Its subject, the migrant Irish "middle class" in eighteenth-century London, eludes firm definition, and the work itself lacks a clear narrative structure. The book might be termed an exercise in historical sociology, and indeed one of the notable features of the text is its array of statistical tables, genealogical charts, maps, and diagrams. The author describes his approach as prosopographical. Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier and his followers long ago applied the techniques of collective biography in their studies of eighteenth-century political history. Unfortunately, however, the contemporary record of the doings of Irish merchants and lawyers is slimmer and more dispersed than that of much-better-documented members of parliament. Bailey manages nonetheless to extract surprising amounts of information from limited sources, including trade directories, probate records, student ledgers, "buttery books," and bond sureties held by the archives of the Middle Temple (one of the four London Inns of Court and the one favored by aspiring Irish lawyers). This data is expertly collated and analyzed, but, as Bailey readily concedes, the sociological profiles which emerge do not add up to an occupationally cohesive, geographically fixed, middle-class "community." Rather, in the course of three case studies of law students, lawyers, and merchants (doctors, journalists, and others are omitted), a variety of "clusters" or networks, based on business connections, kinship, personal relations and, not least, the patronage of certain coffee houses and taverns, are identified and reconstructed.

By London standards the numbers are not imposing, although it is surely significant that between 1736 and 1796, 135 Irish countinghouses banked and traded in the city; that up to one-third of students enrolled at Middle Temple in the 1770s were of Irish extraction; and that during the century as a whole, one-quarter of Irish MPs had trained as lawyers in London. But the primary insight of this study is that the stereotypical portrayal of the London Irish as an underclass, blighted by poverty and popery, is insufficient. "Like the poor," Bailey contends, "middle-class migrants turned to each other to meet the challenges of life in the metropolis" (p. 217). Nor for those "Micks on the Make," as Roy Foster calls their nineteenth-century successors, was Irish identity necessarily a social or economic handicap; on the contrary, it often had "a unique, operative value of its own" (p. 14).Regrettably, Bailey's expository style does not match the precision of his statistical skills. Hats are dropped, "kid gloves" taken off, and muscles flexed, preparatory perhaps, to the grinding of axes, and some "heavy lifting" by persons "standing on their own two feet.

" En route mills are gone through, pockets are lined, and pots call kettles black. Curiously enough no nails, not even final ones, are hit on the head , or driven into coffins. But that happy concession to living English is unlikely to stop such late determined enemies of dead metaphor as George Orwell or Hugh Trevor-Roper from spinning in their graves. Jim Smyth, American Historical Review , vol 119, no 4.