In his impressive monograph, The War of Words: The Language of British Elections, 1880–1914, Luke Blaxill returns to some of the most well-worn debates in modern British political history surrounding the impact of the 1884–85 Reform Acts, Irish Home Rule, imperialism, and New Liberalism and social reform on the electoral politics of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. The corpus linguistics method, applied here to the precise study of electoral politics via the medium of platform speeches, demonstrably offers an exciting new explanatory and contextualizing tool for the study of political languages and ideas both on and beyond the stump. The key corpora—the speeches of East Anglian candidates and those of national cabinet-level figures as reported in regional newspapers and the Times, respectively—are put to use comparatively across the four central chapters, following an account on method in which an over-reliance on election addresses is effectively challenged. The multiparty approach employed is equally necessary in establishing the sense of duality and debate essential for understanding political argument in a (mostly) two-party system.

Throughout the book, a great number of balls are thrown back up in the air. The first substantive chapter demonstrates the immediate impact the Third Reform Acts had on the electoral language of platform speakers in their appeals to the (to contemporaries) new democracy of agricultural laborers. Here, the central East Anglian corpus refocuses the spatial lens of analysis away from urban environments towards rural political discourse and the language of the countryside (49). Here Blaxill contends that historians have similarly underestimated the reach of Joseph Chamberlain's Unauthorised Programme, given its “immense” impact on both East Anglian and frontbench speaking campaigns in terms of policy and its repeated association with the central figure of Chamberlain. Hence, by 1885 Conservatives were already advertising themselves as a modernized party opposed to the “radical menace” (78).

The following chapter on Irish Home Rule takes issue with the claim that Ireland dominated the post-1886 period, rather than Blaxill's more limited offering of the 1886 and 1892 elections only. It emerges that the distinctiveness of Gladstonian Liberalism, as understood by his peers, lay in his policy of Home Rule for Ireland more than anything else (107). Moreover, the association of Gladstone with Home Rule served as political ammunition for his Conservative and Liberal Unionist opponents (93). Yet the Liberal Unionists, who broke from the Gladstonians over Home Rule, are presented here—at least from the perspective of the platform orator—as far less of a unique entity than they liked to see themselves, and with a rather limited impact (123). But while this may have been the case from the perspective of platform politics, I am less convinced that this rings true for the impact of Liberal Unionism in other arenas.

Turning to the election of 1895 and the “khaki” election of 1900, Blaxill contends that previous scholarship exaggerates the centrality of empire in Conservative appeals and that the overall dominance of imperial themes was restricted to 1900 only. Here, Blaxill usefully delineates the problematic tendency of historians to bundle “patriotism’ and ‘imperialism” together, rather than as rhetorically and ideologically distinct discourses that could be deployed independently of one another, and the pinpointing of a transition from the use of “English” to “British” c. 1900 is revealing (169). Blaxill also challenges the claims for Liberal faddism in the 1890s, stating that Liberal appeals to temperance, licensing, and church disestablishment demonstrate an overall coherence when this apparent “faddism” is properly rooted in a Liberal belief in “rational” dispassionate politics (160), the assumption that electors were rational, and that rational people voted Liberal (168). Indeed, divining the character of the new democracy was a bipartisan trend that deserves greater examination. Like many of the findings presented, however, to really unpack such an argument would require a more comprehensive study than this.

The final chapter, on the extent to which New Liberalism was manifest on the platform, asserts that while Liberal appeals to social reform witnessed a marked rise in comparison to previous elections and to their opponents, these were dwarfed when placed alongside to the more traditional themes of free trade and constitutional reform; in this case, of the House of Lords (177, 188). This was not, Blaxill argues, a rhetoric saturated with the language of class (193). The second half of the chapter deals with the electoral politics of Unionism. In pointing to the Unionists’ more unified recalibration over Tariff Reform in the 1910 elections and a growing emphasis on the future benefit to the consumer over the producer, Blaxill aligns himself with recent assessments of the Unionists’ relatively buoyant position as the “what-if” election of 1915 approached (226).

Though Blaxill's historiographical eye is more narrowly trained, his work is thought provoking for those of us who would not consider ourselves to be scholars of electoral politics. The statement that “keywords alone can be useful indicators of more complex issues and ideas in electoral language” is true for other forms of political thought and culture, as well as for the intellectual history of concepts (41). While Blaxill's findings often confirmed rather than challenged my own “intuitions” (43) derived from quite different sources, the confirmatory effect in itself was highly revealing and spoke to the potential for such methods to add both a satisfying contextual layer of “representativeness” and precision on the essential historical question of “when?” At the same time, regional studies and electoral speeches alone cannot answer the much broader question of what it meant to be a Liberal/Conservative (77). Up until now, however, historians of political languages have often dabbled with Google Ngram. The War of Words, on the other hand, provides a much more rigorous model—hence its significance as an important and invigorating intervention in the study of modern British history.