The right to vote in 19th century Britain

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If you see human history as a story of unending progress, leading from ignorance to enlightenment, you might at the very least want to admit that progress hasn’t gone in a straight line. Take, for example, Britain and the right to vote. The number of people who could vote did gradually expand, but boy did the country find some interesting ways to go a-wandering on its path toward universal suffrage.

I’m picking up here on an earlier post about the 1832 voting reforms. This one isn’t specifically about that set of changes, although it is connected. If you haven’t read the older one, I’ll never know, but if you want to go back and fill in the blank, here’s your link. Meanwhile, the rest of us will waddle on, never knowing whether you’re with us or not. 

Irrelevant photo: Mallow

 

Women, men, and freedom of the city

In many nineteenth-century boroughs–that pretty much translates to towns and cities–men with the freedom of the city had the right to vote.

The freedom of the what? 

The phrase goes back to feudal times, when a freeman was someone who wasn’t the property of a feudal lord and when living in a city for more than a year and not getting hauled back to the land could free you.  

Were there free women? Yes, but they don’t seem to have gone into the language in the same way. Funny how that works. 

Even while feudalism was turning to dust, echoes of the system were burrowing their way into the language, and the freedom of the city is one of the echoes. In those nineteenth-century boroughs (didn’t think I’d get back to that, did you?), having the freedom of the city gave you more than the right to vote. Depending on what city you lived in, it might also give you the right to trade or own property in the city; it would connect you to a network of people with money and power; it might allow you to graze your cattle on the town square, but only if you actually owned cattle. But let’s focus on that one benefit, the right to vote.

 

How could you get the freedom of the city?

You could get it by being apprenticed to a freeman or you could inherit it from your father. Or grandfather. Or–well, how many generations back you could go would depend on what city’s freedom you were claiming. 

In some towns, only one son could inherit it; in others multiple sons could. And in some, a daughter could inherit, only she couldn’t use it to cast a vote herself. What she could do was enfranchise her husband so he could vote. The widow of a freeman (again, only in some boroughs) could do the same, enfranchising a second husband, and if he died, possibly a third.  

After the 1832 electoral reforms, the number of boroughs where women could enfranchise a husband shrank from 90 to 15 (did I mention that progress doesn’t know what a straight line is?), but at a time when women’s power in the public sphere was somewhere between minuscule and not noticeable at all, this bit of compromised power is worth  noticing.

Like everything else connected to this story, terms and conditions applied and they varied from place to place. As did the proportion of voters who were enfranchised by their wives rather than voting in their own right: it might’ve been a third here, a sixth someplace else. Pull a number out of a hat and you can convince me that it applied somewhere. 

In some boroughs, marriage wasn’t enough to enfranchise a man. The wife’s consent was required as well. 

 

Why the right to vote mattered

I’ve always taken it for granted that having the vote was about political power, so expanding it was about spreading the power outward and giving new groups of people a voice. I’ve lived around universal suffrage all my life, which is long enough to know that it hasn’t even come close to spreading power out universally, but that didn’t completely knock the rose-colored glasses off my face. 

The belief that having the vote meant you had a voice isn’t entirely wrong–people fought for it and some died for it, and it has made a difference–but it isn’t the whole story either. In the nineteenth century, having the vote gave you some immediate benefits many people would’ve found more useful than that abstraction about having a voice.

Political wheelers and dealers might’ve offered them free food, drink, and until polling places moved closer to the voters, (generous) travel expenses on polling day. Outright bribes weren’t uncommon. In 1774, in Hindon, Wiltshire, householders (a group who were eligible to vote after the 1832 reforms expanded the electorate) were given as much as 20 guineas each. That would be something along the lines of £2,000 in today’s money. 

It wasn’t legal but it also wasn’t uncommon. 

People’s votes were public, so they couldn’t just pocket the money and vote for the candidate they liked. Not only did they have to declare their vote publicly, it would be written down, along with their name, occupation, and address, becoming part of the public record.

A candidate might also get an opponent’s supporters too drunk to vote. If you’re the opponent, that’s dirty pool, but if you’re a voter and don’t much care who wins, a drink is a drink and a chance to get so drunk you land on the floor? Let’s drink to that.

