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III. Concession or Cure: the Sociological Premises of the First Reform Act

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2010

D. C. Moore
D. C. Moore
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

Traditionally, the first English Reform Act has been conceived within the context of two discreet but overlapping models. Both separately and together these models have performed two important functions. They have provided a means of defining the nature and dynamics of the Act itself by relating certain of its crucial provisions to certain aspects of the pre-reform constituency structure. They have also provided a means of relating the Act as a whole—and as thus defined—to the general course of British history in the nineteenth century, to the general problems of explaining how Britain was transformed from an aristocracy to a democracy, from a rural and agri-cultural society to an urban and industrial one, from a Gemeinschaft to a Gesellschaft.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , 1966 , pp. 39 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1966

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References

1 Politics in the Age of Peel (London, 1953)Google Scholar , and ‘English Reform and French Revolution in the General Election of 1830’, Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, Pares, Richard and Taylor, A. J. P., eds. (London, 1956), pp. 258–88Google Scholar.

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8 Ibid. p. 16.

9 See his comments on the constituency boundary scheme, ibid. p. 67.

10 Ibid. p. 16.

11 On this question, see below.

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14 Politics in the Age of Peel, p. 16.

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37 Parliamentary Papers, 1830-31, n, 199 emphasis added.

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