British radical reform politics of the French Revolutionary decade continue to fascinate and inspire scholars and students, and James Epstein and David Karr's British Jacobin Politics, Desires, and Aftermaths: Seditious Hearts will be welcomed by an array of historical specialists. It will particularly appeal to scholars of British politics in the 1790s and beyond, as the title suggests, but the variety of approaches that Epstein and Karr employ mean that it will also hold interest for historians of emotion, of the politics of space and place, and of memory and memorialization.

The book is organized into two parts, with five chapters dealing directly with radical reformers in the 1790s, and three with a triad of “aftermaths”—in the echoes of the 1790s in 1817, in the commemoration of the 1790s in the 1830s, and in the work of one of the most famous scholars of the 1790s, E. P. Thompson. The first chapter was co-written by Epstein and Karr, while the others are divided more or less evenly between the two. Five chapters have appeared elsewhere and have been updated here, and three are new, as is the introduction, written for this volume.

The subtitle signals the real focus and intellectual contribution of this volume. The tie that binds the chapters together is the attempt to understand, as British government ministers and legal officers also did in the 1790s, the “desire”, the “heart”, the intangible intent, behind the overt acts of 1790s radical reform campaigners. Because speech and text had to be made public with caution, Epstein and Karr are as deeply interested in a wider ranging exploration of the traces left by reformers in the 1790s as with their words and reasoning. They investigate evidence of reformers’ emotions and gestures, their imaginations, creativity, narratives and performances, and their use of physical space (from radicals’ homes and meeting rooms to open fields and prison ships, headstones and monuments). Epstein and Karr argue convincingly that investigating these liminal spaces between and behind actions and words, in conjunction with radical texts, speeches, and reasoning, deepens our understanding of the desires and hearts of British political reformers in the French Revolutionary decade and beyond. They probe the struggles in British radicalism between the more orderly constitutionalism and the more demonstrative, uncontained root-and-branch campaign, and between Romantics and the rationalists. They do so without resorting to binaries but rather by recognizing the reformist spectrum of ideas and tactics and the shifting and evolving character of many reformers’ commitments and vocabularies.

Epstein's and Karr's discussions of reformist narratives and activities here are deeply embedded in the great wealth and breadth of 1790s historiography. Other scholars have begun to explore most, if not all, of the approaches deployed in this book—the performance of politics, the political importance of space and place, emotion in politics, partisan narrative, ephemera and speech, political legacy, and memory. But these are all questions that might be said to reveal affairs of the heart in people's politics, and it is their collection together in this book that constitutes one of its chief attractions. (Mark Philp's excellent Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London 1789–1815 [2020], on London reformers in this period, also foregrounds behavior over texts.) Epstein's and Karr's chapters are enormously rich, building on the edifice of work already produced by others as they integrate their own important analyses, questions, and interpretations, and add so many shafts of light as they go. One is left with a great impression of having attended a seminar among experts, authors brimful of ideas.

Moreover, as from such a research seminar, one leaves the book with an array of questions and queries that do not undermine the thesis of the volume, but rather indicate its substance and further possibilities. An enquiry into subtexts, imagination, play, gesture, performance, and narrative cannot help but generate questions about the intentions and meanings that may or may not have been contained in them. Viewing the “Jacobin moment” (43) in the 1790s as a mood or a temper as well as a set of ideas, Epstein and Karr argue in chapter 1, is a suggestive approach; but the terms Jacobin, radical, and democrat are used more or less interchangeably throughout much of the rest of the volume (except that beyond 1800, Jacobinism carried the scent of the 1790s with it more powerfully than did the other terms). Does the interchangeability of these terms matter, given that “radicalism” in this volume is investigated less as an ideology than as a set of identities (77), and given the shifting definitions of these terms? What of the 1800–1815 years between parts one and two? Robert Emmet, Edward Despard, William Cobbett, John Cartwright, and a cast of others create problems for any suggestion (which is not made explicitly here) that radical reformism was dormant in that period. What of British radicals beyond England (or indeed London), given the title of the book? The Scots feature more as a context for Maurice Margarot's story and a subject for a London monument than anything else, and the Irish and Welsh rather less, though Karr's question regarding the place of empire in radical history is a good one (257), and we follow William Winterbotham (on paper) to America and Margarot to Australia. Then, what of women (who, with the exception of Mary Wollstonecraft, make little more than fleeting appearances in this book)? What of abolitionists? How might investigating their occupation of space and place, their performance, their narratives, their expressions of emotion, their gestures add to Epstein and Karr's portrayal of seditious “Jacobin hearts” between 1789 and 1837?

British Jacobin Politics, Desires, and Aftermaths is a book that illuminates, provokes and stimulates. Historians of the British 1790s will want to read it, engage with it, and teach from it.