Himmelfarb, Gertrude. "Commitment and Ideology: The Case of the Second Reform Act." Journal of British Studies 9, no. 1. 1969.

Abstract:

Whatever our differences, I am grateful to F. B. Smith for what must surely be the best academic news of the year: that under- graduates somewhere, if only in Australia, can still find alluring such things as “style and footnote polemic”; our own undergradu- ates, alas, have headier tastes. In other respects, however, I must confess to finding Mr. Smith’s communication disappointing. One of the longer footnotes in my essay in Victorian Minds1 is a rather detailed critique of his own bolok, The Making of the Second Reform Bill,2 a major work on the subject but one that seems to me – and I gave examples of this – td typify at several crucial points the standard “Whig interpretation.” The present discussion would be more fruitful had he addressed himself to those points instead of countering with a critique based on a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of my argument.

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