Only thirty years ago, Georgian Britons were still widely thought to have been a virtually ungoverned people. Stung by the centralizing excesses of the later Stuarts (so the story went), the grandees who ruled Britain in the eighteenth century were perfectly content with an exceptionally weak central government that offered them ample chances to reward their friends with patronage but otherwise did next to nothing. To the extent that poverty, vagrancy, crime, and the malign social consequences of prostitution, drunkenness, and the like were coped with at all (so the story continued), they were coped with by magistrates and other parish officers on a profoundly uneven basis. In the business of social life (so the story concluded), Britons were left very much to their own devices—sometimes for the better, mostly for the worse.

Nobody believes this story anymore. Thanks chiefly to John Brewer and Patrick O’Brien, we now know that the fiscal capacities of the Georgian state made it the most puissant war machine of the long eighteenth century. Thanks to a number of other historians, we also know that the Georgians wrestled pretty strenuously with a range of issues pertaining to poverty, vagrancy, and the policing of vice and debt that today we would consider aspects of “social policy,” and that they wrestled with these issues not merely in the parishes but in the high courts and in Parliament itself. Nobody has contributed more to this new understanding of the depth and breadth of Georgians’ engagement with social questions than Joanna Innes. But because her preferred medium is the long essay rather than the monograph, until now her thoughts have been scattered among a number of scholarly journals and edited collections. By bringing together five of Innes's previously published essays along with two new ones, this volume should introduce a broader readership to her important work while making it easier for the cognoscenti to sustain their engagement with it.

These essays address an ambitious range of subjects. They include the shaping of statute law pertaining to social issues such as the relief and regulation of the poor and the repression of vice; how the Georgian “fiscal-military” state's preoccupation with warfare sometimes prompted more attention to the regulation of social matters at home rather than simply distracting attention away from them; why so much parliamentary energy was devoted to “local” legislation; the evolution of empirical social enquiry in Britain from an early eighteenth-century political arithmetic that chiefly sought to measure the wealth and power of the state to a late eighteenth-century “moral statistics” that helped to create more intellectual space for government intervention in social issues; how the widespread perception of moral crisis in the 1780s gave rise to voluntary bodies such as the Proclamation Society that were able to play significant roles in the policing of vice because the flexible framework of Georgian government enabled them to exert significant influence on magistrates, Parliament, and the law courts; how the seemingly draconian legal process governing debt actually gave debtors considerable agency even within the confines of King's Bench Prison; and, finally, how the apparatus of local government created opportunities for men of modest means but zealous temperament such as the London carpenter and constable William Payne to bring their names and their causes to public notice.

Innes's collection of essays reads more like a book than most. While the pieces are self-contained, they are well connected by several prominent themes. First, Parliament played an important role in the management of a wide range of social matters ranging from the relief of poverty to the suppression of vice. While in many respects, the localities did indeed take the lead in social regulation, they were made by no means as solely responsible for “domestic government,” as the Webbs memorably made them out to be. Local initiative thrived within a robust framework of governance that statute law did much to define, and statute law retained its influence in that framework not least because it was shaped and reshaped by a legislative institution whose permanence and authority were no longer open to serious question. Second, the law courts (most notably the Court of King's Bench) were no less influential than Parliament in the making of what we would now call social policy, because they played a vital role in interpreting the statute law through which social policy was increasingly articulated. Third, it was not merely JPs, MPs, and judges who made social policy; it was also made by voluntary associations of the great and the good and even by resolute men of much humbler means. For good or ill, the loosely articulated apparatus of Georgian government left ample space for a corporate body such as the Proclamation Society and an energetic individual such as William Payne forcefully to intrude themselves in the lives of their fellow Britons—the former by persuading magistrates to restrict public-house licensing, for example; the latter by using his powers as constable to arrest scores of his fellow Londoners for prostitution and other vices.

One finds precious little to quibble with in a collection in which each essay is a feat of scholarship, in which most of the broader arguments, because they are so compelling, have already reached the status of orthodoxy, and in which those arguments speak to each other across essays in ways that make this collection add up to something more than the sum of its parts. It might be said that Innes can be perhaps a mite too erudite for her own good. The book is in places heavier going than it might have been because she sometimes deals at a high level of abstraction, and at prosy length. Innes is at her very best when she permits her analysis to emerge from the lived realities of King's Bench Prison and the streets and alleys around Temple Bar, where William Payne waged his war on urban vice. It augurs very well indeed that the Payne essay, a real gem, is a sample of her most recent work.