[In the following review of The Birth of the Modern, Caute commends Johnson's writing and use of anecdotes, but finds the book's underlying Thatcherite message and expansive digressions tenuously related to its purported theme.]

Paul Johnson's 1,000-page book [The Birth of the Modern] reports everything we might wish to know about the world during the 15 years after the fall of Napoleon—and some more. The Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1815 and fell in 1830; across the Channel, the British settled down to a period of Tory-controlled constitutional stability, and of virtual world hegemony. Although Johnson accords the emergent United States respectful attention, his chosen chronological frontiers clearly indicate a Eurocentric perspective. The British are the star players; the wider world is largely their chessboard. Devoted to balance and moderation, they frequently blast everyone else out of the water.

Industrial power is at the root of it. Science, industry, economic growth and land speculation in the American Midwest lead on to Australia, the aborigines and Maoris, the Cape, Burma, China and Johnson's dislike of Protestant missionaries. The Royal Navy polices the world, reluctantly teaching miscreants a lesson, particularly Arab slavers—a strong smell of the Gulf War here, with Saddam Husseins breaking treaties along the Barbary Coast, until a calm British admiral runs out of patience. When fully engaged, Johnson unleashes a blitz of statistics: We learn that the biggest capital ships consumed 900 acres of oak trees, were driven by 50,000 square feet of canvas, carried 11 square sails on three masts, plus three jibs, four staysails, 10 stunsails and a spanker, not to mention 34 miles of rope, much of it six inches thick. There are three pages of this.

Johnson's cultural searchlight swivels towards continental Europe when musical and philosophical geniuses require walk-on appearances: Beethoven is found strolling with Goethe and vainly urging the poet-minister not to step aside for approaching aristocrats. Rossini, like Byron, races all over the place, Johnson alerts us to the ominous totalitarianism lying latent in the German supremacist philosophy of Fichte and Hegel—the book is alive with Thatcherite warnings.

Johnson also lightens the load with social history: Jane Austen's admiration for the Post Office leads naturally enough to the hazards of coach travel in America and the prevalence of deaths from horse falls. Gas lighting couples with phantasmagoric innovations in entertainment. With Napoleon gone, British tourists flock to Paris to observe the exposed ankles of women whose sexual behavior inspired Mark Twain's quip some decades later: Lucky the Frenchman who knows who his father is.

Stable Britain suffered its social upheavals, its Luddite machine-breaking, its assassinated Cabinet ministers. Johnson views the radical demagogues of that era with distaste. They loathed each other and were accommodated in privileged comfort within Newgate prison. Indeed, Leigh Hunt need not have gone to prison if only he had foresworn further printed attacks on the prince regent. The “mob” features prominently in the narrative—it keeps appearing, but the cool nonchalance of the ruling class is much admired: The Duke of Wellington is found laughing off the dangers of traveling across London.

Although only 313,000 British male subjects were entitled to vote, with electoral bribery massive and many elections uncontested, Johnson regards this system as “probably more representative of national opinion than modern democrats are prepared to allow.” The rebel poets earn few marks for good conduct. Shelley “smacked his lips over words like atheism, anarchy and assassin, which were among his favorites.” Later he and Byron are both caught committing incest or “technical incest.” This leads to general promiscuity in Italy, the wreck of Coleridge's marriage, Byron's sex life and the general mess within what Southey, quivering with conservative indignation in the Lake District, called “the satanic school.” There follows a long section on George IV's contentious divorce from Caroline which “opened the age of public opinion politics.”

For long sections Johnson loses himself in the minutiae of British political life—its connection with “the birth of the modern” is obscure. On the other hand he strikes hard on the anvil when he observes that during the 1820s the “disadvantages of ladies not wearing drawers became apparent”; as a result “the basic components of modern women's underclothes were in place.” Equally significant was the advent of modern trousers “so male calves gradually lost their appeal.” The decline of dueling slots in here, Johnson describing a nice scene at the White House when President Monroe indignantly stepped between the swords of the French and British ministers.

“The Masques of Anarchy” section runs from Bolivar crossing the high Andes to the Monroe Doctrine, then to Byron embracing Greek liberty from Ottoman rule. On to exercise, sport, the dramatic reduction in infant mortality, population explosions, schools—but we remain mainly in England. Coleridge's (happily kicked) opium addiction carries us to China where Johnson finds “that worst of all systems: a society run by its intelligentsia.” Coleridge emerges as one of the model conservative thinkers, balancing duties against rights, individualism against society. (Unfortunately, Burke is already dead.)

The British, meanwhile spread their red ink stain wider across the map, winning battles called Yandaboo—but not really wanting an empire. However, faced with “societies that were sunk in squalor and apathy,” and feeling the “itch to reform these iniquities” they embark on reforms that, for better or worse, but clearly for better, result in a policy of annexation “or taking the native princes under British supervision.”

Johnson is very good on banking, finance and the great American leap forward of the 1820s, but chronology pulls him back to the Bourbon regime on its last legs. Victor Hugo, having discovered Shakespeare, deserts the Bourbon cause and back comes “the mob,” featuring prominently in Delacroix's “meretricious” painting, “Liberty on the Barricades.” According to Johnson, the July Days of 1830 were the first occasion that “the media overthrew the government.”

One might call this form of history a “lateral epic”—it expands sideways, and it dovetails, its narrative hooks, owe something to fictional technique. Despite the massive indulgence in sheer wordage, Johnson always writes well and has a keen eye for detail and anecdote; a Thatcherite journey through early Thatcherism is in any case both instructive and entertaining. Yet it's a curious enterprise. Despite the justifiably heavy emphasis on science and industry, the title, The Birth of the Modern, looks like a highway robbery on the slow, hesitant coach of history, bucking through the ruts. Indeed, from the European perspective, the years 1815–1830 can equally be regarded as the last stand of the 18th century, with mass political parties, democratic elections, organized labor and the birth of socialism still of-stage.