A common though neglected feature of democratization across the late Victorian and Edwardian British world was the shift toward single-member constituencies for elections to national parliaments: Canada in 1867, New Zealand in 1881, the United Kingdom in 1885, Australia in 1902, and South Africa in 1910.Footnote ¹ The British world was following—only too dangerously in the view of some—in the footsteps of the United States, where Congress had decreed as early as 1842 that all elections to the House of Representatives were to be based on single-member districts.Footnote ² In the United Kingdom it was the Redistribution Act of 1885, part of the legislation known as the “Third Reform Act,” that transformed the electoral system into one that was predominantly based on roughly equal-size, single-member seats.

Two assumptions have guided historians in their interpretations of the Redistribution Act of 1885. The first is that the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury pushed for single-member constituencies to maximize the electoral value of what he had referred to acidly in 1882 as “Villa Toryism.”Footnote ³ A number of historians have interpreted this appellation as evidence of Salisbury’s astute recognition of the growing Conservative sentiments of the suburban middle class.Footnote ⁴ The second assumption is that the transition to a single-member regime represented a significant concession to the modern democratic principle that Parliament should represent individuals equally and not, as was traditionally the case, as part of “communities of interests” in which the electoral weight of an individual vote was largely determined by geography.Footnote ⁵ To take one example, on the eve of the Third Reform Act, the Leeds Liberal James Kitson complained that his own borough elected only three MPs despite having as many electors as had sixty-three small boroughs, each of which elected one MP (in some cases two).Footnote ⁶ Through a reexamination of the Redistribution Act of 1885, this article challenges both of these assumptions. Although there was a growing belief among some radicals and party activists that parliamentary representation ought to take more account of the size and incidence of population, the political elite who crafted the Redistribution Bill and the majority of parliamentary opinion still believed that Parliament should represent communities of interests. There was no marked shift in 1885 from the “organic” to the “mathematic” as the basis of the representative system.Footnote ⁷

There was more at stake in 1884–85 than merely the future shape of the electoral map of the United Kingdom. For the very act of drawing boundaries around people raised questions about shapes in society, and how these were to be translated into shapes on the ground, as David Cannadine put it in a different context.Footnote ⁸ Electoral reform is controversial in itself, but what made it doubly so in the context of the 1880s was the pervasive anxiety in elite circles over the erosion of communal bonds in the face of relentless individualization, the decay of traditional values, the rise of class-based divisions, the resurgence of Celtic nationalism at home, and the emergence of colonial nationalism abroad. These developments made for a nervous political elite who were conscious not only of how particular constituency configurations, like all institutional arrangements, had the power to create certain characteristics in the citizenry and their representatives but also of the way that certain shapes could just as easily accelerate communal atrophy as they could stem it.Footnote ⁹ These debates can thus be read as part of a broader intellectual discussion that took place throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian period over the nature and sustainability of communities.Footnote ¹⁰

The article begins by locating the Third Reform Act within the context of an evolving tradition of parliamentary reform, showing how the electoral system between 1832 and 1884 continued to be shaped by undemocratic assumptions about the nature of political representation, assumptions that the Redistribution Act of 1885 did little to overturn.Footnote ¹¹ As the article goes on to show, the problem in 1884–85 was not primarily that politicians had become divided over the question of whether Parliament should represent communities or individuals; rather, the principal line of division was over how best to secure the continued representation of interests. The architects of redistribution had two choices. The first was to preserve the existing system of multimember constituencies and to couple this with an alternative voting system that would secure representation for the varied interests which comprised the national political community.Footnote ¹² Simply to preserve multimember seats without changing the existing first-past-the-post voting system was deemed unacceptable, as it was widely feared that, with the impending extension of the franchise, established propertied interests would be swamped by the masses. Various alternatives presented themselves that fell broadly under the heading of proportional representation and minority representation. The second choice was to retain the first-past-the-post electoral system and to divide multimember constituencies into single-member divisions. It was this second choice for which the architects of redistribution eventually opted for the simple reason that it was the only option on which they could agree. Tories, Whigs, and moderate Liberals (those Liberals in and out of Parliament who shared the Whig aversion to democracy) came to accept single-member constituencies as a less-than-satisfactory solution to the problem of staving off the Tocquevillian nightmare of democratic tyranny and mediocrity. This article thus lends further weight to those revisionist interpretations of modern Britain that view democratization as a gradual and uneven development, a development almost always resisted, and when finally conceded, carefully controlled by the elite to ensure that as much as possible of the old regime was salvaged.Footnote ¹³

In emphasizing the continued commitment of many politicians to communal forms of representation down to the late Victorian period, this article seeks to recover the ideological and intellectual context of the debates on parliamentary reform, a context that has been neglected in previous accounts.Footnote ¹⁴ In doing so, it seeks to build on a growing body of revisionist work that has shown that late Victorian Liberals no less than Tories found themselves “thinking in communities.”Footnote ¹⁵ In recovering the ideological dimensions of reform, the article takes a different view from that of Andrew Jones’s monograph on the elite maneuvering behind the Third Reform Bill, which focused on “personality, personal attraction and personal repulsion … political infighting … duplicity … or frustrated ambition” as key determinants of political decision making.Footnote ¹⁶ It also takes a different view from that of W. A. Hayes’s monograph on the Third Reform Act, which tends to overemphasize the role of “partisan interest and advantage” in the making of the Redistribution Bill.Footnote ¹⁷ To view redistribution in these terms is to seal off the architects of the legislation from the charged debates then taking place on the nature of political representation and its relationship to an increasingly fissured society.

By the late eighteenth century it was widely accepted that Parliament did not represent individuals but communities of interests.Footnote ¹⁸ John Garrard has defined these as “identifiable, geographically-defined gatherings of residential people, normally with a simply definable economic interest, clear and legitimized hierarchies, and natural leaders.”Footnote ¹⁹ The handmaiden to the representation of communities was the constitutional idea of “virtual representation.” According to this notion, those without the vote, including family members, were represented by those who had it. Radical reformers, however, increasingly complained that virtual representation simply did not work, as the views and interests of the many simply went unrepresented. Reformers demanded that the electoral system be purged of indefensible anomalies like the legendary “rotten boroughs,” the worst of which had only a handful of electors. The result was the Whig Reform Act of 1832.

In fact, this purging effect was a common feature of both the 1832 and 1867 reform acts. For all the electric atmosphere surrounding the passing of these great reform bills, and in spite of fulminating reactionaries who deplored what appeared to be a gargantuan concession to “numbers” (1832 increased the size of the electorate by 49 percent, 1867 by 89 percent), the effects were merely to remove the most egregious anomalies from the electoral system. One of the principal objectives of those who crafted the reform bills was to make Parliament more attuned to the genuine interests of property, wealth, intelligence, and industry—interests that sprang from organic communities.Footnote ²⁰ Decayed boroughs, by contrast, with scanty electorates and no discernible interests, were artificial communities unworthy of separate representation. As for the redistribution clauses of the reform acts, the transference of seats from the most rotten boroughs to industrializing towns was a concession, not to the idea that “numbers” should inform parliamentary representation but rather to emergent communities of manufacturing and commercial interests.Footnote ²¹ With the exception of some radicals, there were few politicians who believed that parliamentary representation should be based primarily, or even predominantly, on the size and distribution of population, hence the aversion to equal electoral districts.Footnote ²² The Conservative authors of the 1867 Reform Act would not have recognized that the “logic” of their actions was to “displace the representation of interests from the definition of parliamentary reform” any more than would have their predecessors in 1832.Footnote ²³ Redistribution was conceived as a means to mitigate the democratic effects of enfranchisement by ensuring that established interests were not swamped by those who were about to be enfranchised.Footnote ²⁴ This was achieved by giving more seats to the counties, axing only the most putrid of the small boroughs, and in the case of the Tories by ensuring that urban and rural interests were kept strictly separate.Footnote ²⁵

