ABSTRACT
Described by Ruskin as ‘too hot a socialist’ and by Vicinus as ‘the reddest of the red’, Gerald Massey exerts a commanding presence in late Chartist poetics, and has been cited as the direct prototype of George Eliot’s ‘shaggy-headed’, radical hero Felix Holt—direct, intense and unimpeachable. His own impoverished childhood in a canal-side hovel near Tring, Hertfordshire, is recalled with singular bitterness. His first volume, Poems and Chansons by a Tring Peasant Boy (of which no trace can now be found) was published c. 1846, selling a moderately satisfying 250 copies. In 1850, taking the pseudonym ‘Bandiera’, he began to write for The Red Republican, a fearlessly radical paper run by an ‘uncompromising advocate of revolutionary violence’, Massey’s friend, Julian Harney. Massey would have been much less acceptable had his impassioned exhortations to ‘break the necks of tyrants’ been sounded before the high watershed of militant insurgency in 1848.
