In August 1914, Madame Tussaud's announced that its new attractions included waxworks of Sir Edward Carson, Ireland's leading Unionist, and John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Home Rule Party. Daniel M. Jackson rightly uses this piece of popular cultural history to emphasize the importance of Irish politics in British society in the Edwardian period. Rather than documenting how Home Rule and Ireland produced apathy and disengagement, he convincingly shows that opposition to Irish Home Rule could mobilize enormous numbers of the English, Scottish, and Welsh who supported the maintenance of the Union. The significance of Jackson's book is that it reaffirms that British history must be studied from the perspective of Britain as a whole and not from each of the four nations separately.

Jackson's chapters follow a largely chronological order, beginning at Craigavon in the north of Ireland in September 1911, where over 50,000 people gathered to oppose Home Rule. The lesson that the Unionists took from this meeting was that mass popular mobilization was the only method to oppose Home Rule because the House of Commons had a pro–Home Rule majority and because the Parliament Act of 1911 had removed the House of Lords’ powers of veto over legislation.

Jackson describes in detail the series of demonstrations and events organized by the Unionists in England, Scotland, and Wales up to the outbreak of war in 1914. Alert to local distinctiveness, he asserts that provincial Britain, and especially northern England and Scotland, was the crucial arena in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the British. The reception of Unionist leaders like Sir Edward Carson, the main protagonist in this book, is examined through local newspaper reports, and Jackson takes seriously the specific nature of reporting in each area, which reflected a combination of local and national feeling. Sectarian Liverpool and Glasgow were different and distinct, but imperially minded Bolton and Portsmouth responded similarly to Carson, whereas riotous Norwich offered a different reaction. On the whole, the Unionists were able to encourage and enlarge support for the Union. Jackson concludes that “the solidarity between the peoples of the United Kingdom, in terms of religion and demographics, remained strong … and was often evoked by Unionist stump speakers in this period” (27). Popular Protestantism, he argues, continued to outweigh class feeling and remained an important player in politics. The 6 million anti–Home Rule pamphlets, books, and leaflets produced by the Unionist Associations of Ireland found a mass readership, and 2 million people in mainland Britain signed a version of Ulster's Solemn League and Covenant.

Jackson's assertion that “For no other reason than their opposition to Home Rule, if a general election had been called in 1914 the Unionists would have won” (242) seems less convincing. Historians such as E. H. H. Green and Martin Pugh have argued that Conservatism was in crisis in this period. Opposition to Home Rule was all they had. There was no other reason to vote Unionist. They had one other policy, Tariff Reform, which was deeply unpopular. They lost elections in 1906 and 1910 on the issue and were to lose another in 1923 when the policy was once more put before voters. Without a doubt, an enormous number of Britons were opposed to Home Rule, but was it likely to be a decisive factor in voting behavior? In any case, the Liberals, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the Labour Party stood firmly together on the issue, and in 1914 the anti-Unionist progressive alliance was likely to hold. By-election results are inconclusive. As Jackson points out, twenty seats changed hands in about eighty contests, with the Unionists winning thirteen of these. But the government held forty-one seats. Ireland and Ulster did “seriously matter” in British politics in this period (243), but that did not mean that it only mattered to those who opposed Home Rule. The Liberal government did not need vocal pro–Home Rule demonstrations in the country. They had a parliamentary majority. They had the support of their core voters and of Labour. Indeed, there was no guarantee that those who attended anti-Home demonstrations would vote against the Liberals.

In the end, the question of who would have won an election in 1914 or 1915, if European war had not broken out, is unanswerable. Jackson suggests the anti–Home Rule campaign was a major feature of British society in the years between 1912 and 1914. He is undoubtedly right. His thoroughly researched and detailed account of the campaign in England, Scotland, and Wales is an immensely valuable addition to the history of Edwardian Britain. His sources are extensive, and he more than justifies his claim that “we can also view the crowd of people at political demonstrations as a text that can be analysed and treated as being as much an articulation of belief as a lengthy speech or treatise” (5).