It is important not to dismiss the Reform Act as a Whig imposed Laissez Faire policy as Kitson Clark does. If one compares the voter distribution before and after the act you can easily see a definite change. The voter representation changed quite dramatically in the boroughs. The act altered both franchise and representation. It re-shuffled the boroughs to make them more, dare I say the word democratic. The act abolished the ancient forty-shilling freeholder qualification and sorted out the highly miss-represented electoral system. Perhaps the biggest success of the Reform Act was that of the 50% electorate increase which was because of the newly revised qualifications.
There was a notable redistribution of seats, 55 class A boroughs lost 2 MP’s and 30 class B boroughs lost one MP. Most of the Rotten boroughs were disfranchised and new seats were given to the big towns. 22 boroughs were allocated with 2 MP’s and a further 21 towns with 1 MP. Many people were disappointed with the 1832 Reform Bill. Voting in the boroughs was restricted to men who occupied homes with an annual value of £10. There were also property qualifications for people living in rural areas. As a result, only one in seven adult males had the vote. Nor were the constituencies of equal size. Whereas 35 constituencies had less than 300 electors, Liverpool had a constituency of over 11,000.
However, there was much continuity as a result of the Reform Act. The act failed to rid parliament of corruption because it still didn’t introduce a secret ballot, some may argue that corruption even grew after 1832. An important immediate effect of the Reform Act was the Whig political gain (post reform). The number of Whig MP’s increased because the rotten boroughs which were mostly Tory were abolished in the 1832 Reform Act which then eliminated Tory strong-holds, very convenient for the Whigs! Still only 1 in 5 men could vote, as there were limitations on men with a low property value or a low wage. The Aristocracy still dominated parliament and despite some successful seat redistribution, the number of seats still didn’t correspond to population one historian presented the glum Marxist view that “Grey presented reform as a means to restore the old constitution, not to create a new democratic one” this view is mirrored in many other text books.
There was a dangerous situation post 1832. Many people were disappointed and felt betrayed by the Whigs apparent Laissez Faire attitude to the Reform Act. The pressure groups were afraid that this would be the first and last reform so they then had to re-think their strategies.
When looking back at the 1832 Reform act one can see that it was a catalyst for many other reforms that did eventually happen in time. Some historians described the decades following the reform act as an end to the bleak age. They took this view because of the ostensibly progressive moves taking place such as the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Bank Charter Act of 1844 and the limited liability acts of 1855 and 1862.
The main problem of the 1832 Reform act was that it had to please so many different types of people and tread a fine line of reform and containment. On One hand the Reform act had to please the left wing Radical reformers and pressure groups and on the other had the act had to keep the Laissez Faire policy favoured by the Tory party and right wing MP’s like the Duke of Wellington who remarked in a letter to the Duke of Buckingham three weeks after the Reform act passed: “It is not in my power to prevent the consequence of the mischief which has been done. The Government of England is destroyed.” This was an extreme and very melodramatic view taken by the Duke but some other Tories had adopted this viewpoint. And on the other side of the spectrum there were the radical reformers who were not content with the 1832 Reform act as they wanted more reform and were scared that it would be the only reform to happen. The reform act was the first domino to fall in a long line of dominos that would eventually democratise parliament, but the working class of 1832 could not look at the act with high and sight and could not see the further reforms that would happen. The 1832 Reform act went far enough as to quell voices of revolution and reform yet the Government still had many problems to sort out.