Communal understandings of representation were not just confined to the realms of high politics. They also informed views about voting and electoral culture. The vote was a privilege bestowed on independent men (in practice, male heads of households), who would, at least in theory, exercise the franchise disinterestedly on behalf of their family and the wider community.Footnote ²⁶ This was one of the reasons why many politicians, including some popular radicals like the great Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor, were opposed to the secret ballot.Footnote ²⁷ As the vote was held in trust on behalf of the wider community, it was only right and proper that votes were cast in public, especially in the context of limited enfranchisement. A vote cast in secret would be a vote cast for self-interest. Under the protective cloak of the ballot, electors would only pay lip service, if at all, to the interests of the res publica.Footnote ²⁸ It was only when politicians became increasingly sensitive to corrupt practices and electoral disorder in the aftermath of the 1867 Reform Act that the ballot was reluctantly conceded in 1872 (and initially on a trial basis).

It has often been argued that the Ballot Act was a legislative landmark enshrining the liberal democratic belief that the vote was an individual right to be exercised according to one’s own conscience.Footnote ²⁹ Such a view, however, needs qualifying in at least four respects. First, opponents of the ballot were doing electors a disservice in presuming that they would no longer vote disinterestedly, given that there was such a highly developed and engrained understanding of the vote as a public trust.Footnote ³⁰ Second, as with the reform acts, it was hoped the secret ballot would make Parliament more attuned to genuine, organic interests by purging the system of illegitimate interests, begot in this instance by electoral malpractice.Footnote ³¹ Third, one should not exaggerate the watershed effect of the Ballot Act, as voting before 1872 was not as open as is sometimes presumed. True, voting in the first instance was done by a show of hands in the open air. Yet candidates invariably demanded a formal poll where votes were cast, not in the open, but in enclosed polling booths, which after 1832 were placed at strategic locations throughout the constituency (although unlike modern polling booths, those before 1872 were larger and housed election officials whose job was to record the notes of individual electors).Footnote ³² The votes of individuals were then published in a poll book, theoretically available to anyone who wished to scrutinize its contents—theoretically because we do not know how often voters’ preferences were inspected, radical hyperbole notwithstanding. What we do know is largely confined to those extreme cases where the application of the “screw” had been so blatant that it had come to the attention of the press.Footnote ³³ Neither was voting as closed after 1872 as one might think—at least that was the perception among many of the new electors. This was a perception reinforced by the method used to count votes, especially in the counties where ballot boxes from each village were counted separately so that it was possible for the eagle-eyed to observe the number of votes cast (often very small) for each candidate.Footnote ³⁴ The National Liberal Federation (NLF) went to great lengths during the 1885 general election (issuing pamphlets and holding mock elections) to convince the newly enfranchised agricultural laborers, many of whom were understandably suspicious, that the ballot was secret.Footnote ³⁵ Fourth, while the nomination hustings and open voting were formally abolished in 1872, candidates continued to hold meetings in the open air, with some still demanding a show of hands at hustings-style meetings, while electors could still find themselves intimidated by drunken mobs, interrogated by hired thugs, or, more commonly, quizzed by enquiring party agents.Footnote ³⁶

The franchise and electoral politics, then, did not cease to be about the representation of community after 1872, even if with the benefit of hindsight one can see that the trend was beginning to shift toward the individual. What this alerts us to is the persistence of a neoclassical republican understanding of citizenship. This was a model of citizenship built around civic virtue, the interdependence of rights and duties and, preeminently, independence: as we have seen, it was widely believed that only independent men were capable of exercising the franchise responsibly. Conventional accounts of democratization argue that this republican model of citizenship had been displaced by the mid-nineteenth century and replaced by a liberal model that prioritized individual rights and negative liberties over civic duty. According to John Garrard, it was this shift that was responsible for the gradual acceptance of the idea that the franchise was not a trust or privilege but an individual right.Footnote ³⁷ There is, however, a growing body of research to suggest that republican values were not displaced by liberal individualism; rather, they were fused together.Footnote ³⁸ This fusion was registered in the debates on franchise extension. Independence did not cease to be the central criterion for enfranchisement in the nineteenth century. Rather, under the democratizing impact of the “Age of Revolutions,” independence began to be thought of by politicians and the public in more inclusive ways: the ability to support one’s household, property in one’s labor, and the possession of basic manly qualities such as sincerity and self-assertion became the criteria for political participation.Footnote ³⁹ The further extension of the franchise in 1867 (and in 1884 for that matter) did not represent a tacit recognition that individuals were politically equal or even that the vote was an individual right. Indeed, it was the increasing willingness of popular radicals to subscribe publicly to these republican understandings of citizenship that convinced Gladstone and other like-minded Liberals that some working men were worthy of the franchise.Footnote ⁴⁰

Such was the state of the electoral system on the eve of the Third Reform Bill. That another extension of the franchise was thought to be necessary so soon after the previous one is to be explained by the growing perception among reformers that 1867 had actually rendered the system more anomalous.Footnote ⁴¹ The result in some places was that men on one side of a street qualified for the franchise, while those on the other did not—despite being identical in every other respect to their neighbors. Allied to the dissatisfaction arising out of this arbitrariness was the belief that 1867 had unjustly excluded groups of urban men (notably coal miners) who found themselves in county constituencies where the bar for the franchise qualification was set much higher than in the boroughs.Footnote ⁴² Soon the perception of unjust exclusion was extended to the agricultural laborer, or “Hodge,” as he was jocularly termed. By the time of the 1880 general election the Liberal party, partly from a desire to redress these injustices and partly from the belief that it would be the main electoral beneficiary from the enfranchisement of the miners and possibly even the agricultural laborers,Footnote ⁴³ had pledged itself to what was tellingly described as an “equalization” or “assimilation” of the suffrage in the boroughs and counties (essentially by importing the household and lodger franchises—introduced in the boroughs in 1867—to the counties).

Controversially, it was not just British “Hodge” who was to be enfranchised, but his Irish cousin too. Gladstone had secured approval, in the face of much opposition from the Whig leader Lord Hartington, for the idea of introducing a uniform franchise qualification across the United Kingdom. This overturned the precedent of 1832 and 1867, when separate bills had been passed—one for England and Wales, one for Scotland, and one for Ireland—mainly for the purposes of ensuring that the franchise qualification was far more restrictive in the “Celtic Fringes.” Against the background of growing discontent in Ireland, as manifest in the “land wars” and whipped up so effectively by Parnell, Gladstone maintained that “to refuse equality to Ireland would be a blow to the Union and to the Empire.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Gladstone thus conceived of parliamentary reform as a measure to bind Britain and Ireland closer together, much as he would Irish Home Rule.

