The Second Reform Act by John K. Walton

Author:John K. Walton [Walton, John K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781134848225
Google: EnjnB5dKnHQC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-01-28T15:52:44+00:00

Bright had invested too much in radical reform over the years to repudiate the achievement of household suffrage, whatever his forebodings about the ‘residuum’ might be; and one biographer tells us that he was ‘overjoyed’ at the passing of the Act, despite his revulsion at the Conservatives’ ‘opportunism and hypocrisy’. But fears about the possible consequences of the Act were less easily suspended or set aside in other influential quarters, and they were given added encouragement by the pronouncements of popular intellectuals and opinion-formers. Thomas Carlyle’s blusteringly incoherent apocalyptic vision saw reform as ‘shooting Niagara’, part of England’s headlong rush to the bottomless pit of democracy, ‘The calling in of new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, amenability to beer and balderdash, by way of amending the woes we have had from our previous supplies of that bad article’. Carlyle yearned for a reassertion of virtuous, aristocratic authority; and fears of the potential consequences of working-class electoral predominance were also expressed by the poet, school inspector and standard-bearer of ‘culture’, Matthew Arnold. He, too, discerned a tendency to anarchy in the political developments of the time, and responded angrily to the Hyde Park ‘riots’, suggesting that authority was losing its vigour and self-confidence in the face of a growing propensity to ‘rowdyism’ on the part of a working class which was becoming as assertive as its betters in the defence of its rights. John Ruskin, the great art historian and social prophet, was also sceptical about the trend to democracy, which he

once saw finely illustrated by the beetles of North Switzerland, who by universal suffrage … one May twilight, carried it that they would fly over the Lake of Zug; and flew short, to the great disfigurement of the Lake of Zug … and to the close of the cockchafer democracy for that year.

(1907, 280)

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