Historians have long downplayed British political history during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Those years fall between eighteenth-century struggles that reached a climax in the rivalry between Pitt and Fox and the dynamics associated with the early Victorian era, making it either coda or prelude to another story. The consequent focus overlooks important developments in a transitional period, including changes in language and rhetoric to accommodate a politics expanding its reach to include provincial interest groups. Kathryn Chittick, a literary scholar, picks up the theme in exploring debates about opposition Whig language in the press between 1802 and 1830.

The long war with Napoleonic France and the conflicts during the 1790s over British responses to the French Revolution set the backdrop to these arguments over liberty and patriotism. Opposition Whigs and their intellectual allies strove to make a case apart from both a Pittite tradition with its own Whig ties and the populist rhetoric of plebeian radicals including William Cobbett and Henry Hunt. Whigs distrusted radicals for challenging the social order, and Lord Grey, in a widely quoted phrase, asked Sir Robert Wilson in 1819 if there were one among their leaders “with whom you would trust yourself if the dark.” Chittick notes that some of their unease sprang from the antinomian tendency among segments of the radical press. Blasphemous and seditious libels, with the influence they might have on plebeian readers, bothered Whigs only slightly less than the government's use of legal measures against them. The Whig dilemma involved protecting respectable publishers who risked legal action without being implicated in material they thought bordering on criminal. Whig concerns reflected what Chittick describes as a general horror of democracy among the educated classes, and her point highlights the difficulty that Whigs had in navigating between Tory and radical positions to stake their own ground. The challenge for the Whigs involved finding a relevant political idiom to discuss liberty during both wartime and the instability that followed the coming of peace. “Relevant,” as Chittick suggests, meant appealing to members of the middle and lower classes, who had become increasingly engaged with public debate through the press. The 1790s showed that Jacobinism—and its British imitators—had no intellectual currency in Britain. Sir James Mackintosh, a leading Whig and author of Vindiciae Gallicae (1791), had repented his early support for the French Revolution, and Francis Jeffrey lamented in 1808 the injury that event had done to the cause of rational freedom.

But what had the Whigs to offer in its place? Jeffrey's advice in the Edinburgh Review two years later that Whigs lead the popular party and guide an unsettled public opinion raised that question. Whig principles from the seventeenth century, with their dynastic and aristocratic premises, could not answer it. Indeed, the culture of the grand Whiggery centered on leading families and their role in deposing James II only isolated Foxite Whigs from the wider discourse. Political economy provided an alternative Whig language drawing on insights from the Scottish Enlightenment that connected with an increasing public attention to opinion, especially informed or rational opinion, as an arbiter. The Edinburgh Review, which combined literature and science with political discussion at a high level, became the platform for these new Whig arguments after 1802. Its popularity among educated readers, along with the way it carefully distinguished itself from the populist tone of Leigh Hunt's Examiner and William Cobbett's Weekly Register, brought considerable influence. Chittick emphasizes how the growth of literacy expanded the readership for periodicals and newspapers at the same time that profits from advertising rendered publications independent from outside control. The Times showed how the press could be a business rather than a political or literary affair, while Cobbett successfully reached a plebeian market with the radicalism Whigs sought to preempt.

Chittick describes the years of Whig intellectual ascendancy as spanning 1802–24, but at the close of those years the party remained adrift as ever. The political journey from opposition to office in 1830 paralleled the move from Edinburgh to London by Jeffrey and other key intellectuals as the Tory opposition gained an effective voice of its own in the periodical press. Chittick includes literary rivalries in her account since criticism involved a moral and political act beyond the exercise of aesthetic judgment. Criticism of that kind inevitably focused on the opinions and actions of authors as writers strove to win literary fame. Personality accordingly became a dominant theme of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge described as an age of literary and political gossiping. Although Chittick describes an intellectual world focused on Edinburgh operating alongside politics in London, literature and politics did not run along exactly parallel tracks during these years.

The book's thematic approach creates a somewhat disjointed narrative despite its chronological structure, but Chittick makes no claim to presenting a narrative history of ideas. Her project “began as an anthology of excerpts from the magazine and quarterly writers of the day” (2), and Whig language only gradually emerged as preoccupation during her study. The book draws out important themes that engaged writers and politicians during the early nineteenth century, and Chittick makes a useful contribution by exploring how they adapted language to the demands of a turbulent era.