this book is an exercise in historical pot-boiling. It reflects no credit on Dr. Read, the senior member of the partnership, and it continues the injustice to O’Connor of almost all previous assessments. We have long needed a rounded biography of the man who was leader of the greatest mass movement in the history of the British working class; and it is still lacking. This present volume gives us some hitherto unpublished material on O’Connor’s Irish background, which is useful and interesting, but for his Chartist career it is cursory and superficial, following as it does a hackneyed treatment of the man and the movement. Apart from the Irish chapters, an emphasis on O’Connor’s recognition of the need for an alliance between the Irish peasantry and the British proletariat, and a half-hearted attempt in the last chapter to explain O’Connor’s “demagoguery”, as it is called, there is nothing in this bitty summary that adds to our knowledge. The index is thorough. And that is all that needs to be said by way of review, since it is difficult to believe that Dr. Read, who is responsible for the Chartist section, took the writing of this potted account seriously.
The problem and the fascination of Feargus O’Connor remain. What sort of questions do we need to ask to begin the assessment of this extraordinary man? I take two matters out of many. The first is the Land Plan, that much abused scheme, so unsympathetically treated in the standard texts. How should we analyse it? As Bronterre O’Brien did, as a movement that is diversionary and reactionary from the standpoint of the real interests of the working class? As “economically crazy” as it is sometimes described? Or, as an eminent contemporary wrote, as “well-conceived”, and if it was to fail, “the causes of failure will be in the details of management, not in the principle?” (And the authorship of this commendation will come as a surprise to most readers.) Or should we begin by trying to understand the reasons for the extraordinary response among working men to this attempt to establish a peasant proprietorship in a society that was by now almost completely industrialised?