conditions that allowed, or required, local party organisation to flourish; served to focus constituency politics around particular notions of locality and community; and introduced new uniform, national characteristics into the electoral system.

The final way this book aims to expand our understanding of the 1832 reform legislation is by exploring the impact that England’s reformed electoral map had on the formation of governments, decision-making in the Commons and the evolution of party at Westminster prior to 1868. It draws from the techniques of roll-call analysis, which have been developed by political scientists and historians, in the British context at least, since the 1960s. The analysis presented here is part of my ongoing development of the massive History of Parliament and Eggers and Spirling dataset of parliamentary votes for the period 1836–1910, and is the first constituency-led analysis of voting behaviour covering the entire timespan of the reformed Commons (1832–68). Due to the vast resources required to create a comprehensive set of voting records for the period, previous roll-call analyses have generally focused on analysing individual parliaments, and usually only a specific set of votes. They have also focused primarily on measuring partisanship and party discipline at Westminster, either by comparing the voting records of MPs against party labels, using scaling methods to identify the political positions of individual MPs, or comparing MPs’ votes against the activity of prototypical party whips in the Commons.³³ Eggers and Spirling’s recent analysis of voting behaviour in the Commons between 1836 and 1910 applied the latter technique, and suggested that Ian Newbould’s conclusions on party discipline in the Commons during the 1830s (whose work used the former technique) hold true, as do the observations of a number of qualitative studies covering the entire period. While ‘party’ organisation at Westminster was gradually assuming some of its twentieth-century characteristics, between 1832 and 1868 government authority continued to rely on ‘cohesive, yet mutable, party connection[s]’ in the Commons. These connections – a key component of the prevailing system of ‘parliamentary government’ – could quickly break down if an opposition identified sufficient weakness among a government’s supporters to turn a policy question into an issue of confidence, a tactic that remained the general method of bringing down a government throughout the period.³⁴

Comparatively less attention has been paid by roll-call analysis to the links between constituencies and voting habits in the Commons. Work completed by historians on William Aydelotte’s pioneering dataset of votes for the 1841–7 parliament linked a constituency’s size (according to its electorate) and socio-economic profile to the behaviour of MPs. Aydelotte, and later Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, observed a clear correlation between a Conservative MP’s decision to support free trade or protection in 1846, and the economic interest of his constituency. They also revealed that boroughs with large electorates were more likely to favour politically and economically liberal policies between 1841 and 1847, whereas MPs returned for distinctively rural, small boroughs and counties were most zealous in their advocacy of agricultural protection.³⁵ These conclusions fit broadly with the work of historians who have analysed the party labels (rather than votes) of MPs between 1832 and 1868. In England, Conservative, Liberal-Conservative and Protectionist MPs are known to have prospered in the counties, boroughs with fewer than 500 voters and some larger historic boroughs where an established Anglican elite existed.³⁶ The variety of English Whigs, reformers, Liberals and radicals who proved willing to associate with the Whig leadership of the Commons in the 1830s, and the increasingly distinctive Liberal leadership from the late 1840s, are known to have derived considerable success from boroughs enfranchised in 1832 and ancient boroughs with large electorates.³⁷ My analysis expands on these arguments to explore how far the different types of constituency created by the 1832 reform legislation influenced the party identity and voting behaviour of MPs in the major votes and confidence motions that defined Westminster politics between 1832 and 1868. As the final four chapters of this book reveal, England’s reformed electoral map provided a significant electoral foothold for the forces of protectionism at Westminster into the 1850s and was crucial in shaping the political identities of the emerging Conservative and Liberal parties prior to 1868.

