Welsh Journals

compilation of the register can be distilled into a single volume designed to suit the interested layman as well as the academic reader; this would complement the booklet previously published by Cadw on historic parks and gardens. KEN MURPHY Dyfed Archaeological Trust THE SENSE OF THE PEOPLE. Politics, CULTURE AND Imperialism IN ENGLAND, 1715-1785. By Kathleen Wilson. Cambridge University Press, Past and Present Publications, 1995. Pp. xiv, 460. £ 40.00. During the last two decades it has been fashionable for specialists of British politics during the Georgian era to focus attention on those out of power- Tories, Jacobites, radicals, women, and on the press. Professor Wilson's book is of that genre, and suffers from its faults. It is lop-sided history: government policies, successes and failures are viewed through a distorting mirror of criticism, seldom adequately described and explained in themselves. The historiographical points of reference are almost invariably recent books and articles of the same type, even to the extent of ascribing to them ideas and information current long ago (e.g. p. 85). Yet despite these self-imposed or unconscious weaknesses, this is a quality book that achieves its main purpose of providing an extra dimension to the Georgian political scene. The evidence deployed is convincing in its detail, and the views based on it pertinent and unequivocal, sometimes challenging received or recent opinion: as a recent author of a John Wilkes biography, I found the assessment of the Wilkite movement both sound and shrewd. The active participation of 'the people' in eighteenth-century politics was held to be the distinguishing mark of British 'liberty'. Definitions of 'the people' varied widely, from respectable county freeholders to rioting London mobs. The concern of Professor Wilson is with popular opinions, at social levels, in the provincial towns of England: seldom does she stray into Wales or Scotland. Most of the book is a chronological survey covering urban political behaviour from the Hanoverian Succession to the American War, especially Jacobite and radical activities. A novel slant concerns the popular support for imperialism, as epitomized in the common 'our colonies' so resented by Benjamin Franklin. Here the author repeats what she has already shown elsewhere, that that is why Admiral Vernon was such a popular hero in mid-century. The final third of the book comprises detailed case-studies of Newcastle upon Tyne and Norwich, the former a