the effect of bringing some artisans and skilled workers within the net. The middle class thus attached, in expectation, to the support of the constitution contained large numbers of small shopkeepers, traders, and dealers, small masters and lesser professional men, men of some consequence and influence in their communities but far removed in wealth and status from the great overseas merchants, the bankers and financiers, and the industrial capitalists. Whether they were precisely the sort of men Earl Grey had had in mind when he had spoken of ‘the middle classes who form the real and efficient mass of public opinion, and without whom the power of the gentry is nothing’, may perhaps be doubted, since at the time he was more concerned with the intelligent, educated and articulate men who shaped informed opinion in the press, the journals, the literary and philosophical societies, and the counting houses. Nevertheless, they formed the core of the middle classes, the most numerous and most widely spread groups with a solid stake in the country, however small their individual properties. This core had been growing in size and wealth as a result of the general influences of population growth and economic expansion, but only in some parts, depending on location, had it become integrated into industrial society in direct economic and cultural dependence on the great capitalist employers. In bringing the urban middle classes within the political nation the new franchise brought in something at once more varied, and more traditional, than simply an industrial-based middle class. This was as much a matter of reflecting the nature of the existing social structure as it was one of political calculation, although it did not escape notice that the lesser bourgeoisie of the smaller towns were amenable to patronage and influence.
Political calculation entered strongly into the Reform Act’s treatment of the countryside, and it is arguable that the entire business of reaching some kind of accommodation with the towns and the urban middle classes was of secondary importance to the political managers, whose prime concern was to revitalize and strengthen the power of the landed interest. In this view an inescapable minimum of concessions to the aspirations of the towns was a small price to pay for securing the power base of the landed classes in the counties. The trouble with the unreformed regime had not been its failure to reflect adequately the importance of new social forces in the community, but its increasingly corrupted and attenuated representation of the opinions and interests of the country landowners. Those opinions, it was argued, could only be properly expressed by county members chosen because of the trust placed in them by county constituencies which were too large to be dominated by one or two individuals, and too independent to be bribed. Instead, too many of the landed MPs sat for rotten or pocket boroughs, represented nothing except their patrons’ or their own personal wealth, were prone to be ensnared by the Administration of the day, and failed to voice the feelings of their order. The answer was to increase the county representation, and to purify the county electorates of urban and non-agricultural foreign bodies. This was done in 1832. The number of county members was increased from 188 to 253; and the parliamentary distinction between county and borough was made to correspond much more closely than before to the economic and social distinction between country and town. On the one hand, the invasion of county electorates by extraneous elements who qualified for the 40-shilling freehold county vote by the ownership of urban property was rolled back by the creation of boroughs in which such property conferred the vote; on the other hand, the agricultural character of county electorates was boosted by the enfranchisement, on a Tory amendment it should be noted, of the £50 a year tenants-at-will, that is the middling and larger tenant farmers.
As with so much else about the Reform Act, the line between town and country was not so clearly drawn in practice as this picture implies. To begin with, there were still many lesser towns, particularly in the manufacturing districts, that had not been made into parliamentary boroughs; those who owned freehold property in them worth over 40 shillings a year, whether in the form of warehouses, workshops, offices, factories, mills, or houses did not matter, qualified for votes in the county in which the town lay. Then, while anyone owning property in a borough worth at least £10 a year was expressly restricted to acquiring only a vote in that borough, those who owned smaller parcels of property within a borough worth between 40 shillings and £10 a year remained eligible for votes in the surrounding county. Some dilution of county electorates with urban blood therefore remained, and in the industrial counties it was of considerable political moment. The Whigs in fact had hedged their bets over the wisdom of securing the preponderance of the landed interest in the counties, doubtless calculating that the increase in landlord influence stemming from tenant farmers’ votes would chiefly benefit the Tories, and had therefore retained the urban propertied counter-weight in the counties which they or their liberal allies might hope to turn to advantage. Nonetheless, although it was thus fudged in its execution partly at least for party reasons, one important strand in the Reform design was to pen up the middle classes in the boroughs the better to secure the power base of the aristocracy and gentry in the counties, and thus preserve landed and agricultural interests from being undermined.
In retrospect it might seem that this was a purely defensive and protective measure, the use of entrenched aristocratic power while there was yet just time to fashion a barricade of franchises and constituencies which would keep the mounting urban and industrial forces at bay, thus delaying or preventing altogether their capture of the commanding heights of society and the economy. The barrier was severely tested during the Corn Law debates of the 1840s, when the most radical wing of the Anti-Corn Law League hoped to use repeal as a lever for toppling the entire ‘aristocratic monopoly’; but it survived, thanks to the opportunism and realism of the ruling class, and lived on to shelter the anachronism of a predominantly landed control of an essentially industrial society. Such a view, however, begs many questions: in what sense the landed dominance of government, Parliament, and much of local administration was artificially contrived rather than an expression of the essence of the social order; in what sense Britain was, or became, an industrial society; and in what sense urban and industrial interests and values were in conflict with the rural and agricultural world.
In the 1830s, at any rate, it made perfectly good sense to accord the preponderant place in the political nation to the landed and rural elements. This was not just a matter of privilege, property, and tradition, but one of economic and social reality. It is true that fundamental and far-reaching changes in the scale and methods of production had been under way for the past seventy years: an older generation of historians regarded the Industrial Revolution, in its headlong pioneering phase, as complete by 1830; a younger generation, intrigued by models of economic growth, placed the take-off into self-sustained growth as long since accomplished and viewed the economy of 1830 as being at least half-way through its drive to maturity, the maturity of a modern, fully industrialized economy. All would agree that structural, technical, and organizational changes had gone so far that a wholly new kind of society was bound to develop; and all would accept G. R. Porter’s statement that ‘it is to the spinning-jenny and the steam-engine that we must look as having been the true moving powers of our fleets and armies, and the chief support also of a long-continued agricultural prosperity.’ The revolutionary character of technological innovations and their potential for producing social transformation are one thing, however; the extent and pace of their impact on the social fabric are another matter, and the key to understanding the state of society.
It was a pardonable exaggeration to claim that the spinning jenny and the steam engine had been carrying the economy on their backs since the turn of the century. Cotton goods had replaced woollens as Britain’s principal export, and the meteoric rise of the cotton industry, if not literally attributable to the jenny alone, could be justifiably ascribed to the new breed of spinning machinery, particularly the mule, and its harnessing to water and steam power. The spinning mills, the advance guard of the factory system, had momentous effects on work habits, living conditions, and social relationships, possibly more momentous and revolutionary than their effects in increasing production and creating wealth, since they were the birthplace of the industrial proletariat. Much attention was concentrated on the mills, their marvels and their miseries, their awesome grandeur and awfulness, as contemporaries commented on the apparently limitless power of machinery and speculated on the chances of society handling, or indeed surviving, the arrival of a factory population.
The curiosity and anxiety were most understandable, in face of the novelty
