There was, then, massive working-class involvement in reform, and it centred in the traditional, preindustrial, groups rather than in those spawned by factory and machine. This is not to say that these groups had been unaffected by the course of economic change; but it is to say that viewed from this angle the perceived conflict between the established political structure and social reality was not a simple, direct consequence of the emergence of a factory proletariat. Viewed through the ruling-class end of the telescope, all workers, irrespective of their precise status or relationship to the means of production, being propertyless were either potentially dangerous as liable to subvert property and the social order, or at best not worthy of political recognition as being incapable of taking a balanced and responsible view of the public interest. The vital thing in the situation of 1830–2, so it seemed to Whig ministers, was to break the radical alliance by driving a wedge between the middle and the working classes, buying off the one with votes and representation and leaving the other, isolated and weak, outside the pale. The tactic, in Grey’s words, was ‘to associate the middle with the higher orders of society in the love and support of the institutions and government of the country’. Accordingly, the middle classes were accommodated with the £10 householder franchise, the hallmark of the 1832 Reform Act in the boroughs. It has often been remarked that this action defined, even created, the working class by lumping together all those unable to afford to occupy a house of at least £10 annual value as unfit to exercise the franchise, thus forging a common bond of resentment and frustration between otherwise diverse social groups. The other side of this coin is that the franchise also defined the middle class as all those who came above the £10 line regardless of differences in social position.
The middle classes who asserted their claims to be included in the political nation were a very mixed bag, and it would be as difficult to claim for them as for the working classes that their alienation from the old order stemmed wholly or even principally from the new social forces generated by industrialization. To be sure, by 1830 many industrialists had come round to the view that the protection of their interests and recognition of their status required direct representation in Parliament, whereas a generation or so earlier they had been largely indifferent to notions of parliamentary reform and direct involvement in politics, being content to accept the arguments of virtual representation and leave the conduct of public affairs to those accustomed to handling such matters. Northern manufacturers, in Lancashire and the West Riding, were active in the cause of reform in 1830–2; and a Wolverhampton manufacturer neatly expressed the sharpening of political awareness in his class: ‘Fifty years ago we were not in that need of Representatives, which we are at present, as we then manufactured nearly exclusively for home consumption, and the commercial and manufacturing districts were then identified with each other; where one flourished, both flourished. But the face of affairs is now changed – we now manufacture for the whole world, and if we have not members to promote and extend our commerce, the era of our commercial greatness is at an end.’ Manufacturers were key recruits to the cause of limited reform, and their demands for representation for themselves and the chief industrial centres were clear expressions of the failure of the political structure to reflect new social and economic developments. Nevertheless, manufacturers were recruits to a band of bankers, lawyers, writers, traders, editors, and other professional men, who continued to provide most of the drive and organization of middle-class political action: men of property, conscious of their position and probity no doubt, but not unmistakably men of the Industrial Revolution.
The towns which were given representation for the first time in 1832 were indeed in the main the chief centres of ‘manufacturing capital and skill’ in the Midlands and the north, whose fair representation Lord John Russell picked out as a major purpose of the Reform Bill when introducing it. It is worth remarking, however, that Brighton, the fastest growing town of the 1820s and in its fashionable seaside frivolity the very antithesis of an industrious town, and Stroud, a small pocket of the traditional woollen industry set in rural Gloucestershire, were included in the same company as the familiar industrial giants, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield, and were placed on a par with Bolton, Bradford, Blackburn, or Oldham. Similarly, Cheltenham, Frome, and Kendal were equated with the second-ranking industrial towns like Dudley and Walsall in the Black Country, Rochdale, Salford, and Warrington in Lancashire, or Gateshead, South Shields, and Tynemouth on Tyneside, in being elevated to single-member boroughs. These are reminders that the new constituencies did not all fall into a single category, and that scope was deliberately found for some increase in the weight given to traditional and non-industrial urban interests, quite apart from the five new parliamentary boroughs created in metropolitan London, itself a kaleidoscope of aristocratic, financial, commercial, administrative, and professional, as well as manufacturing, interests. In addition the boroughs which were preserved from extinction, although shorn of one of their former two members, and those which were continued unaltered from pre-reform days, were predominantly county towns, small market towns, long-established ports, and the like, albeit they did include some places – Liverpool, Preston, Hull, Newcastle, or Sunderland, for example – that were in the mainstream of industrial growth. In sum, however, the collection of new and surviving boroughs that made up the total of 187 post-1832 parliamentary boroughs in England was dominated by small towns, hangovers from the preindustrial past.
The fact that something like two thirds of the post-1832 boroughs might be thus classed could indicate no more than the limited, cautious, imperfect, and muddled nature of the Reform Act itself, removing only the most glaring defects of the unreformed system, perpetuating many anomalies and inequalities of representation, and never intending to supply an accurate political mirror of the actual distribution of economic and social weight and consequence in the nation. Even so, it is significant that among the top third of boroughs, measured by the size of their electorates, less than half would figure on any list, however widely drawn, of thrusting, expanding places at the forefront of economic change. Thus Chester, Exeter, Bath, Worcester, or York were in the same league as Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds in numbers of voters, although not, of course, in total population; while Bedford, Reading, Colchester, Canterbury, and Maidstone could out-vote but not outnumber Stockport, Salford, Bolton, Oldham, and Wolverhampton. This was an effect of the franchise and the fact that the distribution of £10 householders differed, often quite sharply, from the distribution of population. In part this was due to marked regional differences in house values, themselves produced by complex interactions of custom and market forces, with the great majority of houses in London having rents of over £10 a year so that many working-class householders obtained the vote, while essentially similar houses in Leeds or Manchester were rented at £5 to £8 a year. In part, however, it was due to regional variations in the numbers and proportions of men with high enough incomes to command a £10 house and the standing of respectability and modest substance that went with it; in relation to total population the older established towns tended to have a higher proportion of such householders than those of most recent rapid growth.
While it is clear that the £10 householders did not constitute a single social class, since there were wide social differences within towns between those who just qualified and those whose houses could be worth £50 or £100 a year, as well as between towns, it is also clear that this property qualification embraced virtually the entire population of middle-class family men, even if in some localities it also had 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