ABSTRACT
The records of controverted elections provide historians with unrivalled access to late-Georgian political culture. It illuminates rich complexity and restoring the personal dimension to electoral politics by exposing the acts, thoughts and feelings of the individuals who brought it to life. Public canvasses, favours and private canvasses were carefully calibrated and made use of increasingly private or domestic locations as the pressure for votes increased. Women were active at all stages of local election campaigns as workers, witnesses and objects of canvassing. They played a formal legal role in a political system that recognised them as rational and reliable witnesses and officially privileged their local knowledge and personal experience. Their interactions with committee members, candidates and agents, like those of their male counterparts, were expressions of gender and power. Gender operated from the bottom up as well as the top down, enabling labouring-sort men and women to make moral claims to respectability, corrupt and ungentle manlike behaviours.