A note on method and structure…

The 1832 reform legislation not only redrew England’s electoral map, but made alterations to Welsh, Scottish and Irish boundaries. A decision was made to focus this book on the English electoral system because English boroughs and counties represented 71 per cent of the reformed electoral system (468 of 658 Commons seats), and the extent of boundary change in England was far more pronounced than in any other nation. No changes were made to the Welsh or Irish counties and only three Scottish counties underwent boundary changes in 1832. Only four of the thirty-three reformed Irish boroughs underwent substantial geographic extension, and Welsh and Scottish boroughs (of which most operated under a contributory borough system) were only updated, or defined, in order that the entire town, and space for its future growth, was included in any reformed limits.³⁸ In addition, the Grey ministry initially identified how to reform borough boundaries by focusing on the issue of boundary reform in England, prior to requesting that commissioners replicate these precedents in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.³⁹ In keeping with recent scholarship, Mapping the State should be viewed as the first part of a four-nation history of the boundary reform legislation of 1832.⁴⁰ It is my hope that this book prompts future investigation into the divergent research questions raised by the Irish, Scottish and Welsh boundary reforms of 1832.

The working papers of the English and Welsh borough boundary commission, which are held by the National Archives, provide the archival spine for this book. This archive has been held by the Public Record Office since 1848, when it was transferred from the custody of the then assistant tithe commissioner, and former 1831–2 boundary commissioner, Robert Kearsley Dawson.⁴¹ Since then, the records have been stored in the records of commissions and committees division of the Treasury archive, under the catalogue number T72.⁴² Despite regular publication of their availability they have never been used by historians of the 1832 reform legislation, and while historians of cartography have noted their existence they have never been subjected to historical analysis.⁴³ The archive consists of 260 folders of variable sizes for almost every English and Welsh borough visited by the commission, and contains the unpublished draft reports, correspondence and maps of the commission, as well as its ledger book. T72 has been used alongside the more traditional archival sources associated with 1832 – the Grey, Durham and Hatherton papers, for instance – as well as some of the less obvious personal papers related to the boundary commission, such as the Larcom papers (National Library of Ireland), Herschel papers (Royal Society), the papers of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (UCL) and the Boulton papers (Library of Birmingham). In addition, extensive use has been made of memoirs, parliamentary papers, newspapers (both physical and digital), and reports of parliamentary debates in Hansard and the Mirror of Parliament, as well as contemporary topographical dictionaries and maps.

Mapping the State combines what might be termed a traditional qualitative historical analysis of these sources, with several linguistic, statistical and geographical digital techniques. Methodologically, it builds on the recent work of Luke Blaxill, Naomi Lloyd-Jones, Henry Miller and James Smith, who have demonstrated how ‘big data’ and new digital approaches can be incorporated into political history.⁴⁴ As well as further exploring the possibilities provided by digital analysis for answering big structural historical questions (such as how did electoral reform change politics and political culture in the UK?), this digital turn in political history is part of a wider effort to reinvigorate the practices of the subject and make a case for its significance within the discipline of history, the humanities and the social sciences.⁴⁵ As Miles Taylor has suggested, this wider effort to demonstrate the relevance of political history to new audiences requires a ‘new synthesis of approach’, which not only embraces digital methods, but also engages with other fields of history such as intellectual history and the history of science.⁴⁶ In this regard, the book combines ‘high political’ methods and electoral history with big data longitudinal analysis, contributes to ongoing debates in intellectual history surrounding representation, and examines the practical application, and cultural significance, of science, statistics and cartography to nineteenth-century British parliamentary and political life. I am not claiming to have developed a new model for political history here. Rather my approach and methods have been carefully chosen as the most suitable from those available within (and without) the discipline to help answer a set of research questions that arose from trying to explain the reasons behind, and the political and electoral significance of, the work of Drummond and his fellow boundary commissioners during the autumn and winter of 1831–2.