The effect of any equalization would be to admit a considerable number of men to the franchise, and so it was thought necessary to accompany franchise extension with seat redistribution. For the political elite, the exigencies of redistribution had little to do with any burning desire to rid the system of anomalies per se. To minds that were unaccustomed to thinking about political representation arithmetically, it mattered little that one-quarter of the electorate was represented by two-thirds of the MPs.Footnote ⁴⁵ In such minds redistribution had rather more to do with assuaging fears of what the democratic consequences of franchise extension might be without the restraint of judicious redistribution. Lord Salisbury’s insistence that the two be coupled was, in his own words, “dictated by the strongest instincts of self-preservation.”Footnote ⁴⁶ A similar concern was raised by Lord Hartington, who was particularly fearful of the electoral consequences of franchise extension without redistribution in Ireland.Footnote ⁴⁷ The prospect of such a large extension of the franchise raised the barbed issue of how best to secure the continued representation of minority interests by protecting them from the coercive power of the majority. In social terms, minority representation was seen as a mechanism for protecting the educated and propertied classes from the rising power of the masses, lest Britain became in the words of Lord Salisbury “a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like.”Footnote ⁴⁸ There was, of course, much truth in this, but minority representation was also conceived more broadly than this. Those groups in need of protection were variously defined by one commentator as “Urban Toryism, rural Radicalism, English Catholicism, Irish loyalty, Scotch Conservatism, Dissenting Orthodoxy, [and] High Church hostility to Establishment.”Footnote ⁴⁹

If the political elite remained wedded to the representation of interests there was a growing number of political activists in both parties who were coming round to the idea that population should form the basis of parliamentary representation “such as would give, as nearly as possible, an equal value to every vote” in the words of a resolution passed at the 1883 NLF conference.Footnote ⁵⁰ On the other side of the political divide, although far less numerous and vocal than their Liberal counterparts, there were urban Tories like Arthur Forwood of Liverpool who believed that their party could do well out of equal electoral districts.Footnote ⁵¹ For these Liberal and Conservative activists, the impetus was largely organizational. But few beyond the ultraradical fringe, as represented by organs like Reynolds’s News and bodies such as the Democratic Federation, went in for full-scale “arithmocracy,” as equal electoral districts were termed.Footnote ⁵² Forwood looked on them favorably not out of any Tory-Democratic commitment to the rule of numbers but because they offered a more effective means of delineating interests by separating urban from rural in the counties and middle class from working class in the large boroughs.Footnote ⁵³ Within the NLF there were voices who viewed the demand for equal electoral districts as unrealistic and even undesirable. The secretary of the NLF, Francis Schnadhorst, took the view that electoral districts would necessitate “too many changes … uproot … too many traditions” and “cross … too many interests.” Tellingly, Schnadhorst went on to state that a way would have to be found that gave “due weight to numbers without undue disturbance of existing conditions or an entire disregard of historic and traditional claims and associations.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Even organized Liberalism, it seemed, felt unable to jettison the notion that Parliament represented communities of interest. What lay behind the resolution at the 1883 NLF conference was not so much an abstract commitment to pure electoral districts but more of the long-standing grievance harbored by Liberals in the northern towns that the main cause of their underrepresentation in Parliament was the overrepresentation of the south of England.Footnote ⁵⁵

Initially, Gladstone had wanted to settle franchise extension in the parliamentary session of 1884 and hold over the more thorny issue of seat redistribution, to be left for others to deal with (he was once again hinting strongly at retirement), much to the consternation of Hartington. Only with the greatest reluctance had Hartington conceded to this, and on the promise that Gladstone would see through redistribution in the following session. The Tories were far less willing to place any trust in Gladstone’s assurances that, if the Franchise Bill were allowed to pass, redistribution would be dealt with in the next session. Partly from a fear that an extension of the franchise without redistribution would annihilate them if the Liberals decided to hold a general election on the old constituencies, and partly from a desire to frustrate the workings of the Liberal government, the Conservatives used the House of Lords to block franchise extension until the government finally agreed on 17 November 1884 to make redistribution the subject of friendly negotiations. And so the details of redistribution were hammered out in a series of bipartisan meetings held in the last week of November 1884. The meetings were held in secret and comprised a very select group: Gladstone, Hartington, and the radical Sir Charles Dilke for the Liberals, and Lord Salisbury and Sir Stafford Northcote for the Tories as joint leaders of their party. As historians have long recognized, however, the “real negotiation was a battle of wits and expertise between Dilke and Salisbury.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The Redistribution Bill was introduced into the House of Commons on 1 December 1884, and, once this bill had passed its second reading a mere three days later, the House of Lords passed the Franchise Bill. The resulting Franchise Act gave the vote to some 1.7 million men. While the percentage increase in the size of the electorate was not as great as it had been in 1867 (72 percent compared with 89 percent), the Third Reform Act admitted more men to the franchise than the acts of 1832 and 1867 combined.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, this should not disguise the overall conservative character of the act. As was the case in 1832 and 1867, ancient franchises were left intact, and despite the rhetoric of equalization and assimilation no attempt was made to codify franchise law that would henceforth be more complex than ever.Footnote ⁵⁸ At first glance, the Redistribution Act appeared far more radical and sweeping than the franchise provisions. The electoral map of the United Kingdom was substantially redrawn by subdividing all counties into single-member constituencies. Boroughs with fewer than 15,000 people were disfranchised, and with the exception of twenty-four medium-size boroughs and the university constituencies of Cambridge, Dublin, and Oxford, which were to continue electing two MPs, those remaining—large boroughs and counties—were to elect a single MP.Footnote ⁵⁹ After the Second Reform Act there existed 190 single-member seats in the United Kingdom; after the Third Reform Act this number rose to 616.Footnote ⁶⁰ After 1885 the largest electorate was now only eight times the size of the smallest; before 1885 it had been 250 times the size.Footnote ⁶¹

Thus, it is unsurprising that a number of historians have argued that the Third Reform Act “established the principle that representation should be allotted primarily according to population,”Footnote ⁶² the conceding of which represented “a massive stride towards … democracy.”Footnote ⁶³ Such a view, however, has its origins in the antidemocratic hyperbole of reactionary politicians and intellectuals.Footnote ⁶⁴ These trepidations aside, there was little that was democratic about the Third Reform Act—democratic in the sense of “one man, one vote” or “one vote, one value.” The vote was still widely seen as a privilege bestowed on the deserving and respectable. As Matthew, McKibbin, and Kay observed of the Edwardian period, “The pre-1867 notion of the vote as a trust … remained.”Footnote ⁶⁵ That the vote was still widely seen as a privilege and a trust is unsurprising given that many adult men (perhaps as many as 40 percent) were still without the vote after 1885.Footnote ⁶⁶ Turning to the Redistribution Act, one can agree that it was the “first systematic attempt to relate parliamentary representation to population size,”Footnote ⁶⁷ but it is difficult to accept the argument that it was the decisive legislative moment when communal understandings of parliamentary representation were “formally and substantially abandoned, and shifted into the representation of individuals.”Footnote ⁶⁸ If it had been, then why were relatively moderate radicals like Dilke so disappointed with the outcome? The source of their disappointment, as Dilke’s latest biographer notes, was that the Redistribution Act “embodied no new principle and fell far short of the democratic sentiments of the radicals.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Gladstone had explicitly told the Commons when introducing the Redistribution Bill in the House of Commons that it had not been the intention of those who had devised the settlement “to efface all inequality from our representative system in respect to electoral areas.” The bill was “neither regardless of history and prescription [nor] ancient arrangements and ancient rights.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Gladstone would subsequently describe the Redistribution Bill as “not so much of a compromise between Parties, as of a compromise between principles,” those principles being population, diversity of interests, and historic community.Footnote ⁷¹ In an earlier speech to the Commons on 6 November 1884 Gladstone had been even more explicit about the need for redistribution to balance the competing demands of population and interest. He had asked rhetorically, “shall we have regard in any degree, and if so, in what degree, to the principle of the community as distinct from the individual … or shall those communities be reckoned as so many individuals … thrown into hotch-potch to take their chance with the rest?”Footnote ⁷² He then went on to sketch out his “centrifugal theory” of parliamentary representation. According to this theory “dispersed and remote populations” deserved greater representation than concentrated populations that were closer to Westminster. This was how Gladstone was able to defend his decision to allow Ireland to retain its 103 MPs despite it being overrepresented in terms of population—yet again in the face of opposition from Hartington and subsequently much sniping from backbenchers and the English press: “Most people will be puzzled to know why the mud cabins of Galway should possess a larger proportion of political power than the suburban villas of Surrey and Kent” was how the Tory Manchester Courier reacted to the proposal.Footnote ⁷³ However much those opposed to Gladstone’s centrifugal theory of representation saw it as merely an act of political cowardice there can be little doubt that in Gladstone’s mind it was a means of strengthening the bond between center and periphery, yet another attempt on his part to revivify the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland, a view shared by the Irish Viceroy Lord Spencer.Footnote ⁷⁴

