The seminar takes place on 17 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The mid-Victorian artistic decoration of the Palace of Westminster, the home of UK Parliament, has long been understood as a fundamentally masculinised scheme. This ambitious art project was overseen by the Royal Commission on the Fine Arts (1841-1863), and was part of the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster after the 1834 fire.

The new interior in the Palace of Westminster offered an opportunity to promote British art and cultivate national political identity through carefully constructed imagery. My paper for the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on 17 February demonstrates that female visual representation was a central concern of the commission.

The 1841-1863 Fine Arts Commission made a conscious effort to include and increase imagery of women throughout the Palace of Westminster’s principal chambers. In doing so, the commissioners conceptualised women as integral to the development of the British political constitution. Their choice of artworks also reflected Queen Victoria’s position as monarch, foregrounding women as religious and military leaders, and as channels and sometimes exercisers of political power.

CG

Dr Cara Gathern is a heritage professional with a PhD from the University of Brighton. She works as a Researcher and Curatorial Assistant for UK Parliament Heritage Collections, where she has an academic interest in the 19th-century scheme under the Commission of Fine Arts, and the 20th-century mosaics. Her Oxford DNB entry on Master Mosaicist Gertrude Martin was published in December 2024 and her journal article on early female contributions to Parliamentary art, co-authored with Caroline Babington, is due to be published in Women’s History Review in July 2026.

The seminar takes place on 17 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

How many people could vote in the UK after the 1832 Reform Act? This is one of the most frequent questions that the History of Parliament’s Commons 1832-1868 project is asked about nineteenth-century electoral politics. The short answer is, it’s complicated. For the long answer, please read on…

To start with, women and everyone under twenty-one could not vote in parliamentary elections throughout the nineteenth century. That’s around 75% of the entire population (more on how I’ve worked out this figure below).

In terms of the remaining 25% or so of the population (those who were male and aged 21 or over), a plethora of data exists to compile reliable UK enfranchisement statistics for each election between 1832 and 1868 (when the electoral system was reformed again). However, UK-wide average figures mask an extraordinary variation in electorate sizes and rates of adult male enfranchisement from country to country, county to county and constituency to constituency during that time.

For instance, at the 1847 general election a maximum of one in six adult males (16.6%) were registered to vote across the UK. However, this general figure disguises the fact that in England at the same election a maximum of around one in five (20.8%) adult males were registered to vote, while in Ireland the same figure was only around one in thirteen (7.5%).

The variations are even starker when viewed at constituency level. At the same general election, a maximum of 1 in 50 adult males living within the boundaries of the Irish county of Mayo could vote for the county constituency of the same name. 1 in 16 adult males could vote in the Welsh borough of Merthyr Tydfil. 1 in 7 could vote in the Scottish burgh district of Ayr. And over 1 in 2 (58%) adult males were potentially registered to vote in the English borough of Beverley.

Why was this the case? A key factor is that the UK electoral system between 1832 and 1868 was not a democracy. Rather, the electoral reforms of 1832 established a complex, mixed representative system intended to balance the nation’s varied political, economic, social and geographic interests. Some constituencies only had around 300 voters, others had over 20,000. Some constituencies were under one square mile in area, others encompassed entire counties that were over a thousand square miles. Some constituencies returned one MP, some returned four. And some voters could vote in multiple constituencies.

One key means of achieving this mixed representative system was via varied franchise regulations. This led to a distinctive combination of, often unique, voting qualifications in each constituency. These might be forty-shilling freeholders, £10 householders, tenants-at-will, copyholders, freemen, potwallopers, burgage holders or scot and lot voters, all of whom are discussed in this article by my colleague, Philip Salmon.

Significantly, most franchises were property-based. This meant that even if two constituencies shared the same legal voting qualification – such as the £10 borough householder franchise – variations in local property values led to wildly differing rates of enfranchisement from region to region. 

As a result, at the 1847 election there were many fewer properties registered in the East Midlands under the £10 a year annual rent qualification than in London. In the borough of Stoke in 1847 a maximum of 9% of adult males were registered as £10 householders, while in the London borough of Lambeth the same figure was 25%. For reference, a £10 a year rent in 1847 equates to around £13,000 a year, or £260 a week/£1,080 a month in 2025.

The complex system of voter registration after 1832 also contributed to discrepancies in enfranchisement levels from nation to nation and constituency to constituency. In England and Wales the 1s. annual registration fee, the reliability of local parish officials in providing annual tax returns, localised rental practices (such as compounding), the efficiency of local party machinery and the strictness of revising barristers at annual registration courts all played a factor in whether someone made it on to the register in the first place.

The unwieldy voter registration systems established in Ireland and Scotland in 1832 were even more significant in terms of preventing potential voters from registering to vote. Loopholes in the Irish and Scottish systems also encouraged fictitious vote creation, and made revising registers so complex that it became almost impossible to remove dead voters from the electoral roll.

Ireland’s unwieldy system was completely overhauled in 1850. Scotland’s burgh and county systems were overhauled in 1856 and 1861 respectively. After these dates the registration process became (slightly) more straightforward and the registers are a more reliable source for calculating adult male enfranchisement levels.

To make things even more complicated men who owned or rented multiple qualifying properties could vote in multiple constituencies (although they could only qualify once per constituency). This means that the ‘maximum’ national and constituency level percentages of enfranchisement discussed here are likely to overstate how many men had the vote. While data does not exist to adjust enfranchisement rates to a high degree of accuracy, contemporary estimates suggested that around 10% of those on the electoral register could vote in multiple constituencies.

This is one reason why I include the word ‘maximum’ before ‘adult male enfranchisement rate’. While a maximum of 16.6% of adult males were registered to vote in the UK in 1847, it was more likely that closer to 15% of adult males were actually enrolled. Statistically speaking, this means the UK-wide adult male enfranchisement rate for 1847 can also be displayed as 15.1%(±10%).

Such a statistical adjustment also provides some leeway for further complicating factors when calculating enfranchisement rates at a constituency level. These factors include men being registered under two or more qualifications in the same constituency and men registered to vote under ancient franchise qualifications via the seven-mile borough residence rule. In a small group of English constituencies (such as Beverley), both factors mean that enfranchisement rates can only be displayed with a confidence range of ±30%.

With all of these provisos taken into consideration, the good news is that sufficient electoral and demographic data exists to model maximum adult male enfranchisement rates at regular intervals between 1832 and 1868 for every constituency in the UK, including for every general election.

