Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act

 

Pimlico edition - 2004

I knew very little about the 1832 Reform Act (even less about the 1867 one). Stanley Weyman's Chippinge was an excellent literary taster, the real Malmesbury giving colour to the fictional Chippinge Borough and the Bristol Riots being faithfully portrayed. I had read Edward Pearce's excellent Lines of Most Resistance (The Lords, The Tories and Ireland, 1886-1914) a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed, and learned much about that period of bitter politics in late Victorian and Edwardian times. This book I found heavier going and took over a week to digest it.

Politicians and others queued up to praise it when it first came out in hardback. Gerald Kaufman called it exciting, amusing, and engrossing; Jane Ridley commented on Pearce's lean, incisive prose;  Roy Hattersley - no mean author himself - was nearer the mark suggesting it was a serious book for serious people (i.e. like himself). I occasionally became lost in who was who, often because both Tories and Whigs were split - into diehards, or waverers etc. What Pearce does do is to place firmly under the glass men like the Duke of Wellington, Lords Durham and Brougham, Earl Grey and the more radical Thomas Attwood; he also seems to have got the measure of Sir Robert Peel and John Wilson Croker. I found it harder to pin down Lords Althorp, Melbourne and Palmerston.  Pearce's useful early Chapter on The Cast is a must-read and I returned to it more than once. 

George Cruickshank - The System Works So Well (1831)

In Cruickshank's cartoon, the House of Commons is shown as a water mill. The water wheel bears the names of rotten boroughs. Underneath lies the corpses of the poor, and from the mill pours a stream of benefits of being MPs, which they stuff in their pockets, while praising the system and opposing reform.

As I read on, the more I realised politicians are the same in every generation. Mind you, they are as every other human being - capable of genuine friendship, loyalty, far-sightedness, with certain principles; but, equally, deceitful, out for the main chance, and fully equipped with the Selfish Gene. The major reason, I got bored once or twice with the book was that it appeared to be a tale of 'action replays'. The die-hards  failed to budge, on either side, and the Waverers said one thing on a Monday and another on the Tuesday. Notwithstanding all this, I am glad I persevered as I now know (and understand) much more about the politics of the 1830s - and then there's Ireland and the Irish!