Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850.

James A. Epstein's Radical Expression provides British historians with a much needed study of the ideas and symbols that underpin nineteenth-century radicalism and help explain its development. Epstein traces popular constitutionalism and Painite republicanism in a variety of different settings and contexts. He argues that popular or plebeian radicalism is syncretic - drawing from both but far more dependent on British constitutionalism. In explaining such dependence, he focuses on the constitution's centrality within British political culture - calling it a "'master-fiction' defining England's place in the universe of the nations" and concluding that this position, more than any other, forced British radicals to use it to make their demands (p. vii).

Epstein not only examines both popular radicals and republicans in the context of political culture, but also expands on the work of Gareth Stedman Jones and E. P. Thompson by offering a study of radical language and symbols that incorporates all aspects of the constitution and treats them as distinct forms neither subsumed under nor independent from the emergence of class in British society.(1) Epstein makes a Herculean effort to show how such common experiences as drinking at a local pub or displaying certain memorabilia became centers of expression. He also recognizes that language and symbols underscore not only the presence of male workers but of women and children in a struggle to define and maintain their liberties.

In trying to bring together so many social and cultural issues, Epstein's work suffers from an uneven treatment of many sub-themes and lack of continuity between chapters. This occasionally obscures distinctions he makes and weakens his argument. While Epstein incorporates aspects of social problems and class structures, he never defines the plebeian or popular audience addressed or provides evidence for their social positions or mentalities. He also does not establish a strong enough explanation of Christianity's role in popular politics to make his discussion of infidelism within Zetetic culture anything other than an oddity in a study of radicalism. Likewise, he discusses two court cases - T. J. Wooler's trial for the publication of the Black Dwarf and Richard Carlile's trial for his republican activities including publication of Paine's works - that offer more similarities than Epstein is able to utilize effectively because he treats them in separate chapters with very different purposes. Because of such organizational difficulties, the continuities and differences between Painite traditions and constitutional radicalism become muddled and the reader wonders why radicals' audiences chose one over the other.

Despite these weaknesses, the work provides historians with an important analysis of a topic which has received too little attention - radical culture and symbols before Chartism. By combining a discussion of Painite republicanism and popular constitutional radicalism, Epstein addresses an issue often ignored within the literature - the relationship between the two within the radical struggle for parliamentary and social reform. That Epstein can do this without neglecting issues of class and gender in such a short volume and still maintain its readability is a tribute to his fine skills as a historian and his mastery of the subject.

ENDNOTE 

1. See Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (New York, 1983) and E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963).

Jodie M. Minor Carnegie Mellon University