At a moment when filibuster abuse, unfilled presidential appointments, and congressional inaction on a range of popular issues have revealed some of the limitations of the American political system, this slim but insightful volume provides a particularly timely read. In it, Frank Prochaska examines Victorian commentary on the US Constitution, a document nineteenth-century Americans had largely come to revere as quasi-sacred. This commentary merits our attention, Prochaska claims, in part because British observers wrote from a critical distance their American counterparts found difficult to achieve, and thus they could offer a fresh, though never unbiased, perspective on the founding document and its workings.

Thomas Paine famously pronounced in 1776 that “in America the law is king.” His words might have served as an epigraph to this book, because the world's oldest written constitution, Prochaska writes, is “a republican substitute for hereditary kingship, and like kingship, hedged with divinity” (1). A very different constitutional culture obtained in Great Britain, where the ancient yet unwritten constitution conditioned political observers to see it as a continually evolving part of the legislative process. This difference sets the stage for the following four chapters, each of which analyzes the commentary of an eminent Victorian: John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, Henry Sumner Maine, or James Bryce. Why these four, when in the middle decades of the nineteenth century alone, some two hundred Britons committed their American observations to print? Prochaska explains that these four engaged constitutional issues more seriously and extensively than others figures such as Charles Dickens or Matthew Arnold, who tended to focus on the social and cultural implications of democracy.

All Victorian observers of America worked in the shadow of Tocqueville, whose magisterial Democracy in America remained a key text in transatlantic political thought throughout the century. Of the four, Mill came closest to following (figuratively) in Tocqueville's expansive footsteps, viewing democracy as a social and cultural phenomenon as well as a political one. Indeed, Mill's most sustained commentary on the United States can be found in his two reviews of the Frenchman's work. But Prochaska makes clear that the British writers did more than simply gloss this earlier work, often dissenting from him in method, ideology, emphasis, and conclusion. They also wrote in different moments, and though this larger historical argument is not dominant in Prochaska's book, he does provide occasional nods toward the changing contexts, in both Britain and the United States, that framed their different political analyses. In particular, the various expansions of the suffrage in Britain (1832, 1867, 1884) and the dramatic transformations in America wrought by war, emancipation, and the Fifteenth Amendment serve as important markers.

Though all four Victorians believed that studying the United States could impart useful information for the British, they focused on separate concerns, which Prochaska efficiently conveys in his chapter titles. Mill, following Tocqueville, worried about the tyrannical potential of democratic majorities, though in Mill's case, this tyranny threatened social oppression and a bland conformity more than political oppression. He took some solace in the active citizenship that Tocqueville found in Americans' habit of association, but the stultifying potential of democracy continued to preoccupy Mill for the rest of his career.

Bagehot and Maine agreed that the US political system—with its divided sovereignty, its complex system of checks and balances, and its inflexible constitution—favored stability over action. Intriguingly, however, this agreement led them to very different conclusions. Bagehot found the Constitution overly constraining and ill equipped to confront the challenges of the aftermath of the Civil War; to the extent the United States succeeded, he believed, it was in spite of its system not because of it. Accordingly, Bagehot memorably wrote of the improbability of Abraham Lincoln: “[S]uccess in a lottery is not argument for lotteries” (47). The conservative Maine, on the other hand, applauded the Constitution as a salutary brake on the popular will, one he hoped democratizing Britain might emulate. Bryce, the only one of the four who actually spent extensive time in the United States, even serving as the UK ambassador, authored the most sustained account of its workings since Tocqueville's volumes: the exhaustively thorough The American Commonwealth (1889). Bryce admired the American system, though he did not shrink from pointing out its many flaws, but his estimation of the American people and their Anglo-Saxon “political genius” was even greater.

Bryce's emphasis on the Anglo-Saxonness of America suggests one of the key commonalities among the four. British political writers insisted on the continuity between the British and the US constitutions, posing a challenge to nineteenth-century American investment in the exceptionalism of their experiment. Prochaska shows how the late Victorians replaced this national exceptionalism with a broader Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism that emphasized the stability, prosperity, and liberty-loving nature of English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. Here, as elsewhere, Prochaska distills the ideas of his figures effectively enough but does little to put his findings in conversation with recent scholarship.

At heart, the book raises the difficult question of how well or ill the US Constitution serves the needs of a democratic people. As Prochaska points out in the conclusion, Americans have at key moments in their history evaded the constraints of their system not by amendment but by the stealthier maneuvers of judicial interpretation or executive end run. Has the Constitution helped or hindered the development of American democracy? Are Americans too reverential toward the document Bagehot labeled an “old state paper?” Prochaska shows his cards in the conclusion when he wonders about originalist interpreters whether they can “be called democrats when they are defending the rectitude of a pre-democratic document ratified by members of the conventions of the original thirteen states, which excluded the majority of the population of the vote” (141). Prochaska admires the courageousness of his Victorian figures in speaking some kind of truth to American bluster. As a lifelong student of Anglo-American relations who has lived in both countries, Prochaska seems uniquely qualified to do something similar for the twenty-first century.