Getting the vote
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Voting rights before 1832
In early-19th-century Britain very few people had the right
to vote. A survey conducted in 1780 revealed that the electorate
in England and Wales consisted of just 214,000 people - less
than 3% of the total population of approximately 8 million.
In Scotland the electorate was even smaller: in 1831 a mere
4,500 men, out of a population of more than 2.6 million people,
were entitled to vote in parliamentary elections. Large industrial
cities like Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester did not have
a single MP between them, whereas 'rotten boroughs' such as
Dunwich in Suffolk (which had a population of 32 in 1831)
were still sending two MPs to Westminster. The British electoral
system was unrepresentative and outdated. |
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Address to the people of Lambeth, 1839
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Pressure for reform
During the late 18th century and the early 19th century,
pressure for parliamentary reform grew rapidly. Some of it
came from men who already had a large say in how Britain was
run: country gentlemen angry about the use of patronage at
Westminster, or manufacturers and businessmen keen to win
political influence to match their economic power. However,
the issue of parliamentary reform reached a wider audience,
particularly after the French Revolution.
Influenced by works such as Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
(1791-2), radical reformers demanded that all men be given
the right to vote. Reform groups such as the Sheffield Corresponding
Society (founded in December 1791) and the London Corresponding
Society (founded in January 1791) were committed to universal
'manhood' (i.e. adult male) suffrage . |
Two decades later, the radical public speaker
Henry Hunt spoke at numerous political meetings on the same
theme. During August 1819, at one such gathering in St Peter's
Field, Manchester, local yeomanry attacked the crowd, killing
11 people. After the 'Peterloo Massacre', as this incident became
known in radical circles, the government passed a series of
repressive measures, and parliamentary reform still seemed a
distant prospect. |
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'A leap in the dark' (Punch
cartoon)
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The Reform Acts
The three parliamentary reform Acts introduced in 19th-century
Britain (in 1832, 1867 and 1884 respectively) satisfied
moderate reformers rather than radicals. The Prime Minister,
Lord Grey, supported reform to 'prevent the necessity of
revolution' and was responsible for the first (or 'Great')
Reform Act of 1832. However, the Act gave the vote in towns
only to men who occupied property with an annual value of
£10, which excluded six adult males out of seven from
the voting process.
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The Tory politician Lord Derby described the
second Reform Act (1867) as 'a leap in the dark'. And yet only
two in every five Englishmen had the vote in 1870. Even the
third Reform Act (1884) - which enfranchised all male house
owners in both urban and rural areas and added 6 million people
to the voting registers - fell some way short of introducing
universal manhood suffrage. |
Third Reform Act:
Gladstone writes to the queen
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Chartist demonstration in Birmingham,
1848
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Campaigns for universal suffrage
Radical reformers pressed for more extensive parliamentary
reform throughout the 19th century. The six-point programme
of the Chartists included demands for universal
suffrage, annual parliaments, and voting by secret ballot.
During the 1830s and 1840s, when Chartism was at its most
influential, meetings to discuss 'constitutional reform' took
place in towns and cities across Britain. |
In the mid 1860s the Reform League
- though less clearly committed to universal suffrage than the
Chartists had been - also mobilised support outside Parliament
for electoral reform. Throughout this period, election campaigns
were sometimes disrupted by unrest and rioting. |
Reform League poster, 1867 Document
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Election violence in Carlisle, 1841 Document
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Conclusions
For many people, 19th-century parliamentary reform was a
disappointment because political power was still left in the
hands of the aristocracy and the middle classes. Universal
suffrage, with voting rights for women (though not for those
under 30), did not arrive in Britain until February 1918.
By the time of the third Reform Act in 1884, Britain was less
democratic than many other countries in Europe. |
The changes made in
the British political system between 1832 and 1884 were nevertheless
important. The electorate increased substantially in size from
approximately 366,000 in England and Wales in 1831 to slightly
fewer than 8 million in 1885. Parliamentary seats were redistributed
to give greater weight to larger towns and cities. Also, the
Ballot Act of 1872, which introduced secret ballots, made it
far more difficult for voters to be bribed or intimidated. |
Bribery at Tamworth elections, 1854
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Ballot regulations, Dover, 1872
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Moreover, Britain - unlike much of
continental Europe in the 19th century - managed to introduce
reform without revolution. This achievement contributed greatly
to Britain's political stability in the 20th century.
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