The two key sources that I’ve used to do this are parliamentary returns and the UK census. Parliamentary returns detailing how many voters were registered in each UK constituency were published on an almost annual basis between 1832 and 1868 (Figure 5). Census returns detailing the population within each constituency boundary were published every ten years. The decennial censuses also contained sufficient national and local population data broken down by age and gender to model the national rate of adult males in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland at each general election (Figure 1).

This data can then be broken down, displayed and interpreted in a number of ways. I’ve provided three examples in this article. The first (Figure 4) shows how maximum rates of adult male enfranchisement varied across England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the UK between 1831 and 1868. 1831 was the last general election held under the unreformed electoral system. Data for the period between 1832 and 1865 demonstrates changing enfranchisement rates under the reformed electoral system established in 1832. The increase in enfranchisement displayed in each of the four nations in 1868 reflects the changes to the electoral system implemented via the reform legislation of 1867-8 (commonly referred to as the Second Reform Act).

The second way that I’ve displayed this data is spatially via a map of several constituencies in the Midlands at the 1847 general election (Figure 6). Lighter shadings of green reflect a lower rate of enfranchisement, such as in Dudley, where a maximum of around 9% of adult males could vote under the £10 householder franchise, and the county constituency of Warwickshire North, where around 7% of men were registered under the county franchise. Darker shadings of green reflect higher rates of enfranchisement, such as in the boroughs of Lichfield and Coventry. In both constituencies a maximum of around 50% of adult males were theoretically enfranchised due to the continuation after 1832 of several ‘popular’ voting qualifications from the unreformed electoral system.

The third way that I’ve displayed the data is via a box and whisker plot of maximum adult male enfranchisement rates in every UK constituency at each general election between 1832 and 1865. This chart (Figure 8) which might appear confusing at first, is an incredibly efficient way of representing a lot of data.

The ‘box’ for each election year indicates the median, lower and upper quartile rates of enfranchisement across the UK at each election (50% of UK constituencies fit within these enfranchisement ranges). The ‘whiskers’ stretch to what statistically speaking can be considered the ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’ rates of enfranchisement in UK constituencies. The dots reflect outliers. These outliers are constituencies with very high maximum adult male enfranchisement rates, which, as discussed above, need to be read sceptically.

Significantly, Figure 8 shows that while variations in adult male enfranchisement between UK constituencies narrowed markedly in the UK as the period wore on, enfranchisement rates remained persistently under 10% in a considerable number of constituencies and that over 1 in 4 men could vote in an equally large group of constituencies. Variation, rather than uniformity, remained the defining characteristic of the reformed UK electoral system between 1832 and 1868.

MS

Further Reading

M. Spychal, Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act (2024)

P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832-1841 (2002)

N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation 1830-1850 (1953)

K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics, and Society in Ireland 1832-1885 (1984)

M. Dyer, Men of Property and Intelligence: The Scottish Electoral System Prior to 1884 (1996)

M. Cragoe, Culture, Politics, and National Identity in Wales 1832-1886 (2004)

D. Beales, ‘The electorate before and after 1832: the right to vote, and the opportunity’, Parliamentary History, xi (1992), 139-50

F. O’Gorman, ‘The electorate before and after 1832: a reply’, Parliamentary History, xii (1993), 171-83

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 25 February 2025, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

During the early 19^th century the way debates and other goings-on in Parliament were reported and broadcast to the public underwent fundamental change. It was during this period that Hansard, the famous record of parliamentary speeches and proceedings, first became established, while daily accounts of discussions in both Houses began to occupy a prominent place in many leading newspapers.

Amazingly, this coverage of parliamentary debates not only occurred in contravention of the ‘official’ orders of the Commons, banning strangers and reporting, but also operated as a commercial venture. Aided by the huge public interest in issues such as the abolition of slavery, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform, what went on in Parliament became big business. By the early 1830s an estimated 2 million people were reading parliamentary reports in the press, while Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, launched in 1803 and taken over by Thomas Curson Hansard in 1812, sold sufficient copies to turn a reasonable profit, at least until the 1850s.

Not every attempt to cash in on the public interest in Parliament succeeded. Hansard reckoned that by 1829 he had already seen off ‘the greater part’ of 18 rival publications, ‘some promising to give a more condensed and some a more elongated account of the proceedings in Parliament’. The ill-fated Parliamentary Review, for example, rearranged all the debates by topic, providing background information and ‘critical essays’ analysing all the ‘measures discussed’ and arguments ‘on both sides of the question’. The extra work this involved, however, made it too expensive and out of date by the time it appeared.

Hansard’s approach, on the other hand, kept costs to a minimum. Rather than paying for his own reporters, Hansard concocted his account of the debates from the daily newspapers and with notes he sometimes received from MPs. His compilations, for that was what they really were, appeared in regular instalments which could later be bound together, rather than at the end of each session. His heavy reliance on the accuracy and selection criteria of the press reporters, however, was far from ideal. Debates on local or minor matters were often omitted, leading many MPs to complain, not least because of their growing need to satisfy constituency opinion. Worse still, speeches delivered late at night, after the reporters had left to file their copy, failed to get covered. Working conditions in the reporters’ gallery, as Kathryn Rix has shown, were also far from ideal and underwent major change.

Sensing a gap in the market, in 1828 Charles Dickens’ uncle, John Henry Barrow (1796-1858), a former lawyer turned journalist, launched the Mirror of Parliament. Unlike Hansard, Barrow not only employed his own dedicated team of reporters, but also paid them a ‘most liberal remuneration’ for each ‘turn’ in the press gallery. The debates that were later covered by his talented teenage nephew Charles Dickens, in particular, were singled out for praise by leading politicians, including Lord Stanley.

By 1831, at the height of the reform crisis, the Mirror had become ‘the highest extant authority’ of proceedings in Parliament. It wasn’t just that Barrow’s accounts of debates were much longer and closer to the original in terms of language and sentiment. Barrow also managed to cover far more speeches and include a broader range of MPs. The radical Henry Hunt’s brief Commons career is a case in point. Where Hansard printed 660 of his ‘speeches’, the Mirror recorded over 1,000.

By now, however, the Mirror was also in financial trouble. The main investor Henry Winchester MP pulled out after haemorrhaging ‘a considerable portion’ of £7,000 and although Frederick Gye, the famous owner of the pleasure grounds at Vauxhall Gardens, stepped in, within a few years he had also ‘lost a good deal of money’.