From a digital and quantitative perspective, Chapter 1 utilises the text mining software CasualConc to analyse a corpus of Cobbett’s and Hansard’s parliamentary debates that I have created for the period 1774–1868, using digitised sources available through Google Books, archive.org and the UK Parliament’s online Hansard archive.⁴⁷ The electoral statistics used throughout the book have been analysed through Excel and ArcGIS and have been compiled primarily from parliamentary returns, in particular the published papers of the boundary commission, electoral registration data for the period 1832–68 and census returns between 1821 and 1871.⁴⁸ A database of election results, party labels and parliamentary divisions also underpins the analysis of the latter two-thirds of the book.⁴⁹ My dataset of party labels and election results has been compiled from annual editions of Charles Dod’s Parliamentary Companion, and cross referenced against the personal questionnaires completed by MPs for the Parliamentary Companion, rival companions, election addresses and speeches, and contemporary newspaper lists of election results.⁵⁰ In order to avoid anachronism in a process fraught with categorisation difficulties, I have only erred from Dod’s party labels where clear errors occurred. My dataset of parliamentary divisions is a revised version of the History of Parliament and Eggers and Spirling’s 1836–1910 dataset of parliamentary divisions, which has been updated to include parliamentary votes between 1833 and 1836, cleaned to ensure all votes are 100 per cent accurate and expanded to include ‘pairs’ and abstentions for each division analysed in this book. This electoral data has been geocoded to work with the shapefiles for English boundaries created by the Great Britain Historic GIS Project at the University of Portsmouth.⁵¹

The first half of Mapping the State provides the contextual backdrop to England’s reformed electoral map. Chapter 1 combines qualitative and quantitative approaches to demonstrate how a fundamental shift in the ‘language of interests’ and attitudes towards the electoral system in the post-Napoleonic period paved the way for reform in 1832. Chapter 2 examines the implementation of the Grey ministry’s theoretical plans for boundary reform from November 1830 and the public outcry over their proposals for the division of counties, which led to the government’s near collapse by September 1831. Chapters 3 and 4 reveal how the lord chancellor, Lord Brougham, and the chair of the boundary commission, Thomas Drummond, established the English and Welsh boundary commission during the summer of 1831. Drummond’s development of an innovative ‘scientific’ bureaucratic framework underpinned the redrawing of England’s electoral map and the remodelling of the disfranchisement schedules in 1832, via what became known as ‘Drummond’s List’. The success of the commission’s methods led to the collection of masses of geographic, electoral and socio-economic data. This unprecedented instance of interaction between the centre and the localities transformed the processes of electoral reform, instilled a new confidence among Whig ministers in the possibilities of domestic inquiry and established major precedents for the better-known commissions and inspectorates which continued the process of redefining the late Hanoverian and early Victorian British state.

The rest of the book analyses the boundary commission’s reconstruction of England’s electoral map during 1831 and 1832. The commission was characterised by its remarkable commitment to the application of Drummond’s ‘scientific’ framework, which was only compromised by the political reality of securing parliamentary approval for the 1832 Boundary Act, and some occasional instances of naked gerrymandering by the government. Chapter 5 examines the large group of English boroughs whose boundaries were extended to include their modern town or remained unchanged in 1832. The consequences of boundary reform in these boroughs varied considerably, contrasting starkly with the ‘multiple parish’ boroughs discussed in Chapter 6. These extensive constituencies were created to ensure each reformed borough contained 300 voters, resulting in a significant electoral boon to the landed, agricultural interest in the reformed Commons. Chapter 7 explores the identification of boundaries for England’s new boroughs in 1832, which subsequently provided the electoral foundation for the emerging Liberal party at Westminster. The final chapter investigates the work of the emerging civil servant John Shaw Lefevre in reconstructing England’s county map, which contrary to Whig expectations became a long-term Conservative electoral stronghold. The enduring legacy of the boundary commission to the development of the British state, and its wide-ranging impact on England’s political landscape, underline the status of the 1832 reform legislation as one of the most transformative moments in the political history of the United Kingdom.

Notes

1. 1. I use ‘1832 reform legislation’ to refer to the five statutes that reformed the United Kingdom’s electoral system in 1832: the 1832 Reform Act (England and Wales) (2 & 3 Wm. IV, c. 45); 1832 Reform Act (Scotland) (2 & 3 Wm. IV, c. 65); 1832 Reform Act (Ireland) (2 & 3 Wm. IV, c. 88); 1832 Boundary Act (England and Wales) (2 & 3 Wm. IV, c. 64); 1832 Boundary Act (Ireland) (2 & 3 Wm. IV, c. 89).

