On 2 June 1780, some 40,000–50,000 people assembled at St. George's Fields south of Westminster Bridge, determined to present a petition to Parliament protesting against the lifting of restrictions on the civil rights of Roman Catholics in Britain. Presentation of that petition was famously succeeded by six days of violent social unrest that, taking their name from Lord George Gordon, leader of the Protestant Association, collectively have been described as the Gordon riots. The “several and disparate actions” (162) of those days have been construed as a single event, but two stages are generally acknowledged: in the first, the attacks of the crowd were directed toward sites with Catholic associations, such as chapels or the houses of known Roman Catholics; in the second, the crowd's attention turned to symbols of state authority, including Newgate Prison and the Bank of England. By 8 June, hundreds of rioters were dead or fatally wounded, and others would be tried and executed for their participation.

Interpretation of these events has varied over the centuries. The revolutionary aspect of the second phase of the riots gained prominence after the French Revolution, which the editors of this volume argue has overshadowed the riots’ significance. Nineteenth-century accounts, including Charles Dickens's description of events in his novel Barnaby Rudge, tended to characterize them as the actions of an irrational mob. In the twentieth century, Marxist historians such as George Rudé and E. P. Thompson argued instead for an underlying political logic rooted in class discontents. As editors Ian Haywood and John Seed comment, however, “no single narrative” or “conceptual framework” can account for or contain the events that comprise the Gordon riots (15). This twenty-first-century collection of essays on the subject usefully returns to a complex event, offering a variety of interpretations that set the riots in a global context and provide a sustained, thoughtful, and considered analysis of the historical record as well as siting them within criminal justice history. The collection also benefits from the disparate disciplinary bases of its contributors, divided roughly equally between historians and literary scholars.

The essays are grouped into three main parts: “The Political Moment of 1780,” “Representing the Unrepresentable,” and “The Aftermath: Politics, Social Order and Cultural Memory,” with an afterword devoted to a biographical reassessment of George Gordon, in which the man who triggered the riots is characterized as a “malevolent eccentric” and “political prisoner by nature” (261). Generally speaking, the essays eschew a parochial, narrowly English, interpretation of the events in question, instead setting them within the perspective of the British Empire. The riots occurred during the war with the American colonies, and Nicholas Rogers argues that this unpopular war helped to shape contemporary understandings of the riots, while Dana Rabin sees antipopery as reflecting fears of a cosmopolitan erosion of English identity by transatlantic bodies—not all of them white. Both Rogers and Rabin invoke the role of the Quebec Act (1774), which extended religious toleration in the colonies, in stimulating anti-Catholic sentiment in Britain. Race is invoked in a number of essays, from Rabin, through Ian Haywood's fleeting reference to “stereotypical images” of blacks in a print recording the riots, to Brycchan Carey's consideration of Ignatius Sancho's account of events. Gender is at issue in Susan Matthews's contribution. Where Matthew White's essay on punishment reminds us that women participated in the riots and were hanged for it, those women tended to be prostitutes or servants and thus had no place in Charlotte Cowley's Ladies History of England.

The focus on historic sources relating to the riots is one of the strengths of this collection. Haywood considers the riots as a “spectacular visual event” (117), offering a close reading of three prints of the burning of Newgate Prison and arguing that “the most conspicuous victim of the crowd's power is the material culture of the propertied classes” (124) and that the riots can be characterized as a “revenge of popular culture on high culture” (125). But the primary focus is on textual sources. The African and former slave Sancho's Letters, four of which were once accepted as eyewitness accounts of the riots, are subjected by Carey to a sustained analysis that posits them instead as “highly ordered rhetorical constructions” (144) based not on firsthand experience but on newspaper accounts of events, to be valued for their “rhetorical complexity” rather than their “historical veracity” (159). Miriam L. Wallace's essay explores another famous contemporary account of events: Thomas Holcroft's Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Late Riot (1780), published under the pseudonym William Vincent, which merged “contemporary news and eyewitness accounts with fictional narrative techniques” (163). Equally valuable are John Seed's and Mark Knight's respective considerations of the petition that sparked the riots. Seed examines religious dissent via the signatories, while Knight explores the petition's political significance. Seed also returns to the vexed question of eyewitness accounts, commenting, “[I]t is striking how little these contemporaries see” (71). Contemporary accounts were partisan; those witnessing events saw what they expected to see.

I have reservations with some of the interpretations advanced in this volume. The racial diversity of eighteenth-century London, it seems to me, is exaggerated in Dana Rabin's article, and Tim Hitchcock's adherence to a “working class versus the state” interpretation of the riots is less than convincing, given that this view has been aptly problematized by his fellow contributors. It is also exasperating, as well as misleading, to find a paragraph in the latter article describing a version of the history of policing and punishment associated with Sir Leon Radzinowicz and an older generation of policing historians (e.g., T. A. Critchley and Charles Reith) cited with the names of scholars J. M. Beattie and Peter King, both of whom have spent their entire careers revising and contradicting the history of Radzinowicz and others. Those reservations notwithstanding, this collection provides a long overdue reconsideration of the Gordon riots, from causation through representation and consequences. It raises questions that will continue to be grappled with by future generations.