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The project I have undertaken here, of examining how the Victorians understood social agency, was anticipated by William Howitt and George Eliot when, during the era in which the Second Reform Act, of 1867, was under discussion, they wrote historical novels that look back to the beginning of the era of reform and the campaign for the franchise. Just as their predecessors constructed historical narratives that were analogous to or culminated in the present, they treated the earlier era of reform as analogous to the present era, in effect asking what had been learned about agency. These novels, like their predecessors, search for alternatives to the franchise and social class, but my focus here is not, as in previous chapters, on how the novels define these alternatives. Rather, I examine what these novels can tell us about the significance of the Victorian conception of social agency as reform rather than revolution. While we know little about the circumstances that led Howitt to write The Man of the People, its appearance in 1860, together with the novel’s implied argument that the people are now educated and should therefore be granted the franchise, suggests that he wrote it in support of the proposal for parliamentary reform advanced that year, the last government-sponsored proposal before 1866. Howitt’s novel reaches back not to the era of the First Reform Bill itself but rather to the era of 1816–1817, which initiated the program of parliamentary reform later taken up by the Chartists. Eliot began writing Felix Holt, the Radical at the end of March 1865, just a month after the formation of the Reform League (discussed below) and completed it at the end of May 1866, when Gladstone’s Reform Bill was being debated.1 Whereas Middlemarch covers the era leading up to passage of the bill, including the last election before its passage, Felix Holt is set just afterCoda Rethinking Reform in the Era of the Second Reform Act, 1860–1867 190 reform acts ward, in late 1832 and early 1833, during the electoral campaign for the first reform Parliament. While both novels are set in the era before Chartism, they draw on parliamentary and Chartist discourses, in particular on the discourse of moral versus physical force. The protagonists of both novels—each based in part on the life of the moral-force radical Samuel Bamford—seek to use moral force and, more particularly , advocate the development of rational decision making through education.2 Both also attempt to mitigate the effects of their fellow radicals’ use of physical force but are arrested and tried by the authorities for what is perceived to be their role as leaders of an insurrection. These plot structures—which recall narratives in which the innocent or those who resist physical force get caught up in mob violence—imply that precisely because moral force cannot be effective without physical force one cannot employ it without being involved in the seditious use of force.3 In what follows, I examine how this problematic accounts for Howitt’s novel’s making the case that the people are now sufficiently educated to be trusted with the franchise yet never depicts a rational people, while Eliot’s, with its often remarked-upon conservative “radicalism,”4 locates culture, and with it social agency, outside of the political domain entirely. Rejecting political reform as the action of a self-interested class, she constructs agency as self-culture, an “inward revolution” that moves the individual beyond class. Q Throughout the 1850s, even as Chartism faded away, various members of Parliament offered proposals to modify the Reform Act of 1832, but none received sufficient support for passage. The government introduced a reform proposal in 1860, but, like its predecessors, it ultimately fell victim to parliamentary infighting . While the US Civil War along with other political factors kept reform off the ministerial agenda over the next few years, popular support for reform began to gather momentum. In April 1864, a largely middle-class group, including many former members of the Anti–Corn Law League, established the National Reform Union with the objective of obtaining suffrage for all males “liable to be rated to the relief of the poor” (Leeds Mercury 21 Apr. 1864: 3). In February 1865, the leadership of the Universal League for the Material Elevation of the Industrious Classes, a group of trade unionists and former Chartists, transformed itself into the National Reform League, which aimed to obtain “an extension of the franchise...

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