Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London
Abstract
BOOK REVIEWS 333 speech, to gather in public, and even to political education and participation. This connection was brought to the fore in the late 1860s. In July 1866, Hyde Park was closed by the auth- orities to prevent the holding of a national demonstration. The following year the Royal Parks Bill was drafted, which was designed to prevent the Reform League holding political meetings in London parks. As Gorman notes, ‘The struggle over the physical space available for meetings was therefore both a direct manifestation of the contest between political auth- ority and radical protest and a reflection of the symbolic meaning of these spaces’ (35). The connection also had a historical dimension. Campaigners appealed to the myth of the ancient constitution, imagining a golden age of democratic communities and common ownership of land that had been destroyed by the so-called Norman Yoke. Though Gorman’s focus is on the common purpose of the legislative campaign and popular action, there are hints of hidden conflict and complexity. The right to ‘air and exer- cise’, which was a crucial component of the nineteenth-century campaign for the preser- vation of open spaces, was not enshrined in law until 1925. Moreover, it