Lords of Misrule: Hostility to Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain (review)

Despite the enduring interest of researchers in nineteenth-century popular politics, it is a remarkable fact that there has been no major study of one of radicalism's most characteristic stances, their hostility to the aristocracy. It is this deficiency that Antony Taylor seeks to supply in this short monographic study of anti-aristocratic sentiment and its place within the radical platform.

The book is set out in five chapters, each dealing with a separate theme. The 'imaginative world of Victorian radicalism', as Taylor states, 'was populated by debauched aristocrats and professional rakes' (25), and the volume opens with the case of Colonel Baker, accused of attempting to rape a young woman called Rebecca Dickinson in the first-class carriage of a train from Liphook (Hants) to Waterloo in June 1875. Baker was cleared of 'assault with intention to ravish' but found guilty of indecent and common assault, for which he received a year's imprisonment, a fine of £500 and had to pay costs. Radical opinion was outraged at the leniency of the sentence, their suspicions about the secret world to which the privileged elite belonged well and truly aggravated. Had Baker been travelling third class, as the Bee Hive observed, the outcome would doubtless have been very different.

The second chapter deals with the influence of the great American land reformer, Henry George. Although somewhat overlooked by modern historians, Taylor sites George firmly in the radical tradition. George's Progress and Poverty (1880) was selling 400,000 copies per annum by 1884, he argues, and his version of land reform represented a kind of ur-belief among radicals. Many socialists were Georgites before they were Labour men. Aristocrats naturally hated George, labelling him a 'plunderer', but Taylor insists George played a crucial role in legitimating the long-standing British radical campaign against the abuses of landowning. Progress and Poverty, with its stories of evictions and historic thefts of land from the people gave the movement an intellectual cogency it had not had before while his public debates with the Duke of Argyll in 1884 exposed the distance between theradical and Whig wings of the Liberal Party on this crucial issue.

An enduring element in radical opposition to aristocratic lifestyles was an abhorrence of hunting, and this forms the substantive issue discussed in chapter three. Taylor points out that for all the attention paid recently to radical support for anti-vivisection, there were many urban radicals who were more offended by the exclusivity associated with hunting: in France and Germany, after all, hunting was a people's pastime, a right wrested from the aristocracy during the revolutionsof 1789 and 1848. British Radicals condemned hunting from a 'pro-ducerist' perspective, claiming that shooting, in particular, led to the removal of tenants and created vast areas of uncultivated land. Their case was well expressed by Annie Beasant who remarked, 'I deny the right of the wealth-consumers to evict the wealth-producers' (84). The attachment of the Royal family to hunting was also the cause of much disgust: Victoria's fondness for stag hunting was condemned, while the big-game hunting that took place during Royal visits to Africa and India allowed radicals to combine anti-aristocratic with anti-imperial sentiment and to draw the parallel between monarchs shooting beasts and the English Army keeping down native peoples at gun point.

By and large, however, the monarchy only appear as peripheral figures in Taylor's account. Indeed, in the remainder of the book,they actually come out of things rather well. In chapter four, Taylor examines the long-standing radical dislike of the House of Lords, and points out that by the early twentieth century, attacks on the Upper House deflected any critical attention to the monarchy. At almost the same moment that the Liberals steeled themselves to take on the Lords in 1909–10...