English Radicalism, 1550-1850 (review)

All too frequently edited collections of essays fail to live up to expectations because they are disjointed, are of uneven quality, or are poorly edited. Such is not the case with this volume. Glenn Burgess (University of Hull) and Matthew Festenstein (York University) have assembled an outstanding collection of essays that address the varying manifestations of radicalism in England from Elizabeth I's reign (Stephen Alford) to Joseph Hume in India (Miles Taylor.) Although the essays are of uniformly high quality, perhaps the most important components in this book are the excellent introduction by Burgess and afterword provided by Conal Condren and J. C. Davis.

In his introduction Burgess addresses the context of these essays. He suggested that there may be three different approaches to the study of radicalism: ideology, functionality, and linguistics. Burgess also notes that each of these approaches varies in its responses to four critical and related questions—historical transmission, radical ideas and social history, religion, and language and anachronism. In each of these questions, Burgess argues that the influence of Marxism on British historiography is quite evident. In his afterword Condren divides the essays into two groups based on definitions and use of the words "radical" and "radicalism"; he is concerned with "semantic and pragmatic relations." In a brilliant and constructive critique, Condren places English radicalism in a new historiographical context based on linguistic values. Davis argues that English radicalism must consider "the fictions and the substance of aspirations to transform the nature of rule and the associated questions of language." He considers a range of topics and personalities, including Gerard Winstanley and James Harrington.

The other essays in this volume include: "Richard Overton and Radicalism: The New Intertext of the Civic Ethos in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England," by Luc Borot; "Radicalism and the English Revolution," by Glenn Burgess; "'That Kind of People': Late Stuart Radicals and Their Manifestoes: A Functional Approach," by Richard L. Greaves; "The Divine Creature and the Female Citizen: Manners, Religion, and the Two Rights Strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications," by Gregory Claeys; "On Not Inventing the English Revolution: The Radical Failure of the 1790s as Linguistic Non Performance," by Iain Hampsher-Monk; "Disconcerting Ideas: Explaining Popular Radicalism and Popular Loyalism in the 1790s," by Mark Philip; "Henry Hunt's Peep into a Prison: The Radical Discontinuities of Imprisonment for Debt," by Margot C. Finn; "Jeremy Bentham's Radicalism," by F. Rosen; and "Religion and the Origins of Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain," by J. C. D. Clark. All of these essays offer much to commend them, but those by Hampsher-Monk, Finn, and Rosen were outstanding; their studies were tightly reasoned, well-argued, and stimulating. These articles not only provide us with different interpretations of radicals and radicalism, but also will provoke new ideas among scholars and graduate students for additional studies on other aspects of English radicalism. All of these essays provide excellent documentation.