Literature and the Culture of Elections and Electioneering in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

Abstract The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the rise of contested elections as an important aspect of political life, and an outpouring of literary texts concerned to represent, and intervene in, the electoral process. This article recovers this rich, wide-ranging, and ideologically diverse genre, and argues that, interacting and overlapping with other forms, literature both reflected and helped to shape electoral culture. Popular literary varieties (from ballad opera to mock-heroic verse) were reworked to serve topical electoral purposes. This literature contributed to the culture of elections, making available particular, generically shaped representations and potentially increasing forms of electoral participation and partisanship. Like election rituals and other forms, literary texts encouraged engagement with elections among voters and non-voters. Indeed, through their formal qualities and modes of dissemination, literary texts could have pronounced power to engage varied audiences, and fuel a culture of contested elections, even when many seats were not contested and many could not vote. The election miscellany highlights links between election literature and regional printing, political, and literary cultures, and the growth of a market for this writing. At the same time, the authorship of election literature afforded diverse individuals a form of political expression and participation. Furthermore, the article considers the significance of the divergent, generically inflected views of candidates, elections, and the electoral activity of particular groups such literature advanced—for wider political culture, as well as specific elections. It proposes that texts from rousing ballads to vividly critical satires energized the divisions key to adversarial electoral culture, and could play into different calls for ‘reform’.