Volume 24, Number 6 · April 14, 1977
Who Shot Aunt Sally?
By A.J.P. Taylor
The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Nineteenth Century English Political System
by David Cresap Moore
Barnes and Noble Books (a division of Harper and Row), 529 pp., $19.50
'The study of politics is just now in a curiously unsatisfactory position.' This sentence by Graham Wallas is evidently a favorite of David Cresap Moore's. He uses it a number of times. This is indeed a habit of his. Once he has found a good quotation he repeats it again and again until the reader is ready to scream with tedium. I was quite interested to learn that Lord Grey defined the 'first and most anxious object' of his government in 1830 as 'the relief of distress' or that Lord John Russell revealed in 1854 a vital 'defect' of the Reform Act. But when I was told these things half a dozen times I began to duck for cover. At any rate we can adapt Graham Wallas's sentence and say that to judge by this book the study of British politics in the mid-nineteenth century is in a very unsatisfactory position indeed. David Moore clearly thinks so. But his attempt to put things right threatens to make confusion worse confounded.
Review, 2123 words
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