Instead of Sex, Money and Personal Character in Eighteenth-Century British Politics, Marilyn Morris's book ought to have been titled “Aspects of masculinity in eighteenth-century British politics,” because that constitutes the bulk of its subject matter. Following in the footsteps of Anna Clark, Morris has written a timely book that might help rejuvenate the presently unfashionable topic of Augustan high politics for another generation of students. This once-Namierite realm of factional politics without ideology is explicitly linked by Morris to contemporary global politics and the modern media's continuing fascination with the morality—variously defined—of scandal. Newspapers constitute the bulk of Morris's sources, supplemented by diaries, printed correspondence and memoirs, the odd cartoon, and political tracts. This is consequently a work primarily about discourse and perception, as opposed to “reality.”

Morris's analysis focuses on two specific periods of comparative stability: the Walpolian era (1721–42) and the ascendancy of the Younger Pitt (1783–1806). She defines the first as a formative period in the politics of personal character, the assessment of a politician's worth by his public morality as opposed to his private influence. Her assessment of the pamphlet war between the courtier John, Lord Hervey and the country Whig parliamentarian-journalist William Pulteney illustrates how private vices, in this case including accusations of homosexuality, were coming to be associated with public virtue forty years before the rise of John Wilkes. This, Morris suggests, was a spin-off of contemporary public fascination with the trials and tribulations of the royal family and its body politics, though this argument is not entirely convincing. Long before the rise of newspapers, Londoners had been fascinated by royal and court scandals, which “gossip” columnists had reproduced from oral networks from the earliest days of “news” print. What is notable about political morality after 1688 is the extent to which bourgeois values began to encroach upon elite “public” perceptions of truth and virtue. By the younger Pitt's time, argues Morris, high political personas had become sexualized according to heteronormative and, to some extent, domestic standards. We will probably never know if Pitt was actually gay, but Morris points out that he took the trouble to appear straight from time to time. Since the printed memoir material from this era is particularly good, Morris tries to evaluate how experiences of male sociability shaped political loyalties. Her answers, however, do not much improve our understanding of male emotionality and political friendship—except to tell us that it was under increasing restraint as to public displays of affection.

Like many social and cultural historians, Morris portrays this period as one of creeping bourgeoisification juxtaposed against a seemingly carefree landed ethos of comparative excess. This involved forms of consumption ranging from sex, alcohol, and gambling to general consumer expenditure. The bourgeoisie, as journalists and cartoonists, were slowly winning this battle in their often satirical reportage upon high politics, while middling-sort values were becoming evident in opposition criticisms of the ever-inadequate civil list and its lack of transparency. The gentry, as usual, are conflicted participants in what Morris portrays as an ethical struggle between the values of prudence and display, whether in private or public life. One deficiency of her work, however, is its failure to connect much with older histories of political theory and party formation. Boyd Hilton (Age of Atonement, 1991) has identified an important political subculture of evangelicals beginning to emerge in the 1780s whose rectitude, as James Sack has noted, led them to canonize the younger Pitt and vilify the gambling, mistress-swapping Foxites (“The Memory of Burke and Memory of Pitt: English Conservatism Confronts its Past, 1806–1829,” Historical Journal 30, no. 3 [September 1987]: 623–640). No engagement is undertaken with Philip Harling's analysis of Old Corruption (The Waning of “Old Corruption,” 1996), though as Karen Harvey has illustrated (Little Republic, 2012), economy was very much a gendered discourse. In terms of modern gender theory, Morris rejects the notion that hegemonic masculinity is inherently unstable, though the conflicts she delineates—sometimes complete with duels—could well be read in that light.

Morris is strongest on the issues of domesticity and nuclear family values that constituted the core of her first book on the later Georgian monarchy (British Monarchy and the French Revolution, 1998). She expertly dissects cartoon and newspaper coverage of royal births and weddings to illustrate, first, the importance of breeding (and, thus, the succession) to public perceptions of male and female royal worthiness; and second, following the accession of George III, the increasing importance of bourgeois morality to public perceptions of public virtue. The politics of personality started at the very top of society, and originated in one's negotiation of patriarchal relationships inside and outside the family. Given that only 17 percent of the British public were voting in national elections, this emphasis upon the royal may have helped a much larger cadre of newspaper readers orient their politics to the royal family, as opposed to any party system. These familiar patriarchal standards, argues Morris, then mapped onto judgements of Hanoverian politicians and, more controversially, some of their conduct. The tension between sober bourgeois values and life's gay aristocratic pageant is never resolved.

The Hanoverian political nation, whether elite or bourgeois, emerges from Morris's account as a sex-obsessed body of public opinion. One wonders how much had really changed, family values notwithstanding, since the days of the Stuarts.