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Reviews of Books
Brighton to the later renovations to Windsor Castle
and Buckingham House, George's legacy as prince and
king is preserved in England's public architecture. He
distinguished himself in his support of literature and
the visual arts as well, and enriched the royal collections.
His political role and constitutional significance is
far more controversial. Here was a sovereign whose
unkopularity was dramatized in the spectacle staged in
the queen's trial, and who presided, however unwillingly, over two decades of dramatic changes—from
Trafalgar to Peterloo to Catholic Emancipation. Having dumped the Whigs when he became regent in 1812,
he retained the services of Lord Liverpool and then
supported George Canning, whom he had once despised. But for Canning's untimely death, Smith unpersuasively suggests, George IV "might be celebrated
as a truly effective constitutional monarch" (p. 235).
As it turned out, he bitterly gave the royal assent to
Catholic Emancipation before his reign ended in prolonged seclusion at Windsor Castle. The author's
generosity in judging him may be excessive, if only by
default. Noting that "his reign marked a vital stage in
the transition from the personal role of the king to the
rule of the Cabinet and Parliament," Smith suggests
that while George was not instrumental in producing
or guiding that process, "he helped to make the birth
possible" (p. 287). The reader is left with the ambiguity
characteristic of nineteenth-century litotes: "his reign
left a not unworthy legacy to his country" (p. 284).
ABRAHAM D. KRIEGEL
University of Memphis
Crowds, Culture, and Politics in
Georgian Britain. New York: Clarendon Press Oxford
University. 1998. Pp. ix, 291. $75.00.
NICHOLAS ROGERS.
Nicholas Rogers has long produced significant work on
the social history of eighteenth-century British political life. Now he has united many of his insights in a
compelling argument for the central place of crowds in
polities. He does so by avoiding the often rigid theoretical constraints that have shaped previous work on
crowds and riots. Instead, we get a subtle look at how
crowds (not the crowd) interacted in varied ways with
other kinds of political activity: elections, journalism,
parliamentary maneuvering, and litigation. The result
is a book that drives home the point that crowds
mattered because they provided the environment in
which common people acted on their concerns about
naval impressment, high food prices, or the corruption
imputed to royal ministers. Rogers demonstrates that
crowd participants were crucial actors in a vibrant,
inclusive political world and thus joins other historians
in undermining notions of a torpid eighteenth century
dominated by an ancien régime elite.
Rogers lays out his analytic debts and intentions in
the introduction. He follows Georges Lefebvre—and,
one might add, David Underdown—in seeing crowds
as a cultural phenomenon manifesting a collective
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW mentality, in this case, one shaped by traditional
celebrations of public anniversaries and other festivals.
Unlike George F. E. Rudé, who only saw crowds in
confrontation with those above, Rogers identifies a
"complex reciprocity" (p. 10) between crowds and
political elites. Crowds did not simply react to outside
forces; they interacted with them: crowd action shaped
elite action as well as the other way around. Here,
Rogers comes closest to E. P. Thompson, though he
prefers something more subtle to Thompson's bipolar
view of plebeian crowds' engagement with social elites.
Rogers recognizes extensive middling sort involvement
in crowds, in the traditional culture that shaped
crowds, and in mediating between the political needs
of those beneath and those above them socially.
Separate chapters on specific examples of crowd
motivations follow, exploring Jacobitism, hardships
created by war and dearth, impressment, Admiral
Keppel and the American war, anti-Catholicism, and
women's roles in crowd action. This sequence coneindes with a chapter on the crowds that championed
Queen Caroline in 1820. For Rogers, these crowds
showed how the nineteenth century would differ from
the Georgian age. Pursuing specific reforms, fueled by
a radical press, and led by a network of political clubs,
nineteenth-century crowds became more confrontational, diverging from a seventeenth/eighteenth-century tradition in which the culture of crowds drew on
everyday life and customary forms of public celebration.
Rogers has written a book rich in details. The trawl
made through provincial newspapers is impressive.
Better still, and unlike others who study popular
politicking in this first great age of the newspaper,
Rogers has worked with a broad array of manuscript
material too. In particular, his use of court records
suggests two important points. First, depositions give
us the words, ideas, and passions of people in the
crowd and those who observed or confronted them. No
matter how large, a crowd was always made of individuals: it was not an amoebic social organism but a
collection of distinct personal anxieties and political
passions. The chapter on popular responses to naval
impressment, with its extensive use of Admiralty court
archives, makes this point with particular force. Second, the use of court records calls our attention to the
fact that crowd polities interacted with other kinds of
polities: in this case, with the polities of the law. Crowd
action was often illegal action, or at least action whose
legality could only be determined through prosecutions. Crowd action thus became legal action as polities
moved from the street to the courtroom.
As Rogers notes, this book is really "a series of
essays" (p. 17), and at times, one wishes they were tied
together more tightly. Greater cohesion might have
been achieved by addressing more thoroughly scholarship about popular polities by Kathleen Wilson, Linda
Colley, or H. T. Dickinson—to name only a few—that
supports or differs from some of Rogers's contentions.
