Westminster and Southwark had defined boundaries, having time out of mind sent representatives to Parliament. By the Reform Act of 1832 five new boroughs were formed out of the remainder, and two representatives were assigned to each. The City alone possessed corporate privileges and civic organization, while outside its ambit lay a confused and anomalous wilderness of parochial jurisdictions and extraparochial liberties, whimsically unequal in their scope and tenor, and frequently irreconcilable in their pretensions and powers. The attempt to describe the chaos that prevailed reads now like an incredible fiction. Three hundred different bodies, under various appellations and with the utmost diversity of functions, claimed the right by prescriptive usage, or by modern acts passed from time to time, to impose local rates for various purposes. No fewer than 10,448 individuals as vestrymen, commissioners, guardians, members of manorial courts, and magistrates of quarter sessions were engaged in daily contention, carried on at the public cost, about the right to do all that required to be locally done, and how not to do it. Streets were unpaved, rights of way were disputed, whole regions lay in darkness by night, unswept and unwatered by day.
Commissioners of Sewers, many of them named ex officio, possessed but ill-defined jurisdiction, which they exercised in general so negligently and at times so arbitrarily, that as a desperate remedy their number was reduced from upwards of a thousand to twenty-three, and subsequently to eleven. Their character for efficiency, however, did not mend, and parochial wags affected to believe that their real function was that of accumulation—not dispersion—of nuisances, especially in the article of debt.
Diversities in the mode of choosing vestrymen and requiting parochial officers naturally arose from the wide discrepancies of situation, ways of life, and other special circumstances in busy communities, practically remote from one another from want of leisure, curiosity, and facilities of cheap locomotion; and within reasonable bounds these disparities would have mattered little. In Hackney no one was qualified who dwelt not in a house valued at £40 a year; and Bloomsbury was so genteel that no man, however good his trade, was allowed to serve if he let any part of his house in
