British General Election 1868

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18681874 →

(in %)

 %

70

60

50

40

30th

20th

10

0

61.2

38.7

0.05

Liberals

Tories

Otherwise.

Gains and losses

compared to 1865

 % p

   2

   0

  -2

  -4

+1.7

-1.8

+0.05

Liberals

Tories

Otherwise.

387

271

387 271 

A total of 658 seats

• Liberals : 387
• Tories : 271

The United Kingdom general election in 1868 ran from November 7th to December 7th, 1868. The winner was the Liberal Party under William Ewart Gladstone .

Suffrage

In the previous year, with the Reform Act 1867, the right to vote was redesigned. With this law, the number of eligible voters almost doubled. The reform gave all male heads of household the right to vote, so that of five million adult men in England and Wales, 2.5 million instead of the previous 1.4 million could vote.

It was therefore the first election in the UK to receive more than a million votes; compared to the previous election in 1865, the number of votes has almost tripled. With this result, the Liberals, led by William Ewart Gladstone, were able to increase their large majority over Benjamin Disraeli's Conservatives to more than 100 seats. This was the last parliamentary election in which all seats were only occupied by the two leading parties, although the parties were loose coalitions at the time and party affiliation was not listed on the registration papers.

swell

• FWS Craig: British Electoral Facts: 1832-1987, 1989, ISBN 0900178302 .
• Colin Rallings: British Electoral Facts 1832-1999, 2000.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gottfried Niedhart: History of England in the 19th and 20th centuries. CH Beck, Munich 1996, p. 95 ff.