Anna Clark's new book is a welcome addition to the political history of the late Georgian era. As a series of chapters devoted to variations on the general theme of “scandal,” it is useful for the additional light it sheds on a series of episodes, most of which (it must be said) will already be pretty familiar to students of the age. But the whole ends up reading more like a collection of loosely connected essays than it does a monograph, and the claims that Clark makes for “scandal” as a driving force in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British politics are not always as richly contextualized as they might have been.

Clark provides fluent and thoughtful readings of several “scandals,” which she organizes chronologically rather than thematically. First, she presents the prosecution of John Wilkes for blasphemy and the subsequent effort to prevent him from taking his seat in the House of Commons as a study in sex scandal as a double-edged political weapon, with Wilkes's opponents depicting his libertinism as a subversive threat and Wilkes himself suggesting that his enemies at court were in thrall to sexually voracious women, their own alleged homosexual proclivities, or both. Second, Clark stresses the limits of aristocratic women's political influence by highlighting the scandalously brutal treatment that Andrew Stoney Bowes, M.P. for Newcastle, inflicted on his wife, the Countess of Strathmore, in his efforts to gain control of her fortune and to exploit it on behalf of his political career in the 1770s and 1780s. Third, Clark explores the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings (1788–95) as a study in the gendered rhetoric of empire, stressing that while Edmund Burke and Richard Sheridan sought to paint Hastings's alleged mistreatment of the princesses of Oudh as an outrageous scandal, by portraying India in terms of helpless femininity they merely provided new justifications for imperial domination. Fourth, Clark shows how in the 1790s female intellectuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah More stressed, respectively, women's rights and women's superior morality as alternatives to the corrupt “petticoat influence” routinely ascribed to queens, duchesses, and courtesans in the political lexicon of the day. Their opponents used the whiff of scandal to discredit their ideas and succeeded all too thoroughly in the case of Wollstonecraft. Fifth, Clarke chronicles the appreciable “petticoat influence” of Mary Anne Clarke, who trafficked widely in army and government patronage while serving as mistress to the duke of York, commander in chief of the Army at the height of the Napoleonic War, and thereby ignited a scandal that helped revive the parliamentary reform movement and obliged the government to crack down on corrupt administrative practices. Finally, Clark provides us with yet another treatment of the Queen Caroline affair of 1820, arguing that George IV's effort to deny the privileges of consort to his long-estranged wife called into question the constitutional power of the monarchy.

There are things to admire in this book. It makes clear, for instance, that the fear of “petticoat influence” remained a powerful one right through the era. While that fear obviously became more obsessive, more pervasive, and a good deal more consequential in the France of the ancien régime than it ever did in Britain, it nevertheless exercised an abiding influence on the late-Georgian political imagination. The theme of “oriental despotism” was only slightly less pervasive than that of “petticoat influence,” and in her particularly vivid chapter on Burke and the Begums of Oudh, Clark does a convincing job of explaining its various and sometimes contradictory uses. Finally, and more generally, Clark demonstrates what those of us who are preoccupied with this era have long felt in our bones but have rarely managed to articulate very clearly or definitively: that “scandalous” episodes created opportunities not only for serious debate but for popular mobilization and that, in this sense, mighty contests did indeed arise from what in a narrower context might seem to have been trivial things.

After the praise comes the inevitable criticisms. First of all, arguably the most consequential “scandals” of the age are ones that Clark scarcely alludes to, most likely because they had little to do with the “sexual politics” of her subtitle: the “scandal” of the slave trade and colonial slavery, and the “scandal” of what radicals interchangeably referred to as “Old Corruption,” “the Pitt System,” and “the Thing.” As critics of “the Thing” deemed it to be an all-encompassing system of elite malfeasance, Clark might at least have invoked it in trying to explain how a significant subset of those same critics made sense of the smaller-scale “scandals” that she chronicles here. Second, some of the conclusions she reads from the “scandals” she does examine are scarcely surprising. Of what profitable use is it to fault Burke for not having criticized the notion of empire per se, for instance, when none of his contemporaries did, either? Why bother stressing that aristocratic women who possessed electoral influence at the end of the eighteenth century did little or nothing to advance the political cause of women as a gender, when nobody ever suggested that this is either what they sought to do or what they in fact did? There is a whiff of the politically correct truism about such verdicts, and it occasionally distracts one from the more interesting points that Clark endeavors to make.