# Peter Gray, William Sharman Crawford and Ulster Radicalism

## Pauline Collombier

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OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/19861

DOI: 10.4000/144cw

ISSN: 2259-8863

**Publisher**

Presses universitaires de Caen

**Printed version**

Date of publication: June 11, 2025

Number of pages: 145-147

ISSN: 0183-973X

**Electronic reference**

Pauline Collombier, "Peter Gray, William Sharman Crawford and Ulster Radicalism", *Études irlandaises* [Online], 50-1 | 2025, Online since 22 May 2025, connection on 13 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/19861; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/144cw

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COMPTES RENDUS

BOOK REVIEWS

Peter Gray, *William Sharman Crawford and Ulster Radicalism*, Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2023, 467 p.

Out of the many figures of early 19th-century Ireland, Daniel O'Connell is certainly the man who has generated the greatest amount of scholarly interest and debate, up to this day – leading Laurent Colantonio to speak recently of an “ocean of bibliographic information”.<fnref n="1" /> Yet, while O'Connell has, in some scholarly works, been regarded as a British radical, there have been few studies of Irish 19th-century politics where the focus was radicalism, instead of nationalism. Fields of study specifically connected to the first half of the 19th century have certainly diversified, but the history of Irish nationalism in all its forms still dominates, with the publishing of many works on the 1798 rebellion, Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen, Robert Emmet, the Repeal movement as well as Young Ireland and its most prominent members. By choosing to focus on Ulster landlord and politician William Sharman Crawford (1780-1861), Peter Gray offers a new and fresh narrative, especially as Sharman Crawford is immediately defined not as a nationalist but as a radical “committed to the pursuit of democratic reform, social and economic justice” (p. 1).

Despite a thirty-year political career spanning both the pre- and post-Famine eras (from his first participation to an election campaign in County Down in 1830 to his final public speech in 1860), Sharman Crawford has held a “rather obscure place in the historical literature” (p. 5) and has been “ill-served by historians” (p. 6). Gray corrects this oversight thanks to an extremely rich and thoroughly researched biography, which relies on an abundant body of primary sources (listed on p. 433-447 of the bibliography), together with no fewer than forty illustrations reproduced in an insert placed in the middle of the book.

Writing a biography can be a challenge for the historian. As was highlighted by Pierre Bourdieu in his 1986 essay “The Biographical Illusion”, narrating a life story always involves the risk of offering a teleological reading of someone’s life and thereby artificially creates meaning. Because events “tend or pretend to get organized into sequences linked to each other on the basis of intelligible relationships”, the life story becomes a narrative of “successive states, which are [...] turned into steps

<footnote n="1">1. Laurent Colantonio, *L'homme-nation: Daniel O'Connell et le laboratoire politique irlandais, 1775-1847*, Lille, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2023, p. 22 (our translation).</footnote>
of a necessary development”.<fnref n="2" /> For Bourdieu a successful biography requires not to separate an individual’s life from its “social space”, and a specific “trajectory” or life path is indissociable from understanding “the successive states of the field through which the trajectory has progressed”, as well as the many links connecting “the agent considered [...] to [...] other agents engaged in the same field and facing the same realm of possibilities”.<fnref n="3" />

While offering a chronological approach spanning Sharman Crawford's entire political career so as to allow for clarity and thoroughness (from chapter 2 to chapter 8), Gray avoids the pitfalls identified by Bourdieu. He achieves this by adopting a timeframe much wider than Sharman Crawford's life and what he calls a “four-generational approach” (p. 5). A first chapter of the book is thus dedicated to Sharman Crawford's father, describing his involvement in the Irish Volunteers movement so as to establish the roots of the son's political commitment both to radicalism and the constitutional tradition. The last chapter of the book evokes Sharman Crawford's legacy, first to show how two of his children (James and Mabel) followed in the father's footsteps; then to highlight how the family radical tradition was reneged upon, when the grandson Robert Gordon Sharman Crawford first converted to liberal unionism and later became a “pillar of the new UUP [Ulster Unionist Party] establishment in the devolved administration of Northern Ireland” (p. 356). This less traditional approach allows Gray to connect the Sharman Crawfords with a “range of key political and social developments” (p. 7) spanning a large period (from the late 18th century to the 1920s!) and to delve further into expanding fields of research such as women's history: the section dedicated to the writings and political activism of Mabel Sharman Crawford, herself a travel writer, feminist and supporter of tenant right and Irish home rule (p. 333-344), is a most valuable addition in a book centred on a male political figure and is likely to generate further scholarly interest into Mabel.