2. 2. SRO, Hatherton papers, D260/M/F/5/27/8, 34, commissioners to Drummond, 6 June 1832.

3. 3. Parliamentary Papers [hereafter PP] 1831–2 (20), xxxvii. 1; PP1831–2 (141), xxxviii. 1, xxxix. 1, xl. 1, xli. 1; PP1831–2 (408), xlii. 1; PP1831–2 (519), xliii. 1.

4. 4. In keeping with M. Cragoe, Culture, Politics and National Identity in Wales 1832–1886 (Oxford, 2004), Monmouthshire and Monmouth Boroughs are considered part of Wales.

5. 5. N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation (London, 1971), 432–3; P. Salmon, ‘The English Reform Legislation, 1831–32’, in D. Fisher (ed.), House of Commons 1820–32 (Cambridge, 2009), i, 395–401.

6. 6. Miles Taylor, ‘Parliamentary Representation in Modern Britain: Past, Present and Future’, HJ, 65, 4 (2022), 1145–73.

7. 7. D. C. Moore, The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Nineteenth Century Political System (New York, 1976), 173–83; D. C. Moore, ‘Concession or Cure: The Sociological Premises of the First Reform Act’, HJ, 9, 1 (1966), 39–59.

8. 8. Salmon, ‘English Reform Legislation’, 399–400.

9. 9. H. Miller, A Nation of Petitioners. Petitions and Petitioning in the United Kingdom, 1780–1918 (Cambridge, 2023); L. Blaxill, The War of Words: The Language of British Elections, 1880–1914 (London, 2020).

10. 10. K. Marx, ‘The Elections – Tories and Whigs’, New York Daily Tribune, 21 Aug. 1852, 6; K. Marx, ‘Lord Russell’, Neue Oder-Zeitung (1855), 359; W. Molesworth, The History of the Reform Bill of 1832 (London, 1865); J. Butler, The Passing of the Great Reform Bill (London, 1914); G. Trevelyan, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (London, 1920).

11. 11. Gash, Age of Peel, 3–33; D. C. Moore, ‘The Other Face of Reform’, Victorian Studies, 5, 1 (1961), 7–34; Moore, ‘Concession’; Moore, Deference; E. P. Hennock and D. C. Moore, ‘The First Reform Act: A Discussion’, Victorian Studies, 14, 3 (1971), 321–37; J. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1973); M. Brock, The Great Reform Act (London, 1973); A. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 1831–1840 (London, 1977); J. Milton-Smith, ‘Earl Grey’s Cabinet and the Objects of Parliamentary Reform’, HJ, 15,1 (1972), 55–74; R. Davis, ‘Deference and Aristocracy in the Time of the Great Reform Act’, American Historical Review, 81, 3 (1976), 532–9.

12. 12. E. Wasson, ‘The Great Whigs and Parliamentary Reform, 1809–1830’, JBS, 24, 4 (1985), 434–64; B. Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: the Edinburgh Review 1802–1832 (Cambridge, 1985); R. Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion, and Reform, 1830–1841 (Oxford, 1987); P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990); I. Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 1830–41: The Politics of Government (London, 1990); L. Mitchell, ‘Foxite Politics and the Great Reform Bill’, EHR, 108, 427 (1993), 338–64; J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (London, 1993), 72–89; B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, & Dangerous People?: England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), 420–37.

13. 13. Miles Taylor, ‘Empire and Parliamentary Reform: The 1832 Reform Act Revisited’, in A. Burns and J. Innes (eds.), Rethinking the Age of Reform (Cambridge, 2003), 295–311; K. Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender, and Political Culture in Britain 1815–1867 (2009), 159–71; A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: Habits of Heart and Mind (Oxford, 2015), 29–98; S. Thompson, ‘ “Population Combined with Wealth and Taxation”: Statistics Representation and the Making of the 1832 Reform Act’, in T. Crook and G. O’Hara (eds.), Statistics and the Public Sphere, Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000 (New York, 2011), 205–23; Salmon, ‘English Reform Legislation’, 411.

