The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature

THE EDINBURGH HISTORY OF S COTT I S H L I T E R AT U R E VOLUME 2 Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918) Period Editor: Susan Manning General Editor: Ian Brown Co-editors: Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature Volume Two: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918) Period editor: Susan Manning General editor: Ian Brown Co-editors: Thomas Owen Clancy Murray Pittock Assistant editor: Ksenija Horvat Editorial assistant: Ashley Hales Edinburgh University Press © in this edition, Edinburgh University Press, 2007 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 10/12pt Goudy by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-10 0 7486 2481 3 (hardback) ISBN-13 978 0 7486 2481 2 (hardback) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The publisher acknowledges subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume. Contents Preface Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock viii 1 Scotland as North Britain: The Historical Background, 1707–1918 T. C. Smout 1 2 A Nation Transformed: Scotland’s Geography, 1707–1918 Charles W. J. Withers 12 3 Standards and Differences: Languages in Scotland, 1707–1918 Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod 21 4 The International Reception and Literary Impact of Scottish Literature of the Period 1707–1918 Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard 33 5 Post-Union Scotland and the Scottish Idiom of Britishness Susan Manning 45 6 The Emergence of Privacy: Letters, Journals and Domestic Writing Karina Williamson 57 7 Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment Ian Duncan 71 8 Ramsay, Fergusson, Thomson, Davidson and Urban Poetry Sören Hammerschmidt 80 9 The Ossianic Revival, James Beattie and Primitivism Dafydd Moore 90 10 Scottish–Irish Connections, 1707–1918 Gerard Carruthers 99 11 Scottish Song and the Jacobite Cause Murray Pittock 105 12 Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair and the New Gaelic Poetry Ronald Black 110 13 Orality and Public Poetry Leith Davis and Maureen N. McLane 125 14 Varieties of Public Performance: Folk Songs, Ballads, Popular Drama and Sermons Janet Sorensen 133 vi Contents 15 Historiography, Biography and Identity Karen O’Brien and Susan Manning 143 16 Scotland’s Literature of Empire and Emigration, 1707–1918 Nigel Leask 153 17 Tobias Smollett Ian Campbell Ross 163 18 Writing Scotland: Robert Burns Carol McGuirk 169 19 Lord Byron Alan Rawes 178 20 Walter Scott Fiona Robertson 183 21 Law Books, 1707–1918 John W. Cairns 191 22 Periodicals, Encyclopaedias and Nineteenth-Century Literary Production David Finkelstein 198 23 Hogg, Galt, Scott and their Milieu Ian Duncan and Douglas Mack 211 24 The Scottish Book Trade at Home and Abroad, 1707–1918 Bill Bell 221 25 The National Drama, Joanna Baillie and the National Theatre Barbara Bell 228 26 The Literature of Industrialisation Alan Riach 236 27 The Carlyles and Victorianism Chris R. Vanden Bossche 244 28 Gaelic Literature in the Nineteenth Century Donald E. Meek 253 29 Nineteenth-Century Scottish Thought Cairns Craig 267 30 Travel Writing, 1707–1918 Catherine Jones 277 31 ‘Half a trade and, half an art’: Adult and Juvenile Fiction in the Victorian Period Colin Milton 286 32 Nineteenth-Century Scottish Poetry Laura Mandell 301 33 The Press, Newspaper Fiction and Literary Journalism, 1707–1918 Bob Harris 308 Contents vii 34 The Kailyard: Problem or Illusion? Andrew Nash 317 35 Robert Louis Stevenson Penny Fielding 324 36 J. M. Barrie R. D. S. Jack 331 37 Patrick Geddes and the Celtic Revival Murray Pittock and Isla Jack 338 38 The Collectors: John Francis Campbell and Alexander Carmichael John Shaw 347 39 Gaelic Literature and the Diaspora Michael Newton 353 40 The Literature of Religious Revival and Disruption Donald E. Meek 360 Notes on Contributors – Volume Two Index 371 376 Preface Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning and Murray Pittock The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature is conceived and produced as a single entity. In consultation with the publishers, the editors have sought to present it in three volumes. This is done for practical reasons. Each volume is in itself of some substance. To publish all three in one volume might have produced an unwieldy and inaccessible tome, not so much weighty as burdensome. The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature in three volumes then is, yet, a single work. Each editor has taken prime responsibility for an individual period: Thomas Owen Clancy for up to 1314, Murray Pittock for 1314–1707, Susan Manning for 1707–1918 and Ian Brown for 1918 onwards. Nonetheless, it is the essence of our editorial process that every chapter has been considered by all editors. In other words, the conception and shaping of this History aims to avoid false time divisions, and to promulgate the understanding that Scottish literature is a continuous and multi-channelled entity from its beginnings – presumably well before the first remnants that survive from the first millennium – till the present moment. Similarly, it has sought to include, and give adequate representation to, wide varieties of Scottish literature, including that in Gaelic, Latin, Norse, Welsh and French as well as the Scots and English most commonly in the past associated with the term ‘Scottish literature’. It also includes, as appropriate, oral and performance literature and diaspora literatures and writers. Scottish literature is best understood as an inclusive, not an exclusive, term. This is a theme, both of intellectual discourse and architectonic structure, of The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature. In preparing this History, the editors have sought at all times to marry the most up-todate and rigorous scholarship with the avoidance of a distracting reference apparatus unsuited to the needs of the general reader. Each of the following chapters is, the editors hope, marked by both a high degree of accessibility and straightforward readability, and also by reliability and the intellectual rigour that comes from commanding knowledge gracefully worn. It is in pursuit of this aim of a balance of deep scholarship and ease of access that the three-volume format has been adopted. Although of course it is entirely possible for an individual reader to choose to focus her or his study on the volume that most closely meets immediate needs or interests, each volume will be most rewarding when read in the context and light of the other two. Readers of volumes two and three are therefore recommended to bear in mind the matters raised in the Introduction which opens volume one. This contains two chapters considering the nature and study of Scottish literature, one prepared by the editors, the other by Cairns Craig. Volume one continues with the first two periods of the History, up to 1314 and 1314–1707. Volume two contains the period 1707–1918. Volume three contains the period from 1918 onwards. Each volume has its own index and list of contributors and so can be read as a coherent whole. The editors, however, make no apology for the fact that each volume contains material that relates to years beyond its explicit period or for the many Preface ix cross-references between volumes that are required for a full understanding of the material under discussion. Many necessary cross-references between volumes demonstrate the power of the continuity of Scotland’s literature. This is a strength of these volumes, and an essential premise of their underlying argument. This volume, in common with the other two, has within its period section (i.e. 1707–1918) a standard structure. Each period has introductory chapters providing a historical, a geographic and a linguistic context to the period’s literature. There is also a fourth introductory chapter in all but the first period concerned with the international reception and literary impact of Scottish literature. Such a chapter does not exist for the earliest period because during that period so much of the literature under discussion is shared between the developing Scottish literary tradition and others. From 1314 on, as more coherent and conscious traditions of Scottish literature develop, so it is more possible to discern and trace their international impact. The chapters in this History relating to this impact offer, for the first time, a coherent picture, based on objective measures of levels of translation, of the powerful impression made by Scottish literature on other cultures. This grew discernibly over the centuries, but began with some éclat with the enormously important writings of Duns Scotus and, later, the often-underrated impact of George Buchanan on wider European culture, particularly the dramaturgic development of writing for the modern European stage. In each period, following these introductory chapters, a variety of distinguished experts addresses aspects of Scottish literature in a series of chapters; some focus on the work of individual writers; more consider the varieties of interaction of writers with one another and with their cultural contexts. Taken as a whole, these volumes offer the most extensive, the most various and the most inclusive history of Scottish literature available to date. 1 Scotland as North Britain: The Historical Background, 1707–1918 T. C. Smout In the political history of Scotland, the Union of Parliaments in 1707 is of course a watershed of supreme importance. It brought to an end the evolution of a native parliamentary tradition, the independent vigour of which has only recently begun to be appreciated by scholars. Henceforth, Scotland’s MPs were to be a numerically minor part of the Westminster Parliament, performing on a distant stage and scarcely noticeable in the eighteenth century unless marshalled as a cohort by their political managers to support the government of the day. Any politician ambitious either for himself or for Scotland cultivated the arts of trimming and lobbying in London; even nineteenth-century franchise reform and twentieth-century democracy, while altering, could not entirely erase this characteristic of the political Scot. Perhaps at the time, however, the Union of the Parliaments (despite the rioting and brouhaha that preceded it) was not seen to have the same overwhelming significance that it took on in subsequent Scottish literary and political culture. For one thing, the role of eighteenth-century parliaments was quite constrained compared to those of the present day. Government was largely a matter of taxation, the regulation of foreign trade in a protectionist manner and foreign affairs: in time of war it might bring the press-gang to maritime communities. Government had little to say about social welfare, public services (including education) or the regulation of income, and nothing at all about public or private health. Agriculture, the livelihood of most people, fell almost entirely outside its purview except for some regulations on the import and export of grain and cattle. The great political issues of the age had little to do with the restoration (or otherwise) of a parliament for Scotland – the Scottish Home Rule Association was not founded until 1886 and then only as part of a ‘home rule all round’ solution to the Irish problem; it thereby gained little popular support until after 1910. What was mooted in the first forty years after 1707 was the restoration of the Stuart kings and, while the Jacobites called for the dissolution of the Union, it was not especially for love of a Scottish parliament. The first Jacobite rising, in 1689, pre-dated the Union of the Parliaments by a generation. The next attempt, in 1708, could easily have succeeded as a coup d’état had the French admiral not lost his way to the Firth of Forth: the Jacobites were so embarrassed by the fiasco, and the Hanoverians so alarmed by their narrow escape, that both sides played down its significance and history has largely overlooked it. The third rising, in 1715, might have succeeded if the Earl of Mar had not dithered so long in command of the main army, but weakness in popular support for a Catholic prince in the Presbyterian south of Scotland can be detected in the failure of anyone to join Mackintosh 2 T. C. Smout of Borlum when he marched with the second army through Fife, Lothian and Dumfriesshire to meet his nemesis at Preston. The rising of 1719 led by Spanish troops was snuffed out as it began. That of 1745 was vastly more dangerous and Charles Edward Stuart went through the Lowlands like a knife through butter. But he, too, did not succeed in recruiting a great tail of Lowland followers that would have frightened the king in London, and failed, in the end, because the French could not come to his aid with an invasion army in the south. The seventeenth century had civil wars involving the enthusiastic participation of tens of thousands driven by passion and ideologies. The eighteenth century had risings, mostly minority interests leading small armies: even Mar at the battle of Sheriffmuir led only 4,000 against Argyle’s one thousand or so government troops. Many thousands more of Mar’s troops had ‘melted away’, such was their enthusiasm to live rather than to fight. The bulk of the population came to dislike the Hanoverians but distrusted the Jacobites, so they tried to keep their distance until the winner was known. Unless, that is (in the case of the Highlanders), they were forced to act decisively on one side or the other by their chiefs: in 1745, twenty-two clans fought on the rebel side, and ten on the government side. After Culloden, Jacobitism was dead as a political cause, but retained a powerful cultural afterlife. Even before, anonymous pamphleteers had been asking if it mattered very much if the king was called Jamie or Geordie, but that was not an opinion anyone would have been wise to put his or her name to. In other less overtly political aspects of Scottish life, the impact of 1707 altered the context of action and behaviour but did not immediately initiate new trends. This was partly because of its subtle character. Despite being described by contemporaries as an ‘incorporating union’, it was only ever acceptable to Scots because it guaranteed independence for the Scottish Church (Presbyterian since 1690) and for the Scottish legal system. The career patterns of Scottish professional classes were not interrupted, though within a few years the Kirk found its ‘liberties’ invaded by having to see toleration extended to other loyal Protestants and the right of patronage (of selecting the minister) returned to landowners; both were resented ‘anglicisations’ imposed by Westminster. Similarly the independence of the judiciary was compromised by referrals in civil cases being allowed to the House of Lords in London, and changed more basically in 1747 when the heritable right of landowners to try their tenants in baron courts was abolished. But such modifications in no way altered the character, distinctiveness or centrality of Kirk and law in Scottish life, or affected their potential as beacons and rallying points for the Scottish identity. By extension, since they were essentially run by Kirk and law, the institutions of welfare and education, central to everyone’s daily life, were for decades barely touched by Union. The poor law, unlike the rate-supported system in England, normally depended on haphazard church collection and distribution of very small sums by the elders, so most of the sick, old and orphaned were perforce reliant on the pity of kin and neighbours, which made for a certain kind of thrift and mutuality in society. Conversely, the parish schools, a matter of charity in England, were supported in Scotland by a rate on the landowners (or heritors): this did not of itself create an adequate network of schools or a fine system of elementary education, but it gave the Scots a leg-up in a world where social betterment depended on certain standards of literacy. The universities of Glasgow, St Andrews, Edinburgh and Aberdeen were similarly beyond the reach of anglicising interference and developed in remarkable and indigenous ways through the eighteenth century. What had been in 1700 no more than provincial seminaries for boys, inadequate for the fullest teaching of medicine or law (for which Scotsmen often travelled to the Netherlands and elsewhere) in most cases The Historical Background, 1707–1918 3 ended the century as institutions for higher learning famous across Europe and America, and particularly noted for medicine, science and philosophy. The place of the Union in economic history is more complex. When the Treaty was entered into, many hoped for what Daniel Defoe had promised: immediate and substantial economic benefit from complete freedom of trade with England and its colonies. In fact, the serious economic crisis that had begun in Restoration Scotland and deepened in the decade before 1707, and which was characterised by stagnant Scottish living standards while those of England rose, continued (in varying degrees of severity) for another four decades afterwards. It was neither fundamentally relieved nor fundamentally aggravated by the fact of Union. In terms of commerce, what ultimately pushed Scotland forward were the exports of cattle and linen to England, and the import and re-export of tobacco from America, each of which had roots in the change and enterprise of Scots in the late seventeenth century, but were enabled by free trade with England and its Empire. On the other hand, Union was insufficient in itself to ensure instant success. Issues of quality and price in exports took time and native ingenuity to solve, and the same were needed to break the grip of London and Whitehaven merchants on the existing tobacco trade. On the other hand, the aftermath of Union was accompanied by an increase in tax burdens and a change in customs dues at the ports, which occasioned serious sporadic rioting. Fortunately the price of grain generally remained low in the first half of the eighteenth century, and there was no return to the starving 1690s, though it was a close-run thing in 1740. From the perspective of the London press, xenophobic then as now, the biggest effect of the Union was to unleash upon England a horde of uncouth and unwelcome immigrants. The Scots had an ancient culture of migration, mainly in the seventeenth century directed towards Europe, and from the later eighteenth century also directed to America; but, after 1707, the Scots were increasingly involved with opportunities in England and the British Empire. Although the stock character of the cartoons was the itchy, smelly, Highland ‘Sauny’, it was not especially a movement of the Gaelic-speaking or of the poor, but rather of the culturally and economically ambitious. The younger sons of the gentry sought offices in the military and in the service of the East India Company and their numbers and success did much to reconcile even old Jacobite families to the Act of Union and the new dynasty. And intellectuals of all kinds sensed the attraction of the most vibrant city in Europe. The Union truly bore fruit economically in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Glasgow challenged London as the main tobacco port, the linen industry soared and laid the foundations for the cotton manufacture of the Industrial Revolution and the cattle trade brought widening profit. Glasgow and Edinburgh grew greatly in size and prosperity; this in turn brought prosperity to the agriculture of the Lowlands. Farming mattered more than any other economic activity. Despite the success of the merchants and the founding of a few spectacular industrial plants – the vitriol works at Prestonpans in 1749, the iron works at Carron ten years later, and big cotton works at New Lanark, Deanston, Stanley and elsewhere in the 1780s – the eighteenth century was essentially an age of agrarian capitalism. Agriculture was seen as the one true source of a nation’s wealth. Improvement became an ideology of patriotic duty for enlightened lairds supported by agricultural societies and peer pressure. If the consequences were sometimes disastrous for small tenants swept aside by enclosure of fields and consolidation of holdings, and for cotters made redundant by new ploughs that needed fewer ploughmen, the general benefit was held by spokesmen such as Henry Home, Lord Kames, to far outweigh the cost to unhappy individuals ground down by the process. 4 T. C. Smout Similarly, as country life was seen to be virtuous and town life to be corrupting, scores of new model villages were built by the lairds to retain employment (and rent) on their estates in the face of change: both the local dispossessed and the hard-working incomer were invited to pursue industries and crafts within them. Few succeeded to the degree that their promoters intended, though some thrived for a time on the linen trade or on fishing. Overall, the period from 1740 to 1790 was indeed one of rising standards of living in farm, village and town alike. The material success of Scotland was a matter of pride to intellectuals like David Hume, Adam Smith and Lord Kames, and of profit to great magnates and small lairds alike. It was a world celebrated in Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9), that, with the editor’s manic enthusiasm and organisation, brought together the clergy to describe the present state and future potential of every parish in the land. It was a feat of mass authorship without parallel in the history of Europe. What the implications of Union were for cultural history is extraordinarily difficult to understand and disentangle. The ideology of Improvement itself is a case in point. Scottish topographical writing before the mid-eighteenth century normally described the natural resources of the country or district involved as if they were fixed, something given by the wise hand of God, pleasant or difficult as may be but not readily capable of change. Then they increasingly came to be described in terms of their potential, and with the Statistical Account, almost every parish description includes observations of what might be bettered. The term ‘Improvement’, like the term ‘industry’, had both a moral and an economic meaning and was linked with a historiographic theory of social progress from barbarism to civility. A population might be morally improved by making it sober and industrious: the land might be economically improved by enclosing and liming the fields, exploring for minerals or tapping the power of its streams for an industrial mill. The moral and the economic were inseparable: one would lead to the other, but the absence of one could obstruct the other. The clergy of the established Presbyterian Church and the landowners were natural allies in their particular fields, but it was appropriate also for the clergy to take a lead in setting an economic example by enclosing their glebes, and for the landowner to punish the drunken or the lazy by salutary eviction when the land was being reallocated. It was a socially conservative and economically radical agenda. This ideology belongs especially to the period 1750–1820, the centrepiece of agrarian change that encompassed an agricultural revolution over most of the Lowlands and the start of clearance in the Highlands. But its origins can be traced back to debates in the last quarter of the seventeenth century about why Scotland was poorer than England or the Netherlands (for example in Privy Council in 1681), to writers like Sir Robert Sibbald in Fife writing before the Union about how the country might be improved, and to the first authors of agricultural advice, one of the most famous of whom, Lord Belhaven, also became a ferocious opponent of Union. After 1707 the debate grew ever more urgent, the references to English superiority more frequent and English example more cited. Some of the earliest Improvers were MPs at Westminster and, like Cockburn of Ormiston, were impressed and inspired by their encounters with the great farming grandees of Norfolk among their political friends. Others, however, were Jacobites like Mackintosh of Borlum, who as a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle wrote a tract about agricultural improvement equally excoriating the sloth of the peasants and the wasteful luxury of a gentry corrupted by tea-drinking and other effete English manners. The Jacobites in no sense represented some otherworldly, non-capitalist ethic opposed to the modernism of the Hanoverian party. Improvement ignited enthusiasm on both sides of the political divide. Criticism of it was extremely muted before the 1770s, when a few writers, including Burns, began to ask (in the face of mounting emigration of The Historical Background, 1707–1918 5 poor displaced people) for whose benefit all this change was taking place. But the most improved and economically dynamic country in Europe was England, and it was obvious that its example would not be lost on Scotland. The Union made its example more urgent and compelling, but the response to it was indigenous and not imported. Similar points can be made about the Scottish Enlightenment, whether considered purely as a philosophical movement, the crowning achievements of which were the works of Hume, Smith and Reid, of Kames, Robertson, Millar and Ferguson, or as a wider cultural movement also including scientists like Cullen and Black, physicians like the Munroes, inventors like Watt, architects like Adam, artists like Ramsay and Raeburn, poets like Burns. It was an astonishing cultural effervescence that gave eighteenth-century Scotland a resounding reputation throughout Europe. Was it a fruit of Union? Clearly the English influence was very profound. The thinking of Newton and Locke was the starting point of Enlightenment philosophical enquiry, and Addison, Steele and Shaftesbury were mentors to the polite and intellectual clubs of Edinburgh in the decades after 1707. Yet the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment can be clearly traced back to changes in the curricula of the Scottish universities after around 1680, and to Restoration savants like Robert Sibbald, Archibald Pitcairne and the great lawyer Lord Stair. These were men of European learning: the lawyers and the physicians had often been taught at Leiden and Utrecht as well as in Scotland, and were at home with scholarship in Latin or French as well as in English. In a later generation, Hume, a close friend of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, declared himself more comfortable in Paris than in London, and Smith’s biggest acknowledged debt was to the French physiocrats. The starting point of the French Enlightenment was itself in many respects English: in Newton’s search for underlying scientific principles, in Locke’s rationalism and in Shaftesbury’s deism. English thought did not need Union to make it potent. On the other hand, the Republic of Letters needed freedom from censorship to allow it to flourish, and an incidental effect of Union had been to weaken the grip of the Church and of church courts. Orthodoxy could no longer be compelled or atheists suffer death as had been the case before. It was important that Scotland could plug into an English tradition of intellectual freedom. The study of history was an essential part of the Enlightenment project. The philosophers subscribed to a view that humanity advanced through a series of stages from hunting to commerce, which they equated with progress from barbarity to civility. Improvement, with all its implications for a conservative social order, was the modern end of this process; for Hume it was self-evident that an age which gave rise to skilled ships’ carpenters and weavers would also excel in science and philosophy. Hume and Robertson, the two most influential of the Enlightenment historians, viewed history, Scottish history in particular, as a moral and political lesson. For them, most of what had happened in Scotland before their own century was nasty and barbarous, the fruit of tyranny, ignorance and religious superstition, from which the country had been rescued by the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and by the Incorporating Union of 1707. They therefore wrote off Scottish history as a serious object of study, an opinion that appears to have been widely shared in Scottish universities throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. Enlightenment history in this mould was a grand affair of conjecture and general trends, certainly conscious of interlocking aspects of intellectual, cultural, political, economic and social history, but classical in sweep and seldom actually tied down to documentary sources. More rigorous was the history of the Jacobite priest Father Thomas Innes, which drew on the modern French source criticism of Jean Mabillon, who exploded the mythological history of older writers like George Buchanan and set a new standard for 6 T. C. Smout basing history upon verifiable fact. Later in the eighteenth century, David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, writing from his crammed library at Newhailes (called by Dr Johnson the most learned room in Europe) began to link medieval Scottish history to charter, legislation and chronicle, a procedure that would inspire Sir Walter Scott with an overwhelming conviction of the importance of collecting and publishing documents. One can understand that Hume and Hailes were not friends. The strength of the former’s grand philosophical historical tradition made Scottish intellectuals vulnerable to the impositions of James Macpherson, whose Fragments of Ancient Poetry claimed to be based on Gaelic manuscripts of the poems of Ossian that he never could produce, but which seemed to exemplify the conjectured primitive state of society and to combine antiquarian recovery with evidence for philosophical theories. To Hugh Blair and his Edinburgh friends who supported him, the fact that the Highlands ought to have been as Ossian described was sufficient evidence that they were, and a romantic bandwagon began to roll that ultimately reached European proportions. Those who subscribed to the ideologies of Improvement and Enlightenment were of course an elite. They lived in country houses of increasing elegance, in manses sometimes of a greater cubic capacity than the rural kirks, and in towns – especially Edinburgh, but also Glasgow and Aberdeen – of fine modern architecture and a network of clubs where they met to discuss economic or intellectual progress (and sometimes matters less edifying). They were literate, well educated, wrote and read in English and emphatically regarded themselves as British as well as Scottish. Even Jacobites, who often emphasised their Scottishness more than their Hanoverian opponents, aimed to place a Stuart on the throne in London. There was, however, another Scotland, not elite, less literate, not inclined to politeness in the eighteenth-century sense of polish, and, if religiously enthused, it was more likely to attend a kirk of evangelical or seceder tendency than one of the dominant ‘moderate’ faction. It was also less inclined to think of itself as British until the wars at the end of the eighteenth century made service in the British army rewarding and acceptable. If Highland, this Scotland spoke Gaelic: the Wordsworths in 1803 encountered Gaelic speakers immediately as they crossed the Highland Line at Luss on Loch Lomondside. Though this Scotland did not always read very much, it still consumed the great Gaelic poems of the oral tradition. In the Lowlands, this Scotland spoke and read Scots. There has been debate about the true extent of literacy in eighteenth-century Scotland, which has shown that the Scottish ability to write (as measured by the ability to form a signature) was not very exceptional in northern Europe. On the other hand, a universal ability to read, at least in the rural Lowlands, was commented upon by all observers from Daniel Defoe