history: john adams

I should preface this post with the fact that I am a Victorianist by training and inclination, and I'm a mid to late Victorianist, at that. I am interested in the late eighteenth-century, but my knowledge there is largely self taught.

I watched the first part of the mini-series John Adams; I admit the dissertation got in the way during the last part. The series itself came at one of those odd moments in my own reading where there was a monumental time period overlap. I finished Antonia Fraser's biography on Marie Antoinette over Christmas, and I've been reading Amanda Foreman's biography on Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. I also read Linda Colley's The Britons, all of which covers roughly the same time period. While I've liked what I've seen of the mini-series, I think Jack Rakove is right in his assessment that John Adams is a more complex character than the series, and particularly David McCullough's biography, presents.

Beyond that, I have a problem/quibble with the misunderstanding of the dynamics behind England's actions towards the colonies. I concede that a declaration of independence was inevitable given the policies of King George III, and more to the point, Lord North, the PM at the time. My problem is with Rakove is his, and it isn't just Rakove here, misunderstanding of representation in Parliament and how MP's were elected to the House of Commons. King George III didn't have the kind of separate power to grant the colonies representation; the power lay with Parliament by the late eighteenth century. Parliament was unprepared and disinclined to increase the franchise in the 1770s. What the colonists were asking for was impossible in the mid-1770s. The government couldn't give the colonies representation without granting more representation to citizens living in Great Britain. There wasn't a major reform of election law until the First Reform Bill of 1832, which did enfranchise most of the middle-classes in Great Britain. It's a small quibble, I admit, but one that irks me nonetheless.

I do highly recommend Colley's book. Besides being a fascinating analysis of how Great Britain became Great Britain, Colley is a wry and humorous writer. I got stuck in an airport for several hours, and I found myself laughing out loud in the waiting area while reading her work.