The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution is a title that evokes the earl of Rochester's description of Charles II rolling from whore to whore and Andrew Marvell's depiction of Barbara Villiers, countess of Castlemaine, washing the calves and tickling the toes of her lackey. But such imagery has no place in this book. As opposed to examining these well-known manuscript poems, The Bawdy Politic analyzes printed sources. In doing so, it advances the surprising thesis that pornography served the forces of royalism, law, and order.

According to Melissa Mowry, after the Restoration royalists used pornography as a way to create a unified critique of civil war radicalism. In particular, in diatribes against the republican adulterer Henry Marten, royalist partisans asserted that republicanism could only produce a “raucous, sinisterly polyvocal, and fragmented democratic bawdy politic” (28). But the Bawdy House riots of 1668 threw sand in the gears of this royalist attack. The first report of the riots falsely accused the apprentices of leading the attacks against the brothels. This brought up two problems for royalist pornographers: the attacks showed that apprentices—according to Mowry a democratic force—clearly produced cohesive politics, and they attacked places of prostitution, which was particularly problematic since prostitution was the key image in the royalist attempt to show the fractious nature of republican politics. Royalist partisans solved this dilemma by producing literature that “brokered a rapprochement between the crown and the city leaders by enabling that latter to repudiate their own apprentices as figures of class insurrection by seeing them as ideologically aligned with the city's prostitutes” (17).

Two chapters follow the discussion of the bawdy house riots that argue that royalists also used the imagery of bawds and prostitutes to denigrate unregulated trade and illegitimate claims to power. The final chapter looks at the period after the Glorious Revolution when Whigs abandoned their tradition of populism and embraced the merger of “entrepreneurial individualism” (79, 105) and “homosocial hierarchies” (79, 97) through their support of the Bank of England. During this era, political pornography's function shifted, acting to separate the Whigs from their populist heritage. New Whig propaganda like John Dunton's The Nightwalker employed “the public sphere … for prohibiting democracy, not augmenting it” (141) and used descriptions of Dunton's meetings with prostitutes (to convince them to repent) to show the viciousness of the working poor and their lack of fitness to participate in politics.

This thesis is innovative and daring. Yet, the supporting evidence, on the whole, fails to convince the reader. One problem is that the book, at 150 pages, including notes at the end of each chapter, is just too short. The reader never gets a sense of the sources that Mowry analyzes, which a fuller description of the tracts in question would remedy. Such ambiguity is further complicated by the author's penchant for coining new terms that she fails to define. Much of her argument revolves around “homosocial hierarchies”—which probably means organizations such as guilds and trading companies—and “entrepreneurial individualism”—which sounds like justification for interlopers and other traders who acted outside the “homosocial hierarchies” but, based on her frequent citations of Steven Pincus's “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth” (American Historical Review 103, no. 3 [1998]: 705–36), which never uses the term, is probably the idea that a successful commonwealth requires individual wealth more than individual virtue.

The most slippery term she uses is “pornography.” Despite spending a few pages establishing that pornography is sexual representation that is normally personal introduced into the public sphere, the work in practice only examines printed descriptions of prostitutes, no matter how tame. Such source selection results in ignoring the considerable amount of pornographic material that is in manuscript or that relates the sexual activities of Charles II, James II, and their mistresses to Mowry's use of the term “pornography” to describe texts like A Catalogue of Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Nightwalkers, Whores, She-Friends, Kind Women, and Others of the Linnen-Lifting Tribe, who are to be seen every Night in the Cloysters in Smithfield, from the Hours of Eight to Eleven, during the time of the fair (London, 1691), a description of prostitutes whose most ribald description is: “Mrs. Peggy L—ly a sly insinuating crack, who in company always talks of her husband at sea; her whole Cargo, with topsails and rigging are hardly worth 10 shillings; but beware her lower tire, for several have found her a fire ship.” Of course, such a critique could have been obviated by Mowry using one of the OED's definitions of pornography, “Description of the life, manners … of prostitutes or their patrons.” But the author never claims to use such a definition.

Such practices, while making life hard for the reader, do not discredit the book's thesis. Printed descriptions of pornography may have been royalist, but the text does too little to establish the royalist credentials of the pornographers. There seems to be no attempt to find out about the authors of these texts. Only subtle clues, such as the fact that many prostitutes were the daughters of commonwealth men, point to any royalist agenda. One wonders why royalists after 1660 needed to be so subtle.

Such lack of care is particularly problematic because the work often takes unwarranted leaps in its analysis of the sources. For instance, Mowry takes an incident from Alexander Oldy's London Jilt, where the heroine punishes one of her father's murderers by dressing him up in women's clothing—a classic form of popular punishment if normally reserved for sexual misconduct such as that of Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor—to demonstrate “that class cannibalism is the inevitable consequence of republicanism, while emasculation is the punishment for those who attempt to profit by it” (120), without establishing how such events are republican. In another example, Mowry attempts to show that the royalists' use of “pornographic imagery” to calumnize republicans had hit a nerve among their Whig opponents. Her proof text is the Whig tract The Protestants Congratulation to the City of Their Excellent Choice of Members to Serve in Parliament, which cries out “Be gone you private panders for the whore” (94). While the Whig author may have had antirepublican pornography in mind, the line is in the context of an anticatholic tirade, and the whore in question is the Whore of Babylon, which the Roman Catholic Church had been called long before the English Civil Wars.

Still, despite such problems the book has strengths. Its analysis of the moral reform societies’ take on democracy and prostitution is intriguing, and its use of court sources is instructive. I only wish that the author would have provided more detailed descriptions of texts, clearer definitions of neologisms, and more explicit justifications for unorthodox readings of the sources.