What did an eighteenth-century politician do all day? This may sound a mundane query, but the simplest questions are often the hardest to answer. The meaning and mechanisms of eighteenth-century high politics have long been debated. Was government personal, local and the possession of a narrow elite, or ideological, proto-modern and answerable to public opinion?1¹ Was politics a masculine bastion, or accessible to propertied widows and heiresses, lubricated by social politics engineered by women?2² Yet notwithstanding decades of scholarship, it is still not easy to discern precisely how and where a politician spent his time and how parliament and court ran on an ordinary day. What time did MPs and Lords clock into parliament? What did they do en route? How did Lords and ministers divide their time between court, allies, society and the House? To make these inquiries requires analysis of all the components of the political infrastructure of the eighteenth-century regime. This article uses the methodological and conceptual prism of a ‘political day’ to develop a new approach to the study of eighteenth-century political culture, using techniques developed by historians of time, space and gender to interrogate political life and to explore how court and parliament, Lords and Commons, noblemen and noblewomen, formal politics and social politics, complemented and countered each other.

中文翻译：

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伦敦政治日，约 1697–1834 年

一位 18 世纪的政治家整天都在做什么？这听起来可能是一个平凡的问题，但最简单的问题往往最难回答。长期以来，人们一直在争论 18 世纪高级政治的含义和机制。政府是个人的、地方的并由狭隘的精英所拥有，还是意识形态的、原始现代的并且对公众舆论负责？1 ¹政治是男性化的堡垒，还是有财产的寡妇和女继承人可以访问，并受到女性设计的社会政治的润滑？2 ²然而，尽管有几十年的学术研究，仍然不容易准确辨别政治家如何以及在哪里度过他的时间，以及议会和法院在平常的日子里是如何运作的。国会议员和上议院几点进入议会？他们在途中做了什么？上议院和大臣们如何在宫廷、盟友、社会和众议院之间分配时间？进行这些调查需要分析 18 世纪政权政治基础设施的所有组成部分。本文使用“政治日”的方法论和概念棱镜，开发了一种研究 18 世纪政治文化的新方法，使用时间、空间和性别历史学家开发的技术来审问政治生活，并探索法院和议会、上议院和下议院、贵族和女贵族、正式政治和社会政治，