onwards, and was true for women as well as for men. The eighteenth century was the age of the ballad and the chapbook, sold from house to house among the wares of a pedlar along with ribbons, needles and suchlike little necessities and luxuries. The Scots of the chapbooks was an ideal language for reading aloud in a cottage where people could read but not always write, the phonetic spelling of words like ‘plooman’ making sense where ‘ploughman’ would have been nonsense. The extraordinary success of the poems of Burns among working people of both sexes was one illustration of the consumption of vernacular literature, the repeated editions of the medieval epics of Wallace and Bruce another: all demonstrated how a sense of Scottishness was alive, and a sense of Britishness perhaps still muted. As the eighteenth century slipped into the nineteenth, Scotland began to change in many profound ways. Politically, the challenge of the radicals of the 1790s, inspired by the French The Historical Background, 1707–1918 7 and American revolutions, culminated in 1796 in the trial and transportation of Thomas Muir. The Scottish establishment was stirred though not immediately shaken, but these events set in train a chain that led, successively, to the so-called Radical War of 1820 (an abortive rising of a few hundred weavers in the west of Scotland), to the Great Reform Bill of 1832, to Chartism, to further Reform Bills in 1868 and 1884–5 and to the beginnings of the rise of organised labour in Parliament before the First World War. What it did not bring was democracy: no women had the vote as a result of any of these Bills, and as late as 1911 some 40 per cent of adult males, mainly the poor, were left out of the voter registration rolls. Nevertheless, in 1832 the ancien régime fell. No individual ever again would wield the political power of those eighteenth-century managers, the third Duke of Argyle or Henry Dundas, whose control of Scottish parliamentary seats at the bidding of the government made them satraps in the land. Yet electoral corruption continued for decades and the arts of political management hardly went out of fashion. Victorian Scotland was a Whig and Liberal country at least as resoundingly as late twentieth-century Scotland was a Labour one: the Tories hung on in some rural areas, and had an injection of urban energy when the Liberals split over Ireland in the 1880s, spawning the Unionists, who eventually became part of the Conservative cause. But the political folk heroes of late Victorian Glasgow were the Grand Old Man, Mr Gladstone, and the new labour MP, Keir Hardie, alike at least in their enmity towards the landed classes and their belief in moral and political progress, one step at a time. The old tenets of the Improvers in the nineteenth century were transmogrified into a personal search for respectability to which the political working classes aspired as much as the middle classes, and for national economic prosperity not so much through agriculture as through free trade and industry. Economically, the nineteenth century was dominated by the Industrial Revolution, which began to transform the country from the closing decade of the eighteenth century as cotton mills multiplied not only in the countryside but also in the towns. The age of steam truly began when coal fuel replaced water-power in the new urban factories, though in the Border mills water stayed dominant until almost the end of the century. Cotton remained the leading sector in the west of Scotland until the 1830s, when the hot-blast process kick-started the Lanarkshire iron and coal industry: textiles and mining together sucked in Irish immigration just as other strains and opportunities in town and country were drawing out Scottish emigrants to the boundless opportunities of the USA and the Empire in unparalleled numbers. Ship-building on the Clyde really took off in the second half of the nineteenth century, and with its related trades was astonishingly successful: the Glasgow area in 1911 made one-third of the ships, one-half of marine engine horsepower, one-third of railway locomotives and rolling stock, one-fifth of the steel and most of the sewing machines in the United Kingdom. It made one-fifth of all the ships launched in the world on the eve of the First World War. Jute was the staple of Dundee, textiles and granite of Aberdeen, sugar machinery of Greenock, printing, banking and legal services of Edinburgh. Towns suddenly burgeoned. The proportion of people living in towns of 10,000 or more, under 10 per cent in 1750, was nearly a third one hundred years later, a rate of urbanisation unparalleled in Europe and accompanied by a spawning of slums that seemed to many similarly unparalleled. To contemporaries, the growth of the city was becoming an uncontrollable juggernaut, and it did not stop in mid-century. Glasgow, for example, ‘the Second City of the Empire’, grew from 275,000 to 784,000 between 1841 and 1911, while Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen all more than doubled over the same period. Urban government struggled to keep pace and much tenement housing remained dense and squalid 8 T. C. Smout in the inner cities. The grosser forms of pollution with their concomitant outbreaks of cholera, typhus and typhoid, however, gradually became things of the past, and were memories by the end of the century, although the infant mortality rate singularly failed to decline in the same way. The great railway termini were a new feature of urban architecture: most of the network was completed between 1840 and the end of the 1860s, but its lynchpin, the mighty Forth Rail Bridge, was not put in place until 1890. As the urban sector grew, the rural sector contracted in relative importance and, ultimately, also in absolute population. The notorious Highland Clearances, the replacement of crofters by sheep farms, are part of this story and remain both historically and culturally contentious, though there were few clearances after about 1870 and more people still lived in the Highland counties in 1900 than in 1800. Furthermore, the Highlanders from 1886 gained special protection from the law to defend them from eviction or unwarranted rises in rent, provisions quite denied to Lowland tenants in a similar position, many of whom also emigrated in large numbers. But it was the Gaels alone, with their fervently expressed love of the land and their burning resentment of landed abuse of power, who caught the public imagination as victims. Who gained and who lost in industrialisation? It is easy to see the principal gainers, in the middle-class villas of Morningside and Helensburgh, the elegant tenements of Kelvinside and Aberdeen, the good housing at Broughty Ferry and Perth Road, Dundee, all stepped out from the centres. It is easy to see the principal losers, in the slum dwellers and on the Highland emigrant ships. It is less easy to see what industrialisation meant to the bulk of the population in between. There is not much to suggest that the general improvement in the standard of living evident before 1790 continued in the next halfcentury, and some groups, like the handloom weavers, found themselves first pulled up to prosperity and then thrust down into the most dismal poverty. Experience was very uneven. Some skilled or semi-skilled workers, including Lothian ploughmen, most coal hewers, millwrights and other engineers, maintained improvements. The least skilled probably did not. Later in the century, especially after 1870, there was a more general improvement in the common lot: real wages for men probably doubled in the second half of the nineteenth century, though a great deal of employment was in badly paid juvenile and female labour, where improvement was much less marked. Gender inequality was written into the system of rewards for the workforce: whether it was agricultural day labourers in the 1840s or schoolteachers in 1890s, a male received twice or more the remuneration of a female for a comparable job. Nor, in terms of their own health record or in the liability to suffer the agony of infant mortality, is it clear that the lot of Scots women improved at all in the second half of the nineteenth century when it was certainly improving for men. The conspicuous new outlets for pleasure, the flashy pubs and the football stadia, were only for men, though the music hall and the theatre catered for a more mixed audience. Religion in Scottish life enjoyed a revival in the nineteenth century at several levels. While church-building did not keep pace with population rise in the great towns early in the nineteenth century, it did after the Disruption of 1843 when the Church of Scotland split between the old Kirk and the new Free Church over the question of patronage and the appropriate role of the state in church affairs. Thereafter, the various competing Presbyterian Churches embarked on a spree of church-building and missionary activity, often with a temperance message, accompanied by a revived and increasingly accepted and self-confident Catholic Church trying to minister to the Irish immigrant, and Episcopalians, a small minority occupying a position between. Altogether the effect was to arrest any previous decline in church-going, and to particularly attract skilled working-class men and their wives back to The Historical Background, 1707–1918 9 the Presbyterian pews. Right to the end of the century church attendance was relatively high in Scotland among the middle class and the working class, especially among women, and visitors noted one of its consequences, the sternness of Sabbath observance in town and country, with a certain amount of awe. Just as religion regained its social place, so it reasserted its intellectual place. Divines had never ceased to be central to Scottish life, but whereas men like William Robertson and Hugh Blair in the eighteenth century had been accommodating to the Enlightenment ideals of free enquiry and knowledge-centred rather than scripture-centred human and natural science, Thomas Chalmers and his nineteenth-century evangelical colleagues were overtly concerned about rationalism overstepping the bounds set by faith. It would be wrong to suggest that they sought to reimpose censorship, but in the great mid-century controversies about geology and evolution the Scottish clergy made it socially unacceptable to be too outspoken. Thomas Carlyle, for example, found Edinburgh provincial, too constraining for his talents, full of ‘intellectual smoke’, or, in his wife Jane’s words, a ‘poor, proud, formal, “highly respectable” city’ (Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage, 2001). Robert Chambers published anonymously his remarkable book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which set the agenda for the cosmological debate before Darwin and further defended himself by larding it with anodyne comments about the Wisdom of the Creator, to conceal his basic scepticism. He did not escape intense personal attack, though his book was also phenomenally successful. Yet there was still plenty of room in nineteenth-century Scotland for intellectual achievement, at least of the kind the Church had no interest in smothering. Thus Sir Walter Scott met no obstacle in his gargantuan achievements as a novelist and scarcely less notable ones as a historian. He is sometimes now accused of making the Scottish past blandly palatable (after its Enlightenment rubbishing), by bathing it in a soothing romantic haze. Yet he also had a remarkable and unprecedented passion for accurate social history, of which he might fairly be regarded the father, brilliantly pioneering in his attempts to recapture the texture and experience of ordinary daily lives. He also did more to stimulate the publication of Scottish historical documents (through historical clubs) than anyone before or since. Other nineteenth-century Scottish historians included Thomas McCrie, whose biographies of Knox and Melville saved them from the infinite condescension of the Enlightenment and inspired a generation of evangelical clergy to recover the stern Church of their forefathers. This was acceptable, but Patrick Fraser Tytler’s History of Scotland (1828–43), by suggesting that Mary Queen of Scots might have been more sinned against than sinning, caused Presbyterian uproar. The antiquarian John Pinkerton (who vociferously denied the authenticity of The Poems of Ossian) gave the Scottish past a racist twist by suggesting the Scots were more Teutonic than Celtic, and was part of popular discourse in the nineteenth century, but W. F. Skene’s Celtic Scotland (1876–80) was the first scholarly attempt to investigate Highland history in its own right. It unwittingly helped to promote the so-called ‘Celtic Revival’ at the end of the century. In natural science, the titanic figure of James Clerk-Maxwell proved to be the most important British physicist since Newton with his work on electromagnetism and the kinetic theory of gases. In social science, the titan was Patrick Geddes, founder of modern town planning and urban environmentalism. In arts, it was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, centre of a cluster of Glasgow geniuses that included his wife Margaret Macdonald and her sister Frances. This was the city of another great architect, Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, and of the circle of artists known at the end of the century as the ‘Glasgow Boys’. There is 10 T. C. Smout no sense that Victorian Scotland was starved of genius, but if they called biblical Christianity into question they did not find the same congenial company as Hume and Smith had done. In 1881, William Robertson Smith was expelled from the chair of the Free Church College in Aberdeen for suggesting that the Pentateuch might be been written by different hands, and withdrew to Cambridge University, where he became one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology. Presbyterian heresy trials continued until as late as 1902, disciplining academic clerics who questioned the literal truth of the Bible or demonstrated the debt of the Old Testament to Babylonian myth and Jewish fancy. What reception could intellectuals and literary figures hope for, beyond the clergy? The early nineteenth century was the age of the reviews, beginning with Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review in 1802: it was Whig, and offended the evangelical clergy, who declared it had crucified Christ anew, but it was still an extraordinary national and international success. Seven years later it was followed by the Tory Quarterly Review (founded partly on the instigation of Scott and his preferred outlet) and accompanied by equivalent newspapers, The Scotsman and Blackwood’s Magazine. By the 1830s and 1840s publication of ‘useful knowledge’ became big business, and Chambers Journal (another venture of the author of Vestiges), started in 1832, reached a middle-class readership of nearly 90,000 a decade later. Readership widened again after the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855 reduced the price to a penny or so, and the number of newspapers in Scotland grew from about eighty in 1845 to three times as many by 1910, mostly local papers. By 1871, almost 90 per cent of men and 80 per cent of women marrying in the previous decade had been able to sign their names, though in the Highlands these percentages were only 65 per cent and 49 per cent respectively. Reading ability would have been greater. So as literacy increased, the newsprint fell on fertile ground. The population read in both English and Scots, though many fewer in Gaelic. Discovery of the vigour of the Scots language in the Victorian local press has been one of the surprises of modern scholarship. The subjects discussed were by no means confined to the couthie and the comic, or to sub-Burns verse, but encompassed many serious topics, especially of a local nature. And serious books in English now began to count their sales in tens of thousands: Chambers’s Vestiges sold 40,000 over fourteen editions between 1844 and 1890, and the works of the geologist and evangelical journalist Hugh Miller, not least Foot-prints of the Creator (1849), which was intended as a riposte to Vestiges, sold at least as well. Meanwhile, this vigorous and multi-faceted Scotland continued to emphasise its Scottishness in a number of other ways. The growing power of the British Parliament at Westminster, interfering for the first time in the early Victorian period in matters of public health and poor law reform, and then in land law and industrial relations, called forth a strong reaction, a demand for greater sensitivity to Scottish peculiarities expressed in 1853 by the foundation of an Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights. This issued in 1885 not in a Scottish Parliament but in a Scottish Office, based not in Edinburgh but at Dover House in London. It acted like a Home Office but controlled the various agencies that were situated in Scotland such as those dealing with the poor law, education and lunacy. The country was still lightly governed: as late as 1911, there were only 944 civil servants or government officials in Scotland including the customs and excise service. Increasing sensitivities about the invasion of Scottish rights and peculiarities, however, went hand in hand with an enthusiastic assertion of Britishness, and a feeling that Scotland had embarked on the Union with England on equal terms, entering a partnership and not a subservient relationship, what Graham Morton has called ‘Unionist Nationalism’. Even in the midst of an age of European nationalism, patriotic pride in Empire and in the large part The Historical Background, 1707–1918 11 that the Scots played in it, both as administrators and soldiers, fostered a feeling of Britishness. Indeed, it was an expression of nationalism to be simultaneously fervently Scottish and British. When the Wallace Monument was constructed outside Stirling, European nationalists such as Kossuth, Mazzini, Garibaldi and Louis Blanc were invited to contribute their own ‘appropriate patriotic sentiments’ that were to be placed in ‘a large and beautiful frame’ made of wood from the Wallace Oak at Elderslie. The meaning of the tower to Victorian Scots was that they had secured their own liberation long ago, by avoiding conquest in the Middle Ages, humbling kings, fighting for religious liberty and finally making a profitable union on equal terms with their former enemy, now their partner and friend. The meaning of Union and of Scottishness took another turn in the tragic, final years of our period. In the First World War, more than half a million Scots enlisted in defence of Britain and the Empire, and more than a quarter of those died. Proportionately the loss of life in Scotland was far greater than that in the other parts of the United Kingdom. Memorial after memorial, from the great one in Edinburgh Castle to the small monuments crowded with names in villages and glens, remind us still of the scale of the sacrifice. At home, it was the shipyards and munitions factories of Glasgow that provided the sinews of war, and in the discontent of the workers and the rent strikes of their wives demonstrated a latent power of the people not yet realised. It would take the final arrival of democracy after the war, interwar economic depression, various crises after the Second World War, collapse of that Empire in which so much Scottish energy and blood had been invested and finally the discovery of oil to give Scottish nationalism a different meaning. And it would take a remarkable economic revival and devolution to give the Union a different face and to make it still apparently acceptable to most Scots in the twenty-first century. But that is another story. Further reading Devine, T. M. (1999), The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000, London: Penguin. Kidd, Colin (1993), Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Secord, James A. (2000), Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smout, T. C. (1986), A Century of the Scottish People, 1830–1950, London: HarperCollins. Smout, T. C. (ed.) (2005), Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1603–1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press for The British Academy. Whatley, Christopher (2000), Scottish Society, 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, towards Industrialisation, Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2 A Nation Transformed: Scotland’s Geography, 1707–1918 Charles W. J. Withers Neither 1707 and the Union of Parliaments nor 1918 and the end of the Great War mark significant moments in Scotland’s geography. The roots of that agrarian transformation that would so alter the rural landscape from the later eighteenth century lie in the halfcentury before 1707. The effects of agrarian change, including the capitalisation of farming and rural-to-urban population redistribution, would not be everywhere the same even by 1918. True, almost every town and village in Scotland has its monument to the dead of the Great War. Yet, and not forgetting the personal geographies that lie behind these lists of names, 1918 witnessed no major change to the face of the land. Even so, Scotland’s geography was dramatically altered in this period, the result, usually, of slow and episodic rather than revolutionary change. In 1707, most Scots lived in the countryside. By 1901, most Scots were urban residents, principally in the central Lowlands, and earned their living from industrial manufacture or in associated services. Many had quit Scotland altogether. They and their descendants may have thought of Scotland, even a particular croft or wynd, as ‘home’. Letters – from frontier cabins in upper Canada, Australian shores or Flanders’ trenches – nurtured migrants’ Scottishness from a distance. For Scots abroad at any time, Scotland’s geography is encountered through acts of remembrance: for residents between 1707 and 1918, it was a changing daily experience. Scotland’s geography in this period was transformed through the interrelated effects of changes in agriculture and rural society, urban and industrial development and population growth and displacement. One of the essential features of such national transformation was its regional variation, whose resultant patterns and formative processes are revealed through source materials – such as estate maps and the Census – not available for Scotland in earlier centuries. It is also possible to think of Scotland’s geography in other ways. The eighteenthcentury Enlightenment may be considered as not just a historical phenomenon but also a geographical one, rooted in Scotland’s improving soil and diverse urban life. In mapping, in written surveys, most notably in the 1791–9 ‘Old’ Statistical Account of Scotland, in the nineteenth-century New Statistical Account (1831–45), and through formal scientific enquiry, Scots geographically recorded themselves. There is, even, a geography of geography in that, from 1708 and for years afterwards, lecture classes in geography were held in Scotland’s cities and towns as the urban public sphere used geography as a vehicle for the promotion of civic utility. In the nineteenth century, documents rooted in the politics of social intervention and amelioration record the state of Scotland’s urban poor and, for the Highlands, the condition of the crofting populations. In providing insight into the geographies of people’s lives, they also represent a particular form of investigative social literature. Scotland’s Geography, 1707–1918 13 There is generally in this period, furthermore, a geography of or, more properly, a geography behind Scottish literature as the facts of change in Scotland’s countryside and towns were used as the settings for works of literature. The period also sees the creation of enduring imaginative geographies of Scotland – for Highland Scotland in particular with its geographies of tartanry, Balmorality and myth-representation. Changes in the geography of agriculture and rural society in Lowland Scotland were apparent from the mid-eighteenth century in several ways. One was the movement to enclose fields with stone dykes or hedges. Another was the move to extinguish the run-rig system. Others included the adoption of newer methods of land management, including fertilisation, longer written leases, the concentration of land ownership in fewer hands, and that rhetoric of ‘Improvement’ which informed both the landowners’ views of their own mission and the state’s judgement concerning the agrarian economy. Labour services hitherto largely paid for in kind increasingly demanded cash. It would be a mistake, however, to consider such processes as everywhere and at once the same. The salience of terms like ‘Agricultural Revolution’ depends upon where one stood, geographically and socially, in Scotland’s changing farming world. The rate of agricultural enclosure in Lowland Scotland, for instance, had an initial peak in the 1760s, was followed by a decline, reached its highest point around 1810 and had generally high levels through the nineteenth century. The gradual capitalisation of farming – of which enclosure was one expression – was likewise uneven in geography and chronology. Yet, over time, the growing penetration of Scottish farming by the demands of profit and the market had an important effect upon Lowland rural society. This was not so much to remove people from the land as to alter their relationship to it and to others. The result, locally, was that sub-tenants and cotters were pushed on to smaller holdings on marginal lands and, generally, that farm labouring systems with new social hierarchies came into existence in different parts of the country. In the eastern Lowlands, the expansion of cereal cultivation, advances in rotation, fertilisation and technology meant that ploughing became a more specialised task, the ‘plooman’ becoming the aristocrat of the labour force. Even there, advances in agriculture depended as much upon personality as upon the philosophies of profit. James Hutton, the geologist and Berwickshire farmer, took his ploughman to Norfolk to learn first hand from his peers in that advanced agricultural region: the attempt failed as neither ploughman could understand the other. Both practice and language were local. In the south-east Lowlands generally, ploughing was undertaken by a hind, who would reside on the farm in a rented cottage with a small holding with his wife, and, usually, a bondager (a female labourer on the farm hired and paid by the hind). Outside the south-east, most hinds had a place in either the ‘kitchen and chaumer’ system or the bothy system. In the first, all farm labourers ate in the farmhouse kitchen, the male workers sleeping in the ‘chaumer’. In the bothy system, which was chiefly confined to the central and Lowland counties of Fife, Perth, Forfar and in Buchan, the ploughman and other farm workers ate and slept in separate quarters known as bothies. Bothy ballads provide rich insight into the changing geographies of farm life: bargaining at feeing fairs, the rigours and companionship of labour, the impact of mechanisation. Overall, the effect in the Lowlands was regional specialisation in rural social structure and in farming type. In the south-east and west, married labour was normal. Prompted by the markets of the Edinburgh area, the region was distinguished by large grain farms and strict labour hierarchies. In the eastern Lowlands, single men and women made up a class of farm servants. There, wage earners outnumbered independent holders of land by about 14 Charles W. J. Withers ten to one. The south-west became, increasingly, a region of cattle-keeping, early enclosure and farming based upon the family unit, with local distinctiveness reflecting the demands for dairy produce from the urban populations of west central Scotland. In the north-eastern counties of Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardine, a hierarchy in farm type was apparent by the 1830s: many small one-plough farms and small crofts on the marginal lands with larger-scale farming in the region based chiefly on cattle-rearing. William Alexander’s Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk (1871) well describes the rural north-east at work and play: orra men, feu’d loons, hiring fairs, authority vested in the clergy and the schoolmaster (the Rev. Andrew Sleekaboot and Mr Jonathan Tawse). Occupational change within rural society after 1707 was apparent in the growth in size of villages and small towns and in the establishment of planned villages, designed to employ the rural labour force in textiles, fishing or distilling. Most planned villages in Lowland Scotland were established between 1750 and about 1840. In the north-east, they were mainly associated with estate improvement, in the west with the expanding cotton industry and, in the south-east and central areas, with advances in agricultural marketing. Between 1770 and 1820, most planned villages were located in the Highlands in an attempt to bring employment and industry to the region. To see Scotland’s geography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as marked by a distinct separation between ‘Highlands’ and ‘Lowlands’ is misleading. The Highlands do not enter the contemporary British geographical consciousness as some sort of ‘problem’ or ‘underdeveloped’ region simply in consequence of 1746 and All That. It is true, of course, that the area was largely foreign to outside observers and the need to know underlay the mapping work of the 1747–54 Military Survey of Scotland. This survey, the earlier development of military roads under Wade and the related building of barracks at Fort George and Fort Augustus and so on were part of the military surveillance of the Highlands. Yet the region had connections with the rest of Scotland. Many Highlanders of nobility and achievement saw themselves as British Gaels. The Highland economy, especially on its south and east margins, was integrated into neighbouring areas. The region was never wholly Gaelic speaking: Gaelic was for far longer in this period the language of the hearth and of religious worship than it was of commerce. Nor should we see the Highlands as a uniform region. Those districts south and east of the Great Glen were the ‘farming’ Highlands with a mixed economy in which, for example, large-scale cattle-raising and commercial sheep-farming and the social consequences of agrarian capitalism were known, in south-west Argyll and in upland Perthshire, before 1746. The north and west, including the Hebrides, were the ‘crofting’ Highlands. Crofting, a form of small-scale subsistence land-working dependent upon by-employment, was established as an agricultural system only from the later eighteenth century in response to rising population levels and the need to retain labour. Crofting is not a timeless feature of Highland geography. What characterised and changed the Highlands, especially the crofting districts from the 1750s onwards, were the facts of comparative regional disadvantage. The climate and the terrain limited arable agriculture. Highland social structure centred upon the clan, loyalty to kin, and an attachment to land encapsulated in the Gaelic word duthchas, which encompasses notions of birthplace, hereditary occupation and belonging. The tenantry, which looked to a moral relationship with land and the landowner, was increasingly faced with the imperatives of political economy. Subsistence agriculture, especially the dependence upon the potato, was unreliable, but unless emigration or, in extreme years, famine took people away from the land, it had the effect of allowing the population to increase beyond its means. On Tiree, to take just one parish, the population rose from 1,500 persons in 1747, Scotland’s Geography, 1707–1918 15 to 1,997 in 1776, to 2,306 in 1787 and 2,443 by 1792. In 1771, the Duke of Argyll described the island as even then ‘over-peopled, and my farms oppress’d with a numerous sets of indigent tenants and cottars’. The climax to the Highland problem came with the potato famine, which began in the early 1830s and reached its height in the decade after 1844. The geography of shortage was especially severe in the north and west Highlands and Hebrides. As population pressure remained and the cash economy collapsed, so landlords accelerated the emigration of their labour force and converted agricultural holdings to deer forests and shooting estates. Only with the 1886 Crofter Holdings Act was the power of landlords restrained in law. Not until the 1897 Congested Districts Act was additional land made available for the Highland populations. This date marks the effective beginning of what, in modern parlance, we would think of as formal regional assistance for the Highlands and Islands. The Highlands were, in short, subject to the same processes of capitalisation and economic rationalisation that affected the rest of Scotland, albeit later and in a more acute and accelerated form. How, then, in terms of Scotland’s geographical identity did the Highlands come in this period to have a cultural significance quite contrary to their economic importance? The cultural creation of the Highlands after about 1760 is the result of several agencies in combination. The region was ‘discovered’ by travel writers and painters. James Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry helped to instil the idea of Highlanders as Europe’s primitives and encouraged cultural forays into the region by antiquaries and poetry collectors. Cultivated interests valued the aesthetics of the uncultivated – upland scenery and the sublimity of desolation. The Highlander was seen as Scotland’s ‘noble savage’ in relation to Enlightenment theories on the stages of social development, the region as the nation’s past in the present. Dr Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) influenced later travellers as he had himself been swayed by Martin Martin’s 1695 Description of the Western Isles. Where Martin and Johnson and Boswell led, others followed – natural historians like John Lightfoot and Thomas Pennant, literary figures like the Wordsworths and, notably, Sir Walter Scott, whose writings helped open up the Highlands to outsiders’ curious, amused and, often, condemnatory gaze. Scottish literature was here made through geography: as tales of particular places, in accounts where topography is integral to the narrative and through walking the landscape, representing its moral and physical contours to distant audiences. Royalty lent an already apparent Highlandism further marketing power from 1822 when George IV wore tartan for his visit to Scotland and from 1848 when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bought Balmoral Castle on ‘Royal’ Deeside. Nineteenth-century landscape painters and photographers captured Highland scenery as others, with rod, gun and net, bagged its specimens. By the early twentieth century, the ‘wet wilderness’ of the Highlands was seen as a natural heritage elsewhere lost through careless exploitation, but was so at just the moment its ‘naturalness’ was threatened by ramblers, mountaineers and others who saw the region as a playground. Yet we must be careful in seeing Highland geography in just these terms and only from the outsiders’ perspective. Many of the above views were confined to bourgeois sensibilities. What aesthetic theory saw as sublime emptiness and sportsmen as shooting grounds, emigrant Gaels remembered as home. Gaelic poetry and prose writing has a tradition of opposition to unwelcome material change, in the eighteenth-century through men such as Duncan Ban MacIntyre (Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir) and Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, and in that theme of ‘homeland’ which informs the poetry of the Clearances. The break-up of Highland (and, earlier, Lowland) society was resisted with more than words. The geography of Highland protest effectively began in Easter Ross in 1792 when locals 16 Charles W. J. Withers opposed the establishment of a commercial sheep farm in Alness parish: 1792 is remembered as Bliadhna nan Caorach, ‘The Year of the Sheep’. Between that date and the Highland Land Wars of the 1880s and 1890s, dozens of acts of opposition to rural change took place: rent strikes, assault on estate officers, destruction of field dykes and land raids. Many land raids in the Outer Hebrides even after the Great War – protest there continued into the 1930s – drew strength from the feeling that fighting for one’s own land was more just than fighting for one’s country. As one land raider declared in 1919, ‘We fought for this land in France and we’re prepared to die for it in Lewis.’ Set against the context of an increasingly capitalised and specialised agriculture, Scotland’s urban geography experienced major changes from the mid-eighteenth century. In 1755 there were only four towns with a population of 10,000 or more, a figure that represented about 9 per cent of the nation’s total population. By 1851 approximately one-third of the country’s population lived in towns of 10,000 persons and over. By 1891 the proportion was just under 50 per cent. In 1911 when a new census definition of urban as centres of 1,000 persons or more was introduced, 75 per cent of the country could claim to be urban residents. In respect of the term ‘urbanised societies’ (the percentage of a nation’s total population inhabiting towns of 10,000 persons or more), Scotland was tenth in Europe in 1700, seventh by about 1750, fourth by 1800 and second only to England and Wales by the mid-nineteenth century. Such statistics represent new urban geographies – of population distribution, economic activity and social change – in formation. In 1755, over half of Scotland’s population lived north of the Clyde-Tay line. By 1911, 72 per cent of Scotland’s population lived in the central counties of Ayr, Dunbarton, Lanark, Renfrew, Clackmannan, Fife, Stirling, the Lothians and the city of Dundee. But statistics mask geographical difference and do not explain Scotland’s urbanisation. In general terms, most Scottish towns in this period fitted into a threefold urban hierarchy: the four major cities, smaller industrial towns and local centres whose principal function was serving their immediate neighbourhood. In similarly general terms, four main causes for the nation’s urban growth may be identified. The first was enhanced agricultural productivity. The second was the further development of specialised services. The third was industrial growth. Finally, population in-migration from rural Scotland and, for Dundee and towns in the west central Lowlands, from Ireland provided cheap labour. Rapid urban growth after 1755 did not at once mark a break between the old and the new urban Scotland. The four major cities of the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee, had been the biggest burghs in the seventeenth century, and, with only one or two exceptions, the thirteen largest towns in 1831 were the same as those in the early eighteenth century. What was new was the rapidity of urban growth, the regional concentration of population that it effected, the specialisation of urban occupational and residential patterns and, from the 1830s, the scale of the social consequences. In all except Edinburgh of Scotland’s major cities by 1841, textile employment was the dominant source of employment. The capital had, relatively, higher proportions than elsewhere employed in the professional and commercial sectors and domestic service was by far the largest source of employment for women. In Dundee with its linen manufacture, and notably after 1860 in its jute mills, the textile industries dominated and female labour was prevalent in certain sectors of jute production. Glasgow’s growth from 1707 was the result of the tobacco trade, cotton manufactures, developments in coal and iron working in its hinterland, and, from the later nineteenth century, heavy engineering and ship-building. Aberdeen, like Dundee, served its hinterland as a regional capital and became a major Scotland’s Geography, 1707–1918 17 fishing port, the third biggest in Britain by 1911. Scotland’s urban growth was particular in character, rooted in shared national circumstances and part of international networks – Glasgow with the Americas in tobacco and cotton and, as the ‘Second City of the Empire’, with the world; Dundee with India; Edinburgh and Leith with Baltic Europe, the Low Countries and beyond. By the 1830s, the geography of urban Scotland was for many a geography of distress. Rapid urbanisation was accompanied neither by housing controls nor the management of sanitation. If nineteenth-century Scotland had a ‘shock city’, it was Glasgow. The population of the City of Glasgow increased nearly fourfold between 1831 and 1911. Suburbanisation, itself dependent upon the growth of the railway, had, as in Edinburgh, produced large dwellings for the better-off and a distinct residential segregation across the city. But in the wynds and closes of the inner city lay an unimproved Glasgow: overcrowded, dirty, disease ridden, perceived to be beyond moral and spiritual improvement and revealed, if at all, only through the agents of municipal philanthropism, the pens of radical journalists and the probing lenses of photographers like Thomas Annan. Improvements to the basic necessities of domestic geography came late to urban Scotland. Provision of fresh water to Glasgow followed the construction of the reservoir and dam at Loch Katrine in 1859. Fresh water to Dundee from the Sidlaws only came in 1875. National legislation informed by a passion for sanitary purity progressed from the Dwelling Houses and Nuisances Removal Act (1855) to the 1875 Artisans and Labourers Dwellings Improvement Act, where municipal authorities had the right to demolish ‘nuisance areas’, to the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act, which encouraged public housing construction. Scotland’s principal cities each had improvement schemes, in effect, corporate demolition plans: Glasgow in 1866, Edinburgh in 1867, Dundee in 1871, Greenock in 1877 and Aberdeen in 1884, and new houses were built following these schemes. But the ‘long nineteenth century’ ended with working-class unrest in relation to housing – in the agitation of the Scottish Miners’ Federation in 1909 and in the Glasgow rent strike of 1915, for example – and poor housing continued as a problem feature of Scotland’s urban geography well into the twentieth century. By 1918 and for some decades before, Scotland’s industry was factory-based, heavily capitalised and geographically concentrated. This was not always so. The countryside was for long the locus of industrial production. Scotland’s principal manufactures in 1707 were linen and woollen cloths produced, largely, in domestic systems of production. The production of linen overtook that of woollen cloth during the eighteenth century. Both displayed regional, even local, specialisation. Galashiels produced yarns, for example, Kilmarnock and Stewarton concentrated upon bonnets and serges, Angus, Fife and Perth were the leading linen-producing counties. By the later eighteenth century, cotton was a leading industry and, initially, given the importance of clean water, it too was located in the countryside albeit in large manufactories as at Deanston and Stanley in Perthshire. From the early nineteenth century and in relation to urban growth, the demands of technical change and the availability of and need to concentrate labour, cotton production became concentrated in the west central Lowlands. By 1831, 91 per cent of Scotland’s cotton mills were located in Glasgow, Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire. Woollen manufactures concentrated in the Borders towns. Further development of the west central Lowlands as Scotland’s industrial heartland came with the nineteenth-century coal and iron age. In 1830, Scotland had twenty-seven furnaces producing pig iron. By 1860, there were 171. Coal output, a total of 7.5 million tons in 1854 – the product of 368 collieries spread across Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, the Lothians, Stirling and Fife – had doubled by 1873. From the last 18 Charles W. J. Withers quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, iron and coal production underlay the emergence of steel-making and, in turn, the remarkable productivity of Scottish ship-building centred on Clydeside. Between 1870 and 1914, Scottish shipyards produced nearly one-third of Britain’s total production; in 1913, it was one-fifth of the tonnage in the world. In contrast to pre-Union periods, Scotland’s population geography between 1707 and 1918 can be determined in its overall numbers, dynamics and patterns with considerable certainty. It is, nevertheless, a geography whose underlying sources determine different accuracies in different periods. The Census begins only in 1801. Only from 1851 do we know place of birth at parish level and can we document migration at that scale between birthplace and place of enumeration. Statistics on the numbers speaking Gaelic and Gaelic and English are first available from 1881. Civil registration of births, deaths and marriages was not instituted in Scotland until 1855. Before then, we are reliant upon parochial registers that have survived, and were originally kept, variably well. Scotland’s population in 1755 was about 1.25 million, 1.6 million in 1801 and 2.3 million by 1831. Between 1831 and 1911, the nation’s population almost exactly doubled, to 4.7 million. In the mid-eighteenth century, Scotland exhibited a ‘high pressure’ demographic regime characterised by high birth rates and high mortality rates. Population growth thereafter was principally determined by reductions in crisis mortality as, for example, harvest failure and famine became less frequent and severe, and by a decline in underlying crude death rates. Epidemic disease still characterised mortality – measles and smallpox for children, cholera and typhus more generally in the 1830s and 1840s – and cities such as Glasgow were distinguished by high rates of age-specific mortality associated with respiratory diseases among the old until well into the twentieth century. In general, mortality rates dropped because of improved living standards, medical advances and, perhaps, the diminished virulence of diseases themselves. For mortality anyway, it is more accurate to think of different local geographies – of urban–rural and intra-urban contrasts, of changes in the age-structure of Scotland’s population, and of age- and disease-related mortality – than it is of a national mortality decline everywhere and at once the same. Scotland’s crude birth rate was fairly stable at around 35 per 1,000 population from the 1830s to the late 1870s, then fell steadily to about 25 per 1,000 in the period 1911–15. Fertility was mainly within marriage, yet, as with other demographic indicators, there were regional and temporal variations. In parts of south-west Scotland, for example, and, notably, in districts in the north-east, illegitimacy was much higher than elsewhere. Quite why is still not fully understood, but there appears to have been in places what we might think of as accepted local geographies of bastardy and of moral tolerance in which the bearing of children outside wedlock was common over several generations. In 1861, the mean age at first marriage for women was twenty-five and was generally lower in towns given the economic opportunities there. In regions like the Highlands with a less secure resource base, marriage was often delayed or never happened at all. The expansion of urban Scotland and the transformation of the countryside were underlain by cycles of seasonal labour migration, notably from the Highlands, and, increasingly throughout the nineteenth century, by the permanent redistribution of population. Assessment of inter-regional permanent migration flows shows, for 1851 and for 1901, an increased emptying of the Highlands and of the Borders and north-east Lowlands. On a smaller scale, redistribution within counties occurred as people moved from farms to smaller towns and, in the west central Lowlands and Midlothian, from smaller towns to the cities. There were two quite distinct waves of immigration into Scotland: of the Irish, from the late eighteenth century until its peak in the 1840s; and a smaller movement, mainly of Jews, Scotland’s Geography, 1707–1918 19 Poles, Lithuanians and others from eastern Europe, between 1890 and 1914. Emigration from Scotland, which began in major ways from the Highlands in the 1770s, may not have been more than a few thousand persons per year in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and is only statistically assessable from 1861. Scotland lost nearly 1.5 million people through net emigration between 1861 and 1939, nearly 44 per cent of the country’s natural increase in population. The peak of this loss was in the 1910s and 1920s. Relatively, few Scots emigrated to Australia, southern Africa or elsewhere in the world. Most headed for North America with the favoured national destination before 1838 and after 1905 being Canada. In the five-year period from 1910, almost 170,000 Scots emigrated to Canada. The United States predominated between 1860 and 1905. The processes of geographical change here explained are apparent, for the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century respectively, in the ‘Old’ and New statistical accounts of Scotland, works which amount to national geographical self-portraits. Both are part, however, of a longer-run tradition of geographical enquiry in Scotland. Geographical descriptions of the nation, only partially or never realised, were undertaken in 1708, 1721–44, 1757 and 1781. The particular mapping project that was the Military Survey of Scotland (1747–54), an exercise in political control after Culloden, was followed by the work of estate surveyors and, in turn, by maps and plans of farms and new policies as the rhetoric of Improvement became inscribed on the land. In the cities especially, a new type of Scot emerged, the self-styled ‘private teacher of geography’: men like Robert Darling, who, in Edinburgh’s Ramsay’s Land in 1776 and again in 1793–4, ‘teacheth Youth Writing, Book-keeping, Mathematics and geography, and Gentlemen to Measure and Plan their own estates’. Ebenezer MacFait, another such in late Enlightenment Edinburgh, taught geography to Walter Scott. Robert Burns took what he termed ‘My knowledge of ancient story’ from geography books, including the Brechin-born William Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar, first published in 1770. Geography was taught in the universities: by mathematicians like Colin MacLaurin, by natural philosophers like Thomas Reid and by natural historians like Robert Jameson. If, then, we can locate geography in the Scottish Enlightenment, it is also possible to see the Enlightenment as both concerned with matters of geography – with the cultural status of the Highlands, with potato yields and with soil chemistry, for example – and itself geographically different. In Glasgow, for example, the Enlightenment had its own distinctive character based on the city’s industrial and American-oriented commercial growth, the dynamism of the evangelicals and the status of the merchant classes. In Aberdeen, by contrast, the Enlightenment was distinguished by the town’s European outlook, apparent both in philosophical concerns and in the town’s trading links, by explicit interests in rhetoric and the Scots language and by the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and his circle. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scotland’s geographical self-awareness was furthered by the work of formal survey projects: the Ordnance Survey with its hesitant beginnings in Scotland in 1809; the Geological Survey of the north-west Highlands between 1883 and 1907; the British-wide Linguistic and Ethnological Surveys of the 1880s and 1892–9 respectively, and the 1907 Pigmentation Survey, which aimed to document the racial make-up of the nation by measuring head shape and skin colour. Individual Scots at home and overseas likewise promoted the geographical sciences as a contribution to Empire: John Murray on HMS Challenger, W. S. Bruce on the Scotia in the 1902–4 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, and, from his Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, Patrick Geddes emphasised geography as a means to local knowledge, national understanding and global citizenship. 20 Charles W. J. Withers Consideration of Scotland’s geography over the 300 years from 1707 reveals a nation transformed by being always in a state of becoming ‘modern’. Scotland’s geography was, at one and the same time, internally dynamic, locally variable and, in numerous ways, implicated in the circumstances of global change. These things we can think of as the changing geography of Scotland’s places. The period 1707 to 1918 was also marked by a wider public engagement with geography – in school and university teaching, in geographical book and atlas publishing, in public lectures in geography and in mapping, hill walking and other popular geographical practices. This we can think of as the changing place of geography in Scotland. If it was the case that Scotland in 1918 looked a different country than it had in 1707, so, too, many Scots at home and abroad would have looked differently upon themselves as geographical citizens. Further reading Devine, T. M. (1994), The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and the Agrarian Economy, 1660–1815, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Devine, T. M. and R. Mitchison (eds) (1988), People and Society in Scotland: A Social History of Modern Scotland, Vol. 1: 1760–1830, Edinburgh: John Donald. Flinn, M. (ed.) (1977), Scottish Population History from the 17th Century to the 1930s, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, W. H. and R. J. Morris (eds) (1990), People and Society in Scotland, Vol. 2: 1830–1914, Edinburgh: John Donald. Richards, E. (2000), The Highland Clearances, Edinburgh: Birlinn Press. Withers, C. W. J. (2001), Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland since 1520, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3 Standards and Differences: Languages in Scotland, 1707–1918 Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod The Gaelic language At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Gaelic-speaking community of Scotland was overwhelmingly monolingual and almost entirely confined to the Gàidhealtachd. Publishing in the language was confined to a few basic religious texts, and literacy rates were extremely low; the Scottish Gaelic vernacular, as distinct from the Classical Common Gaelic used by the learned classes of both Scotland and Ireland since the end of the twelfth century, had not yet been codified. Two centuries later, following a succession of repressed risings, heavy emigration (both voluntary and forced) and economic transformation, the position of the language and the speech community had changed dramatically. Language shift from Gaelic to English had begun in almost all parts of the traditional Gàidhealtachd, and indeed was effectively complete in a number of areas; the Gaelic community had diffused beyond the Gàidhealtachd into industrial cities and distant countries; the range of publication had expanded enormously, and the language had been significantly standardised; and public authorities had taken the first tentative steps to move away from policies of repression or malign neglect to an acceptance and accommodation of the language. In 1700 Gaelic was the sole language spoken by the great majority of the Gàidhealtachd population; of the total Scottish population of around 900,000, about 25 to 30 per cent spoke Gaelic. English–Gaelic diglossia had not yet developed: for most Gaels English was an unknown tongue, although there were of course many individuals in the Gàidhealtachd who knew English to some degree, including cattle drovers and those living in areas adjoining the Lowlands where economic interactions involved language contact. By the middle of the eighteenth century, language shift was evidently under way in certain Highland areas, especially those nearest the ‘Highland Line’. In such districts transitional bilingualism had developed, with the language passing out of community use soon thereafter. Adam Ferguson, born and raised in Perthshire, became a chaplain in the Hanoverian Black Watch regiment by virtue of being a Gaelic speaker; education in St Andrews and Edinburgh prepared him to become a major contributor to the Scottish Enlightenment with An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), which drew on this double inheritance. Language-shift processes slowly worked their way north and west, driven by improved transport links and increased economic interaction with the Englishspeaking world, including both internal migration and overseas emigration. Gaelic was very slow in disappearing altogether, however: when the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of 22 Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod Scotland undertook its fieldwork from 1950 onwards, linguistic investigators were still able to locate Gaelic speakers native to almost every parish in the traditional Gàidhealtachd. Before 1881, when questions concerning Gaelic were placed on the national census, evidentiary sources for the demography of the language are relatively thin. The ‘Old’ Statistical Account (1791–9) and New Statistical Account (1831–45) provide invaluable information about the linguistic dynamics of the different Highland parishes, revealing a complex and variegated situation across the region, and often recording significant sociolinguistic changes in the few decades between these surveys. Calculations based on this data suggest that there were just under 300,000 Gaelic Speakers at the start of the nineteenth century, approximately one-fifth of the total Scottish population. Having reached its peak between 1820 and 1840 in most districts, the population of the Highlands dropped precipitously from the middle of the century, so that the first census results in 1881 showed a total of 231,594 Gaelic speakers (both monoglot and bilingual), a mere 6.2 per cent of the national population, which had grown significantly during the era of industrial expansion in the Lowlands. By 1921, the number of Gaelic speakers had fallen to 158,779 (3.3 per cent of the national population), with only 9,829 monoglots, and had become a minority language in most Highland parishes. In parts of the Black Isle, south Kintyre and Highland Perthshire, the Gaelic-speaking population had dropped below 10 per cent of the total, while much of Easter Ross, Badenoch and Strathspey had dropped below a quarter. On the other hand, most of the mainland to the north and west of the Great Glen, to say nothing of the islands, remained well over 75 per cent Gaelic-speaking. Ten parishes, mostly in Skye and the Western Isles, stood at over 90 per cent, with Applecross, at 91 per cent, being the strongest Gaelic area on the mainland. Internal migration and overseas emigration from the late eighteenth century onwards meant that Gaelic had spread out beyond the traditional Gàidhealtachd. Sizeable Gaelic communities developed in the Lowland towns and cities, especially in west central Scotland. By 1921, in the wake of language shift within much of the Highlands summarised above, almost a quarter of Scotland’s Gaelic speakers lived outside the Gàidhealtachd. Indeed, a significant proportion of the overall Gaelic-speaking population lived outside Scotland: in 1901, for example, there were some 50,000 Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia alone (between one-quarter and one-fifth of the total recorded in Scotland in that year). Although Scottish Gaelic had diverged from Irish and Manx Gaelic during the Middle Ages, the language was codified in a distinctively Scottish form only in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gaelic publishing in Scotland had begun in 1567, yet it was only with the preparation of the Bible in vernacular Scottish Gaelic (a project completed in 1801) and the publication of a range of secular poetry collections from 1751 onwards that an orthography designed for Scottish Gaelic was developed. This orthography was based on the system of Classical Common Gaelic, the literary language of the late medieval period, but with appropriate modernisation and adaptation to suit Scottish pronunciation and morphology. One key innovation was the development of the grave accent – previously only acute accents had been used – which allowed the written form to show key phonological differences. This written form was polished further during the nineteenth century, especially in works written or edited by ‘Caraid nan Gàidheal’ (Rev. Norman MacLeod, 1783–1862), and remains in use today, albeit with some relatively minor modifications. Grammatical study also developed at the turn of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Rev. Alexander Stewart’s Elements of Gaelic Grammar (1801) and a number of Gaelic dictionaries were published from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, beginning with Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s Leabhar a Theagasc Ainminnin, produced for the Languages in Scotland, 1707–1918 23 Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), and culminating in Edward Dwelly’s Illustrated Gaelic–English Dictionary (1902–11), which remains the standard work. Academic interest in Celtic Studies grew significantly during the nineteenth century, particularly in connection with advances in philology led by central European scholars, and the first Chair of Celtic was created at the University of Edinburgh in 1882, following a lengthy grass-roots campaign in the Gaelic community, led by Professor John Stuart Blackie, the Professor of Greek in Edinburgh. Glasgow followed suit by creating a lectureship in Celtic in 1901. Language contact between Gaelic and English became increasingly obvious through the adoption of successive waves of loanwords, particularly names for new materials that came into the Gàidhealtachd from the south. The poetry of the Jacobite period, for example, is replete with English terms relating to weaponry and military activity, while nineteenthcentury usage demonstrates an adaptation to urban life in the industrial era. From at least the later eighteenth century, complaints about the decreasing ‘purity’ of Gaelic became commonplace, as knowledge of English and eventual full-scale bilingualism became more and more prevalent. Although various plans and initiatives had been announced throughout the seventeenth century, only in the eighteenth century did the authorities succeed in establishing schools in the Gàidhealtachd in a meaningful fashion. Instrumental in these efforts was the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), founded in 1709, which had set up over 300 schools by 1795. The record of the SSPCK schools with regard to Gaelic is a mixed one. The ideology underpinning the initial approach of the SSPCK was summarised by a royal commission in 1716 as ‘reducing these Countries to order [. . .] making them usefull to the Commonwealth [. . .] teaching them their duty to God [. . .] and rooting out their Irish Language’. Over time, however, a more accommodating policy developed, partly due to the manifest failure of English-only methods in strictly educational terms. The publication of the Gaelic Bible, coupled with the initiatives of the SSPCK and other educational institutions, affected a significant increase in Gaelic literacy rates in the first part of the nineteenth century. This growth in the scope of the reading public led to a wave of publication initiatives, including the first Gaelic periodicals from 1829 onwards. Only seventy Gaelic