14. 14. K. T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland 1832-1885 (Oxford, 1984); S. Farrell, ‘Ireland’, in Fisher, Commons 1820–1832, i. 211–16; M. Dyer, Men of Property and Intelligence: Scottish Electoral System Prior to 1884 (Aberdeen, 1996); G. Pentland, Radicalism, Reform and National Identity in Scotland 1820–1833 (Woodbridge, 2008); Fisher, ‘Scotland’, in Fisher, Commons, i 141–6; M. Cragoe, Culture, Politics and National Identity; M. Escott, ‘Wales’, in Fisher, Commons, i. 84–96.

15. 15. R. Quinault, ‘The Industrial Revolution and Parliamentary Reform’, in P. O’Brien and R. Quinault (eds.), The Industrial Revolution and British Society (Cambridge, 1993), 183–202; D. Fisher, ‘England’, in Fisher, Commons, i, 1–62; Salmon, ‘English Reform Legislation’, 404–10; 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.

16. 16. R. Quinault, ‘The French Revolution of 1830 and Parliamentary Reform’, History, 75, 297 (1994), 377–93; N. LoPatin, Political Unions, Popular Politics and the Great Reform Act of 1832 (Basingstoke, 1999); R. Ertman, ‘The Great Reform Act of 1832 and British Democratization’, Comparative Political Studies, 43, 8 (2010), 1000–1022; Gleadle, Borderline Citizens, 171–91; R. Saunders, ‘God and the Great Reform Act: Preaching against Reform, 1831–32’, JBS, 53, 2 (2014), 378–99; T. S. Aidt and R. Franck, ‘Democratization under the Threat of Revolution: Evidence from the Great Reform Act of 1832’, Econometrica, 83 (2015), 505–47; K. Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789–1848 (Manchester, 2016), 122–9.

17. 17. Brock, Reform Act, 141–2, 157–9, 247, 260–66, 269–81, 377; Kriegel, Holland House, xxx–xxxi, 5, 99–100, 425–6, 447.

18. 18. Gash, Age of Peel, 69.

19. 19. Moore, Politics of Deference, 173–83; Moore, ‘Concession or Cure’, 39–59.

20. 20. Thompson, ‘Population’, 205–23.

21. 21. B. Robson, ‘Maps and Mathematics: Ranking the English Boroughs for the 1832 Reform Act’, Journal of Historical Geography, 46 (2014), 66–79.

22. 22. S. Farrell, ‘Poole’, in Fisher, Commons, ii. 334; T. Jenkins, ‘Villiers, Frederick’, in Fisher, Commons, vii. 563–64.

23. 23. Salmon, ‘English Reform Legislation’, 384–88.

24. 24. H. Clokie and J. Robinson, Royal Commissions of Inquiry (New York, 1937), 54–79; L. Hume, ‘Jeremy Bentham and the Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government’, HJ, 10, 3 (1967), 361–75; W. Lubenow, The Politics of Government Growth (Plymouth, 1971); A. Brundage, The Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Inquiry, Enactment and Implementation (London, 1978); idem, England’s Prussian Minister: Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1832–54 (London, 1988); O. MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government 1830–1870 (London, 1977); U. Henriques, Before the Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Britain (London, 1979), 18–46.

25. 25. B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815–30 (Oxford, 1977); R. Tompson, The Charity Commission and the Age of Reform (London, 1979); Parry, Rise and Fall, 34–8; 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. Mandler, ‘Tories and Paupers: Christian Political Economy and the Making of the New Poor Law’, HJ, 33, 1 (1990), 81–103; P. Jupp, British Politics on the Eve of Reform: The Duke of Wellington’s Administration, 1828–30 (Basingstoke, 1998); J. Innes, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2009).