In 1834 the Mirror appealed to Parliament for financial assistance. The editor of The Times, however, was unimpressed. ‘That an individual who had embarked in the business of reporting for his own profit should throw the losses caused by his own unsuccessful management … upon the country… to the detriment of all other journalists [was] barefaced … impudence’, he declared.

The Commons agreed. A motion to support publication of an ‘authentic report of the debates arising in the House’ was defeated by 117 votes to 99. Although the Mirror managed to soldier on, reducing its reporters’ salaries and switching to a cheaper folio size, the writing was clearly on the wall. In 1841 it ceased operation.

Ironically, around the time that the Mirror of Parliament folded, the newspaper reports upon which Hansard relied so heavily for its commercial survival started to be replaced by a new form of coverage. By the late 1840s satirical and descriptive ‘sketches’ of parliamentary proceedings had begun to emerge as a staple of the rapidly expanding Victorian popular press.

This created an obvious problem for Hansard. With many newspapers eventually adopting some version of the ‘parliamentary sketch’, the number and range of press reports that Hansard was able to use to compile debates shrank. In 1862 the Morning Chronicle, which had continued to produce extensive daily coverage of debates, was forced to cease publication, leaving its arch-rival The Times as the pre-eminent source.

In this changing public atmosphere, and with its subscriptions falling, it was now Hansard that turned to Parliament for support. In 1855 the government agreed to purchase 100 copies for the various departments of state, providing a guaranteed annual income. In the late 1870s ministers agreed to subsidise coverage of the debates that the press usually ignored, and for the first time Hansard started to use its own reporters, rather than relying solely on newspaper reports.

Even this was not enough, however, and in 1888 Thomas Hansard junior (1813-91), who had been running the business since 1833,  retired and sold the entire operation to a new company, which reckoned it could produce an ‘authorised report’ without subsidy.

Over the next twenty years this venture and six successor operations, including one run by Reuters, all tried to succeed where Hansard had failed, and make a commercial success out of producing parliamentary debates. None of them succeeded. One even went bankrupt. In 1909 Parliament finally assumed responsibility for recording debates itself, employing its own staff of reporters and creating the department that continues to operate today.

P.S.

Details of the various historic Hansards available online can be found here. A BBC documentary about Charles Dickens and parliamentary reporting can be viewed here.

Further Reading:

J. Vice & S. Farrell, The History of Hansard (2017) VIEW

K. Rix, ‘ “Whatever passed in Parliament ought to be communicated to the public”: reporting the proceedings of the Reformed Commons, 1833-1850’, Parliamentary History (2014), xxxiii. 453-74

http://www.carolineshenton.co.uk/dickens-and-parliament/

E. Peplow, The Story of Parliament: Parliament and the press

P. Salmon, ‘The House of Commons, 1801-1911’, in A Short History of Parliament, ed. C. Jones (2009), 248-69 VIEW

A. Sparrow, Obscure Scribblers. A History of Parliamentary Journalism (2003)

M. H. Port, ‘The Official Record’, Parliamentary History (1990), ix. 175-83.

E. Brown, ‘John Henry Barrow and the Mirror of Parliament‘, Parliamentary Affairs (1956), lx. 311-23

H. Jordan, ‘The Reports of Parliamentary Debates, 1803-1908’, Economica (1931), xxxiv. 437-49

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 17 November 2017, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

2025 also saw the 1832-68 Commons project take on a new PhD student, in a similar collaborative PhD partnership to those we have previously run with the University of Warwick (Dr Seth Thevoz) and the Institute of Historical Research (Dr Martin Spychal). The successful candidate was Megan Hall. She is now working at the University of Sheffield on a fascinating study exploring the experiences of 19^th century Irish MPs.

Many of our Victorian Commons posts in 2025 explored themes beyond the remit of the MP biographies and constituency histories we write for the 1832-68 project. Kathryn Rix continued her research into the reporting of parliamentary debates, showing how growing demands for accurate reporting led to major changes in the reporters’ gallery, as famously used by a young Charles Dickens. She also described the often-misunderstood role of Hansard and modifications to both the temporary House of Commons and Charles Barry’s new Victorian Palace. At one point in the 1850s a brand-new roof even had to be rebuilt to improve acoustics.

Martin Spychal, meanwhile, extended his work on the first Black MP to represent a Scottish constituency. He investigated Peter McLagan’s complex heritage and extraordinary wealth as the son of a Demerara slave owner and an enslaved woman. This new series of articles was complemented by a one-day workshop held jointly with Joe Cozens at The National Archives, involving scholars of slavery and colonialism. More posts in this series will follow.

Alongside this political ‘first’, Naomi Lloyd-Jones offered a memorable ‘last’ with her account of the last known political duel involving MPs. One of the combatants was the noted ‘pistoleer’ George Smythe MP (1818-1857), later 7th Viscount Strangford and 2nd Baron Penshurst, who was also notorious for getting a daughter of the earl of Orford pregnant but refusing to marry her. His adversary was his fellow MP for Canterbury Frederick Romilly, with whom he had fallen out over election arrangements. Their exchange of shots in a wood in 1852 captured the attention of the national press and was widely ridiculed, helping both MPs get defeated at the next election.

Electoral corruption is a standard feature in all our research on 19^th century politics. Anyone thinking there was little left to say, however, should read Naomi’s post about the murky world of behind-the-scenes dealing in election petitions. This was especially revealing about the understudied practice of party agents ‘pairing off’ or ‘swapping’ challenges against recently elected MPs accused of bribery or malpractice. This ‘secret’ dealing in corruption allegations between the parties seems to have become rife before the reform of the whole election petition system in 1868. The changing nature of corruption also featured strongly in Kathryn Rix’s post comparing the practices and culture of the 1835 and 1865 general elections – an important reminder that adjustments to the UK’s electoral system were ongoing and not just confined to landmark Reform Acts.

Changes to the electorate between the 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts formed the basis of another article by Martin Spychal, drawing on research undertaken for his recent book. Taking into account the anomalies caused by plural voters, multiple qualifications and inconsistencies in the way ‘returns’ were compiled, this post showed how the large variations in the levels of adult male enfranchisement across the UK’s constituencies narrowed significantly from 1832 to the 1860s. Again this showed that the first reformed electoral system was far from ‘fixed’.

