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Miles Taylor, Reform and Reformers in Nineteenth-Century Britain, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXII, Issue 498, September 2007, Page 1099, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem208
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Michael Turner has put together an interesting and accessible collection from papers originally presented at a conference which he organised at the University of Sunderland. As he explains in his brief introduction, the volume aims to take a fresh look—from the perspective of the ‘new political history’—at various aspects of the age of reform in Britain, by which is meant, roughly speaking, the era from the Catholic emancipation crisis through to the mid-Victorian equipoise. Inevitably, although there is a whiff of the populist turn (Antony Taylor) and the occasional gesture towards the importance of gender (Matthew McCormack) as a historical category, this is not so much new political history, as early- and mid-Victorian politics looked at by a new generation of historians. But there is nonetheless some very welcome revisionism going on. Excellent chapters on Catholic politics in Munster after 1829 (Martin McElroy) and the so-called turn to free trade in the legislation of the 1840s and 1850s (Catherine Molyneux on the Bank Charter Act of 1844, Michael Turner on corn law repeal, and James Taylor on the advent of limited liability) all question the extent and timing of ‘reform’ as ethos and as policy. McElroy shows how it was only really once the British state opened up patronage to the Munster Catholic elite in the later 1830s and reformed Irish corporations in 1841 that Catholic relief really began to work properly. Molyneux shows that parliamentary support for Peel's 1844 banking reforms was at best lukewarm, with criticism effectively suppressed in the name of maintaining public faith in the system during the commercial crisis of 1847. Turner highlights the continuing fears of free-trade MPs such as T.P. Thompson over a resurgent Tory protectionism at the time of the repeal of the Navigation Acts (including the bizarre insistence that Queen Victoria be seen wearing only British-made clothes). And James Taylor whets the appetite for his monograph on the subject, by showing just how contingent was support for joint-stock company reform, even among free traders. Freedom to fail was as important as the gospel of success. Elsewhere in the volume, contributors stretch the idea of reform culture even further than is usually associated with the historiography of this period. Thus, Newport's Chartist-bashing mayor, Thomas Phillips, gets friendly and thorough reappraisal as a moral reformer in the Carlylean mould p(Chris Williams), the flotsam and jetsam of late London Chartism are reclaimed as the maelstrom of a ‘febrile crowd politics’ through the 1860s and 1870s (Antony Taylor), and dissenting Gladstonian liberals such as W.H. Willans come over as noble in their failure to get into Parliament (Clyde Binfield). Perhaps the most original piece is reserved for last: an account of late nineteenth-century municipal Toryism on Merseyside (Sandra O’Leary) which thoughtfully uncouples Liverpool conservatism from any automatic association with sectarian Orangeism. Michael Turner has done good service in getting these papers into the public domain: they add considerably to the burgeoning new historiography of the ‘age of reform’, and at least two-thirds of the book reveals some of the best of recent PhD research in the early Victorian period.
