So vast and protean was the Chartist movement that it might almost be regarded as the Rorschach test of British social historians. At various times, it has been variously interpreted as a knife and fork question, a loose umbrella coalition, the final flowering of the moral economy, a precursor to the modern Labour Party, the opening volley in an inevitable class struggle, a discursive construct that must be apprehended in its own political language, and a plebeian patriarchalism that excluded women through the masculine notions of citizenship in which it was framed. Because each of these interpretations contains at least a grain of truth, Chartism remains an attractive and even inevitable topic, which—despite dozens of books and hundreds of articles—still remains a lively focus of historiographical debate. It would, of course, be a mistake to think that all interpretations are equally valid or that no advancement in understanding has been made. The most successful general syntheses have all recognized that Chartism was both diverse and united and have sought to forge an effective dialectic between this unity and diversity. Thus, in 1941, G. D. H. Cole's Chartist Portraits sought to grasp the unity of the movement, by tracing the struggle of its contending leaders, as the agitation pressed onward from phase to phase. Then, in 1959, Asa Briggs's Chartist Studies probed beneath this national unity to show how local conditions and contingent circumstances shaped a movement that differed widely from place to place. Finally, in 1984, Dorothy Thompson's The Chartists restored the theme of unity by explaining Chartism as a broad-based class movement, which nevertheless varied significantly by craft and region, as it encompassed a multiplicity of traditions and trades.

Although the present book makes no explicit attempt to situate itself in this literature, it bears the weight of this complex historiography. Following Cole, Owen Ashton and Paul Pickering have attempted to grasp Chartism through a collective biography of its leaders. Following Briggs, they have focused on leadership at the local rather than the national level. Following Thompson, they have accepted the proposition that Chartism was essentially a working-class movement, while simultaneously insisting that the movement's middle-class leaders deserve study in their own right. The result is a book that adds a great deal to our knowledge of a six locally significant leaders, but only slightly to our understanding of the movement as a whole. To juxtapose the lives of the militant doctor Peter McDouall, the respectable improver Henry Solly, the Irish aristocrat William Sankey, the charismatic preacher Benjamin Parsons, the rationalist dissenter William Schofield, and the political organizer Richard Reed is to assert the diversity of the movement not so much by argument, as by design. Exactly why these particular individuals were selected is never made clear. One senses that they were targeted as an assortment of significant figures, who had not been adequately covered by existing scholarship. The sense that we are merely adding a few missing bricks to edifice of Chartist studies is further reinforced by the absence of a strong analytical introduction or conclusion that might have sought to tie the separate studies together.

That said, the research behind these deftly painted vignettes is impeccable. The authors are thoroughly steeped in their material and have mined a wide range of different sources to piece together the details of lives that would otherwise have remained uncertain and obscure. Moreover, in rescuing these middle-class Chartists from the condescension of posterity, Ashton and Pickering do at least gesture toward some common, overarching themes. The first is the artificiality of the distinction between moral and physical force Chartism. This distinction had been emphasized by the movement's earliest historians, most of whom were late-Victorian movement veterans, eager to dissociate themselves from the violent language of the 1840s. More recent scholars have begun to question the validity of this distinction by emphasizing the nonrevolutionary character of even the most militant leaders, while simultaneously noting that amid the hottest heat of agitation, even the moderates toyed with coercive means. Ashton and Pickering confirm and expand the second half of this argument. With the exception of McDouall, all of their subjects were moderates, many of whom became associated with mid-Victorian liberalism once the Chartist challenge failed. Yet, at some point during the heated years between 1839 and 1842, each had dallied at least briefly with physical force remedies. To view Chartism from the vantage of these second rank middle-class leaders is not to see a movement neatly divided into two factions, but rather a swirling mélange of causes—suffrage reform, education, temperance, factory reform, Poor Law reform, Corn Law reform, medical reform, and religious revivalism—all melded uneasily together in various proportions that shifted according to the vicissitudes of time, circumstance, person, and place.

The second conclusion that Ashton and Pickering draw from their six studies is encapsulated in their subtitle “uneasy radicals.” Middle-class Victorians, they contend, were socially insecure and economically vulnerable, and it was this “unease” that delayed their descent into conventional Victorian liberalism and (at least temporarily) propelled them into radical alliances with the disenfranchised working class. A fuller study based on a larger number of cases might well bear this hypothesis out. The milieu of dissenting preachers, common surgeons, and penny journalists—from which all but one of these subjects was drawn—was clearly a stratum of great uneasiness, in which hostility to the Anglican Aristocratic establishment was at least as intense as in the working class below. But Ashton and Pickering's studies only obliquely and imperfectly illustrate this point. For they show that every one of these marginal professional men would have enjoyed a happier, more secure, and less marginal existence if they had only kept their mouths shut, deferred to the establishment, and avoided association with the Chartists in their locality. These men did not become “Friends of the People” because they were uneasy, but were rather uneasy because they had the courage and tenacity to become Friends of the People. For their allegiances to Chartism they paid a heavy price in income, reputation, respectability, and professional advancement. In a world where even “progressive” celebrities are obsessed with their multimillion dollar multimedia contracts this is reason enough to salute and honor their memory.