Bogeyman but not bigot

Edward Carson: even today, almost 70 years after his death, the name of the barrister and Unionist leader has the power to inspire hatred or adulation. A short time ago Ian Paisley was photographed at the election count in Belfast City Hall touching a bust of Carson as though it was a sacred relic. To his detractors, Carson stands in the same relation to the rancorous, sectarian creed of Paisleyism as Hitler does to neo-Nazism.

Carson has not lacked biographers, notwithstanding the dust-jacket’s puff for this as the first modern biography. The three-volume official biography, started by Edward Marjoribanks, half-brother of the late Lord Hailsham, and completed by Ian Colvin, was published a decade or so after The Waste Land; it was hardly modernist but it was certainly modern. Eighteen years after Carson’s death, H. Mont- gomery Hyde published a substantial life in one volume. The Belfast historians A. T. Q. Stewart and Alvin Jackson have both written brief but elegant biographical essays, the one in 1981 and the other 12 years later. Eight years ago John Hostettler produced a lengthier but less original biography. And now Geoffrey Lewis appears on the stage of Carson studies.

What sort of contribution has he made? His work is longer than Stewart’s or Jack- son’s, more interesting than Hostettler’s, and more critical than those of Montgomery and the official biographers. He is not unduly hostile, though, in the way of George Dangerfield in his beautifully written but vastly overrated The Strange Death of Liberal England.

Lewis makes fairly extensive use of some private archival sources in addition to those in public hands. He has been given access to papers still in the possession of Carson’s family. He makes good use of the letters of Carson’s patroness Lady Londonderry (not Edith, but her mother-in-law, Theresa).