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Imprison'd Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons 1760-1800

Imprison'd Wranglers reconstructs the eighteenth-century House of Commons as a rhetorical space, offers a detailed analysis of its speaking practices, and evaluates the impact of parliamentary oratory on reading audiences. Its primary sources are complex and extensive: unpublished manuscript parliamentary diaries (e.g. Cavendish's diary of the 1768-74 parliament, a key resource, extends to 3 million words), reports of proceedings in contemporary newspapers, and multi volume anthologies of debates. The critical arguments are based on an extensive survey of these varieties of report, a systematic examination of their formal conventions and claims for authenticity, assessed by means of close comparative analysis.