On or about 1848 “the idea of the English national character” changed, asserts Peter Mandler in his new book. Mandler's is clearly a history of “an idea,” in the words of his subtitle. The bulk of his sources are works of history, treatises, speeches, sermons, national newspaper leader articles, travelogues, “auto-ethnographies,” poll and surveys, and “national inquests at moments of crisis” (p. 5). In what seems to have started partially as a respectful argument with Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992), among other works, Mandler traces the rise of discussions about Englishness to moments of uncertainty in domestic rather than international politics. The notion of national character, he argues, “developed for the first time into a serious and respectable category of self-analysis for the writing and reading classes” in the mid Victorian decades, in the wake of Chartism and Anti-Corn Law agitation in England and the 1848 nationalist revolutions on the continent (pp. 58–59). Following Stefan Collini, Mandler contends that there was a shift for the first time in the belief that the mass of Englishmen possessed “character.” Citing material changes, such as urbanization, the railway, telegraphy and steam printing, along with the growth of social statistics and early social psychology, the nation became “a cultural unit” only in the 1850s. In Mandler's words, “the British were coming to see themselves as more homogeneous and uniform, less fissured by differences of region, religion, morals and class if not gender” (p. 66). (Historians of gender are likely to be repeatedly frustrated by statements such as this.) This was the period when Thomas Babington Macaulay, Henry Thomas Buckle, and William Stubbs wrote their histories of the English, and Charles Dickens penned his own characterizations in books like Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865). “Teutomania,” with its emphasis on England's Anglo-Saxon roots and “ancient constitution,” allowed English dominance of the union to be taken for granted. In Mandler's reckoning, there were 112 “Victorian textbooks on the history of Britain,” 108 of which “called themselves histories of England” (p. 67). After the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, we learn, there was a revival of more conservative notions of patriotism “based on leadership, emulation and institutions” (pp. 106–107). The “Great Briton” of Punch's John Bull personified for a time the English national character until the Boer War and World War I made such complacent self-imaginings impossible. John Bull was then replaced by the “Little Man,” Sidney Strube's cartoon featured in the pages of the Daily Express from 1920 to 1947. The “Little Man's” representation of national character was a strange mélange, incorporating an older imagining of the English gentleman, along with the working-class “chirpy Cockney” and “the bourgeois suburbanite” with his pipe, his garden, and his nuclear family. Mandler convincingly argues that only in the 1950s and 1960s was the English national character recast in the image of the gentleman across the political spectrum. Depending on one's politics, though, the gentleman was the villain who had to be ousted or the gallant defender of traditional English values under threat in the postwar world. The death of the idea of national character, according to Mandler, came in the process of cultural change in the course of the 1960s (p. 221). In Mandler's reading, the concept “had lived too long” and “been stretched too far” “to function any longer in a credibly monolithic way” (p. 221).