Another type of change was explored in Philip Salmon’s post examining the work of the chairman of ways and means. It was during the 19^th century that this key position in the Commons evolved into its recognisably modern form. The character and impartiality of the men appointed altered significantly. Early 19^th century officeholders – among them a crop of slave owners and fraudsters – were gradually replaced by a series of increasingly high calibre administrators. In 1853 the chairman also began to act as deputy speaker, a move reflected in the growing tendency for retirees to receive a peerage or even be promoted to the Speakership itself. One highlight here was the inclusion of a rare Victorian audio recording of Henry Cecil Raikes MP, the chair of ways and means from 1874-80.

Any idea that the changes outlined in all these posts increased the status or power of the Commons, however, was countered by an article by Philip examining the role and significance of the 19^th century House of Lords, based on a talk given in the River Room, House of Lords. As well as challenging the view that the Lords became subservient to the Commons in the 19^th century, this examined various attempts by Liberals, Radicals and even some Conservatives to reform the Lords. It also charted its perception as a legitimate alternative to the Commons in representing ‘popular opinion’ and the ‘will of the nation’ on key issues.

House of Lords reform, of course, is likely to be a topic that many commentators will be turning their attention to – historical and otherwise – during the new year. We will be continuing our research into 19th century parliamentary politics, MPs and elections, and look forward to sharing more highlights in 2026.

Peter McLagan senior was born in 1774 in Moulin, Perthshire. He was the son of a tenant farmer, John McLagan, and Girzel ‘Grace’ McLagan, née McInroy. McLagan senior had travelled to Demerara (modern-day Guyana) by around 1797, where his uncle, James McInroy, was an enslaver, merchant trader and plantation owner. McInroy was a founding partner of McInroy, Sandbach & Co., part of the ‘mercantile conglomerate’ that later became Sandbach Tinné & Co.

McLagan senior managed the enslaved labour forces on several plantations on the Essequibo coast during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, most of which were owned by (or financially connected to) McInroy, Sandbach & Co. Two of these plantations were the Coffee Grove and Caledonia estates. In 1820 467 enslaved persons were recorded on both estates, where a mixture of coffee, sugar and cotton were grown. The slave-produced coffee, sugar and cotton (and rum) was exported primarily to the UK, where it was distributed by the Liverpool and Glasgow partner branches of McInroy, Sandbach and Co.

McLagan senior managed Coffee Grove and Caledonia as a joint enterprise from at least 1804. By 1815 he had made sufficient income to become a co-owner of the estates and a partner (with a 5% stake) in McInroy, Sandbach & Co. He sold out of McInroy, Sandbach & Co. in 1821, when his 5% share was worth at least £12,500, but continued to own Coffee Grove & Caledonia until at least the late 1830s. In 1829 his 50% stake in these plantations (his co-owner was Samuel Sandbach) was valued at £31,200 (for more on calculating wealth in modern terms see below).

Outside of plantation management on the Essequibo coast, McLagan senior lived in the elite Kingstown district of Georgetown from at least 1814, probably at a property he owned on Water Street. A Presbyterian, in 1815 he was a founding committee member and benefactor of St Andrew’s Kirk, Georgetown. Two years later he purchased a second Georgetown property in the Cummingsburg district.

Although he did not marry until his return to the UK, McLagan senior was the father of two sons born in Demerara, John (1821-1850) and Peter junior (1823-1900). The latter served as MP for Linlithgowshire between 1865 and 1893, and a number of contemporary sources indicate he was of African or Caribbean heritage. No formal record identifying either boy’s mother has yet been discovered. However, between 1820 and 1823, McLagan senior purchased a Barbadian-born enslaved woman named Filly and her three children (Henrietta, Joe and Robert) from another domestic residence in Georgetown.

Filly and her children were enslaved at McLagan’s senior’s Water Street residence between 1820 and 1823, where they continued to live until at least August 1834. Filly, whose story I’ll explore in the next article in this series, may have been John and Peter’s mother, or possibly their wet nurse. Alternatively, the timing of her sale to McLagan senior, and the birth of his two sons, may have been a coincidence.

McLagan senior left Demerara with his two sons John and Peter in June 1825 on board the Boode. The boat, which was owned by McInroy, Sandbach & Co., was loaded with an extensive cargo of sugar, rum, cotton, coffee and ‘one pipe’ of madeira wine. McLagan senior and his children arrived in Liverpool in August 1825, following which they lived between Perth and Edinburgh. In 1827 McLagan senior married Elizabeth Hagart Steuart. The family subsequently moved to 77 Great King Street, Edinburgh. Elizabeth died in November 1833.

Over the following three decades McLagan senior played a limited role in Scottish public life. Politically he was a Conservative: he was probably the Peter McLagan who signed the Edinburgh anti-reform petition in April 1831, and in the later 1830s he offered some financial assistance to Conservative electioneering efforts. He supported the authority of the Court of Session over rights of patronage in the Scottish church in the lead up to the Disruption, and remained a member of the Kirk following the establishment of the Free Church.

By January 1836 McLagan senior had been awarded extensive ‘compensation’ under the terms of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act for formerly enslaved persons at his Water Street residence and Coffee Grove and Caledonia estates in British Guiana (formerly Demerara). On 14 December 1835 he received £189 0s. 3d. for Filly and her two surviving children (Joe and Robert), who continued to live at Water Street. On 18 January 1836 he was awarded a share (probably 50%) of £21,480 10s. 10d. for 407 formerly enslaved persons on the Coffee Grove and Caledonia plantations.

In 1842 McLagan senior purchased the Pumpherston and Calderbank estates in Linlithgowshire (modern West Lothian), which covered around 1,000 acres. Following this he referred to himself as a ‘landed proprietor’ in official documentation. That said, he continued to live primarily in Edinburgh, while entrusting the management of the estates to his son, Peter McLagan junior. McLagan senior died of a ‘disease of [the] heart’ in April 1860, aged 85, at his Great King Street residence.

An exact probate valuation for McLagan senior’s estates has not yet been discovered. However, in a subsequent interview, Peter McLagan junior claimed that his father had been ‘worth £100,000’ at his death. While this may have been a retrospective embellishment, it is in keeping with McLagan junior’s own place in Britain’s ‘Upper 10,000’ by the 1870s.

