Dr J.A. Langford (1823-1903). A Self-Taught Working Man and the Sale of American Degrees in Victorian Britain, Stephen Roberts, Authoring History, paperback, 2014, 65 pp. ISBN 9781495475122

John Alfred Langford, is depicted in later life on the cover of this fascinating, brief, biographical profile as an elderly figure with long straggling hair, a full patriarchal beard, his right arm resting on a walking stick, his left arm clutching a large bound volume, staring intently and warily through his thin, miniscule, circular, wire-framed spectacles and the cloud of pipe smoke rising from his small clay pipe at a serpent on a visit to Australia. This scene became immortalised in one of his contemplative verses contrasting hidden Antipodean dangers with the familiarity of  the English countryside, in which like Edwin Waugh, he loved to ramble for poetic inspiration. Although Stephen Roberts, the author of this new appraisal of Langford, pronounces his compositions as poetically mediocre, like Carl Chinn, Langford's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography biographer, he recognises Langford as ‘a prime example of a self-taught working man who strove to better himself and his class' and impressed local philanthropists such as the Smethwick machine tool maker, Richard Tangye, who financed his Australian expedition and the Birmingham preacher, George Dawson who paid for Langford to study mathematics at Queen's College and then hired him to teach evening classes at the Church of the Saviour.

Chartist historian, Roberts is to be congratulated on seeking to revive interest in yet another story of a forgotten Victorian working-class politician and writer recovered from obscurity, although Langford, Roberts observes, ‘always ‘steered clear of men calling themselves Chartists' whilst admiring middle class radicals notably Thomas Attwood and Joseph Sturge. Alongside his trade as a chair maker, he increasingly immersed himself from his youth in the emergent autodidactic working class literary as much as political culture of his native Birmingham and later as both an advanced Liberal and Gladstonian loyalist he became committed to the promotion of the civic gospel in his home city, chronicling its local history, advancing its educational opportunities and commending to Birmingham working men his support for Hungarian and Italian national liberalism abroad, penning, for example, a poem condemning the ‘death-increasing carnage' on Solferino's plains'. This attractively produced sixty-five page booklet includes a cluster of photographs of Langford and other figures referred to in the text, three appendices of Langford's selected prose sketches, poetry and letters together with a bibliography of his books and pamphlets.

Langford's claims to escaping the condescension of posterity would not include his acquisition of a rather dubious doctor of laws degree, one of forty-two such degrees purchased by British citizens between 1866-77, to subsidise the development of the embryonic Tusculum College, Tennessee, which stands somewhat uneasily alongside his dedicated service on the Birmingham School Board. Indeed Roberts in this sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of the Birmingham autodidact, drawing on archival and newspaper sources, identifies other incongruities in Langford's attitudes and conduct during his life at the heart of Birmingham's educational, cultural and civic development. A man of strong republican sentiments he was not averse to kissing the hand of Queen Victoria on her royal visit to Birmingham in June 1858, Roberts observes, and his local histories of Birmingham from 1741 to 1841 and 1841 to 1871, he judges, were the work of ‘a collector rather than a writer', though they are still regularly consulted by local historians today.