The question of continuity looms large in the historiography of nineteenth-century British radicalism. For decades, the mid Victorian years figured in the secondary literature as a ‘profound caesura’, a deep disjunction perceived to divide the robust radicalism of the French revolutionary and Chartist eras from the etiolated reformism of the late Victorian labour and socialist movements. But radical historiography of the modern era is now decisively shaped instead by the so-called ‘currents of radicalism’ thesis. Where historians once saw a sharp break between the class-conscious politics of early nineteenth-century radicalism and the ameliorative reformism of the later Victorian period, the ‘currents of radicalism’ school posits a more continuous narrative of constitutionalist popular politics in which liberal, radical and even socialist tendencies are seen to have coexisted in a largely symbiotic relationship, rather than to have acted consistently in opposition to each other. In this interpretation, populist appeals crafted to transcend both class rhetorics and economic conditions take pride of place, underpinning a continuous strand of radical activism that crossed socioeconomic divides and extended from the eighteenth into the twentieth century.

Recently, John Belchem and James Epstein have interrogated the role played in this debate over continuity by a central figure in the history of popular politics – the gentleman radical leader. Gentlemanly radicals, these authors note, have served a central function in works that emphasize the continuities of the nineteenth-century radical movement.