As a schoolboy I was exposed to an enduring account of the rise and fall of British Whiggery. It ran as follows. Whigs were first recognized as a distinct group in politics in the late seventeenth century. In the next century they were led by great landowning families who promoted Protestantism, the rights of Parliament against those of the monarch, religious toleration, and the growth of commerce and industry. During the French Revolution, Whigs added a policy of parliamentary reform, which was in part secured in 1832. By the 1850s the Whig party was being transformed into the Liberal Party.

These familiar emphases on ideology and policy have been incorporated into analyses of Whiggery which stress high-society intrigue and political manoeuvre. Joe Bord has now added another perspective – ‘manners’, by which he means those values which expressed group identity. For him, manners existed to convey impressions, so that such themes as signalling, positioning and the display of the personal are central. Bord believes that in the years 1790 to 1850 there was a recognizable continuity of political manners among Whigs, despite their considerable disagreements about ideologies and policies. It follows that this turbulent period of sixty years, from the outbreak of the French Revolution to the death of Robert Peel, may be treated as a unity and studied thematically, provided the sustained focus is on how Whigs behaved and not on Whig goals. Of course Bord acknowledges that manners were not as important as ideology, policy and class in driving events; yet he believes that they constituted a key element of politics and that they helped to demarcate Whigs from, say, ultra-Tories and radicals.

A further novelty of Bord's approach is his claim that Whig manners were dominated by four main values and that British Whigs expressed them via distinctive modes of engaging with science. The first value was the advantage of showing character as a statesman, a public man of comprehensive knowledge. To illustrate this point Bord adduces Henry Brougham, who, he claims, integrated science and republicanism in developing his political identity. The second value was the imperative to display rational sociability, the leading examples being the third Baron Holland, in his London salon at Holland House, and the Lansdownes in their country estate at Bowood in Wiltshire. In the former the interest in science was conversational, in the latter empirical. The third value was liberality, in the senses of being munificent and informed. For Bord science was an important exemplar of liberality because ideally savants displayed breadth of information and dedicated themselves to amicable free enquiry. The final value was an interest in land and rural matters, the leading example being the agrarian manners of the sixth Duke of Bedford, of Woburn Abbey, who promoted botany and agriculture not least by his patronage of Humphry Davy's research on agricultural chemistry.

Bord thinks that intellectual historians have underestimated the importance of the land to Whig identity, and he is aware that in the 1830s Whigs became conspicuous in the patronage of science. But by rejecting chronology so resolutely he denies himself the possibility of a resounding conclusion in the form of an extended discussion of the ways in which, from the 1830s, landed Whigs engaged with science. It is a pity that two well-known aristocratic Whigs, Northampton and Rosse, are ignored, while Fitzwilliam is merely mentioned. Their cases would have provided extra grist to Bord's mill. The second Marquis of Northampton (1790–1851) achieved sudden fame in 1836 when his popular manners enabled him to be a successful last-minute president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in place of the third Marquis of Lansdowne. A poet and archaeologist, Northampton's main interest was polite geology. At his country home, Castle Ashby, Northants, he was a hospitable host to wandering savants. As president of the Royal Society of London, from 1838 to 1848, he was a master of tactful conciliation. In Ireland William Parsons, third Earl of Rosse (1800–67), completed in the early 1840s his huge telescope in the grounds of his estate at Birr. From 1849 to 1854 Rosse was president of the Royal Society of London, which had been ‘reformed’ in 1847. His presidential style was that of a conscientious constitutional monarch who still believed in the importance of position in society and science. Bord notes that the third Earl Fitzwilliam (1786–1857) was a leading officeholder as president of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, the Geological and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding of Yorkshire, the Statistical Society of London, and the Archaeological Institute, to which list should be added first president of the British Association. Fitzwilliam not only was well informed about polite science but also had extensive interests in coal mining, iron manufacture and agriculture. His huge country house, Wentworth Woodhouse, near Sheffield, was a favourite resort of travelling savants, especially geologists, who enjoyed the lavish hospitality for which he was renowned. According to one obituary he had the manner of a thorough statesman and man of science, but it was his equestrian enthusiasm that led to his death. After bathing in the North Sea on the Yorkshire coast, Fitzwilliam came out of the water, remounted his horse, and swam it out to sea. This feat of hypothermic horsemanship proved to be fatal for the septuagenarian.

Bord is well informed about political history, displays historiographical alertness, and offers interesting notes and bibliography, but he does not pretend to be comprehensive. Instead he gives suggestive examples in order to present a pointillist view of the political manners of Whigs, his main focus, and their tendentious conscriptions of science. His volume, he declares, shows no more than its examples indicate. Despite this disclaimer, Bord's book, with its emphases on Whig statesmanship and landowning, usefully complements Stephen Jacyna's perceptive study Philosophic Whigs: Medicine, Science and Citizenship in Edinburgh 1789–1848 (1994).