26. 26. T. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, 1986), 36; A. Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality and the March of Intellect (Durham, N.C., 2001); M. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (Hassocks, 1976); S. Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York, 1978); J. Morrell and A. Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (New York, 1981); E. Higgs, Before The Information State: The Central Collection of Information on Citizens since 1500 (Basingstoke, 2004); J. Bord, Science and Whig Manners: Science and Political Style in Britain, c. 1790–1850 (Basingstoke, 2009); E. Gillin, The Victorian Palace of Science: Scientific Knowledge and the Building of the Houses of Parliament (Cambridge, 2017); L. Goldman, Victorians & Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford, 2022).

27. 27. R. Hyde, ‘Mapping Urban Britain 1831–32: The Compilation of the Reform Bill Plans’, Bulletin of the Society of University Cartographers, 9, 2 (1978), 1–9; C. Close, The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey (Newton Abbot, 1969), 89, 138; C. Delano-Smith and R. Kain, English Maps: A History (London, 1999), 98–139; R. Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London, 2011), 262–7.

28. 28. R. Oliver, The Ordnance Survey in the Nineteenth Century: Maps, Money and the Growth of Government (London, 2014), 108–30; R. Kain and E. Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State (Chicago, 1992).

29. 29. P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003), 35–61. Joyce draws from J. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998); J. Harley ‘Deconstructing the Map’, Cartographica, 26, 2 (1989), 1–20.

30. 30. Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space, 154–76.

31. 31. J. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour 1818–1841 (Oxford, 1992), 303; J. Phillips and C. Wetherall, ‘The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England’, American Historical Review, 100 (1995), 411–36; P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties 1832–1841 (Woodbridge, 2002); M. Cragoe, ‘The Great Reform Act and the Modernization of British Politics: The Impact of Conservative Associations, 1835–1841’, JBS, 47, 3 (2008), 581–603.

32. 32. A. Heesom, ‘ “Legitimate” versus “Illegitimate” Influences: Aristocratic Electioneering in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Parliamentary History, 7, 2 (1988), 282–305; F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England (Oxford, 1989); F. O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England 1780–1860’, Past and Present, 135 (1992), 79–115; D. Eastwood, ‘Contesting the Politics of Deference: The Rural Electorate, 1820–60’, and Miles Taylor, ‘Interests, Parties and the State: the Urban Electorate in England, c. 1820–72’, in J. Lawrence and Miles Taylor (eds.), Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997), 27–78.

33. 33. D. Beales, ‘Parliamentary Parties and the Independent Member’, 1810–1860’, in Robson, R. (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (London, 1967), 1–19; H. Berrington, ‘Partisanship and Dissidence in the Nineteenth Century House of Commons’, Parliamentary Affairs, 21 (1968), 338–74; D. Close, ‘The Formation of a Two-Party Alignment in the House of Commons between 1830 and 1841’, EHR, 84 (1969), 257–77; I. Newbould, ‘The Emergence of a Two-Party System in England from 1830 to 1841: Roll Call and Reconsideration’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 5, 1 (1985), 25–31; For the second technique see: W. O. Aydelotte, ‘Voting Patterns in the British House of Commons in the 1840s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5 (1963), 134–63; J. Bylsma, ‘Party Structure in the 1852–1857 House of Commons: A Scalogram Analysis’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7, 4 (1977), 617–35; C. Schonhardt-Bailey, From the Corn Laws to Free Trade (London, 2006). For the third technique see: A. C. Eggers and A. Spirling, ‘Party Cohesion in Westminster Systems: Inducements, Replacement and Discipline in the House of Commons, 1836–1910’, British Journal of Political Science, 46, 3 (2014), 567–89.

34. 34. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, 128–31; I. Newbould, ‘Whiggery and the Growth of Party 1830–1841: Organisation and the Challenge of Reform’, PH, 4 (1985), 137–56; Parry, Rise and Fall; Mandler, Aristocratic Government, 157–99; Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics; Hilton, Mad, Bad, 513–24.

35. 35. W. Aydelotte, ‘Constituency Influence on the British House of Commons’, in W. Aydelotte (ed.), The History of Parliamentary Behaviour (New Jersey, 1977), 225–46; Schonhardt-Bailey, Corn Laws to Free Trade; G. Cox, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England (1987), 57–9, 148–65.

