In a lecture to the Royal Historical Society in 1965, Professor Michael Thompson lamented the fact that it was difficult to take the English land reform movement seriously because whatever its seeming importance as a contemporary issue, it left no legacy in the form of a successful outcome. Forty years ago, Readman suggests, historians did not take too much interest in losers, but new ways of thinking in more recent times suggest that we need to return to the land question with a different set of presuppositions. Readman accepts, not surprisingly, that in England the land reform movement failed, both before 1914 (the terminal date for this book) and subsequently, to achieve any of its major goals. But, he suggests, by failing to pay much attention to the contemporary political debates surrounding land reform, historians have overlooked their importance within the wider political debates of the period. In particular, historians fail to take sufficient account of the important role land reform issues played in debates relating to patriotic sentiment about the nation and about the character of its people, themes closely linked to English national identity. Readman argues that if we ignore the land reform debates because land was not reformed, we overlook their importance for political debate more generally, which we would be much less likely to do in relation to contemporary discussions relating to issues that did have a positive outcome. The thrust of the book is that an assessment of the political debate we associate with the land question helps us to understand the broader contemporary debates about Englishness, and English national identity, in these years.

The book begins with a chronological narrative of the English land question as a basic point of reference for factual information on the politics of land, but the majority of the text is an examination of land reform issues in the context of better-known and better-covered political debates. The chapters in part 1 are concerned with the relationship between the land system and the social and constitutional stability of the nation and the impact of the second and third reform acts, particularly in terms of the debate about peasant proprietorship as a means of forestalling class conflict. Also in this part of the book are discussions of the interrelationship of the land reform movement with the English national character and debates about the future of agriculture as a result of the great depression.

Part 2 contains essays on land politics and visions of England, particularly ruralized Englishness. Readman maintains that both Liberals and Conservatives drew on an idealized English past, before enclosure and arguably even before the Norman Conquest, as reasoning for their support of land reform. Liberals thought in terms of returning the Englishman to his birthright on the land, while Conservatives were more inclined to picture a rural England peopled by sturdy yeomen proprietors whom they saw as having once constituted the backbone of the land system and the nation's strength and stability. For Labour, the socialist approach was to see land politics as a crucial part of the crusade against capitalism. Responses to the issues thrown up by the land question were actuated by patriotic concern, or national renewal. Land reform, Readman suggests, “offered a means of revitalising the nation while simultaneously forging new and effective appeals to a mass electorate” (207). In the wake of the Third Reform Act, an increasingly broad-based electorate had to be taken into serious account by politicians, and this meant that defending the status quo, in this case the existing land system, became politically awkward if not downright dangerous in a democratic state in which many agricultural laborers were enfranchised. The consequence was an intense political debate involving all three main parties, on wider issues of patriotic and national concern, notably the character of the freeborn Englishman, as well as food supply and other issues connected to farming and the land. Land reform was part of this debate, but while supporters failed to obtain the legislation that might have radically altered the shape of society, the political debate in England was no less significant than the parallel discussions in Wales and Ireland where land reform did occur—in the context in both cases of national identity issues.

It is problematic from the perspective of the twenty-first century to look back on the land reform movement as anything more substantive than a lot of hot air generated by genuine fears among some parts of the political establishment that the neglect of agriculture during the 1880s and 1890s meant the nation was on the brink of rural catastrophe. Such views help to explain contemporary discussion of land nationalization, peasant proprietorship, county council allotment schemes, and a whole raft of other back-to-the-land ideas. But they made relatively little progress in a society that was increasingly committed to the idea that the wealth of the nation would be sustained and increased by a mixture of industrial and commercial wealth. Perhaps that is, in the end, why there was no reform, but Readman unpacks some interesting ideas associated with the debate and with the deeper questions relating to how land was, and in some respects remains, a test of English patriotism.