Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires

Interdisciplinary history can be challenging to accomplish. Books written with an eye to multiple disciplinary audiences may insightfully illuminate some dimensions of their subject for a certain set of readers and then fall short for different readers in other respects. Davis is a first-rate historian with an impeccable mastery of sources—both primary and secondary. She is also well versed in performance history and literary genre studies. Consequently, her efforts to apply the tools of these (latter) academic disciplines to the empirical material she has uncovered through extensive research open several new vistas of understanding. At the same time, they also leave jargon-laden passages in other portions of the text where efforts to link theory to practice do not hang together.George Thompson, the central figure in Davis’ story, is a character loosely familiar to students of Victorian British radicalism. Because most of us have encountered him as a shadowy personage on the edges of various movements (such as antislavery, aboriginal protection, the Anti-Corn Law League, suffrage reform, Indian reform, the peace movement), he has so far earned small, walk-on parts in the historiography of these subjects. To my knowledge, Davis is the first person who has deeply researched Thompson’s biography and varied activities to produce a composite understanding of his aims and life’s work. Thanks to her sleuthing, we can now see Thompson for the remarkable individual that he was—a quintessential self-made Victorian liberal. From humble petit bourgeois origins, he struggled mightily to forge an ethical life and to leave a lasting political mark, all while raising a large family on an income that was inadequate and insecure.Davis’ study is further enriched by her recognition that an autodidact activist such as Thompson had to pay close attention to pre-existing behavioral repertoires and performative strategies, which he could partly draw on but was inspired to develop further by conscious strategy. Building on skills acquired through his own interdisciplinary exposure to preaching, theater, elocution, economics, and law (none of which he ever formally studied), Thompson cobbled together the capabilities that eventually made him a formidable polemicist, able to shine charismatically as a platform speaker, while also expostulating eloquently on the page. Most impressively, Thompson did more than any other leader to connect the separate (abovementioned) strands of the radical-liberal program and to assert them synergistically in an uncompromising way. This agenda sent him far beyond the shores of Britain, to the United States and to India, where he encountered much more hostile and dangerous reactions than in his early years at home. As Davis astutely demonstrates, the determination to prevail in the face of these hazards induced Thompson to cultivate a more variegated and improvisational dramaturgy in his performances than the repertoires that he had inherited from earlier generations of activists.After analyzing Thompson’s career, Davis turns to compare and contrast it with that of his son-in-law Frederick Chesson. Coming from a similarly modest social background, Chesson built on the network of activists and instrumentalities that Thompson had set in motion. Cutting his teeth as a reporter for a series of mostly short-lived radical publications, Chesson established himself during the 1860s as a fixture in the world of London journalism and as an organizer of well-publicized “progressive” gatherings and events. Deeply involved in supporting the Union cause during the American Civil War and in leading the fight against racism in Jamaica by advocating the prosecution of Governor Edward John Eyre, Chesson cultivated access to many leading British politicians, keeping one foot in the familiar terrain of left-liberal activism while advancing the other into the precincts of Britain’s mainstream governing elite. Where his father-in-law had made himself a master of the speech and the pamphlet, Davis shows how Chesson became preoccupied with the more cutting-edge forms of late Victorian media, the cheap daily newspaper, the public exhibition, and the burgeoning information nexus that was opened by steam navigation, and global transcontinental extension of telegraphic communication to ever more distant locations.In her final chapter, Davis makes an interesting contribution to what might be termed the household mode of intellectual production at a transitional moment just before the advent of women’s emancipation.1 Davis incorporates the experience of Chesson’s wife, Amelia, showing how she creatively combined maternal functions and domestic activities with a freelance career as Britain’s first female theater critic while also participating in her husband’s political work.Exhaustively researched and enriched with a host of insightful reflections, Liberal Lives is only partly successful in linking these lives (and this liberalism) to the conventional repertoires by which ordinary (or less progressively motivated) Victorians performed routine activities on their own quotidian stages. Davis’ heroic efforts to apply postmodern performance theory to Victorian cultural history is sometimes unpersuasive. Conversely, she is insufficiently mindful of the broader patterns of class structure and social arrangements within which her subjects were obliged to operate. Chesson’s strategy of “leveraging networks rather than ... building a broad movement” is presented as savvy and sophisticated in a way that Thompson’s “bottom-up” mobilizing approach was not (261). In fact, as Davis’ own evidence makes clear, it reflected the greatly narrowed political possibilities for radicals in the late Victorian period: Women might begin to participate in politics or journalism, and well-connected reformers might gain access to cabinet ministers, but they had lost control of the increasingly chauvinist, racist, and sexist popular and media politics that increasingly dominated the late Victorian public sphere. The players tried their hardest, but their performances fell short

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