To be brutally honest about it, one usually dips into a Festschrift with low expectations—that the essays will be uneven in quality, that there will be little or no thematic connective tissue between them, that many will deal with trivial things, and that few of them will leave a lasting impression on you. Happily, this Festschrift, in honor of Iain McCalman, readily transcends those low expectations. As Paul Pickering notes in his worthy introduction, there are two themes characteristic of McCalman's own rich body of work that weave together most of the diverse contributions to this volume. The first is the marginal status of so many critics of the British political status quo from the French Revolution through Chartism. The second is the rich theatricality of those critics’ politics. There is at this point nothing very surprising about these themes, which of course McCalman himself charted masterfully in Radical Underworld (Cambridge, 1988). But they are nicely amplified here in a wide variety of settings, and in this sense the book is a worthy tribute to the scholar who inspired it.

Of the several essays that focus on marginal characters, those by Paul Pickering and James Epstein strike me as the most interesting and significant. Pickering's essay focuses on the common but rarely noticed theme of betrayal and exile within radical experience. We might understandably assume that radical traitors hounded into exile lived out their days in miserable colonial obscurity. But as the stories of William Griffin and James Cartledge make plain, this was by no means always the case. These two Manchester Chartists who turned Queen's evidence in the wake of the Plug Plot Riots exiled themselves to Australia, where, far from languishing in anonymity, they made of themselves leading citizens—Cartledge as a shipping, mining, and building magnate, and Griffin as a progressive leader in the Auckland provincial council, where he continued to champion such Chartist causes as payment for political representatives and broader access to the land. The shadowy figure at the heart of Epstein's essay, P. F. McCallum, had more in common than Griffin or Cartledge with the denizens of McCalman's radical underworld, in that he was never able to make anything more of himself than a would-be lawyer and occasional literary blackmailer. But Epstein's nuanced reading of McCallum's lurid account of sexual and political corruption in a newly British island, Travels in Trinidad (1805), reminds us that there was a rich colonial dimension to the radical critique of Old Corruption—one that skillfully contrasted an idealized version of British constitutional liberty with its glaring absence in the colonies. While some of the other essays on marginal figures are to my mind somewhat less vivid than Epstein's and Pickering’s—Jon Mee's on the Della Cruscan poet and playwright Robert Merry, Christina Parolin's on the atheist radical Susannah Wright, for instance—they are, respectively, worthy contributions to the rich literature on radical literary circles in the 1790s and radical infidelism in the 1820s and 1830s.

Several essays speak clearly to the Festschrift's other broad theme—the theatrical and performative nature of oppositional politics in the late Georgian era. Of particularly broad significance is Michael Durey's illuminating discussion of mass oath taking in Ireland in the late 1790s. As is typically the case in societies wracked by civil war, Durey convincingly argues, much of the population was caught in the middle and felt the need to trim their allegiances according to shifting local circumstances. The taking of political oaths was a very widespread practice, but a great many of those who took them did so for prudential reasons and could and often did later deny those oaths when doing so seemed the wisest course. Thus, oath taking was just as often a pragmatic as it was a doctrinaire performance. In another especially interesting piece, Michael T. Davis shows that the London Corresponding Society's doctrine of “Members Unlimited” was increasingly circumscribed by rules, such as the expulsion of habitual drunkards, which were designed to counter Church-and-King accusations of radical fecklessness. In their efforts to “civilize” the London Corresponding Society's membership through sanctions and exhortations, its leaders turned it into an increasingly undemocratic organization. Finally, in her contribution to the volume, Gillian Russell notes that the Whig no less than the radical opposition of the 1790s was marked by its fondness for theatrical performance. While Sheridan and Fox are better known to students of that era than the barrister (and later lord chancellor) Thomas Erskine, Russell points out that Erskine's extravagant lawyerly eloquence was marked by a potent “theatricality of sympathy.” This he deployed to telling effect not only in his successful defense of Hardy and Horne Tooke in the famous treason trials of 1794 but also in a number of highly publicized criminal conversation cases in which Erskine's theatrical performance “destabilize[d] boundaries between the private and public, masculine and feminine, the familial and the social, rulers and ruled” (66).

By now it should be obvious that this Festschrift is a worthy testament to the influence of Iain McCalman's scholarship. Its contributors share his affection for radical eccentrics and follow them around the globe just as he followed Count Cagliostro's remarkably broad-ranging adventures through eighteenth-century Europe. Few scholars can match McCalman for verve and gusto, so it is no great criticism to note that most of the essays here fall a bit short of the master in this regard. But while some of the contributions are a bit wanting in brio, most of them are thought provoking, which makes this a Festschrift worth browsing through more than most.