A paper of this title must inevitably be extremely selective. The subject is complex and the available material vast in bulk. As Paul Langford has recently shown with his study on the first Rockingham administration one could conceivably do justice to it at the rate of one volume a year for much of the period 1763 to 1776. I can do no more in the compass of this paper than pursue one or two themes which appear to be emerging from the mass of recent detailed scholarship. Moreover, I am going to take a major, though I hope justified liberty with my title, and treat of policies as well as politics. After all the second is not fully intelligible without the first. This paper does not adopt a “structure of politics” approach. Thanks to the initiatives of Sir Lewis Namier in that field we now have a pretty full knowledge of the structural framework of British politics during the revolutionary crisis, and this provides useful guidelines for understanding the ebb and flow of political controversy—as the recent work of Paul Langford and Peter Thomas bears admirable witness. But knowledge of political structure tells us little about the essence of the arguments connected with the American question. We cannot understand the politics unless we understand the policies which were at issue.

During the past several years published studies of nineteenth-century parliamentary elections in several regions have failed to satisfy all those who have wished for a thorough understanding of the electoral structure of Victorian Britain. Perhaps the most important statements about these elections have been made by D.C. Moore, for he has been one of very few researchers to place his findings into a theoretical structure. Professor Moore's model for voting behavior is that of the deference community, which may be described as a group of individuals who, having close contact through occupation, residency, or other interests—or several of these—acknowledged a limited number of individuals as their social, economic and ideological leaders. According to Moore the deference community is a more powerful explanatory device than models based on class or individualism. He supports this with poll book data which suggest that, at least for rural constituencies prior to 1867, group networks were stronger than the ties of social status, and more apparent, than is evidence that electors voted only for their particular interests.

What influenced the decay of the deference community, Moore would argue, were those forces seemingly omnipresent every spring in Western Civilization classes—industrialization, urbanization, and migration. Moore suggests that the three forces weakened the traditional social nexus and hierarchical relationships. Voters thereafter could be recruited by Victorian election managers directly, that is as individuals and not as members of a community.

This paper is the first fruit of a study of electoral politics in the Borough of Cambridge between the first and second Reform Bills, in which we are attempting to explore in detail some of the most important general questions about the political history of mid-Victorian Britain.

The critical importance of the period between 1832 and 1868 to the transition from aristocratic rule to parliamentary democracy in Britain is not in doubt. In the terms of the most useful comparative study (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) 1832 represented an early, genuine but limited concession by the old elite to bourgeois and working class claims to political influence, a remarkably Whig view. The major works on the politics of the period (esp. Gash 1933 and Hanham 1959) have emphasised the limited nature of the concession while other have thrown doubt on the notion of concession, at all, pointing out the conservative intentions behind the First Reform Bill (Moore 1966, 1976) and the contingent pressures on the actual provisions of the Second (Cowling 1967). Control of Parliament remained largely where it had been before; the decline of aristocratic government was long drawn out; adaptation of the political system followed slowly in the wake of economic and social change. Middle class reform and militant labour were gradually accommodated in the parliamentary system, enlisted in the ranks of the aristocratic parties, which though transformed, even now, moderate, loyal, constitutionalist, bear the marks of their origin. Part of the explanation for the success of gradualism must be sought in the weakness of the labor movement and its failure at the revolutionary moment, which has been illuminated in detail by Foster's studies of industrial towns (1967, 1968, 1974).

When one of the characters in William Morris's Utopian romance News from Nowhere says “We are very well off as to politics—because we have none” he was talking about the manipulation and intrigue that everyone hopes will be banished from Utopia. Morris had to carry on his own political work amidst the manoeuvring he hoped would be unnecessary in the future. News from Nowhere is about politics in the sense in which the word is used in the title of Aristotle's Politics; and it teaches the rather Aristotelian message “Men come together in communities to live, they remain in communities to live in fellowship.” But the book had its local and immediate political context: most directly, in 1890 Morris gave up the editorship of the Socialist League magazine Commonweal, which was publishing the story in installments, when twenty out of the thirty-nine installments had appeared. While his retirement was not entirely voluntary there is no reason to think that the remaining installments were altered by the new editors. When Morris published the story as a book the following year he added a certain amount of new material which indicates a somewhat different point of view.

What he published in 1890 (the Commonweal version) was considerably closer to the anarchist view of revolution than what is now accepted as News from Nowhere, and what he added for the 1891 version (the book) shows a distinct shift towards an attitude more favourable to the State Socialists, or Fabians, that anything he wrote in Commonweal.