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

Though these volumes cover just 12 years of parliamentary history, they are the most substantial yet to be published in the great series that will eventually make up the History of Parliament project. Seven stout volumes contain well over five million words, making their immediate predecessor, the volumes covering 1790–1820 edited by R. G. Thorne, look comparatively svelte. Work on 1820–32 began when the Thorne volumes were published in 1986, and the editor, David Fisher, had been assistant on the previous enterprise, thus devoting an entire career to the project. Of the 1367 biographical articles on MPs, and 383 constituency articles, he alone has written nearly 500. In approach and format, these volumes are a continuation of the Thorne tomes. Not only is the traditional tripartite division of introductory survey, biographical and constituency articles maintained; the content and style of each are essentially unaltered. This is overwhelmingly a work of reference, bulging with fact. Its enormous size is the consequence of the proliferation of source material: division lists, local newspaper accounts of elections, parliamentary diaries. Its relentless factuality is both its greatest strength and its necessary weakness. It is indispensable, but it aims at neither analytical novelty nor analytical coherence – and it would be pointless and unfair for a reviewer to criticise these absences, however much one might regret them. Nonetheless, as many critics have pointed out over the years, the result is not really a history of parliament: there is scant coverage of its institutional and procedural history, the culture of debate, the nature of representation, the operation of interest groups and other lobbies, and much else besides.