In this month 750 years ago, Parliament first met at Westminster Hall. Simon de Montfort, who had led a rebellion against Henry III, had summoned it without a prior royal authorisation. He sought to consolidate his own authority by summoning those from the gentry class, as nobles had abandoned him and his goals. This group of gentry became known as ‘the Commons’, a version of ‘community of the realm’. Although de Montfort was killed at the Battle of Evesham later that year, his idea of a regular parliament survived.

Today, there is considerable debate about the role of Parliament, and in particular about the accountability of our elected representatives in the House of Commons. MPs’ expenses, Plebgate, austerity measures – we wonder whether MPs are working for or against us. Many of us find out what is happening in Parliament through the media – local and national newspapers, radio stations and television. Most papers have a parliamentary correspondent; there’s even a whole television station dedicated to covering Parliament.

But all this is nothing new. Throughout the centuries, individuals and publications have sought to ensure that the public are kept abreast of what our politicians are doing. In the 17th century and for much of the 18th, this was no easy task. The House of Commons forbade individuals from ‘taking notice’ of proceedings and publishing what had happened. Reporters sought to work around this by writing ‘letters’ about affairs, and printers risked prosecution for producing reports of parliamentary speeches. Only in 1771 did the House of Commons stop punishing the press for publishing accounts of parliamentary proceedings, and then only after protests by printers and some radical members of Parliament.

As the press began to print regular accounts of parliamentary affairs, so too did their readers start writing to them in response. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, readers wrote to the papers to complain about specific acts of parliament that they disagreed with, the behaviour of certain MPs, or about how society was disintegrating – as evidenced by legislative acts. One reader of the Universal Register (the precursor of the Times) in 1785 bemoaned the fact that since the year 1762, more Acts of Parliament have been passed for dissolving marriages, and enabling the parties to marry again, than during the many ages that have elapsed since our Parliaments assumed the regular form they bear at present. The reader saw this as a sign that both Parliament and the monarchy had become corrupt, and pleaded for virtue to return, as the present is the most vicious age that ever existed. (The Universal Register, 18 January 1785)

Corruption was a valid concern. This was an age of rotten boroughs and a restriction on who could stand as an MP – only the propertied elite were eligible, and relatively few people were allowed to vote. A survey in 1780 found that less than 3% of the population had the vote. (see nationalarchives.gov.uk). Therefore the ordinary person in the street was limited in his participation in politics. This does not mean that people were not interested – they were. Politics was a subject of keen debate in rural inns and urban coffee houses. Newspapers were provided and distributed by coffee houses for their patrons to read, discussed between those patrons, and then the news disseminated at home. In addition, ‘runners’ were employed to travel to different coffee houses reporting current events – it is clear that politics was a subject of great interest to a wide range of people. But one of the few ways where people felt they could make their views heard in a wider environment was through the letters page of their newspaper.

In times of dearth, letter writers to the newspapers were more critical of their elected representatives. During a period of high prices of basic food in 1801, for example, a letter writer to the Bury and Norwich Post noted that politicians blamed different factors:

Under a most unexampled rapid advance in the prices of all the necessaries of life, that bears hard on every rank of society, many speculative politicians have laboured, according to their powers of investigation, their party prejudices, their professional characters, or their unguided fancies, to find out some latent cause of the distresses of the nation. [Bury and Norwich Post, 22 July 1801]

These reasons included the impact of two bad harvests, an increase in population, enclosure, or the use of horses instead of oxen in agriculture. Others blamed the impact of the Napoleonic Wars and the related cost of government contracts for armies and fleets employed abroad, or the depreciation of the currency. The writer stated that parliamentary committees investigating the problem were shamefully deluded as to what was going on, talked about political evils and implied that some MPs failed to research the issue as deeply as they should.