books were published in the 1700s (forty-five of these in the 1780s and 1790s), but the number reached more than 1,000 in the following century. The Education Act of 1872, which replaced the existing network of charitable schools managed by the SSPCK and other private institutions with a system of state schools from whose curriculum Gaelic was entirely excluded, has generally been considered a disaster for the Gaelic language. Under this hostile regime, Gaelic literacy began to decline once again, and generations of Gaels were ‘educated out’ of the language, immersed in an unknown and foreign language and trained for emigration. The Act was deeply unpopular among Gaelic organisations and activists at the time, but efforts to promote the language in the education system lacked a critical mass, and failed to persuade the authorities. Piecemeal improvements were made to authorise the teaching of the language in different ways, culminating in the ‘Gaelic clause’ of the Education Act of 1918, which required education authorities to make appropriate provision for the teaching of Gaelic in Gaelic-speaking areas. Even so, Gaelic remained marginal to the state education system until the 1960s, when the first initiatives in Gaelic-medium education began in parts of Inverness-shire. Despite the wrenching upheavals that affected Gaeldom during the period between the Union of Parliaments and the First World War, the discourses and language ideologies relating to Gaelic underwent relatively little change, although differences of idiom and 24 Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod emphasis did become apparent over time. The voices of power generally expressed hostility of varying kinds and varying degrees of intensity, while a countervailing strain of what might be called Gaelic ethnolinguistic consciousness also emerged. From at least the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards the state’s policy towards Gaelic was explicitly hostile, with its stated goal that of ‘abolishing and removing’ the language. A similar viewpoint underpinned many of the initiatives of the SSPCK and other religious institutions in the Gàidhealtachd, as summarised above. By the later eighteenth century, the ideology of improvement had become dominant, an outlook that was to be further developed during the Victorian era, with its gospel of progress. In this vision, Gaelic was perceived as a barrier to the economic development of the Highlands, and linguistic uniformity was considered a necessary precondition of British national unity. Although such views certainly found currency among some Gaels, who voted with their tongues, so to speak, by shifting towards English, the dominant ethos within Gaelic circles was one of cultural self-defence. Beginning in 1707, when three Scottish ministers wrote dedicatory Gaelic verses to the pioneering Celticist Edward Lhuyd as epigraphs for his Archaelogia Britannica, a new sub-genre of poetry developed, praising Gaelic’s glorious past and bewailing its current neglect. Most influential of these compositions was Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s ‘Moladh an ùghdair don t-seann chànain Ghàidhlig’ (‘The Author’s Praise of the Ancient Gaelic Tongue’) (c. 1738), which praised (with purposeful bombast) the origins and virtues of the language: Bha a’ Ghàidhlig ullamh ’Na glòir fìor-ghuineach cruaidh Air feadh a’ chruinne Mun thuilich an Tuil-ruadh. Mhair i fòs Is cha tèid a glòir air chall Dh’aindeoin gò Is mìoruin mhòir nan Gall. Is i labhair Alba Is gallbhodaich fèin Ar flaith, ar prionnsaidhe Is ar diùcanna gun èis [. . .] Is i labhair Goill is Gàidheil, Neo-chlèirich is cléir, Gach fear is bean A ghluaiseadh teanga am beul. Is i labhair Àdhamh Ann a Phàrras fèin Is bu shiùbhlach Gàidhlig O bheul àlainn Eubh [. . .] Tha Laideann coimhliont’, Torrach teann na’s leòr; Languages in Scotland, 1707–1918 25 Ach ’s sgalag thràilleil I do’n Ghàidhlig chòir [. . .] (Gaelic was fully formed With its rigorous truly keen voice Throughout the world Before the Red Flood. Still it survived And its voice will not be lost Despite the deceit And great ill-will of the Lowlanders. It is [Gaelic] that Scotland spoke And very Lowland churls Our nobles, our princes And our dukes, without defect [. . .] It is [Gaelic] that Lowlander and Highlander spoke, Layman and cleric, Every man and woman, Who would move their tongue in their mouth. It was [Gaelic] that Adam spoke In his own Paradise And Gaelic came fluently From Eve’s beautiful mouth [. . .] Latin is complete, Abundantly fruitful and rigorous; But it is a servile churl To the noble Gaelic [. . .]) In the wake of the Ossianic controversy, the rhetoric of Gaelic cultural self-defence became more insistent, especially in the many celebratory songs composed for Gaelic societies in the Lowlands and beyond, although this rhetoric was tempered with an awareness of the language’s weak state and the power of countervailing discourses of disdain. Stewart’s pioneering Elements of Gaelic Grammar (1801) began with an apology, which gives a useful summary of the competing arguments of the era: The utility of a grammar of the Scottish Galic [sic] will be variously appretiated [sic]. Some will be disposed to deride the vain endeavour to restore vigour to a decaying superannuated language. They who reckon the extirpation of the Galic a necessary step toward that general extension of the English, which they deem essential to the political interest of the Highlands, will condemn every project which seems likely to retard its extinction. Those who consider that there are many parts of the Highlands, where the inhabitants can, at present, receive no useful knowledge whatever, except through the channel of their native tongue, will probably be of [the] opinion that the Galic ought at least to be tolerated. Yet these too may condemn 26 Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod as useless, if not ultimately detrimental, any attempt to cultivate its powers, or to prolong its existence. Others will entertain a different opinion. They will judge from experience [. . .] that no measures merely of a literary kind will prevail to hinder the progress of the English language over the Highlands; while general convenience and emolument, not to mention private emulation and vanity, conspire to facilitate its introduction, and prompt the natives to its acquisition. They will perceive at the same time, that while the Galic continues to be the common speech of multitudes; while the knowledge of many important facts, of many necessary arts, of morals, of religion, and of the laws of the land, can be conveyed to them only by means of this language, it must be of material service to preserve it in such a state of cultivation and purity, as that it may be fully adequate to these valuable ends; in a word, that while it is a living language, it may answer the purpose of a living language. As with many other small nations and quasi-nations across Europe, a range of revivalist Gaelic organisations emerged in the later nineteenth century. The creation of An Comunn Gaidhealach (the Highland Association) in 1891 was an important milestone; this was the first organisation founded with the objective of defending and promoting Gaelic culture, particularly through the Mòd, an annual cultural festival patterned on the Welsh Eisteddfod that began in 1892. An Comunn maintained an explicitly non-political stance, however, and it never succeeded in inspiring a broad-based language movement of the kind that emerged in Wales or Ireland. In the early twentieth century, revival efforts in a different vein involved literary and cultural initiatives by Gaelic intellectuals, notably Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar, whose periodicals (especially Guth na Bliadhna, 1904–25) and other publications endeavoured to modernise the language in various respects, including the development of innovations in literature. Underpinning this was a new Gaelic-centred form of Scottish nationalism that promoted Gaelic as the national language of Scotland, a move suggested by successive waves of activists in more recent decades. If the politics of such proposals are transparent, the changing nomenclature relating to Gaelic is sometimes more subtle. One small but telling indicator of the evolving position of the language is the change of names used to label it in English. Until the end of the fourteenth century or later, Gaelic had generally been known as ‘Scottish’, but then acquired the name ‘Irish’ (or ‘Erse’) while the Germanic vernacular of the Lowlands became ‘Scots’. Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, the term ‘Irish’ went out of fashion and was replaced by ‘Gaelic’. While ‘Irish’ seems to have been the universal form before 1700, ‘Gaelic’ began to appear from at least the 1720s onwards and had almost completely replaced ‘Irish’ by the end of the century. The reasons for this shift of usage are not entirely clear, but it is certainly tempting to explain the change in terms of the politics of the Union and the new ‘North Britain’. The English language in Scotland We might expect that what was still very much an economically impoverished country, with its national status lost at the beginning of the period and a considerable proportion of its population non-English speaking, would seem fertile ground for a linguistic take-over by its larger and more powerful southern neighbour. Indeed, the revolutionary tendencies in politics, economics and religion which typify the ‘long’ eighteenth century and which lasted into the nineteenth, brought with them social changes of a type which led to the Languages in Scotland, 1707–1918 27 overt politicising of language. Should there be, for instance, a single type of English for both parts of Britain; should the language of North Britain be treated as foreign and therefore brought into line with its more prestigious southern cousin? What kind of role should language itself play in the identification of the emerging social class structures – could there be a Scottish-English as well as an English-English standard? There can be no question but that linguistic usage was at the forefront of political and social concerns throughout both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at a level perhaps seen neither before nor since. It is at this time that we see a sustained effort to standardise the form of the spoken language in England, bringing with it high levels of contempt of and demands for the suppression of regional and other non-standard types. Socially-aspirant Scots men and women were conscious as probably never before of the challenges to their social standing presented by their vernacular form of English both at a local and British national level. At first sight it may appear that for such individuals there was a stark choice – either adopt the language recommended by the very active proselytisers of the usage of metropolitan London (especially its court) or, at the very least, adopt an intermediate stratagem, ridding themselves of what were seen to be the most saliently Scottish features of their language, and adopting instead a ‘refined’ form of the version of English spoken in Scotland at the time, a usage devoid as far as possible of what were seen (both in Scotland and England) as ‘Scotticisms’. There can be no doubt that south of the border there was a general view that the form of English spoken in Scotland was non-prestigious; for some of its manifestations, such a view was held even within Scotland itself as well. Comments on usage by the Scottish compilers of the first Statistical Account regularly characterise the language of the lower classes as ‘vulgar’, ‘harsh’, or ‘crude’, as well as reflecting a view that the language of the Scots gentry was coming to be more and more distinct from that of the peasantry. By the middle of the nineteenth century we see what were generally considered to be the negative effects of language contact brought about through industrial migration. In his History of Renfrewshire (1840) Andrew Crawfurd records the arrival of immigrants into the village of Lochwinnoch, resulting in a ‘clanjamfray of Irish, Highlanders and other dyvours [. . .] a Babylonish dialect, both in idioms and accent’ (Crawfurd MSS, Paisley Library); yet the surrounding countryside is still seen as the place where the ‘pure’ Scots is spoken among the peasantry. Not unrelated to such a perception, there was a view emerging that while the ‘old Scots’ language of the earlier literary tradition was to be appreciated and held in high regard, its contemporary equivalent in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was seen as compromised. Rather earlier, Allan Ramsay was bullish about the positive role of Scotticisms in his Poems (1721): The Scotticisms, which perhaps may offend some over-nice Ear, give new Life and Grace to the Poetry, and become their Place as well as the Doric Dialect of Theocritus, so much admired by the best Judges. In the late eighteenth century particularly, however, the view of the English spoken in Scotland is an intensely negative one: for Hugh Blair, in his immensely influential Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783), the mark of a good literary style was a function of the extent to which it avoided Scotticisms of all kinds, these being unashamedly conflated with general grammatical irregularity: Style may be pure, that is, it may all be strictly English, without Scotticisms or Gallicisms, or ungrammatical irregular expressions of any kind, and may, nevertheless, be deficient in Propriety. 28 Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod From an English perspective at least, the English spoken in Scotland was regarded as at best second rate, the repository of ‘errors’, ‘barbarisms’ and ‘vulgarities’. Even a Scotsman like James Buchanan in 1757 condemned Scottish English as ‘that rough and uncouth brogue which is so harsh and unpleasant to an English ear’. The irony of the situation is that the success of the movement in England for linguistic prescriptivism, which was so prominent a feature of language politics from 1750 onwards, was in a very large part due to the efforts of Scottish grammarians like James Elphinston, James Buchanan, James Beattie and (as an emigrant to the United States) John Witherspoon. These were among the foremost advocates for the purification of language, the eradication of vulgarity and error, and the suppression of provincial (including Scots, Irish and English regional) forms. Some of the most ardent supporters of an English Academy where the linguistic rectitude of ‘correct’ English would be maintained, on the model of the French Academy and the Academia della Crusca in Florence, were Scotsmen: Tobias Smollett, Henry Home Lord Kames, Hugh Blair, Adam Smith and William Robertson. But the case for supporting at least some form of modification of the broad Scots vernacular was strongly argued by many influential individuals and groups who believed passionately that political union had brought with it a sense that a national British language would be a major cultural, social and – perhaps above all – economic gain. The dilemma faced by the socially aspirant classes in Scotland was to ascertain which was the appropriate ‘standard’ of language at which they should aim: was it to be some purely English model (thus risking a charge of national treachery); a more indigenous, ‘polite’ Scottish version; or, more radically, should speakers simply refuse to abandon even ‘broad’ versions of their language? This predicament is echoed in the contrasting views of two eighteenth-century observers, both patriotic supporters of political Union. Sylvester Douglas (1744–1823), KC and diplomat, averred in 1779 in A Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland that: ‘A provincial phrase sullies the lustre of the brightest eloquence, and the most forceful reasoning loses half its effect when disguised in the awkwardness of a provincial dress’, while the Scotophile English Jesuit James Adams took the view in his Pronunciation of the English Language (1799) that: There is a limited conformity in the present union of heart and interest of the two great kingdoms, beyond which total similarity of sounds would not be desirable, and dissonance itself has characteristic merit. Writers like Adams defended the pedigree of the Scottish form of English, saw it more as a separate identifiable language in its own right and advocated its preservation as a ‘tempered medium’, an expression of national identity. But the written Scottish Enlightenment, especially in the latter half of the eighteenth century, supported what were contemporary pressures not merely across Britain, but across Europe, for language standardisation, especially through the invention of new orthographies that would result (it was claimed) in the permanent ‘fixing’ of language in both time and space. Scottish intellectuals were much attracted to such views and were not averse to the idea of establishing a Scottish linguistic Academy of some kind; James Elphinston, for example, in 1786 embraced the idea wholeheartedly for the opportunities he believed it would bring for the establishment of linguistic propriety. No Scottish Academy along such lines was ever established. However, less formal attempts at setting up a linguistic regulatory body were attempted. Richard Sheridan referred in his Heads of a Plan for the Improvement of Elocution and for the Promoting of the Study of the English Language (1762) to the need to see established an ‘institution of societies for encouraging Languages in Scotland, 1707–1918 29 such arts, sciences, manufactures, and studies as are most wanting’. Following his public lectures On Elocution in Edinburgh in 1761, he drew up a special set of Regulations ‘for promoting the reading and speaking of the English Language in Scotland’ by the Select Society, a philosophic debating society of the Edinburgh literati. Its members were particularly zealous in the identification and eradication of ‘Scotticisms’ in their writings. Nor were such intellectual societies, part of whose remit was language ‘improvement’, entirely in the male domain: in Edinburgh as early as 1717, the all-female Fair Intellectuals Club supported similar aims. The importance of linguistic usage in achieving the interconnected aims of political and economic success for Scotland often underlay appeals for ‘standardisation’ in the direction of models which were London English in origin. Echoing the utilitarian point of view of the Select Society’s Regulations, John Sinclair recommended the political advantages of a ‘national language’: such as wish to mix with the world, and particularly those whose object it is to have some share in the administration of national affairs, are under the necessity of conforming to the taste, the manners, and the language of the Public. Old things must then be done away – new manners must be assumed, and a new language adopted. To the modern observer, it seems wholly unrealistic to expect the everyday users of an entire national language, or even certain social classes within a national group, to completely forego their native linguistic habits in favour of an imported, imposed model (notwithstanding their familiarity with its forms in written prose). But this is precisely what many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prescriptive grammarians sought to achieve. But their literary counterparts used Scots within standard English as a way to validate and create a space for Scottish experience. More realistic attitudes were also being proposed to cleanse Scots of its perceived vulgarisms. There were other definitions of ‘propriety’ in the air, several observers proposing that a Scottish national spoken standard should be minimally influenced by the emergent metropolitan standard being advocated for the territory of its English neighbour. While several Scottish linguistic commentators, like their English counterparts, were anxious to promote language propriety and to establish a spoken (perhaps a written) standard, the sense of national identity tended to favour the promotion of extant local, Scottish ‘refined’ usage, based upon what were perceived to be the best Scottish exemplars: academics, lawyers, advocates and the clergy. There was strong support for the promotion of a form of Scottish English which would fulfil all the requirements of linguistic propriety sought for by the socially aspirant. James Adams’s Pronunciation of the English Language even went so far as to claim that ‘mere local dialectal sound never should, never will, never can be, totally removed’. Scots language in the nineteenth century By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the effects of political union were being increasingly seen as having a negative effect on the Scottishness of the English spoken in Scotland, and several observers were coming to share the view expressed by John Jamieson in the Preface to his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language: Since the union of the kingdoms, how beneficial soever this event has been in other respects, the language of Scotland has been subjected to peculiar disadvantages. No longer written in 30 Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod public deeds, or spoken in those assemblies which fix the standard of national taste, its influence has gradually declined, notwithstanding the occasional efforts of the Muse to rescue it from total oblivion. Despite views like this, the recognition persisted that, far from being universally regarded as vulgar or barbarous, there were varieties of Scottish English that in Scotland – and to some extent even in England – were regarded as refined and acceptable usage. The author of The Vulgarities of Speech Corrected (1826) for example, notes that Many well-educated Scotsmen, who move in the most polite circles in their own country, take a pride in speaking the Scots dialect blended with English, and when this is not done from affectation, and a love of singularity, it can scarcely be reckoned vulgar, though it must require great attention to avoid low and unseemly expressions. The Scottish speakers of Adams’s ‘tempered medium’ were clearly the individuals in the mind of Sylvester Douglas as those ‘whose language has already been in a great deal refined from the provincial dross, by frequenting English company, and studying the great masters of the English tongue in their writings’. Adams held up the model of ‘The manly eloquence of the Scotch bar’ which ‘affords a singular pleasure to the candid English hearer, and gives merit and dignity to the noble speakers who retain so much of their own dialect, and tempered propriety of English sounds’. We might ask: what was the ‘tempered medium’, the ‘mixed’ Scotch, the prestigious and non-barbarous variety to which so many contemporary observers made reference, and were there any attempts at devising orthographic systems which might unambiguously represent its salient characteristics? Both of these questions were at least partially addressed by Alexander Scot in a letter of 1779 extolling the improvements in Enlightened Scotland he noted as a returning exile: That Caledonians can think, nay, that Caledonians can write, is no secret to the learned world. But that any nation should write a language, which it can neither read nor speak, was a paradox reserved for the ingenuity of modern times. Certain it is however, that our Country, amidst the many improvements which daily more distinguish her, has within these fifty years made considerable alteration in her language. The Scottish dialect of this day is no more that of Allan Ramsay than of Gawin Douglas; but that the language of Edinburgh is not nearer the language of London than it was a century ago, whether in idiom or in utterance, will irrefragably appear from the following letter, which fairly paints the present Caledonian English of the college, the pulpit, and the bar. Scot devised an orthographic system to represent the ‘Caledonian’ usage of that most prestigious of Scottish social groups: ‘the present college, the pulpit, and the bar’. In his Epistle addressed to the Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries in Edinburgh, Alexander Geddes too ‘ventured [. . .] to make the orthography a little more uniform, and more agreeable to the Scottish idiom, than the orthography of the present day’, by utilising a set of vowel and consonantal diacritics in his poems ‘Tránslâtit into Skottis vers’ (Three Scottish Poems (1792)). Yet the picture regarding ‘broad’ Scots usage throughout the period is not altogether one of denial. Vernacular spoken Scots obviously continued to be used in daily communication and even from the pulpit – albeit alongside an English Bible – and there is no evidence that pulpit discourse was delivered in anything approaching a London metropolitan norm. Languages in Scotland, 1707–1918 31 Indeed, it could be argued that the independence and unique character of Scottish Presbyterianism were preserved and enhanced through a conscious use of Scots rather than English-English. Even the ‘tempered medium’ of the pulpit and the bar have appeared quite ‘broad’ to a modern. In Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818) the Edinburgh Provost compelled to justify the activities of the local guard during the Porteous Riots causes offence in the House of Lords by describing the calibre of the ammunition used as ‘sic as ane shoots dukes and fools with’. Now, it would seem likely that in the highly formal context of the Upper House, an official like the Provost would be extremely conscious of his linguistic usage, and select forms which, for him at least, were of a high – albeit local – prestige. Thus the djooks for ‘ducks’ and fools for ‘fowl’ should perhaps be considered examples of the very ‘tempered medium’ to which Adams and Scot were so attached. That it might cause confusion and offence in London serves to demonstrate that the two ‘standards’ were rather different. Many nineteenth-century authors used Scots not only as a ‘tempered medium’ but authentically and for new purposes. William Alexander’s novel of the 1843 Disruption, Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk (1871), preserves his Aberdonian dialect; Scots becomes the dialect of political dissension through the plot but also a vehicle of reclamation and recovery. George MacDonald’s use of Scots is optimistic like Alexander’s, but MacDonald employs dialect for theological issues. Rather than being problematic as in Johnny Gibb, the dialect is praised in MacDonald’s later novel, Castle Warlock (1871). Robert Louis Stevenson’s use of Scots is more complex, articulating the imaginative, evocative experience of the Scots. Diabolic in The Master of Ballantrae (1889), it registers internal division in Weir of Hermiston (1896). However, the end of the nineteenth century saw writers flattening the dialect and pandering to the popularity of Scots as a piece of exoticism. George Douglas Brown’s novel, The House with the Green Shutters (1901), parodies Kailyard themes but falls back on a similar use of the dialect. Linguistically, by the late nineteenth century many of the concerns relating to the sociolinguistic status of the English language in Scotland had been superseded by a more ‘scientific’ approach to the description and formal analysis of the contemporary language itself. For the first time, exhaustive research using data gathered from actual speakers was carried out into the regional forms of English in Scotland. James Murray produced the still unsurpassed Dialects of the Southern Counties of Scotland (1876), a landmark not only in Scottish regional studies but also in dialectology in general, while E. J. Ellis performed a wider survey of Scottish regional variation in his Early English Pronunciation (1889). To carry out such detailed phonetic accounts, Murray (alongside Ellis and Melville Bell in the tradition of their Scottish predecessors such as Elphinston and Scot) devised a highly elaborate and powerful set of phonetic alphabets, Paleotype and Glossotype, the forerunners of the International Phonetic Alphabet itself. Murray can be credited too for the first coherent linguistic history of the English language in Scotland. Further reading Aitken, A. J. (1979), ‘Scottish Speech: A Historical View with Special Reference to the Standard English of Scotland’, in A. J. Aitken and T. McArthur (eds), The Languages of Scotland, Edinburgh: Chambers, pp. 65–84. Basker, J. G. (1993), ‘Scotticisms and the Problem of Cultural Identity in Eighteenth Century Britain’, in John Dwyer and Richard B. Sher (eds), Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, Edinburgh: Mercat Press, pp. 81–95. 32 Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod Jones, Charles (1995), A Language Suppressed: The Pronunciation of the Scots Language in the Eighteenth Century, Edinburgh: John Donald. MacKinnon, Kenneth (1991), Gaelic: Past and Future Prospect, Edinburgh: Saltire Society. Thomson, Derick S. (ed.) (1994), The Companion to Gaelic Scotland, rev. edn, Glasgow: Gairm. Withers, Charles W. J. (1984), Gaelic in Scotland, 1698–1981: The Geographical History of a Language, Edinburgh: John Donald. 