
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This fascinating "book of the film" - Peterloo, directed by Mike Leigh - gave some wonderful and equally disturbing insights into the events that led up to, and resulting consequences of the traumatic hustings in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, on Monday 16th August 1819. The descriptions of the many main characters, such as Henry Hunt, Samuel Bamford, Lord Sidmouth, Joseph Nadin and various magistrates, gave the reader some kind of balance to the context but did not change my overall final emotions of sadness and outrage on behalf of the needlessly slain and injured people who had gathered in Manchester.
Whether the local and national governments' statements and various "Acts" later on were all part of a massive kind of cover-up is still debatable but I have no doubt that the whole event (incident?) was disgracefully mishandled by all of the authorities involved, including the military and various administrators. The mere fact that they employed several, later (in)famous, spies who also acted as agents-provocateurs seriously undermines any case of justification put forward by the Home Secretary Sidmouth and his lackeys. The book is incredibly revealing in lots of those sort of details and Jacqueline Riding is to be highly commended for the amount of research done for this very readable account.
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