Michael Fry is a Londoner who settled in Scotland in the early 1970s and soon made his name as an eccentric and occasionally provocative journalist. In the 1980s he changed tack and embarked on a new and probably more useful career as an independent historian.
Today most history is written by academics who are employed at universities and other institutions of tertiary education; in effect the taxpayer pays for much, if not most, of their labour. The independent scholar outside the nexus of state tertiary education has in some ways a privileged position; he or she is certainly not bogged down by the administrative chores and time-consuming departmental politicking which so many contemporary historians complain about with such vehemence.
Fry has flourished outside the confines of our official education system. His work has at times been brilliant, at times erratic, but you always sense that he is writing essentially for himself rather than some prissy peer group, and that is all to the good.
His latest book on Scottish history has the usual Fry merits of being elegantly written and the product of an incisive and original mind, but there is a distinct sense of journeying across ground that has been well travelled previously, not least by this very author.
There is also an occasionally patronising and insensitive tone that jars: Fry is an unashamedly right-wing historian and he sometimes lacks sympathy for those who suffer. Sadly, Scotland in the period he discusses was a country in which many people suffered terribly, and indeed in the immediately subsequent period many, many more were to suffer even more terribly.
I am no advocate of "bleeding heart" writing but I find it marginally distasteful when, for example, Fry writes about Scottish miners "fleecing" their employers. He warns us not to assume that the industrial revolution (well under way by 1815, when his book closes) always brought woe to the people. Well, of course it didn't, but it undoubtedly brought grievous woe to thousands upon thousands of Scots, and things got even worse later in the 19th century.
He is right to say that what he calls the new way of life was not necessarily degraded, but he does appear to underestimate the sheer hellish squalor which was becoming the lot of so many Scottish men, women and - worst of all - children.
Of course social services, of a kind, had been organised, but the relief system went back to the 16th century and the time of the Scottish Reformation. What was introduced then was far-sighted, even visionary, but it was a pastoral system, backed by the national kirk, for a society that was both agrarian and deeply religious. As Fry rightly suggests, poverty was often regarded as not a social but an individual and moral problem. That was obviously wrong by the late 18th century (if it was ever right) and it was becoming spectacularly wrong in the early 19th century.
The social cost of the industrial revolution in Scotland (and even more in England) was to be utterly devastating. Eventually the great political and intellectual response came from Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, and their work presaged a new political creed which was to change the world, if not necessarily for the better.
Indeed most of the significant responses to industrialisation were to come from south of the Border. Even Keir Hardie, the great Scot who was later to marry socialism and Christianity, did most of his important work there.
This is obviously beyond the specific scope of this book; yet it is germane, because the Scottish Enlightenment, which Fry so reveres, manifestly failed to bequeath a society that was capable intellectually, socially or politically of responding effectively to rapid and often deleterious change.
The lack of a political response was to be the most debilitating omission. It is surprising that in this book Fry does not deal at any great length with politics. Away back in the 1980s he set himself the task of putting politics back to the forefront of Scottish historiography. Yet this book is divided into five sections and the slightest is the one dealing with politics.
The political life of Scotland intrudes elsewhere in the narrative, but it should have intruded much more. An intriguing theory which Fry adumbrates rather than develops at length is that the political project to integrate Scotland into the wider UK was never wholly successful. Fry never grapples for long with the extent to which the UK was becoming genuinely united in the crucial period of its first hundred years, the very period he is discussing.
The book ends in 1815, the year of Waterloo, which he never mentions. It was a battle that was significant for its political as much as its military implications, yet Fry does not discuss this at all. The theme of Scotland's partial integration into the British state, which is so important in the light of our present situation, needs to be developed far more.
This is a big, if not a huge, book, yet somehow it seems unfinished, as if it is an astringent series of aperitifs before a rich meal that never materialises.
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