‘“Democracy Has Come!” The Third Reform Act & the Making of British Democracy’. I'll be speaking at the IHR Modern British Seminar on Thursday 29 Jan, on why the 1884 Reform Act is more exciting than you think... 17:30 in London or online. Read on for a taster...🧵 www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

The 1884 Reform Act was a political earthquake. The Conservative leader, Lord Salisbury, called it "a change so tremendous that it exceeds the Revolution of 1688". The Radical Joe Chamberlain thought it "a transfer of power unparalleled in the history of reform … Democracy has established itself"

It created 2 million new voters - twice as many as 1867 & many times the total in 1832. It tripled the electorate in Ireland, with seismic consequences for Home Rule. It was the first reform crisis in which women's suffrage was a major issue; the first at which Proportional Repn was widely debated

The Reform Act established, for the first time, the modern system of single-member constituencies using First Past the Post across much of the UK. It brought mineworkers, agricultural labourers, gamekeepers and domestic servants cascading onto the electorate, & made them a serious political power.

The bill triggered a fight between Commons & Lords that Victoria thought "fraught with peril". There were mass demonstrations across the UK. Gardeners carried giant thistles, to warn the Lords that ‘they won’t sit on us’. Tobacconists joked that ‘tobacco & the Lords are equal – they're all weeds’

The Tory MP & newsagent W.H. Smith claimed that "No greater change had ever been proposed to Parliament. It amounted to a complete transfer of political power from those who had it now to another class who had it not". That sense of a democratic revolution was found across the political spectrum.

The Reform Act did not establish universal suffrage, even for men; but it was widely believed to have made "the demos" - the common people - the dominant force in the electorate. Yet 1884 was also a moment of democratic exclusion, with a rare *five-line whip* imposed against votes for women.

Josephine Butler wondered bitterly how MPs could dare to speak of a "wholly enfranchised people", when "half the people remain unenfranchised". "A time will come", she wrote, "when men will look back with wonder that such an expression should have been possible, the facts being such as they are".