The War of Words: The Electoral Language of British Elections, 1880–1914, by Luke Blaxill

Abstract

Preceded by a series of innovative articles, Luke Blaxill’s debut monograph is a remarkable achievement. Blaxill invites readers both to reassess the electoral politics of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and—through a corpus linguistics-based approach to the stump speeches delivered at nine general elections—to consider the utility of digital techniques to historical analysis and explanation. The book will be a must-read for those interested in modern British politics, but, beyond representing a dynamic intervention in its immediate field, it will also stimulate welcome debate about historical methods and inspire future research. Blaxill positions his work as a ‘methodological experiment’ (p. 12), posing questions about the capacity of quantification to provide and articulate evidence and seeking to answer them by reference to a field where the historiography is mature (but which also, in several cases, needs reinvigorating). Given the nature of this testing ground, the book is interested in questions which have long preoccupied political historians, yet it occupies a distinctive position within the scholarship. Blaxill contends that the emphasis on deep readings prompted by the turn to the political-cultural has led to a privileging of the recovery of narrative over the provision of causal explanations or generalisations (pp. 6–8). He suggests that these strands of historical analysis and outcome might be reintegrated and strengthened by a ‘hybrid methodology’ that blends both the qualitative and the quantitative and which, simultaneously, builds a bridge between the social sciences and the humanities (pp. 9, 238–40). Quantification, Blaxill convincingly demonstrates, can enhance our capacity to analyse vast discourses systematically, precisely and verifiably—in this case, the enormous volume of words spoken by politicians in the era of the mass electorate (p. 229). As Blaxill notes, electoral culture was, from the later nineteenth century, increasingly ‘platform-centric’, its language being deliberately partisan and delivered with the intention to persuade (pp. 2, 27–9). For Blaxill, close and distant readings could and should be carried out in tandem, the result being the empowering and augmenting, rather than the replacement, of traditional approaches. From local and national newspaper reports of election speeches, he constructed (and checked for quality and accuracy) three main corpora (collections of texts), containing over four million words. They are: the principal corpus, covering East Anglia, a region where he identified an opportunity to expand historiographical coverage of political life in the countryside, and from which he builds a period-wide case-study; a ‘constituencies’ corpus, encompassing seats outside the region and representing a variety of constituency types; and a ‘national’ corpus for front-ranking politicians. From these datasets, Blaxill generated statistics showing, for instance, the frequency with which issues were discussed, the linguistic context in which they were mentioned, and the connections between the words which made up the rhetoric by which politicians appealed to electors (see Chapter One).