At the IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on 17 June 2025, Professor Julian Hoppit, Honorary Professor of British History at UCL, will be discussing John Rickman and his career in Parliament.
The seminar takes place on 17 June 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.
John Rickman (1771-1840) is best known for overseeing the first four censuses in Britain, 1801-31. These were indeed a considerable achievement, though they were beset with shortcomings, only some of which he acknowledged.
Rickman has also been considered in relation to his contribution to debates over political economy, particularly through his relationship with Robert Southey, Poet Laureate from 1813 to 1843, who like Rickman ditched an early enthusiasm for the French Revolution for Toryism. Southey, along with other leading literary figures of the time, valued Rickman for the breadth of his knowledge and the pugnacity of his views.
While those two elements to Rickman’s life were very important, they were predicated on his parliamentary work, which deserves to be better known. He was Charles Abbot’s secretary as Speaker from 1802-14 and then a clerk in the Commons for the rest of his life.
These led to his considerable roles in building roads, bridges, harbours and churches in Scotland. He also played a major part in producing the printed records of the Commons, notably the Votes, while also indexing the Commons Journals and Hatsell’s Precedents. He was a witness to many select committees, some concerned with wider matters of the day, leading him to innovative tabulations, including counts of acts, attendance in the Commons and local taxation.
He was lauded for these efforts. Five MPs heaped praise on him when the Commons noted his death, including Lord John Russell, Henry Goulburn and Joseph Hume. Yet privately Rickman disdained much of his routine work and savaged most parliamentarians, of both houses, including Russell and Hume.
These criticisms reflected a misanthropic streak in his personality. Rickman’s rich and revealing correspondence with Southey is littered with slurs of individuals, not only Whigs, and of positions he was hostile to, especially ‘liberality’ and ‘mock humanity’. Rickman hated the ‘mob’ and the press. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), and despite becoming independently wealthy in 1817 and seriously considering retirement in the early 1830s, he kept his shoulder to the wheel. Rickman worked ferociously hard in and for Parliament over nearly four decades.
How to interpret this? An obvious starting point is with Rickman’s role as an administrator and civil servant. Yet he ill fits Max Weber’s typology, showing characteristics of both the pre-modern and the modern bureaucrat. The same could be said regarding Aylmer’s more historically informed ‘old administrative scheme’.
Rickman was a one-off, which means it is more helpful to place him in his immediate context. The route to his parliamentary career began with George Rose, his local MP. It was from Rose, usefully described as a ‘man of business’ by Joanna Innes, that the connection to Charles Abbot was made, in around 1800. Abbot was not just Rickman’s employer, but his patron, promoting his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, while Abbot’s wife was godmother to Rickman’s first child.
As is reasonably well known, though historians might have made rather more of it, from 1796 Abbot was a leading figure in various significant efforts to improve practices in the House of Commons, including financial management, the promulgation of statutes, the Journals and its library. Abbot, Jeremy Bentham’s stepbrother it might be remembered, used Rickman in these reform efforts, which Rickman then took further when Abbot’s Speakership ended in 1817.
Associated with this was Rickman’s steadfast commitment to hard work. This might have been a more general psychological state and he never set out why he gave so much to his parliamentary roles, but it seems likely that it was to show that the Commons, as it was, could function effectively, in the process advancing its dignity.
Rickman’s effort was commensurate with Bagehot’s later remark that ‘The House of Commons needs to be impressive … but its use resides not in its appearance, but in its reality.’ Abbot and Rickman both sought to improve practices in the Commons, based on better information of what it had done previously rather than abstractions, and without embracing the language of reform. This was Burkean in its way. But Rickman was suspicious of economical reform and defended payment by fees rather than salaries, while relishing his lack of specific expertise.
Despite Rickman’s lack of enthusiasm after 1800 for reform in any guise, his own work was, in its own way, revolutionary. The census allowed the state much greater knowledge not only of demographic matters but, as David Green has shown, the complexities of ecclesiastical and civil administrations.
The rag bag of jurisdictions that had evolved over the centuries was hard to justify, even harder to engage with to ensure equity in central-local relations. Municipal reform in 1835 rested on this, along with raw head counts of urban populations. The census was also, as Stephen Thompson has shown in a brilliant doctoral thesis, employed heavily in the debates that led to the Reform Act of 1832. Rickman placed great faith in facts, but failed to see how corrosive they could be of the world he cherished.
Rickman’s contradictions were also evident in his faith. The son of a clergyman of the Church of England, he conscientiously attended St Margaret’s, Westminster from 1802, late in life publishing a brief commentary on its historical curiosities. He was interred there. Yet he deplored the ‘baseness’ of the episcopal bench over the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and Catholic Emancipation and bemoaned the abilities and energy of many clergy when called upon to provide him with data.
But there was more to his religious disposition than this. He set firm limits to the scope of providence, denying its continuing role; as a young man he refused a lucrative offer to take holy orders, unwilling as he was to tell ‘lies once a week’; and in his will he forcefully expressed his opposition to his son’s long expressed aim of taking holy orders. At best, clearly his views were complex.
That the History of Parliament project focuses upon biographies of members is understandable. It is rarely possible to delve far into the lives of those many others who made Parliament work. There is no claim here that Rickman was in any ways typical, but he alerts us to the fact that even those playing supporting roles could influence, sometimes significantly, what MPs and peers could and did do.
The seminar takes place on 17 June 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.