The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1820-1832

THE latest instalment of the History of Parliament is a beast of a book. Twenty-three years in the making, it fills seven back-breaking volumes and comprises more than five million words of text. There are 383 constituency studies and 1,367 biographies, of which the longest cover thirty to forty pages each. An introductory volume explores parliamentary procedure, the strength of party and the English reform legislation, together with survey essays on England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. If, as Callimachus believed, a ‘big book’ is a ‘big evil’, this is the literary equivalent of all seven deadly sins. Despite its scale, many of the things one might expect in such a work are absent. Like its predecessors, it ‘does not cover the institutional history of the Commons; nor does it include any kind of political narrative or chronological record of parliamentary activity’. There is little on rhetoric, the incidence of legislation or the impact of changes in patronage. The use of select committees receives scant attention, except with specific reference to reform. In this respect, as one of its contributors has acknowledged, it is ‘a moot point’ whether it constitutes a ‘History of Parliament’.1 What it offers instead is a magisterial survey of those who served in Parliament and the constituencies by which they were elected. In particular, it provides the most thorough investigation ever undertaken of the ‘unreformed’ system in the final decade before the Great Reform Act of 1832. Appreciated in these terms, this is a massive work of scholarship and an invaluable resource for historians of local, as well as national, politics.