If McLagan senior had died with an estate worth around £100,000 in 1860 it would have comfortably made him one of the richest 10,000 people in the UK, and one of the 1,000 richest people in Scotland. Trying to make modern comparisons of estate values and personal wealth of historic figures is an imperfect science. However, the online historical financial tool MeasuringWorth does offer some comparative figures. It suggests that dying with an estate worth £100,000 in 1860 is equivalent to leaving assets with a ‘relative income’ value of around £128 million in 2025.

Check back for the next article in the series in early 2026. To read the first article in Martin’s series click here

This article reflects ongoing research into Peter McLagan (1865-1900). The author would like to thank Dr Alison Clark for sharing her research on McLagan senior and Sandbach Tinne & Co. and the participants of a workshop on Peter McLagan held at the National Archives in October 2025. If you would like to discuss this article and the sources used, please contact Martin at mspychal@histparl.ac.uk.

Suggested Reading

A. Clark, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Empire, 1790-1838: Scottish Traders in the Southeast Caribbean: Slavery, Cotton and the Rise of Sandbach Tinné & Co.’, PhD Univ. Edinburgh (2024)

M. Al Nasir, Searching for My Slave Roots: From Guyana’s Sugar Plantations to Cambridge (2025)

M. Al Nasir (ed.), ‘Sandbach Tinne Collection’, Cambridge Digital Library

D. Alston, Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (2021)

N. Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (2013)

C. Hall, N. Draper, K. McClelland, K. Donington & R. Lang, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (2014)

‘Peter McLagan’, Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/41631

E. A. Cameron, ‘McLagan, Peter (1822/3-1900)’, Oxford DNB (2023), www.oxforddnb.com

Scotlands People, ‘Our records: Peter McLagan (1823–1900, British Liberal Party politician and Scotland’s first black MP’ (2022)

The free seminar takes place on 3 December 2025, between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

On 3 December 2025 I will be discussing my doctoral thesis ‘Black & Political: Black Political Participation in Britain, 1750-1850’. My research re-examines the political landscape of the long eighteenth century through the lives of Black and mixed-heritage individuals active in British political culture.

Focusing on a self-built database of over 80 figures, my work combines archival research, digital methodology, and prosopography. It illuminates modes of political participation during the long eighteenth century, ranging from electoral voting and petitioning to informal political influence and community leadership.

My paper for the seminar will reflect on the methodological challenges and opportunities involved in recovering these individuals, many of whom left fragmentary archival traces. I will explore how sources such as poll books, wills, newspapers, personal correspondence and institutional records can be read together to reconstruct political agency beyond the traditional boundaries of office-holding and elite reform circles.

I will also explain how I constructed the profiles for several key individuals in my database and the methods I used to identify race and uncover instances of previously marginalised political activity.  In doing so, I will discuss how implicit markers and passing references can be used to identify race, as well as the variety of historical sources that can be used to confirm political participation.

Importantly, my case studies illustrate both the limitations and possibilities of the historical archive for demonstrating the diverse forms of political life that have been overlooked in British historiography. In doing so, my work acknowledges the entangled histories of race, empire and politics at the heart of British political history. 

HW

Helen’s seminar takes place on 3 December 2025, between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

You can read more about Helen’s work in the following History of Parliament articles:

H. Wilson, ‘Profile of an 18th century Black Voter: George John Scipio Africanus’, History of Parliament (2022)

H. Wilson, ‘The Presence of Black Voters in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, History of Parliament (2022)

H. Wilson, ‘Catherine Despard (c.1755-1815): Wife, Mother, Radical advocate’, History of Parliament (2023)

Historically, cricketing terminology, with its allusions to ‘fair play’ and playing with a ‘straight bat’, has been a mainstay of British political discourse. This was certainly the case in the Victorian era. For example, in 1864, when the Conservative opposition brought forward a motion criticising the Liberal government’s response to the Schleswig-Holstein question, Lord Elcho, who believed the motion was politically motivated, argued that the Conservatives ‘think they have been fielding long enough, and that it is now their turn to have an innings’.

The link between the cricket pitch and the Victorian House of Commons becomes even stronger when we consider MPs who, away from the debating chamber, put on their ‘whites’ and stepped up to the crease to play in first class matches. So, in the spirit of the game, what follows is a First Eleven of cricketing MPs, elected between 1832 and 1868.

To open the batting is Henry Cecil Lowther, Conservative MP for Westmorland from 1812 until his death in 1867, when he was ‘Father of the House’. Lowther, ‘a tall man with a white beard and remarkably red face’, suffered from ‘extreme diffidence in public speaking’. Throughout a career that spanned over half a century he only spoke once in the Commons.  At the crease, however, his prowess was undoubted. He made 47 appearances in first class matches for Hampshire and Surrey, and was described as ‘a good steady batsman, forward in style’.

Lowther’s fellow opener is Edward Harbottle Grimston, Conservative Member for St Albans from 1835 to 1841. Like Lowther, Grimston’s silence in the Commons contrasted with a flair for batting. Regarded as ‘one of the best style of players ever seen’, Grimston appeared in 30 first class matches as a right-hand batsman between 1832 and 1847, playing for, amongst others, Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the Gentlemen of England, and posting a highest score of 74 runs.

Not all cricketing MPs were silent and inactive in the Commons. At number 3 is John Henry Thomas Manners Sutton, Conservative MP for Cambridge, 1839-40 and 1841-47. The son of the former Speaker Charles Manners Sutton, he served in Robert Peel’s cabinet as Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. Manners Sutton played ten matches for Cambridge University and the MCC between 1832 and 1836. Meanwhile, our fourth batsman, William Deedes, spoke in the Commons over 200 times as Conservative Member for East Kent from 1845 to 1862. In a brief but busy sporting career, he played first class matches for the MCC, Kent, Hampshire and Surrey.

Conservative county MPs make up our next three cricketers. William Bagge, an ‘affable, unostentatious country gentleman’ and staunch Protectionist who sat for Norfolk West, 1837-57 and 1865-80, played for Norfolk and the MCC, while Thomas De Grey, who represented the constituency with Bagge between 1865 and 1870, appeared for the MCC and the Gentleman of England. It is not known whether De Grey’s defensive skills were called into action at the 1865 general election when he was pelted at the hustings with hare-skins! Next up is Lord George Stanhope, MP for Nottinghamshire South from 1860 to 1866. His career in the Commons was unremarkable, but he appeared in five first class matches for Nottinghamshire and the Gentlemen of the North, with a batting average of 13.50. In 1870 he helped found Derbyshire Cricket Club, becoming its first president.

