Harling, Philip

English

University of Kentucky

University of KentuckyUKnowledgeHistory Faculty Publications History12-2018[Review of ] Edmund Burke and the Invention ofModern Conservatism, 1830–1914: An IntellectualHistory. By Emily Jones. Oxford HistoricalMonographs. Edited by P. Clavin et al. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. x+274. $90.00.Philip HarlingUniversity of Kentucky, harling@uky.eduRight click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you.Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/history_facpubPart of the Political History CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the History at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in History FacultyPublications by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact UKnowledge@lsv.uky.edu.Repository CitationHarling, Philip, "[Review of] Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914: An Intellectual History. By EmilyJones. Oxford Historical Monographs. Edited by P. Clavin et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. x+274. $90.00." (2018).History Faculty Publications. 9.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/history_facpub/9[Review of] Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914: An Intellectual History. By EmilyJones. Oxford Historical Monographs. Edited by P. Clavin et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp.x+274. $90.00.Notes/Citation InformationPublished in The Journal of Modern History, v. 90, no. 4, p. 937-939.© 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.The copyright holder has granted the permission for posting the article here.Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1086/700142This book review is available at UKnowledge: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/history_facpub/9‘impolite’ and threatening noise” (164) to attack and discredit diverse genres of cheap printand popular forms of speech. But chapter 6 inverts rather than repeats this theme. Work-ing with a different set of authors, from Aphra Behn to Adam Smith, McDowell showswhere figures of Billingsgate “eloquence” with its “obscenities, slang, hyperbole and oc-cupational argot” (193) and portrayals of fishwives (female hawkers, vendors, and sellersof fish) who were “verbally victorious” over “gentlemen” were used to critique the spreadof reading and the artificial dictats and mealymouthed politeness promoted by print.The strengths of The Invention of the Oral are that it brilliantly reproduces eighteenth-century writers’ “both-and” thinking—their habit of seeing and productively deploying mul-tiple sides of an issue rather than plumping for one side of an “either-or;” that it fully dem-onstrates the interest and value of paying closer attention to contemporaries’ comments onorality and print; and that this leads us to question and critically reexamine our modernscholarly terms and taxonomies. It seems a little churlish to observe that it is never quiteclear why these particular male authors figure as the most important embodiments of thedevelopmental history being proposed, since they were not all as influential then as theysubsequently became. Nor is it quite clear why this particular developmental history is pre-sented as the sole source of “the late twentieth-century development of the compound terms‘oral culture’ and ‘popular oral culture’” (287). As the partly anomalous chapter on satir-ical representations of fishwives suggests, other things were being printed and argued thatcould equally be construed as part of the “prehistory” (187) of these concepts. Why shouldBillingsgate not figure as part of the prehistory of Rap, or vendors’ verbal victories overgentlemen as an ancestor of popular late night satire? Why are critiques in “plebeian dis-course” of gentrified forms of print, not likewise to be viewed as part of the long historyof popular preference for oral and visual forms of entertainment and for information de-rived from “cheap print”?Eve Tavor BannetUniversity of OklahomaEdmundBurke and the Invention ofModernConservatism, 1830–1914: An Intellec-tual History. ByEmily Jones. OxfordHistoricalMonographs. Edited byP. Clavin et al.