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The Social Calculus: Deference and Defiance in Later Georgian England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

John A. Phillips
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Extract

The history of the long reign of George III has recently been shaken by a vigorous and determined revisionism. A temblor of this magnitude has not been felt since Sir Lewis Namier mounted his prosopographical revolution more than half a century ago. Indeed, it has been suggested that J. C. D. Clark's English Society actually will surpass the influence of Namier's Structure of Politics. If so, it is difficult to imagine the combined impact of English Society, Rebellion and Revolution, The Dynamics of Change, The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, the host of articles already published, and the plethora of words certain to be typeset in the relatively near future.

Perhaps Clark's relentless torrent of prose will relegate to the historiographical scrap heap virtually all existing scholarship about the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in favor of his corrected model of Hanoverian England. Already Clark claims that the standard account depicting eighteenth-century England as “an economically progressive society, increasingly secular and individualist in its ethos and distinctively demarcated from its European contemporaries” is, quite simply, “no longer tenable.” Clark's most recent pronouncement declares that “the revisionists’ [i.e. his] views of the period now command widespread acceptance.” The revisionist view cannot be fairly summarized in a single statement (though the phrases “ancien regime” and “confessional state” both manage nicely to encompass a great deal), but a passage Clark cites to illustrate England at the death of George III serves as a point of departure.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , Fall 1989 , pp. 426 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1989

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Footnotes

*

A version of this paper was read at the joint meeting of the North American and Pacific North-west Conferences on British Studies in Portland, Oregon, October 1987. I would like to thank the Research Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California, Riverside for its support of this research, and Louis Masur, Charles Wetherell, and Virginia Ettinger for their criticisms.

References

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