“We sometimes hear a man boast of being a Londoner, but without any knowledge of what London is or what it means” (153). So spoke Joseph Chamberlain in 1894 on the floor of the House of Commons. His reflection reminds us that, given its size and influence, metropolitan history is less understood than it deserves. Nowhere is this truer than in the part played by the late Victorian London electorate in reconfiguring the political landscape of modern Britain.
The work of James Cornford (his influential 1963 Victorian Studies essay, “The Transformation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century” is now nearly half a century old) led historians to believe that, beginning in the 1880s as part of a class-based realignment of British politics, villadom assisted the Conservatives in becoming the party of a socially and politically conformist suburban middle class. This happened presumably because the Redistribution Act of 1885 crafted naturally safe suburban seats: the suburbs were now Conservative, and Conservatives were henceforth the party of the suburbs. Alex Windscheffel's purpose in Popular Conservatism in Imperial London is to challenge this thesis as too reductionist, too dependent on class-based paradigms, and too attuned to sources that supported this understanding while ignoring a body of evidence to the contrary—particularly regarding working-class Conservatives. Thus, the author puts a stake in ground early on: “The chronological and conceptual frameworks of these historiographical orthodoxies are inadequate in explaining the late-Victorian Conservative revival” (12). London's suburbs, it turns out, were not uniform but heterogeneous, while working-class tories were not deviants or class traitors but had a different worldview than their mates—a more robust understanding than Marx's “dangerous classes.” Windscheffel's alternative narrative is built upon these two particulars: thus he sets out to discover not the transformation of Conservatism but Conservative transformation. How the tories faced the threat of the coming of democracy it turns out was based less on class appeals than the popularity of cross-class ideology, effective modes of communication, and hard organizational work.
Shut out in 1865, almost nowhere in the late Victorian and Edwardian metropolis were tories unable to make an effective appeal: between 1885 and 1900 in only four of fifty-nine London constituencies did the Conservatives never win on at least one occasion, from posh Westminster in the West End to proletarian Bethnal Green in the east. This achievement resulted from the creation of a political platform embodying pro-London interests: it was, of course, a Conservative government that had sired the London County Council (LCC; it could be argued that, by pushing Home Rule for London, the Conservatives won the capital for their party while losing Ireland for their country). The LCC then became a training ground for the party's London parliamentary candidates. Popular Conservatism in Imperial London is effective because it also addresses the failure of the Liberals to maintain their hegemony, even while pointing out the durability of suburban Liberalism alongside the rise of villa toryism. With the tone set by LCC Progressives, London Liberalism moved leftward following their debacle in 1886, a development that helps to explain why Labour had so few successes in London—a story told from the other side in Paul Thompson's Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London, 1885–1914 (1967).
Windscheffel makes it clear that there was more than one London Conservatism: tories remained divided between progressive stances (e.g., votes for women or Home Rule for London) and retrograde thinking (e.g., anti-Semitism or defense of plural voting, following George Goschen's maxim that the community rather than the individual was the historic unit of representation). So, it was not simply the tory platform, as important as that was. Where Popular Conservatism in Imperial London breaks new ground is in its study of forms and content—and agency—in shaping an understanding of working-class tories as being as much actors as acted upon and that political identity is contingent on, not predetermined by, social and economic circumstances. Windscheffel stresses that London Conservatives could never take the metropolitan seats for granted. The book's two chapters on Conservative Party machinery reveal the limitations of external management: in the face of local autonomy, political control was rarely unconditional. It is part of the book's thesis that London politics was fluid rather than predictable in large part because the metropolis was a mosaic of locales. Thus it was that tory clubs enhanced the appeal of Conservatism by emphasizing popular leisure activities rather than operating as schoolrooms where workers were taught to accept new political values.
For both workers and middle-class voters, imperialism was an effective agent for London's tories, including, famously, Henry Morton Stanley in Lambeth North but, provocatively, Sir Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownnaggree in the prime London working-class seat, Bethnal Green North East, where in 1895 he ousted the veteran radical George Howell. Windscheffel makes particularly good use of the local press, a vital resource for this kind of study. He uses such sources to challenge the reading of the 1900 “khaki” election in Richard Price's An Imperial War and the British Working Class (1972) as that apathy and social reform, not war and empire, were key issues for workers. Rather, at least in the capital, Windscheffel argues that 1900 was a test case of how critical imperial identity was to the Conservative Party. “The empire is in danger” theme resulted in the Conservatives winning 90 percent of the London seats in 1900. Yet, the local could always be played off against the global, as when in 1906 a Liberal candidate in Paddington North succeeded in charging the Conservative government with neglecting Paddington so as to squander millions on Somaliland.
The larger story in Popular Conservatism in Imperial London is the rise and fall of class as the explanatory variable for political behavior: the new political history as practiced by, among others, Miles Taylor and Jon Lawrence, to whom we can add Alex Windscheffel, de-emphasizes electoral sociology in favor of political parties’ adaptability—especially evident among Conservatives—and the role of ideas combined with the popular politics of place. But it is also to understand what Sidney Webb did, that London was “a whole kingdom in itself ” (quoted on 34).
