92 REVIEWS lications, may even help to knock down the preposterous prices on early New Zealand books, but I suspect that its readers may be few. JUDITH BINNEY University of Auckland

Professor of Democracy. The Life of Charles Henry Pearson, 1830-1894. By John Tregenza. Melbourne University Press, 1968. xvi, 279 pp. Australian price: $8.90.

THIS is an absorbing survey of the complex fate of Charles Henry Pearson, Oxford don, Melbourne radical, intellectual. Son of an embittered, evangelical father, Pearson grew up a clever, sharp-tongued, ill-tempered boy, soon to be expelled from Rugby. Thence he studied rewardingly at King's College, London, under J. S. Brewer and F. D. Maurice, and un- rewardingly at Oriel College, Oxford, where he took a first in Greats and became a Liberal star at the Union. Disliking the law, too doubting for the Church, without patrons in the civil service, too poor to teach or enter politics, Pearson succeeded Maurice as Professor of Modern History at King's College in 1855. Despite ill-health and poor eyesight Pearson compiled a highly original set of historical maps and wrote a standard history of the middle ages. The young professor also emerged as a brilliant member of that London- Oxbridge vanguard of Liberal intellectuals including Brodrick, Goldwin Smith, Hutton, Furnivall, Bagehot and Frederic Harrison. They wrote and worked for good causes, school, university, parliamentary and land reforms, European nationalist movements, against victimisation of Catholics in state departments, for the academic education of women. For a time Pearson edited the National Review. It was the glad confident morning of British liberalism. There are few recent biographical studies of its spokesmen and one wishes that Dr. Tregenza had given us more about Pearson at this time than an austere dozen pages. One would like to know, for instance, how his important contribution to Essays on Reform was commissioned. Amidst this happy activity, in 1863, Pearson suddenly left for an ex- tended visit to South . Dr. Tregenza plays down the rashness of the act: King's College had refused to increase his miserable salary, he had quarrelled with Bagehot on the National Review and suffered a break- down in health; but nonetheless Pearson's sudden embarkation for the Antipodes has an element of that drastic impulsiveness which surfaces periodically in his career. At Melrose in South Australia Pearson, in his own estimate and in Dr. Tregenza's view, changed from being 'a liberal of the English type to a democratic liberal'. He admired the 'independence' of Australian workingmen and found a new informality in social relation- ships, a sharing of amusements and crises regardless of social origin. Nevertheless, as Dr. Tregenza also points out, Pearson quickly acceded to his place among his fellow landholders on the bench, conducted the local Anglican services, frequented the Adelaide Club, and married the daughter of a local Anglo-Australian bigwig. Pearson's South Australian sojourn and his Victorian experience after 1871 never made him a democrat. True to the philosophy in his Reform essay, Pearson looked to a widening of participation by the lower orders under the aegis of the educated as a means towards efficiency in government and the preservation of education REVIEWS 93

and property; but never to equality. Pearson's English experience, his historical intelligence, his observation of diverse societies including the and , gave him peculiar insight into the Australian polity. Like his academic protege and colleague, , he was both a passionate participant in the stir of affairs and a queerly detached narrator of them. He loved the political battle, yet was always bitterly distressed by the intellectual dishonesty, the broken allegiances and compromises that it involved. During his brief grasp of power in Victoria, together with Marcus Clarke (something that students of Clarke have missed entirely), he cleaned up some of the horrors in management of state reformatories and the handling of neglected children, but his magnificent plans for state secondary education and the expansion of Melbourne University still await implementation. His other campaigns for sweetness and light in the colony were equally unsuccessful. His efforts to open the Art Gallery on Sundays and to lessen bigotry about scripture reading in state schools were defeated by the religious philistines and he failed to persuade local worthies with his ironies about gubernatorial use- lessness and warnings against crazy government spending on railways. Pearson early discerned that militant conventionality, not rampant radical- ism, was the colonial malaise. His real influence on Australia, as Tregenza suggests, was manifested in the work of his pupils who strove against that malaise, Deakin, Higgins, Shiels and Alexander Sutherland. The fall of the Deakin-Gillies government and the onset of the De- pression lost Pearson his place in Victoria and, nagged by his snobbish Anglo-Australian wife, Pearson returned home. There he worked as Secre- tary to the Victorian Agent-General (he was effectively cheated of the Agent-Generalship itself) and wrote doggedly while, egged on by his wife, he importuned his successful former cronies, Bryce and Goschen, for a civil service post. In 1894 he died, leaving less than £1,000, soon to be forgotten in both countries. Tregenza beautifully develops the contrast between Pearson in his metro- politan milieu and Pearson the carpet bagger M.L.A. for Castlemaine. If he treats the professor's shifts and political passions too blandly, he achieves that rare quality in a biographer of conveying the intellectual power of a highly intelligent subject. The book has one further bonus for students of early nineteenth century radicalism, in that 'Piercy Ravenstone' who has eluded identification for 150 years turns out to be Richard Puller, Pearson's uncle.

F. B. SMITH Australian National University

Henry Lawson Among Maoris. By W. H. Pearson. A. H. and A. W. Reed, Wellington, 1968. xvi, 224 pp. N.Z. price: $4.95.

HENRY LAWSON made three visits to New Zealand in the eighteen- nineties. He spent six months of his last visit in 1897 teaching at the Native School at Mangamaunu near Kaikoura in the South Island. Since he had had only three years' schooling he was ill-equipped to teach, but he took the job because he hoped it would allow him time to write; he was looking for 'good copy'. It is not surprising that he failed as a teacher.