It could be argued that Gladstone’s repeated assertions in 1884–85 that Parliament still represented communities of interests furnish evidence of his refusal to fully acknowledge the democratic implications of the Redistribution Bill. When Gladstone did intervene in the bipartisan negotiations, his actions appear retrograde, such as when he made a desperate bid to save as many boroughs as possible from subdivision. Gladstone secured a limited victory here when, as Richard Shannon puts it, as a sop to his “sentimental attachment to historic communities,”Footnote ⁷⁵ Dilke and Salisbury reluctantly agreed to allow a small number of medium-size boroughs to continue as undivided double-member constituencies. Gladstone certainly had an unrivaled capacity for deluding himself—and nowhere more so than in his hope that the extension of the franchise in Ireland might neutralize Parnell and the NationalistsFootnote ⁷⁶—but in this instance there can be little doubt that he was more representative of the political elite than some historians have implied.Footnote ⁷⁷ Part of the reason why Gladstone has been presented as out of kilter is that historians have paid insufficient attention to the ideological principles that lay behind redistribution. If the reform episode is interpreted primarily through the prism of personal and partisan calculation, then Gladstone’s attachment to historic communities certainly looks sentimental and out of place. But such a view is myopic: Gladstone’s sentimentalism was merely one manifestation of a pervasive attachment to community. With the sole exception of Dilke (who, as one would expect of a radical Liberal, was committed to political equality and symmetry), the intention of those who crafted the bill was to ensure that the electoral system continued to represent interests. This was certainly how others interpreted redistribution, and approvingly so. The Tory MP Alfred Hickman declared, “The very essence of the Redistribution Bill was to preserve community of interest,”Footnote ⁷⁸ while Arthur Arnold, the radical MP for Salford, assured Gladstone that he “carried the House with him entirely when he said that the scheme of the Government would have reasonable regard to the maintenance of communities.”Footnote ⁷⁹ This attachment to the representation of communities even extended out into the world of popular Liberalism.Footnote ⁸⁰ As the Liberal Leicester Chronicle—no friend of the old electoral system—confessed at the time of the interparty negotiations on redistribution: “We cannot count by heads in too literal a manner. Something must be allowed for historic importance, for the individuality of certain populations, for the claims of long prescription. We cannot legislate as if we were a mass of emigrants just entering upon the possession of a new country.”Footnote ⁸¹

The Liberal Newcastle Chronicle similarly approved of Gladstone’s “observations concerning the constitutional basis of our system.” Parliamentary representation, in its view, “should bear the impress of local life and peculiarities.” It concluded that it “will be an evil day for the country … when local idiosyncrasies and the peculiar life of an outlying constituency are swamped by numbers concentrated elsewhere.”Footnote ⁸²

The representation of interests was given a further boost by Salisbury’s insistence that the new constituencies reflect the “pursuits of the population.” This insistence has often been interpreted by historians as a stratagem to enhance the electoral currency of Villa Toryism by carving out socially homogenous suburban constituencies in the large boroughs.Footnote ⁸³ Yet Salisbury’s insistence, along with his recommendation that the boundaries of boroughs be extended and that urban areas in otherwise rural counties be grouped together to form one constituency,Footnote ⁸⁴ stemmed more from a determination to rid Tory shires of contaminating urban and suburban populations. The continued representation of interests and a stricter demarcation between them, Salisbury confessed to one Tory traditionalist, was “the thing to struggle for.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Salisbury’s main concern, as it had been since he had first turned his attention to redistribution, was future Tory prospects in county electorates that would now include coal miners, agricultural laborers, and village artisans.Footnote ⁸⁶ This explains why Salisbury had initially pressed hard for “grouping” (the gathering together of noncontiguous towns to form borough seats) as a means to remove urban patches from the counties. However, grouping was totally unacceptable to Dilke (on the grounds that it would have necessitated surrendering seats that he wished to allocate to the large boroughs and industrialized counties). As a compromise it was agreed that the boundary commissioners were to work “under words strongly directing them … to separate as far as possible, the urban from the rural.”Footnote ⁸⁷ There is no evidence to suggest that Salisbury envisaged the inclusion of Villa Toryism in the counties as a counterweight to the radicalism of the newly enfranchised agricultural laborers, just as there is no evidence to suggest that Salisbury’s request was driven by a calculation that the inclusion of suburbia in the boroughs would partially nullify urban Liberalism. Salisbury, as Richard Shannon has observed, was still operating along the lines of pre-1868 electoral geography, where Tories did best in agricultural counties. In any case Salisbury, Shannon notes, was too much of a pessimist to pin the electoral hopes of conservatism on the “owners of pineries and vineries” as Randolph Churchill sneeringly dubbed the suburban middle class.Footnote ⁸⁸

There is marked continuity in Salisbury’s thinking with that of Disraeli’s in 1867: urban and rural communities were to be kept as separate as possible, and the boroughs were best written off as Liberal territory. If Salisbury had really discerned the Villa Tory in 1884 as the sculptor does the angel in marble, then one wonders why he would later express such surprise at the growth of suburban conservatism.Footnote ⁸⁹ Similarly, by interpreting Salisbury’s “radical readiness” to go in for single-member constituencies as evidence of his casual disregard for historic communities, one should not be led too much astray by the astonishment of Gladstone and Dilke at the ease with which Salisbury went in “for newfangled innovations.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The methods may have been revolutionary, but the objectives were deeply conservative. Salisbury was as fearful of “arithmocracy” in 1884 as he had been in 1867 when he resigned from the then Tory government in protest at Disraeli’s Reform Bill. Salisbury’s vision of a “healthy community,” however much he felt that it was under fire by the 1880s, remained decidedly Disraelian: “It would look to men of wealth, intellectual power and culture and … birth, who would be motivated by patriotism and a high code of honour … checked by constitutional forms and watched by an active public opinion lest their rightful pre-eminence degenerate into mere class domination.”Footnote ⁹¹ Salisbury’s greatest fear was the splitting of the nation “into a bundle of unfriendly and distrustful fragments.”Footnote ⁹²

