Political Evolution of 19th Century Britain
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The Reform Act of 1867, which sharply reduced the property qualification for eligibility to vote in British parliamentary elections, was one of the major steps which, in the course of the nineteenth century, led Britain from a governmental system based on landed privilege to one approaching mass democracy. At a step, this Reform Act increased the number of electors in British elections by about fifty percent (Feuchtwanger, 1985, p. 2). While its short term effects proved to be somewhat limited, it also represented a major step in the "disenfranchisement" of the Monarch as an effective power in the British government. Finally, the Reform Act of 1867 is notable as being one of the historic high water marks of "Tory reform" that is, reform tending in a liberal, democratizing direction, but introduced and carried through by the conservative party in this case, by the Tories, under Benjamin Disraeli, hard on the tail of the defeat of a (more modest) reform proposed by Gladstone and the Liberals the year before. Thus, the Reform Act of 1867 is notable both in and of itself, as a major step in the evolution of the unwritten British constitution, but also as an exemplar of the workings and development of British parliamentary government in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both these aspects will be considered in the pages following. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1815, Great Britain was a commercial and proto industrial power in its economic life, but s
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me way, on the political as well as the economic level, to prevent an explosion at some future date. More important, perhaps, was the general impulse in the nineteenth century towards "reform." It is difficult for us, in the jaded late twentieth century, to grasp the limitless possibilities for progress which appeared to the nineteenth century mind. The material possibilities of life were probably changing faster around 1867 than at any time before or sense. Railroad and telegraph were still new enough to be fresh. Electrical experimentation had still produced little practical effect (save the telegraph), but its potential was well recognized. Other technologies, such as gas lighting unimportant side branches to us seemed equally impressive at the time.
In a generation or two, in short, people had moved from a material life not so different from that of the Middle Ages, to one beginning to have a recognizable air of modernity. Poverty was as intense as ever, perhaps in some ways more so, but the idea of its eradication was no longer seen as unthinkable. Thus, an optimism was in the air that seems quite quaint to us.
In one crucial way, however, British attitudes and values differed fundamentally from those of the
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Approximate Word count = 2331
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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