19세기 말 영국의 상원개혁론―1880-1895년 잡지 논설 분석―

Abstract

There was heated and voluminous debate in the form of periodical articles on the status, structure, and power of the House of Lords in Britain in the period 1880-1895. Of the 79 articles published in influential periodicals including Contemporary Review, Fortnightly Review, National Review, Nineteenth Century and Westminster Review, more than half advocated reform, not abolition of or status quo for the Lords. Reformists defined the House of Lords as a Second Chamber to check the ‘democratic’ House of Commons. To enhance the representative nature and weaken the dominant hereditary principle of the Lords, these reformists proposed to change the Lord’s composition by reducing the number of hereditary peers and establishing life peerages within it. Compared to the discoursive intensity on the raison d’être and structure of the House of Lords, the question of the Lords’ veto did not attract much attention from the reformists. In this sense, the celebrated Parliament Act 1911, which restricted the power of the Lords, articulated in statutory form a kind of technical aspect of the reform question of the late 19th century. However, as the Preamble to the Parliament Act 1911 reveals, the late 19th century debate on reform of the House was a discoursive prerequisite for the Parliament Act 1911 and a signpost for post-1945 legislation such as the Parliament Act 1949, the Life Peerages Act 1958, the Peerages Act 1963, and the House of Lords Act 1999, which were largely concerned with structural change within the House of Lords.