One may conjecture that one of the main reasons why Gladstone and Hartington did not object to Salisbury’s injunction that constituencies reflect the “pursuits of the population” was because they too continued to think in communities. We might also note that the failure of the Redistribution Bill to secure an equal value for every vote was one of the main reasons why the leaders of the recently established Proportional Representation Society (PRS) were so vehemently opposed to the bill.Footnote ⁹³ The PRS may well have been animated by a communitarian desire to reenergize social bonds,Footnote ⁹⁴ but as far as its opponents were concerned proportional representation was the very negation of community representation. As one Liberal MP reasoned during the debate on the second reading of the Redistribution Bill, once you “took communities and represented so many of the majority and so many of the minority, they no longer represented communities … they represented individuals according to their individual opinions.”Footnote ⁹⁵

The PRS was led by a triumvirate of moderate Liberal intellectual MPs: Sir John Lubbock, Albert Grey, and Leonard Courtney. Of the three it was Grey who was most explicit in his denunciation of the Redistribution Bill for its failure to secure representation for individuals. Grey was of the view that it was “the community alone … to the exclusion of the individual” that had hitherto been represented in parliamentary elections,Footnote ⁹⁶ the only exception to this being the thirteen constituencies where the “limited vote” operated, introduced by the Second Reform Act.Footnote ⁹⁷ There had been some justification, Grey argued, for basing parliamentary representation on communities while the franchise had remained restricted and varied on the grounds that constituencies of different sizes secured varied representation. But now that the franchise was about to be equalized, the representation of communities in single-member constituencies no longer guaranteed diversity of representation, by which Grey meant direct representation for minority interests. Grey equated proportional representation with the individual and majoritarian representation with the community. As he was at pains to emphasize, while the principle of proportional representation was “that the vote of every single elector shall count for as much as that of any other elector,” majoritarian electoral systems represented “only part of the whole”—the bare majority. The vision of the PRS was of a national political community composed of individuals: it was no coincidence that proportional representation was used by some of its supporters interchangeably with “personal representation,” a phrase popularized by John Stuart Mill and the electoral reformer Thomas Hare in the 1860s. To be fair to the PRS, it was not as unequivocally individualistic as its opponents alleged. One of its main objectives in opposing single-member constituencies in 1884–85 was to “secure the maintenance of our great local communities” by preventing their subdivision.Footnote ⁹⁸ Nonetheless, the perception remained that it subordinated the community to the individual.

What of the herculean task before the boundary commissioners? Only six members were appointed to this commission, four government officials (two Tories and two Liberals) and two army officers seconded from the ordnance department whose expertise would be required to map the new constituencies. The commissioners, however, were empowered to add to their number by appointing subcommissioners who had some knowledge of the areas to which they were sent.Footnote ⁹⁹ It was their job to go out to the constituencies and to hold local inquires and receive suggestions (often highly partisan ones) for subdividing seats, which, as Rossiter, Johnston, and Pattie have observed, “indicated the importance placed on winning local acceptability.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This they did between November 1884 and February 1885. Little detailed attention has been paid by historians to the instructions that were issued to the commissioners with most simply noting that population was to be roughly equal and that the “pursuits of the population” meant dividing boroughs along class lines.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Strictly speaking, this is not accurate, as the commissioners received a set of different instructions, one for the counties and one for the boroughs, along with some overarching guidelines. In the counties, their priority was to ensure that urban areas were all included in the same division unless that could not be done “without producing grave inconveniences” and “boundaries of a very irregular and objectionable character.” Further, while the commissioners were to form divisions that were “as compact as possible,” these were to be “based upon well-known existing areas,” such as parishes and other petty-sessional districts, and in drawing constituency boundaries these areas were not to be intersected. The concern here was to prevent constituencies from being formed that had no organic connection with the community, for if the new divisions took no account of existing shapes on the ground then they would be completely artificial. Turning to the boroughs, the commissioners were to determine whether the existing boundaries should be extended to incorporate any contiguous populations that were linked to the borough by virtue of shared interests—yet another means of separating the urban from the rural. If this amounted to a sizeable number of people and could not be done without intersecting well-known areas, then the commissioners were empowered to form a new county division. Finally, in dealing with county and borough divisions population was to be proximately equalized across the constituent divisions and in a way that reflected the “pursuits of the population.”Footnote ¹⁰²

So much for the intention, but what was the effect? The reports of the commissioners for England and Wales, Ireland, and Scotland furnish testimony to the frequent difficulties they had in trying to reconcile the conflicting priorities of population size, constituency shape and the “pursuits of the population,” and all within a framework that was still based on territorial representation. Few commentators at the time believed that anything like equal electoral districts had been created in the counties. As scholar J. Holland Rose approvingly noted in his book The Rise of Democracy (1897), such had been the attachment to “old names and areas” in 1885 that the new county divisions may be “regarded as a far more satisfactory compromise between the old and the new … than the singularly uninteresting departmental divisions imposed on France by the rigorously mathematical democrats of 1789.”Footnote ¹⁰³ As Rose’s comments imply, one of the most controversial aspects of subdividing the counties concerned the name to be given to the new constituencies, the effect of which in many counties was to reinforce the sense of difference between urban and rural interests. While county opinion was insistent that the names of the historic shires live on and requested that the various divisions be named after the points of the compass (Norfolk North, for example), spokesmen for disfranchised boroughs that were to be submerged into surrounding county seats believed their spirited self-sacrifice ought to be rewarded by naming the division after their borough (Nottinghamshire Newark, for example), while representatives from other towns that did not have the privilege of borough status “insisted that a merged borough ought not to have preference over a more important town or a well-known district.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the boroughs the commissioners proved even less willing to sacrifice preexisting boundaries than in the counties, especially those pertaining to municipal government as there was “a strong desire in every borough that in forming the divisions the wards should if possible be preserved intact.” In “deference to this feeling,” they had “allowed a larger disparity in the population of several of the divisions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

It is also instructive to note just how arduous and subjective were the processes by which the subcommissioners arrived at their proposals for subdivision, especially in relation to the boroughs. In the first instance, they were instructed to consult ordnance survey maps to determine provisional boundaries and then to place their proposals before local inquiries. Then to satisfy themselves that due regard had been paid to the “pursuits of the population” the commissioners were advised to visit the various part of the borough.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Thus, in forming new districts, the boundary commissioners were utterly reliant on perception—either their own or, if they accepted the recommendations of others at the inquiries, that of other interested parties. To make matters worse, it was not entirely clear what was meant by “pursuits of the population.” Indeed, when Dilke was pressed in the Commons by Henry Fowler to clarify whether “pursuits of the population” meant “that the boroughs are to be divided upon class, or sectional, or social pursuits,” Dilke could only reply that if he were a boundary commission he “should understand that as being a general direction to have regard to the varying nature of the representation.” Perception, then, was the final court of appeal, and thus one begins to appreciate how considerations of population—the priority of which had been dubious at the outset—were emasculated in practice. Through the agency of the boundary commission, the political elite were attempting to reduce electoral geography to a coherent and knowable space, not entirely unlike colonial cartographers whose purpose was to map the empire so that it could be made knowable and, by extension, governable.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The boundary commissioners, with the aid of the two army officers, were to produce maps of every territorial constituency that were to be submitted to Parliament for scrutiny as part of the committee stage of the Redistribution Bill. This made the committee stage even more laborious than usual as MPs pored over the maps, each no doubt anxious about the new shape of their constituency (if, of course, they were one of the few lucky ones whose existing constituency had survived). These maps provided something of a panoptican and allowed politicians to visualize the new electoral landscape. And yet they offered at best a partial vision of the new electoral geography. Almost from the moment of their production, while the physical shapes on the ground had obviously not altered, the shapes in society that the maps reflected had, not least because the boundary commissioners had used the census returns for 1881, already four years out of date.

