victorian political situation

The Victorian age has often been called 'The Age of Reform' and much of the legislation that passed through Parliament at the time, successful or unsuccessful, was aimed at reform, including bills relating to Parliament itself.

Distinctions came to be drawn between constitutional, political, economic and social reform bills. The last of these categories dealt with what were conceived of as 'social problems' or 'social abuses', many of which were associated with the growth of population and the development of capitalist industry, including health and factory acts. Initial reform bills were concerned with the hours and condition of factory children and women. One bitterly contested economic reform, the repeal of the corn laws in 1846, involved and affected the balance of social forces in the country - rural versus urban, agricultural versus industrial - but within a few years of repeal, the opposition to it had dwindled away.

Structures and processes changed. Early in Victoria's reign organised political parties were beginning to take shape, and there was no totally independent civil service. Yet, by the end of the reign, 'democracy' was no longer a bogey word, political parties had a constituency as well as a Parliamentary base, and competition to enter the civil service (by examination) was taken for granted. The pattern of communications, physical and social, had also changed with the rise of a railway system. A new geography had effectively been created, and there was a different kind of popular Press. Long before the launching of the Daily Mail in 1896, press circulation had begun to increase after the abolition of stamp duties on newspapers in 1855, the result of sustained agitation. The National Education Act had also been passed, belatedly, in 1870, creating elementary schools financed from local rates. Attendance was made compulsory ten years later.

TopExtra-parliamentary forces
The drive behind reforming legislation usually came from outside Parliament, as with the working-class Chartist movement intent on reform of the whole electoral process. It is essential, therefore, in the case of each projected 'reform bill' to assess the influence on it of extra-Parliamentary pressures, both of opinion and interests and, in the case of each successful 'reform bill', it is necessary to weigh the role of Parliament and the role of extra-Parliamentary forces in determining the outcome. Doing so has involved controversy between historians as it usually involved political controversy at the time. Moreover, since reformers outside Parliament were often dissatisfied with the extent of the reform, they returned sooner or later to what seemed to them a continuing struggle. Meanwhile, those public servants concerned with implementation often suggested further reforms in the light of experience. The stories of particular reforms, therefore, were usually serial stories.

Whether the comprehensive title the 'Age of Reform' should refer to the whole period in British history between 1837 and 1901 - a period of sharp contrasts in place and time - raises other basic questions, pivoting on the relationships between 'improvement', 'reform' and 'revolution'. As the fear of revolution in Britain receded after 1815, many 'reformers' claimed that only if particular reforms were carried in time could revolution be avoided. And almost all reformers agreed that 'revolution' was the best means of 'reform'. The opponents of the Great Reform Bill claimed that it was 'revolutionary', but within two years of its passing in 1832 most of them accepted it as a fait accompli and adjusted their politics accordingly. It proved to be the first of four successful 19th-century reform bills, the second in 1867, the third introducing the ballot in 1872 and the fourth in 1885. There was more popular agitation, driven by economic as well as by political discontent, in the years 1830-1832 and in the years 1866-1867 than there was in 1885, when the Reform Bill was introduced, as the 1867 had been, by a Conservative government. Yet the 1885 Act had long-term radical consequences - mainly, the political opening up villages through a rural electorate.

It is difficult in retrospect to tell the serial stories of particular reforms in terms of party manifestos, although politicians (and some historians) have been tempted to do so. Group politics are relevant in early and mid-Victorian Britain because members of the medical profession were in a position, as many clergymen were, to cross environmental and social divides and collect evidence, including statistical evidence, when they sought to identify 'problems' requiring action. It is individuals, however, who must usually be given the limelight. Coming from different social and political backgrounds, their personal commitment was crucial to the success of reform legislation.

TopThe Earl of Shaftesbury
The individual most involved in a sequence of different social reforms was the evangelical Tory philanthropist Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885), who fought indomitably for the protection of children in factories and mines, and later chimney sweeps, for public health legislation and for the proper treatment of what were then called 'lunatics'.

Nonetheless, it is doubtful whether Ashley, as a private member of Parliament before he became an earl, would have been as successful as he was had he not been accepted as a Parliamentary leader by a popular movement in the North of England actively engaged until an Act acceptable to them was passed in 1847. Not all the movements had a working-class base, as Chartism did. The Health of Towns Association, for example, founded in 1839, had substantial middle-class support. The main obstacle to its success was apathy, but it also provoked opponents of 'centralisation'.

TopOther individual reformers
Other voluntary associations pressing for reforms were mobilised by women, like the Ladies' Sanitary Reform Association of Manchester and Salford, founded in 1862. Women were without the vote, but there were two women, in particular, who were as outstanding in influencing Parliament as Shaftesbury - Josephine Butler (1828-1906) and Octavia Hill (1838-1912). The former fought a long (and still controversial) battle to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, which regulated women working in brothels. The Acts were totally repealed after a long agitation, which had international ramifications, in 1886. Octavia Hill, housing reformer, supported by John Ruskin, was more interested in voluntary than in state action. She wanted affordable working-class houses to become real 'homes'.

Josephine Butler was a reformer who was concerned not with new legislation but with repeal. And so had been Ashley's Parliamentary political leader, Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), who earlier in the century reformed the Metropolitan Police and carried Roman Catholic emancipation (giving Roman Catholics civil rights) before Ashley, who had little in common with him, entered Parliament. Peel, along with Wellington, had opposed the Parliamentary Reform Bills introduced by the Whigs in 1831 and 1832, but he appreciated the need to adapt to change; and while he opposed most of the social reforms that Ashley supported, it was he who as Prime Minister carried the repeal of the corn laws. The part that he played in securing repeal - and his motivations - have been assessed and re-assessed. So, too, has the role of the Anti-Corn Law League, founded in Manchester in 1838, a largely middle-class organisation, extremely well organised under the leadership of Richard Cobden (1804-1865) who won a seat in Parliament in 1841. This enabled him to confront Peel directly across the floor of the Commons. They both believed in 1846 that repeal would benefit both working-class consumers (through cheap food) and industrial employers (through the opening of foreign markets), but Peel, unlike Cobden, refused to try to exploit repeal politically. Indeed, in carrying repeal he broke up his own divided party.

TopConclusion
Not everyone who believed in free trade, which became a gospel, precluded acceptance of measures which social reformers were urging. Nor did the people influenced by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1882) consider that the State had no part to play in what came to be called social policy. The role of Benthamism in the evolution of 19th-century policy has been as controversial as the role of Peel and far more controversial than the role of Fabianism (the socialism of Sidney and Beatrice Webb) in the formation of 20th-century policy, culminating in the 'welfare state'. It was the important early 19th-century British political economists, Nassau Senior (1790-1864), one of the framers of the New Poor Law of 1834, who wrote that 'it is the duty of a government to do whatever is conducive to the welfare of the government'.

The British emphasis on reform rather than revolution, the desire to adapt institutions rather than to destroy them, seemed a national asset in the nineteenth century, but in the last decades of the twentieth century many writers in the media, including some historians, claimed that by not having a revolution in the nineteenth century Britain had suffered. In particular, old values of deference survived. Old institutions, like Parliament, the key to much else, should have been totally transformed. Tradition was a brake on progress.

taken from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/reforming_acts_01.shtml

Anton & Lucía