4 The International Reception and Literary Impact of Scottish Literature of the Period 1707–1918 Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard Introduction This chapter reviews the international reception of Scottish writers and assesses their role and impact in the development of world literature. It focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on writers who are perceived as Scots abroad and thus directly contribute to foreign images of Scottish writing and culture. For brevity’s sake, it adopts a relatively narrow definition of literature as poetry, fiction and drama, touching only briefly upon philosophy, political science, theology and historiography. While Scottish literature has often had a significant impact in non-literary art forms – for example, Ossian and Scott were both highly influential on music and opera – this chapter is of necessity focused on Scottish literature’s literary impact. The chapter concentrates on reception in non-English-speaking areas, the emphasis inevitably falling upon Europe. Eighteenth century Like the makars, the Vernacular Revivalists awoke little foreign interest. The first translation of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson dates from 1846. They came too early (Ramsay, in particular) to benefit from the ‘anglomania’ that swept mid-eighteenth-century France and Italy or the late eighteenth-century German discovery of Volkspoesie. Paradoxically, they may have appeared insufficiently polished to European Classicists, but too Classical for their Romantic successors. Burns did enjoy a significant international reception, but, with only three poems translated before 1800, not until the nineteenth century. The Romantic discovery of Burns sparked little interest in his immediate forebears; indeed Ramsay and Fergusson still await an international readership. Barring the isolated late sixteenth-century translations from the Scots of James VI and Lindsay discussed in the ‘Reception to 1707’ section of Chapter 18 of volume one, the first literary work translated from any of Scotland’s vernacular languages is James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–30). Thomson’s (largely posthumous) European vogue has been obscured by that of Ossian for which he paved the way. The first extracts from The Seasons, translated by Barthold Heinrich Brockes, appeared in German periodicals in the early 34 Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard 1740s. Brockes’s complete translation was published in 1745, printed with his own Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, the first major poem influenced by Thomson. Five further German versions followed before the end of the century, and eight French translations between 1759 and 1806. The Seasons also appeared in Dutch (1765), Italian (1793), Latin (1795), Russian (1798), Spanish (1801), Swedish (1811), Greek (1817), Czech and Hebrew (both 1842). Although Thomson’s international importance lies essentially in his contribution to the cult of nature, foreign interest initially centred on his moral and philosophical digressions. French critics praised him for his love of humanity and meditations on conjugal happiness and eternal life, subsequently imitated by poets like Léonard and Delille. In Germany, Hagedorn and Klopstock echoed Thomson’s advocacy of religion, patriotism and the pleasures of friendship and the country life. Schiller, meantime, drew on Thomson’s ideas on the rise and fall of civilisation in his Der Spaziergang unter den Linden (1782). As the century progressed, Thomson was increasingly seen as the first poet to celebrate nature even in its irregular, uncultivated state. Particularly influential was his vision of nature as divine revelation, a harmonious creation designed solely to assure human happiness. In their portrayal of men living according to natural law, imitators of Thomson implicitly criticised existing social and political regimes. While early admirers were most drawn to passages which placed man at the centre of nature, the ‘pre-Romantic’ cult of Ossian and Rousseau led to an appreciation of nature at its most sublime or inhospitable. Where ‘Winter’, whose landscapes betray little human presence, was initially ignored or abridged by translators, it was now seen as The Seasons’s most original section. Besides writers already mentioned, Thomson inspired Gessner in Switzerland (with whom he is often paired as a co-founder of nature poetry), Wieland and C. E. von Kleist in Germany, Saint-Lambert, Fontanes and André Chénier in France, Pindemonte and Cesarotti in Italy, Karamzin and Zhukovsky (who both translated his work) in Russia, Niemcewicz in Poland, Wergeland in Norway and Winter in the Netherlands. Although few complete translations of The Seasons were made after the early nineteenth century, descriptive fragments became much anthologised, attracting translators of the calibre of the Czech Doucha in the nineteenth century, and Menart (Slovenia), Orban and Tótfalusi (both Hungary) in the twentieth. Perhaps surprisingly, Thomson’s dramas played a role in the development of modern European tragedy. Championed by Lessing and translated by Johann Heinrich Schlegel, they helped persuade Sturm und Drang writers to take up blank verse. (Germany also saw the only eighteenth-century translation of John Home’s Douglas (1769), although versions subsequently appeared in France, Italy (both 1822), and Japan (1979).) Although the first Scot after Buchanan to influence European verse and drama, Thomson is seldom (even today) perceived as a Scot by his international admirers. James Anderson Russell has argued, in Dutch Poetry and English (1939), that his reception on a continent still dominated by Classical aesthetics was positively aided by his construction of generalised, typical landscapes and avoidance of local colour. James Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian, contrastingly, are matched only by the Waverley novels in their impact on foreign images of Scottish national and literary identity. The first fragments were translated in France in the early 1760s by some of the leading lights of the Encylopédie: Diderot, Turgot, and Suard. The complete Poems were subsequently translated in Austria (1768–9), Italy (1773), France (1777), Denmark (1790), Russia (1792), Sweden (1794), Hungary (1815), Poland (1838), Norway (1854) and Spain (1880). Ten German versions appeared between 1768 and 1924, and seven French between 1777 and 1859. For many readers, however, the first encounter with Ossian came via Goethe’s much-translated Literary Impact of Scottish Literature, 1707–1918 35 The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which included Goethe’s own versions of extracts from ‘The Songs of Selma’ and ‘Berrathon’. Macpherson created a taste for a natural landscape wilder and more sublime than even Thomson could offer. Far from remaining the focal point, man paled into insignificance, his helpless alienation tempered only by the ‘joy of grief’. The providential, deistic religion of The Seasons gave way to a pantheism in which no element of organised religion remained. For many of its earliest European readers, Ossian’s lament for a vanished race articulated fears about contemporary society’s debilitated state and guilty feelings over the destruction of primitive cultures in the name of civilisation. Simultaneously, Ossian’s heroes offered a model for cultural and national regeneration through the noble disinterestedness that characterised their pre-feudal, pre-capitalist society. The Celts came to be seen as the founders of a distinctively northern culture. Particularly in Scandinavian and German-speaking countries, Ossian was adopted as a national bard, the ‘Homer of the North’, in the perceived absence of an adequate indigenous candidate. Herder argued, in Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (1773), that while the spontaneous, concrete, sensual character of ancient verse could never be recaptured, the northern peoples retained enough of their primitive vigour to foster a genuine Volkspoesie expressive of national character. Mme de Staël adapted Herder’s ideas in De la littérature (1800) to present Ossian as a model even to the effete south. For her, Ossian is superior to Classical Greek poets as he goes beyond sensation to invite reflection on the human condition. As modern poetry must follow the philosophical bent of its times, Ossian suggests how to blend image and idea, lyric and meditation. By the early nineteenth century, Ossian’s western European admirers largely followed de Staël in stressing his intimate and subjective rather than historical and folkloric qualities. (The latter, of course, presupposed the authenticity of Macpherson’s epic.) For Europe’s and Latin America’s emerging or re-emerging national literatures, however, Ossian continued to offer a model for cultural regeneration. Macpherson’s example stimulated scholars and antiquarians to reconstruct their own fragmented native traditions, real or ‘invented’. In stark contrast to his Scottish reputation as arch-angliciser and apologist for the Union, he was translated and imitated by the Romantic nationalists Petőfi in Hungary, Runeberg in Finland, Palacký in Bohemia, and Heredia in Cuba. Macpherson helped create the myth of the moral superiority and greater cultural antiquity of the subjugated people, which, in much Romantic historiography, provided justification for defeat and failure. The prototype for the national bard of Romanticism, Ossian showed how despoiled rights might be reclaimed in the imaginative realms of poetry and prophecy. Macpherson’s anti-classical commingling of genres – epic narrative and dramatic dialogue, elegy and lyric, poetry and prose – influenced pre-Romantic and Romantic novelists as well as poets: these include Klopstock, Schiller and Tieck in Germany; Chateaubriand and Lamartine in France; Zhukovsky, Pushkin and Lermontov in Russia; Monti and Foscolo in Italy; Mickiewicz and Niemcewicz in Poland; Rivas and Espronceda in Spain; Almeida Garrett in Portugal; Bilderdijk in the Netherlands; Bridel in Switzerland; Atterbom in Sweden; Clewberg and Kivi in Finland; Oehlenschläger in Denmark; Vörösmarty in Hungary. Ossian’s European success also initiated the Romantic literary tour of Scotland, pioneered by the Poles Jan Potocki and Princess Izabela Czartoryski, followed by, inter alia, Frenchmen like La Tocnaye and Pichot, Germans like Arnim and Fontane, and the Swiss Necker de Saussure. 36 Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard The Poems of Ossian sparked no interest, however, in more contemporary or authentic Gaelic verse. The first translation from Scottish Gaelic into a language other than English or Latin is as late as 1948; the first into a non-Celtic language (other than English or Latin) 1972. Whether one regards Macpherson as exploiting and traducing tradition, or as attempting to safeguard a threatened corpus by adapting it for Enlightenment tastes, his success effectively blocked translation from Gaelic for two centuries by nurturing the perception that it was an ‘ancient’, ‘primitive’, dead medium. European Ossianists also encouraged the belief that ‘Scottish’ and ‘Highland’ were synonymous. Ironically, rather than promoting Celtic culture, they often elided it entirely by superimposing Lowland culture on the north. Thus operatic and theatrical adaptations of Scott clad his heroes in plaid and transferred the action to a mountainous realm more precipitous than anything Scotland could offer. Likewise, an early Burns translator like Philarète Chasles claimed to be rendering ‘the patois of the Scottish mountains’, implying descendants of Macpherson’s Celts had abandoned Gaelic for Scots. The only other Scottish poem to influence eighteenth-century European verse was Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743). Outside the Netherlands, where it was translated and imitated by Elizabeth Wolff, and Germany, where versions appeared in 1784 and 1793, its direct reception was modest. As an inspiration, however, for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, which rivalled The Poems of Ossian and The Seasons in popularity in eighteenthcentury Europe, it helped form the pre-Romantic taste for the sepulchral. (Blair was often confused with his namesake Hugh, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres were widely translated in early nineteenth-century Europe and even in mid-century formed part of the school curriculum in Spain and Italy.) If contemporary Scots verse remained unknown, Bishop Percy’s inclusion of a number of Scottish pieces in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) introduced Europe to the ballad tradition. The first translation was Herder’s version of ‘Edward’ in his Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker, where Ossian and the ballads were presented as equally vigorous examples of Volkspoesie. ‘Edward’ was reprinted, along with translations of thirteen other Scottish ballads in Herder’s anthology, Volkslieder (1778). Wilhelm Grimm published an anthology of Scottish traditional ballads in 1813; further German anthologies appeared in 1852, 1861 and 1875. As Romanticism increasingly looked towards indigenous folk traditions as the basis for an anti-Classical aesthetic, Scots ballads were translated by major figures like Pushkin and Pavlova in Russia, Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark, Bilderdijk and ten Kate in the Netherlands, Afzelius and Geijer, compiler of Svenska folkvisor, the major Swedish folk song collection, Doucha in Bohemia, Arany in Hungary, Runeberg in Finland, Wergeland in Norway, and Fontane in Germany. The eighteenth-century Scottish novel had little European fortune. In Germany, as Price observes, Smollett’s perceived indifference to moral questions led to unfavourable comparisons with Fielding. In France, his linguistic coarseness, ignoble heroes, amorality and cynicism, even in bowdlerised translations, shocked French critics. The picaresque, moreover, was perceived as outdated, superseded by the psychological novel with its limited cast, linear plot, sympathetic heroes and strong love interest. Commercially, Smollett was more successful in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, but there appears to be little research into his reception there. Often regarded as the epitome of English insularity, he was nowhere perceived as Scottish until Scott’s 1821 essay sparked brief interest in his fiction as foreshadowing the Waverley novels. Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771), translated into German (1774), French (1775), Russian (1779), Dutch (1780) and Polish (1817), was favourably reviewed, but often perceived, anachronistically, as derivative of Goethe’s Werther. Literary Impact of Scottish Literature, 1707–1918 37 Nineteenth century and until 1918 Literary traffic between Scotland and mainland Europe was inevitably suspended throughout the revolutionary wars. A few translations did, however, appear, notably German and (Swiss-)French editions of Joanna Baillie’s dramas. The return of peace in 1815, though, almost immediately brought the first translations of two Scots whose influence on nineteenth-century literature is without parallel: Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Byron’s well-charted international fortunes cannot be discussed at length here, as – rarely, if ever, perceived as a Scot abroad – he had little direct impact on perceptions of Scottish literary identity. Nonetheless, as the Romantic writer par excellence, sparking unprecedented foreign interest in British writing, he provided a filter through which other, more recognisably Scottish figures were read. For many international readers, Byron forged a new language to express desire for freedom, national, social, individual, or existential. He showed that the poet could also be a person of action, inspiring the writer-soldiers and writer-politicians who participated in the Latin-American Wars of Independence (like Andrés Bello and José María de Heredia), the 1848 revolutions in Europe (Mazzini, Lamartine, Arany, Eötvös, Mickiewicz), and other national liberation movements. He was influential not only in allying poetry to democratic and national causes, but in rebelling against both Christian and rationalist beliefs and in presenting a vision of cosmic injustice. For many readers living under the restored anciens régimes, he expressed a generational sense of metaphysical exile and failed ideals. Major writers under his spell include Vigny, Musset, Stendhal and Hugo (France), Heine (Germany), Lenau and Grillparzer (Austria), Mickiewicz and Slowacki (Poland), Pushkin, Lermontov and Zhukovsky (Russia), Petőfi and Vörösmarty (Hungary), Mácha (Bohemia), Vraz and Kukuljević (Croatia), Espronceda and Bécquer (Spain), Almeida Garrett and Herculano (Portugal), Beets and ten Kate (the Netherlands), Kierkegaard, Rahbek and Paladan-Müller (Denmark), Almqvist and Tégner (Sweden), and Wergeland (Norway). The ageing Goethe translated extracts from Manfred (1817), Don Juan (1819), and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1821) and cast Byron as Euphorion in the Second Part of Faust. For Goethe, Byron/Euphorion symbolised the union between Romanticism and Classicism, north and south. For most younger writers, however, Byron represented the vanguard of the struggle against Classical restraints. British writers translated in Byron’s wake were often erroneously credited with similarly advanced political and aesthetic views. Thus Classical elements in the thought and poetics of Burns and Scott, and the latter’s Toryism, passed largely unobserved. The primary significance of Scott’s Waverley novels, translated voluminously from 1816 onwards, lay in placing the individual at the confluence of historical forces. Abandoning the abstract psychology of the eighteenth-century novel, Scott rooted the personality in a constantly evolving social and economic context. Almost as important were his formal innovations. In mixing styles and genres and promoting the locally characteristic over the classical and universal, Scott was seen as developing the innovations of Ossian/Macpherson. The use of dialogue to carry narrative, the radically reduced presence of the narrator, the unexceptional ‘wavering’ protagonist all contributed to a new ‘democratic’ vision of the novel where competing passions and ideologies were equally voiced. Scott’s influence thus extended beyond the historical novel to the great social novel of the mid-nineteenth century. For many nations, Scott is rightly considered father of the novel, finally dispelling prejudices against it as a low genre unsuited to weighty topics and unworthy of serious readers’ attention. Writers turning to fiction following Scott’s example 38 Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard include Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Vigny, Stendhal, Sand and Mérimée in France, Alexis and Fontane in Germany, Manzoni in Italy, Almeida Garrett and Rebelo da Silva in Portugal, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Tolstoy and Turgenev in Russia, Gil y Carrasco, López Soler, and Galdós in Spain, Stifter in Austria, Ingemann and Andersen in Denmark, and Sadoveanu in Romania. Scott’s role in creating a pan-European vogue for the medieval is well known. It is less often acknowledged that his ‘Scottish’ novels, particularly Old Mortality, were read as a response to the conflicts and upheavals of the revolutionary years. Liberal and nationalist readers lauded Scott for introducing the people into the novel, granting their language and traditions literary dignity. He was often incongruously paired with Byron as a challenge to the political and cultural order. Particularly in the Habsburg Empire, Scott was widely censored or prohibited for his anti-Catholicism and perceived nationalist and democratic sympathies. Elsewhere, Conservative critics lamented a refusal to give clear moral guidance. Only rarely – but significantly in France – was Scott portrayed as a unionist and apologist for the status quo. Scott could be equally important as a negative example, spurring the Young Germans or Mazzinians in Italy to develop a more explicitly engaged narrative model. Although Scott’s international reputation rests on his fiction, his verse attracted translators of the stature of Droste-Hülshoff and Fontane in Germany, Zhukovsky, Kozlov and Pavlova in Russia, Beets and Potgieter in the Netherlands, Sienkiewicz in Poland, Rahbek in Denmark, Fröding in Sweden and Heredia in Cuba. It was imitated by Pushkin (Boris Godunov (1831) draws on The Lady of the Lake), Mickiewicz and the Ukrainian Shevchenko. It was primarily the songs and ballads inserted in Scott’s narrative poems that excited interest, offering an influential model for the literary exploitation of folk forms. Of all literary works, The Poems of Ossian and the Waverley novels have had by far the greatest lasting impact on European perceptions of Scottish literary and national identity. Where, at home, they are read as attempts to reposition Scottish writing within a broader British literary identity, to most European critics and readers they have appeared to pursue a cultural-nationalist agenda. In his Historical and Literary Tour of a Foreigner in England and Scotland (1825), Amédée Pichot, translator of Byron’s and Scott’s verse and well-acquainted with Scott’s political convictions, described his works as ‘poetical protests against the act of union’. For Pichot, Scott had ‘restored Scotland to the rank of nations, by continually occupying Europe with the subject of independent Scotland’. Such readings of Scott and Macpherson hindered the European reception of writers, notably those of the twentiethcentury Renaissance, with more explicitly nationalist (or cultural-nationalist) aims. Other Scottish novels were translated in Scott’s wake, presented as products of Scott’s ‘school’ or even erroneously attributed to Scott. The 1820s saw translations of Galt, Hogg, Allan Cunningham, Thomas Dick Lauder, J. G. Lockhart, John Wilson, Jane Porter, Grace Kennedy, Susan Ferrier, Elizabeth Hamilton and Mary Brunton. Existing research does not indicate whether these authors had any individual impact. Galt – the most successful of them abroad – may, however, have influenced writers who proposed, like him, a more politically engaged historical novel. The one major Scottish novel of the period not translated is Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner; perhaps unsurprisingly given its stony reception at home. Only in 1949 did André Gide present the novel to a European audience. His preface to the first French translation underlined its innovative techniques and described Hogg’s characterisation of the Devil as ‘among the most ingenious ever invented’. Scott’s popularity played a major role in the European discovery of Burns. Although eventually translated into more languages than any other Scottish poet, Burns’s international success was not immediate. Indeed, despite jingoistic claims to the contrary, his Literary Impact of Scottish Literature, 1707–1918 39 impact on the high season of European Romanticism was slight. The first of his poems to be translated appeared in Germany in 1795, but by 1850 Burns had been translated into only four other languages: Russian (from 1800), French (from 1818), Dutch (from 1833), and Norwegian (from 1836). He was translated into sixteen more languages in the second half of the nineteenth century, eight more in the first half of the twentieth, and eighteen more in the second. He was first translated surprisingly late in some of the major areas of reception for Scottish literature: Sweden (1854), Italy (1863), Poland (1872) and Spain (Catalan: 1917; Castilian: 1919). No Burns anthology was available in Spanish before 1940, Polish before 1956, and Portuguese before 1994. Conversely, he was translated early (and extensively) in countries with limited historical interest in Scottish writing: the Netherlands, Norway, Croatia (1854), and Latvia (1863). No global study of Burns’s international fortunes currently exists, but the above suggests that both his ‘universality’ and his influence on Romanticism are more problematic than is often assumed. Although a handful of earlier translations exist, the reception of Burns really began in France in the 1820s with versions by the prominent translators and anglophiles, Pichot and Chasles. Burns was personally recommended to Pichot by Scott during a visit to Abbotsford. The conduit for Chasles was Byron, whose use of lines from ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ as the epigraph for The Bride of Abydos (1813) first alerted many European readers to Burns. The first French anthology of Burns’s works appeared in 1826, followed in 1829 by the first Russian anthology translated by the major Romantic poet I. Kozlov. The poems that appealed to these early translators were those that celebrate the domestic affections or the patriarchal simplicity of country life, and appear to advocate Christian resignation, or develop motifs from the ballad tradition. Even in this relatively conservative presentation, Burns influenced a poet of the stature of Leopardi, whose ‘A Silvia’ (1828) and ‘Il sabato del villaggio’ (1829) echo ‘To Mary in Heaven’ and ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ respectively. Carlyle’s advocacy of Burns in correspondence with Goethe was the major spur for German interest. In his introduction to the German translation of Carlyle’s Life of Schiller (1830), Goethe called for a German edition of Burns, which, with Goethe’s sponsorship, eventually appeared in 1839. So popular did Burns become in Germany that eleven further anthologies of his work appeared before 1896, while in Switzerland August Corrodi prepared his celebrated Schweizerdeutsch versions. The German Burns of the 1830s and 1840s was not the pious peasant of the earlier French and Russian translations, but the democrat Marx admired. Translators favoured poems with patriotic, egalitarian, humanitarian, or Jacobitical themes. Particularly in the translations of Freiligrath he was paired with Byron as the poet of progressive ideas. Similarly in 1850s Russia, the revolutionary poet Mikhaylov presented a Burns who appealed to the democratic writers engaged with the Agrarian Question. In the second half of the century, Burns was widely translated by champions of the newly emerging (or re-emerging) national literatures of central and eastern Europe. Versions appeared by some of the most significant poets of Romantic Nationalism: the Czech Doucha (1852), Croat Vraz (1854), Hungarian Arany (1873) and Ukrainian Franko (1896). For these, Burns not only combined political radicalism with non-parochial nationalism, but provided the model for literary use of folk traditions and for reclaiming a degraded language. In Italy, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, Burns spurred writers promoting the regional and popular over the metropolitan and artificial. In western Europe, he was as much the poet of realism as pre-Romanticism. In 1892, Burns became the first Scottish writer (after Alexander Fraser Tytler) to be translated in Japan, where he remains highly popular as a poet of nature. Ironically, 40 Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard a Chinese version of ‘My Heart is in the Highlands’ became a popular patriotic song of resistance during the Japanese occupation of mountainous northern China. If European interest in Burns slackened during the first half of the twentieth century, the post-1945 period saw massive translation in the Soviet Union (including versions in Estonian, Armenian, Georgian, Belarusian, Mari, Kirghiz, Kazakh and Tajik). Here Burns was presented as Marx’s favourite poet, a peasant revolutionary whose satire lacerated kirk and political establishment. Although an ‘official’ poet, Burns enjoyed enormous popular success in Communist Europe. The inspired versions of the Russian Samuil Marshak, the fruit of forty years’ labour, sold over 600,000 copies. It remains to be seen whether the fall of the Iron Curtain will have a lasting adverse effect on Burns translation. Certainly, the bicentenary of his death in 1996 sparked significantly fewer foreign editions of his work than earlier anniversaries in 1896 and 1959. Nonetheless, the last decade of the twentieth century saw newly translated editions in German, Japanese, Polish, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Portuguese, Spanish and the most authoritative to date in French. Only rarely, however, have Burns’s translators tackled other Scots poets. In Germany, Heinrich Julius Heintze published a joint anthology of verse by Robert Tannahill and William Motherwell (1841), while Freiligrath included verse by Allan Cunningham, Hogg and Motherwell in an anthology of British verse, Rose, Distel und Kleeblatt (1863). Exceptionally, Freiligrath also included, in Ramsay, a precursor of Burns. For many languages, though, Burns remains the sole Scottish poet to be translated. The little critical and biographical material accessible to most nineteenth-century translators presented Burns as an isolated genius. For his earliest European advocates, he was Henry Mackenzie’s ‘heaventaught ploughman’. From the 1830s onwards, however, Carlyle fixed the European image of Burns. His ‘Essay on Burns’ (1828) asserts that ‘for a long period after Scotland became British we had no literature’ and that the francophile Scotland of the Enlightenment ‘had no Scottish culture’. It was following Burns’s example that Scottish literature underwent a ‘remarkable increase of nationality’. Yet, Burns had ‘models only of the meanest sort’, taking ‘the rhymes of a Fergusson or Ramsay for his standard of beauty’. Carlyle is unambiguously disparaging of Burns’s immediate Scots predecessors, but many European readers took him to mean that even pre-Union Scotland had no Scots poets. The vision of Burns as reviver of a debased tradition or, more frequently, initiator of a national literature proved immensely influential among the Romantic Nationalists of central and eastern Europe. Just as Ossianism blocked translation from Gaelic, the cult of Burns delayed discovery of the indigenous Scots tradition. There are, however, two remarkable exceptions: Eduard Fiedler in Germany and Stanko Vraz in Croatia. In 1846, Fiedler published the two-volume Geschichte der volksthümlichen schottischen Liederdichtung, the first anthology of Scottish verse since the Delitiæ poetarum scotorum. His aim in presenting verse in Scots from the Middle Ages to the mid-nineteenth century was to show that Burns was no ‘diamond solitaire’, but ‘the centrepiece of a whole set of gems varying greatly in colour, size, and value’. Astonishingly from a contemporary perspective, Fiedler excluded the makars, offering only traditional ballads before the seventeenth century. The earliest credited poet is Lady Grizel Baillie. Volume one deals primarily with the eighteenth-century Vernacular Revival, including the first translations into any language from Ramsay and Fergusson. Volume two introduces no fewer than fifty-seven nineteenthcentury Scots poets. Pride of place goes to Motherwell, Tannahill, Cunningham, Hogg and, among living poets, the now obscure Hugh Ainslie, Robert Gilfillan, William Miller and William Thom. Fiedler’s anthology does not, however, appear to have triggered further translations from Scots. Perhaps the very range of (largely mediocre) verse defeated his object. Literary Impact of Scottish Literature, 1707–1918 41 Stanko Vraz (1810–51), the leading poet of the Croat literary revival, is the first translator of the makars. In 1868, a posthumously published volume of translations from various tongues included poems by Dunbar and Douglas, alongside Drummond of Hawthornden, Burns, Byron, Richard Gall, Alexander Hume, William Thom and William Miller. Regrettably, existing research does not indicate when the translations were made or how Vraz encountered this material. Scottish literature has never since matched the international visibility achieved by Macpherson, Scott and Burns. Such was its popularity and perceived fecundity that a Polish periodical, Rozmaitościszkockie, began publication in 1840, entirely devoted to Scottish or Scottish-inspired writers. The later nineteenth century is necessarily an anticlimax, with continuing interest in Burns masking substantial indifference to contemporary Scottish writing. Indeed no living poet appears to have been translated between the mid-nineteenth century and MacDiarmid in 1923. Novelists like William Black, Margaret Oliphant, J. M. Barrie, Ian Maclaren and Annie S. Swan fared better, especially in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Bohemia. Sweden, in particular, remained the most receptive terrain for Scottish fiction up to the end of the Second World War. Existing research, however, does not identify the Swedish audience for the Scottish novel, or chart possible late nineteenth-century Scottish influences on Swedish fiction. It seems likely that here and elsewhere, contemporary Scottish fiction was characterised as wholesome family reading. In France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia, only a handful of Scottish novelists were translated before Stevenson. The most successful was the now forgotten historical novelist G. J. Whyte-Melville, whose 1863 novel The Gladiators appeared in French with a prestigious preface by Théophile Gautier. Stevenson won almost immediate critical and popular acclaim abroad. Again the first translations appeared in Sweden – ‘Story of a Lie’ (1881) and New Arabian Nights (1884) – but international interest largely followed the French translations of Treasure Island in 1884 and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1887. Before the century’s end, both were translated into Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. Stevenson’s works have continued to be translated and re-translated at a steadily increasing rate. Comprehensively Scotland’s most translated author, Stevenson has now appeared in eighty-nine languages, and is the only Scot translated into a significant number of non-European languages. Yet there is remarkably little research into his reception and influence despite his importance for some of the twentieth century’s major writers: Proust, Gide, Malraux, Borges and Calvino. For Stevenson’s earliest French advocates, he was essentially a Symbolist. The leading Symbolist poet Mallarmé hailed him as a ‘Visionary’ (‘Robert-Louis Stevenson’, 1896). Marcel Schwob spoke of his ‘unreal realism’, with its ‘images sublimated beyond realities’, and praised the fascinating ‘silent spaces’ in Stevenson’s prose (‘R.L.S.’, 1895). Téodore de Wyzewa, a passionate Wagnerian, extolled Stevenson’s musical language but noted too that his characters shared with Dostoyevsky’s a ‘mixture of grandeur and vice, naïve innocence and depravity’ (Revue des deux mondes, 1905). By 1900, however, French critics recommended Stevenson as an antidote to the narcissism and hypersensitivity of Symbolism and Decadence. Camille Mauclair and Jacques Rivière drew on Stevenson’s essays ‘A Gossip on Romance’ and ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ to theorise a new ‘novel of adventure’ in which the creative imagination broke free from utilitarianism, idealism, or overt ideology. They echoed Stevenson in prizing ‘brute incident’ and the ‘charm of circumstance’ over moral and psychological analysis. This reading proved influential for Gide, who also underlined the mythical, epic dimension to Stevenson’s fiction. 