An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison (review)

Sir Archibald Alison (1792–1867) will be an obscure or unprepossessing figure to many Victorianists: not only a High Tory, determinedly setting himself outside and against what we think of as the main currents of thought in the first half of the nineteenth century, but, worse, a Scotsman, whose intellectual and legal career marched through the glum dusk of the Scottish Enlightenment. To his credit, Michael Michie refuses to make inflated claims for Alison’s originality, or even attractiveness, forthrightly identifying a “stern, pompous, and long-winded” man with “reactionary and bigoted” views (4). Instead, Michie represents Alison (son and namesake of the better-known author of a treatise on aesthetics) as an exemplary or symptomatic figure in one of the less-understood transitions in early-nineteenth-century cultural history, between the mysterious collapse of the Scottish Enlightenment following the French Revolution and the Reform Bill and the rise of a Victorian Toryism traumatized by both events. Michie judiciously cites Alison’s case to test larger historical theses, such as the confidence with which the British state deployed coercion against labor unrest in the 1830s and 40s (90).

Alison followed a career pattern typical of the gifted and ambitious sons of the professional classes in late-Enlightenment Edinburgh. Michie cites the Whig Henry Cockburn as Alison’s contemporary and analogue, and might have made more than he does of the example of Walter Scott (who more than anyone kept Toryism safe in Edinburgh during the Whig regime of the Edinburgh Review). Alison entered the Scottish legal profession, which afforded good opportunities for upward mobility, and settled for a career appointment rather than venturing into politics, in order (he said) to be able to devote time to literary pursuits. Like Scott, Alison became a county Sheriff-Depute; unlike the relative backwater of Scott’s Selkirkshire, however, Alison’s fief was Lanarkshire, which comprised Glasgow and its outlying ports and burghs—the populous, unruly center of the Scottish industrial revolution, with its attendant political radicalism. In the 1830s and 1840s, Alison found himself “on the front lines as an agent of the British state when working-class resentment and political organization reached their peak” (68). He relished the situation, and late in life would look back fondly on his exploits riding out with dragoons to disperse crowds and arrest labor leaders. (Alison favored transportation and public hanging to keep the poor in order, as well as a scheme of working-class property ownership that anticipates certain aspects of Thatcherite policy.)

Alison’s principal literary works were an attempted refutation of Malthus, Principles of Population and their Connection with Human Happiness, begun as early as 1810 to 1812, but not published until 1840, and a ten-volume History of Europe during the period of the French Revolution (1833–42), which enjoyed an immense popular success, outdoing Thomas Carlyle to become the standard early Victorian treatment. Michie’s account of these works (he devotes a chapter to each) is rather disappointing, in that he conveys little of their quality beyond their lack of originality. Michie cites contemporary accounts of the popularity of Alison’s History as well as a couple of discussions by modern historiographers; but the reasons for the work’s extraordinary popularity never quite come into focus. What nerve did it strike? There must have been more to it than a clear and exhaustive narrative of “facts”—here one does feel the need for literary criticism.

As for Alison’s less successful study, Principles of Population, Michie observes its close resemblance to Malthus after all, except where Alison misread him, and in any case it appeared too late to make a significant contribution to the debates it addressed. Flawed and belated in itself, it remains interesting, Michie argues, for its adoption of the principles of Adam Smith for a conservative vision privileging agrarian over commercial interests in the national polity—a...