A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783-1846

BEFORE the advent of ‘the long eighteenth century’, a Berlin Wall lay between the historiography of eighteenth- and of nineteenth-century Britain, generally constructed, for no very good reason, at Waterloo. On its far side lay the moral economy, gin lane, Gordon riots, and on its near the age of equipoise. The partition was embodied in the preceding volumes in the Oxford History of England series, J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–1815 (1960; rev. ante, lxxvii (1962), 115–8) and E.L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (1938; rev. ante, liv (1939), 517–9), and much of the monographic literature continued to operate either side of it. It was therefore prima facie welcome when historians began to cross its border, most famously in the diverse assessments respectively of ideology, national identity, and party development, by J.C.D. Clark, Linda Colley, and Frank O’Gorman, all of which pursued continuities either to the reform bills or to Victoria's accession, and reduced older periodisations to rubble. As Boyd Hilton freely acknowledges in the bibliography of his tour de force in the New Oxford series, his is not the first survey text the very periodisation of which defies either convention. Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement (1959; rev. ante, lxxv (1960), 173–4) and Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State (1983), as well as more recently Michael J. Turner, The Age of Unease (2000) and Jennifer Mori, Britain in the Age of the French Revolution (2000), all had a terminus a quo of, or around, 1783, and, Hilton argues, could therefore do better justice to the domestic consequences of the American and French revolutions and the emergence of a new political and economic order.