John Smith
Victorian Culture
Timeline Capzle
26 August 2011
Topic: First Reform Bill
Date: June 7, 1832
Graphic:
Hayter, Sir George. House of Commons, 1833. 1843. National Portrait Gallery. Collections.
Web. 29 July 2011. <http://images.npg.org.uk/790_500/1/5/mw00015.jpg>
Summary:
The First Reform Act (AKA the Great Reform Act) was passed on June 7, 1832 and set the stage
for later progressive reforms in the rest of the 19th century. The British Parliament had resisted
reforms in the late 18th and early 19th centuries because reform was associated with the extreme
violence of the French Revolution. In addition, many landowning Tories feared reform would
diminish their power (which it did). The act doubled the voting franchise (the number of people
who were allowed to vote for MPs (members of parliament) from “478,000 to 813,000 in a total
population of 24 million (about 4 men in every 100)” (“The Great Reform Act”). Voter
eligibility was based on how much property a man owned or leased (only males could vote). The
act also reapportioned voting districts to more fairly reflect the population. The middle classes
and factory owners of the industrial north (i.e., Birmingham and Manchester) benefitted
significantly from this change. Additionally, rotten boroughs (voting districts with almost no
voters) were reduced and their seats were reallocated to larger districts. According to Glenn
Everett, before the reform voting districts such as Old Sarum had “only seven voters (all
controlled by the local squire)[but] was still sending two members to Parliament.” Two more
important reform bills were passed in 1867 and 1885 which further expanded the franchise.
Connections to Victorian Cultural Artifacts:
Sir George Hayter’s . House of Commons, 1833 is a painting more directly influenced by
the Great Reform Act than any other painting because it commemorates the first meeting of
parliament after the passage of the bill and includes likenesses of actual members of parliament
including Charles Grey, leader of the Whig party who advocated for the bill and Arthur
Wellington, the First Duke of Wellington, leader of the Tory party who opposed the bill. Whig’s
are seated on the left side in the portrait while Tories are on the right.
Francis O’Gorman argues that Tennyson’s poem “The Lotus Eaters” reflects the political
contours of the period leading up to the Great Reform Act: “Tennyson responds to questions of
the relation between inside and out; between Parliamentary discourse and popular sentiment;
government ministry and Commons majority; King William IV and his prime ministers; front
benches and opposition; Tory and Whig. What binds these together for the poet is a common
problem of paralysis, a matter of reversal--and from the perspective of those outside Parliament-the persistent stalling of action, taking place within an increasingly urgent context of physical
threat” (5).
Works Cited & Consulted:
Everett, Glenn. “The Reform Acts.” The Victorian Web. Web. 29 July 2011.
<http://www.victorianweb.org/history/hist2.html>
E. A. Smith. "Great Reform Act" The Oxford Companion to British History. Ed John Cannon.
Oxford UP, 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Web. 29 July 2011.
<http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t110.e191
2>
Frawley, Maria. “The Victorian Age, 1832-1901: Historical Overview.” English Literature in
Context. Ed. Paul Poplawski. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 408-29. Print.
“The Great Reform Act.” Teacher’s Notes. National Portrait Gallery. 29 Web. July 2011.
<http://www.npg.org.uk/assets/migrated_assets/docs/learning/digital/NPGTeachersNotes
_ReformAct.pdf>
“June 7, 1832.” Romantic Chronology. Eds. Laura Mandell and Alan Liu. 21 May 2002. Web.
29 July 2011. <http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/>
O'Gorman, Francis. "Tennyson's 'The Lotus-Eaters' and the Politics of the 1830s." Victorian
Review: The Journal of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada and the
Victorian Studies Association of Ontario 30.1 (2004): 1-20. JSTOR. Web. 4 Aug. 2011.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793534>