The persistence of anomalies after 1885 has not gone unnoticed by historians but few have appreciated the extent to which the population principle was sacrificed. The gap between the largest and smallest electorate may well have been substantially narrowed by the Redistribution Act, but, as the radical Liberal J. O’Connor Power caustically observed of the new constituencies, it “would be possible for a borough with a population over 15,000 to have one member, while boroughs with a population of 165,000 will have only two, so that 15,000 people in one part of the country will have as much power as 80,000 in another.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

One can see in the Third Reform Act the same sort of conservative intentions as existed in 1832 and 1867. If the architects of the Redistribution Bill had been fully committed to the representation of individuals, then one would have expected the bill to have prescribed a uniform ratio of seats to population, or electors to representatives as was the case in other democratizing nations. It did not even set an upper limit for the maximum number of people a constituency could contain (as in the United States).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Such anomalies grew apace in the aftermath of the Third Reform Act, to such an extent that by the early years of the twentieth century a growing number of politicians were clamoring for a new redistribution of seats.Footnote ¹¹⁰ By 1914 the average number of electors per constituency in England was more than twice the size of the average for Ireland.Footnote ¹¹¹ The half-hearted way in which population intruded into parliamentary representation in 1884–85 is further confirmed by the failure to establish a boundary commission to oversee periodic redistricting or even to stipulate how often such redistricting should take place as was the done in the United States. Only in 1944 was a permanent boundary commission finally established.Footnote ¹¹²

How best to secure the continued representation of communities? That was the difficult and potentially divisive question facing the political elite in 1884. As outlined earlier, the architects of redistribution had, in effect, two choices, each of which to varying degrees commanded wider parliamentary and public support. The first was to preserve the existing system of multimember constituencies and couple this with mechanisms to secure direct minority representation such as the limited vote or the cumulative vote used in school board elections from 1870.Footnote ¹¹³ Direct representation of minorities was the preferred option of many Tories, Whigs, and moderate Liberals. A variant of this option was to introduce some form of proportional representation, the most widely advocated system being the single transferable vote. The second choice was to implement single-member constituencies, the demand for which, as we have seen, had been gaining ground among political activists.

As the attention of politicians began to turn seriously to the details of redistribution in the autumn of 1884, there were few front-bench politicians who were outspoken advocates of single members. The notable exceptions were, on the Tory side, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach (soon to be leader of the Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer) and the calculating Lord Randolph Churchill,Footnote ¹¹⁴ and on the Liberal side, Dilke. While Churchill and Co. favored single members as the only practical means to secure diverse and separate representation for “classes, interests, industries, and minorities” (no mention of numbers here),Footnote ¹¹⁵ Dilke advocated them on the grounds that they were simple, uniform, and equitable.Footnote ¹¹⁶ By contrast, Gladstone, Hartington, the influential radical Joseph Chamberlain, Salisbury, and Northcote disliked single-member constituencies. Gladstone was uncomfortable with the idea of slicing up organic communities.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Hartington feared that single-member constituencies would pit moderate and radical Liberal factions against one another as they could no longer each nominate a candidate.Footnote ¹¹⁸ His fears may have been exaggerated here as the Whigs were not as dependent on double-member boroughs as has often been claimed: of the forty-four aristocratic Whig MPs elected in 1880, only ten sat for such boroughs.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Nonetheless, in his opposition to single-member seats Hartington found an unlikely ally in Chamberlain, who objected to them in the boroughs on the grounds that the Tories stood to benefit from them, especially in London.Footnote ¹²⁰ Salisbury and Northcote thought single-member constituencies provided inadequate protection for minorities in the boroughs and without “grouping” did little to keep “the urbans out of rural districts” in the counties.Footnote ¹²¹ As for the rest of the Tory party, Edward Stanhope—a Tory front bencher in the Commons with his ear to the ground—relayed that “double-member [borough] constituencies are most in accordance with general opinion.”Footnote ¹²² Salisbury’s own preference seems to have been for an extension of the “limited vote,” but as he confessed to his nephew Arthur Balfour, he had not felt able to push for the retention of the limited vote as vigorously as he would have liked because it had few supporters and the Liberals were opposed to it.Footnote ¹²³

So when it became clear by the end of November 1884 that redistribution was, nonetheless, going to be based on the widespread introduction of single-member seats, there was a significant current of parliamentary and public opinion that was less then enthusiastic, and a vocal minority who were openly hostile. The most vocal opposition came from the leaders of the PRS and from some of the large boroughs that were about to be subdivided. Opponents of single members alleged that division of large boroughs into artificial entities would destroy corporate life, with subdivision being likened to vivisection. Biological categories and organic metaphors frequently appeared in the debates on single-member constituencies. The opponents of single members applied the evolutionary theory that society was a natural organism to electoral social geography. As the Conservative journalist and novelist Percy Greg told the readers of the Tory National Review, under the existing system, MPs represented “a real living society … an organic constitutional being with ideas, traditions, interests of its own, with a collective thought and will.” Under the single-member regime they would represent “a fragment chopped from some living entity.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Worse still was the fear that a single-member majoritarian system, by maximizing the electoral clout of bare majorities, would leave many unrepresented with the feeling that their vote did not count. This would lead to apathy and the decline of serious electoral competition. In the absence of stiff competition and the need for a party to construct broad-based coalitions of electoral supporters the parties would fall under the sway of cliques and extremists who would be much freer to pursue their own faddist goals whose power would be all the more concentrated in smaller constituencies.Footnote ¹²⁵ Single-member seats would thus be inimical to political vitality and the kind of active citizenship associated with regular and meaningful electoral participation articulated by John Stuart Mill in his influential Considerations on Representative Government (1861).Footnote ¹²⁶

The leaders of the PRS interpreted all this in Darwinian terms (it was surely no coincidence that Lubbock had been a pupil of Darwin’s).Footnote ¹²⁷ Lubbock and Courtney in particular registered a wider intellectual concern with the shifting forces of competition, conflict, and harmony, which occupied such a prominent place in evolutionary understandings of society and politics in late Victorian Britain.Footnote ¹²⁸ Paraphrasing Lubbock, Courtney warned an audience at Leicester that all those who went unrepresented would be “cut off, in a large measure, from active relation to the national life.” In many cases the ones who would be cut off would be “men with conservative instincts” whose important moderating influence would be shut out by radical caucuses. Despite the valiant attempts of these men to take an active part in politics, with the passage of time they would be “cabin’d, cribbed, mutilated, dwarfed, reduced in their energies” by the coercive power of the majority. Intelligent men would be “reduced to inertia,” and the political life that they valued would dwindle and become extinct just as beings did in the natural world.Footnote ¹²⁹ It was not just electors who would be dwarfed. The absence of serious competition, the ascendancy of the caucus, and the localization of politics inherent in the subdivision of large parliamentary boroughs into smaller fragments would lead to a corresponding reduction in the quality of MPs, who would henceforth be too closely identified with the petty interests of the constituency, thereby introducing “a parochial element into imperial politics.”Footnote ¹³⁰ In language reminiscent of de Tocqueville on the inherent mediocrity in American democracy, the Tory Yorkshire Post predicted that single-member seats “will be the apotheosis of the Alderman, of the Town Councilors, of the Vestryman, and as far as the rule operated in that way it will of course tend to lower the tone and degrade the House of Commons.”Footnote ¹³¹ Thus did Millite citizenship meet Darwinian natural science.

