Public Petitions to the House of Commons, 1780-1918

Miller, Henry and Huzzey, Richard (2022). Public Petitions to the House of Commons, 1780-1918. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-855556

The project investigated the scale, nature and effects of petitions and petitioning in the UK, 1780-1918. While historians and social scientists have privileged elections, voting and partisan activity in their studies of political culture and participation, in the period in question, many more people petitioned than voted. Indeed, petitioning was a universal form of political activity at a time when the right to vote was restricted: women were explicitly excluded from voting in parliamentary elections between 1832-1918, and a majority of adult men only attained the parliamentary franchise in 1885. Yet all British subjects (including in the British empire) enjoyed the formal right to petition Parliament. This right was not limited by gender, class, race, voting rights, literacy, property ownership or education. Per capita comparisons show that scale of UK petitions to the national legislature in the 1780-1918 period was historically exceptional compared to other countries and other periods. Petitioning was central to all the major social movements and mass campaigns of the era, such as the anti-slavery movement, women’s suffrage, and the working-class campaign for democratic rights known as Chartism.

The project focused largely on public petitions – that is requests for measures of general applicability rather than demands for specific legislation limited to a locality or particular group - to the House of Commons, as these were the most popular form of petition in this period; and the wider culture of petitioning – the practices associated with the drafting, signing and presentation of petitions. The research was enabled by using the Reports of the Select Committee on Public Petitions (SCPP), which had generally been neglected by scholars.

Data description (abstract)

The data contains two files that together record and classify over one million public petitions to the House of Commons, 1780-1918, by the subjects that they addressed, which in turn are placed into broader categories to facilitate analysis. For the 1833 to 1918 period, the data also records the 165 million signatures on public petitions to the House of Commons, classified by subject and category. The data was produced as part of a project examining the role of petitions and petitioning in the UK during the ‘long’ nineteenth century (1780-1918) as a universal form of political expression, participation, mobilisation and representative before democracy. This data enabled researchers to establish key chronological trends, and the key subjects and themes on which petitioners addressed the House of Commons. It was thus the foundation for the project.

The data is based on aggregate of public petitions classified by subject. The data does not contain petitions to other authorities (e.g. the monarchy, local or central government, or the House of Lords); petitions to Parliament concerning private or local bills; petitions to Parliament regarding contested parliamentary elections; or the signatory lists for the petitions (as the original manuscript petitions do not survive). The data does not include the detail of specific petitions (e.g. the self-description of petitioners or specific location), rather it captures the number of aggregate petitions on particular topics.

Data creators:

Creator Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Miller Henry	University of Durham	https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0003-1898-5381
Huzzey Richard	University of Durham	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4765-9270

Contributors:

Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Jones Peter	University of Glasgow	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9210-9112

Sponsors:

Leverhulme Trust

Grant reference:

RPG-2016-097

Topic classification:

Politics
History

Keywords:

PETITIONING, POLITICAL PARTICIPATION, BRITISH HISTORY, POLITICAL REPRESENTATION, POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS, POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR, POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS, POLITICAL HISTORY, POLITICAL ISSUES, POLITICS, POLITICAL PROTEST, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, PROTEST MOVEMENTS, MODERN HISTORY, SOCIAL HISTORY, HISTORY, PUBLIC OPINION, LEGISLATURE

Project title:

Rethinking Petitions, Parliament and People in the Long Nineteenth Century

Grant holders:

Richard Huzzey

Project dates:

From	To
2016	2019

Date published:

07 Apr 2022 10:26

Last modified:

07 Apr 2022 10:27

Coverage and Methodology

Temporal coverage:

From	To
1780	1918

Collection period:

Date from:	Date to:
2016	2019

Geographical area:

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Country:

United Kingdom

Spatial unit:

Grid > British National Grid

Data collection method:

The data was collected from two sources. 1) the 1833-1918 data was inputted from the end of session reports published by the Select Committee on Public Petitions. These tabulated the aggregated number of petitions (and signatures on them) over a parliamentary session by topic. The topics addressed by petitioners were classified under five categories by parliamentary clerks; these were also inputted. Petitions allocated to the analytically meaningless 'miscellaneous' category were reassigned to the other original categories, and five new categories created by the researchers.
2) the 1780-1832 data was derived from handcounts of petitions from the Journals of the House of Commons (CJs), the printed daily record of parliamentary proceedings. As signatures were not recorded in the CJs, researchers only inputted the number of petitions per issue per day in each session. They only inputted petitions that would qualify as 'public' after 1833, and so excluded petitions relating to local or private bills, or contested elections, for example.

Observation unit:

Geographic unit, Time unit, Other

Kind of data:

Numeric, Text

Type of data:

Historical data, Qualitative and mixed methods data, Time series data

Resource language:

English

Access and Administration

Data sourcing, processing and preparation:

The sources for the data were 1) for the 1833-1918 data, hard copies of the Reports of the Select Committee on Public Petitions held by the Institute of Historical Research and the Parliamentary Archives; and 2) for the 1780-1918, the digitised Journals of the House of Commons, accessed through ProQuest's Parliamentary Papers database. Once the 1833-1918 data had been inputted researchers recategorised the topics in the Miscellaneous category and added subcategories, during which process the data was cleaned, checked, and amended, and the categories reviewed. The 1780-1832 data involved more scholarly judgement in that researchers categorised petitions as 'public' based on the clerks' categorisation of post-1833 petitions. Researchers developed a query process to decide whether petitions should be classed as public (measures relating to national or general applicability), or private or local, and so excluded. Once the data had been collected, the data was cleaned, checked and amended and assigned to categories, based on the categories employed after 1833 by clerks, and the new categories created by the researchers. Further details are provided in the metadata and user guide documentation.

Rights owners:

Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Miller Henry	University of Durham	https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0003-1898-5381
Huzzey Richard	University of Durham	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4765-9270