It was not just members of the public who criticised the politicians – the newspaper reporters did too. In 1838, the election of Lord Stanley and Sir James Graham into office were criticised in the Morning Chronicle, which wrote that like two solitary birds of ill omen, they took their seats in Parliament, scarcely recognised by the opposition, not recognised at all by ministers, not cared for in the House of Commons, but I will venture to say despised, aye, and cordially despised (as politicians I speak of them) by every class of the community, whether Tories or Conservatives, Whigs or Radicals. It compared James Graham’s previous act of sanctioning physical force against France with his current acts – And what is Sir James Graham now? – listing as one critique his voting against the extension of suffrage. Graham’s conduct in Parliament – which included crossing the floor of the Commons, abandoning the Whigs for the Tories – had alienated him from many Whig supporters, and the newspaper reflected the popular opinion of him. In 1838, he had been returned as MP for Pembroke, before getting into debt and having to run from his creditors. He held on to his seat until 1841, when he finally resigned. Stanley had similarly tried to break away from the Whigs, creating a more Conservative off-shoot with Graham and others. (The Morning Chronicle, 24 December 1838)

The Victorian press played a valuable part in holding politicians to account. Their criticisms were of politicians’ actions – but they also satirised or mocked them personally. This occurred with members of the House of Lords, too. In 1838, when Lord Brougham made a speech about the slave trade, the Morning Post noted, There was so much of chronic and hopeless eccentricity in the Noble Lord’s speech that it defies anything like sober analysis. (Morning Post, 3 March 1838). Newspapers employed reporters specifically to help record and relay what was happening in Parliament. Charles Dickens was one such reporter sitting in the gallery in the early 1830s, producing parliamentary reports for the Mirror of Parliament. He later took a job with the Morning Chronicle, where he covered elections. In 1835, the parliamentary press gallery was established. Prior to this, reporters had needed to reserve spaces in the Strangers’ Gallery in the House of Commons or House of Lords, with Dickens commenting that the reporters were huddled together like so many sheep .

Of course, the papers also reflected their general political views. William Cobbett, the radical journalist, established the weekly Political Register in 1802, after earlier turning down the editorship of a government newspaper. He used the Register to critique the government policies of the day, and the leadership of Prime Minister Pitt, singling out for particular attention the huge national debt and the corruption he witnessed in parliamentary elections.

The Morning Post, on the other hand, was an overtly Conservative newspaper. When, in 1838, it covered the election of an MP in Marylebone, it recorded that the Conservative candidate Lord Teignmouth had been elected and that this was just the latest beating of the Whig-Radicals, asking, When do these Ministers budge? How much beating do they require to convince them that their continuance in office is offensive to Parliament and to the country? How long do they mean to be dragged through the mire of defeat, as they cling to Mr O’Connell’s skirts? (The Morning Post, 3 March 1838). The Post flagged Teignmouth’s election up to its readers as a sign that the public had had enough of the Whigs. In addition, they felt that Daniel O’Connell – the Irish MP – received too much adulation from the Whig party (George IV had once complained that O’Connell was King of Ireland whereas he was only the Dean of Windsor ).

Two years after this report, in 1840, the postal service was revolutionised with the introduction of the uniform penny post, making letter writing a cheap and efficient way of communicating, and letters to the newspapers had never been easier. Writing to the papers about the politics of the day also gave readers the feeling that their views were being taken into account, being published to be read by others. They were able to make their feelings about politicians and law-making clear.

In 1851, letter writers were discussing anti-Catholic legislation, free trade, and education, as well as discussing whether Lord Palmerston should have been dismissed as foreign secretary by the prime minister, Lord John Russell. Although some concerns were fairly local, issues such as free trade legislation concerned writers from Lancashire to Essex.

Today, readers from across Britain still unite over politics and the actions of politicians through the letters pages of the newspapers – but now readers have an even easier way of expressing their views, through the comments on online news sites and via social media. ‘Twitterstorms’ are the modern equivalent of the angry Victorian newspaper reader putting pen to paper to complain about politicians and their actions. Just as the media has always had an important role in publicising what parliament is doing, we, the readers, have always wanted to hold our elected members of parliament to account – all that has changed is the way we can do so.

Further reading

The Press Gallery website has some interesting information about its formation and history

Nikki Hessell, Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens, Cambridge University Press, 2011