T HE impersonal nature of most of the available materials on
Julian Harney, mainly newspapers and periodicals in which
he wrote, leave one with no more than conjectures about some
aspects of his life. Though Harney, like such other "typical"
Victorians as Gladstone and Disraeli, was an extraordinarily
prolific correspondent, of the hundreds of his letters which sur-
vived him only a handful were discovered. Almost as disappoint-
ing was my inability to find the invaluable hoard of corre-
spondence from his friends--Marx, Engels, Louis Blanc, Ledru
Rollin, Feargus O'Connor, and so on--to which he casually
alluded in the 1890's as reposing in a Cambridge ( Massachu-
setts) attic.

It may have been the lack of such personalia, or perhaps frus-
tration at the impossible task of really knowing the man (which
I suspect everyone who attempts biography feels) that led to a
recurrent dream. In the dream, Harney was still living in the
house at Richmond, Surrey, where he spent his last bedridden
days, and I was taken there by one of his friends to be intro-
duced. The friend rapped on the old man's door, and I could
just glimpse the foot of Harney's bed as he entered, leaving
me filled with an inexpressible anticipation. At last I should
know the answers to all the questions left in doubt. Finally, after
a long conversation within, in which I could hear the muffled,
faintly irascible tones of Harney without being able to under-
stand what he said, the friend came out. The old man was too
ill to see me. Now I should never know--and never did, though
I was to stand outside the door again in other dreams.

There remained, however, the materials for describing his
political life and the movements in which he played a leading
part: and for help in unearthing these I have to thank many
people. Foremost among them is Mr. H. L. Beales of the London
School of Economics, to whose fertility in imaginative generaliza-
tion and knowledge of nineteenth-century English social history
a generation of grateful students and scholars has paid due. I
must also express my gratitude to the institution with which he
is connected, the University of London, for a grant in aid of
research.

One hesitates to select from those in the British Museum, the
Public Record Office, and the provincial libraries, whose efforts

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