At 8 and 9 we have two brothers. William Thomas Spencer Wentworth Fitzwilliam (Viscount Milton), Liberal MP for Malton, 1837-41 and 1846-47, and Wicklow, 1847-57, and his younger brother Charles William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Liberal MP for Malton, 1852-85. William, who employed a cricketing tutor, played for the United Eleven of England in a match at Dublin in 1854 and became president of the MCC in 1856, while Charles played one game for the MCC in 1849.

Finally, the Victorian Commons tail-enders comprise two MPs whose careers in the Commons and at the crease were equally perfunctory: Gervaise Tottenham Waldo Sibthorp, Conservative MP for Lincoln, 1856-6, who played four first class matches for Oxford University, and Walter Cecil Chetwynd Talbot, Conservative MP for County Waterford, 1859-65, and a noted sailor, who played one match for the MCC in 1851, scoring 9 runs.

So there we have the Victorian Commons First Eleven. Although the combined batting averages of the players is only 9.23 runs, it seems that in an age which witnessed a ‘rage for speaking’ in Commons, the majority of this team were more comfortable standing up to a bowler than standing up in the debating chamber.

The batting statistics for the MPs discussed in this article are taken from the website www.cricketarchive.com

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 10 July 2013, written by Dr James Owen. For another 19th-century cricketing MP, see https://victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/the-commons-and-cricket-charles-george-lyttelton-1842-1922/

The seminar takes place on 25 November 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

‘The Tartan rage has at length reached Paris,’ declared the World in June 1787. Demand for tartan fabric and accessories had swept British high society earlier that year, with the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser reporting in March that ‘the tartan plaid has obtained a complete triumph over every other ribband.’

Not everyone was pleased to see tartan becoming a fashion must-have: in March 1787 The Times archly commented that plaid ‘reminds us of the irritating constitutional disorder of its ancient wearers,’ a remark which highlights entrenched negative views of Scottish identity and history.

Some of this history was recent: during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, plaid had become indelibly intertwined with rebellion in many English minds. In the 1760s, tartan had developed a further negative connotation in England, being used in satirical images to identify the unpopular 3rd earl of Bute, a Scotsman who acted as Prime Minister between 1762 and 1763. In many of these prints (such as Figure 1) Bute was accused of advancing his fellow Scots at the expense of English politicians.

Despite its historic connotations in England, by the spring of 1787, every fashionable woman in London wanted to be seen with a bright plaid ribbon encircling her waist. Who was behind this Scottish fashion revolution?

Born the daughter of an impoverished baronet in Galloway, southwest Scotland, Jane Maxwell leapt up the social ladder when she wed Alexander, 4th duke of Gordon, in 1767. Having spent her teenage years rubbing shoulders with leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh, Jane’s social acumen saw her rise to become one of Georgian Britain’s foremost society hostesses, alongside her friend and rival, Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire.

Where Georgiana supported the Opposition, Jane was a supporter of the government, led by William Pitt the Younger. Nathaniel Wraxall, a writer and politician, remarked that Pitt’s government ‘did not possess a more active or determined partisan’ than the duchess of Gordon. 

Having already cultivated her reputation as a leading society hostess and patroness in Scotland, in the mid-1780s Jane began to spend more time in London, where she astonished contemporaries with her hectic social calendar. After recounting a long list of Jane’s activities on a single day, the writer Horace Walpole remarked: ‘Hercules could not have achieved a quarter of her labours in the same space of time.’ Jane also hosted many gatherings of her own and she quickly established her reputation as a leading society hostess in the capital.

Society hostesses like Jane participated in what Elaine Chalus has called ‘social politics’. Namely, ‘the management of people and social situations for political ends’. Social politics gave aristocratic women the chance to participate in a political system from which they were officially excluded. For these women, the home was an important site of political networking. Outside the halls of Parliament, balls, visits, and dinners were opportunities for political discussion and alliances to flourish. 

Jane was best known for hosting ‘routs’, gatherings which were more informal than balls, but which also tended to feature dancing, card-playing, and plenty of gossip. At these events, Jane’s guest lists comprised individuals from the highest echelons of British society, including the Prince of Wales and his brothers. One of Jane’s most extravagant events took place in February 1799, when the Courier reported that she had hosted ‘between five and six hundred personages of the highest rank and fashion’ at her home in Piccadilly.

When the trend for tartan swept London’s high society in 1787, it was evident that the duchess of Gordon was responsible. Jane continued to incorporate tartan elements in her clothing, including at Court celebrations for Queen Charlotte’s birthday in 1788, and again in 1792. At the latter event, Jane wore a tartan gown made from Spitalfields silk, setting off yet another frenzy for tartan in the capital.

Five months later, Isaac Cruikshank produced a print titled ‘A Tartan Belle of 1792’ (see Figure 2). It showed a lady (probably Jane herself) bedecked in tartan fabric. Far from a simple fashion statement, Jane’s endorsement of tartan was part of a wider campaign to popularize Scottish identity and culture.

Jane distinguished herself from rival society hostesses by placing her Scottish identity front and centre at her events. In May 1787, The Times reported that 500 guests of the first rank were invited to a ‘tartan ball and supper’ at Jane’s London residence.

At Jane’s parties, Highland dancing and music were the main entertainments, and guests were encouraged to wear ‘Highland’ dress. The trend for tartan among aristocratic women eventually spread to the men. In June 1789, the Star and Evening Advertiser reported that the Prince of Wales would ‘shortly appear in Highland dress’ at an upcoming ball. 

Jane’s persistent assertions of her Scottish identity through fashion had provoked criticism in some quarters, yet her advocacy for Scottish dance was viewed in a more positive light. In October 1808 La Belle Assemblée or Court and Fashionable Magazine praised Jane for making Highland dancing popular at high society events, because it discouraged people from gambling in high-stakes card games.

The popularity of Scottish dance was undeniable and many other society hostesses began to integrate reels and strathspeys into their events. Scottish dancing even received the royal seal of approval. In 1799, Jane’s two eldest children were asked to perform in front of the king and queen at a fête at Oatlands Palace.

By blending her Scottish identity with her role as a society hostess, Jane helped to shift preconceived notions of Scottishness in Georgian England. Once viewed as symbols of rebellion, markers of Scottish identity like tartan and Highland dancing became fashionable in London’s high society thanks to the influence of the duchess of Gordon.

