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REVIEWS
| A Mad, Bad, & Dangerous People? England 1783–1846. By Boyd Hilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xxvi plus 757 pp. $45).
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| Hilton's questioning whether Englishmen who lived during the years 1783–1846 deserved the label 'mad, bad, and dangerous' neatly encapsulates the substance of the latest volume in The New Oxford History of England series. The author makes the case that during the late eighteenth and early and middle years of this 'long nineteenth century' the unruly 'crowd'(which has garnered so much attention in recent English historiography) gradually became a 'respectable society'. This remarkable change was rooted in despair from having lost colonial America and concluded in jubilation derived from imperial resurgence in the mid-nineteenth century. Hilton calls this new colonialism a 'moral' empire and suggests labeling the entire epoch the Great Transformation (p. 1). |
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All the diverse themes notwithstanding, this book deserves top billing as one of periodization, and it is an extraordinarily good one at that. Hilton regards Chartism's demise as having settled the 'mob' matter; the Great Exhibition just a few years later projected the image of a new and quite different England: "An inescapable conclusion that the political events of 1846 did not point forwards, but brought to a close the hegemony of a governing order and a set of political ideas that had preponderated since 1783." (p. 513). This assumption, which undercuts E. L.Woodward's logic of 1815 in the earlier Oxford History as a starting point, is equally dismissive of the Industrial Revolution as an epoch marker. |
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Having pronounced this Mad, Bad, etc. as one on periodization, this reviewer feels compelled to admit that it is not obtrusively so. While the defining structure is political/ chronological, this narrative is softened by a vibrant, sometimes folksy style and enlivened and amplified by sketches of great lives, and thematic essays on religion, science and literature. |
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