Introduction The structure of politics in Victorian cities

Abstract

Politics involve the pursuit and exercise of power, and debate and conflict over policy. Urban politics in mid-nineteenth-century England concerned power and policy over a very broad field of local and national affairs. Politics for Victorians, unlike ourselves, began not at Westminster but at their own front gates. Whether the pavement was drained and swept, whether the poor should be incarcerated in workhouses, whether Dissenters should pay church rates depended upon the exercise of power and were issues of as much intrinsic political interest as great questions of national policy. Politics intruded into the whole urban experience and the limited political world of parliamentary elections, identified by many historians as the stuff of urban politics, was not a political boundary recognized by contemporaries. The mid-nineteenth-century political activist pitched his tent in whatever battlefield was open to him. Urban politics ran through many channels.

‘Politics are the vital element of all elections — parliamentary, municipal, parochial or philanthropic’. Porcupine, 8 November 1862