Morris is strongest on the issues of domesticity and nuclear family values that constituted the core of her first book on the later Georgian monarchy (British Monarchy and the French Revolution, 1998). She expertly dissects cartoon and newspaper coverage of royal births and weddings to illustrate, first, the importance of breeding (and, thus, the succession) to public perceptions of male and female royal worthiness; and second, following the accession of George III, the increasing importance of bourgeois morality to public perceptions of public virtue. The politics of personality started at the very top of society, and originated in one's negotiation of patriarchal relationships inside and outside the family. Given that only 17 percent of the British public were voting in national elections, this emphasis upon the royal may have helped a much larger cadre of newspaper readers orient their politics to the royal family, as opposed to any party system. These familiar patriarchal standards, argues Morris, then mapped onto judgements of Hanoverian politicians and, more controversially, some of their conduct. The tension between sober bourgeois values and life's gay aristocratic pageant is never resolved.The Hanoverian political nation, whether elite or bourgeois, emerges from Morris's account as a sex-obsessed body of public opinion. One wonders how much had really changed, family values notwithstanding, since the days of the Stuarts.
Poems LXXVI–LXXXII in Greville’s sonnet sequence, Caelica, are among the most heavily revised writings in all of the Warwick manuscripts. The poems struggle to reveal in the lexicon of courtly love the workings of positive law and temporal power, implicitly understood in opposition to natural law and grace. In these poems, grace signifies its very opposite, not just a parody of itself but a perversion of itself, which subjects such as the ‘dull spirits’ of poem LXXX experience as temporal power. But Greville also places in the midst of these analytical poems one gem of clarity, poem LXXXII, shining there like a good deed in a bad world, exhorting the reader to ‘make time, while you be/ but steppes to your eternitie’.
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