1880 Election Violence Mapped

For Easter Friday, we have suspended our usual Short EV Accounts in favour of releasing a geographical day-by-day representation of our 1880 election violence tweets; the red dots appear on the day that they occurred, while the black dots represent all events over the election period:

It seems clear that election violence was both common and geographically widespread, reaching most areas of England and Wales.  The most interesting things among the dispersed events that we’ve noticed are as follows:

  1. The relative concentration of violent events in Lancashire and the surrounding region; this broadly conforms with our data for previous elections – possible causes for this include the economic and religious composition of the population.
  2. Given the size of London’s population, the number of events occurring in the capital is much lower than might be expected – one possible explanation for this is the relative skill of local authorities (especially the Metropolitan Police) in maintaining order, as opposed to still-developing Victorian constabularies in other areas of the country.

These, and other potential causes and consequences of electoral violence, will be explored in detail by our project.

(The county boundaries are provided by www.VisionofBritain.org.uk and uses historical material which is copyright of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project and the University of Portsmouth)

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