NG

Natalee’s seminar takes place on 25 November 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Further reading:

E. Chalus, ‘Elite Women, Social Politics, and the Political World of Late Eighteenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal 43:3 (Sep. 2000), 669-697

W. S. Lewis (ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols (1937-83)

H. Wheatley (ed.), The Historical and the Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, 5 vols (1884)

The seminar takes place on 11 November 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

In 1881 the House of Lords select committee on the law relating to the protection of young girls recommended the passage of a criminal law amendment bill. The bill proposed raising the age of consent from 13, increasing the power of the police over brothels and criminalising acts of what it called ‘gross indecency’ between men. Despite passing repeatedly through the Lords, the legislation twice failed to pass through the House of Commons in the face of parliamentary inertia.

A campaign to win popular support for raising the age of consent as a means of combating juvenile prostitution had been promoted by the social purity movement from the 1870s. The movement advocated for a single standard of morality between men and women. Its members included Alfred Dyer, who highlighted the traffic of English women to European brothels, and Ellice Hopkins who founded both the Church of England Purity Society and the working-class White Cross Army. Dyer’s journal The Sentinel was the official organ of the social purity movement, which had grown out of the success of the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, led by Josephine Butler. Butler had set up the first purity association, the Social Purity Alliance, in 1873.

The Contagious Diseases Acts (the first of which passed in 1864) covered certain areas of the UK around military bases and gave the police powers to compel women suspected of being sex workers to be medically inspected for venereal disease and detained until they were cured. These acts were designed to control the spread of venereal disease within the armed forces but there was no equivalent compulsory examination or detention for men. The ultimately successful campaign for their repeal mobilised middle class women and gave them an unprecedented political voice.

The criminal law amendment bill failed to pass the House of Commons in 1883 and 1884, due primarily to extraordinary pressures on Gladstone’s Liberal government. These included the third reform bill, the Mahdist uprising and the very real prospect of war with Russia in 1885. The bill was also held up, in part, by conflict within the social purity movement, some of whom wanted to focus parliamentary time on the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts after they were suspended in 1883. One source of planned pressure on Parliament to pass the bill surrounded the revelatory trial of the high-class brothel keeper, Mary Jeffries, in May 1885. However, her unexpected guilty plea prevented the giving of evidence and the plan collapsed.

The next attempt to force the bill through Parliament was a series of sensational articles in the Pall Mall Gazette. This series, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, was written by the Gazette’s editor, W. T. Stead, over the course of a week in July 1885. The articles highlighted the issue of juvenile and coercive prostitution. They were the result of an investigation by a ‘secret commission’ headed by Stead and including members of the Salvation Army. He described the revelations in these articles as ‘abominable, unutterable, and worse than fables’.

Stead’s articles made repeated reference to Parliament and sometimes directly addressed Lord Salisbury’s new Conservative government, which had taken office a month earlier. The articles had to make a careful and considered appeal to legislators to achieve a change in the law, while also rousing public opinion about the ‘protection of women and girls’.

While the earlier failures of the bill to pass the Commons were mainly due to pressure on parliamentary time, during 1885 the likely success of the bill was bolstered by allegations that some MPs would be personally embarrassed by revelations in Stead’s articles in the Pall Mall Gazette. Josephine Butler commented that ‘there are guilty men on the Treasury bench who now begin to be most uneasy’.

Some MPs actively supported the bill. They were all Liberals and mainly Nonconformists in religion. These included Samuel Morley, Henry Broadhurst, Samuel Smith, James Stuart and James Stansfeld, who was a veteran of the Contagious Diseases Acts campaign. Two MPs, Morley and Richard Reid, sat on a committee of inquiry which verified the truth of W. T. Stead’s articles, alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Catholic Cardinal Manning.

The Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed by Parliament in August 1885.  The new Act raised the age of consent to 16, increased the power of the police over brothels and criminalised acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men. Clauses relating to the latter, which criminalised sexual activity between men, were added to the bill by the Liberal MP Henry Labouchere.

Following the Act, the social purity movement coalesced itself into the National Vigilance Association to ensure the legislation was effectively enforced. Their campaigns and subsequent police prosecutions would focus primarily on the anti-brothel legislation, rather than the age of consent clauses. The impact of the Criminal Law Amendment Act’s criminalisation of male homosexuality would continue to be felt until its partial repeal by the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.

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To find out more, Steven’s seminar takes place on 11 November 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

In the chamber used by the House of Commons before the catastrophic fire of October 1834, women – officially barred from the chamber itself since February 1778 – had been able to listen to debates through the ‘ventilator’ in the attic above St Stephen’s Chapel. In this cramped and uncomfortable space, a small number of women could look down into the chamber and listen to debates. An account in 1832 described

a circular shed of sixteen sides or panels … a small oblong square aperture in every panel serves to admit the heads of sixteen anxious females who creep, unseen and unheard, to see and hear. … Green baize benches surround the shed, and afford repose to the wearied forms of dowagers and damsels.

After the fire, many of the old chamber’s features were reproduced when MPs moved into their temporary home in the former House of Lords at the beginning of 1835. It was obvious, though, that the unusual means by which women had accessed debates would not be directly replicated in the temporary Commons, and initially, no provision was made for female spectators. However, MPs realised that their temporary relocation offered an opportunity for experimenting with new features, which resulted in changes such as a dedicated reporters’ gallery and the construction of a second division lobby.

In keeping with this, on 16 July 1835, George Grantley Berkeley, Whig MP for Gloucestershire West, successfully moved for a select committee to consider adapting part of the strangers’ gallery in the temporary Commons for the use of ladies and making similar provision in the new House of Commons. He dismissed the ‘erroneous opinion’ that there was ‘too great interference of ladies already in the political world’ and asked whether anyone would ‘assert that the female portion of the population does not contain a vast share of the better intellect of the country’. He noted women’s access to debates in the pre-fire Commons and urged that they be given ‘a less lofty but more comfortable accommodation’ in the temporary chamber. He also suggested that it would be beneficial if, as some predicted, women’s presence prompted ‘the language of the House’ to ‘assume a softer, a more poetical, and a more civil style’.

