Although the term activism is a twentieth-century invention, it was during the nineteenth century when it came of age. This, in brief, is the core historical contention of Tracy C. Davis's wonderfully rich and colorful study of three activist lives in Victorian Britain and the causes they advanced. “Before there was a word for it, there was the cogent, argumentatively forcible, activity of activism,” she writes, one that was rooted in a variety of communicational forms, among them speeches, meetings, petitions, and deputations, as well as journalism (193). Together, Davis argues, they formed a veritable “activist repertoire” (16): a medley of practices that were deployed and combined, mastered, and manipulated, in a self-consciously syncretic, tactical fashion for maximum political effect. There is no doubt a dramatic quality to all reformist endeavors. Davis's point is more profound. In its activist variants, Victorian social reform was essentially a performative art that sought to politicize issues by dramatizing them. As she argues in the introduction and opening chapter, to understand it otherwise is to obscure so much of what made activism distinctive at this juncture, and how it worked and resonated culturally (1–8, 16–30).
The three lives in question are George Thompson (1804–78), his daughter Amelia Chesson (1833–1902), and her husband Frederick Chesson (1833–88). Unlike the many radical–liberal causes they advanced—free trade, suffrage reform, antimilitarism, antislavery, and the rights of indigenous populations, among others—none of the three is especially well known, least of all Amelia, who still awaits an Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry. This is perhaps because none scaled the heights of public office, though Thompson briefly represented Tower Hamlets as an independent MP between 1847 and 1852. The book, which draws on a wealth of printed and archival sources, can certainly be appreciated from a biographical point of view, and each of the trio is attended to over the course of the book's five substantive chapters: Thompson is the focus of chapters 1 and 2, Frederick chapters 3 and 4, and Amelia chapter 5.
The book also has a historical story to tell. As Davis argues, spanning two generations, their lives capture some crucial shifts in the culture of Victorian radicalism and humanitarian agitation (5–6; 264–5). Thompson's principal craft was oratory, which he first practiced on behalf of the London Anti-Slavery Society in 1831, and he came to enjoy a reputation on a par with other revered speakers of the time, such as Lord Brougham and the preacher Charles Spurgeon. Though Thompson often ventured into print, he was most at home on the stage, before a crowded assembly hall. The Chessons were no less steeped in the arts of public speaking, not to mention the arts more broadly: Amelia became an established music, theater, and book critic, and was likely Britain's first female in this role (308). The world in which they operated, however, was free of newspaper taxes and enjoyed the benefits of ocean-crossing telegraphy. In contrast to the activism of Thompson, theirs was more print-based—Frederick was a journalist, editor, writer, and pamphleteer—and more concerned with circulating news from fellow radicals scattered around the world.
The biographical and historical dimensions of the study are both hugely satisfying, but what really distinguishes the book is the addition of a third interpretive ingredient, the dramaturgical. Davis draws on performance theory throughout, and the book pays welcome attention to two neglected aspects of reform. One is the cultural form of the meeting and rituals of performance and process (e.g. proposing, seconding, and voting on a motion), as well as techniques of audience interaction. Knowing how to handle hostility was a must, as Thompson learned during a tumultuous lecture tour of the US in 1834–5, where he frequently encountered heckling and abuse (30–8). The other aspect is the great labor of organizing interventions and publicity, which Frederick in particular excelled at, not least in his role as secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society from 1857. The tasks were many: writing letters, minuting meetings, booking rooms, distributing circulars, and hosting fellow activists. The three were, in short, incessantly busy, and, as Davis argues, the way they allowed these activities to slip and spill into the domestic sphere is partly what defines their militancy. These were lives characterized, she writes, by “a mash-up of political awareness, sociability, leisure, work, and family,” blurring any distinction between public and private, “frontstage” and “backstage” (326).
In this way, the book works as a kind of alternative social history of various reformist currents that have otherwise been so well served by intellectual and transnational historians. It is unfortunate that it does not close with a concluding chapter, condensing what Davis thinks we might understand differently, or addressing, if only briefly, how radical activism mutated once more in the twentieth century. For those wanting to rethink the latter and trace new connections and genealogies, Davis's fine study will furnish essential reading; but it is also an immensely enjoyable and thoughtful evocation of the lives of three individuals whose passion for social justice burned just as intensely as their love of the arts.
