James Shaw Grant, Highland Villages

Abstract

REVIEWS tions that sections of better-off workmen explicitly and implicitly accepted the social norms set by the presbyterian churches, that they were church-goers who could afford to pay modest seat rents, and cooperated with middle-class philanthropy in the launching of social control schemes such as industrial schools for the training of juvenile waifs picked off the streets. Yet Dr MacLaren shows that the record of the home mission endeavours by the presbyterian churches in and around the city, directed at the conversion of the 'dangerous classes' of the spiritually destitute labouring poor and lumpen-proletarian elements in the congested areas, must be regarded as a dismal failure. The rankling problem of working-class non-attendance continued to worry respectable society. Although the clergy did not encounter militant infidelism among the working class in Aberdeen, at least one minister complained bitterly about the sneering contempt with which his well-meaning conversion overtures were greeted-'Some of them have not the rational knowledge of the fallen state of men. Many of them become Chartists ... or have no profession of any definite religion'. Indeed, in the 1840s many working people in Aberdeen had become committed to the Chartist alternative, awakening to a consciousness of political rights and suspicious of middle-class tutelage in political and social affairs. Dr MacLaren is rather cursory in his treatment of the Chartist challenge to clericalism and the establishment principle. Certainly his judgment is acceptable that the local Chartist leaders were, on occasion, ambivalent in their attitude towards the clergy, that they cooperated with middle-class agencies in the promotion of self-improvement schemes like the temperance crusade and, generally, that they failed to break from the confines of bourgeios ideology. But the author is either unaware of, or chooses to ignore as insignificant, the notable instances of local Chartist resistance to the Church of Scodand and the denunciation of the Establishment clergy as opponents of working-class rights, as upholders of aristocratic privilege and the corn laws, as recipients of state stipends, and protagonists of ignorance and superstition standing in the way of popular education. Further, there is the celebrated incident in 1841 when the Chartists swamped a special non-intrusion meeting, reducing the redoubtable evangelical leader Candlish to a helpless figure of white-faced fury. After the Disruption, in July 1843, the Chartists organised a public meeting attended by 2,000 people to protest against the induction of clergymen into the vacant Established church charges, insisting that the buildings could be put to better public use and resolving an end to 'ministers' salaries' which could then be set aside for the common good. Dr MacLaren acknowledges the various sectarian and small separatist churches in which working-class congregations could find an identity as members of a community, but fails even to mention the existence of the influential Chartist ...