Peterloo

The violent suppression of a mass public demonstration in Manchester on 16 August 1819, first satirised as ‘Peter-loo’ by the radical Manchester Observer, holds a very ambiguous place in the historiography of Britain in the early nineteenth century. Although it has remained a staple item in the teaching of modern British politics on A-level syllabuses and undergraduate history courses since the 1960s, largely owing to the influence of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class on the imaginations of a generation of history teachers, this new text by Robert Poole is, in fact, the first complete scholarly account of an episode which Poole describes as ‘the bloodiest political event of the nineteenth century on English soil’. Poole’s work is fastidious and highly detailed, with a command of the archival and printed sources that comes from a long career of research and scholarship. It is also written in a

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