Hawley Croft, a very poor area of Sheffield, date unknown. Source: Picture Sheffield.
By the early 1850s the working-class struggle for Chartism was largely spent, both nationally and in Sheffield, although Isaac Ironside’s Democrats offered a radical alternative to the middle-class Liberal establishment that ran municipal politics.
In the 1860s leading Liberals formed the Sheffield Reform Freehold Association to campaign for the secret ballot, free trade, extension of suffrage and opposition to the extension of religious endowments. Reform demonstrations, held in the Haymarket in January 1867 and in Paradise Square in May of the same year, attracted large crowds. The 1867 Act trebled the Sheffield electorate from 9,000 to 28,000 and many workers were able to vote for the first time.
In the 1870s younger radical Liberals appeared who energetically supported ‘reformist’ causes at home and abroad and reached out to the trades unions and working classes, but by the 1880s the Liberal party was losing supporters to the Conservative cause while under the surface a new socialist radicalism was emerging.
