The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660-1780 by John SmailReview by: John A. PhillipsThe American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 1206-1207Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2169697 .

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1206 Reviews of Books

culmination of right-wing sensibilities (taking prece- dence over attachment to monarchy) seems an arbi- trary choice given the rich array of conservative atti- tudes that he has so painstakingly disinterred. After all, it was not a Catholic but the Evangelical William Wilberforce who achieved the status of "rightist bogey man" (p. 204), excoriated less for his antislavery crusade than for his neo-Puritanism. More convincing, albeit anticlimactic, is Sack's admission of the difficul- ties in identifying a consistently rightist attitude with respect to issues of national policy. Instead, the right- winger has to be recognized in the vaguer terms of "disposition," and "a certain edge or inflection in the argument" (p. 253), the targets of which shifted over time: from slave traders and imperialists in the eigh- teenth century, to abolitionists, other do-gooders, and political economists in the early nineteenth. This right- ist sensibility, it seems, was less the inspiration for modern Toryism than a kind of ideological dyspepsia that had to be palliated before a renewed Tory party could emerge.

JOHN SAINSBURY Brock University

JOHN SMAIL. The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Hali- fax, Yorkshire, 1660-1780. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni- versity Press. 1994. Pp. xvi, 240. $39.95.

Recently, a number of vigorous revisionisms have suggested that the long-established orthodoxy con- cerning eighteenth and nineteenth-century England is not just incorrect but has actually been replaced by a new consensus. In place of earlier accounts of dramatic change, these revisionists posit continuity. Although not portraying England during the long eighteenth century as an ancien regime, these revisionists stress the absence of profound change until at least the last third of the nineteenth century, if then. For this group, there was no industrial revolution, no "age of reform," and no vibrant change in many social, economic, and political arenas beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century and extending across the nine- teenth. Although he does not engage this revisionism directly, perhaps the most important contribution of John Smail's local history of Halifax during the century following the Restoration is the compelling evidence he presents against continuity. He demonstrates a critical change that crystallized a middle class in Yorkshire in the two decades after 1750. Not for Smail is this new notion that continuity marked England's development; in his book, Industrial Revolution always appears in uppercase, and he emphasizes the changing scale that began to transform the nation even before the accession of George III.

Arguing that currently the middle class "is little more than a caricature" (p. xiii), Smail joins R. -J. Morris (Class, Sect, and Party [1990]), Dror Wahrman (Imagining the Middle Class [1995]), and others in considering this group seriously. In order to study the making of the middle class effectively, Smail believes

that he must blend the empiricism of traditional economic history with the antiempiricism of the new cultural history. But to achieve such a blend is about as easy as achieving nuclear fusion in a water glass at room temperature, and he predictably fails in this task. Fortunately, this failure does not really harm the book. Instead, it leaves an intricately detailed, solidly archi- val study of local history occasionally marked by linguistic turns in which Smail valiantly attempts to blend matter and antimatter before turning back to the issues at hand. He brings to bear an impressive collec- tion of evidence concerning the changing nature of the economy and society in Halifax in the second half of the century taken from quarter sessions records, wills, probate registers, letter books, ledgers, churchwar- dens' and bankrupts' accounts, hearth tax returns, and family histories. Smail's "The Stansfields of Halifax" in Albion (24: 1, 1992) presaged the book's economic argument, without the postmodernist gloss.

Smail is fatally flawed as a postmodernist because, as he admits himself, he believes in "socioeconomic reality," as the long list of his primary sources confirms (p. xiv). He is much more successful as a student of older social and cultural theories. For example, he uses Juirgen Habermas to good effect in setting up his principal argument. Thus, differences in both the public and private spheres resulted in an "emerging class consciousness" among "Halifax's merchants, manufacturers, and professionals," who set themselves "in opposition to the parish's yeomen and artisans" on the one hand, and "the landed elites" on the other in ways that drew upon their experiences in both realms (p. 163). According to Smail, local and national politics shaped the emerging consciousness of the middle class in the public sphere, but changes in the private sphere played an equally critical role as new forms of a more "orderly and exclusive" sociability differentiated the middle class from its neighbors (p. 186).

An anthropological sensibility also enriches this careful local study; on more than one occasion cock- fights enter the story, although Smail wisely resists pushing that part of the story too far. He also considers the role of deference and independence in the emer- gence of the middle class in Halifax. After leveling charges against other historians for considering the middle class in a "studiously vague" fashion (p. 13), Smail engages in his own distinctive variety of ambi- guity by discussing the "marginal or pseudo gentry" (p. 29). More interesting is his consideration of the damage done to E. P. Thompson's identification of the working class by his reliance upon an "abstract na- tional class discourse." Smail believes that Thompson would have made a more resilient case had he been able to articulate the relationship between the national discourse and the "practical and contextualized local class discourse" (p. 231). But Smail does not follow his own advice. He limits his study to that local class discourse and leaves the larger relationship -largely unexplored. The problem with such a consciously

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1996

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Modern Europe 1207

limited local approach, however, is the barrier it automatically raises against generalizations.

