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Chartism in Scotland, by W. Hamish Fraser; pp. 264. London: Merlin Press, 2010, £18.95, $35.00.
Just over forty years have elapsed since the publication of Alexander Wilson's The Chartist Movement in Scotland (1970). This makes particularly welcome the appearance of a new history of the movement in the north of the British Isles, which can moreover benefit from the great advances made by the historiography of Chartism in the meantime. W. Hamish Fraser intends to present Scottish Chartism as part of a wider movement, while also highlighting its distinctive features. To achieve the former, the bulk of the book is devoted to a chronological account of Chartism, from a scene-setting chapter covering the period between the 1780s and 1836 to the evolution of the movement into Liberalism. In each chapter, developments in both English and Scottish Chartism are recounted in detail, though with varying geographical emphasis, leading to the Scottish movement at times being submerged by its English counterpart. Only in the final two chapters, entitled "Leaders and Supporters" and "Being a Chartist" respectively, and in the conclusion does the reader find some general characterizations and assessment of the movement in Scotland. Moreover, it is only here that Fraser engages with ongoing debates in Chartist historiography, though but selectively and cursorily. In the introduction, too, his treatment of it is limited to what little has been written on Chartism in Scotland.
Conditions peculiar to Scotland made for a number of distinctive features of the movement in comparison with English Chartism. There was an easy alliance with temperance and Church Chartism was much stronger. The...