The Reform: or, How Would You Have It?

Overview
Charles Caleb Colton’s The Reform: or, How Would You Have It? is a five‑act comedy of manners and political satire from 1816 that turns the era’s fever for parliamentary and social change into the stuff of drawing‑room intrigue. Written in the unsettled years after the Napoleonic Wars, it treats reform less as a set of bills than as a fashionable enthusiasm, showing how slogans, pamphlets, and public meetings can be co‑opted by vanity, ambition, and self‑interest. The title’s wry challenge, how would you have it?, frames a debate about ends and means, exposing the gap between public virtue professed and private motives pursued.

Setting and Premise
The action moves between London salons, coffee‑house committees, and a provincial household whose inheritance becomes a lever for influence. Reform is the reigning mode: hosts display it like a new fabric, gentlemen rehearse it in clubs, and tradesmen invest in it as social capital. Against this backdrop, a courtship plot is yoked to a campaign plot. Whoever shapes opinion and captures the language of improvement stands to gain both a fortune and a reputation.

Characters and Conflict
At the center stands a fluent, self‑styled reformer who treats causes as stepping‑stones, switching principles as readily as coats. He pursues a wealthy young heiress whose clear sense and moral steadiness are protected by an older guardian of moderate convictions, a man wary of tumults and nostrums but not insensible to the need for change. Around them circulate a fashion‑struck hostess eager for novelty, a credulous alderman whose philanthropy dissolves under praise, a sincere but awkward suitor who believes reform begins at home, and a chorus of servants and dependents who observe how grand talk translates into small deeds. Wit, malapropism, and epigram mark their exchanges, with the heroine’s sobriety often pricking the bubbles of rhetoric.

Plot Summary
The would‑be tribune first wins drawing‑room allies by declaiming against abuses that cost his friends nothing to deplore. He converts a social circle into a committee, ghostwrites resolutions, and stages a public meeting meant to display his ascendancy. The guardian, unconvinced by oratory, contrives a series of tests that move talk from abstractions to responsibilities: a distressed tenant requires relief, a dismissed servant needs protection, and a charitable subscription is weighed in private accounts rather than public applause. Each episode uncovers the gap between declaration and action. Meanwhile, letters and drafts of puffing essays, circulated for signature, betray the reformer’s bargaining for posts and patronage.

The love intrigue tightens as the heiress, courted through her conscience, asks for consistency rather than compliments. Her other suitor, awkward in speech but consistent in conduct, becomes the play’s quiet counterexample: he supports reform where it remedies real hardship, resists it where it serves vanity, and submits his own interest to the test he applies to others. The showpiece meeting, engineered to crown the demagogue’s ascent, turns into an exposure when stage‑managed enthusiasm collides with unanticipated questions and with documentary evidence of his double‑dealing. Masks slip; allies reassess; the crowd’s cry for reform is redirected toward self‑reform. By the fifth act, the mercenary champion is undone by the very public he sought to manipulate, the moderate suitor wins the guardian’s consent and the heroine’s esteem, and the household restores order on a principle of improvement grounded in duty rather than display.

Themes and Style
The comedy satirizes cant, fashionable enthusiasm, and the trade in reputations, but it does not merely lampoon politics. It distinguishes between reform as moral discipline and reform as spectacle, between gradual amendment and incendiary posturing, between genuine charity and public‑spirited show. Colton’s taste for pointed aphorism animates the dialogue; characters earn their laughs and their lessons in couplets of sense that anticipate his later reputation for epigram. The final cadence answers the title’s question by implying that how you have it matters as much as what you have, and that a reformed polity begins with reformed persons.