John Barrell has done it again. The latest book from this prolific and influential scholar offers yet another provocative survey of eighteenth-century British culture that will surely be much debated for years to come. His focus here, as in much of his recent work, is on the dramatic final decade of the eighteenth century and particularly the impact of the French Revolution and the counterrevolutionary wars that Britons found themselves engaged in during the 1790s.

At the heart of this provocative new cultural history is an argument that the decade saw a redefinition of an already tenuous distinction between public and private life so dramatic that one can characterize this redefinition as an “invasion” of the latter by the former. Barrell concludes his study by stating that the 1790s were “a phase in the history of the public sphere when the idea of the public as constituted by men's private reasoning was caught in an equal and opposite reaction by which private opinions, and even private life itself, were represented as the proper object of the intrusive authority of the loyalist public and the state” (246). He illuminates this argument with chapters on the varying political geographies of metropolitan London, arguments about the relative public or private nature of coffeehouse space, the varying receptions of King George III's holiday retirements to the seaside resort town of Weymouth, the debates over William Pitt's introduction of a sumptuary tax on hair powder in 1795, and finally the use of the image of the rural cottage as a site for arguments about the role of domesticity in the age of the French Revolution. Throughout this work is a concern for the ways in which eighteenth-century notions of privacy were constantly “invaded” by the public political concerns raised by the wars with France and the fears of domestic revolution provoked by those wars.

Most of the invaders of the private sphere in Barrell's account are the agents of the Pittite state and the “loyalist public” that supported its war efforts abroad and its counterrevolutionary activities at home. With the notable exception of the discussion of John Wolcot's (aka “Peter Pindar”) antiroyalist satires in chapter 3, Barrell's focus is on the ways in which counterrevolutionary politics could be just as invasive on the north side of the English Channel as revolutionary politics were on the south side. The result is an argument that may lend new life to the concept of “Pitt's terror” as an apt means of characterizing the political culture of counterrevolutionary Britain. “The conflict between the ancien régime and the democratic movement was so fundamental that it could not be contained within what had previously been thought of as the ‘normal’ arena of politics. Activities and spaces which had previously been thought to be private … suddenly no longer enjoyed that protection” (4).

The similarities between Barrell's arguments about Britain's revolutionary crisis of the 1790s and those that have been made by recent scholars of the French Revolution are so striking that some readers may find it odd that he does not venture any comparative speculations between the British and French cases. Readers familiar with Roger Chartier's now famous argument that the expansion of a notion of private life in ancien régime France provided a necessary precondition for the dramatic scrutinization of all aspects of life during the Revolution itself in his Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (1990; English trans., 1991) will find an interesting British parallel here. One of the main virtues of this book is its willingness to push its arguments into acknowledged speculative territory, as in the case of its attempt to explain the radical London Corresponding Society's relative lack of success in organizing cells in the City of London (55) and its discussion of the chronology of the development of a “public vs. private” distinction in early modern Britain (95). It is surprising then that Barrell is reluctant to draw connections between, say, the politics of hairstyle and consumer society that he so carefully details for the British case in the fourth chapter of this book and similar debates about self-presentation that raged in revolutionary France at the same time. The book ends rather abruptly with its last chapter on the image of the cottage in British art and literature, and it would have benefited from a more expansive conclusion in which the British and French experiences of the revolutionary 1790s were explored explicitly, perhaps along the same lines as that offered in the final pages of Dror Wahrman's The Making of the Modern Self (2004), another provocative and speculative essay in eighteenth-century cultural history with which Barrell's arguments could be usefully compared.

There is much fuel for further discussion in this book. Cultural historians interested in the development of the public/private distinction in the century that both Jürgen Habermas and Phillipe Ariès identified as crucial cannot afford to ignore Barrell's argument for the distinctiveness of the 1790s. Political historians will find new evidence for the repressiveness and intolerance of Pittite counterrevolutionary “terror” (even if Barrell himself does not quite state the gist of his argument so baldly), and all future scholars of the revolutionary last decade of the eighteenth century will certainly have a new comparative agenda to explore in forthcoming studies as they continue to map out the ways in which both British and French culture were transformed by the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy.