Conclusion: 1867 and Beyond

Abstract

The 1867 Reform Act provides a convenient historical moment on which to conclude. This legislation admittedly lacked the iconic status and energising socio-political discourses of the First Reform Act, but it provided a vital and highly charged point of national self-definition.¹ Through its enactment, a little under a million men gained the vote, doubling the electorate. Whereas the dominant rhetoric of the 1832 Act challenged the extent of aristocratic power, the debates leading up to 1867 focused more specifically on who would be included in the franchise, and thus on what defined a political subject. Key questions involved the judicious extension of power to further bases, rather than the destabilising of traditional power bases. The definitions sought by parliamentarians and campaigners were of noble versus unsuitable working-class men,² not of dissolute aristocrats versus gifted elite leaders. This emphasis on franchise-centred models of expansion and legitimation confirmed the gradually lessening relevance — even to aristocrats themselves — of vocabularies, images and ideas traditionally associated with the aristocracy. The Act itself came in between the death of Lord Palmerston in 1865 and the retirement of Lord John Russell in 1868, two politicians emblematic of the Whig-Radical coalition that had furthered reform in 1832 and onwards, and whose departures opened the way for Gladstonian Liberalism.