Likewise, Rogers notes that crowds of the eighteenth
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
century "were very much a product of a seventeenthcentury inheritance" (p. 17). Again, without exploring
the work of historians like Underdown and Tim Harris, one cannot appreciate fully how much of an
inheritance there was and thus the extent to which we
should view the political potency of eighteenth-century
crowds as novel. But these are minor quibbles set
against Rogers's accomplishment in a book that will
certainly help to shape future work on popular participation in the life of the nation.
PAUL D. HALLIDAY
University of Virginia
HEATHER SHORE. Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in
Early Nineteenth-Century London. (Royal Historical
Society Studies in History, New Series.) Rochester,
N.Y.: Boydell, for the Royal Historical Society. 1999.
Pp. xiii, 193. $55.00.
Juvenile crime in the early nineteenth century—as
now—provoked high measures of despair. The respectable classes believed that if children and young
people who were "at risk" were not saved and readjusted to decent society, they would inevitably mature
into hardened criminals. Heather Shore's focus is the
"juvenile offender," a term that only achieved its
present currency and the status of a label in the early
nineteenth century. In this lively and engagingly written book, she builds on the well-tested foundations of
published research and offers, if not a new interpretative field, then certainly a new collection of primary
source materials from which conclusions can be
reached. Shore explores shifts in the attitudes of the
establishment toward juvenile delinquency in the early
nineteenth century but, more significantly, she also
examines the lives of the young offenders themselves.
Although the study is largely centered on nineteenthcentury London, it has wider and more contemporary
resonances, all of which emanate from Shore's main
purpose: to incorporate the young offender's point of
view in a revised examination of juvenile crime.
Shore creates a sensible structure for her thesis by
skillfully juggling theory and evidence. The introduction sets out her main intentions, the sources used, and
the historiography. The main thrust of the book challenges traditional middle-class perceptions about juvenile crime by setting them against the testimony of
young criminals. Thereafter the debates surrounding
the treatment of those same offenders are rehearsed
and reevaluated. Various explanations are given for
the causes of crime, many of which sound uncannily
familiar to contemporary ears: inadequate parenting,
inadequate education, lack of religious training, and
the degrading effects of popular culture.
The juveniles' own explanations for their behavior
are, on the whole, consistent with the perceptions of
the elite. What is strikingly evident is that crime, or at
least detected crime, was essentially committed by the
working-class male; the crimes of young females and
the crimes of middle and upper-class males were
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 255
generally not recorded. The crimes committed were
generally the actions of unruly youths characterized by
what we would recognize as typically laddish behaviour. Most young men were tried for petty larceny; very
few were indicted for anything more serious. Once
arrested, tried, and convicted, there were a number of
options for sentencing: the list included imprisonment
(with occupational training), execution, and transportation. By 1847, seventy-six percent of juvenile criminals were given a custodial sentence. Children were
sent to prisons, houses of correction, reformatories,
industrial schools, and voluntary associations. They
could also serve time on the notorious Eutylus, a
juvenile convict ship where young boys were subjected
to grievous bullying by other prisoners. In prison,
offenders were subject to solitary confinement or
physically beaten: the birch, the rod, or the cat were
seen to be effective as a short sharp shock. Sometimes
boys received rudimentary training to work on farms,
while girls were trained as domestic servants. Children
could be sentenced to death by hanging: yet, in a
chilling note, Shore confirms that none of the 103
children under fourteen years of age who were sentenced to death between 1801 and 1836 at the Old
Bailey was in fact executed.
Transportation to the colonies increasingly became
a favored method of juvenile punishment and reform:
it was seen as an appropriately severe punishment that
carried the added benefit of providing the young
convict with opportunities for a new life. Sentences
involving transportation, therefore, were couched in
the quasi-noble rhetoric of sending children off to a
fresh start in the colonies, and the language of transportation was gradually upgraded to approximate the
language of colonial emigration.
This book is predominantly about young male crime.
The female voice is under-represented, and only a few
examples are used. Perhaps Shore could have elaborated on the implications of some of her most interesting appendixes in the main body of her text: one the
distribution of centences by gender, where it is clear
that many more young men were sentenced to whipping, to death, or to transportation than young women.
It would be interenting to reflect on the reasons for this
and to consider why punishment was so clearly differentiated by gender. I regret that Shore decided not to
use the new analytical categories developed by feminist historians to examine the processen of arrest, trial,
and detention.
Nevertheless, this is a fine book which deserves to be
read by all those hardened professional or potential
students of nineteenth-century England. It is based on
a wide range of well-marshalled primary evidence that
emphasizes the voice of young offenders rather than
the more familiar views of those who arrested, tried,
and sentenced them. It is highly readable and will
make an important companion to the forthcoming
series of books on the history of crime that Judith
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