Electoral politics, 1886–92: an overview

On 8 June 1886 Gladstone's Irish Home Rule Bill was defeated in the House of Commons. Ninety-three Liberals – almost a third of the party – voted against it. Parliament was dissolved two weeks later and the country was plunged into another general election. A substantial group of Liberals – including Hartington, Goschen, Henry James, Lansdowne, Chamberlain and Bright – left the party in opposition to the bill, and fought as Liberal Unionists. The campaign was predictably dominated by Home Rule, with ‘Ireland’ and ‘Irish’ alone comprising over 1 per cent of all words uttered in all three of our main corpora, on a par with basic words in the English language including ‘they’, ‘want’, and ‘must’. As an Ipswich Liberal remarked, ‘this election will be fought on the question of Ireland and nothing else’.

The result of the election was a huge defeat for Gladstone and his supporters: the Liberal vote declined by 2.4 percentage points, and the party won just 192 seats, a fall of 127 from 1885. The new government was formed of 316 Conservatives and 77 Liberal Unionists and boasted a Commons majority of 114. The result signalled the end of the dominance of Victorian Liberalism, and the party was confined to opposition for seventeen of the next twenty years. This, and the fact that the vast majority of Liberal Unionists never returned to the fold, has led a number of historians to conclude that the great Home Rule schism of 1886 was chiefly responsible for the long-term decline of British Liberalism.

The East Anglian picture was as grim for the Liberals as the situation nationally, with the successes of 1885 decisively reversed, seemingly due to the abstention or defection of the agricultural labourers. Nine of the Liberals’ twelve seats were lost: five to Conservatives, and four to Liberal Unionists. In the boroughs, the swing to Unionism was 2.2 per cent, and only J. J. Colman at Norwich survived. In Ipswich the Conservatives Charles Dalrymple and Lord Elcho (who had won the by-election caused by the dismissal of Jesse Collings and Henry Wyndham West on the grounds of corrupt practice in April) held their seats, as did Samuel Hoare (Norwich), Francis Hervey (Bury St Edmunds), Harry Tyler (Yarmouth) and Henry Bourke (King's Lynn).