Dr Martin Spychal, research fellow on the Commons 1832-1868, reviews Robert Poole’s Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford, 2019)
What drove 400 volunteer soldiers and special constables to murder 18 and maim nearly 700 of their fellow Lancastrians? This is the key question that Robert Poole’s definitive and illuminating Peterloo sets out to answer. As Poole states in his prologue, ‘two hundred years on, it is still possible to be angry about Peterloo’. Thanks to this revealing, tragic and at times harrowing thick description of one of the pivotal moments in the development of Britain’s democracy, Peterloo will continue to make future generations of students, teachers and general readers angry about the events at St Peter’s Field on 16 August 1819.
Those massacred at Peterloo formed part of an unarmed, peaceful crowd of around 40,000 children, women and men assembled to hear…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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