Radical Spaces - By Christina Parolin

“This study,” Christina Parolin writes in her concluding remarks, “has argued that … there is a dynamic, dialectical and symbiotic relationship between radical culture and the sites in which it operated” (p. 279). Taking the complex interactions between radicalism, space, and power in Georgian and early Victorian London as its focus, this ambitious study negotiates and consolidates, under the auspices of a spatial approach, the histories (and historiographies) of radicalism, identity, the public sphere, gender, performance, justice, protest, science, memory, publishing, theatre, and graphic satire. Such an approach should, and rightly has been, applauded, yet it is also the source of the monograph’s shortcomings. If indeed Radical Spaces is the spatial turn in action (more on which later), it demonstrates that more work is needed to integrate such analyses into the canon of social and cultural history....