ABSTRACT
The aspiring political community in Bath, Freemen, tradesmen, and artisans, like the trade unionists, seemed to have found little to engage their attentions in the Utopias of the eighteenth century. The political claims they eventually made show that most of them found it in the programme of political reform advocated by John Cartwright as early as 1776. At the end of the eighteenth century, the independence that had been a feature of the Corporation's electoral record, had begun to change. In education the most successful development, illustrating the spread of radical consciousness among artisans, was the formation of the Mechanics Institute in 1825. In Bath the immediate preliminaries to the Reform Bill focused on the election of 1830.
