Book review: Malcolm Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom

A different policy in Scotland from Wales, England or Ireland. This, as V. A. C. Gatrell notes in his book The Hanging Tree, has led to omissions, for example ‘Historians have given astonishingly little attention to the Scots’ (1994; 299). It has also led to the misreading of events. Several Scottish historians, and most influentially, Peter Berresford Ellis and Seumas Mac a’ Ghobhainn in The Scottish Insurrection of 1820 (1970), examine political events according to borders that Chase argues do not exist in 1820. Furthermore, addressing works such as James Chandler’s England in 1819 (1998), which takes its title from Shelley’s Peterloo sonnet of the same name, Chase contends that the ‘revolutionary potential’ of Peterloo has been ‘misapprehended’ (1). Beginning by noting that Mary Shelley actually changed the title of her husband’s poem from ‘England in 1820’ to ‘England in 1819’, Chase demonstrates that 1820 was really the year of ‘European Revolution’ as in revolutionary terms it was ‘without parallel until 1848’