42 Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard The Vatican Caves (1914), with its mixture of tragedy and farce and constantly changing viewpoints, has been compared to Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights. Gide’s favourite work, however, was The Master of Ballantrae, which has subsequently provided French writers from Mac Orlan to Le Clézio, with a model for exploring France’s colonial relations via the adventure novel. The novelist most sensitive to this dimension of Stevenson’s work, however, was André Malraux, whose The Royal Way (1930) and Man’s Estate (1934) draw from both The Master of Ballantrae and Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness in bringing western man face to face with his sinister double. The treatment of duality equally fascinated Proust, who, in Time Regained (1927), has Swann declare that Stevenson ‘is a really great writer [. . .] equal to the greatest’. Robert Fraser notes, in Proust and the Victorians (1994), that Proust’s favourite Stevenson works, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and New Arabian Nights, investigate ‘inner spaces that are initially sealed’. He suggests that Proust responded to hints that Jekyll might be homosexual and derived the motif of shuttered interiors in Remembrance of Things Past from Stevenson. From 1927 onwards, when Borges declared Stevenson’s ‘grandiose romances’ among ‘the greatest literary joys I have experienced’ (‘Literary Pleasure’), he repeatedly identified Stevenson as a major influence. Anglophone interviewers who queried Stevenson’s greatness were told that it was ‘as obvious as the sun in heaven’ (Conversations, c. 1998). The Fables in particular, which he translated (1983), were ‘a brief and secret masterpiece’ providing the blueprint for Borges’s parables of the 1960s. Yet, for Borges, Stevenson was perhaps more important as theorist than narrator. Borges developed the anti-realist aesthetic of Stevenson’s ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, which insisted that life was ‘monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant’ and art ‘neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate’. For Borges as for Stevenson, the well-wrought plot was more important than psychological motives, for the reader identified with incident rather than character. He echoed ‘A Gossip on Romance’ too in recommending that writers select details which open up ‘whole vistas of secondary stories’ rather than pursue descriptive totality. Just as Stevenson acknowledged the artificial nature of literary narrative, branding his characters ‘puppets’, Borges insisted that fiction should be self-contained and nonreferential. As read by Borges, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ and ‘A Gossip on Romance’ became two of the founding texts of Latin-American magic realism. In Italy, the young Calvino wavered between neo-realism and Stevenson’s creative liberty. Looking back in 1964, he saw his first novel The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947) as an attempt to combine For Whom the Bell Tolls and Treasure Island, from which he derived the technique of viewing the adult world through the eyes of a puzzled child. His second novel, The Cloven Viscount (1952), placed Calvino firmly in the Stevensonian camp. Its protagonist, split into good and evil halves by a cannon ball, is a grotesque variant on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There are further allusions to The Master of Ballantrae and Treasure Island. Calvino echoes Borges in presenting Stevenson as a master of playful, self-conscious, non-referential fiction, but insisted that his work had a ‘moral nucleus’. Despite having no explicit message, Stevenson taught a ‘precious secret’: that ‘believing in stories with a beginning and an end, with their own beauty and moral, means believing in the writer’s link with his people, in his place in a society’ (‘L’isola del tesoro ha il suo segreto’, 1955). Endorsed by Borges and Calvino, Stevenson remains a major influence on Hispanic and Italian literature. His impact elsewhere, however, remains largely uncharted. Although Scotland’s most widely read author, it is questionable how far Stevenson has contributed to international perceptions of Scottish writing. As his life-story is well known, he is generally recognised as a Scot, but is seldom placed within a Scottish literary tradition. Where Literary Impact of Scottish Literature, 1707–1918 43 Scottish critics have traced his interest in moral and psychological duality to indigenous sources, foreign critics locate them within the European Gothic or stress a Calvinist or ‘Puritanical’ background shared with non-Scots such as Hawthorne and Gide. Stevenson’s earliest French readers certainly traced his lineage to Scott, applauding Stevenson for liberating the adventure novel from ‘romantic furors’. However, more recent readings of Stevenson as a forerunner of magic realism and postmodernism have appeared incompatible with Scott’s historical documentation. Few contemporary works were translated before 1914. ‘Kailyard’ novelists, particularly Ian Maclaren and Annie S. Swan, remained popular in Scandinavia and made belated inroads into Germany and the Netherlands. New writers translated included Mary and Jane Findlater and John Buchan, whose international reception, however, largely postdates the Second World War. Most successful were the humorists J. Storer Clouston and Ian Hay, author of The First Hundred Thousand, a look at the ‘lighter side’ of life in the trenches. The novels now seen as the period’s major works, George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901) and J. MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914), met no more immediate recognition abroad than at home. More surprising is the (persisting) foreign indifference towards Neil Munro, translated only into Finnish and Irish. In the interwar years, J. M. Barrie, already successful as a novelist in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Bohemia, was widely translated as a dramatist. His plays proved remarkably successful in crossing linguistic, cultural and political barriers, with editions appearing in post-revolutionary Russia, China, Japan, Turkey and India. Even after the fall of Empire, Barrie’s drama was translated into Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and Arabic. The Admirable Crichton has been Barrie’s greatest international success, assisted by film adaptations in 1918, 1919 (Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female), and 1957. Its theme of social reversal lending itself to a Marxist reading, it was widely translated and performed in the eastern bloc. Recent translations of Barrie’s plays – Pantaloon, The Old Friends and Shall We Join the Ladies? in Italy (1993), The Admirable Crichton and The Old Lady Shows Her Medals in France (1999) – challenge British perceptions that he survives only as the creator of Peter Pan. Unquestionably, however, the archetypal ‘Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow up’ assures Barrie’s place in world literature. Pan’s fortune by no means stems solely from the 1953 Walt Disney version. Barrie’s various Pan texts (Peter Pan, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy) were already translated into over twenty languages by 1939. Herbert Brenon’s 1924 film (where George Ali doubled up as Nana the Dog and the Crocodile) had already made Pan familiar to cinema-goers. More recently, growing anglophone interest in Barrie’s private life is matched abroad, inspiring fiction by the Frenchman François Rivière (Les Ailes de Peter Pan, 1993) and the Argentinian Rodrigo Fresán (Los jardines de Kensington, 2003). [For convenience, key foreign language texts on the topic of this chapter are listed: Cameron, Margaret M. (1927), L’Influence des Saisons de Thomson sur la poésie descriptive en France (1759–1810), Paris: H. Champion. Kupper, Hans Jürg (1979), Robert Burns im deutschen Sprachraum, Bern: Franke Verlag. Michel, Francisque (1862), Les Écossais en France, les Français en Écosse, 2 vols, London: Trübner. Van Tieghem, Paul (1924–47), Le Préromantisme: études d’histoire littéraire européenne, 3 vols, Paris: Rieder.] 44 Paul Barnaby and Tom Hubbard Further reading Cardwell, Richard (ed.) (2004), The Reception of Byron in Europe, London: Thoemmes/Continuum. Gaskill, Howard (ed.) (2004), The Reception of Ossian in Europe, London: Thoemmes/Continuum. Henry, Peter, Jim MacDonald and Halina Moss (eds) (1993), Scotland and the Slavs: Selected Papers from the Glasgow-90 East–West Forum, Nottingham: Astra Press. Price, Lawrence Marsden (1953), English Literature in Germany, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Roy, G. Ross (1963–4), ‘French Translations of Robert Burns’, Revue de littérature comparée XXXVII (1963): 279–97, 437–53, and ‘French Critics of Robert Burns (to 1893)’, Revue de littérature comparée XXVIII (1964): 264–85. Smout, T. C. (ed.) (1986), Scotland and Europe, 1200–1850, Edinburgh: John Donald. 5 Post-Union Scotland and the Scottish Idiom of Britishness Susan Manning The parliamentary Union of 1707 was a much-contested event whose cultural consequences have been equally vigorously debated by scholars. This chapter will not attempt to review the course of the ongoing controversy over whether its effects were beneficial, or disastrous; almost the only point of universal agreement is that that Union was a watershed which defined the shape of modern Scotland in cultural as well as political terms. The critical preferences of most commentary have been coloured, if not driven, by (declared or implicit) political allegiance: nationalists tend to prefer literature of resistance that celebrates older Scots forms and idiom; Unionists find interest in assimilative forms. More recently, scholars have become interested in reading the post-Union idiom of ‘Britishness’ not as a condition imposed by loss of parliamentary sovereignty, but rather as a creative Scottish response which made available a whole new range of idiomatic, thematic, formal and – not least – critical possibilities to all subsequent writing in English. Developing this line of approach, this chapter will consider the defining contribution of ‘British’ voices that develop in Scottish writing between 1707 and the beginning of the twentieth century to literary modernity. In 1766 an ambitious young architect brazenly advertised his connection with an illustrious forebear to win favour for his entry in a major public competition. The architect was James Craig (1744–95), the poet under whose name he sought patronage was his uncle James Thomson (1700–44), and the prize (which included a gold medal and Freedom of the City) was offered by the Town Council of Edinburgh for the best design for a proposed New Town to the north of the ancient city. The ‘Prospect of Britain’ from Thomson’s Liberty (1735–6), elegantly inscribed in the approved version of Craig’s successful plan in 1767, was carefully chosen to appeal to the vanity, and the aspirations, of Scotland’s capital: August, around, what Public Works I see Lo! Stately Streets, lo! Squares that court the breeze See! Long Canals, and deepened Rivers join Each part with each, and with the circling Main The whole enliven’d Isle. The optative vision of the poem brings the confidence of early eighteenth-century neoclassical England into North Britain; like its great Roman antecedent, Augustan Britain would be imperial, connected, and – above all – united. The ‘enliven’d Isle’, surrounded 46 Susan Manning by sea, reinforced a British identity seen as culturally uniform and secured against its continental predators. Craig’s plan associated Edinburgh with the public-minded and progressive desires of a modernising age, and reminded his judges of the benefits brought by the Union of Parliaments in 1707 (indeed, the original version of his prize-winning plan, now lost, may have inscribed its Unionist patriotism on the cityscape in streets laid out in a Union Jack grid). ‘Order and regularity’ – in the terms of the Proposals for carrying on certain Public Works in the City of Edinburgh (1752) – were its ideals, as they were of the poetry of Augustan Britain. Whether architecturally or poetically embodied, Scottish Britishness proudly announced a public, civic identity, fostered but not circumscribed by the post-Union political state. The Kirk, the universities and the legal system all contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment as a phenomenon that explored – and expanded – what it might mean to be simultaneously Scottish and British. Private diaries, poetry and periodical criticism, formal historiography, ethics and epistemology articulate a multi-perspective sense of identity with complex individual and national expressive resources. Thomson was the eighteenth-century’s great British poet. A minister’s son from the Scottish Lowlands who lived most of his adult life in London, he wrote (with his countryman David Mallet, or Malloch as he had been known in Scotland before his own move south) ‘Rule, Britannia!’, in a masque of 1740 which attempted to create a unified British mythology of origins around the figure of Alfred, the exemplar of Anglo-Saxon liberties. The new polity that cost Scotland its independence from its ancient enemy was imaginatively legitimated, broadly, in two ways: first, through discovery of more ancient shared origins which antedated the existence of Scotland and England as separate states, and second, by describing the Union as a necessary stage in Scotland’s teleological historical progression from barbarity to the refinement of civil society. Political expedience was elevated to historiographical theory and political science in the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Ferguson’s A History of Civil Society (1767), for example, found a natural and universal tendency for ‘small nations’ to unite with their neighbours in mutual interests that served the larger cause of progress. (Michael Newton’s chapter on Gaelic diaspora literature is of relevance in relation to this point.) John Home, clergyman and author of ‘a tragedy of Alfred’, was much better known as the author of the sensationally successful historical tragedy Douglas (1756), which though it heralded a revival of Scottish theatre and became an object of Scottish national pride – at its first Edinburgh performance, a voice from the pit was reputed to have cried in triumph, ‘Whaur’s yer Wully Shakespeare nou?’ – Douglas was very much a ‘North British’ initiative, supported by the Kirk Moderates and University of Edinburgh professors. In the first scene Lady Randolph, one of the great tragic parts of the eighteenth-century stage, laments the ancient feud which precipitates the downfall of the Douglas family as a civil war between ‘sister kingdoms’ on either side of an ‘ideal line, /By fancy drawn,’ who refuse to ‘unite their kindred arms’. Thomson spoke broad Scots all his life, but perfected an English prose and poetic style based on Addison, Prior and Pope. His extended political pastoral The Seasons (1726–30) developed Pope’s praise of the prosperous legitimacy of the Stuart monarchy in ‘Windsor Forest’ into Whig praise of the stability of post-Union Britain. Particularly before the final confirmation of its supremacy in Britain in 1746, it was harder to authenticate the Hanoverian dynasty through continuity and tradition; it simply did not have the pedigree, in post-Union Britain, of the Stuart line. Cannily, Thomson instead elevated the concept of ‘British’ Liberty, the constitutional nature of the post-1689 monarchy, as the guarantee of Post-Union Scotland and Britishness 47 national prosperity. As we see in ‘Summer’ in The Seasons (1727), if architecture, as Christopher Wren wrote, has its political uses, so clearly has landscape: Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around, Of hills, and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires, And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all The stretching landscape into smoke decays! Happy Britannia! where the Queen of Arts, Inspiring vigour, Liberty, abroad Walks unconfined even to thy farthest cots, And scatters plenty with unsparing Hand. [. . .] Unmatch’d thy guardian-oaks; thy valleys float With golden waves [. . .] Thomson was perhaps the first, but certainly not the last, Anglo-Scottish writer to equivocate usefully around those patriotic ‘guardian-oaks’, symbols at once of covert Jacobitism and of British naval supremacy and doughtiness; the ‘native oak’ appears also in the full version of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ The genre of ‘prospect poetry’ to which ‘Summer’ belongs traditionally offers a unifying vision where the poet’s eye (and the reader’s mind) takes a sweeping, harmonising view of landscape as an evocation in synecdoche of the state of the nation. ‘A spacious horizon is an image of liberty’, Joseph Addison had announced in The Spectator in 1712; The Seasons elaborated this image across the geographical and metaphorical extent of the new Britain of the eighteenth century. It offers both mythological and classical sanction for the status quo; ‘Liberty’ naturalises it, guaranteeing abundance without toil, and sanctioning commerce and – by implication – imperial exploitation. But origins were as important as advancement in this compound vision. Britons laid claim to ‘ancient’ English constitutional rights, independence, and – somewhat later – invoked Scottish national heroes such as William Wallace and Robert Bruce as precursors of the freedoms of both Scots and English in Britain. In a spectacular exercise of convoluted rhetoric, Joanna Baillie’s ‘Metrical Legend’ of Wallace’s leadership of Scotland’s bloody resistance to Edward I (1821) was made to testify to the ‘blessing’ of the 1707 Union, while in an article on ‘Scottish National Character’ for Blackwood’s Magazine of 1860, Margaret Oliphant would invoke Bannockburn, assuming, for a moment, a Scots idiom to express her own sympathetic resistance to the ‘inevitable junction of the two portions of our island’ which ‘has been the one steadfast ghost afflicting the spirit and aggravating the temper of our auld respected mither’. At a moment of political tension which appeared to undermine the political principles of the Union, Walter Scott penned the Letters of Malachi Malagrowther (1826) to draw attention to the Westminster government’s encroachment on the British liberties of its Scottish citizens, and proclaimed the vitality of unity-in-diversity: ‘let us remain as Nature made us, Englishman, Irishmen and Scotchmen, with something of the impress of our several countries upon each!’ Union is not to be equated with ‘the necessity of Uniformity’. Malachi is a lineal descendant of a character in Scott’s novel about the earlier Union of Crowns in 1603, The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), in which the Scottish King James VI sits uneasily on the English throne, surrounded by an entourage of adventurers eager to take advantage of the new circumstances. The Letters describe a more passive vision of postUnion Scotland as a patient in the hands of medical innovators, ‘bled and purged [. . .] and talked into courses of physic’, and a ‘sort of experimental farm, upon which every political 48 Susan Manning student has been permitted to try his theory’. Such are the costs of progress, and Scotland has borne them disproportionately. While formal histories of Britain set the union in a concrete story of the nation’s advancement from barbarism to civility, a sort of shadow-history was created through antiquarian collections of artefacts, tales, songs, myths and legends of the nation, which brought a more diverse past into the popular present to celebrate the continuities of national identity. Robert Burns’s tale of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ was written for Captain Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland (1789–91), a companion volume to his already-successful Antiquities of England and Wales (1773–87). Walter Scott was an enthusiastic amateur antiquarian, both in the old black-letter books, and as a collector of artefacts. His national fictions were built on foundations of his own or his friends’ research; The Antiquary (1815) discusses the relationship between antiquarianism and history in construing meaningful relations with the past, and against a backdrop of threatened French invasion that reinforces the political expediency of union against a common enemy. Antiquarianism was not only a Scottish preoccupation: across the British Isles and in Europe antiquaries searched out and preserved relics of the peculiar and differentiated manners of particular communities. In Scotland’s case, however, the passing of tradition and custom was typically described as a process initiated or accelerated by the Union. Conventions of evidence and authenticity were flexible: James Macpherson’s ‘translations’ of The Poems of Ossian (1760–5), Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) all existed within a continuum of antiquarian recovery and literary impersonation; the relationship between authenticity and forgery in antiquarianism remains a much debated issue. Thomson combined both the tropes of ancient origin and historical progress in ‘Spring’ (1728), in which ‘sportive lambs’ ‘sprightly race’ over Druidic remains of ‘ancient barbarous times’ in a pastoral landscape that promised present and future peaceful prosperity. The bleeding world of ‘disunited Britain’ is recovered as the playground of a new British harmony created by political union between Scotland and England in 1707. Following the researches of William Stukeley, the Druids were invoked by Thomson and his later contemporaries William Collins and Thomas Gray, as ancient upholders of British liberty against Imperial Rome. Through the century the evidence of antiquity would be deployed as a calming measure in response to external threat and to anti-Unionist sentiment from within Britain; the Scottish jurist, agriculturalist, philosopher and essayist Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) composed his Essays on Antiquities in the shadow of ‘our late Troubles’ – the 1745 Jacobite rising against the Hanoverian monarchy. The author hoped ‘to raise a Spirit among his Countrymen, of searching into their Antiquities,’ in the belief that ‘nothing will more contribute [. . .] to eradicate a Set of Opinions, which, by Intervals, have disquieted this Island for a Century and an Half’. Not all was sunny in The Seasons, however: ‘Winter’ (1726), widely believed to draw on Thomson’s bleak memories of the Borders, described ‘Earth’s universal Face, deep-hid, and chill’, as ‘one wild dazzling Waste, that buries deep/The Works of Man’. In this desolate landscape, [The Hare . . .] the garden seeks, Urg’d on by fearless want. The bleating kind [sheep] Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth, With looks of dumb despair [. . .] The starving animal seeking nourishment in the garden: this was the outcome of the Union most feared by English observers. Not wishing to be left out in the cold, ambitious Scots Post-Union Scotland and Britishness 49 flocked to London to partake of the benefits of trade and patronage. ‘Winter’ was published the year after Thomson’s own migration to the capital; over the next two centuries he would be followed by Tobias Smollett, Joanna Baillie, Thomas Carlyle and many more; others, like John Gibson Lockhart, Scott’s biographer and editor of the London-based Quarterly Review, would reside there for longer or shorter periods in search of professional advantage. Scottish artists who spent periods in Italy, from Allan Ramsay and the Adam brothers to David Wilkie and Robert Scott Lauder, forged cosmopolitanism idioms to articulate local and vernacular subjects; writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan chose to live abroad while retaining a strong sense of Scottish identity. Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (1888), whose eponymous protagonist plays the exile as a bravura performance in the novel, is introduced by an ‘editor’ who describes himself as ‘an old, consistent exile’ guilty of ‘two unpardonable errors: that he should ever have left his native city, or ever returned to it’. This paradox of attachment, compounded of frustration, guilt and loss, animates post-Union Scottish literature of exile; in Ballantrae, it produced a masterpiece which exerted a profound influence on the idiom of Anglo-American modernist writing. James Craig’s somewhat self-interested veneration of his famous uncle was by no means unique in late eighteenth-century Scottish literary circles. The Cape Club, to which both Robert Fergusson and his friend the antiquarian David Herd belonged, marked Thomson’s birthday – as it did Shakespeare’s – as a special day in its annual calendar. Fergusson’s poetry is considered in more detail in other chapters in this volume; his accomplished English verse, like that of his admirer Robert Burns, has been programmatically undervalued in relation to his output in Scots. To be sure, a measure of political radicalism was encoded alongside the increasingly familiar nostalgia for a lost Scotland, in Burns’s versions of the old Jacobite songs; equally powerful, though, is the Unionist patriotism given intensely local expression in ‘The Dumfries Volunteers’ when ‘haughty Gaul’ threatened invasion in 1793: The Nith shall run to Corsincon, And Criffell sink in Solway, E’er we permit a Foreign Foe On British ground to rally. O, let us not, like snarling tykes, In wrangling be divided, Till, slap! come in an unco’ loun, And wi’ a rung decide it! Be Britain still to Britain true, Amang oursels united; For never but by British hands Must British wrongs be righted. The strategically mingled diction exposes the fallacy of a nineteenth-century critical myth about post-Union Scottish writing which still retains some currency: that it can be divided into the anglicised (rational, limited) productions of the ‘head’ and the emotional effusions of the natural Scots ‘heart’. Equally, it marks as futile any attempt to derive the ‘real’ views of any writer on the Union from his or her imaginative writings. It is perhaps more productive to regard the condition of Britishness as offering Scottish writers a range of rhetorical resources with which to explore the implications of ‘being modern’ in the post-Union period. Burns, as closely versed in eighteenth-century English neo-classical tradition as in traditional 50 Susan Manning Scottish song, turned both to a linguistic account in which the universal and the local are not alternatives, or opposites, but aspects of the same compound fate of consciousness. This versatility implies no neglect or undervaluing of the conditions in which this complex perspective of British writing was forged. By the mid-eighteenth century, Scots’ success in trade, in preferment at court and in government, became a major source of friction. In a letter of 1772, Hume declared that ‘being a Scotchman’ had damaged his interests in England; Alexander Carlyle records in his autobiographical memoir how he and Smollett were forced to hide in a London alleyway during the vigorous mob response to the Jacobite rising (Carlyle, along with Hume and most of the Edinburgh intelligentsia, took a strongly pro-Hanoverian stance in 1745, even to risking their lives in the city’s defence). In the fifteen years following Culloden, a new phase of Scots expatriatism and ‘invasion’ of London (in itself a mark of the success of the Union, at least as far as Lowland, Hanoverian Scots were concerned) led to renewed English antagonism. Between 1760 and 1790, sixty Scots were elected for seats in English parliamentary constituencies; between 1790 and 1820, over 130 Scots sat for seats south of the border. The ‘West Lothian question’ has a history as long as the Union. The London Journal of 1762–3, in which James Boswell set out to form his style, recorded the experiences of a young provincial engaged in an enterprise of cosmopolitan self-fashioning at one of the most unpropitious moments in Anglo-Scots relations during the postUnion period. His arrival in London to seek fame and fortune, or a commission in the British army – or, failing that, at least some form of patronage – coincided with intensifying anti-Scots feeling in the capital. The government, under the Scottish Earl of Bute, was unpopular for its policies and more so for its preferment of Scots. It was both a good and a bad time for an Ayrshire boy in the metropolis. Within a month of his arrival, Boswell’s national allegiances were tested at the first night of a new comic opera at Covent Garden. Two Highland officers (in the British imperial force that Boswell himself aspired to join) were jeered from the ‘mob in the upper gallery’, who roared out ‘ “No Scots! No Scots! Out with them!” ’ Boswell’s ‘heart warmed to [his] countrymen, [his] Scotch blood boiled with indignation’. What seems a clear moment of patriotic elation is rendered equivocal by an uneasy tense change which separates the composed reflection from the moment of action: ‘I am very sure at that time I should have been the most distinguished of heroes. I hated the English; I wished from my soul that the Union was broke and that we might give them another battle of Bannockburn.’ Boswell’s journal writing repeatedly registers the compound dynamic between the Anglo and the Scot in his British identity. A similar tension energises other Anglo-Scots writing: Smollett’s first novel Roderick Random (1748) opens with the sentence ‘I was born in the northern part of this united kingdom.’ Roderick Random, like the later Humphry Clinker (1771), contains characterrepresentatives from Wales as well as Scots, northerners as well as Londoners. Like many ‘North British’ eighteenth-century novels, this includes episodes in the trading colonies of the West Indies. There was some audacity in Random’s publication just two years after Culloden, when Anglo-Scots fences were just beginning to mend: in a mock-apologetic preface the author implies the breadth of a ‘North British’ perspective over English prejudice; and though the eventual marriage of Roderick with Narcissa presents the unity of the two kingdoms in time-honoured fashion, her name offers a veiled insult at the moment of reconciliation. Notwithstanding his preoccupation with independence (a quality he associated firmly with British identity), Smollett was invited to edit a magazine to defend Bute’s policies at the height of anti-Scots feeling in 1762. The Briton – whose title referred to George III’s Post-Union Scotland and Britishness 51 profession in his speech at the new session of Parliament in 1760, ‘I glory in the name of Briton’ – prompted immediate retaliation by John Wilkes and others in the form of a rival paper, The North Briton (1763), which attacked Scots’ language and their place-seeking indiscriminately: ‘Though I am a North Briton, I will endeavour to write plain English, and to avoid the numerous Scotticisms the Briton abounds with; and then [. . .] he may be taken for a Scotsman, and I shall pass for an Englishman.’ A comic character in Roderick Random, Mr Concordance, personifies the homology between national identity and language use. Scots (and notably Smollett himself) had a vested interest in stabilising English as the dominant literary idiom, against a backdrop of ridicule. Humphry Clinker, which might have been subtitled after an early Unionist work of Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, undertook a peregrination of the regions as a means of articulating the unity-in-diversity of Britain. Unlike Defoe’s Tour (1724–6), the integrity of its narrative was guaranteed not by the voice of an empirical, authoritative English voice enquiring into the socio-economic conditions of the different parts of Britain – Humphry Clinker’s story is told in a series of letters from correspondents of different classes, genders and local origins – but as a comic consensus built on the insufficiency of any single viewpoint to know, or to be, ‘the whole story’. Samuel Johnson’s great Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was essentially a product of mid-eighteenth-century Britain (Boswell tells us that five of Johnson’s six amanuenses on the project were from ‘North Britain’). It had an ideological, nationalistic aspect: emphasising the libertarian basis of English language change as opposed to authoritarian prescriptiveness of the French Académie Française, it institutionalised ‘British liberties’ in semantics and etymology. In the nineteenth century, the authority of Johnson’s dictionary was superseded by A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles – in 1933 renamed the Oxford English Dictionary – initiated in 1857 and brought to first publication in 1884 under the editorship of a Border Scot, James Murray, whose 1872 edition of the Complaynt of Scotlande discovered in this sixteenth-century tract ‘sanction [. . . for] forms and idioms which [he] had thought to be modern “vulgarisms of the local patois”, but which are thus shown to have a pedigree of three and a half centuries to plead’. The OED has been described by John Willinsky as instituting an ‘Empire of Words’ – the title of his book (1994) – substantiating its own claim to be ‘the most authoritative and comprehensive dictionary of English in the world’. The linguistic authority of ‘standard English’ in the world – and its associated cultural values – derived proximately from Anglo-Scots’ desire to eradicate ‘Scotticisms’ from both speech and prose, and simultaneously to find in them a more ancient and purer linguistic authority than the words that had supplanted them. ‘There has been a strange propensity’, wrote James Beattie in the introduction to Scotticisms, his 1787 collection of terms that Scots should take care to avoid, to debase the purity of the language, by a mixture of foreign and provincial idioms, and cant phrases; a circumstance, which has in other countries generally preceded, and partly occasioned, the decline of learning, and which of course must be matter of regret to those who wish well to British literature. This linguistic ‘purity’ was another version of the myth of single common origin which sustained Britishness; it was supplemented by an antiquarian desire to record older more various forms now passing into uniformity. More than most languages, ‘English’ (as Samuel Johnson recognised) is in philological fact a hybrid and dynamic compound of multifarious influences. If English and Scots were not identical, neither were they entirely separate; 52 Susan Manning while eighteenth-century Scots increasingly strove to write a ‘pure’ English untainted by Scotticisms, they retained what was perceived as the natural vigour of Scots idiom in their speech; its cultural value enhanced by the poetry of Fergusson, Burns and their successors, it became an available indicator of national feeling. In 1801 Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs record her ambition was to see ‘the study of gude braid Scotch made part of polite education’. According to J. G. Lockhart (whose Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819) assiduously records the linguistic habits of the older generation of Scots), Henry Cockburn used ‘Scottish dialect’ effectively in his own public utterances, but lamented that by 1844 it had ‘ceased to be the vernacular language of the upper classes’. William Smellie’s entry on language in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–71) – whose title indicates its Edinburgh authors’ ambitions to attract a readership well beyond Scotland – compared the ‘British’ tongue to ‘a healthy oak planted in rich and vigorous soil’; like its companion ventures Chambers Encyclopaedia (put together by William and Robert Chambers), Britannica exemplifies a powerful impulse of what might be called ‘pedagogic Britishness’ emanating from Scotland in the post-Union period. An analogous enterprise, the New and Complete British Letter-Writer (n.d.) by David Fordyce, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Aberdeen, was a manual of polite style that included model letters for merchants involved in colonial trade, as well as examples of emigrants’ correspondence suitable to various occasions and social stations. The ethos of self-improvement through intense personal effort, exemplified in the lives of the Chambers brothers (as told by William’s biography of Robert), and in part derived from a Calvinist-inspired striving for moral betterment, was secularised in the nineteenth century in exhortatory manuals such as Samuel Smiles’s Self-help (1859), Thrift (1875) and Duty (1880), whose fictional analogues were popular novels about the rise of ‘lads o’ pairts’ from humble origins to secure social standing and places of influence. The trajectory typically involved a symbolic journey from an obscure Scots village to London, or the colonies, with an additional optional – but equally symbolic – phase of final homecoming, and retirement in Scotland surrounded by loyal retainers. John Galt’s epistolary The Ayrshire Legatees (1814) and the third-person Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk (1822) were early but important examples; his The Last of the Lairds (1826) consolidates the hero’s success in the colonies, perhaps (like Fordyce) implying that a true Scot might find the symbolic capital of Britishness in the dispersed, and ‘rising’ centres of Empire, rather than among the corrupting influences of a seat of power irretrievably associated with England. Half a century before, Henry Mackenzie had been projected from trainee lawyer to celebrated author of the first popular modern novel by his astute adaptation in The Man of Feeling (1771) of the cult of Sensibility popularised in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) to the inverse case of a young provincial who travels from Scotland to London in search of his inheritance, only to find himself thwarted at every turn by his ignorance of the manners of the metropolis. Taking things at face value, the protagonist Harley is repeatedly rooked, outwitted and victimised; throughout these humiliations he retains the moral advantage by a superior sensibility which, though it called up answering sympathies in an extraordinary range of readers, renders him incapable of either civic or domestic life. Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) had made clear the need for natural sympathies to be checked by prudent consideration, to enable effective operation of moral behaviour in civil society; The Man of Feeling inflects thoroughly contemporary British concerns with a more local Scottish awareness of the problematics of personal expression in a social context that has moved beyond the reach of local kinship relations. Post-Union Scotland and Britishness 53 The Man of Feeling’s theme of provincial at the metropolis had a fragmentary, broken structure (probably inspired by Macpherson’s Ossianic fragments, a cause célèbre in London as Mackenzie, a young legal student in the capital, was composing his early draft) which suggests the hiatus at the heart of the continuous narrative of Britishness. Both Ossian and The Man of Feeling – each written by a committed Unionist with strong Highland ties, both products of the Scottish Enlightenment’s theorising about human sympathy and sociability, equally concerned with personal goodness and ancestral virtue outflanked by the conditions of modern society and the culture of progress – are significant productions of British literature. Periodical writing was perhaps the most significant vehicle for disseminating British idiom and manners. In the immediate post-Union period, Addison and Steele’s Spectator essays gave a uniformly trusted voice to the rising ‘middling’ classes; their authority was consolidated in Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783), which subjected The Spectator to sustained stylistic analysis. These lectures, delivered to successive generations of Edinburgh University students from 1762, formed the polite style of the later Scottish Enlightenment, and – exported to the American colonies – exerted similarly powerful influence over the idiom of generations of independent Americans. Other Spectator-inflected Edinburgh initiatives, Mackenzie’s The Mirror (1779–80) and The Lounger (1785–6), promoted the novel as a moral tool; subsequently Scott would expand the form to explore the personal and national complexities of Britishness as a compound of contested allegiances. Assimilative formulations of North British identity served well the interests of the travelling, trading and talking classes, but cultural uniformity was far from a social reality, even within the regions of England. Richard Finlay has questioned how far down the social scale this ‘process of Britification’ penetrated, how truly ‘national’ the identity it expressed. The ambivalence of ordinary Scots towards the Union was not lost on as astute a cultural historian as Scott in The Heart of Midlothian (1818): ‘[T]his reprieve wadna stand gude in the auld Scots law when the kingdom was a kingdom.’ ‘[. . .] when we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o’ our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns – But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’ Lunnon.’ Scott wrote three novels directly concerned with the consequences of the Union for Scotland – and England – in which the Jacobite threat is central to the plot: Waverley (1814), set in 1745; Rob Roy (1817), whose backdrop is the 1715 rising; and Redgauntlet (1824), about an aborted third rising in the 1760s, in which the refusal of Redgauntlet’s anglicised nephew Darsie Latimer to espouse the ancient cause, and of the Hanoverian forces to quell the plot by oppressive means, signals the definitive neutralising of the Jacobite threat to the unity of Britain. At this point, ‘the cause’, as Redgauntlet puts it with melodramatic finality, ‘is lost for ever!’ It is both a tragic moment, and a comic one. With the effective end of the Stuart threat as a realistic challenge to the throne, it became, in nostalgic cultural memory, a literary growth area even among those such as Scott whose political allegiances clearly lay with the Hanoverian dynasty. If Britishness was a state of being most fully articulated and exploited in writing by Scots intellectuals and adventurers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so too was Scottishness. Language was the most important common counter for Scots in their concentric formations of Scottish and British national identity after 1707. New forms of literary vernacular developed by 54 Susan Manning Fergusson, Burns, Scott and others expressed the continuing vitality of Scottish identity, and made it a valuable commodity for export. Landscape was another. ‘Everything belonging to the Highlands of Scotland,’ wrote Scott in 1816 in ‘The Culloden Papers’ for the London-based Quarterly Review, which he was instrumental in founding, ‘has of late become peculiarly interesting.’ These elements began to transform the neo-classical Britishness articulated in Edinburgh’s claim to be the ‘Athens of the North’ – not, like Rome, the seat of imperial power (that was the prerogative of London) – but the hub of an empire of learning and scholarship, where philosophy, education and art thrived; above all, a place of ideas. The foundation of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 began a new phase of Britishness in writing emanating from Scotland and based on the constitutional premises inherent in the postUnion state. With its Tory rival Blackwood’s Magazine (from 1817), the Edinburgh Review brought Scottish-inflected writing back to the centre as arbiter of British taste. However, by 1822 it was Edinburgh’s – and Scotland’s – provinciality that would strike sceptical observers. Robert Mudie’s anonymous The Modern Athens, written in the shadow of the spectacular public relations extravaganza choreographed by Scott to welcome George IV to Edinburgh, presented the city as a ‘widowed metropolis’, forever in mourning for the loss of her ‘head’. Scott’s grand historical pageant of clan loyalty included, with breathtaking chutzpah, a specially rewritten Jacobite song, ‘Carle Now the King’s Come’, to welcome the Hanoverian monarch whose great-uncle had routed Charles’s army at Culloden. Although the ironies of this celebration did not go unremarked, Scott’s vision embodied a new phase in Britishness: where, broadly speaking, in the eighteenth century Scots took Britishness to England, in the nineteenth, English visitors brought it to Scotland, and Scots took it to the world. After George IV’s visit, the most influential of these English tourists were Queen Victoria and her consort Albert, who became devoted to Scotland as a refuge from London. Beautiful scenery, plentiful game for shooting and an idealised peasantry brought generations of the English upper class in their wake. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scots developed a bifocal national identity, at once Scottish and British, described by Murray Pittock in Inventing and Resisting Britain (1997) as ‘the Victorian duality of localist loyalties within an imperial community’. Not until 1914 was ‘Scottish Nationalism’ articulated in terms of separation from England; before that Scottish civil society existed intact within the British state. Margaret Oliphant’s Annals of a Publishing House (1897) gives a lively account of the influential unionist-nationalist politics of the Blackwood imprint in a period when ‘a stream of constant communication flowed between Pall Mall and George Street’; her own extensive contributions to ‘Maga’ include a series of reflections on the cultural politics of Victorian Scotland. Scottishness within a British perspectival sensibility had been projected on to the landscape since Thomson’s Seasons and – more conceptually – Macpherson’s Ossian poems. After the work of Scott and his successors had associated antiquarian recovery of national traditions with precise localities, Scotland’s landscape and its guardians the ‘rural peasantry’ became texts of a Scottishness located strongly in the past: the painter David Wilkie found Scotland most remarkable as a volume of history. ‘It is,’ he wrote, ‘the land of tradition and poetry, every district has some scene in it of real or fictitious events, treasured with a sort of religious care in the minds of the inhabitants and giving dignity to places that in every other respect would, to the man of the world, be considered barren and unprofitable.’ That reference to the cosmopolitan viewpoint is significant: the national associations evoked in the contemplation of landscape gave it a value independent, and to one side, of the acknowledged cultural and commercial imperatives that drove forward Britain’s place in the modern Post-Union Scotland and Britishness 55 world, not least in the developing industrial heartlands of Glasgow. In the same year as Wilkie’s evocation of landscape as the great treasury of historical Scottish identity, Scott’s Bailie Nicol Jarvie declared (in Rob Roy) ‘Let Glasgow Flourish! [. . .] since St Mungo catched herrings in the Clyde, what was ever like to gar us flourish like the sugar and tobacco trade? Will onybody tell me that, and grumble at the treaty that opened us a road west-awa yonder?’ By 1900 Glasgow was not only Scotland’s largest city, visited by many international trade delegations that by-passed Edinburgh; in antithesis to the Athens of the North, it gloried in the soubriquet ‘Second City of the Empire’. By then, too, as Angus Calder has put it in Scotlands of the Mind (2002), Scottish culture was ‘a component, at the very centre, of the British Empire’. Joseph Conrad wrote in a letter in 1907 that ‘There isn’t a single club and messroom and man-of-war in the British Seas and Dominions which hasn’t its copy of Maga.’ But as Stevenson, alive to the regionalities of Britain, pointed out in ‘The Foreigner at Home’ (1882), the English language, ‘which will now frank the traveller through most of North America, through the greater South Sea Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a hundred varying stages of transition. You may go all over the states, and [. . .] you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow.’ Distinguishing between cosmopolitan ‘Book English’ and the still spoken ‘racy idioms of our fathers’, he pointed to the imperious presence of ‘foreign things at home’. In this essay and its companion pieces of Memories and Portraits, Stevenson (like that other self-exiled Scot Thomas Carlyle) modulates without apparent distinction between what is clearly a Scots sensibility, and its equation with the intensely anglicised moniker ‘the typical John Bull’. And yet he declares that despite their ancient enmities and different racial stock, the Lowland and Highland expatriates to the British Empire were ‘sentimental countrymen’ as they were not of their English compeers. Such unstable elisions and distinctions are characteristic of the Scottish idiom of Britishness in the second half of the nineteenth century. Burns’s martial unionism found an echo in the poet William Allan’s imperial version Rose and Thistle (1878): ‘The Rose and the Thistle thegither are gane [. . .] An’ wae to the loons wha their growin’ wad mar’. The first issue of Patrick Geddes’s The Evergreen (1895), whose title referred its reader directly back to the cultural nationalism of Allan Ramsay, insisted that ‘because we would not quarrel with brother Bull, nor abandon our part in the larger responsibilities of united nationality and race, we [Scots need not] also sink the older loves and kinships, the smaller nationality wholly’. Geddes promulgated a resurgence of ‘Celticism’ in Scottish writing, which found kinship rather with other races – the Irish, the Welsh – on the fringes of Britain than with the Anglo-Scots consensus. For much of the nineteenth century ‘race’ had – often in confused and contradictory ways – an intrinsic place in expressions of ‘scientific’ Britishness. John Pinkerton, antiquarian collector – and forger – of Scottish ballads, attempted to prove the degradation of the Celtic peoples (‘mere savages, but one degree above brutes’, as he put it in his Inquiry into the History of Scotland (1790)) in relation to the Goths (who in his account included both the Greeks and the Romans). Pinkerton and his successors sought to unite Scottish Lowlanders with English in a common Gothic or Teutonic stock, a position whose literary implications in the identification of a Celtic alternative (more poetical, perhaps, but less advanced in the scale of civilised values) would find expression in the full-blown, and divisive, theory of literary ethnicity advanced by Matthew Arnold in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). John Buchan’s Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot are British heroes of Empire; their sentiments and origins are unmistakably Scottish, but (like Thomas Carlyle) they refer to 56 Susan Manning ‘England’ as home, and contribute to the stereotype of the intrepid, upper-class, Englishman abroad. Occasionally, at moments of high tension, Scotticisms emerge through the standard English narrative; in danger, the heroes communicate through coded snatches of Scots ballads. As an infiltrator of enemy secrets in Greenmantle (1916), Hannay is a virtuoso of idiom, adopting and discarding voices, languages and accents at will, while Arbuthnot has a capacity for impenetrable personal disguise. Buchan’s distinctive gift to literary modernism is the representation of a consciousness simultaneously feeling one self, and inhabiting the public role of another. In their expedient pluralities, Buchan’s heroes embody the compound North British identity that escapes racial typing, narrow nationalism and single voices. Further reading Broun, Dauvit, R. J. Finlay and Michael Lynch (eds) (1998), Image and Identity: The Making and Re-Making of Scotland through the Ages, Edinburgh: John Donald. Colley, Linda (1992), Britons, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kidd, Colin (1993), Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manning, Susan (2002), Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Simpson, Kenneth (1988), The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Trumpener, Katie (1997), Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 6 The Emergence of Privacy: Letters, Journals and Domestic Writing Karina Williamson On Saturday, 10 January 1784, James Boswell recorded in his diary a ‘very agreeable dream’ about David Hume, which fastened so strongly on his mind that he ‘could not for some time perceive that it was only a fiction’. He dreamt that he had found a diary kept by the philosopher, ‘from which it appeared that though his vanity made him publish treatises of scepticism and infidelity, he was in reality a Christian and a very pious man’. It is not altogether strange that, seven years after Hume’s death, Boswell should still be troubled by the thought of Hume’s ‘infidelity’. Confined at the time to his house in Edinburgh with yet another bout of venereal disease, Boswell was prey to morbid anxieties; four days earlier he had a horrifying nightmare in which he watched a ‘poor wretch lying naked on a dunghill’ and being flayed alive (Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, 1982). In the present context, however, the dream about Hume is significant for the special authenticity it attributes to diaries; as evidence of a writer’s true belief, ‘published treatises’ are worthless compared with the countervailing ‘reality’ inscribed in a private diary. This chapter will be concerned with literature not primarily intended for print or wide public consumption (excluding letters and journals written by travellers, discussed by Catherine Jones in Chapter 30 on travel writing), a type of writing practised by Scots with peculiar energy and success between 1707 and 1918. Religious and secular influences combined to stimulate the growth of private writing in Scotland after 1707. The keeping of personal diaries as a means of moral and spiritual improvement through self-analysis was encouraged by the Scottish Presbyterian Church, and Enlightenment philosophy exerted a less direct but equally pervasive influence. The conjunction of Hume and diaries in Boswell’s mind was not fortuitous. Throughout his life Boswell regarded self-knowledge as the primary goal of diary-keeping. The Stoic precept ‘Know thyself’ is quoted in his London Journal (Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, 1950) as the motive for writing, and repeated in public twenty years later, with a new rationale: ‘because memory is so frail and variable [. . .] it is very necessary to have our thoughts and actions preserved in a mode not subject to change, if we would have a fair and distinct view of our character’ (‘On Diaries’, London Magazine, March 1783). There is a clear link between this conception of diary-keeping as a means of self-conservation and the debate about personal identity stirred up by Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). Hume overturned received theory by asserting that the sense of self depends on nothing firmer or more unified than ‘a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’. Subsequent attempts by Scottish philosophers of the Common Sense school to rebut Hume’s argument and restore 58 Karina Williamson the concept of a stable, coherent identity were so permeated by Hume’s rhetoric that, as Susan Manning has suggested in Fragments of Union (2002), they ‘effectively propagated the union-fragmentation tensions in his thought’. In the close-knit intellectual community of eighteenth-century Scotland, it was unnecessary to be a professional philosopher or to have read the Treatise – few did – to be aware of this contentious issue. The protagonists in the debate were not reclusive academics but actively engaged in social and literary life; hence speculation about the fixity, coherence and knowability of the self could not fail to gain general currency. Thus the concept of personal identity became problematic at the very time that new conceptions of national identity were emerging in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union. The ensuing ‘crisis of identity’ was a major factor in the shaping of eighteenthcentury Scottish fiction, poetry and drama. That it also gave a powerful impetus to selfwriting generally, and was a driving force behind the spate of domestic writings in particular, cannot be doubted. In Scotland, as in England, the eighteenth century witnessed a huge surge in the writing and circulation of private diaries, journals, letters, family lives, personal reminiscences, autobiographies and memoirs. The Scottish contribution to this body of private literature is both substantial and important, yet it has attracted little critical attention. In the past, few texts were readily available in printed form; Henry Grey Graham, in his study of Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (1901), noted the lack of ‘such diaries and voluminous correspondence as abounded in England’, claiming that in Scotland ‘no diaries were written, little correspondence was preserved’. Graham cannot have looked very hard, for by 1901 a substantial number of diaries, journals and letters had in fact been printed, usually privately by learned societies or aristocratic families; most of these, however, were confined to scholarly libraries or private houses. Among modern literary historians, Maurice Lindsay’s History of Scottish Literature (1977) is unusual in recognising ‘private literature’ as a significant Scottish tradition. More recently, Dorothy McMillan has demonstrated the wealth and variety of private writings produced by Scottish women. Yet in critical and theoretical studies of individual genres (autobiography, letters, diaries), Scottish writings, if discussed at all, are treated as tributaries to a cultural mainstream that is routinely configured as ‘English’. Boswell, Byron and Scott, for example, are discussed in Robert Fothergill’s Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (1974) without any mention of their Scottish origins. Despite their heterogeneity in character and form, Scottish private writings constitute a loosely coherent whole united by common social and cultural roots. The majority of authors belonged to a small caste of upper- and middle-class men and women, many of them bred or living in Edinburgh and the Borders, and linked by ‘those ties of affinity and family connection, which are, in Scotland, the pillars of society’, as Elizabeth Hamilton caustically observed in her Memoirs of the Late Mrs Hamilton (1818). It is crucial also to remember that unpublished writings were virtually never ‘private’ in an absolute sense; that is, intended for closet reading by the author or recipient alone. It was common practice for personal letters, journals and memoirs to circulate within families, groups of friends or coteries of like-minded readers. This kind of private dissemination was especially common among upper-class women. While resolutely, sometimes anxiously, shunning the perceived impropriety of appearing in print, they confidently expected their letters and journals to be read by members of their family and social set. By this means, expatriate Scots like Lady Louisa Stuart and Joanna Baillie remained within the community of readers and writers, and a tradition of private writing was transmitted via an intertextual web, sustained especially by the exchange of letters (Scott’s correspondence alone embraced almost all the authors mentioned in this chapter), but by other links also. Henry Cockburn, for example, Letters, Journals and Domestic Writing 59 heard about Henry Mackenzie’s reminiscences and read Lady Anne Barnard’s memoirs while working on his own. Robert Louis Stevenson in turn knew Cockburn’s Memorials (1856) and Thomas Carlyle’s Reminiscences (1881). When Scott started writing his journal in November 1825 (edited as The Journal of Sir Walter Scott by W. Anderson in 1972), he thought of turning it into an extempore ‘memorandum-book’ modelled on Byron’s journals, which Thomas Moore showed him when he visited Abbotsford in the same month. Letters By 1707, letters were already ensconced in the emergent bourgeois public sphere. The English ‘familiar letter’, with its recognised conventions of style and content deriving from Cicero, Pliny and Seneca, became a de facto literary genre in the eighteenth century. It acquired de jure status in Scotland when Hugh Blair included it in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783), decreeing that Writing becomes a distinct species of Composition, subject to the cognizance of Criticism, when it is of the easy and familiar kind; when it is conversation carried on upon paper, between two friends at a distance. Blair rated the correspondence of Pope and his friends as ‘the most distinguished collection of Letters in the English Language’, singling out Arbuthnot (the only Scottish writer he mentions) for the ‘ease’ and ‘beautiful simplicity’ of his contributions. In addition to the irony and humour characteristic of his published writings, Arbuthnot’s letters, which unlike Pope’s were written with no eye to publication, have a warmth and spontaneity rare in Augustan letters; Samuel Johnson remarked in Lives of the English Poets (1781) that he wrote ‘like one who lets thoughts drop from his pen as they rise into his mind’, in contrast to Pope. It was only through his friendship with Pope and Swift in London, however, that Arbuthnot’s letters got into print at all. Publication of private letters was strongly disapproved of in Scotland throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. Hume’s efforts to prevent his letters from being published posthumously are well known. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, whose well-informed, entertaining, gossipy letters were highly prized among his friends and acquaintances, was nevertheless angry when, in 1804, the Earl of Buchan tried to acquire some of them for publication. He ‘esteemed the publishing private, perhaps unadvised letters, without people’s consent to be almost high treason against society’, and thought it ‘a miserable thing for a peer to copy [. . .] Boswell who got nothing by it but hatred and contempt’ (as cited in Letters of John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, 1799–1812, 1966). As a young man, Boswell flouted convention by publishing a private correspondence, Letters between the Honourable Andrew Erskine and James Boswell, Esq. (1763), ‘with the utmost boldness too, as we have printed our names at length’, he boasted to his friend John Johnston. In the preface he impudently turned transgression into commercial virtue, arguing that it is the privacy of letters that attracts readers: Had any man in the three kingdoms found the following letters, directed, sealed, and addressed, with post-marks [. . .] he would have read every one of them; or had they been ushered into the world, from Mr Flexney’s shop, in that manner, they would have been bought up with the greatest avidity. As they really once had all the advantage of concealment, we hope their present more conspicuous form will not tend to diminish their merit. 