James H. Murphy promptly acknowledges a limited but important ‘first study of the politics of Dublin Corporation in terms of the political actors engaging in the issues of their day’ (p. 12). This he has admirably achieved in a relatively short text of one hundred and eighty pages that captures the essence and nature of the politics of the corporation in the Victorian period through its day-to-day challenges, preoccupations and issues amid sectoral and party divisions and personal rivalries. Originally conceived as the final instalment of a trilogy on the development of nationalist political culture within the constitutional frameworks of the crown, it emerged as a stand-alone narrative of the political discourse of the city assembly. It is limited, however, only in relation to the limitations of its subject, Dublin Corporation politics, situated within wider metropolitan and national politics, and within the social and economic history of the city. Here, it fills a chronological gap between Jacqueline Hill's study before 1840 and Joseph V. O'Brien's work after 1900, and complements with detail the more definitive histories of the city by Mary E. Daly and David Dickson.

Murphy has succeeded in distilling the considerable and dense detail of some sixty years of almost weekly meetings into a readable and accessible history. He has simplified citations for the reader who wants to learn more, with clever in-text references to the dates and newspaper reports of meetings, enhanced by an appendix with basic biographical detail on 160 individuals mentioned in the book. Murphy based his study on the extensive reporting of city council meetings in the Freeman's Journal. The written archive of municipal proceedings is minimal, limited to recording motions, votes and decisions rather than the detail of debates, but the newspaper coverage more than compensates for this.

The book follows a broadly chronological format from the 1840 reform of the corporation's structures and the end of Tory control in chapter one, through to the expansion of its electorate and its boundaries by 1900 in the final chapter, which also assesses the changes, progress and failures of the previous sixty years. Chapters 2 and 3 relate the influence and aspirations of Daniel O'Connell's attempts to capitalise on the corporation's political potential as a ‘civic parliament’, which receded with the decline of Repeal after 1843. Its narrow mercantile, urban and professional interests, out of tune with the rest of the country, saw this opportunity missed, as it failed to take any leadership position on the Famine, with only ‘infrequent references’ in official minutes, to the plight in rural Ireland (p. 49). This sectoral preoccupation marked the entire period and explains much of the slow progress in addressing the challenges that the city faced. Chapters 4 and 5 relate the turbulent years of the unpredictable John Reynolds M.P., lord mayor in 1850, the expansion of powers and the beginning of a deepening politicised inertia that lasted thirty years. The middle chapters deal with the politics of municipal administration over extended periods: markets, prisons, taxation, water, sanitation, gas and electricity.

Up to the early 1880s Dublin Corporation was largely unaffected by and detached from national politics, including the Fenian threat, but in what is described as a ‘Parnellite takeover’ in chapter eleven, became more politicised, and ‘an adjunct of wider politics’ (p. 149). The defeated motion to confer the freedom of the city on the imprisoned Parnell and Dillon in October 1881 marked the beginning of a backlash that culminated in the election of nationalist M.P.s to the council, a purge of Liberals and the end of the rotating arrangement for the mayoralty. Publicans and merchants became more prominent, and their issues and the preoccupation with national politics diverted attention from tackling poverty, housing and sanitation problems. Dublin Corporation remained Parnellite after the split but party discipline and influence declined as factionalism took over.

Throughout, Murphy reminds us of the ever-present divisions that changed from a sectarian Protestant–Catholic and political Tory–Whig cleavage to nationalist–unionist, as the old political ascendancy of the city attempted to regain then thwart control before abandoning it to the suburbs and townships. The minutiae of municipal life, the catalogue of controversies and episodes, while sometimes a little too dense, help the reader appreciate the antagonisms, machinations and realities of Corporation politics, with ‘many issues intertwined in subtle ways … as the Corporation would zigzag between matters of high national importance and very local concern’ (p. 111).