Recent years have seen a real growth in work on the history of nineteenth-century Belfast, perhaps best represented by Sean Connolly's excellent synthesis, Belfast 400 (Liverpool, 2013). Even with this new work, however, the early nineteenth-century Belfast experience remains relatively neglected, which makes Jonathan Jeffrey Wright's insightful study of politics and culture in the Georgian city a particularly welcome addition to the literature.

Wright's analysis of early nineteenth-century political culture is rooted in his analysis of the extensive Tennent papers, as well as underutilized sources like the Belfast Monthly Magazine. Using the Tennent family as a biographical focus, Wright argues for a more complex portrait of Belfast politics, showing how the Tennents and their allies maintained liberal (and sometimes radical) political commitments throughout this increasingly conservative era. Particularly effective is his examination of the Belfast response to events like the Saint Patrick's Day Controversy and the Queen Caroline affair, controversies often neglected in narratives of nineteenth-century Ireland. Using these as fresh entry points for his analysis of Georgian Belfast's contested politics, Wright shows how reformers consistently (and sometimes successfully) fought the conservative establishment in post-Union Belfast. Another strength of the book is Wright's determination to ground his study of political culture in its urban social context. Like many other British industrial cities, the twin forces of industrialization and rapid demographic growth transformed Belfast in these years, and unlike so many treatments of British and Irish politics in recent years, Wright's nicely balanced portraits of local politics and civic culture never lose sight of that fact.

The book's biographical focus on the Tennent family provides a stable center for an otherwise wide-ranging narrative, as well as the occasion for vignettes about a fascinating and influential political family. Both the core of the study and a metaphor for the complexity of the city's Georgian politics, the Tennent family may have left the Society of United Irishmen (Wright argues convincingly that William Tennent was involved in the famous revolutionary association), but they did not abandon their reforming beliefs, supporting Catholic emancipation and other reforms while opposing the conservative establishment across the era. But this is not simply a book about the Tennents; Wright's study of Belfast's largely Presbyterian reformers also features fleshed out portrayals of oft-mentioned but rarely featured figures like William Drennan and John Lawless. The latter, often associated with O'Connellite politics and the ill-fated Invasion of Ulster, emerges as an influential participant in the city's tumultuous early 1820s, keeping radical politics in full public view in lively and pointed critiques in his newspaper, The Irishman.

If Wright's biographical structure lends a sense of cohesion to his story, other features of the book's organization challenge the coherence of the author's narrative. While chapters on Belfast reformers' involvement in European politics and romanticism and classicism are full of interesting details about Belfast intellectual life and associational culture, and certainly underline both the diversity and the relative cosmopolitanism of this liberal-minded clique, they undermine the narrative flow of the overall argument, which has something of an uneven quality that is reinforced by some of the short sections within the book's chapters. Thankfully, Wright's prose style is both lively and balanced, helping to hold this rather diverse study together.

It is not only the organization of the book that raises questions. The author's repeated insistence that the Tennents and their Belfast circle lived in a British political and cultural milieu is true in a contextual sense; there is no doubt that these Belfast reformers both participated in and responded to the dominant British issues and trends of their day. Moreover, Wright's determination to place his subjects in a British context strengthens the historiographical framework of the monograph, because he brings in a range of British historical scholarship rarely seen within an Irish historiography that is still too often shaped by national difference. That said, the analytical value brought by the author's insistence on the British nature of key aspects of Belfast's early nineteenth-century civic culture is unclear and/or undeveloped. The overlapping nature of nineteenth-century British and Irish political contexts and identities is a fruitful and hitherto undervalued area of research in the vast historiography of nineteenth-century Ireland, but, despite repeated assertions, this study of Georgian Belfast's political culture only scratches the surface of possibilities here.

I do not want to end this review on such a negative note, however, for this is a fine book, a well-written and insightful study on early nineteenth-century Belfast politics. By focusing on the Tennent family and using a rich array of underutilized sources, Jonathan Jeffrey Wright has produced an important book that greatly adds to our understanding of this critical era. If the book raises as many questions as it answers, we are further indebted to the author's work, particularly if this stimulating study leads other talented scholars to examine the rich and often ignored experience of early nineteenth-century Belfast.