Mapping and ‘stage-managing’ elections in the long eighteenth century: electoral culture, popular politics and the rhetoric of political space

Abstract

This article uses diverse forms of electoral culture – including newspapers and magazines, election plays and ballads – to recover an overlooked aspect of perceptions of political corruption in the ‘pre-Reform’ era: the partisan control of electoral space. These forms also present new perspectives on the political engagement of voters and non-voters, showing how perceived spatial corruption was actively exposed to public view. In the process, the article unearths a multimedia precursor to Hogarth’s famous series on the ‘humours’ of an election, which combines text, mapping and visual satire to challenge the legitimacy of an election result, and how the dynamic interplay between drama and electoral culture – including the contemporary puppet play – helped to popularize opposition to the ‘stage-managing’ of elections. Election ‘mapping’ affords new avenues into the eighteenth century as an age both of perceived corruption and of active challenges to that corruption.