Volume 12, Number 12 · June 19, 1969
Farmers in Arms
By J.H. Plumb
Captain Swing
by Rudé George, by E.J. Hobsbawm
Pantheon, 384 pp., $7.95
William Cobbett, His Thought and His Times
by John W. Osborne
Rutgers University, 272 pp., $10.00
The English Jacobins
by Carl B. Cone
Scribners, 248 pp., $6.95
The nature of English politics in the late eighteenth century has suffered because historians, like voyeurs in a crowd, get hypnotized by the object of their preoccupation and pursue it with a concentration so intense that they ignore everything else that jostles them for their attention. For Sir Lewis Namier politics was the House of Commons and its members, rather than its activity. Who were these members? How did they get there? These were the grand objects of his passion. That artisans of Birmingham, the great manufacturing center of the English Midlands, were swarming to John Freeth's coffee house and passing resolutions in favor of Wilkes and, later, of the American colonists mattered not one whit to him. The control of the Forester family of the nearby constituency of Much Wenlock obsessed his eye.
Review, 2179 words
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