The Popular Movement for Parliamentary Reform in Provincial Britain during the 1860s

Provincial perspectives are largely lacking in accounts of the emergence of the second reform act, but a vigorous and innovative popular movement for reform emerged in the mid-1860s. A burgeoning newspaper press both conveyed and itself did much to create a sense of accelerating movement unparalleled since chartism. Former chartists, notably Ernest Jones, were significant organisers, but the infusion of this movement into communities hitherto untouched by organised popular politics was widespread. Formal organisations can be identified in at least 282 separate localities outside London. Conservative working men’s associations, by contrast, were slow to emerge and ephemeral. A rich material and performative culture bore witness to workers’ sense of property in their skill, their education and importance as wealth creators, but also to the popular reform movement’s profoundly gendered character. Though committed in principle to manhood suffrage, by the spring of 1867 working-class reformers were largely reconciled to incremental change and middle-class opinion about reform similarly softened. This is demonstrated in the history of the Reform League’s ‘Yorkshire Department’ and the success of its president, Robert Meek Carter, at the 1868 parliamentary election in Leeds.