Review by Choice Review
Pugh (University of Newcastle upon Tyne), author of the valuable The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867-1939 (CH, Nov '82), has written a very useful study of the Primrose League that, in its heyday in the 1890s, was the largest political organization in Great Britain. The author devotes three-quarters of the book to the years before 1900 and requires of his readers considerable background knowledge to fully appreciate the thesis he develops as to the significance of the League. Pugh credits the ``peculiar mixture of innovation and antiquarianism entailed in the politics of the Primrose League,'' founded in 1883, as providing ``Conservatives with a reassuring and efficacious means of transition from the narrow world of parliamentary politics and tight local elites to twentieth-century conditions.'' This well-written and thoroughly researched work is a model study. It makes a significant contribution to the debate about how the late Victorian Conservative party was able to make a timely and necessary adjustment to mass or democratic politics and become the most successful British political party of the 20th century. An important acquisition for academic libraries with an interest in 19th- and 20th-century British political history. Endnotes; sources; 50 pages of appendixes; index. Upper-division undergraduates and above.-R.S. Fraser, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