36. 36. B. Coleman, Conservatism and the Conservative Party in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1988), 102–5; R. Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830–1867 (London, 1978), 215–16; Parry, Rise and Fall, 338–41; T. Jenkins, Sir Robert Peel (Basingstoke, 1999), 90–91; I. McLean, ‘Interests and Ideology in the United Kingdom Parliament of 1841–7: An Analysis of Roll Call Voting’, Contemporary Political Studies, 1 (1995), 1–20; Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, 181–2.

37. 37. Parry, Rise and Fall, 193–4, 339.

38. 38. M. Escott, ‘Welsh Reform Legislation’, D. Fisher, ‘Scottish Reform Legislation’, and S. Farrell, ‘Irish Reform Legislation’, in Fisher, Commons, i. 84–92, 141–6, 211–16.

39. 39. UCL Special Collections, Brougham Papers [hereafter UCL, Brougham], 457, ‘Scotch Reform Bill’, fo. 24761; National Archives, T72/9/18, ‘Frome’, Drummond to Ansley, 20 Oct. 1831.

40. 40. N. Lloyd-Jones and M. Scull (ed.), Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis)United Kingdom? (London, 2019); J. Smith, ‘Legislating for the Four Nations at Westminster in the Age of Reform, 1830–1852’ (unpublished University of York thesis, 2021).

41. 41. Tenth Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, C 1046 (1849), 7, 12.

42. 42. HMSO, Guide to the Contents of the Public Record Office: State Papers and Departmental Records (1963), ii. 298.

43. 43. Oliver, Ordnance Survey, pp. 108–9.

44. 44. Blaxill, War of Words; L. Blaxill, ‘Why Do Historians Ignore Digital Analysis? Bring on the Luddites’, Political Quarterly, 94, 2 (2023), 279–89; Miller, Nation of Petitioners; N. Lloyd-Jones, ‘A New British History of the Home Rule Crisis: Public Opinion, Representation and Organisation’ (unpublished University of London PhD thesis, 2019); J. Smith, ‘Legislating for the Four Nations’.

45. 45. A. Middleton, ‘ “High Politics” and its Intellectual Contexts’, Parliamentary History, 40, 1 (2021), 168–91; M. Skjönsberg, ‘The History of Political Thought and Parliamentary History in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, HJ, 64, 2 (2021), 501–13; C. Murphy, ‘The Future of British Political History’, Political Quarterly, 94, 2 (2023), 201–7.

46. 46. Taylor, ‘Parliamentary Representation’, 1173.

47. 47. Digging into Linked Parliamentary Data project, https://web.archive.org/web/20230321120911/https://did3.jiscinvolve.org/wp/projects/dilipad/ [accessed 20 May 2022]; Blaxill, War of Words, 21–43.

48. 48. PP1833 (189) xxxvii. 21; PP1836 (190) xliii. 363; PP1837–38 (329), xliv. 553; PP1840 (579) xxxix. 187; PP1846 (284) xxxiii. 145; PP1852 (4) xlii. 303; PP1854 (280) liii. 211; PP1859 (140) xxiii. 139; PP1862 (410) xliv. 703; PP1865 (448), xliv. 549. For census data see: PP1833 (149) xxxvi. 12–13; PP1843 (496) xxii. 8; PP1852–53 (1691) lxxxviii. 206; PP1863 (3221) liii. 278; PP1873 (872) lxxi, 12.

49. 49. M. Spychal, ‘The geography of voting behaviour: towards a roll-call analysis of England’s reformed electoral map, 1832–68’, https://thehistoryofparliament.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/m.spychal-geography-of-voting-ppp-seminar-16-mar-2021.pdf [accessed 5 Dec. 2022]

50. 50. London, History of Parliament, Unpublished facsimile, ‘Autobiography of five hundred members of Parliament’; J. Coohill, Ideas of the Liberal Party: Perceptions, Agendas and Liberal Politics in the House of Commons, 1832–52 (Chichester, 2011), 19–45.

51. 51. Great Britain Historical GIS, http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data/ [accessed 20 May 2022].