Irene Collins

Review: Jane Austen and Representations of Regency EnglandSalesRoger, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England, Routledge, 1994, pp.xxii + 270, £13.99 pb.

that patriarchal culture produces in cuckolds so many examples of its failure, she is so determined to present them as comic confessions of inadequacy that she scarcely considers the possibility that they might represent scapegoats. What The Deceived Husband has to contribute on the literature of infidelity is therefore disappointing; though it is often interesting on the psychology of male characters.

Review: In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940AllenJames Smith, In the Public Eye: a History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. viii + 356, £25.

have long studied Cobbett as a stylist and grammarian, someone of significance in the evolution of the English language. It also has much of value to say on the history of popular political journalism of wide rural appeal that made him notorious and widely feared by those in certain circles at the time. Further coverage that especially impressed me included Dycks handling of issues to do with the control or reform of popular culture, especially after c. 1815; his discussion of Cobbetts own farming and employment practices; his valuable assessment of Cobbetts involvement in the Captain Swing disturbances, which will interest those studying rural protest; and his account of popular attitudes to the poor law, and the change to the new poor law in 1834. The text supplies a convincing elucidation of Cobbetts career in Parliament, and the problems he faced in adapting to being an M.P. for Oldham rather than for the southern rural regions he knew best. This in turn illuminates important issues of rural-industrial incompatibility at this time, when political ideologies were being re-formulated in response to changes like shifts in population employment and distribution. Cobbetts incongruity with his Oldham constituents is an interesting reflection of this. Like his subject, albeit in a different vein, Dyck has a fine ear for language, and the book is extremely well written, in flowing, varied and controlled prose. Some of its literary juxtapositions would no doubt have delighted Cobbett himself I think for example of the evocations of Gilray, folktale and folksong Dyck evokes a lively sense of the political and cultural atmosphere of Cobbetts period. This is very much a work to bring Cobbett back prominently onto the historiographical stage, and it allies itself with current developments in rural social and cultural history. One reads it with a growing sense that many of the remedies proposed by Cobbett for the state of rural poverty and social bitterness were far more credible than has sometimes been supposed. Dycks work deserves to be recognised as a very significant and notable breakthrough in the sympathetic study of rural popular culture and in Cobbett scholarship.

Reviews : Peter H. Amann, Revolution and Mass Democracy: The Paris Club Movement in 1848, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975. xviii 370pp. £7.60

phantoms, by suicides in the public baths. In Cobb’s Paris, people skate on the Seine, fish and bathe in it, but meanwhile dead horses are rotting on the Ile des Cygnes, and the smell from Bicetre can sometimes penetrate as far as the Rue St Jacques The whole book is punctuated by the recurring, hauntmg image of the chaine the convict gangs wending their way to the prison hulks. What, then, does Cobb regret in his final lament for the passing of Paris’s outlying villages, and their replacement by new jungles like La Courneuve? The answer is not clear. The Bois de Boulogne may be scarred by the Boulevard Periph6rique, but its prostitutes are now outnumbered by the racehorses. Orly, Rungis, and La Defense have destroyed the Paris of the Impressionists, but this book, with the primeval fear it describes, hardly seems