So forget about using their vote, these voters were without question being used, but for a lot of people the material advantages of being voters would’ve outweighed any abstraction. And I’ll bet a ham sandwich that it was a rare election when the outcome made a difference to the voters’ circumstances after the food and drink were gone and the bribes had been spent.

22 thoughts on “The right to vote in 19th century Britain”

  1. In ancient Greece, the bedrock of democracy, only the men could vote. The rest were slaves and, you guessed it, women.
    And something that is incomprehensible, in a way—people died to get the vote, but how many do not bother nowadays. Although I must admit that the choice is mostly not very tempting.

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  2. That detail about daughters and widows passing the freedom of the city to their husbands – shrinking from ninety boroughs down to fifteen after 1832 – shows just how messy institutional “reform” really is. It is quite the irony: Parliament tidies up the books in the name of modernisation, and in doing so, casually strips away a slice of informal female influence that had quietly existed for centuries.

    Your contrast between the grand abstraction of having a voice and the immediate reality of a free pint, travel expenses, or twenty guineas in Wiltshire is spot on. When a vote must be declared out loud and written down next to your name and trade, it looks far less like civic liberty and much more like a high-stakes auction.

    If people treated the franchise as a transactional asset rather than an ideological tool, was that sheer cynicism on their part, or the only rational response available? If an election was unlikely to change a labourer’s day-to-day existence anyway, wouldn’t taking the cash and the free ale be the most practical exercise of power they actually had?

    Which brings up a broader question about how we define democratic progress: when a reform replaces messy, localised customs with a streamlined national standard – often wiping out strange little pockets of influence like those freemen’s wives along the way – is it genuine progress if it leaves the individual voter just as powerless against the machine as before?

    Best wishes,

    Bob

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    • You raise interesting questions, most of which I don’t have the time to address, so I’ll hopscotch around and address a few: the 1832 reforms were anything but streamlined. They ended up with one system overlying an older one and created a thoroughgoing mess. But in the name of expanding the vote (not as far as laborers, though–they were left waiting) they did indeed wipe out a bit of influence women had once had.

      The introduction of the secret ballot brought with it a new problem–people who could vote but couldn’t read. In the US, at least, parties used to pass out s complete list of their party’s candidates. I’m not sure if people could drop those in the ballot box or whether they had to painstakingly match them to what was on the ballot forms.

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  3. Over here some of The Powers That Be or Hope To are seriously advocating the repeal of the 19th Amendment. They are firm in their belief that women should not vote. It’s quite obvious why they would believe that.

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  4. Hi Ellen, thanks for more of the stop/go, forward/back history of the vote. There are times when I wonder whether it’s actually worth bothering given the strange effects of population statistics on any single vote having any influence on the result. I want my vote, I want to use my vote but does it actually make a difference, ever? But if no-one votes? There are so many variables affecting the outcome and so little chance of finding a party, or a candidate, that truly represents all of one’s opinions that it can induce a kind of hopeless inertia.
    Many years ago, so long that I can’t recall title or author, I read a story of a future society where one man(!) was randomly selected to decide on who should be president of the US, with the attendant pressure from all sides. Interesting idea, I thought, conjuring up the “We know where you live, we know where your children go to school,” or “Here’s a donation to your expenses,” scenarios suggested by the public voting you mention. Safety in numbers and secrecy?
    Jeannie

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    • Occasionally the vote does get us something: the 8-hour day; the end of child labor; a retirement income, the NHS. I could go on, but you get my drift. Without the vote, none of that would’ve happened, although I do notice it’s been a long time since any of that stuff has happened.. And no matter how frustrating the choices, I find there’s always someone I want to vote against. Inevitably, that means voting for someone I wouldn’t get out of bed to throw out of the house, or sometimes someone I know will lose, but it’s a sacrifice I’ve been willing to make, at least so far.

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  5. Completely off topic. Am I alone in thinking it strange that President Trump wants to rename so many places (it seems he’s now set his sights on New Mexico) in honour of a Spanish citizen of Italian birth? Amerigo Vespucci would no doubt be pleased to be known for his recognition of the Americas as separate from Asia…
    Maybe I’m mistaken in thinking that Mr Trump doesn’t hold those of Mediterranean extraction in particularly high regard. Or maybe he just hasn’t registered the connection.
    Jeannie

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