Gladstone, Disraeli, and the creation of a mass electorate

Gladstone in old age
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Politics in the 1870s and early 1880s was dominated by the figures of William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. Both rose from middle-class backgrounds to lead their respective parties, and both presided over major reforms to the electoral system. In 1832 the Great Reform Act had increased the electorate, disenfranchised some pocket boroughs, and secured parliamentary representation for the new industrial towns. 

However, the Reform Act had not given the vote to the great majority of the working classes, even though many of them had campaigned for reform. The vote was still seen, not as a right, but as a privilege attached to the ownership of property. However, thanks to two further reform acts, by the time Gladstone finally left office in 1894, a mass electorate had come into being - though even then, not all men had the vote.

The Second Reform Act

Gladstone began his political career as a Tory, but following the repeal of the Corn Laws, became a Peelite. In 1859 he  joined Palmerston’s Liberal government as chancellor of the exchequer. By the mid-1860s he had come to accept the necessity of further political reform that would extend the right to vote, but everyone knew that this could not happen while Palmerston was still alive. The old man had set his face against further reform and as long as he was Prime Minister there would be no changes to the Reform Act of 1832.

Palmerston died in October 1865, shortly after winning another election for the Liberals, and he was succeeded by Earl Russell (the former Lord John Russell). Gladstone remained chancellor of the exchequer, but also became leader of the Commons. Because the Conservative leader, the earl of Derby was in the Lords, Disraeli was the Tory spokesman in the Commons.

Benjamin Disraeli
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The Liberal bill: In March 1866 Gladstone introduced a bill for modest electoral reform, designed to enfranchise the ‘respectable’ working class by giving the vote to those with a £7 rental qualification in the boroughs and £10 in the counties. This would have enfranchised some 400,000 men, but the vote was still to be attached to the ownership or occupation of property. 

The bill was immediately opposed by the Conservatives and some anti-reform Liberals, notably Robert Lowe, and its opponents were derisively called the 'Cave of Adullam' by the radical Liberal, John Bright.  The bill was passed but by a very narrow majority. In June it was defeated on an Adullamite wrecking amendment and Russell resigned. The Liberals were now out of office only a year after winning a convincing electoral victory. The queen then sent for the Conservative leader.

Edward Stanley-Smith, 14th earl of Derby
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The Conservative bill: Twice in the 1850s Derby had headed a minority Conservative government, and now for the third time he found himself prime minister without a Commons majority. Disraeli was now chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the House. But the change of government did not mean that the reform issue was going away. With this in mind, Derby wrote to Disraeli: 

I am coming reluctantly to the conclusion that we shall have to deal with the question of reform.

A new urgency was given to this by threats to law and order. In July 1866 a rally planned by the Reform League in Hyde Park was banned by the police. Defying the authorities, the League marched from Trafalgar Square and skirmished with the police in Park Lane. For two days Hyde Park was the scene of disorder and riots. The railings were torn down and the home secretary, Spencer Walpole, was in tears. 

Victorian servants

Women and work

Some of the standard images of Victorian women are the 'angel in the house' of Coventry Patmore's poem, the factory girl, and the domestic servant (and possibly Florence Nightingale's nurses). In fact, more women worked in the various dressmaking trades than in factories, and until the end of the nineteenth century the numbers of women in paid work was declining. Women in Victorian art are usually portrayed as wives subordinate to their husbands and rarely in paid employment. This owed a great deal to ideology but was also based in fact. With the advance of industrialisation and the shift to heavy industry, the incomes of most families were restricted to those of the male breadwinner - a circumstance that owes as much to trade union pressure as to middle-class ideology. A great deal of casual female labour went unrecorded in the censuses but even allowing for this, probably no more than ten per cent of married women were in paid employment. The great majority of women who worked full-time were young and/or single.

The Victorians in love

The Victorians: prudes and hypocrites?

The Victorian period is often associated with doctrines of sexual self-restraint and an accompanying hypocrisy. It is often said that they were so prudish that they covered piano legs with pantaloons and spoke of white meat rather than chicken breast. In their hypocrisy they ignored the dark reality - the prevalence of prostitution was high and the practice of incest among the urban and rural poor

The late-Victorian and Edwardian periods saw attacks on Victorian hypocrisy and repression - for example in  Hardy’s Tess of the D'urbervilles and H. G. Wells’s daring Ann Veronica.

There is certainly considerable literary evidence for Victorian prudishness. In Our Mutual Friend Dickens mocked the figure of Mr Podsnap, who did not wish a book to contain anything that ‘might bring a blush to the cheek of a young person’. This suggests that novelists, perhaps Dickens in particular,  felt frustrated at the limitations imposed by the conventions of propriety.

The Victorian novel can leave key questions unanswered. Is the marriage of Dorothea and Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch consummated? Is Hardy's Tess raped or seduced? The reader is led to infer that Nancy in Oliver Twist is a prostitute, but it is not made explicit. No British novel of the period has the frankness of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856).

However, this prudishness can be exaggerated. If the Victorians put pantaloons on piano legs it was probably to protect the furniture! British Victorians mocked the prudery of  Americans because they talked of ‘dark’ and ‘white’ chicken and called cockerels roosters. Pruder and censoriousness was personified in the much-mocked person of ‘Mrs Grundy’ - seen below confronted by Oscar Wilde who is showing her his Picture of Dorian Gray. By the end of the century a reaction had set in against the sexual reticence of the high Victorian period. 

And even at the height of so-called Victorian prudery, marital sex was praised and the 'unnatural' celibacy of Roman Catholic and some Tractarian clergy was condemned.

Exploration and evolution: Darwin and Wallace

Here is the most fabulous site, with all Charles Darwin's works available online. There is no end to research on Darwin and a recent set of book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement give a clue to some of the latest thinking.

Darwin in 1854
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The context

Science is not value-free, and the language and concepts of Darwinism are those of the economic and social doctrines of the time. Darwin's Origin of Species was published at a particularly sensitive time, when scientists were making a bid for cultural supremacy.

The keystone of traditional naturalism was Archdeacon William Paley’s Natural Theology, which Darwin studied at Cambridge. The argument was simple and apparently convincing:

• Life was good because through the kindness of God, all human beings were adapted to their surroundings;
• Animals, including humans, are complex beings from the divine workshop, exquisitely fitted to their place in the world.
• This proves there must be a designer.

Paley was writing during the wars with France, at a time of great social and political upheaval, his science legitimized the existing social order, and his conservative politics were unacceptable to radicals and to rationalist Unitarians such as Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather. But Paley’s followers included not merely naturalists at the university, but also scores of vicar-naturalists working in their parishes.