Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act (review)

The Second Reform Act of 1867 ranks as one of the most significant legislative landmarks in modern British political history. The making of the Act—the parliamentary drama and the leading personalities associated with it—continue to dominate historical narratives of Victorian politics. Though Robert Saunders’s book lacks the polemical flare of Maurice Cowling’s 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution (1967) or the methodological innovativeness of Catherine Hall, Jane Rendall, and Keith McClelland’s Defining the Victorian Nation (2000), non-specialists will find it the most readable. Based on extensive archival research, it is unashamedly traditional: narrative political history unencumbered by the linguistic turn and Foucauldian debates about whether the invention of democracy was based on an increasingly restrictive definition of citizenship as suggested by Hall, Rendall, and McClelland. The problem with these revisionist interpretations, as Saunders sees it, is that they tend to assert rather than demonstrate and are based on an ahistorical and too narrow definition of citizenship. To argue that enfranchisement was the precondition of citizenship, and to suggest that those without the vote were little better than slaves, is to take literally what was, in fact, a rhetorical argument of radical reformers: “For most politicians, both inside and outside Parliament, the idea that freedom lay in the exercise of political power was a Continental error” (20).

Saunders does not get bogged down with historiographical controversy—indeed once the battlefield has been sketched in the introduction, the following eight chapters are virtually free of any explicit historiographical posturing. While this makes for a more fluent narrative, it can also make it more difficult for the reader to fully appreciate the novelty of Saunders’s more specific arguments relating to personalities and episodes. There is no lack of clarity, however, in the exposition of Saunders’s over-arching interpretation: to fully understand the Second Reform Bill episode, 1867 needs situating in the context of twenty years of constitutional debate. As Saunders convincingly shows, historians have failed to appreciate the extent to which parliamentary reform was a live issue between 1848 and 1860. With Chartism safely dead, a growing number of politicians, including Tories, became convinced, from a variety of motives, of the need for a final settlement of the franchise question.

Against the background of Chartism, the 1848 revolutions, the rise of Napoleon III, and pre-eminently the American Civil War, British politicians, including many reformers, became acutely aware of the need to make the British political system more representative without making it more democratic. Rather, the objective of reform was to balance the interests of classes and to protect the variety of representation. This was the objective for Lord Derby, Benjamin Disraeli, and Robert Lowe no less than it was for John Russell, W. E. Gladstone, and John Bright, and the helter-skelter parliamentary drama in 1867 as Disraeli jettisoned what looked like crucial safeguards against democracy should not disguise the fundamentally conservative nature of the Second Reform Act—a conclusion that Cowling also reached in his study of 1867, and one that chimes with much of the revisionist historiography from which Saunders distances himself.

The problem, as Saunders shows, was that there was “no consensus over the kind of change desirable,” especially when it came to the vexed issue of the borough franchise (8). For some, the answer lay in a rental franchise, but where to draw the line? And even if the line could be drawn, there were many who doubted whether such an arbitrary and artificial qualification could be a reliable guarantee of finality. Others preferred a rating franchise, believing that this would enfranchise only working men who paid their own rates, though this opened a can of worms between 1866 and 1867 due to the complexities of rating law (Saunders is, incidentally, excellent in elucidating the meaning of, and differences between, rating and rental franchise qualifications). Framing...