Rebel Life: The Life and Times of Robert Gosden, Revolutionary, Mystic, Labour Spy by Mark Leier (review)

These days, the reprinting of any book in Canadian labour history is a cause for celebration, and in this spirit we welcome the revised edition of Rebel Life, Mark Leier’s 1999 biography of Robert Gosden. Since 1999, life for the left and the labour movement has not gotten any easier, and so it is not surprising that this second edition finds Leier in an even more reflective mood, weaving discussions of the state of the unions and the Black Bloc into his narrative. That said, the revised edition is not greatly altered from the original, the main changes being the larger physical size of the book and a judicious weaving of new evidence and analysis into the text. There is updated information about Gosden’s parents and siblings, extended analysis of his involvement with the Vancouver Island Coal Strike of 1912–14 and role in the Miners’ Liberation League, and revelations about Gosden’s life and activities in Alberta in the late First World War period. The concluding chapter updates Leier’s ongoing quest to find new information on Robert Gosden’s life, and the addition of works in labour history printed since the first edition came out.

Rebel Life is really three books in one: first, a biography of Robert Gosden; second, a history of Canadian labour and the state of the left; and third, a journey through Leier’s own revealing and fascinating research. Leier is addressing multiple audiences – graduate students in labour history, academic historians, the general public, and the left and labour movement. The result is Joyceian, a stream of class consciousness, a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Labour Historian. Well, perhaps not so young.

The subject of Leier’s book is Robert Raglan Gosden (1882–1961), a British immigrant of working-class background who lived, by anyone’s standard, a tumultuous and intriguing life. Part of our fascination with Gosden is that he seems so outside the bounds of “acceptable” behaviour, so unlike the person we all like to think of ourselves as being. How could a revolutionary and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (iww) become a paid organizer for the British Columbia Liberal Party and a labour spy for the Mounted Police? How did the man who once denounced spiritualism as “metaphysical dope” (22) become a theosophist and spiritualist himself? Yet was Robert Gosden’s turn to spiritualism to be any more condemned than the seeming contradictions in the life and thought of Rose Henderson, a fellow theosophist who may have met Gosden in British Columbia in the mid-1920S? Indeed, there was a period in my own research when I seriously considered the possibility, in part based on the rhetorical excess that Henderson shared with Gosden, that she may have been working as a police agent.

The controversial sidebars remain. In a smaller font and comprising roughly a third of a page, they run to several pages in some cases. Their strength is that they allow Leier to provide more information and analysis than in conventional footnotes; the weakness is that the reader is forced to move back and forth between the text and the sidebars, leading to interruption in the flow of the narrative. The sidebars remain essentially the same, although Leier has wisely removed the long sidebar entitled “When Did Gosden Become a Spy?” and integrated it into the text.

One of the longest sidebars is on the Socialist Party of Canada (spc), reflecting Leier’s love-hate relationship with the spc that continues to skew his work. On the one hand, Leier is magnanimous, challenging the characterization of the spc as “spittoon philosophers,” noting that “the spc membership played an active role in the battles of the day and supported workers on strike” (42). Yet in a sidebar he claims that the spc “collapsed” during the First World War (67), then calls it a “relative collapse...