In Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), Benedict Anderson memorably remarks that modern societies, with their tombs of unknown soldiers, cannot imagine “a tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals” (10). Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrell, in the opening essay of this valuable collection, deny Anderson's claim. “Memorials of this sort are all around us,” they insist, “because radicals and reformers of all stripes have waged long and bitter campaigns to commemorate their ideals and the heroes who upheld them” (1). Pickering and Tyrell's book, written at the intersection of labor history and memory studies, explores how nineteenth-century reformers sought to commemorate other reformers. It is less the monuments themselves that occupy the authors and their collaborators than the struggle for and over them—and, incidentally, a later age's forgetting of them.

Several essays focus on stone monuments of reformers and radicals—instances of the general Victorian “statumania” familiar to anyone who has wandered through a London park. The several contributions treating memorial obelisks, spires, and pinnacles spend little time on formal analysis (just as well, as the finished products were rather plain and uninteresting). Despite references to monuments as “sacro-secular political sites” (105) and as “mnemotechnic aids” (110), the authors are less concerned with how these sites were experienced than with the politics of how the monuments came into being.

Pickering uses the construction of two memorials to Feargus O’Connor—in London and Nottingham—as a window onto late Chartism. Subscription records allow some mapping of the movement's regional and local health. Internal rivalries reached their height when the London monument was, in 1857, erected surreptitiously, apparently so as to freeze an alternative faction out of any claim to proprietorship. The quick neglect the memorials suffered indicates to Pickering that “there was no room in the mid-Victorian consensus for Feargus O’Connor. As it transpired, the most effective response to the O’Connor monuments was simply to ignore them” (119).

Tyrell's essay on the teetotaler burial ground in Preston offers a fascinating look at the “counter-culture” (130) of temperance. She draws particularly revealing links between temperance and Victorian antipathy to “the mid-nineteenth-century pharmacopoeia” (139). As she points out, Victorian medicine often was alcohol, so it is no surprise that teetotalers were prominent among critics of medicine.

Tyrell, with Michael T. Davis, chronicles efforts to commemorate the five “Scottish Political Martyrs,” tried in Edinburgh in 1793–94 and transported to Botany Bay. Obelisks were built in both Edinburgh and (more modestly) London—and quickly forgotten (at least until Scottish nationalists recently began invoking the Calton Hill monument as a symbol of national identity—overlooking the Englishness of three of the Martyrs). The essay demonstrates how the northern monument's construction and public meaning were hostage to local politics. This persuasive account of the contingencies influencing construction makes one wish Pickering and Tyrell had resisted, earlier, citing a dubious social psychology study that suggests emotional reasons for the (supposed) fact that monuments are “erected either immediately after an event, or in 20 to 30 year cycles thereafter” (7).

The book follows Pierre Nora's wide definition of memorial “sites” as including any material or immaterial touchstone with which a community thinks about its past. An essay by Nicholas Mansfield (the only piece, other than Iain McCalman's lively preface, in which neither Pickering nor Tyrell had a hand) analyzes 150 trade and reform banners, some of the more than 2,500 tabulated by the lottery-funded National Banner Survey. Mansfield conveys the frustrations involved in studying banners, not simply because so many have been lost (no Chartist examples survive), but also because those still extant are difficult to read. Must the presence of a Union Jack on a banner be read as loyalist? In the absence of external evidence—such as a newspaper description of a march in which the banner was displayed—Mansfield concludes that it is impossible to say.

Perhaps the most satisfying essay is Pickering's account of William Cobbett's famous 1819 exhuming of Thomas Paine. Cobbett hoped that Paine's remains, once “returned” to England from their grave in New Rochelle, New York, would rally sympathizers to radicalism. Instead, the relics turned the journalist into a laughingstock. Cobbett's behavior spotlights his grandstanding (“these bones will effect the reformation of England in Church and State” [59]), his recklessness (New Yorkers quite reasonably regarded his act as one of simple grave robbery), and ultimately his clumsiness (the bones ended up lost). Cobbett comes off poorly, not least when, frustrated in his initial efforts, he announces that he also possesses Paine's hair and will fashion it into gold rings to fund a Paine monument. The thought of selling off bits of a man's body in order to buy him a stone tablet is almost enough to make Jeremy Bentham's Auto-Icon sound heartwarming.

Pickering points out that Cobbett was quite openly seeking to atone for the abuse he had rained on Paine in his Tory youth. The essay takes seriously the talismanic power of material objects and does not regard Cobbett's faith in the potential of some ragged bones as inherently risible. (Just a few years before, Cobbett had observed the citizens of Plymouth reverently trying on bits of Napoleon's laundry, sent to shore while the captive's ship sat in harbor: the journalist knew the power of the tangible.) But since we live in a world where celebrity bodies and their possessions continue to compel, it seems unnecessary to invoke, as Pickering does, a “syncretic belief system” incorporating “animism, fatalism, and a residual paganism” or to read Cobbett's actions in the light of traditional “post mortem rituals” (64).

By book's end, it is clear that Pickering and Tyrell may have been too quick to contradict Anderson. The monuments discussed are not tombs for unknown but for known radicals—and it is unknownness, and thus nonindividuality, that defines the tombs that were born with the twentieth century (and, thanks to DNA testing, that died with it as well). Posterity's neglect of the monuments that the book describes—their fate in an era of unknown soldiers—suggests that individuals in general have become less interesting as subjects for memorialization in stone or bronze. Perhaps the photograph and moving picture are partly to blame: individuated statuary has ceased to be a particularly satisfactory way of remembering a hero.

But statues may retain their memorial function for subjects other than individuals, as an excellent final essay by Tyrell and James Walvin leads one to conclude. The subject is slavery monuments (and once again, a key theme is internal discord, with Whigs and “Saints” building competing monuments to claim abolition as their exclusive achievement). The authors emphasize how odd it seems, from the perspective of our own day, that the nineteenth century memorialized British critics of slavery while turning a blind eye to slaves (other than the occasional “deferential supplicant” [152]). Monuments celebrated Britain's ending the slave trade without acknowledging that Britain had also been “the key slave-trading nation” (148). Only very recently, as Tyrell and Walvin explain, have memorials like the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery (in the Merseyside Maritime Museum) or the Highland Clearances Memorial begun to spotlight not reformers but victims. There may not be any tombs of unknown radicals, but (as scores of Holocaust memorials suggest) the defining monuments of our time may be cenotaphs for the fallen and persecuted.

Much remains to be explored about the role of memory in British political culture. Pickering and Tyrell's solid and important volume should inspire further work in this compelling field.