In this book, Marc Baer turns the oft-cited axiom that “all politics is local” on its head, arguing that “Westminster was the one site in Britain where the local was the national” (10). Until 1885, when the borough was divided into single-member districts, Westminster was the largest urban constituency in the country. It was also the “most scrutinized,” and contemporaries regularly claimed that it reflected in miniature the politics of the entire nation (2). Inspired by this observation, Baer's study employs the archives produced by the well-documented politics of the borough as a vehicle for understanding broader trends in British political history between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. In doing so, however, he remains laudably alert to the ways in which Westminster also was often an “exceptional” and “distinctive” place in the political landscape, one with its own unique political “dialect”—what Sir Francis Burdett called the “Westminster language” (72, 81). The result is a study in which conclusions about broader political trends are balanced by careful attention to local spatial and social particularities.

Baer primarily seeks to explain the “changing contours” of the borough's politics—the shift from “the most radical and contentious constituency in the age of oligarchy” to “the most conservative and tranquil in an age of democracy” (1). In the 1780s, a popular radical tradition emerged, focused around the reformist politics of Charles James Fox. This ultimately created a radical political tradition that dominated the borough from the establishment of the Westminster Committee in 1807 to the defeat of John Stuart Mill by W. H. Smith in 1868. Thereafter the district's reputation as a center of radicalism declined rapidly, Westminster becoming instead “a bellwether for urban Toryism” (37). The remainder of the book examines the forces responsible for this transformation, analyzing the roles played by charismatic individuals, visual and rhetorical imagery, crowds and violence, rituals, space, and varieties of association.

The result is a history of paradoxes. First, though always articulating a politics of the “people,” Westminster's radical forces of the Left dominated the borough during the era when the fewest of its inhabitants possessed the right to vote. In fact, Baer notes that rather than expanding the franchise, the 1832 Reform Act greatly reduced the number of eligible voters in the borough, a state of affairs that would be rectified only in 1867. In like manner, the efforts of individuals like Francis Place to make radicalism “respectable” (and thereby demonstrate the worthiness of the masses to participate in national politics) had the opposite result. Baer contends that reducing the incidence of election disorders, minimizing both the literal and rhetorical violence involved in political practices, and moving campaigning out of the public and into the private sphere (replacing personal canvassing with letter-writing initiatives, for example) all contributed to reducing popular participation in the political process by separating it from traditional spatial and ritual associations, discouraging voter turnouts, and removing elements of personal sociability. Thus, for all their claims to the contrary, Baer argues that Westminster radicals ultimately replaced one form of oligarchy with another, and thus it fell to the initial defenders of the old order—the Tories—to create a legitimately popular politics in the borough in the 1860s and 1870s by reviving many of the traditions those on the Left had come to reject (annual dinners, for example).

As the range of themes Baer brings together suggests, his is an “integrative” approach, refusing simple, monocausal explanations or any easy separation between change and continuity (1). Indeed, he criticizes much previous historical scholarship for failing to fully contextualize or analyze its sources judiciously. Yet Baer's own dedication to a multivalent understanding of Westminster politics comes at a cost. By attributing events to multiple factors, Baer sometimes implies that each had an equal part to play, rather than functioning in a hierarchical fashion. In regard to political rituals, for example, he observes that events like chairings and political dinners “embodied both planning and impulsiveness”—they were simultaneously staged and spontaneous (186). Such may have been the case, but surely staging such events must have also erected specific boundaries around spontaneous behavior, channeling it in certain directions while simultaneously shutting down other possibilities for expression. Spontaneous acts in an environment consciously constructed to yield such behaviors do not necessarily function in the same manner as completely unpremeditated actions, and a bit more attention to the power relations existing among the range of factors Baer's analysis so carefully elicits would have deepened the insights of his account.

Furthermore, Baer's repeated criticisms of other historians' failure to fully contextualize their subjects make the reader more conscious of those moments when he does not consider all the dimensions of his own source materials. This is particularly notable where gender is concerned. Though Baer does not ignore the category entirely, his treatment of gender is largely limited to questions of private versus public. Yet gender politics also played a potential part in other themes he examines (in the contents of print and visual media, for example). While a 1868 cartoon he references, in which Smith ushers a cross-dressed Mill out a door, likely was intended to allude to Mill's “advocacy of female suffrage,” as Baer contends (229–30), one wonders if the image delivered other gendered messages as well, especially given contemporaries' emphasis on Smith's supposedly “manly character” (58, 150). Indeed, given that Baer himself repeatedly notes the importance the possession of “manly” qualities played in Smith's and in other Westminster elections, greater attention to the nature of gender imagery would have further enriched his otherwise dense analysis of Westminster politics.

Finally, though Baer repeatedly identifies important moments of continuity in the history of Westminster politics, change (as the book's title suggests)—a narrative of radical “rise and fall” and conservative “fall and rise”—dominates this study's conclusions, and rightly so. However much their actions may have drawn upon the legacies of earlier decades, by the late 1860s neither Smith nor the newly enfranchised workers who helped to elect him looked much like Fox or the laborers who had cheered, heckled, and rioted for him at the hustings in the 1780s. In this fashion, this distinctive political transformation paralleled the equally remarkable changes that had altered Westminster's architectural and social fabrics during the same years—related transformations that Baer's study of national politics in a local setting deftly illuminates.