The Great Reform Act

by Michael Brock

'It was not a good bill, but it was a great bill when it passed,' said John Bright of the famous 1832 Reform Bill. It left much undone; it included clauses introduced to win critics over to its cause; it lacked administrative foresight; it created anomalies in the voting qualifications. But it was great because it heralded a far-reaching and peaceful revolution in the British parliamentary system. The crisis which preceded its passing dominated British political life and British statesmen - Wellington, Grey, Peel, to name only three - for two dramatic years during which party intrigue and reforming zeal affected London and the country, the press and the unions, aristocracy and working class alike.

The last full study of the Reform Act was published in 1914. Since then, many manuscript collections have become available to historians; and detailed studies have been made of such episodes as the agricultural laborers' 'revolt' of 1830 and the run on the banks in May 1832. Michael Bock has drawn upon this material to look again at a patrician society in which 'democrat' was a term of abuse, and to reassess what the reformers achieved. His story is as colourful and compelling as his characters, and his use of manuscript material makes his book an original and important contribution to nineteenth-century British history.

411 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

A specialist in modern British history, Michael George Brock was Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1978 to 1988.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1832 Reform Act is commonly regarded as the first step undertaken by Parliament towards transforming Great Britain into the parliamentary democracy it is today. Requiring nearly a year and a half of contentious political drama before passage was achieved, under its provisions changes were made to the electoral for the system in the first time in over a century. While the aristocratic landowning oligarchy maintained their dominance over the British political system, the franchise was expanded to include more men who were middle-class property holders and tenant farmers, “rotten boroughs” were abolished and the seats redistributed, and other borough boundaries were redrawn so as to create a system that better represented the changing nation.

Given its importance to modern British history, the Reform Act has never wanted for attention. Since its initial publication over a half-century ago, the value of works about it have been measured by Michael Brock’s dense study of the bill and his tortuous description of its passage. Drawing upon a vast corpus of records and the enormous literature related to his subject, he painstakingly recounts its evolution from the decades of reform pressures that conceived it to its birth into statute. From this account emerges an argument as a measure that, for all of the dramatic changes it wrought to the British electoral system, was fundamentally a conservative effort to accommodate middle-class demands without compromising the aristocracy’s hold on the political process. In this manner, calls for reform from that growing segment of British society could be met in a way that gave them a stake in the system while maintaining the authority of the elite.

To make this case, Brock explains the motivation behind every twist and turn in the long struggle to win the bill’s passage. To borrow from an old adage, it is an autopsy of the sausage-making process of legislation, and one that is not for the casual reader seeking an introduction to the subject. Yet despite its age and the excellent research that has been undertaken about the legislation and its implementation since then, the level of detail he employs and the research behind it has ensured its continuing status as the foremost study of the act. It is a book that needs to be read by anyone interested in understanding this pivotal piece of legislation and how it came to be law.