By Bari Logan

David Rubinstein, Editor. People for the People. Radical Ideas and Personalities in British Social History. Introduction by Michael Foot. 254 pages. Illustrated. Ithaca Press. £3 (paper: El). 

WHEN I RECEIVED this book I thought that in the light of its title I would find a section on Richard Carlile. I was wrong. Once again Carlile, like Thomas Spence, remains one of the forgotten people in English (British) social history. Perhaps it can be argued that Spence achieved little and left less, although his political tokens have presented coin collectors not only with a multitude of problems but quite an historical bonanza, but at least the East German published tribute to William Gallacher did include a long and important essay on Spence. Carlile, alas, a pioneer in the fight for a free press, and a working class press at that, is ignored. 

In this collection of essays you get the predicatable, Owen, Paine, Morrls, Besant, Hardie, and one is tempted to say Old Uncle Tom Cobley – and all, but that is being just a little naughty, or is it? The book contains some quite outstanding contributions, and some pretty dismal efforts too. Into the former category come the late Henry Collins contribution on Paine, Edward Thompson’s on Peterloo and David Rubinstein’s on Annie Besant, to name three, In the latter category there are well charity perhaps forbids me to mention them, but I must confess that I find the inclusion of Bradlaugh (an overrated character if over there was one, indeed a reactionary not a radical for all his use of secularism for his own ends) strange. Personally I would have thought that Holyoake had the better claim for inclusion in a work of this character. 

Well after hitting out what does one make of the book as it stands? Well it’s good, even if it deals in the main with the familiar. It’s worth getting, although I am uncertain as to what section of the reading populace towards which it is directed. Its time span is long and its field broad, perhaps if anything it fails only in that it is too ambitious in scope and so just as you expect to get deep into a subject the writer has reached his last paragraph. But then if it wets the appetite for more it has perhaps achieved its purpose.