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Small Boroughs and Political Modernization 1832–1868: A Cornwall Case Study*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
Mid-nineteenth century elections in England's small towns were vividly described in contemporary fiction. For example, Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers included the Eatanswill contest in which a bucolic exuberance among voters rendered irrelevant the political differences between candidates Slumkey and Fizkin. Who could blame the enfranchised mob for their behavior during polling when “Excisable articles were remarkably cheap at all the public houses,” producing an epidemic of dizziness “under which they [the voters] might frequently be seen lying on the pavements in a state of utter insensibility.” Following his bitter experience in unsuccessfully contesting Beverley in East Yorkshire, one of the Eatanswills of the sixties, Anthony Trollope parodied the election in Ralph the Heir when he took his readers to Percycross, where the Conservative Sir Thomas Underwood managed to edge out Ontario Moggs, the radical bootmaker. Similarly, at Trollope's Silverbridge (in The Prime Minister), the levers of the “Castle” interest had long been pulled by the ironmonger Sprugeon and the cork sole maker Sprout, issues and principles apparently being of peripheral importance.
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1997
Footnotes
*
Earlier drafts of this paper were presented to the Celtic Studies Conference, Sydney, December 1995, and the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, Los Angeles, March 1996. I am grateful to participants for their comments and for the valuable advice given by Richard Davis and John Phillips.
References
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