Perhaps the greatest objection raised was that single-member constituencies would introduce the dangerous precedent of creating constituencies dominated by one social class.Footnote ¹³² The virtue of multimember seats, as the moderate Liberal George Goschen reminded the House of Commons, was that they brought classes together and forced them to cooperate and compromiseFootnote ¹³³ and, in the words of Courtney, made “people feel that they belong to one community.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Such fears were understandable in the context of the 1880s, and it was to be expected that moderate Liberals such as Goschen and Courtney (as well as Tories) were deeply anxious about the polarization of politics along class lines. Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London had recently been published, the latest in a series of revelations about the prevalence of poverty amid plenty.Footnote ¹³⁵ The Democratic Federation had recently turned itself into the Social Democratic Federation and was preaching socialist doctrines, and against the background of a downturn in trade there was the beginning of long-term structural depression in key industries and rising unemployment. Even Joseph Chamberlain was asking “What ransom property would pay?” to ensure its continued existence. Courtney and Goschen in particular were worried that “the reign of numbers,” implicit in an extended franchise and single-member constituencies, “endangered … political economy and the teaching which made Englishmen self-reliant.”Footnote ¹³⁶ In Goschen’s mind the “new democracy” would demand collectivization at the expense of property and liberty. What Goschen, Courtney, and Lubbock feared was that a single-member majoritarian electoral system would prevent some groups from gaining representation and that this could only incite more class hatred. By contrast, under a system of minority or proportional representation, “There would be no single artisan or agricultural labourer or man of learning who would not be able to say, ‘There is somebody in the House for whom I voted who represents me.’”Footnote ¹³⁷ Worse still was the polarizing effect that single members were likely to have on Irish politics.Footnote ¹³⁸ Courtney countered Gladstone’s argument—that by treating Ireland on the same basis as the rest of the United Kingdom the Irish would be reconciled to the Union—by arguing that the loyalist minority would be swamped by the nationalists under a single-member regime. This, Courtney concluded, would make Home Rule inevitable.Footnote ¹³⁹

Supporters of single-member constituencies, however, argued that smaller units, by concentrating political energies, would actually reenergize political life, not least by “bringing candidates into more close personal contact with their constituents.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ As one opponent of the single-member system was forced to concede, in large multimember seats it was “difficult to generate political warmth and activity away from the centre of a great town,” especially among the sleepy suburbanites who, under a single-member regime, would be forced to organize their own politics.Footnote ¹⁴¹ As for the counties the revivifying effect would prove even greater. Vast multimember seats were not conducive to political engagement, and they were difficult to mobilize. Single-member constituencies, it was also claimed by their advocates, were the simplest method for securing (indirectly) minority representation. As the Liberal Shaw Lefevre calculated, the more constituencies “are broken up, the more districts or divisions there are, the greater the chances of the minority of the whole being successful at the poll.”Footnote ¹⁴² Turning to organizational implications, the Liberal Western Daily Press believed that single-member constituencies “will greatly reduce the cost of election … [and] to some extent check the dominion of central political organizations.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Advocates of single members also disputed that the new divisions would be entirely artificial since they were to be based where possible on existing boundaries. As for the argument that more local men would be elected, this was surely a means of reenergizing community-based politics. The Liverpool Daily Albion believed that the subdivision of large boroughs would “open the way for recognizing the merits and special aptitudes of prominent townsmen.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This was the positive repost to the charge that the ward system would vestrify the Commons. Who could reasonably object, Mr. Roby of the Manchester Liberal Association asked one audience, to a system that “would elect men well known in the district—men who understood and shared their feelings and shared perhaps their prejudices?”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The concentration of political energies would give rise to more election contests and stiff political fights. Greater competition would produce good quality MPs (no Darwinian wastage here), and, in a political culture that evaluated the character of politicians in terms of their manliness, regular interaction with the rough and physically demanding world of electoral politics was important.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Finally, the suggestion that single members would divide boroughs along class lines was thought to be potentially applicable only to London with its greater extremes of wealth and poverty. As the Tory MP Henry Raikes pointed out during the second reading of the Redistribution Bill, “We are told that in the great provincial towns there is seldom so definite a local demarcation between the classes.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷

In the end the supporters of single-member seats won the day. Yet this should not disguise the fact that their adoption was far from being a foregone conclusion. A series of developments had led, crab-like, to the decision to adopt them. First, although few had been outspoken advocates of single-member constituencies at the outset, when the Liberal government and the Tory front bench turned their minds seriously to the details of redistribution in October 1884, both had concluded that the counties ought to be divided into single-member constituencies on the grounds that this would make the counties more manageable for the Tories and potentially more winnable for the Liberals.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The latter calculated that the more rural constituencies there were, the less chance there was of each one being dominated by a Tory squire, while the Tories hoped that more manageable county divisions would induce the landed classes to continue offering themselves for election,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ which perhaps goes some way toward explaining why many new county constituencies remained disposed to “old interests” well beyond 1885.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Second, other mechanisms for the direct representation of minorities, it was claimed, had either been tried and found wanting (the limited and cumulative vote) or were too complicated and artificial and commanded little support (proportional representation).Footnote ¹⁵¹ More importantly, Gladstone and Dilke had made it a condition of agreeing to the interparty negotiations on redistribution that “minorities not be directly represented.”Footnote ¹⁵² This was mainly because they were worried that if Salisbury and the Tories pushed for minority or proportional representation it could lead to a “‘monstrous coalition” against the government as there were many moderate Liberals who were also favorably disposed to minority representation.Footnote ¹⁵³ Salisbury and the Tories, however, fearing the democratic consequences of enfranchisement were adamant that some method had to be found for ensuring that minorities were represented. It soon became clear that single-member constituencies were the only option on which both parties could agree. While Dilke had pushed for single members from the outset, Salisbury came round to them only when it became clear that the Liberals would not accept minority representation. Even then he was hesitant and made desperate last bids to retain the limited vote in some of the larger boroughs.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The historical view of what Salisbury’s objectives were at the interparty negotiations on redistribution have too often been filtered through the distorting lens of Dilke, whom it suited to present Salisbury as an out-and-out advocate of single-member seats in his battle to secure the acquiescence of his own colleagues who were less than enthusiastic for single members.

As for the swath of parliamentary opinion that was at best lukewarm and at worst hostile to single-member districts, it was widely recognized that a single-member regime was the price that had to be paid to settle the franchise question.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ And as we have seen, single-member constituencies were not without their virtues. The Liberals from the large boroughs who had initially been hostile to single members could take some solace in the fact that extra seats had been given to the large boroughs.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Finally, despite the claims of the archopponents of single-member constituencies, the large boroughs had not spoken with one condemnatory voice. To take one example, while the Liberal Birmingham Daily Post was opposed to the subdivision of Birmingham, its rivals—the Tory Birmingham Daily Gazette and the Liberal Birmingham Daily Mail—approved of single members, showing also that parties were internally divided over the issue.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

The use of single-member constituencies to delineate interests was to reappear in the colonial context, where it would excite even more controversy as it became embroiled in attempts to ensure representation for minorities. However, what is remarkable about the debates on reform in 1884 is just how insular they were. The leading lights of the PRS requested on several occasions that the government inquire into the operational effectiveness of single-member constituencies overseas, but this fell on deaf ears. Gladstone simply asserted that “the whole of the representative systems of the civilized world which have this single-Member system do not show the least desire at present to get rid of it.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Bryce, Courtney, and Lubbock were the only politicians to draw heavily on the electoral experiences of other countries, especially the United States, to show how, in their view, single-member districts had led to a decline in the quality of representatives, apathy among the electorate, the distortion of majority opinion, and the ascendancy of the caucus.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ But few seem to have taken on board their insights, and of those that did it was already too late to reject single-member districts as they were a vital part of the redistribution negotiations that had been presented as a fait accompli to Parliament.

