UK Elections in Fiction
| DOI | 10.1111/2041-9066.12084 |
| Published date | 01 April 2015 |
| Date | 01 April 2015 |
| Author | Steven Fielding |
| Subject Matter | Article |
22 POLITICAL INSIGHT • APRIL 2015
As Britain prepares for the
2015 general election, an
unprecedented number say they
will support the United Kingdom
Independence Party (Ukip), a party whose
main purpose is to articulate an inchoate
popular disenchantment with Westminster.
Such is the alienation from the established
institutions of representative democracy,
less than half of Britons are certain to vote,
according to the 2014 Hansard Society Audit
of Political Engagement.
There was a time when general elections
enjoyed a far more central role in national
life: in 1950 as many as 84 per cent of adults
went to the polls. Like the FA Cup Final, the
Monarch’s Christmas Address and Derby Day,
elections were one of those occasions when
the nation shared the same experience. At
least according to the ocial view, the very
act of voting demonstrated that which all
the monarch’s subjects held in common,
distinguishing them from those poor
foreigners oppressed by autocratic emperors,
fascist despots or Communist dictators.
Indicting their cultural importance in times
gone by, according to Christopher Harvie’s
The Centre of Things (1991), elections were
a quintessential part of the Victorian novel,
being a narrative device that put issues of
right and wrong or personal ambition to the
test. Indeed, Harvie sees such novels as a vital
means of schooling the newly enfranchised in
the ways of the Westminster model, thereby
ensuring their integration into the mother of
all parliamentary systems.
Harvie is a historian, one of a number
working in that discipline, who sees ction
as a way of constructing how Britons regard
their real democracy. Yet, few experts in
contemporary British politics take ction
seriously when trying to explain why so many,
as Colin Hay put it, ‘hate politics’.
But, many authors and dramatists have used
their work to critique the electoral process for
the entertainment of millions and in so doing
have acted as vernacular political theorists
with an inuence beyond the dreams of their
academic equivalents. And, despite what
Harvie says about the Victorian novel, such
gures – many of whom had close experience
of politics – have generally highlighted the
failure of elections to represent the people,
increasingly taking a populist turn in blaming
politicians for this unhappy state of aairs.
From Dickens to Trollope
Former Parliamentary reporter Charles
Dickens, was the rst writer to depict a British
election in ctional form. In The Pickwick Papers
(1837) Dickens has his innocent hero enter the
hurly-burly of the Eatanswill by-election. Set in
the period before the introduction of the 1832
Reform Act, when the franchise was severely
limited and elections often corrupt, Dickens
the radical was understandably scathing
about the contest. Despite its pre-democratic
setting, his story nonetheless set down
themes that would be reworked in ctions
Steven Fielding takes a look at representations of British general elections in fictions – and finds that on
the page and on screen depictions often influence how voters view real world politics, contributing to the
current populist rejection of established politics.
UK Elections in Fiction
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