William Sharman Crawford's career dovetailed neatly with many of the political Irish and British campaigns and struggles witnessed between the 1830s and 1860s – such as the anti-slavery movement, the reform of the vote, the question of Ireland's political fate, the repeal of the Corn Laws, Chartism, as well as agrarian reform before, during and after the Great Irish Famine. Because he was involved in all of these struggles, Sharman Crawford came to be connected to many other Irish and British politicians. But, as is often shown by Gray, he also sometimes strongly diverged from them. There was thus an increasing and, ultimately, long-lasting antagonism between him and Daniel O'Connell: Sharman Crawford was not only opposed to Repeal but also less socially conservative on questions such as the tithes, the poor law and the reform of municipal corporations – revealing “an ideological divide” between the two men on the subject of “social entitlement and welfare” (p. 102). Sharman Crawford also had a turbulent relationship with

<footnote n="2">2. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Biographical Illusion” [1986], in *Identity: A Reader*, Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, Peter Redman (eds.), London, Sage Publications, 2000, p. 300.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. *Ibid*., p. 304.</footnote>
fellow Irishman and Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor (p. 128, 140 and 144) and favoured a gradualist and constitutional approach to the land issue, which antagonised more radical agrarian reformers such as William Conner, James Fintan Lalor and John Mitchel (p. 220-221 and 228-235). Sharman Crawford's singularity and "distinct voice" (p. 5) are thus stressed by Gray all along the book.

In the end, Sharman Crawford emerges from this biography as a political figure that was at least as equally important as Daniel O'Connell for he was in many ways as much of a visionary and pioneer as the "Liberator". An advocate of patriotism rather than nationalism, Sharman Crawford embraced a federal solution to the Irish national question instead of Repeal, "presaging the arguments later rehearsed in the home rule debates from the 1870s" (p. 156). A convert to complete suffrage, he envisaged the use of parliamentary obstruction so as to force Westminster to consider reform as early as 1843-1844, i.e. "thirty years before the adoption of the tactic by Charles Stewart Parnell and his allies" (p. 149). And his defence of tenant right from 1835 onward, which insisted on fair rents and on compensations for improvements, and resulted in a nationwide movement for tenants, prefigured what would be eventually granted through the land legislation of 1870 and 1881 (p. 3 and 322).

Because he was an MP for the English constituency of Rochdale (1841-1852) and participated to struggles such as those in favour of reform and free trade, Sharman Crawford "stressed the essential unity of Irish and English reforming objectives" (p. 137), confirming that Irish politics were indissociable from British politics and that there was a pan-British form of radicalism. A Protestant from the north of Ireland, he was also a strong advocate of the union of Catholics and Protestants and of non-sectarian collaboration, deeming "religious unity [...] essential to social progress" (p. 56). While not a socialist but rather a "radical democratic liberal" (p. 3), Sharman Crawford defended the enfranchisement of working-class men, arguing that "educational advancement would flow from the conferral of civil rights and should not be a prerequisite for the vote" (p. 122). A political figure and Protestant landlord from Ulster, Sharman Crawford is therefore all the more fascinating as he supported collaborations and campaigns across geographical, sectarian and class lines. This also makes him unique and visionary and certainly corroborates Gray's view that "his political and social principles remain relevant" and "worthy of modern attention" (p. 367).

Pauline COLLOMBIER

Université de Lorraine, IDEA, F-57000 Metz, France