Antony Taylor's prodigiously researched and highly readable monograph argues for the centrality of antiaristocratic sentiment, linked with the land question, well into the twentieth century. Challenging the widely held view that radical and working-class hostility toward the aristocracy was peripheral to British political, social, and economic discourse during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Taylor sees his book, in part, as “an exercise in reclamation” (8). His purpose is to provide a corrective to the school of social history that perceives the aristocracy, however privileged, as redeemed by its pragmatic recognition of the need for the sort of controlled change embodied in the Reform Acts and the repeal of the Corn Laws. He asserts that past historians of working-class and middle-class Britain relegated the aristocracy to the margins of social struggle, causing history of landed society to be “neglected and under-researched” (3). While giving credit to David Cannadine, among others, for initiating a revival of serious studies on the social and political importance of the aristocracy, Taylor believes that book's like Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990) take on trust the aristocracy's view of itself. Thus, recent literature on the landholding class has failed to appreciate the width and depth of the bitterness and disaffection aroused by the landed aristocracy. By contrast, Taylor pictures antiaristocratic sentiment as a fundamental aspect of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century radical reform wherein Liberalism and Radicalism overlapped and new Labour gained an early foothold. He finds considerable merit in the idea that the middle class was defined, and even in part created, by a robust and persistent opposition to the perceived failings of the aristocracy.

Taylor presents his case by focusing on separate antiaristocratic themes—their immorality, their monopoly in landholding, their traditional hunting privileges, the continuing legislative abuses of the House of Lords, and, in the twentieth century, the entrée of surviving aristocratic families into the ranks of a new British plutocracy. Thus, he elucidates the moral, economic, emotional, and legislative arguments that depicted the aristocracy as a pretentious, piratical, and parasitic class whose elimination would lift the economic, political, and social circumstances of freeborn Englishmen to levels unknown since the imposition of the Norman yoke.

Taylor's initial chapter centers on the notorious 1875 trial of Colonel Valentine Baker, at once “the epitome of the mid-Victorian gentleman” (20) and a poster boy for aristocratic debauchery. Although convicted of indecent assault on a female railway passenger, his pun ishment was limited to a fine and a year's incarceration in a poshy first division cell. Baker's light sentence and close ties to royalty—he was an equerry and confidante of Prince Albert Edward—evoked exhaustive and outraged coverage in the radical press led by the hammer of the aristocracy, radical republican G. W. M. Reynolds, whose popular and widely read Reynolds’ Newspaper, in Taylor's view, contained many home truths about Victorian society. Indeed, Reynolds was so influential in antiaristocracy struggles that during the next decade followers of Henry George dubbed him as a John the Baptist who prepared the way for the Georgeite land campaign of the 1880s and 1890s.

Taylor's serious research for this volume began with an interest in Henry George, and he sets out to revalue and upgrade George's importance as a radical social reformer who significantly influenced early Labourites as well as radical Liberals. He sees George's Single Tax campaign as a sort of catchall for attacks on the landholding aristocracy and believes that the fervent ideas of this rough-hewn American crusader, while incapable of fitting comfortably into either a Liberal or Labour Party framework, were central to popular radicalism.

Taylor also discusses the links between traditional aristocratic hunting privileges and radical reformers’ sense that these special prerogatives were a glaringly insulting reflection of the self-indulgent lifeways of the landed classes. His reexamination of antihunting campaigns within the context of public hostility to landlordism and aristocratic entitlements is a reminder that recent controversies over foxhunting and other blood sports are part of a tradition that preceded the rise of animal-rights advocacy.

The most familiar aspect of Taylor's study deals with the long campaign against abuses of the legislative process by the House of Lords. With Eugenio Biagini, the author depicts the mantra, “Peers against the People,” not as the ineffectual effort of a weakening Liberal Party but rather as a cardinal principal of British popular politics. Attacks against the Lords muffled antimonarchical republicanism and gave the Liberals a constitutional position that was at once loyalist and egalitarian. Taylor believes that the anti-Lords campaigns that culminated in 1910–11 had broad appeal both as a traditional struggle by the friends of liberty and a progressive attack on antidemocratic hereditary power.

Taylor's final chapter is concerned with the “plutocratisation” of an apparently declining hereditary aristocracy after the Great War. This process began during the Edwardian period with the ennobling of newly wealthy businessmen, many of them Jews, a development that continued as Lloyd George cynically sold honors to the highest bidders. In any case, the new plutocracy gained its wealth from other sources than land—from 1921 to 1930 only thirteen of ninety-three new peers had landed backgrounds. The collapse of the Anglo-Ireland peerage after the establishment of the Irish Free State struck a further blow to the old titled families. Still, the surviving aristocracy remained an object of enmity for, among other things, their continuing frivolous lifestyles and for the willingness of antidemocratic nobs like the Cliveden Set to cozy up to foreign dictators. By contrast, a new form of dreamy, nostalgic writing about a romantic aristocratic world of sunlit shires and ubiquitous social harmony also flourished in the interwar years.

Antony Taylor has astutely drawn on a mass of printed sources to develop his thesis and to advance his particular arguments. Some readers may wonder about the questions he to fails to address, such as, What of the great services members of the landed classes did selflessly perform for the nation? Or, did the Liberal assault on the Lords really have any effect on the second election of 1910? Still, Lords of Misrule is a very good read, filled with fascinating and often amusing material. Scholars of social and political history will find it worth their time.