United Kingdom

The year 1830 was also one of economic and social grievances, with religious issues still being thrown into the melee. In the Midlands and in northern towns and cities, well-organized political reform movements were winning widespread support. Corn Laws and Poor Laws, as well as currency and game laws, were all being attacked, while in the industrial north the demand was growing for new laws to protect factory labour. It was in such an atmosphere that the new Whig-led government prepared its promised reform bill.

Early and mid-Victorian Britain

State and society

The implementation of the liberal, regulative state emerging after the Napoleonic Wars involved a number of new departures. The first of these concerned the new machinery of government, which, instead of relying on patronage and custom, involved an institutionalized bureaucracy. This was evident in the development of the factory inspectorate, established by the 1833 Factory Act, though the characteristic way in which the state institutionalized itself was by means of local bodies administering such areas as the fast-developing realm of “public health” and the Poor Law. In fact, towns and cities themselves became very important new locations for the expression of the power of the decentralized state. After the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, local government, if developing unevenly, was a major part of the new machinery of government. There was a great flowering of civic administration and civic pride during the early and mid-Victorian period in Britain. This was particularly reflected in the architecture and infrastructure of British cities—one of the most notable legacies of the period. Magnificent town halls, libraries, concert halls, museums, and, not least, the great civil engineering projects of the time all inculcated the virtues of civic identity and therefore of instituting civic power.

Beyond the machinery of government, the Poor Law of 1834 represented the clearest example of the new ideological departures that characterized the liberal state. Its encouragement of self-supporting actors within the greater scheme of a natural order expressed the mixture of utilitarianism and evangelicalism that was characteristic of the new order. New areas of state action were also evident in education as well as in factory reform, and with these departures a new kind of bureaucratic expertise arose. Expert bureaucrats from outside of government, including the physician and medical reformer James Kay-Shuttleworth in education and the lawyer Edwin Chadwick in Poor Law and health reform, were brought in to advise the government. Figures such as these indicate the permeability of the Victorian state and its closeness to civil society, for they established their reputations and gained their expertise outside the attenuated structure of the state bureaucracy. From the 1850s onward, however, centralized bureaucracy accrued to itself increasing powers. The reforms of 1853–54 engineered by Charles Edward Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote instituted, by means of public and competitive examination, a system based not on patronage but on merit. In fact, public examination was designed to create meritocracy of a very particular sort, one based on the classically educated Englishman of Oxford and Cambridge universities. For the first time in British history and the history of Oxbridge (the two universities viewed as an institution), though in both cases decidedly not the last time, the ideology of merit was employed to reproduce a particular kind of ruling elite. This elite was built upon the idea of public duty, inculcated by an Oxbridge education, but above all it was based upon the notion that the state and its bureaucracy could be neutral. This neutrality was to stem from the open, competitive examination itself but also from the idea of that the neutrality of the civil service could be guaranteed by the ethics of the Oxbridge-educated English gentleman.