"This ill-shaped monster": Writing the Representation of the Commons in Parliament, 1776-1831

High-profile campaigns to bring about legislative change, by using writing to inform public opinion and by demonstrating that opinion to the House of Commons, generally failed, 1772-1828. Writers were looked to as more responsive effecters of real-world change. They used the figure of the writer as a Member of Parliament to describe what and why (to do what? to whom?) they wrote. By questioning how far Members were elected by and represented the interests of the people, their mandate to legislate, reformers simultaneously opened a critical space in which writers could question their own mandate to write, at a time when it was more possible for women and/or members of lower income groups to live by their pen. I trace the ways in which the reform debate affected how the writer-as-legislator figure was used by three writers who (a) claimed to apply experimental realistic modes to represent ordinary, private life and (b) subscribed to different reform ideologies. All three pitted a ‘rightly’-mandated writer and legislator against a ‘wrongly’-mandated writer and legislator, representers of the ‘right’ against representers of the ‘wrong’ group’s interests in writing and in statutes. William Wordsworth aspired to represent what he abstracted from his subjects’ reality, as thinkers and actors in socio-political and -economic contexts. Despite his support for radical reform before 1818, Wordsworth compared such a writer to a Member not elected by the people, who represented his own, party, or electoral supporters’ interests. George Crabbe and Maria Edgeworth aspired to represent their subjects’ reality and to align themselves with a reformed House of Commons, elected by and representing the interests of a larger subset of the people. These findings dispute Raymond Williams’s thesis that the ideal of writing as a representation of subjects’ ordinary way of life, their reality, emerged during the mid-nineteenth century.