Talking to some purpose

Nineteenth-century British politics used to be the historian’s bread and butter, but it has gone sadly out of fashion. Instead of the Great Reform Act, what every schoolgirl knows today is Hitler and Stalin, studied over and over again. The story of reform is too narrowly political for today’s tastes. The historians spoiled it too. Doctoral students were taught to comb the archives for correspondence, the more obscure the better, and the dense and tedious monographs they wrote about ‘high politics’ added very little to the big picture.

Edward Pearce’s new book shows what a mistake it is to ignore reform. It is quite simply a splendid story. The fact that Pearce is a political journalist not a professional historian is probably an advantage. He has none of the historian’s hang-ups about saying something original, kowtowing to academic fashion or notching up archives in his bibliography. In fact, this book is largely based on the most obvious source, which historians in their wisdom have dismissed or ignored — Hansard’s parliamentary debates.

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Pearce is refreshingly straightforward. There is no trendy stuff here about political discourse, no computer-generated electoral statistics or voting analysis. Pearce is an old Commons gallery man, and he tells it straight. But this is an entirely legitimate approach, as reform was essentially a parliamentary drama.

Party, as Pearce rightly implies, counted for relatively little in the small, tight world of 1830s politics. The Duke of Wellington, whom Pearce sees as a lousy politician, incapable of consulting or playing for time, was the man who started it all. Having taken power in 1830 with formidable support, Wellington threw it away by standing up in the House of Lords without warning and declaring against reform — one of those ‘nevers’, says Pearce, ‘which good politicians know better than to utter’.