No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Social Structure, Voting Behavior and Political Change in Victorian London*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
During the past several years published studies of nineteenth-century parliamentary elections in several regions have failed to satisfy all those who have wished for a thorough understanding of the electoral structure of Victorian Britain. Perhaps the most important statements about these elections have been made by D.C. Moore, for he has been one of very few researchers to place his findings into a theoretical structure. Professor Moore's model for voting behavior is that of the deference community, which may be described as a group of individuals who, having close contact through occupation, residency, or other interests—or several of these—acknowledged a limited number of individuals as their social, economic and ideological leaders. According to Moore the deference community is a more powerful explanatory device than models based on class or individualism. He supports this with poll book data which suggest that, at least for rural constituencies prior to 1867, group networks were stronger than the ties of social status, and more apparent, than is evidence that electors voted only for their particular interests.
What influenced the decay of the deference community, Moore would argue, were those forces seemingly omnipresent every spring in Western Civilization classes—industrialization, urbanization, and migration. Moore suggests that the three forces weakened the traditional social nexus and hierarchical relationships. Voters thereafter could be recruited by Victorian election managers directly, that is as individuals and not as members of a community.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1977
Footnotes
*
The author wishes to acknowledge the thoughtful criticism of this essay by W.O. Aydelotte, Richard W. Davis, and Robert J. Klaus.
References
1 Moore, D.C., “Social Structure, Political Structure, and Public Opinion in Mid-Victorian England,” in Robson, Robert, ed., Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark (London, 1967), p. 36Google Scholar; “The Matter of the Missing Contests: Towards a Theory of the Mid-Nineteenth Century British Political System,” Albion 6, 2(Summer, 1974): 116Google Scholar. See also Moore's, “Political Morality in Mid-Nineteenth Century England: Concepts, Norms, Violations,” Victorian Studies 13, 1(September, 1969): 5–36Google Scholar and The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Nineteenth Century English Political System (Hassocks and New York, 1976).Google Scholar
2 Moore, , “Social Structure,” pp. 56–7Google Scholar; “Missing Contests,” p. 117.
3 Joyce, Patrick, “The Factory Politics of Lancashire in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Historical Journal 18, 3(September, 1975): 525–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moore, , “Social Structure,” pp. 37–8Google Scholar; “The Other Face of Reform,” Victorian Studies 5, 1 (September, 1961): 11, n.6.Google Scholar
4 Davis, Richard W., “The Mid-Nineteenth Century Electoral Structure,” Albion 8, 2(Summer, 1976): 142–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Defence and Aristocracy in the Time of the Great Reform Act,” American Historical Review 82, 3(June 1976): 532–9Google Scholar; “The Whigs and the Idea of Electoral Deference,” Durham University Journal, n.s. 36, 1(December, 1974): 79–91.Google Scholar
5 Nossiter, T.J., Influence, Opinion and Political Idioms in Reformed England: Case Studies from the North-East, 1832-1874 (Brighton, 1975)Google Scholar; Davis, , “Electoral Structure,” pp. 151–3.Google Scholar
6 Jones, Gareth S., Outcast London: A Study of the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971), esp. ch. 19.Google Scholar
7 Cf. Joyce, “Factory Politics”; Foster, John, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three English Towns (London, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Richard W., Political Change and Continuity, 1790-1885: A Buckinghamshire Study (Newton Abbot, 1972)Google Scholar; and Richter, Donald, “The Role of Mob Riot in Victorian Elections, 1865-1885,” Victorian Studies 15, 1(September, 1971): 19–28.Google Scholar
8 Cf. Moore, , “Missing Contests,” pp. 94–5, 111.Google Scholar
9 The Times 20 November 1860; Weekly Advertiser 8 December 1860.
10 South London Chronicle 24 November 1860; Stephen, Leslie, The Life of Henry Fawcett, 3rd ed. (London, 1886), p. 193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 The Times 28 November 1860, 1 December 1860, 3 December 1860 and 6 December 1860; Weekly Advertiser 15 December 1860. For the firms and their authority structure see Maiden, H.E., ed., Victoria History of the County of Surrey (London, 1905), vol. IIGoogle Scholar; Yeo, Eileen and Thompson, E.P, eds., The Unknown Mayhew (New York, 1971), pp. 451 ff.Google Scholar; and Dodd, George, Days at the Factories (London, 1843), chaps. 7 and 8.Google Scholar
12. Layard to Benjamin Austen, 5 December 1860, Layard Papers, British Library Add. MSS. 38948, f. 92.
13 For example Greenwich, which with Southwark had an electorate roughly one-half working class, based on P.P. 1866, LVII. 47, “Borough Electors (Working Classes).” For similar evidence from Greenwich at the general election of 1852 see The Times 8 and 9 July 1852.
