Political Movements in Urban England, 1832–1914 (review)

This engaging study of British popular movements between the 1832 Reform Act and the outbreak of the First World War is a welcome addition to Palgrave’s British History in Perspective series. In line with the reputation of its companion volumes, Matthew Roberts’s new text offers an authoritative reading of radical activism that will make it required reading for all undergraduate students and scholars interested in this aspect of nineteenth-century English history. Its focus on the mass movements that punctuated the period determines the study’s essentially urban dynamic for, as Roberts argues, these were the “epicentres” of Victorian and Edwardian England (1).

There are other studies that cover similar territory, but Roberts’s text is more than a survey of the recent historiography of the nineteenth century, however helpful that might be; the author had a more ambitious project in mind. Roberts has adopted a braided narrative to deliver the book’s bold objective: to subject recent interpretations of the key political transitions of the age to rigorous and challenging scrutiny. The careful introduction makes a powerful case for the presence of a “vibrant popular political culture” in the nineteenth century, an argument that refutes the claims of those postmodernists who have insisted that the roots of political apathy can be traced back to the Victorian period. As Roberts notes, there was “more to the politics of the period than mere verbal tussle,” and he takes issue with historians of the so-called New Political History whose “linguistic determinism” has effectively denied the agency of ordinary voters (8).

The opening chapter explores citizenship’s definition in a society that valued private property above all else and appraises the ways in which this ideological framework shaped the rights of individual citizens in 1832, most notably in the attachment to a householder franchise. This exploration of the “political citizen” is of central importance in demonstrating high levels of popular participation (14), and much of the book is concerned with the ways in which a voting system based on property was challenged and eventually replaced by the transition to individual voting rights. Few would deny that the Reform Acts of 1832, 1868, and 1884 were key staging posts in the progress toward an enlarged electorate and that, perversely, citizenship became a gendered concept under the terms of the Third Reform Act. As one Liberal MP maintained, citizenship should be limited “to men of the highest type” (qtd. in Roberts 25).

Securing better citizenship rights lay at the heart of the Chartist campaign, and Roberts is at pains to underline the centrality of an earlier radical tradition that was strengthened by more than a decade of activism. This section is particularly adept at highlighting the complexity of radical ideas that coalesced into a mass platform of unprecedented numbers and superficially gave the appearance of uniformity under the umbrella of Chartism. Undoubtedly, internal wrangling over objectives and strategies was a factor in the movement’s failure to achieve the Six Points, but success, Roberts argues, can be measured in other ways. In establishing the state’s responsibility for the socio-economic distress of the times, the government was forced to act, even if this was strictly “on its own terms” and “not at the direct bidding of the Chartists” (43).

Tensions between tradition and progress framed the difficult path to modernisation, and Roberts suggests that radicals and Chartists were just as likely as anyone else to succumb to the idea of a reformed administration. Rather than replace the hierarchical structure of British society with a radical democracy, many sought only to replace the existing power structure with a leaner, less expensive monarchy and a more responsive Parliament. The deep religiosity of Victorian society inflected the Chartist movement through its cultural apparatus of hymns and rhetoric, and it too flowed into the constitutional approach that became the preferred modus operandi of most of its members. If this was...