Professor Richard Huzzey richard.w.huzzey@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Professor Richard Huzzey richard.w.huzzey@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Dr Henry Miller henry.j.miller@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor
Over the course of the long nineteenth century, people in the United Kingdom signed a wide variety of petitions, addresses, testimonials, and related documents. Though many forms of subscriptional culture had medieval and early modern origins, their transformations across this period reveal the shifting perceptions of the crown, parliament, the administrative state, and local government. The article draws on a dataset of more than 1 million petitions to the House of Commons and surviving data from the House of Lords, alongside qualitative evidence of signed addresses to other authorities. This reveals a pattern whereby applications and requests increasingly took new, bureaucratic forms, and petitions became more closely associated with the representation of public opinion. The study suggests the value of examining the practices and processes, alongside the languages and ideas, that shaped political culture. This emphasises the participatory and representative politics of name‐signing as a means to materialise popular opinion in a responsive ‐ but not democratic ‐ state.
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Dec 9, 2020 |
Online Publication Date | Apr 5, 2021 |
Publication Date | 2021-03 |
Deposit Date | Jan 6, 2021 |
Publicly Available Date | Jun 9, 2021 |
Journal | History |
Print ISSN | 0018-2648 |
Publisher | Wiley |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 106 |
Issue | 370 |
Pages | 221-243 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.13103 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1254255 |
Published Journal Article
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PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Petitions and Petitioning in Historical Perspective
(2023)
Book Chapter
The Evolution of Petitioning in Europe and North America, 1850-2000
(2023)
Book Chapter
Petitioning and People Power in Twentieth-Century Britain
(2022)
Book Chapter
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