What the Act did was to transfer the balance of power from the landed aristocracy, which had been in the main predominant since 1688, to the richer members of the middle class--the big farmers in the country, the prosperous shopkeepers in the towns.

The working class was still voteless, and the old democratic franchise of Preston and Westminster was gone from those boroughs.
The first reformed Parliament met early in 1833, and the change in the character of the House of Commons was seen at once.

Government accepted responsibility for legislation in a way that had never been known before.
The New Poor Law, 1834, and the new Municipal Corporations Act, 1835, were the beginning of our present system of local government.

Slavery was abolished in all British Colonies in 1833.
Greville, in his Memoirs, gives us an impression of the new regime in Parliament as it appeared to one who belonged to the old dethroned aristocracy.
"The first thing that strikes one is its inferiority to preceding Houses of Commons, and the presumption, impertinence, and self-sufficiency of the new members....

There exists no _party_ but that of the Government; the Irish act in a body under O'Connell to the number of about forty; the Radicals are scattered up and down without a leader, numerous, restless, turbulent, bold, and active; the Tories, without a head, frightened, angry, and sulky." THE WORKING CLASS STILL UNREPRESENTED But the working classes were the really disappointed people in the country.
They had worked for the reformers, and their energies--and their violence--had been the driving force that had carried the Bill into law.