The premise of Chittick's study is that the national discourse found in British periodical literature of 1802-30 is crucial to an understanding of the literary language of the era.

Five essays on the tendency of modern historians to update other eras and on the need to recapture the concrete life of the past.

In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Alexander Pope noted that his age was one of Parties, both in Wit and State. Much scholarship has been devoted to the complexities of the political parties of the eighteenth century, but there has been a surprising reluctance to explore what Pope implied were the corollaries of those parties, namely, parties in literature. The essays collected here explore the literary culture that arose from and supported what Pitt the Elder referred to as the great spirit of Whiggism that animated English politics during the eighteenth century. From the prehistory of Whiggism in the court of Charles II to the fractures opened up within it by the French Revolution in the 1790s, the interactions between Whiggish politics and literature are sampled and described in groundbreaking essays that range widely across the fields of eighteenth-century political prose, poetry, and the novel.

This study of English political thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is organized around the concept of a Whig tradition. Professor Burrow argues that the study of nineteenth-century liberal thought has taken insufficient account of its eighteenth-century antecedents. The work of modern scholars on eighteenth-century themes, especially the civic humanist tradition and the Scottish Enlightenment, is drawn on as a preamble to considering the central ideas of Liberalism. The book traces how the concept changed between the early eighteenth and the late nineteenth century, and examines the main points of continuity, analogy, and difference in the progress of society, public opinion, individuality, and the idea of balance. A concluding chapter looks at the early twentieth century.