Review

In the eleven pages which constitute his 'Commencement', Marc Baer reveals the ambitious task facing any biographer of Westminster. In order to understand why what was to late-Georgians 'Radical Westminster' became by the 1880s a bellwether of conservatism, why the 'glue which held together the culture of elections' (p. 10) changed so strikingly, a biographer of Westminster needs not only a command of chronological scope – 1780-1890 in this case – but also thematic breadth. Language, ritual, association, place, personality, violence, democracy, gender, class, and the visual are all encountered, and – Baer suggests – need to be encountered in order to give any such biography sufficient gravitas.