Amanda Goodrich has written an informative, meticulously researched, and sometimes stimulating study of the representation of the English aristocracy during the pamphlet wars over the French Revolution. Taking as her starting points Burke's and Paine's well-known tracts the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the Rights of Man (1791–92), she has examined over five hundred pamphlets published before Pittite repression ended the debate in 1796. Goodrich divides her pamphlets into two groups, loyalist and radical. Her conclusions about the trajectory and constitution of each group form the basis for her interesting thesis.

The representation of aristocracy conveyed in the loyalist pamphlets begin, of course, with Burke's portrayal of a medieval-ish nobility, full of benign and paternalistic appetites. Within a year or two of the Reflections, however, this antirevolutionary print movement had metastasized into what Goodrich terms a conservative loyalism and a commercial loyalism. The former group was aggressively Anglican and Royalist even to the point of promoting indefeasible and divine hereditary right; the latter was Lockeian, whiggish, somewhat secular, and supporters of a mixed and balanced constitution. While the Burkeite and the Anglican-Royalist point of view never entirely disappeared in the period, it was, by 1796, the commercial loyalist tradition that largely carried the day. Commercial loyalism more or less repudiated Burke's medieval aristocracy and saw Britain's entire ruling class (including the nobility) as an open elite with philanthropic tendencies, even a meritocracy.

The radical representation of aristocracy went through a similar metamorphosis. Its essential starting point was Tom Paine's ruminations on the English aristocracy as the enemy of the people, worthy of abolition as a legal group, and diseased, corrupt, and idle as their French counterparts before 1789. The Terror, however, with its public executions of so many of the French aristocrats had a great effect upon English radical representation of their own nobility. While the general discourse remained highly critical, even abusive, of aristocracy, there were decidedly fewer calls for abolition of the Lords or for any type of serious revolution. Indeed, by 1795–96, Goodrich finds that the language of post-Paineite radicalism and post-Burkeite commercial loyalism was seriously converging.

Although the subject of this book is simply the representation of the English aristocracy, this reviewer would still have appreciated a short section on the authorship of the database. Some of the pamphlets were anonymous, but a few pages might have been devoted to the careers and to the religious, political, and social background of the signed authors. Then, one wonders exactly how important the pamphlets were in influencing elite or nonelite public opinion on the English aristocracy. Goodrich has searing criticism of Linda Colley, Dror Wahrman, and Jonathan Clark and their discussions of the representation of aristocracy. Yet, Colley, Wahrman, and Clark in developing their opinions used a variety of different sources. Goodrich, however, though she terms her work “a history … of discourse” (2), tackles only a relatively restricted section of print culture. Might her argument have been stronger if she had dipped into loyalist and nonloyalist newspapers to supplement her pamphlets? Arguably, by the 1790s more people read the press than read pamphlets.

Goodrich also may put more weight upon the importance of her pamphlets in the representation of the English aristocracy than they can bear. For example, she notices that those two überloyalists Hannah More, in Village Politics (1793), and Edmund Burke, in Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), were not shy in attacking the morals of the English aristocracy. She suspects that this shows “the significance of radical anti-aristocratic rhetoric in changing the way aristocracy was represented in England” (140). But was not aristo-bashing an old sport in England, by no means limited to what passed for a political left? Then, in her analysis of Burke and his role in the representation of the aristocracy, she at times exhibits a lack of sure-footedness about English politics in the period. Thus she asserts that after 1791 “Burke no longer held a place within the Whig aristocracy” (30). This is a questionable remark indeed given the contemporary importance of Burke's friends Earl Fitzwilliam and the Duke of Portland at the very center of that aristocracy. Then, dealing with the 1794 union of those same Portland Whigs with Pitt's government, Goodrich supposes that this would have added a strong Whig dimension to Conservative Pittite loyalism. Has the work of Richard Pares and Frank O’Gorman been forgotten so soon?

This book is suffused with the notion that England ought to have had or might have had a French-style revolution. What goes unexamined is why England ought to have had such a revolution any more than France ought to have had an English-style constitution.