A major accomplishment of Britain’s Reform Act of 1832 was that it gave voting rights to the middle class.
The Reform Act gave benches in the House of Commons to the large cities that had emerged during the Industrial Revolution, and took away seats from the so-called "rotten boroughs" (unpopulated cities that continued to have their representation of medieval origin). The law also increased the number of individuals eligible to vote, increasing the mass of the electorate from about 500,000 to 813,000, and thus allowing one in six adult men to vote, in a total population of 14 million people.
