Gerald Massey

ELT 40:1 1997 knows it will be a long day, for the Battle of Arras is about to begin. What he cannot know is that early the following morning the blast of a German shell will instantly end his life. Something of what that life meant to Thomas's friends is conveyed in the four brief memoirs with which this absorbing volume ends. Martha S. Vogeler California State University, Fullerton Gerald Massey David Shaw. Gerald Massey: Chartist, Poet, Radical and Freethinker. London: Buckland Publications, 1995. 264 pp. Paper £9.95 IN MY BIOGRAPHICAL sketch of the Victorian poet Gerald Massey (1828-1907) in volume 2 of the Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals since 1770(1984), I noted the lack of a complete and objective study of Massey and his work. David Shaw has now remedied the deficiency in this perceptive and detailed biography. It certainly replaces previous studies of Massey by B. O. Flower (1895), Sidney Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1901-1911 (1912), Buckner Trawick's unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Harvard, 1942), and my brief essay on Massey as a Victorian Radical and nonconformist. In his obituary on Massey in the Review of Reviews (December 1907), W. T. Stead declared that Massey should best be remembered as the eloquent "sympathetic bard of the masses . . . , the oppressed and dispossessed in Britain and the world." Massey also merits recognition not only as a fine Victorian working-class poet, but as a "Chartist and political radical," an interpreter of Shakespeare's sonnets, a spiritualist, and a reearcher of the "mythical origins" of mankind. Interest in his poetry has been resurrected and its merit acknowledged during the past three decades in such publications as Martha Vicinus's The Industrial Muse (1974), Peter Scheckner 's Anthology of Chartist Poetry (1989), and the New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1990) and "increasingly in publications . . . concerned with the political poetry of. . . [the] . . . Victorian era." This is also part of the realization that a large quantity of the "protest verse" of such proletarian poets as Massey actually "reached a very large proportion of the labouring populations. . . ." However it wasn't only Massey^ "protest verse" which made him something of a popular icon during the mid- and late-Victorian decades; it was also his appealing lectures and attractive publications on the great British poets and English literature which exuded "a dynamic realism 118 BOOK REVIEWS that captivated his audiences . . . [and inspired] . . . extremely strong idealism...." The son of a canal boatman, Gerald Massey's childhood was blighted by extreme poverty and hardship. Obliged by necessity to leave school at the age of eight, he worked an eleven-hour day in a silk factory and other jobs to sustain his family until, at the age of fifteen, he left his native Tring for London. In the metropolis, Massey labored as a messenger and, encouraged by the Christian Socialist, Frederick Denison Maurice, and by Charles Kingsley, immersed himself in the study of the works of Thomas Paine, William Cobbett, and several prominent Radicals and Chartists and began to develop his skill with verse. In 1846, he published his Poems and Chansons, a passionate indictment of industrial poverty and social injustice in Britain, and as an ardent Chartist edited the Radical paper, Spirit of Freedom. Massey soon became a regular contributor of poetry (the most well-known poems included "A Call to the People," "The Famine Smitten," "Press On, Press On," "The Song of the Red Republican," and "The Cry of the Unemployed") to the Chartist press and achieved some renown as "a poet of common life." Following the failure of the Chartist agitation and the decline of Chartism, Massey became an ardent advocate of Frederick Maurice's Christian Socialism and a prolific contributor of poetry and articles to The Christian Socialist. It was during this phase of his career that he produced the volume of verse, Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love (later reprinted as Poems and Ballads) which, with the ensuing The Ballad of Babe Christabel and Other Poems, was lauded by Walter Landor, John Ruskin, and Lord Tennyson and established his reputation as a gifted Radical poet and a very articulate "poet of liberty...