William Sharman Crawford (1780–1861) has been ‘ill-served by historians’ (p. 5), argues Peter Gray, with his ‘obscure place’ (p. 4) in studies of nineteenth-century Irish politics being due to the fact that he embodies a ‘series of contradictions’ (p. 2), which have made it difficult for historians to categorise him. He was an Ulster landlord who sought to curb the power of his own class by extending property rights to tenant farmers and who, as a result, was accused of ‘communism’ (p. 268). Before converting to Unitarianism late in life, he was an Anglican, yet he supported the disestablishment of the state church, the total abolition of tithes and Catholic emancipation. He denounced government policy during the Famine in a pamphlet appealing to parliament, Against the extermination of the Irish people (p. 204). But he was not a separatist nor even a repealer, championing instead a form of home rule known as federalism. Although a wealthy Irish landowner, during 1841–52 Crawford represented the Lancashire industrial town of Rochdale in parliament, where he supported Chartist demands that included universal male suffrage, secret ballot and the payment of members. He strongly opposed slavery, as well as Britain’s imperialist wars in India and China. Gray, in seeking an appropriate political label for Crawford, concludes that he is ‘best understood as a radical democratic liberal’ (p. 3).

The book offers a detailed, fluently written and exhaustively researched account of Crawford’s life and career. But, in addition, it devotes chapters to successive generations of his family: his father, two of his children and a grandson in particular. Gray also charts Crawford’s often fraught relations with many of his leading political contemporaries, notably Daniel O’Connell. Crawford held the seat of Dundalk in 1835–7 initially with O’Connell’s support, but the two men fell out when Crawford attacked the Irish policies of O’Connell’s Whig allies, especially their harsh poor law and their tithe compromise. By exploring Crawford’s family and political contexts at considerable length, Gray seeks to demonstrate that he was not, as some of his critics alleged, a ‘deluded and self-promoting eccentric’ (p. 2).

Crawford’s politics were certainly radical, yet he engaged imaginatively with many of the major issues of his day across the whole of the United Kingdom: not just Irish land reform and Ireland’s constitutional relationship with Britain, but church-state relations and the emerging political power of the urban working class in a period of rapid industrialisation. None of the many tenant-right measures he proposed between 1835 and 1852 were achieved during his lifetime and support for federalism waned after the 1840s. Gray acknowledges that when Crawford died in 1861, his public career was an ‘apparent failure’ (p. 2). Nevertheless, much of what Crawford fought for in terms of land reform and working-class rights came to be realised in the decades after his death.

According to Gray, Crawford ‘cannot be understood in isolation from the radical dynasty that he was born into and sought to sustain’ (p. 360). In other words, his Ulster radicalism was very much a family affair. His father, William Sharman (1731–1803), a County Down landowner, was a leader of the Volunteers from the early 1780s up until they were suppressed in 1793. Sharman aimed for Irish ‘legislative autonomy’ (p. 25) but rejected republicanism. William, his heir — who adopted the name Crawford after he inherited estates from a relative in 1827 — maintained a ‘continuing degree of reverence towards his father’s political ideals’ (p. 48). In turn, some of Crawford’s children followed in his footsteps. James (1812–78), the ‘son politically and socially closest to his father’s ideals’ (p. 322), was a tenant-right advocate who sat as a Liberal member for County Down in 1874–8, while Mabel (1820–1912), the ‘most radical and visionary’ (p. 333) of Crawford’s eleven children, was a prominent female suffragist. But leading members of the next generation eventually abandoned the family’s radicalism, transitioning through British liberal unionism to embrace conservative Ulster unionism.

That biographies of nineteenth-century Irish politicians are moving away from a focus on O’Connell or Parnell to investigate the careers of an array of lesser-known figures is to be welcomed. Aidan Enright’s recent study of the liberal Catholic unionist, the O’Conor Don (1838–1906), reflects this trend, as does Gray’s current book. But there are still major figures lacking modern biographies, a prime example being Crawford’s fellow tenant-right advocate, Charles Gavan Duffy (1816–1903), who also produced an influential political dynasty. Hopefully, Gray’s fine book will act as an inspiration and model for future political biographers.