The reputational power of English reform crowds 1816 – 1848

The historiography of reform crowds is dominated by references to excessive attendance numbers. This is the case in both primary and secondary sources. Through three case-studies across the period, this thesis challenges such claims and asks why historians have seldom looked at the evidence, leading them rarely to question crowd size. By combining theories of crowd densities with evidence of on-the-ground area at these meeting sites, the thesis scrutinises the feasibility of crowds reaching massive numbers and considers whether the political power of reform crowds was dependent on magnitude. Drawing on sources as diverse as Home Office papers, digital maps and early photographic evidence, the research indicates that, while discrete crowds were often significantly smaller than previously thought, the combined effect of the so called ‘mass platform’ was to project an impression of ‘reputational power’ disproportionate to its numerical magnitude. This power was manifested and multiplied via newspapers to such an extent that the crowd was simultaneously féted by the people and feared by the state; the people emboldened to make increasingly robust demands; the state repeatedly provoked into misguided and disproportionate shows of force and punitive legislation. It will be argued that the linking of magnitude to political power was a twoway process, leading people to exaggerate crowd numbers post-event on the basis of perceived power. This thesis seeks to decouple magnitude from power. Invoking methodology from the emotional turn, crowd theory, haptics and proxemics, along with a consideration of the physicality of the crowd experience, this work is inevitably an interdisciplinary undertaking. After examining the power dialectics both within the reform movement and with the state, the thesis will conclude by arguing that, rather than discrete crowd events, it was the reputational power of the wider and long term ‘metaphorical’ crowd which was so feared by the state and which was ultimately (albeit retrospectively) successful in widening the franchise