SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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Labour Weekly - March 2nd 1984
Jim Murphy reviews –
A Radical Reader: The struggle
for change in England 1381-1914
Edited by Christopher Hampton
Fighting for our freedoms
The past, as L R Harvey once
thoughtfully observed, is like a foreign country: they do things differently
there.
Or do they?
According to Christopher Hampton, little has in fact changed in merrie
England over the last 600 years.
Witness the perennial struggle
between privilege and poverty, a struggle which has driven the course of English
history from the days of Wat Tyler to the outbreak of world war one. All experience has not been valuable; all change has not been
progress.
For “all our freedoms have had
to be fought for again and again by the oppressed, sometimes over ground already
strewn with the wreckage of defeat, if always under different conditions.” Wealth and power are forever watchful of their chance to
reverse any gains made by the poor who in turn will battle on to complete their
“unfinished business”. This was
England then, this is England now.
Not a sophisticated vision of
history, I think you will agree, but it makes for a suitably romantic
introduction to A Radical Reader, an anthology of prose and verse, prepared to
record the authentic voice of a struggling people down the ages.
Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens
are some of the bigger names contained; less commonly presented but perhaps more
interest are selections from Chartist tracts, snatches of popular song, early
feminist writings etc.
Naturally enough, and Hampton
concedes this, the book is an uneven read for not all the pieces have great
literary power, but they are none the less fascinating for what they convey of a
people in ferment, of the radical ideas which fired the imagination of thinking
men and women.
The more famous authors are more
generally selected with particular contributions from Shelley, Blake and the
young Coleridge, noteworthy here for a wonderfully over-the-top speech entitled
the Dunghill of Despotism.
Let me not divert you from what remains a very interesting and lovingly researched anthology which offers hundreds of good quotes with which to pepper speeches and articles. An excellent birthday gift for the socialist who has everything.
Price: £18.00
ISBN: 978 085124 7250
600 pages
