This excellent book makes an important contribution to debates about the decline of the Liberal Party, the rise of Labour, and the nature of party politics and organization. It reveals a great deal about local government and urban political culture, the impact of the electoral reforms of 1884–85, and the growing grassroots involvement in politics. James R. Moore has produced a truly substantial work that will be useful to many scholars of late nineteenth-century England.

The Liberal Party was not in decline between the mid-1880s and mid-1890s, argues Moore. Instead, these were years of renewal and adjustment. Liberalism had strong local supports, and it is to the localities—specifically to English urban boroughs—that Moore looks for evidence of vitality, commitment, and participation. Moore offers a detailed analysis of Liberal politics and organization in Manchester and Leicester. Both had solid Liberal traditions, but Liberalism also faced challenges in Manchester and Leicester, and Moore's main purpose is to explain how Liberals met these challenges.

Manchester radicals clamored for more influence in the local Liberal Association, which had long been controlled by moderates, and gained considerably from the redrawing of constituency boundaries in 1885. Divisional organizations were established, and in the industrial parts of Manchester the radicals were able to run them. Moderates were initially uneasy about the decentralized party structure, but there was no radical takeover, just an increase in radical influence at the moderates’ expense. This was also seen in municipal affairs. The growing complexity and responsibilities of local government made local issues ever more relevant, and a series of scandals enabled radicals to undermine the power of the old Liberal elite, exercised mainly through the aldermanic bench. The extension of the city's boundaries in 1890 also gave activists new opportunities to make their mark. A more cohesive Liberal group emerged in the council, with a progressive program and a much closer connection with local party institutions. Liberals resisted the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which turned out to be weaker than they had expected, and even those radicals who were prepared to work with the ILP were alienated by its uncooperative stance. Although Liberalism could not recover the supremacy it had previously enjoyed in Manchester, it remained “intellectually vibrant and electorally significant” (235).

Leicester was smaller, more insular, and less economically diverse than Manchester, but it also experienced significant change. Moderate and radical sections of the Liberal Party in Leicester disagreed about the need for more representative party organs, and because the parliamentary borough remained intact in 1885 as a two-member constituency, the radicals could not take advantage of any structural reorganization. Nevertheless, they became more assertive and played an important role in the politics of the county, where all Liberals could unite against familiar enemies (the church and the landed interest). In view of the fact that the two borough seats were safe, “county work provided a psychologically attractive and politically worthwhile alternative to the internal bickering and bloodless victories in the borough” (73). Liberals also controlled the municipal council, holding forty-eight of seventy-two seats in 1895, and—as in Manchester—the connection between the local Liberal Association and the Liberal group on the council, and between party bodies and ward organizations, became very close. The need for municipal improvements encouraged the adoption of a progressive program and new management techniques, including more centralized policy making. The ILP offered no great threat to Leicester Liberals in the 1890s, and the ILP had to take up traditional Liberal causes (land reform, disestablishment, and temperance) because these were still popular. The real danger for the Liberals, since they had long been dominant in Leicester, was complacency among their own supporters.

Moore relates his Manchester and Leicester material to broader points. He maintains that we can learn more from local studies than from a focus on Westminster, that party affiliation did not depend primarily on class, that we should not predate the decline of the Liberal Party, that the English boroughs were far more important to the Liberals than the Celtic Fringe, and that the municipal interventionism of the late Victorian period indicates that there was no dogmatic Liberal attachment to laissez-faire.

There is so much in this book that there are bound to be quibbles. It is not clear that developments in Manchester and Leicester reveal much about the situation elsewhere. Liberalism was diverse. Moore admits that local findings cannot easily be applied to a wider area, but he is confident that they “can illustrate ways in which major Liberal groups came to renew themselves in the face of major political difficulties” (20).

In arguing for the vitality of the Liberal Party after the Home Rule crisis of 1886, Moore suggests that the party's general election victory in 1906 proves that it cannot really have been in decline in the 1880s and 1890s. Yet the Liberals were not the only party, and much depended on what the conservatives were doing. The Liberals did well in 1906 in part because the conservative governments of 1895–1905 had become tired, divided, and discredited. It is not helpful to examine the Liberal Party in too isolated a fashion, when it was shaped to some extent by its political rivals. Moore sometimes loses sight of this fact. In stressing the Liberal commitment to social improvement and progressive programs, Moore points out that when Labour finally formed a government, it was much less radical than its Liberal predecessors. But this has a lot to do with the fact that the 1924 Labour government did not have a parliamentary majority.

Readers will find other points on which to question Moore, but this is as it should be, and his book will certainly reward those who engage with its contents. It is based on an impressive array of contemporary sources and demonstrates a sure grasp of the relevant historiography. Since it is so admirably thorough in other respects, however, it is a pity that more careful attention was not given to proofreading. The English is clumsy in places, with missing punctuation, split infinitives, the confusion of singular and plural forms, and various other stylistic infelicities.