Long before his death in 2015, Paul Langford was recognized as one of the most important and original historians of eighteenth-century England. Having begun his academic career as a political historian, he became distinguished thereafter for his wide-ranging interests in social and cultural history—what in the eighteenth century, according to Rosemary Sweet in this collection, “would have been called the ‘manners and customs’ of the age” (153)—as well as for his innovative use of sources including art, literature, and caricature, which has subsequently become widely adopted by historians. If, as Joanna Innes notes in her contribution, Langford advanced ideas, concepts, and methodologies well in advance of others working in the field, he remains best remembered for his 1989 synthesis A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783, the first (and still among the best) of the volumes in the New Oxford History of England series. Innes, for one, does not think this his best scholarly legacy and, in an afterword to this volume, offers a highly useful synopsis of Langford's Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (1991).

Revisiting the Polite and Commercial People is both a memorial festschrift to Langford and an extended reflection upon the themes that have made the book such an enduring, and influential, reference point in the thirty years since its publication. The thirteen contributors to the volume were all connected to Langford in some way—as former students, colleagues, or coadjutors on major scholarly enterprises with which he was connected. The tone is warm, generous, and admiring, as one would expect, but individual essays are at pains to debate, as Bob Harris puts it, “how far in the last twenty [sic] years the vision of the eighteenth century created by Paul Langford has become paradigmatic” (133).

Langford's stress on the rise and growing influence of the urban middle class during the period has undoubtedly been influential, finding echoes in a host of subsequent work. Even more formative was his stress on the cultural glue of “politeness” that, despite the diverse incomes, wealth, definitions, and lifestyles of the middle class, unified their ambitions. For Langford, it was the pursuit of genteel status, rather than slavish obeisance to the lifestyle and manners of their social superiors, that characterized the dynamism, vitality, and inventiveness of the period. Langford's stress on the all-powerful pursuit of gentility has not been universally accepted, as the volume itself testifies. Hannah Barker's essay suggests that Manchester's Georgian middle class was “a devout and commercial people” for whom “other values and forms of social behavior—and specifically religious devotion—are much easier to locate” than invocations of politeness (136).

Given Langford's interest in the powerful moral and political (as well as economic) claims made for property, during this period, several of the essays—including those by William A. Pettigrew, Perry Gauci, and Ian Doolittle—examine the different ways in which property was held, disputed, and negotiated during this period—whether by individuals or, in the case of the City of London, corporately. Looking beyond Britain, Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy offers a clear-eyed comparison in “British Imperial Policy and the American Revolution,” placing developments in the context of parallel initiatives in Canada, Ireland, and India. O'Shaughnessy suggests a common metropolitan agenda of imperial reform, revenue creation, tighter regulation, defense, and strengthened metropolitan control motivated British policy during these years. P. J. Marshall contributes a fascinating case study of the “imperial” reach of politeness from the West Indies, considering Sir William Young's attempt to advance his wealth and polish in the island of St. Vincent. Young's attempt to “generate an income sufficient to meet the huge demands that he was making on it in order to sustain the style of life that he chose to live in England” (177) offers a salutary reminder of the losses which could be accrued by those who amassed and redistributed huge amounts of money. Closer to Britain, Leslie Mitchell's account of the Anglo-French connections of the Harcourt family suggest the enduring reach of the Whig cousinhood. Not only did these class and familial connections survive the tumult of the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror, but they also offered “a support-system of real solidity” (221). An instructive contrast with Mitchell's study of Anglo-French amity is provided by Elaine Chalus's consideration of the teenage Betsey Wynne, during the “itinerant restlessness” (227) of her family's self-imposed exile in Revolutionary Europe between 1791 and 1796. Wynne's adolescent journals reveal a young woman who drew increasingly sharp contrasts between the “open, honest, modest, and unaffected” character traits of “English or Anglicized European women” as compared with “what she came to identify as characteristically French behaviours” that were “artificial, false, and immodestly coquettish” (230–31).

Two further essays offer echoes of Langford's initial focus as a political historian: an area to which he returned in later work studying the concept of politics and manners in public life. Paul Seaward considers how visitors to parliament viewed proceedings in the lower chamber, from the awkward and uncomfortable vantage point provided by the gallery of the old House of Commons, while Cindy McCreery offers an original exploration of satirical representations of King William IV. In a nod to Langford's innovative use of visual imagery, McCreery considers both “official” paintings such as those by Benjamin West and satirical caricatures from the likes of James Gillray and William Dent. However, she mistakenly identifies The Royal Jonah (94–95) as the work of John Doyle, who worked under the pseudonym “HB.” Not only is the image stylistically different from Doyle's work, but the fact that HB's signature is reversed (the common resort of imitators and emulators of his work) shows it to be a visual conceit adopted by the publisher—one “I B” Brookes. Langford, I suspect, would have appreciated the irony.