The Victorian Era

Victorian Political History

Article · History & Overview · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Victorian political history covers the sixty-four years from 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, to 1901, when she died and the Edwardian era began. The political history of these years is the story of the transformation of the British state from a restricted oligarchy into a recognisably modern mass democracy, and of the parallel transformation of the United Kingdom into the centre of the largest empire in history. This page surveys the principal political movements, parties, laws, and crises of the period. For the broader historical context, see The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview, and for a focused look at the queen whose name the era bears, see The Reign of Queen Victoria.

The Political System in 1837

The United Kingdom in 1837 was a constitutional monarchy with two chambers of Parliament. The House of Lords was a hereditary chamber composed of the peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Great Britain, together with the bishops of the Church of England. The House of Commons was elected by a complex franchise that varied from borough to borough and county to county. In some rotten boroughs, a single patron controlled the return of two members of Parliament. In the new industrial towns of the north and midlands, which had grown enormously in the previous half-century, there was often no representation at all. The electorate in 1837 was perhaps 800,000 out of a population of around 16 million, and the voters were overwhelmingly propertied men.

Two great parties dominated the political life of the kingdom. The Conservative Party, descended from the Tory Party of the eighteenth century, drew its support from the landed aristocracy, the established church, and the country gentry. The Liberal Party, in the process of formation through the 1830s, drew its support from the dissenters, the industrial middle class, the free traders, and the more flexible Whig aristocrats. The Whigs, who had been the dominant force in British politics for much of the eighteenth century, were being absorbed into the Liberal coalition. Outside the two parties stood the radicals, the Irish nationalists, the Chartists, and the first labour movements.

The Chartist Movement

The first great mass movement of the Victorian era was the Chartist movement. The People’s Charter of 1838 set out six demands: universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, no property qualification for members of Parliament, payment of members of Parliament, equal-sized constituencies, and annual parliamentary elections. The Chartists organised monster meetings, petitions, and a brief armed rising in Newport in 1839, and they remained a significant force in British politics for almost two decades. The movement’s failure to win its demands immediately has sometimes led historians to dismiss it. In fact, five of the six points of the Charter became law by 1918, and the movement was one of the most important political mobilisations of the nineteenth century.

The Reform Acts

The three great Reform Acts of the Victorian era transformed the political system. The Reform Act of 1832, passed just before Victoria’s reign began, had abolished many rotten boroughs, redistributed seats to the new industrial towns, and extended the franchise to a wider section of the middle class. The Reform Act of 1867, passed by the Conservative government of the Earl of Derby with Benjamin Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer, extended the franchise to most urban working men. The Reform Act of 1884, passed by the Liberal government of William Gladstone, extended the franchise to most rural working men. By the late 1880s, the United Kingdom had near-universal male suffrage, and the political system had become recognisably modern.

The reform acts were not simply about elections. They were about the redistribution of power in the United Kingdom, and they were contested every step of the way. The Reform Act of 1832 was passed only after the political crisis of the early 1830s, the rejection of the first Reform Bill by the House of Lords, and riots in many British cities. The Reform Act of 1867 was passed after a long campaign in which the Conservative Party feared that it would be outflanked by the Liberals on the question of working-class enfranchisement. The Reform Act of 1884 was the result of a decade of pressure from radicals, trade unions, and the women’s suffrage movement. The story of the three acts is told in detail in the page on the Reform Acts.

The Corn Laws, Free Trade, and the Party System

The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was one of the most important political events of the period. The Corn Laws had imposed tariffs on imported grain since 1815, and they had kept the price of bread artificially high in order to support the incomes of the landed aristocracy. The campaign for repeal, led by the Anti-Corn Law League and its brilliant organisers Richard Cobden and John Bright, was a landmark in the history of British popular politics. The repeal split the Conservative Party: the free-trade faction under Sir Robert Peel broke away and eventually merged with the Whigs and the Radicals to form the Liberal Party, which dominated British politics from the late 1850s to the 1880s.

Free trade became a central tenet of Victorian Liberalism, and the United Kingdom remained a free-trade country for the rest of the Victorian era. The gold standard, the City of London as the centre of international finance, and the policy of free imports of raw materials and food all helped to make Britain the workshop of the world. For the economic context, see The Victorian Economy and Industrialization.

The Liberal Party, 1859 to 1886

The Liberal Party dominated British politics from 1859 to 1886. The principal Liberal prime ministers of the period were Lord Palmerston, who served from 1855 to 1858 and from 1859 to 1865; William Ewart Gladstone, who served four times (1868 to 1874, 1880 to 1885, briefly in 1886, and finally 1892 to 1894); and Lord John Russell, who served from 1865 to 1866. Under these leaders the Liberals passed the Irish Land Acts, the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, the Education Acts of 1870 and later, the Irish University Act of 1879, the Employers’ Liability Act of 1880, and the two Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, both of which were defeated in the House of Lords.

