Social Control and Social Criticism: the nineteenth-century còmhradh

The paper discusses the emergence of the còmhradh (dialogue)as the preferred prose genre for the discussion of social issues in the course of the century. It focuses on the way in which the còmhradh was used, first by the Rev. Dr Norman MacLeod (Caraid nan Gaidheal) as a form of Establishment propaganda which aimed to diffuse social unrest during the famines of the 1830s and 1840s, then offers a contrast with the use of the còmhradh in the 1870s and 1880s when it was adopted as part of the campaigning literature of the crofters’ cause