In the bad old days of history teaching, you were made to learn a little about a lot, that lot comprising mainly public figures and events set in a chronological framework nailed into your brain. Thus, all I knew about William Huskisson was that he had been President of the Board of Trade some time during the 1820s, that he was associated with Canning and that he met an untimely but picturesque end when run over by Stephensen's Rocket at the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester railway. To us irresponsible youths who put pennies on the line and dared each other to dash across and retrieve them before the approaching electric train, that seemed careless. After all, the Rocket was quite slow, wasn't it?
Not that slow, according to this fascinating account, which also shows Huskisson's death as fuller of irony and sadness than our schoolboy minds had time for, though we might have appreciated the gore. It shows his life, too, as more significant than we realised. Although not one of the greatest political figures of his century, he was arguably among the most influential, especially in his early espousal of the new age of rail, whose first public victim he became.
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