It is tempting to conclude that the adoption of single-member seats in 1884 was a classic instance of pragmatism triumphing over principle as the political elite abandoned long-held assumptions about parliamentary representation and conceded to radical demands for arithmocracy in a desperate bid to renew their political tenure.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Such a view seriously underestimates how ideologically charged were the debates on reform. For the political elite the triumph of single members had little to do with democratic notions of proportionality or the representation of individuals. Few were willing to jettison the traditional assumption that Parliament represented communities of interest. After all, the basis of parliamentary representation not only remained territorially defined after 1885 (as it still does), but the new single-member divisions in the boroughs and counties were to be based not on “more or less artificial units”Footnote ¹⁶¹ but on well-known existing areas. With the exception of some radicals, those politicians and activists who pressed for the adoption of single-member districts did so not out of any attachment to abstract democratic ideals but because they saw them as the most simple, practical, and effective means of securing representation for varied interests. Tories and moderate Liberals came to accept single-member constituencies as a less than satisfactory double-barreled solution to the linked problem of how to ensure that propertied interests were not swamped by the masses and of how to manage an electorate that was about to be swelled by the addition of some 1.7 million voters. While the novel decision to introduce uniform franchises throughout the United Kingdom seemingly brought an end to the historic division between the counties and the boroughs, the instructions to the boundary commissioners to separate as far as possible urban from rural actually sharpened the electoral distinction between town and country, just as the previous reform acts had done.

Yet as we have seen it was not only in the realm of intention that one can discern the conservative nature of the Redistribution Act of 1885, but also in its operation. The population principle was sacrificed again and again on the altar of interest. Reynolds’s News complained that the Redistribution Bill did not go far enough in moving the political system away from the representation of interests, which it blamed on Gladstone’s reverence for tradition and on Salisbury’s preoccupation with ensuring the supremacy of the counties. The great towns were still underrepresented, and nowhere more so than London. As one would expect of a radical organ, Reynolds’s concluded that only manhood suffrage and equal electoral districts would bestow an equal value on every vote.Footnote ¹⁶² But it was not just ultraradicalism that railed against the bill. Randolph Churchill on learning of the redistribution scheme hatched by the party leaders complained to Hicks Beach that the “principle of single-member seats is only feebly adopted, and only in new constituencies and very large towns.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Churchill and Hicks Beach, as well as many backbench Tories, disliked the survival of the twenty-four double-member boroughs—“a ridiculous and absurd anomaly” was how the London Tory MP C. T. Richie dismissed them, although revealingly he added that “I am not one of those who desire to see the Constitution of this country set out as a mathematical problem.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Finally, the criticisms leveled at single-member seats by the PRS (that they did not accord an equal value to every vote) provide further evidence that, far from heralding the transition to individual representation, single-member constituencies of a very roughly equal size merely repackaged communal representation in a form that was more acceptable to the democratizing environment of late Victorian Britain. The Fourth Reform Act of 1918 would edge Britain closer to the principle of “one vote, one value” by aiming for constituencies of 70,000 people, but even this desideratum was not fully met by allowing existing constituencies of 50,000 to retain separate representation, by increasing the number of university seats and by stipulating, just as the authors of the Third Reform Act had, that boundaries should be coincident with existing areas.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ As late as 1983 a court ruling upheld the view that Parliament represented places as well as people, and there is still no requirement that constituencies contain the same number of people—hence the demand made by some at the recent 2010 general election for equal electoral districts.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ As for the more general notion that Parliament represented interests, in terms of statute this survived until the Redistribution Act of 1944, which, as a recent overview has perceptively observed, was the first such act to contain “no reference to constituencies representing separate interests.” No subsequent act has reinstated this notion.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

There are grounds, then, for interpreting the transition to single-member constituencies as part of a carefully managed attempt by the political elite to control and limit democratization. Radical critics at the time viewed single-member constituencies as a cunning device to contain and dilute the electoral impact of the working class by spreading them across constituencies: the spokesmen of labor in the 1880s recognized, even if historians have not, that the working class was often not sufficiently concentrated (let alone unified) to determine electoral outcomes.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ While single-member constituencies threatened to disperse the electoral clout of the working class, critics pointed out that it was the propertied middle-class man who stood to benefit the most from subdivision, as it increased the likelihood of plural voting.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Furthermore, after 1885 the vast majority of electors would find themselves at the ballot box with one vote and a straight choice between two candidates that contrasted with the degree of choice electors had in multimember constituencies. As was pointed out by critics at the time, under a single-member system it is the political party who selects the candidate whereas multimember systems give the elector more choice.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Given such a reduction of choice, it is possible to interpret single-member constituencies as part of the process by which electoral politics was, in the words of James Vernon, “disciplined, regulated, and disabled.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ The transition to single-member constituencies did much to consolidate the two-party electoral system and to strengthen the power of parties over electors. As students of electoral systems know only too well, single-member constituencies and two-party politics reinforce one another to the detriment of minority interests and independence. Only a good party man stands a realistic chance of being selected as a candidate. The problem with this, as one critical pamphlet observed in 1885, was that “when only one of the political parties in a given district can only send one man, that one man cannot represent the various sections of his party.”Footnote ¹⁷² As Albert Grey shrewdly observed, the failure to accord an equal value to every vote devalued the currency of the franchise and electoral citizenship. Grey dismissed as a “complete delusion” the idea that “when a man is given a vote he is admitted to participation in public affairs.” For it was “not only essential that a man should have a vote, but that he should be able, by means of his vote, to give effectual expression to the opinions which he may entertain.”Footnote ¹⁷³ It was this thinking that had lain behind Chamberlain’s objections to single members in 1884, although Chamberlain, unlike Grey, did not convert to proportional representation as a result. As Chamberlain warned Dilke, in socially mixed constituencies (by far the majority) “you will have working-class candidates whom the middle-classes will not support.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴

In drawing up the balance sheet of who gained and lost from the Third Reform Act, conventional portraits are apt to note that the victors were the Tories and the radicals, both of whom could look forward to a more polarized electoral world, a world in which there would be no place for Whigs or even moderate Liberals. But just how much and just how quickly the Whigs lost out from the transition to single-member constituencies is not entirely clear. Further research is needed into the types of constituency for which Whigs sat before 1885 (as noted, they were not as dependent on small double-member boroughs as received wisdom would have it), and into the organizational and electoral dynamics between Whigs, Liberals, and radicals, before one can conclude, as does Hayes, that the Third Reform Act “made inevitable the ‘passing of the Whigs’ from the British political scene.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ One could argue that it was not just the Whigs who lost out from the Redistribution Act of 1885 but the whole Liberal party. For in hindsight the transition to single-member constituencies in 1885 appears as a lost opportunity to institutionalize the emerging Lib-Lab tradition of a Liberal gentleman running in harness with a Liberal representative of Labor, which was to become such a controversial issue from the late 1880s. If multimember constituencies had remained the norm rather than the exception after 1885, perhaps the forces of independent labor might have felt less need to establish their own separate party. History would prove that it was Chamberlain, not Dilke, who correctly divined the electoral future in 1884.