The Profligate Son, or, A True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice, and Financial Ruin in Regency Britain by Nicola Phillips (review)

This story, told in exhausting detail in strict linear narrative, follows the downward spiral of the wayward scion of an otherwise upright and upwardly mobile family. William Jackson senior (1763–1814) amassed a considerable fortune as an East India Company operative, and in spite of a blighted career was able to establish himself back in England as a landed gentleman, although one of only recent vintage. By contrast, William Jackson junior (1791–1828) in his youth spent lavishly on his family’s credit, and when that source was no longer available, he resorted to fraud, forgery, and finally outright theft, resulting in imprisonment and transportation to Australia, where he died in abject poverty and terminal-stage alcoholism. That, more or less, is that; Phillips delivers exactly what her title and subtitle promise and little else. Consequently, The Profligate Son is a much less interesting book than it might have been.

The Profligate Son is a trade publication intended for a popular audience; it contains references and discussions clearly intended for nonspecialist readers with third-millennium assumptions and preoccupations. It makes brief forays into adolescent psychology and offers cursory disquisitions on substance abuse and addiction, but it borrows no methodologies from the social sciences or any other discipline. Moreover, even though Phillips has found ample material pertinent to the particular individuals and episodes that she traces, she has not framed her research to address any particular historical problem or issue.

The saga of the Jacksons might have been employed to illuminate a wider historical context in interesting ways. Instead, only as much social or cultural context enters the book as is necessary to elucidate young Jackson’s circumstances at any given time. The demands of the “story,” relating every recorded episode in exact chronological order, and at length, crowd out any opportunity to fit these events into a wider framework. Narrative is consistently privileged over analysis, and exciting and colorful episodes take precedence over informative but quotidian discussions. A number of potentially fruitful themes are introduced—empire, consumer culture, credit and debt, social mobility, notions of respectability, and masculinity, which historians of the period have treated at length. Although Phillips cites some of these scholars in her endnotes, she does not engage substantively with their ideas. Nevertheless, both scholars and readers of popular history are usefully reminded in this work that social mobility can go down as well as up, and the book provides valuable, if disparate, nuggets of information about banking and credit, the prison system, and the early settlement of Australia, to name a few examples.

Ironically, Phillips’ obsessive linearity confounds the narrative thread, especially toward the end, once the scene has changed to Australia. The episode that cost the elder Jackson his career with the East India Company (a botched negotiation with a local ruler that resulted in a massacre) is related at the beginning before quickly disappearing, only to emerge again in the epilogue, where Phillips treats it as though it had cast a long shadow over both father and son. Indeed it may have done so, but Phillips never explores whether the elder Jackson’s failing as a civil servant influenced his parenting. She instead turns her attention to his efforts to give his son a genteel education, as if his own gentility were firmly established in the book, but it is not. Phillips says far too little about Jackson senior’s struggle for respectability; in fact, he is largely absent, except when called upon to play the stern and disapproving paterfamilias. In fact, his own pursuit of status is as interesting and important to Phillips’ larger point as his son’s is, if not more so. Phillips would have done better to set this dysfunctional relationship at the center of a “thick description” of its varying contexts, a method employed successfully by such scholars as Colley and...