How refreshing it is to see a major academic publisher allow a historian the luxury of more than two hundred pages to probe the complexities of a single year. That it was an extremely busy, eventful, and important year, which illuminates a number of interesting themes in the historiography of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, is axiomatic to Malcolm Chase's excellent monograph. He receives poetic assistance in initiating his case from the happy accident that Shelley's famous sonnet “England in 1819” (itself the jumping-off point for a work of literary scholarship that has clearly influenced Chase's account, James Chandler's England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism [Chicago, 1998]) was originally titled “England in 1820.”

The author's argument as to why this particular year is such a ripe subject for careful anatomization is based on a number of claims. First, while important events that bookend his period—the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 and the “Caroline fever” during the second half of 1820—have spawned their own discrete historiographies, they have tended to overshadow the important period in between. How the United Kingdom lurched from one crisis to another, very different, one and then reached the comparative stability of the 1820s is one of the central themes of the book. This is not, however, an attempt to spot the potentially “revolutionary moment” that formed such a popular historians' pastime in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, Chase offers a more open-ended and nuanced account of the “persistence of stability” (214).

A second concern is to revise the Anglocentric picture of the Regency and its immediate aftermath by adopting a self-consciously four-nations approach and providing a detailed examination of the dynamic interactions of England, Scotland, Ireland, and, to a lesser extent, Wales. (Indeed, a three-nations approach is a more accurate description; the reader is informed early on that Wales “barely troubled the Government in 1820” [2].) Readers of Chase's previous monograph, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2007), which achieved something similar over a longer period, will realize that Chase is something of a dab hand at this particular balancing act. The canny decision to focus on a single year allows Chase to tease out the full complexities of these interacting histories as well as to bring in the important European context and remind readers that 1820 was a year of revolutions, albeit one not as well remembered as its younger cousins in 1830 and 1848.

The result is a richly contextualized analytical account of a pivotal moment in British and Irish history and a complex but compelling narrative. Perhaps the greatest strength of the volume lies in Chase's sheer range, which his restricted chronology allows him to develop to the full. There is assured command not only of individual national histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland and the connections among them but also of a range of disciplinary contexts. So, for example, one of the historian's old favorites—pointing to analogies between the theatrical and political worlds—is elevated above cliché in Chase's volume, because the parallel histories of the politicized London theater scene and the preoccupations of publicity-minded radicals are brought together in a sustained and effective way. While the complex shifting interactions of high and popular politics dominate, these are sensitively placed in a range of contexts throughout the book, including, for example, environmental and ecological ones (we are informed there would be “no colder January until 1838” [9], the year during which Chartism was born). Chase is equally adventurous in the wide range of sources employed, which leads to especially engaging passages on, for example, the rich print and material culture associated with the Queen Caroline agitation.

There are perhaps two slight tensions in the book worth noting. The first is that Ireland, while it is incorporated into the overall analysis, remains somewhat apart, corralled under its own subheading in each individual chapter. In one sense this is simply an accurate reflection of Ireland's very different experience during 1820: it conditioned some of the experiences of politicians and radicals in Scotland and England, but it never drove them. Nevertheless, the points at which the Irish experience is more fully integrated into the wider narrative are suggestive (for example, when Chase discusses physical links between agitators in Ireland and the west of England in chapter 4). These might have been pushed further. For example, agrarian disturbances over clearances in the Highlands of Scotland (especially in the county of Ross) bear at least a family resemblance to some of the protest in Ireland and, in their turn, influenced Lowland radicals. The second tension is that the chronological framework adopted means that some themes are a little starved of sustained individual treatment or else receive it at slightly awkward points in the narrative. Popular loyalism is an example of the first, while the European context is an example of the second. Given the obvious merits of the chronological approach pursued, however, it is very difficult to see how such slight problems could have been avoided.

The overall result is a rich tapestry that recovers the complexity of this tumultuous year and effortlessly brings together a number of themes: the shifting strategies and concerns of different groups of radicals; the fears and inconsistencies of political elites (dangerously “almost entirely reliant” [55] on the dodgy dossiers of a single informant, George Edwards, at a crucial moment); and the trials and aspirations of ordinary men and women. Chase's conclusion that stability depended on “an untidy conjuncture of policy, policing, reform, repression, chance and contingency” (214) is surely correct. As with the very best history books, however, the journey toward this conclusion matters every bit as much as the conclusion itself.