Ahead of next Tuesday’s Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Mary O’Connor of Somerville College, University of Oxford. On 12 March she will discuss the political identity of ‘inhabitant’ in early nineteenth-century England
The seminar takes place on 12 March 2024, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.
In the decades prior to the 1832 Reform Act ‘inhabitant’ was the leading political identity used to present arguments in the public interest. Inhabitant sounds an obvious identity, almost anodyne. But understanding how and why it was used to express what we might call political opinions in the early nineteenth century can tell us much about the practice of organising in the period.
In the early eighteenth century collective representations, if they really were necessary, only came from well-defined public bodies – the county, corporate bodies, perhaps a few meetings of voters. In contrast, by the early nineteenth century it was broadly accepted that meetings of inhabitants in any place could petition on any matter about which they felt strongly. Why did this change take place?
Part of the explanation lies in the demands of urbanisation in the eighteenth century which raised the status of inhabitant as an identity within towns, as it diminished that of corporate bodies. The rise of the industrial towns of the north and Midlands was another element. These were not sufficient, however, to establish inhabitants as a political identity in the eyes of all parliamentarians.
When Richard Brinsley Sheridan challenged Lord Sheffield (John Baker Holroyd) in 1795 for failing to acknowledge that a Bristol petition with four thousand signatures expressed the ‘general sense of the inhabitants’ against the Seditious Meetings Bill, Sheffield responded that he believed that it did not, for it ‘came neither from the corporation, nor from a body of merchants but from the people indiscriminately’.
Events of the 1790s made many activists reassess the best way to proceed when campaigning resumed in the early nineteenth century. The upheavals of those years heightened the need to appear legitimate and affected how people organised.
This was more than concern about the law. The 1810s and 1820s were when the well-known nineteenth-century growth of petitioning began to take off. To draw the widest support, beyond the already committed, required activity that seemed appropriate to participants, the authorities, parliament and the nation.
There was no right to meet, but the best claim could be made by inhabitants. Meetings to discuss issues that affected the internal management of villages and towns have a long, fuzzy history. The more formal town meeting of inhabitants probably developed organically, part of the response to the challenges of urban growth in the eighteenth century.
Originally about local matters, they were easily repurposed to hold meetings about issues of public interest. They were familiar and had legitimacy with inhabitants and with local and national authorities. In the early nineteenth century, the ways in which inhabitant meetings could be called – and particularly by whom – changed so that they became a broadly accessible method of meeting.
Care was taken about the identity that was mobilised to campaign. Identity was not about who people were, but what description was adopted by the group meeting and petitioning. In these years, most interest groups – religious or economic – generally limited their campaigning to issues that directly concerned their interest.
If you wanted to campaign about, taxes, parliamentary reform, the suspension of habeas corpus, Peterloo, stamp duty on newspapers, the criminal laws, Ireland, cruelty to animals, emigration, the Greeks, theatres, royalty and myriad other issues, the best way was to organise a public meeting of, and petition as, inhabitants.
Interest groups offered parliament knowledge and experience; it was well established that they were entitled to lobby about issues that affected them. But what did inhabitants have to offer parliament? There must have been voters amongst them, but that was not the identity being presented. To justify their engagements, inhabitants wrapped their interventions in a cloak of civic mindedness.
These early decades of the century were perhaps a brief period during which activists were so circumspect about who campaigned about what. As the nation and parliament relaxed into the new ways, these conventions softened. But the identity of inhabitant provided a bridge from the eighteenth-century attitude that only recognised public bodies could express collective opinions on matters of public interest to the widespread expressions of opinion across the nation in the nineteenth century.
MOC
The seminar takes place on 12 March 2024, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.
