The Path of Least Resistance: Mapping the 1832 Reform Act and Felix Holt

The 1832 Reform Act has been hailed as the best mapped piece of legislation of the century, and this from a country characterised by map historians as ‘leading the map-making world with the most prolific output and the most innovatory technology ever known in cartographic history’. This paper examines a cartographic corpus – of retrospective, interpretative maps – in relation to the riots and resistance associated with the passing of the Great Reform Act. By arguing that Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical (1866) contributes to such a corpus, thanks to its concern with ideas of discretisation and summation, its aerial insistence and its belatedness, the paper attempts to cartographically contextualise traditional critique of Felix Holt’s much-debated conservatism and engages with the problems of using an archive to animate resistance.