Dining in the Palace of Varieties: institutional culture, society living and party management in the Victorian House of Commons

A good deal has been written on how successive rounds of political reform forced Conservative and Liberal parties to become more bureaucratic and more professional, and by the last quarter of the nineteenth century to experiment with the development of mass organisations. Considerably less has been done to try to recover the machinery of a party system within Westminster in the later part of the nineteenth century. This paper will explore the relationship in the late nineteenth century between a rapidly-changing system of politics; a new and extraordinary building; and the network of men whose job it was to try to deliver the government’s business in the House of Commons – the whips. It will do so through examining the complex problem faced by the whips of ensuring that they had sufficient Members present to vote for government business during the crucial hours of the evening when they all too often dispersed for dinner or other entertainments. The problem got worse with the campaigns of deliberate obstruction mounted both by the Irish party, and also by some English politicians. As they struggled to adjust dining arrangements and House procedure to try to tempt them back, the whips came to perceive the problem as relating to the changing nature of the membership of the House of Commons under the pressure of political reform.

Paul Seaward was Director of the History of Parliament Trust 2001-18 and 2020-23. He is currently writing an institutional history of Parliament from its origins to the present. He is author of the related ‘Reformation to Referendum’ blog which can be found at https://historyofparliamentblog.wordpress.com/