Abstract

Reviews Christopher Reid, "Imprison'd Wranglers": The Rhetorical Culture ofthe House ofCommons, 1760-1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 270 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-958109-2 As rhetoricians expand the parameters of rhetorical histories, the inter­ actions between politicians and the people on "Main Street" or "out of doors" become as important as the words of famous orators. In Imprison'd Wranglers, Christopher Reid extends this approach to the eighteenth-century British Parliament. He argues for a "rhetorical culture" surrounding the House of Commons in an era when politicians became public figures. According to Reid, new relationships developed between Members and constituents with the expansion of print culture: "eloquence was flowing outside the House, to be captured, admired, or caricatured in print, before flowing back in the form of pamphlets and newspaper reports... which were read in the Chamber " (p. 14). By tracing this flow through multiple institutions and media, he produces a comprehensive account of change and continuity in parliamentary oratory. The title of Reid's book comes from William Cowper's The Task (1785), in which the poet, reading newspaper reports of debates, longs to "set th' im­ prison'd wranglers free." While Cowper reconstructs orators' performances, Reid examines now MPs were metaphorically "imprisoned" in the "chain of newspaper mediations that brought speech events in Westminster" to distant constituents and reassesses the rhetorical dynamics of distributing parliamentary speech in print (p. 3). By addressing "the complex reciprocity between print and oratory" in late eighteenth-century Britain, Imprison'd Wranglers complements recent work by Carolyn Eastman (A Nation ofSpeechifiers , 2009) and Sandra Gustafson (Imagining Deliberative Democracy, 2011), who explore how printed American oratory fostered new political identities in the new nation and promoted new forms of rhetorical education at the turn of the nineteenth century (Eastman, p. 10). Reid likewise studies how print reconstructions of the British Commons "brought parliamentary debate onto a broader terrain of public argument," "permanently altered the rhetorical context" of political speech, and gave the people "a stake in Parliament" (Reid, p. 11, 75). To survey the breadth of Parliament's "rhetorical culture," Reid exam­ ines newspapers, pamphlets, letters, collections like William Cobbett's ParliaRhetorica , Vol. XXXII, Issue 3, pp. 312-323, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2014.32.3.312. Reviews 313 ntaty History ofEngland, and satirical sketches (p. 3). The architecture of the Chamber, the classical curriculum, and the working conditions of newspaper reporters also come under his purview. He draws on political historians like David Cannadine and Joanna Innes but approaches parliamentary texts and practices as a historian of rhetoric. Reid compares parliamentary speaking techniques to classical and eighteenth-century rhetorical theories and ad­ dresses the challenges of working with transcripts of oral performances. For him, reporters transcripts matter less as accurate representations of speech than as efforts to represent "the House as a place of collective rhetorical action ... in which political arguments and meanings were forged" (p. 17). These archives, including the transcripts, the Chamber, and reporting practices, re­ veal how oratory circulated beyond the Chamber and brought constituents into the political nation. Imprison'd Wranglers comprises four sections: Part 1 (Chapter 2) ap­ plies Roxanne Mountford's "geography of a communicative event" to St. Stephen's Chapel, the home of the eighteenth-century Commons (p. 25). The three chapters of Part 2 discuss how Parliament reached the public through the "fictitious tribunals of the press" (Chapter 3), reporters who copied debates from memory (Chapter 4), and visual satirists like James Gillray (Chapter 5) (p. 75). In Part 3, Reid examines how MPs modified classical rhetorical practices including declamation (Chapter 6) and the con­ cept of ethos (Chapter 7) in the face of increasing publicity. Part 4 features a broader view of parliamentary rhetorical culture with a case study of the 1773 Lord Clive debates (Chapter 8) and an exploration of MPs' persuasive uses of quotation (Chapter 9). Reid concludes with...