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Victorian Pressure Groups: Directions for Research*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
In recent years there has been considerable interest in Victorian politics and the Victorian political system. This has provided a substantial and continuing literature, much of which, however, remains preoccupied with leadership and organization at a parliamentary level. It may, therefore, be valuable to suggest an area within this most traditional of fields which might provide an alternative approach to that of “high politics”—of cabinet intrigue and parliamentary speech-making. In fact, one might ignore, for the moment, Parliament altogether, and consider that side of Victorian political activity which has been largely obscured by Hatfield dinner parties and Highbury foxing. That is, the manner in which Englishmen from outside Westminster, and perhaps from outside the formal institutions of party and government, attempted to determine the substance of issues and solutions debated in Parliament and at Whitehall.
One should avoid confusing the visible and symbolic place Parliament has occupied with the reality of political initiative. In England the rapid growth of new economies and the cities they created in the North and Midlands at the beginning of the Victorian age detracted from the centralness of London and Westminster, blurring somewhat the focus of English economic and political life, and creating new urban hierarchies consciously opposed to domination from Whitehall. Within the vast new urban centers, fed by a rural migration and accellerated by the spreading railway system, voluntary associations of all sorts became a peculiarly Victorian characteristic—serving perhaps as surrogates for a sense of community lost in the passage from a rural to an urban environment. Reading and corresponding societies, social clubs, self-help and benevolent associations, charities—this kind of activity penetrated Victorian society from the respectable working classes to the very rich. Related to this social phenomenon was a growth in local and national political associations—what one might today call “cause lobbies.” It is this type of pressure group activity, predominantly urban and probably largely middle-class, which needs to be more systematically studied. This essay will attempt to indicate the value of such research into “low politics,” and to suggest some avenues of approach.
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1973
Footnotes
*
Revised version of a paper read at the Conference on British Studies, Bay Area Section, Stanford, California, March, 1973.
References
1 See Heyck, Thomas William, “New Sources and Methods In the Study of the Nineteenth Century Parliament,” Albion, IV, 2(Summer, 1972): 67–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a survey of recent trends in analysis of the Victorian political system.
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10 Vincent, John, The Formation of the Liberal Party 1857-1868 (London, 1966)Google Scholar; Hamer, D. A., Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar. Too much recent research has focused on the Liberals. While the Liberal Party presents a more obvious forced coalition of interests, the organized pressure groups which contributed to Conservative electoral successes have been largely ignored.
11 Anyone now engaged in investigation of any of these groups should seriously consider publishing his membership lists—if only as an appendix to a work which otherwise does not follow the lines suggested here.
12 For example, it is difficult to discover the primary motive behind the anti-alien agitation of the 1880s and 1890s if attention is focused solely upon that movement. Revelation that many of the chief restrictionists. however, were also involved in an agitation for state emigration for the English poor may indicate that the principle concern for them, at least, was demographic—that is. Malthusian—rather than anti-Semitism.
13 Sources tor this kind of research include collections of lobby propaganda—which frequently advertise membership lists, subscribers and officers. These can sometimes be supplemented with diaries and letters, and information from the standard biographical and geneological sources. Much pressure group literature can be found among official government records, especially when deputations saw ministers and left behind detailed schemes for consideration. Then there are newspapers: notices of meetings, descriptios of and attendance at such meetings, accounts of other activities, and public letters. The discovery of association record books is always to be hoped for, but much can be done with these sources alone.