The Gladstonian settlement of the period reshaped the relationship between the British state and the British citizen. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 established school boards, the Employers’ Liability Act of 1880 gave workers a right to compensation for industrial accidents, the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 gave married women control over their own property, and the Ballot Act of 1872 introduced the secret ballot. The parliamentary triumph of the Liberals in the mid-Victorian period rested on the new urban middle-class electorate created by the Reform Act of 1867 and on the new Welsh and Scottish seats created by the Reform Act of 1884.

Ireland and the Irish Question

The Irish Question ran through the entire Victorian period. Catholic Emancipation was achieved in 1829 through the political movement of Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, and the Catholic Association; O’Connell then organised mass “monster meetings” of Irish peasants in the 1840s to demand repeal of the Act of Union of 1801. The Young Ireland movement staged a small rising in 1848. The Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852, caused by the failure of the potato crop, killed a million people and forced another million to emigrate. The Fenian Brotherhood, founded in 1858 by James Stephens, organised an attempted rising in 1867 and a campaign of bombing in English cities. The Land War of 1879 to 1882, led by Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell, won a series of Land Acts that began to break the power of the Irish landlord class. The two Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, both introduced by William Gladstone, divided British politics and eventually destroyed the Liberal Party. The Irish Question shaped the careers of Disraeli, Gladstone, Salisbury, and Parnell, and it would shape the politics of the early twentieth century as well.

The Conservative Party, 1886 to 1905

The Conservative Party dominated British politics from 1886 to 1905. The principal Conservative prime ministers of the period were the Marquess of Salisbury, who served three times (1885 to 1886, 1886 to 1892, and 1895 to 1902), and the Earl of Derby, who served three times in the 1850s and 1860s. Salisbury was a man of immense intellectual range, a former Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and the first prime minister to be addressed in that style rather than as First Lord of the Treasury. Under his leadership the Conservatives consolidated the electoral gains they had made in 1886 by splitting the Liberals over Irish Home Rule, and they governed the empire with a mixture of patrician detachment and strategic realism. The Conservative period ended in 1905, when the party was defeated over Joseph Chamberlain’s campaign for tariff reform and the Lords rejected Lloyd George’s 1909 budget.

The British Empire

The Victorian era was the high point of the British Empire. India had been brought under direct British rule after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and a stream of conquests, protectorates, and informal spheres of influence stretched from Canada to the Cape, from Hong Kong to the West Indies. The empire was, at its peak in the late Victorian period, the largest in history. It was defended by the Royal Navy, which was the largest navy in the world for most of the period, and by the British army, which was reorganised several times during the era. The empire shaped British politics, British culture, and British self-image, and the question of how to govern it, of how to relate to it, and of how to end it, would be one of the central political questions of the twentieth century. For the cities that grew up around the empire, see Victorian Cities, Transport, and Entertainment.

Gladstone and Disraeli

Two figures dominated Victorian politics. William Ewart Gladstone, four times Liberal prime minister, was the great parliamentary figure of the mid and late Victorian era. A former Conservative who had become a Liberal, Gladstone was a brilliant orator, a budgetary reformer, a passionate advocate of Irish Home Rule, and a man whose religious sensibility and high moral tone became a model for Victorian Liberalism. Benjamin Disraeli, twice Conservative prime minister, was Gladstone’s great rival. A novelist, a dandy, and a political strategist, Disraeli was the founder of modern Conservatism, the architect of the Reform Act of 1867, the promoter of the public health acts, and the man who gave Queen Victoria the title of Empress of India. The two men defined the politics of their age. Their rivalry, in Parliament, in the press, and in the country at large, shaped the political culture of the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Late Victorian Party System

By the 1880s, the political system of the early Victorian period had been transformed. The electorate had grown from perhaps 800,000 to almost 6 million. The Liberal Party had emerged as the dominant force in British politics, but it was being challenged from both flanks: by a new radicalism from below, organised in trade unions, socialist societies, and the Independent Labour Party, and by a new unionism from above, in Ireland. The Conservative Party, which had been the underdog for most of the mid-Victorian period, regrouped under the Marquess of Salisbury and won a series of election victories in the 1880s and 1890s. The third Home Rule crisis of 1912 to 1914, the result of the third Home Rule Bill, led to a virtual civil war in Ireland and to the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, and it is generally taken as the political bridge between the Victorian era and the modern world. For the everyday social context, see Victorian Daily Life and Society.

The Army and the Military Reforms

The Victorian army was repeatedly reformed. The disasters of the Crimean War in 1854 and 1855, when the British army was shown to be inefficient, poorly supplied, and badly led, led to a series of reforms under Lord Cardwell in the 1870s. Cardwell abolished the system of purchasing commissions, established linked battalions, and reorganised the army’s reserve. The Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902, in which a small British force in South Africa held off a much larger British army for almost three years, led to a further round of reforms under Lord Haldane in the 1900s. The Haldane reforms created the Territorial Army and the modern framework of the British army.