The British franchise remained unchanged from fifteenth century until the Great Reform Act of 1832. Although it could be argued that this in itself is enough to earn the epithet Great', in recent years historians have been reluctant to ascribe much significance to the Act. The debate on whether or not the Reform Act was a watershed in British politics centres on what degree of change was instituted, or if the very existence of a Reform Act is in itself marks a new development in British politics. After the collapse of the Wellington's government in 1830, it took two years, a general election, and widespread violent demonstrations for Earl Grey's Whig coalition to pass a Reform Bill. From June 4th an estimated 217,000 new voters joined the franchise, bring the proportion of men who had the vote up to one in seven. To determine with what justification the Act can be termed a watershed in British politics', we need to examine how far reform, either directly or indirectly, changed the political and social landscape in Britain. An obvious starting point is dissecting the nature of the reformed electorate.
Although heralded by its creators as the final measure needed to resolve the reform question that had, to varying degrees, plagued Parliament since the mid-eighteenth century, the 1832 Reform Act was just the beginning of parliamentary reform in the nineteenth century. Do we therefore interpret the Act as opening the floodgates for reform, or merely being so insubstantial as to be fairly meaningless in Britain's inexorable, if slow, progression towards democracy? Historians have often pointed out the undeniably conservative nature of Reform in 1832. Nothing like universal manhood sufferage was approached or even seriously considered. Household suffrage, supported by many in the later eighteenth century, was even considered too radical. Instead the bill continued the British tradition of equating political influence with landed wealth by instituting a uniform £10 property qualification in the boroughs.