14 D'Eyncourt Papers, Lambeth Surrey Collection, Minet Library, Lambeth, IV/3/65.
15 P.P. 1857 (Sess. 2), VI. 603, “Lambeth Election Petition.”
16 Joyce, , “Factory Politics,” p. 542.Google Scholar
17 Morning Advertiser 6 July 1852; Shoreditch Observer 4 April 1857.
18 In 1865 23.8 percent of Tower Hamlets electors were workers, based on P.P. 1866, LVII, 47, “Borough Electors (Working Classes).”
19 See The Times 24 March 1857 for Charles Westerton and 19 June and 5 December 1868 for James Beal; see also Beal, James, Municipal Corporation for the Metropolis (London [1862]).Google Scholar
20 “… it encouraged the formulation of issues in terms of which the status of these men within their deference communities might be legitimized or threatened” (Moore, , “Social Structure,” p. 49Google Scholar).
21 Kentish Independent 17 July 1852.
23 P.P. 1852, XLII. 303, “County Electors”; P.P. 1859 (Sess. 1), XXIII. 203, “Poor Rates”; P.P. 1867, LVI. 337, “Inhabited Houses (Voters).”
23 East London Parliamentary Reform Association, Ought Workingmen to be Fined for Claiming the Franchise (London, 1863)Google Scholar; P.P. 1860, XII. 1, “Elective Franchise,” esp. p. 14; P.P. 1866, LVII. 215, “Population and Electors”; and P.P. 1867, LVI. 449; “Parliamentary Boroughs.” See also Seymour, Charles, Electoral Reform in England and wales, 1832-85, (new ed.; New Haven, 1970) pp. 149–55.Google Scholar
24 Moore, , “Missing Contests,” pp. 116–7.Google Scholar
25 The censuses of 1851, 1861 and 1871 reveal that less than half of those aged twenty and over and living in London registration districts were born in greater London, and many of these probably moved within the capital at some time after their birth.
26 Layard to G.T. Clark, 15 November 1868, Layard Papers, British Library Add. MSS. 38946, f. 52.
27 See especially Anderson, Michael, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971)Google Scholar; Armstrong, W. Alan, Stability and Change in an English County Town: A Social Study of York, 1801-1851 (Cambridge, 1974)Google Scholar; and McLeod, Hugh, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (Hamden, Conn., 1974).Google Scholar
28 Hanham, H. J., Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1959), p. 226.Google Scholar
29 Lord Nevill, a Conservative whip, suggested to one of his party's unsuccessful candidates in November 1865 that “So radical is the City that I have grave doubts whether a Conservative would be carried” (quoted in Flynn, John S., Sir Robert Nicholas Fowler [London, 1893], p. 89Google Scholar); cf. Constitutional Press 18 September 1858.
30 See Baer, Marc B., “The Politics of London, 1852-1868: Parties, Voters and Representation,” Ph. D. thesis, University of Iowa, 1976.Google Scholar
31 Moore came quite close to suggesting this when he alluded to the decline in the cohesiveness of traditional community ties as a consequence of the increasing strength of party organization (“Missing Contests,” p. 118; “Social Structure,” pp. 56-7.).
32 Jones, , Outcast London, pp. 153–4.Google Scholar
33 This is suggested by Moore, , “Social Structure,” p. 57.Google Scholar
34 For example the following appeared in The Standard of 2 November 1868:
BEALES and ODGER and BRADLAUGH gather the sweets, and HOARE and DILKE and VERNON HARCOURT consume them. We trust that working men are satisfied with this division of labour. They may be tempted to grumble, possibly, at a dispensation which gives them all the work, and their aristocratic friends of the Whig connection all the wages, but they should be careful, lest by their murmurs they “divide the Liberal Party”
(quoted in Harrison, Royden, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861-1881 [London, 1965], p. 184Google Scholar). Smith was the founder and first president of the London and Westminister Working Men's Constitutional Association.
35 “Missing Contests,” p. 97.
36 This conflicts with J.P.D. Dunbabin's thesis concerning the rise of urban Conservatism after 1868, for which see his “Parliamentary Elections in Great Britain, 1868-1900: A Psephological Note,” English Historical Review, 81, 319 (January, 1966): 82–99.Google Scholar