JOHN A. PHILLIPS University of California, Riverside

PETER MANDLER. Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830-1852. New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. 1990 Pp. xii, 307. $75.00.

The status of the Whig party in the age of reform has often been regarded as that of an anachronism. Having fulfilled their historical function as "trustees of the people" in the fortuitous circumstances of 1830-1832, the Whigs lost their raison d'etre and became a feck- less, amateurish coterie of aristocrats, adept at high political maneuvers but little more. Their survival in the age of reform underscored the willingness of members of the middle class to leave the governance of the nation to their social superiors and perhaps the ability of at least a few Whigs to translate the aristo- cratic concerns for virtue and civilization into a com- mercial idiom.

Peter Mandler's book seeks to revise these views. Drawing on a copious range of Whig private papers, Mandler disaggregates the party into different sections or styles of governance. He shows that while some Whigs were attracted to economic liberalism, most notably those who contributed to the pages of the Edinburgh Review, influencial Whigs at the center of the party, organized informally through Holland House, retained the Foxite tradition of acting as the trustees of the people. They did this by striving to enact social legislation that would ameliorate the conditions of the people, temper popular discontent, and avert democratic reform. In Mandler's view, the 1830s and 1840s did not see a smooth progression to economic liberalism but a continuing dialogue about the virtues of government intervention in which the aristocratic Whigs played a formidable role.

In seeking to establish a constructive, centralizing role for the Whig aristocracy, Mandler is immediately confronted with the Whig government's uneven and ambiguous record prior to 1841. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was, after all, a weak central- izing measure. Although it established a Central Com- mission to guide local Boards of Guardians in their management of poor relief, the thrust of the act was to eliminate "indulgent" modes of social welfare in favor of a harsher workhouse regimen designed to encour- age greater self-reliance among the poor. Similarly, the Factory Act of 1833 was a compromise measure that sought to thwart the demands of factory reformers outside of Parliament by regulating only the hours of children under thirteen and establishing only a modest inspectorate to police them. Taken together with the government's authoritarian response to industrial un- rest, it is no accident that such acts fueled rather than abated demands for democratic reform and did noth-

ing to convince the unenfranchised that the Whigs were genuinely interested in addressing popular griev- ances.

Mandler's response to these issues is to stress the political difficulties that the Whigs encountered in framing a legislative program amenable to all interests in the party and outside of it and to point, instructively, to the fact that the New Poor Law was, in its origins at least, of liberal Tory rather than Whig inspiration. These explanations hardly strengthen his central thesis that the Whigs were constructive social reformers in a Foxite tradition. Their record to 1841 smacks of legislative drift. The only latent Foxite propensities Mandler can find come from Lord John Russell, who, as Home Secretary after 1835, was beginning to find a rapport with Benthamite civil servants about the need for greater government intervention, and who was striving, with little success, to wrest education from sectarian voluntarism in order and to fashion a na- tional network of schools staffed by state-trained teachers.

Mandler's case rests or falls on the Whig record of 1841-1852, or more accurately 1846-1852, because Robert Peel was in power for the first six years of that period. Mandler makes a compelling case that the Foxite Whigs were far more interested in education, factory, and sanitary reform than the Tories, who remained essentially committed to laissez-faire. He shows that the reforms they enacted, most notably the Ten Hours Act of 1847 and the Public Health Act of the following year, the latter of which set up a General Board of Health with quite extensive powers to estab- lish local boards where mortality rates were above average, were not opportunistic sorties into social legislation but the product of genuine consultation with civil servants and different interest groups, grounded in the firm conviction that such legislation would be an antidote to social unrest. Against this, he shows that the Palmerstonians within the Whig party resisted the centralizing thrust of the board and starved it of funds. He also notes Russell's increasing isolation as an advocate of legislative activism in the party, and his inability to attract a younger generation of Whigs to his style of government, even to politics tout court. The result was that the impetus toward Victorian centralization was brief, superseded by Lord Palmerston's saber-rattling foreign policy on the one hand and by a continuing shift away from intervention- ism on the other. Within two years of its passing, George Grey would modify the Ten Hours Act in the interests of millowners and press for more fiscal con- servatism in government. Russell's vision of a strong central government, enacting social legislation in the public interest and paring down local impediments to change, was over almost as soon as it had begun.

Mandler's account of the shifts in the Whig party is measured and subtle, so subtle, in fact, that one wonders whether his main argument holds. Yet he does make a viable case that there were important countervailing tendencies to laissez-faire government

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1996

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