History, Politics And Cultural Studies
Abstract
Michael Davitt: Freelance Radical and Frondeur by Lawrence Marley, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2007, 314 pp., €45.00 (hardback), ISBN 987-1-84682-066-3 Michael Davitt's life should be of central interest for anyone trying to grapple with the often perplexing narrative of political Irishness in nineteenth-century Britain. Born in Straide, Co. Mayo on 25 March 1846, he spent his formative years in the small textile town of Haslingden, 17 miles to the north of Manchester. Spending most of his life actively identifying with the aspirations of 'men of no property', he nevertheless formally aligned himself with the sense of grievance and loss which underlay Irish political identity in urban Britain. As Lawrence Marley demonstrates with considerable skill, Davitt therefore applied the self-discipline gained at the local Wesleyan school first of all to an early career as a key Fenian conspirator and then to the more practical political problem of gaining an Ireland both free and socially just. To do the latter, however, required, in his words, 'Principles of reform, intelligently and fearlessly propagated' (90); these principles in turn involved drawing on his education and shared experience of life in industrial Britain. Davitt, and his 'social nationalist' friends in Scotland in particular,