Continuing our series reflecting on the recent‘Politics before Democracy’conference,our assistant editor Dr Kathryn Rixlooks at the impact of the 1832 Reform Act on the personnel of the House of Commons.
In March 1833, two months after Parliament assembled following the first election held under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act, the cartoonist ‘H.B.’ (John Doyle) produced a cartoon depicting the ‘March of Reform’. Set in the lobby of the House of Commons, it showed four former Tory MPs – marshalled by Francis Williams, the under door-keeper – looking on with suspicion and dismay as three newly elected MPs walked into the chamber. While the effects of the 1832 Reform Act have been much debated by historians, for contemporaries, as Doyle’s image of the changing of the guard at Westminster encapsulated, it marked an important symbolic break with the past.
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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