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. x1274. $90.00.When we think of British C/conservatism (both the party-political and the social philos-ophy) we think of Edmund Burke. A preference for slow and “organic” change and dislikefor “mechanical” theories and systems of governance; a reverence for history and tradi-tion; a deep respect for religion, property, and order—these are the foundations of whatwe still tend to call “Burkean” C/conservatism 220 years after Burke’s death. The associ-ation between Burke and such ideas has taken on the status of an immemorial truism. Butthe great value of Emily Jones’s perceptive and erudite book is to show that this associa-tion was the outcome of a century of writing about Burke that only gradually turned himinto a C/conservative master spirit. Hers is a compelling and admirably well-researchedstudy in the construction of a durable political tradition.The reception history of Edmund Burke over the “long” nineteenth century was tortu-ous. It took many decades for his public image to evolve from that of an apostate Whigwith a hyperactive imagination to an oracular “founder” of modern Conservatism. In thefirst half of the century, Whigs and Tories alike admired Burke’s eloquence, but neitherside felt they could fashion his disparate body of ideas into a usable political creed. TheBook Reviews 937This content downloaded from 160.036.194.071 on February 28, 2019 14:00:30 PMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).heirs of Charles James Fox could not forgive Burke for breakingwith their idol and turningso dramatically on the FrenchRevolution. The heirs of the younger Pitt, for their part, con-tinued to suspect Burke for his early writings, in which he weighed the British monarchyand the East India Company in the balance and found both wanting, and in which he ex-pressed a tad too much sympathy with American rebels and Irish Catholics. Burke wasfrom an ancient Irish family, and his Irishness was another thing that English commenta-tors tended to stress for a couple of generations after his death. Some saw in him a certainkind of Celtic wisdom, while others stressed a Celtic passion that devolved into madnessin his last few years. Either way, Burke was deemed an Irish oddity—the father of his owncrotchets and eccentricities rather than the father of any kind of British political tradition.The second half of the nineteenth century was much kinder to Burke. From the 1860sthere was a stronger tendency for Tories to praise the Reflections, while Liberals hailed hisearlier critiques of royal prerogative and imperial excess. Both sides had come to revereBurke’s dislike of abstract theory and sudden political change and his admiration for Brit-ish institutions. These were sources of near-unanimous reverence by the third quarter ofthe nineteenth century, when virtually everyone could agree that the “British constitution”was the key to Britain’s status as the greatest power the world had ever known. Thus Burkewas well on his way to canonical status when the Irish Home Rule debates of the mid-1880s to the early 1890s cemented his status as a formidable and intellectually consistentpolitical thinker. In an especially interesting chapter, Jones shows that both sides drew con-siderably on Burke’s writings to support their arguments. Gladstone and company citedBurke’s sympathy for Catholic relief and his stress on voluntary political ties in making theirarguments for HomeRule. Liberal Unionists andConservatives counteredwith a “Burkean”emphasis on the need to preserve the unity of the Empire and to protect the Protestant mi-nority in Ireland fromwhat they feared would be the Jacobinical zeal of a Catholic major-ity backed by the authority of a revolutionary Irish legislature. The long, zigzag course thatturnedBurke into a political thinker whose conservatismwas both an abstract political phi-losophy and the basis of a specific party tradition was completed in the Edwardian era. Bythen, idealist philosophers such as JohnMacCunn and Tory politicians such as F. E. Smithand Lord Hugh Cecil were habitually citing Burke as the progenitor and champion of sev-eral vague but axiomatic conservative beliefs—hostility to sudden or dramatic constitu-tional change, the dogged defense of private property and the establishment in churchand state, and a staunch respect for the organic nature of society. There was at this sametime a vogue for identifying Burke with these C/conservative virtues in university syllabi,extension courses, school textbooks, and cheap editions of key Burkean texts, notably theReflections.One can of course find a few quibbles with even as admirable a book as Jones’s. There isscarcely amention of TomPaine, and the dialectical relationship betweenBurke and Painewas surely the stuff ofmuch interestingVictorian commentary—as it continues to be. Thereis likewise scarcely a mention of Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795), in which Burkeclosely identified himself with the laissez-faire ideals of Adam Smith, famously (or infa-mously) lauding “the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequentlythe laws of God.” The sacralization of the market was of course a pronounced Victoriantrait, and it would have been instructive to see how Burke was used in this particular formof worship. While in Victorian thought the market was inspired by God, it is perhaps nottoo much of a stretch to say that in contemporary neoliberal thought the market has re-placed God. What would Burke have thought of the “creative destruction” of the market?This is a kind of destruction most