In A Polite Exchange of Bullets Stephen Banks offers a thorough and rounded topography of the duel and the cultural values that sustained its practice until the mid-nineteenth century. One of the book’s key themes is dueling’s decline and eventual cessation by the 1850s, and it is here that Banks is keenest to integrate a practice—which, as he admits, was performed infrequently and by a select group—with broader themes of social and political change. In its post-Restoration heyday, therefore, the English duel “played an important role in constructing and sustaining the social structure,” while its early Victorian demise signaled “the most profound changes in the social fabric in the road to modernity” (1). En route Banks approaches the duel from several perspectives: its relationship to criminal law and the divergence between possible and probable legal sanctions; its professional composition within the gentry, the largest number of combatants coming from the military (and for brief periods also from law and medicine); and its geographical distribution—contests being most frequent in London and with a significant incidence in English ports and garrison towns, although far less common in regional manufacturing centers like Manchester or Sheffield.

Questions surrounding the numbers and social profile of those who took part, together with the trajectory of decline from the 1810s, have been recurrent themes in the long historiography of dueling. Here Banks draws on a detailed survey of nearly 800 reported contests in The Times, as well as from selected provincial newspapers, to describe a practice that proved most popular in “parts of the military, descending down the ranks of the aristocracy to the young untitled but well-born in the metropolis,” but which “did not succeed in insinuating itself among the new manufacturing and managerial orders” (94). Elsewhere, Banks is keen to view the duel from fresh perspectives, and these studies form several of the book’s most interesting sections. As the author reminds us, paying close attention to the “why” and the “who” of dueling risks taking the act itself for granted, even reducing it to a stereotype of heaths, paces, and “pistols at dawn.” Banks is good at re-creating the varieties and minutiae of the duel, not to mention its tensions and dangers. Equally good is his recovery of some overlooked aspects, including the role of the second and the alternative forms of redress that might prevent gentlemen taking up arms. Interesting perspectives in their own right, these subjects also play to Banks’s explanation of the duel’s decline. In many ways the exchanges of bullets, swords, canes, and the occasional horsewhip that occur in this book are less “polite” than “honorable,” with honor maintained or lost through duelists’ attention to highly mannered forms of conduct. It is honor, not politeness, that lies at the heart of this book, or rather it is the conditions that preserved honor as a quality sufficiently fragile and valuable for some to risk everything for its public restitution.

For Banks, the duel’s decline is explained by changing notions of honor and status as something readily infringed and challenged and, therefore, in need of defense and reassertion. As he argues, the duel could not have been sustained without a “broader class of men” who “shared a particular sensitivity in respect of reputations,” conferred with constant reference to one’s competitors above, below, and beside (26). At its height dueling was sustained by practitioners’ readiness to take offense, by the difficulties of negotiating public and of establishing personal space, and also by a desire among socially undervalued military men to assert their status. Underlying the demise of the duel, by contrast, was a move toward an alternative concept of honor made possible by greater resort to nonviolent forms of redress and the development of less performative, socially determined forms of “rationalist functionalist” manhood (236).

Banks’s assessment of decline is most successful when focusing on the duel and its alternatives. In charting the role of the second, for example, he shows how their increasingly formalized place, coinciding with the move from swords to pistols in the 1780s, served to create opportunities in which tempers might be cooled and disputes negotiated without conflict. Likewise, although always limited in deterring or punishing willing duelists, by the early nineteenth century “the courts were more successful in offering a remedy to gentlemen who did not want to duel and who asked for legal protection” (154), not least by threatening challengers with a breach of the King’s Peace. By degrees, the honor culture that had once given meaning and legitimacy to the post-Restoration duel was hollowed out and rendered obsolete: by the 1840s the duel “had become unpatriotic, antisocial and uncomfortable in its allusion to the realities of social power” (241). However, the range of possible factors expands so rapidly in the book’s concluding chapters that any links between dueling’s demise and the context in which it is said to have occurred prove difficult to assess. Thus, improvements in civic space and higher (less intrusive) standards of social interaction run alongside new forms of policing and gentlemanliness; similarly, growing appreciation of the rule of law and of “rule-based systems of governance” (237) emerged in tandem with a common elite and middle-class interest in a state now “adept at suppressing popular culture and radicalism” (241). Sweeping and challenging, it is at least a suitably provocative way to end a study of the duel.