June
1818
liverpool
Contested
GENERAL ELECTION
In the general election of June 1818, 2864 people voted. There were 9 candidates, with George Canning I & Isaac Gascoyne elected.
Poll book data from:
Citation: The poll for the election… (Liverpool: J. Gore, 1818)
Source: John Sims (ed.), A Handlist of British Parliamentary Poll Books (Leicester, 1984); Jeremy Gibson and Colin Rogers (eds.), Poll Books, 1696–1872: A Directory of Holdings in Great Britain (4th edn., Bury, 2008); L. W. L. Edwards (ed.), Catalogue of Directories and Poll Books in the Possession of the Society of Genealogists (4th edn., 1984).
Timeline & Key Statistics
Contexts & Remarks
- Nine candidates appear in the poll book for the Liverpool general election of 1818, but only three received more than ten votes: George Canning, Isaac Gascoyne, and William Philip Molyneux, Earl of Sefton. Each stood independently. Canning, a liberal Tory minister in the Liverpool Administration, on the interest of a faction of Canningite independents; Gascoyne, on the interest of the corporation; and Sefton, on the interest of the Whigs (though he declined to canvass to avoid expense). The other candidates were all proposed by the various factions as a means of opening up more friendly bars at which freemen could vote for their main candidate.
- Sefton retired from the contest on 25 June with Canning having another 300 voters to poll.
- The poll book is arranged so that 'Vote 1', on the left-hand side of the votes column, indicate at whose bar the vote was cast (i.e. if an elector's votes reads 'C S' it indicates that they voted for Canning and Sefton at the bar of Canning.
People & Places
Poll Book
Below is a digitised version of the poll book for this election: