The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s David Francis Taylor Barrell John , The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 278. £50.00 hardback. 0 19 928120 3. John Barrell's latest book bears all the hallmarks of his exemplary scholarship: meticulous research, a lucid and pacy prose style that renders even the most detailed or difficult material accessible and exciting, and, most importantly, a sustained level of interdisciplinarity. The Spirit of Despotism buildsits thesis upon an extraordinary array of sources spanning the breadth of cultural registers and media: from poems and journals, to maps of London, loyalist medals, political caricatures, and legal and parliamentary proceedings. Such a range of reference represents, for Barrell, a conscious exegetical strategy that seeks to avoid the label and potential pitfalls of 'old new historicism', as he calls it, and to occupy'a space somewhere between political and cultural history' (p. 14). Prescriptions of space, physical and theoretical, are central to the book's concerns. Barrell contends that the 1790s involved the 'politicization of the private' on a previously unseen scale (p. 8), and argues that the reaction of the Pittite administration to the regime of regicide and Terror in revolutionary France, and later to the continental war, involved new forms of state oppression and political surveillance that challenged the late eighteenth-century paradigm of privacy. The reactionism of the Tory government during this period has been well documented and debated by both historians and literary critics, as has its corollary in studies of parliamentary reformism, literary radicalism, the censorship of the press and theatre, and the state treason trials; Barrell's thesis marks a departure from these surveys in that it considers the consequences of institutionalised repression on private spheres such as those of metropolitan geography, cosmetics, and cottage life – spheres that have been largely neglected by current research. Barrell is keenly aware of the two major problems that such an approach entails: firstly, the difficultyof gathering and organising the often sparse and disparate evidential data relating to areas that were,by definition, beyond the apparatuses of regulationor reliable public records; and, secondly, the need to delimit the vast field of potential cultural material invoked in his notion of 'invasions of privacy'. He overcomes the first of these by working his argument around an exhaustively researched and adeptly managed plethora of sources, and the second by selecting just five instances of the aggressive renegotiation of British culture that, he maintains, pervades the decade. Each of these examples, through which Barrell structures his book, embody public incursions into issues or sites that, prior to 1789,were considered domestic, personal, or even trivial.In each case Barrell opens up his discussion by way of an historical or literary anecdote – the Godwinian man of talent pacing the city, the arrest of John Frost for republican sentiments voiced in a coffee house, or the bear's grease advocated in 1795 as a hair-restorative – which he then skilfully unpicks, eliciting complex issues from these brief narratives that serve as the basis for further analysis. His first chapter attempts to reconstruct the political geography of 1790s London. Barrell maps the polarised economic and ideological climate of the period onto the east–west division of the city and notes several occurrences of protests and triumphal parades that functioned as 'plebeian invasions of the west end' (p. 45). He then gives specific consideration to the distribution of divisions [End Page 189] of the London Corresponding Society throughout the capital, highlighting their dearth within the walled City and suggesting several possible explanations for this surprising absence. This discussion is followed by a chapter on the coffee house. Drawing on his detailed knowledge of the treason trials and unstable legal taxonomy of the 1790s, Barrell examines a numberof cases in which radicals were tried for seditious utterances made in coffee houses, which, he contends, operated as spaces in which conversation involved a 'delicate negotiation between public and private'(p. 83). Barrell's thesis here is indebted to, and perhaps slightly guilty of repeating, material already covered in the recent studies of the eighteenth-century coffee house provided by Markman...