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Alexander Campbell and the Search for Socialism, by W. Hamish Fraser; pp. 173. Manchester: Holyoake Books,1996, L8.95 paper.
The Alexander Campbell who is the subject of this book is not the American founder of the Disciples of Christ who engaged Robert Owen in a famous (if inconclusive) debate on the truth of Christianity in Cincinnati in April 1829. Rather, W. Hamish Fraser has written the biography of Alexander Campbell (1796-1870) , who was one of the most steadfast and influential disciples of Robert Owen: steadfast because of his lifelong commitment to the cause as he understood it, and influential because he was one of six Owenite "Social Missionaries"-I suppose we would call him a national organizer today-who spread the gospel of Owenite socialism throughout Britain starting in 1838 and continuing well into the 1840s. Having gained his introduction to trade unionism, cooperation, and community-building in the 1820s, he was at the very center of the labor movement in Glasgow and the west of Scotland in the 1830s-years of the 1832 Reform Act agitation, worker-run labor exchanges, pioneering labor journalism, and much more, culminating in his playing a mayor role in organizing the defense efforts on behalf of the Glasgow cotton spinners, who were being savagely persecuted for waging the great strike of 1837. The 1840s were taken up with his work as Social Missionary and his decision to move, along with his wife and three children, into the intentional community founded by Bronson Alcott at Ham Common in Surrey Journalism once again provided the main focus for his energies during the last two decades of his life. With the important exception of Chartism, much of Campbell's life reads like chapter headings in a history of the British working class during these crucial decades.
It was a remarkable life, and we may be glad that Fraser has undertaken the writing of it. There are, however, problems, not all of Fraser's making. We are all of us prisoners of our sources-or the lack thereof In Campbell's case, not enough has survived for an historian, however talented, to write a biography that is all that biographical. Fraser establishes beyond a doubt Campbell's utter dedication and competence, qualities which seem...