Review

General Books

The politics examined in this lucidly written study, originally published in 1990, is distinctly "high politics." The foci of Derry's attention are the statesmen of the title and the other leading competitors for the favor of Parliament and George III and George IV from the 1780s to the 1820s. Local politics figures only as a backdrop against which the politicians at Westminster pursued place and power. Derry firmly relegates ideologues such as Burke and Eldon, on the one hand, and Paine and Major Cartwright, on the other, to the margins of the politics he studies. Cobbett and "Orator" Hunt, avatars of radical and class-conscious politics, make no appearance in the book at all; and the Duchess of Devonshire, now of so much interest to historians of gender, makes only one, simply as Fox's "warm admirer."	1
Derry's is not only high-political history, it is more specifically Pittite history. Pitt and Liverpool, whose careers at the highest level of politics successively spanned the two generations under study, appear here as pragmatic, conscientious, loyal, and hard-working statesmen devoted to the service of king and country in extraordinarily trying times. Derry sees Fox as a politician much more pragmatic in his behavior than subsequent Foxite history depicted him, and thus the Pittite virtues are, as by courtesy, extended in part to Fox himself. One is not entirely persuaded here: Fox's place in British history, certainly from the 1790s onward, is owing to much more than his flexibility and pragmatism.	2
Derry is first-rate in analyzing the conventions of the late Georgian constitution. His treatment of the relationship among king, prime minister, and cabinet is fresh and persuasive. He has keen and perceptive things to say about the growth of the collective responsibility of the Cabinet and the authority of the Prime Minister within the Cabinet. Derry moves confidently and carefully through the thicket of political and constitutional issues involved in Pitt's handling of the question of Catholic Emancipation at the turn of the century, and, indeed, in the subsequent history of that question, central to high politics until 1829.	3
Derry tackles party politics during the half-century as a veteran of historiographic debate on the subject. He firmly rejects searching for the origins of the Victorian two-party system in late Georgian politics. He is thus at odds with those who view this period as one in which a two-party system emerged. The frequency of Derry's warnings against such a view may be welcomed by teachers who know all too well that their students tend to think that the history of representative government and the history of two-party politics are coextensive. Yet here and there the author overdoes it. Derry acknowledges that the Foxites by the 1820s had successfully monopolized the label of "Whig," but he seems annoyed by their success. Similarly, he asserts that "it is far from satisfactory to call Liverpool a Tory." But not to call Liverpool a Tory in the 1820s is even less satisfactory, for it denies the common usage of the decade itself.	4
Politics in the Age of Fox, Pitt and Liverpool is for those who would study how power was used by men who possessed it or aimed to possess it. It expends little of its clear and readable prose on the doings of the "marginalized," whether by gender or by class. From Derry's point of view, the importance and significance of the Jacobin trials of the 1790s and the Peterloo "Massacre" have been much exaggerated; he thinks that Sidmouth, all told, was not a bad Home Secretary. At the end of the period, Derry concludes, personal liberty had been protected, private property was secure, and the country was but modestly taxed. These were the goals of good government in the age of Pitt and Liverpool, and they had been achieved in the face of blinkered Foxite obstruction and radical militancy.	5
This book will be most helpful to the diminishing number of those who find teaching its subject matter profitable and rewarding. Few American undergraduates without a prior knowledge of the main outlines of modern British history will be able fully to grasp what Politics has to offer them, but it will serve upper-level seminars quite well as an introduction to the monographic literature and primary sources. A beginning graduate student in modern British history can consult it with profit. The suggestions for further reading at the end of the book are valuable and up to date.	6
Grinnell College, Iowa D. A. Smith

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.