Public Petitions to the House of Commons, 1780-1918

The data contains two files that together record and classify over one million public petitions to the House of Commons, 1780-1918, by the subjects that they addressed, which in turn are placed into broader categories to facilitate analysis. For the 1833 to 1918 period, the data also records the 165 million signatures on public petitions to the House of Commons, classified by subject and category. The data was produced as part of a project examining the role of petitions and petitioning in the UK during the ‘long’ nineteenth century (1780-1918) as a universal form of political expression, participation, mobilisation and representative before democracy. This data enabled researchers to establish key chronological trends, and the key subjects and themes on which petitioners addressed the House of Commons. It was thus the foundation for the project. The data is based on aggregate of public petitions classified by subject. The data does not contain petitions to other authorities (e.g. the monarchy, local or central government, or the House of Lords); petitions to Parliament concerning private or local bills; petitions to Parliament regarding contested parliamentary elections; or the signatory lists for the petitions (as the original manuscript petitions do not survive). The data does not include the detail of specific petitions (e.g. the self-description of petitioners or specific location), rather it captures the number of aggregate petitions on particular topics.