outspokenly embraced by a Thatcherite (and Reaganite)right that still claims Burke for a father, but one that has wreaked havoc on the “little pla-toons” of society that Burke identified inReflections as the “first link in the series bywhich938 Book ReviewsThis content downloaded from 160.036.194.071 on February 28, 2019 14:00:30 PMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).we proceed toward a love to our country, and to mankind.” It is not entirely fair to fault abook for what it is not about. Nevertheless, it would have been interesting to follow Jonesinto a contemporary analysis of the ongoing uses—and abuses—of the still-venerated Burke.Philip HarlingUniversity of KentuckyWinston Churchill in British Art, 1900 to the Present Day: The Titan with ManyFaces. By Jonathan Black.London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. xxiv1288. $29.95 (cloth); $26.99 (EPUB orPDF e-book).This is a life of Churchill refracted through the work of the British or British-based art-ists who portrayed him from 1900, when he was first elected to the House of Commons,right up to the present day. Jonathan Black is an art historian, and reading him is rather likevisiting a major exhibition in the company of its curator. No such collection as this, embrac-ing the work of painters, sculptors, photographers, and cartoonists, has ever been assembledbefore. There are ninety-five illustrations in black and white and twelve colored plates, withthe provenance of each work meticulously researched. Some of the items belong to a long-established Churchill iconography that includes the paintings of Orpen, Lavery, Sickert, andSutherland, the photography of Beaton andKarsh, the sculptures of Epstein andNemon, andthe rugged, hunched figure of Roberts-Jones’s statue in Parliament Square. Churchill’s “fin-est hour” is captured in two famous cartoons of 1940: David Low’s “All Behind YouWin-ston” (May 14) and Sidney Strube’s portrayal of Churchill as a bulldog (June 8). Suchfamous images select themselves, but Black has searched assiduously for other materialsthat are less well known but no less interesting. The first of his illustrations is a photographof Churchill on campaign in Egypt in 1898, taken in Cairo in the studio of a Mr. J. Hey-man. The last is a screen print of 2010 by Sarah Haines, based on a photograph of Chur-chill in Cairo in 1942.Enjoyable though it is to browse through the pictures, the substance of the book lies inthe text, which is both scholarly and original. As a famous politician and great war leaderChurchill was bound to be photographed, caricatured, painted, and sculpted. But as Blackpoints out, there was a potent chemistry between subject and artist. Churchill was a show-man who understood that imagery was as important as language in democratic politics. Car-toonists, meanwhile, rejoiced in the variety of roles he played and the diversity of costumesin which he appeared. For a painter or sculptor, observing him in a series of sittings, he wasa profoundly human but phenomenal being with a wondrous array of qualities, all in pri-mary colors. There was something about Churchill that brought out the best in artists ofall kinds and gave rise to a uniquely rewarding visual legacy. It has, admittedly, little ornothing to tell us about the workings of politics and government. But it is rich in insightsinto his character and helpful, too, in reflecting the way in which political perceptions ofhim changed over time.Black provides an amusing account of goings on at the National Liberal Club, whichin 1915 gratefully accepted the donation of a portrait of Churchill by Ernest Townsend, buttwice banished it to the basement during periods when they disapproved of his politics, onlyto put it on show again in 1943 in the presence of Churchill himself. It still hangs there, closeto the basement stairs, doubtless ready to be moved again if necessary. On the personal sideChurchill’s relationship with his cousin, the sculptress Clare Sheridan, is touchingly described.A political innocent who fell in love, in swift succession, with Lenin and Trotsky, the buc-Book Reviews 939This content downloaded from 160.036.194.071 on February 28, 2019 14:00:30 PMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).

[Review of] \u3cem\u3eEdmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914: An Intellectual History.\u3c/em\u3e By Emily Jones. Oxford Historical Monographs. Edited by P. Clavin et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. x+274. $90.00.

https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&amp;context=history_facpub

[Review of] \u3cem\u3eEdmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914: An Intellectual History.\u3c/em\u3e By Emily Jones. Oxford Historical Monographs. Edited by P. Clavin et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. x+274. $90.00.

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