Chapter 6 - Change and Conflict: 1830–44

Summary

AS part of his preface to the second edition of Music and the Middle Class, William Weber notes: ‘The 1830s and 1840s served as a key period of change and conflict in the evolution of concert repertories.’ It is thus surprising that until recently most musical historians seem to have overlooked the 1830s when creating a context for their studies of Victorian music, for the seismic political events and the advent of a new monarch, William IV, were accompanied by a radical change in cultural direction. A new era (often called ‘the age of reform’ by political historians and identified as the first phase of Victorianism) had sprung from a confluence of political events, which in turn were to have a dramatic effect on musical culture.

Following Waterloo in 1815, euphoria had gradually given way to disillusionment, as the country struggled to support the thousands of war heroes (300,000 had returned in 1816 and another 32,000 in 1817), and to cope with heavy taxation. Revolution had not happened in Britain, but there was still a real possibility that it might. There was much social unrest, and according to one commentator:

A large part of the public between 1815 and 1830 were easily brought to accept the radical thesis (popularised more than anyone by Cobbett) that the woes of post-war society sprang from the extravagance of aristocratic government and that the only remedy lay in parliamentary reform.

This finally happened with the Reform Act of 1832, which was forced through by the new Whig government with the help of the new king, William IV. This allowed for a more realistic representation of the centres of population in parliament, whilst restrictions on voting rights still left seventy to eighty per cent of adult males without the vote. Such restrictions were deemed necessary to stave off radical pressures, and to secure the sovereignty of parliament against the threat of revolution.

On 26 June 1830 George IV had died, an event The Times marked by observing that ‘no monarch, will be generally less mourned’; and indeed, the Regency and the subsequent reign of George IV had been characterised by social unrest, profligate spending, and political inertia.