The committee’s report less than two weeks later recommended that not more than a quarter of the strangers’ gallery should be partitioned off before the start of the next session to accommodate 24 ladies. It also stipulated that future provision should be made for 40 ladies in the new House of Commons. Berkeley’s motion in early August 1835 that the Commons agree to the committee’s report was narrowly rejected, by 83 votes to 86. Undaunted, in May 1836 he moved that the plan for a ladies’ gallery drawn up by the architect Sir Robert Smirke should be carried out ‘as speedily as possible … at such hours as may not interfere with the business of the House’. MPs who supported Berkeley’s motion dismissed concerns that there was anything ‘improper’ about ladies listening to Commons debates. The Radical MP for Wigan, Richard Potter, noted that

during the Session of 1833 and 1834, he had repeatedly observed hon. Members take their wives and daughters into the ventilator, particularly when subjects of importance were under discussion, and he felt convinced they would not have done so had they supposed the least injurious consequences to have followed.

Among these wives and daughters was Harriet Grote, wife of the MP for London, who recorded that ‘one hears very well, but seeing is difficult, being distant from the members, and the apertures in the ventilator being small and grated’.

Less convinced about the need to provide for the ladies was the Wolverhampton MP Charles Villiers, who questioned whether there was any demand for it, as he was unaware of any petitions on the subject. He also queried how the limited number of places would be allocated. Berkeley’s motion passed by 132 votes to 90, but further progress was scuppered when the Commons voted in August 1836 against granting £400 to fund the work. Although only 70 MPs were present, 42 of whom opposed the grant, this occasion saw the fullest debate on the matter. Members of the Melbourne ministry spoke on either side of the question, with the future prime minister Viscount Palmerston among those backing Berkeley, on the grounds that ‘the ladies … took very considerable interest’ in Commons proceedings.

His ministerial colleague Sir John Hobhouse was among the opponents of a ladies’ gallery, considering it ‘a very bad joke’. Not only might ‘the peace and comfort of men’s homes’ be disturbed by women wishing to discuss the issues debated in the Commons, but women’s presence in the House would be ‘most indecent’, as ‘in the course of a debate it was impossible to prevent allusions from being made which no man could wish his mother, sister, wife, or daughter to hear’.

Such objections were ridiculed by the Sheffield MP James Silk Buckingham, for whom they confirmed the oft-repeated accusation that the Commons ‘was at least half a century behind the rest of the community’. He protested that after hearing Hobhouse’s speech,

one would think, first, that the women of England were at present wholly ignorant, and wholly indifferent to, the public affairs of their country; and next, that by the simple act of admitting some twenty or thirty ladies, chiefly, perhaps, the relatives of Members of that House, occasionally to hear the debates – the whole of the females would be converted into mere politicians – would cease to become good wives and good mothers – and be so many firebrands casting nothing but discord into every circle of society.

Berkeley tried a different approach the following year, moving for an address asking the king to give directions to carry out the select committee’s recommendations. His motion was seconded by William Chetwynd, who rebuffed the idea that ‘the presence of the ladies would lengthen the debate, and induce Members to enlarge on subjects, and cause considerable delay’, arguing that ‘hon. Members would be less likely to talk nonsense in the presence of ladies’. However, they were defeated by 92 votes to 116.

No further debates on the ladies’ gallery have been traced in Hansard, but there were evidently behind the scenes negotiations to enable its construction, and in March 1842, Berkeley was rewarded for his perseverance in securing their gallery with the presentation ‘by ladies’ of a piece of silver. The gallery appears to have been built during the parliamentary recess of October 1841 to February 1842. In late February 1842, the Court Journal recorded the ‘little known’ fact that ‘a small enclosure behind the strangers’ gallery has been erected … for the accommodation of political ladies desirous of hearing the debates’. Rather than the 24 spaces for women recommended by the 1835 committee, it had ‘not room for more than 12 or 13 of the fairer sex’, who could ‘peep totally unobserved’ through ‘a space about the breadth of a hand’. Access was controlled by written ‘orders’ signed by the serjeant-at-arms. After a seven year absence, women again had a space from which they could witness the proceedings of the Commons.

Among this gallery’s earliest occupants were the wives of one future Conservative prime minister and three future Liberal prime ministers: Lady Stanley (later Countess of Derby), Catherine Gladstone, Viscountess Palmerston and Lady Frances Russell. They attended to hear the debate on the corn laws on 14 February 1842, in which Lord John Russell and William Gladstone spoke. Catherine’s account suggested that conditions were as confined and awkward as those in the ventilator had been, recording that ‘I found myself nearly upon Lady John Russell’s lap!!’ Frances Russell told her that her heart was beating in anticipation of Russell’s speech, and ‘she was all attention’ when Russell began. The ladies’ gallery does, however, appear to have had satisfactory acoustics, as Catherine recorded that when Gladstone spoke, ‘we heard him very well – he was very rapid – without the smallest hesitation throughout’.

A later visitor to the ladies’ gallery in the temporary chamber was Charlotte Brontë, whose publisher George Smith took her there in June 1850. He recollected in his autobiography that ‘the Ladies’ Gallery of those days was behind the Strangers’ Gallery, and from it one could see the eyes of the ladies above, nothing more’. Brontë evidently found her visit to the Commons interesting, as when Smith went to find her, thinking she had indicated that she wanted to leave, she told him that ‘I made no signal. I did not wish to come away’.

Just as they had been in the ventilator, women were permitted to access debates, but kept out of sight of Members of Parliament. The grudging and uncomfortable way in which they were accommodated was encapsulated by the Birmingham Journal’s description of the ladies’ gallery of the temporary chamber as ‘the sweltering little stewpan assigned females by the gallantry of the British House of Commons’, not what Berkeley had anticipated when he lobbied for their inclusion. The nickname given to the ladies’ gallery in the new House of Commons – ‘the cage’ – showed that matters improved little after 1852.

Further reading

Sarah Richardson, ‘Parliament as Viewed Through a Woman’s Eyes: Gender and Space in the 19th-Century Commons’, Parliamentary History 38:1 (2019), 119-34

Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (2013)

I am very grateful to Dr Mari Takayanagi for drawing to my attention the subtle differences between Catherine Gladstone’s account of her visit to the Ladies’ Gallery as published in Mary Drew, Catherine Gladstone (1919) and her original entry in her diary, held at Gladstone’s Library, GLA/GGA/4/9/1/10, and have revised this article thanks to her help.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 8 March 2024, written by Dr Kathryn Rix.