60 Karina Williamson Although the facetiousness and laddish posturings of the Boswell–Erskine letters appealed to London reviewers, Scottish friends were shocked at the indecorum of publishing such trivialities. Blair urged Boswell to suppress or disown the book, but he was impenitent, bragging to Johnston, as cited in The Correspondence of James Boswell and John Johnston of Grange (1966), that ‘the narrow-minded and censorious Scotch rail at us. The goodhumoured jolly English like and praise us.’ Despite the taboo on publication, the art of letter-writing was assiduously cultivated by Scottish authors. Hume’s awareness of epistolary tradition is evident in the self-consciously ‘familiar’ quality of his first surviving letter, written when he was sixteen and to be found in The Letters of David Hume, edited by J. Greig (1932). Although his later letters achieve the unforced wit and conversational ease of his English peers, he continued to take pains over their style and diction. English epistolary tradition in fact impeded as well as stimulated Scottish letter-writing. Ramsay’s remark, ‘I look on ease and nature as the excellency of epistolary writing far superior to elaboration of style’, reflects the standard prescribed in Blair’s Lectures, but attainment of this cultivated spontaneity was hampered by anxieties about linguistic correctness. James Beattie, who, like Hume, worked hard to acquire a fluent epistolary style, pinpointed the problem when he complained in 1766 that ‘we who live in Scotland are obliged to study English from books, like a dead language’, and hence ‘are slaves to the language we write, and are continually afraid of committing gross blunders; and when an easy, familiar, idiomatical phrase occurs, dare not adopt it [. . .] for fear of Scotticisms’. (Beattie’s Letters were published in 1820.) Women letter-writers, however, with no public status to safeguard, were less constrained. Alison Cockburn, Hume’s friend and correspondent, writes with refreshing freedom, intelligence and compassion, her Letters and Memoir of her own Life being published in 1900. Robert Burns trained himself in letter-writing by zealous apprenticeship to the Augustans, as he explained in an autobiographical letter to his patron Dr John Moore, cited in The Letters of Robert Burns, ed. J. DeLancey Ferguson (1931): I engaged several of my schoolfellows to keep up a literary correspondence with me – This last helped me much on in composition. – I had met with a collection of letters by the Wits of Queen Anne’s reign, and I pored over them most devoutly. – I kept copies of any of my own letters that pleased me, and a comparison between them and the composition of most of my correspondents flattered my vanity. Burns used the letter form extensively for self-evocation; his virtuosity emerges in a mastery of a wide range of idioms and levels of formality matched to the occasion and the image he wished to project. His concern with style and tone are shown in his habit of making drafts of more important letters. These are consummately ‘literary’ affairs: they teem with references, mostly to English rather than Scottish writers, and allusions ranging far beyond the Augustan ‘Wits’. Burns wrote letters of application, of supplication, of defiance and of friendship, on literary topics and on politics, but he is best known as a writer of love letters, ranging from the mannered, sentimental correspondence with Agnes McLehose (‘Clarinda’ to his ‘Sylvander’), to the bawdy. His epistolary style is at its most studied when appearing least composed, as in a vernacular letter to William Nicol in 1787, reminiscent of Smollett’s burlesque transliteration of the epistolary efforts of Winifred Jenkins in Humphry Clinker: ‘I was gaun to write you a lang pystle, but, Gude forgie me, I gat myself sae notouriously bitchify’d the day after kail-time that I can hardly stouter but and ben.’ Letters, Journals and Domestic Writing 61 James Hogg, another working-class poet, and even more determined autodidact, has been undeservedly overshadowed as a letter-writer by Burns. This is partly attributable to accessibility: Burns’s correspondence first received scholarly attention in 1931, while Hogg’s letters still await a collected edition (currently in the process of being published: both volumes one and two are available as of 2006; the third at a still undetermined later time). Shepherds and bluestockings alike were his recipients, but perhaps even more than Burns, Hogg was the correspondent of the major literati of his day: Scott, Byron, Southey, Sir Robert Peel, and the publishers Murray, Blackwood and Chambers. His letters to William Blackwood alone furnish an enthralling snapshot of author–publisher relations in the early nineteenth century, as well as a guide to Edinburgh’s social and cultural dynamics. Hogg’s epistolary style is less obviously studied than Burns’s, but equally skilful, versatile and self-revealing. His command of irony in sensitive situations is notable. In his first letter to Margaret Phillips (27 July 1811) he qualifies a declaration of love with the addition: ‘do not be angry with me my dear Margaret – I am not courting you – nay I do not believe I would take you in a present (though it might make me cry to refuse you)’. Double-edged irony delicately bridges the social gap when writing to Scott after his ruin. Hogg consoles him, as quoted in Sir Walter’s Post-bag (1932), with thoughts of ‘the one great blessing that will attend it. It will free you from the endless pressure of fashionable company’; he too, he confesses, is ‘exposed [to that pressure] in a small way, and feel it a grievance on a poor man. But mine is as pease and groats to pearls and diamonds.’ The nineteenth century was the golden age of Scottish epistolary writing, as fears of committing linguistic solecisms receded and national identity became a less problematic issue. Together, the letters of Hogg, Byron, Scott, Joanna Baillie, Anne Grant of Laggan, Lady Louisa Stuart, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson provide a literary resource of absorbing interest and variety. Letter-writing was the sole literary outlet for Jane Carlyle, as discussed by Chris R. Vanden Bossche in Chapter 27 on the Carlyles; for Thomas Carlyle, it was another channel for his powerful rhetoric; for Scott, it was an extension into the private sphere of his restless addiction to writing in general, an issue broached by Fiona Robertson in Chapter 20. Scott brought to letter-writing a professional interest, as editor, in the private letters of others, and a novelist’s interest in epistolary fiction: The Fortunes of Nigel started life as a collection of invented ‘Private Letters of the 17th Century’ (in collaboration with Louisa Stuart). Generations of readers have been attracted to Scott’s own letters partly by the infectious gusto with which he sets out to entertain his correspondents, but above all by the honourable, warm-hearted personality they project. In comparison with Byron and Stevenson, Scott appears self-effacing but he is no more transparent than they are: as is clear from The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, edited by H. J. C. Grierson (1932–7), reticence and modesty, rather than self-parade, are his chosen style. He himself recognised that letters, like journals, are forms of self-representation, whether by display or by concealment. Speaking of Burns, he remarked in his journal that letters seldom convey the writer’s ‘real opinion’; the author treats subjects ‘rather so as to gratify his correspondent than to communicate his own feelings’. Stevenson, whose Letters were edited by B. Booth and E. Mehew in 1994, was familiar with Scottish epistolary tradition: he associated Hume with ‘the urbane, cheerful, letterwriting eighteenth century’, and enjoyed the letters of Scott and Anne Grant. In his later years he wrote with an eye to posthumous publication, and his superb letters abundantly display his narrative and descriptive gifts. But his self-absorption, like Boswell’s and Byron’s, is as engaging as Scott’s more extrovert epistolary manner. As Henry James 62 Karina Williamson observed in Notes on Novelists (1914), ‘He is never more delightful than when he is most egotistic, most consciously charmed with something he has done.’ Journals As journal-writers, Boswell, Byron and Scott rank alongside the great English diarists – Pepys, John Wesley and Frances Burney – but their productions should be seen in the context of a massive increase in diaries and memoirs in Scotland from the eighteenth century onwards, written by people of all ranks and occupations. The accepted functions of such writing are listed by Adam Mackie of Fyvie, farmer, merchant and innkeeper, in The Diary of a Canny Man, 1818–28 (1991), on his opening page: 1st May 1818. This book is purposed for writing down occurrences, passing events and designed to serve as a refreshment of mind afterwards, and to be a sort of diary wherein I may write what manner I have spent my time whether in labour, study, business, pleasure or idleness. Also to be a taskmaster which I may suppose askes the question every night: What have you done this day? The relative weighting given to topical happenings, personal memoranda and selfexamination naturally varies from writer to writer, but self-analysis for the purpose of personal improvement is especially prominent as a motive. Scott, recalling on 1 January 1828 that he has kept a diary for over two years, adds ‘that it has made me wiser or better I dare not say’. The moral motive provides a rich source of unconscious humour in the delightful journals kept by Marjory Fleming from the age of seven to eight (1810–11). She dutifully confesses and deplores her lapses, but rebellious nature keeps breaking in. As Mark Twain, quoted in The Complete Marjory Fleming, edited by F. Sidgwick (1934), observes, her ‘perfunctory pieties and shop-made holiness’ cannot ‘squelch her spirits or put out her fires for long’. The freshness, charm and precocious sagacity of Marjory’s journals, enhanced by the pathos of her early death, have captivated readers since they were first published in 1858. Her juvenile perceptiveness about people and social manners anticipates that of two other young Scotswomen: the diaries kept by Helen Graham in Edinburgh in 1823–6, published as Parties and Pleasures: The Diaries of Helen Graham in 1957, and the journal kept by Anne Chalmers on a visit to London in 1830 when she was seventeen, contained in Letters and Journals of Anne Chalmers (1922), bear comparison in acuteness of observation, vivacity and wit with the early diaries of Frances Burney. Boswell noted the conjunction of journals and letters as modes of self-writing: ‘my book of letters is in effect part of my journal, as it shows how my mind was occupied’ (cited in Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, 1982). Taken together, his private writings form one of the most sustained, uninhibited and compulsively readable exercises in selfrepresentation in the English language. Boswell’s psychology – a singular mixture of vanity and humility, lecherousness and moral conscience, shrewdness and naivety, reverence and impudence, violent swings from exuberance to depression, chameleon-like adaptability to his audience – is laid bare with unparalleled candour. Margaret Boswell commented that he was leaving himself ‘embowelled to posterity’; to which Boswell retorted, as quoted in Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–6 (1963), ‘but I think it is rather leaving myself embalmed. It is certainly preserving myself.’ His incessant struggle to establish a durable identity is one of the peculiar fascinations of his private writings. Letters, Journals and Domestic Writing 63 Shown these ‘strange journals’, Boswell’s parish minister was ‘surprised a lad of sense and come to age should be so childish as keep a register of his follies and communicate it to others as if proud of them’. Boswell, however, felt vindicated some weeks later when Samuel Johnson praised him (in principle) for keeping a ‘fair and undisguised’ journal of his life. To be sure, Johnson advised him to ‘keep it private’ and to arrange for it to be burnt after his death, but Boswell preferred to envisage it (see his London Journal, as published in 1950) ‘carefully laid up among the archives of Auchinleck’. The privacy question resurfaced later, however. In 1779, Boswell took fright on reading the diary of a farmer in which ‘his acts of profligacy were recorded in plain terms, and his folly and vanity set down’, and resolved, as quoted in Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782 (1977), to be more circumspect himself: Reading this journal made me uneasy to think of my own. It is preserving evidence against oneself; it is filling a mine which may be sprung by accident or intention. Were my journal to be discovered and made public in my own lifetime, how shocking would it be to me! And after my death, would it not hurt my children? I must not be so plain. Recorded among the self-revelations and indiscretions of his own journals, the incident should perhaps be read as exemplifying the paradoxical combination of secrecy and revelation that characterises ‘private writing’. Non-literary diaries and memoirs from the 1707–1918 period are of literary interest in three ways: sometimes intrinsically, as texts; generically, as revealing the cultural conventions governing their production; and contextually, as providing a rich sub-stratum of recorded experience on which fictional constructions could draw. Clerical diaries, for example, chronicling the parochial and domestic lives of church ministers, constitute a sub-genre fictionalised by John Galt in Annals of the Parish (1821). George Ridpath’s Diary, 1755–1761 (1922), covering six years of his ministry in Stichel, Roxburghshire, gives an intimate picture of parish life comparable to that recorded by his English contemporary, parson James Woodforde. John Mill’s Diary, 1740–1803 (1889), part retrospective memoir, part journal, records the strenuous life of a minister of three parishes on Shetland. Mill is singularly unimaginative, but his literal-mindedness gives his prose a certain blunt eloquence: spiritual crises, tempestuous sea-journeys, parish finances, or the search for a wife all occupy the same discursive plane. Especially memorable are Mill’s altercations with the Devil, whom he treats more like a delinquent schoolboy than the Prince of Darkness. Early in his ministry, ‘Satan raged exceedingly’, taking possession of three of his parishioners. One woman was mute until Satan seemed to make use of her tongue and said – The pulpit was upon the South Side of the Kirk. I said it would continue there as long as God pleased. He said I made lies upon him, for which I called him (as indeed he was) a damned rascal for his lying impudence, which he cared not for. Numerous diaries and memoirs recording the spiritual struggles of faithful Christians survive from this period. Most are too suffocatingly pious to be readable, but they re-emerge, parodically transformed, in Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Byron’s journals offer an altogether more patrician insouciance to the world, the flesh and the Devil, but they present similar ambivalences about human motivation, and about the appropriateness of the journal as the oxymoronic private–public space best able to articulate this. His first journal opens on 14 November 1813 with 64 Karina Williamson a Boswellian flourish (Byron was an avid reader of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, but could not have known his private journals): If this had been begun ten years ago and faithfully kept!!! – heigho! There are too many things I wish never to be remembered, as it is [. . .] At five-and-twenty, when the better part of life is over, one should be something; – and what am I? nothing but five-and-twenty. (Quoted in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. L. Marchand, 1973–82) Granted a glimpse of Burns’s letters, then regarded as unpublishable, Byron exclaimed on 13 December 1813: ‘What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!’ This celebrated pronouncement has furnished the title of at least one study of Burns; in context, it seems at least as much displaced self-analysis as critical judgement. It is a form of self-characterisation inseparable (as Leslie Marchand makes clear) from that of Byron’s letters. Both are enormously effective rhetorical performances, with an audience most firmly implied (some of Byron’s most accomplished letters were to his publisher, John Murray, another expatriate Scot), even when that audience is himself. On 6 December 1813, for example, reflecting on the self-contradictions which arise out of extempore journalising, he makes virtue out of necessity thus: ‘If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to one’s self than to any one else), every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor.’ Scott turned to journal-keeping under duress: his journal is the product of his years of greatest pressure (and arguably greatest personal unhappiness): the collapse of his publishing house, Constable, his personal bankruptcy, the death of his wife and his own increasingly debilitating illness. More than once, in his self-imposed course of grinding productivity to meet the claims of his creditors, he commends himself to the wisdom of the ancient Stoic philosophers. But the ‘Gurnal’ (as he self-deprecatingly styled it) served also as a kind of pressure-valve, allowing him to record – and therefore perhaps to realise – aspects of his punitive daily routine which he was too proud, too private – and too much of a man of the Enlightenment – to confide even to close friends: bad dreams, bodily indignities, irrational fears and angers. In these, Scott aligned himself, as nowhere else in his writing, with that great herald of Romantic self-expression, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The entry for 1 January 1828 opens with the same epigraph as on the title-page of 1825: As I walked by myself I talkd to my self And thus my self said to me. The reference is to Rousseau’s Confessions of 1781, a work first translated into English in 1782, as Scott entered his teens. Domestic writing The term ‘domestic writing’ describes texts primarily concerned with ‘home’, in the sense of family and household, a particular locality, or Scotland at large. They commonly took the form of personal memoirs and reminiscences but they were not intimate or introspective even when (as in Sir John Clerk’s memoirs, for example) the format was autobiographical. Letters, Journals and Domestic Writing 65 Although grounded in the personal experience and perceptions of the author, their purpose was to record national, local, or family affairs, characters and manners for posterity, not to explore inner thoughts and feelings. Thus they complemented in private the public efforts of eighteenth-century antiquaries, such as Sir David Dalrymple (Lord Hailes) and Clerk himself, to promote a sense of Scottish nationhood by reconstructing Scotland’s past. Concern with the roots of identity is manifest in the assiduous recording of family histories and genealogies: Walter Scott prefaced the account of his own ancestry in ‘Memoirs’ (1808) with an aphorism. ‘Every Scotishman has a pedigree. It is a national prerogative as inalienable as his pride and his poverty.’ In his memoir, Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk, 1676–1755 (1892), Clerk disingenuously asserted and disclaimed his prerogative at once, by declaring that ‘having nothing to boast of as to the Antiquity of my Family, which by-thebye, I have always laught at in others, I shall trace my mean Progenitors no farther back than about the [year] 1568’. The value of domestic writings as historical sources and illustrations is unquestionable, but their literary value is variable. Truthfulness is sometimes their only merit. Private Annals of my Own Time (1914), by Christian Dalrymple, daughter of Lord Hailes, simply reports, with painstaking fidelity, family births, marriages, illnesses, accidents, journeys and deaths. As Samuel Johnson, quoted in Boswell’s Life (1791), said of her father’s Annals of Scotland (1776), they are ‘very exact; but they contain mere dry particulars’. In the reminiscences and memoirs of Alexander Carlyle, Henry Mackenzie, Henry Cockburn and a cohort of talented women writers, however, the dry bones live. Carlyle, Mackenzie and Cockburn vividly re-create the culture and society of Edinburgh in what they regarded as its most brilliant epoch. For Carlyle, this was a vanishing world; for Mackenzie and Cockburn, in Memorials of his Time (1856) looking back in the 1820s, ‘Old Edinburgh was no more.’ Yet there is little sentimentality in their reconstructions of the past. Carlyle, minister of Inveresk from 1748 to 1805, opens his ‘Anecdotes and Characters of the Times’ with a commitment to fact: Having observed how carelessly, and consequently how falsely, history is written, I have long resolved to note down certain facts within my own knowledge [. . .] that may be subservient to a future historian. Though modestly offering only ‘such a faithful picture of times and characters as came within my view in the humble and private sphere of life’, he justifies his subjective viewpoint on universal grounds which reveal his commitment to Scottish Enlightenment principles: in his Autobiography (1860) he observes ‘in whatever sphere men act, the agents and instruments are still the same, viz. the faculties and passions of human nature’. Thus empowered, he writes with a frankness, garrulity and fullness of detail that make his work engaging both as a self-portrait and as a picture of his world. Though many things of a private and intimate nature are not said, no impression of secrecy or suppression emerges: the mask of decorum is impenetrable. Mackenzie’s ‘Reminiscences’ (published as The Anecdotes and Egotisms of Henry Mackenzie, 1927) took a different shape. Written as a disconnected set of texts of varying length, from aphorisms to short essays, and in different modes (description, reflection, pithy comment and personal narrative), their appeal lies in their vivid, kaleidoscopic quality and dry wit. Neither ‘Anecdotes’ nor ‘Egotisms’ were published in Mackenzie’s lifetime, and the lack of polish in both works is part of their informal charm for a modern reader. The raw material for a never-written autobiography, they remained unpublished for a century after his death. 66 Karina Williamson It is evident from the care Cockburn took in his later years to edit his memoirs and journals that he intended them for eventual publication, but he observed the strict conventions of privacy prevalent in Scotland in his day by withholding them from print while he lived. In January 1857, the Edinburgh Review hailed Memorials of his Time on publication for its ‘high artistic merit’, and ‘very just impression’ of the author’s rare powers of conversation. It successfully combines personal memoir with social history and a colourful gallery of character-portraits. After fifty years’ energetic activity in political and cultural affairs as a leading Whig lawyer, Cockburn believed (quoting his Life of Lord Jeffrey, 1852) he had lived through ‘the last purely Scotch age’. Nevertheless, he was acutely aware of the danger of sentimentalising the past; when he discovered in 1824 that Mackenzie was being tempted by a bookseller to write his reminiscences, he ‘hoped the temptation would prevail’, but added, Yet it is nearly impossible for an old good man to remember truly. Whatever it is amiable to soften or forget, is forgotten or softened, the angularities of nature are smoothed down, and everything is coloured by a haze of tenderness. The angularities remain unblunted in Cockburn’s own memoirs. In a style which has the force and suppleness without the redundancy of everyday speech, he conveys a richly detailed, affectionate, but far from rose-tinted view of the Scottish society of his earlier days: his criticisms of its rigidities are hard-hitting. The two primary reasons why domestic writings were not published in their authors’ lifetime were fear of giving offence to people named in the text and literary decorum. The strength of feeling about personal privacy in Cockburn’s generation became apparent when John Gibson Lockhart published his own domestic records, in the semi-fictionalised shape of Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819). Masquerading as a Welshman residing in Scotland, Lockhart drew vivacious, sometimes satirical sketches of Scottish society, characters and manners. Although he wrote as a self-proclaimed enemy of Scottish Whiggism, he avoided personal invective and did not probe into the private lives of the well-known people he described. Nonetheless, the book gave offence. In a spirited appendix to a later edition, ‘Peter’ describes how he was accused of violating ‘the rights of privacy’ by writing about named and known individuals. He retorted by deriding the absurd ‘squeamishness’ of his critics, claiming that their real motive was political. This was doubtless partly true, but Lockhart failed to recognise the genuine, if excessive, ‘squeamishness’ of Scots of earlier generations about naming individuals in public (for Mackenzie, a material objection to publishing his reminiscences). Literary decorum provided an even stronger obstacle. Blair’s strictures on domestic history-writing in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783) show why the Scottish literati were so reluctant to publish their personal memoirs. He discusses ‘Memoirs’ as one of the inferior kinds of Historical Composition [. . .] in which an Author does not pretend to give full information of [. . .] the period of which he writes, but only to relate what he himself had access to know, or what he was concerned in, or what illustrates the conduct of some person, or the circumstances of some transaction, which he chooses for his subject. Hence, ‘profound research, or enlarged information’ are not required, nor is the memoirist ‘subject to the same laws of dignity and gravity’ as a serious historian. ‘He may talk freely of himself; he may descend into the most familiar anecdotes.’ The only obligation is to Letters, Journals and Domestic Writing 67 convey ‘useful and curious’ facts in a ‘sprightly and interesting’ manner. Blair thus grants memoirs some literary merit but no importance, describing them with genial contempt as ‘a species of Writing very bewitching to such as love to write concerning themselves’. It was precisely the trivial, undignified nature of domestic writings that inhibited Scottish authors from exposing them to public gaze. Clerk left firm instructions on this matter in his manuscript Memoirs; since his intention, he explained, was only to satisfy the curiosity of his relations and dependants, he would write ‘with the same negligence of style that so many trifleing occurences may deserve’, adding, ‘with a view to all this, I absolutely prohibite and discharge any of my Posterity from lending them [heavily emphasised] or dispersing them abroad’. Mackenzie’s resistance to the repeated urgings of booksellers and friends to publish his reminiscences was based on the same scruple. Such ‘trifles’, he feared, might ‘excite the ridicule of the fastidious, or the censures of the critical’, and he was nervous about ‘risking the little reputation which I have acquired as an author’ (quotations are from Literature and Literati: The Literary Correspondence and Notebooks of Henry Mackenzie, vol. 2, 1999). The aesthetic principle here is obvious: it was a central tenet of neo-classical criticism that art should aim at the dignified and general rather than the trivial and particular. But Mackenzie’s anxiety about his reputation has a specifically Scottish dimension: it reflects the disabling awareness among Scots of his generation of their insecure status in the Anglocentric public sphere. Domestic writing by Scottish women arguably flourished because rather than in spite of the protocols which excluded women generally from the public sphere, and the additional social stigma inhibiting middle- and upper-class women from publishing under their own name. Family memoirs provided a channel for talents and energies that under other conditions might have gone into the production of novels or plays. Dorothy McMillan identifies a strong ‘subterranean tradition’ of memoir-writing which developed among upper-class Scotswomen, motivated by attachment to family and class, and ‘a sense of shared values’, rather than national loyalty as such. Addressing a limited circle of relations and friends without thought of publication (even posthumously), they adopt an intimate, high-spirited and forthright style, using dialogue and scene-setting details for dramatic effect, and skilfully control the dynamics of storytelling. Lady Murray of Stanhope, whose account of the adventurous life of her mother, Lady Grisell Baillie, was written in 1749 and published in 1822 in Memoirs of the Lives and Characters of the Right Honourable George Baillie of Jerviswood, and of Lady Grisell Baillie, disclaimed literary pretensions: fearing that affection for her mother ‘may bias and blind me’, she resolves ‘to set a guard upon myself, to keep strictly to truth, and relate facts which will speak for themselves’. The result is far from the dry, emotionless chronicle this might suggest. Lady Murray’s powers of imaginative reconstruction, coloured by her irrepressible affection, give her story animation, poignancy and a satisfying shape. Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard, better known for her travel letters and journals, writes with more self-conscious craft. In her private memoirs (lengthy extracts from which were published in The Lives of the Lindsays, 1840), Barnard positions herself ironically as heroine of the narrative, making her appearance in 1750 as her mother’s first infant. ‘That child was the Anne Lindsay who now addresses you, and in the arms of my nurse I promised to be a little heiress, perhaps a heroine worthy of having my name posted on the front of a novel.’ She was robbed of her prospects, however, when her parents, ‘having nothing else to do in the country’, persisted in their ‘laudable aim of peopling the castle of Balcarres, till their family consisted of eight boys and three girls’. With a mixture of astringent humour and rueful honesty, Barnard 68 Karina Williamson describes a privileged childhood made miserable by the punitive regimen presided over by their mother: our house [. . .] was often a sort of little Bastile, in every closet of which was to be found a culprit, – some were sobbing and repeating verbs, others eating their bread and water – some preparing themselves to be whipped. The talents of a novelist manqué are equally conspicuous in Lady Louisa Stuart’s biographical memoirs, especially her Memoire of Frances, Lady Douglas (1985), and sparkling ‘Account of John Duke of Argyll and his Family’ (in Lady Louisa Stuart: Selections from her Manuscripts, 1899). She turns character-portrayal into high art, excelling both in set-pieces, like the superb portrait of Lady Mary Coke, and in the satirical unfolding of character through situation and action. Jane Warburton, Duchess of Argyll, emerges from a string of appearances as a creature of incurable vulgarity and stupidity, her placid unawareness of her own deficiencies giving her a comic integrity that prevents the portrait from becoming mere caricature. Elizabeth Grant’s appealing Memoirs of a Highland Lady (1898) is a later development of this ‘subterranean tradition’ into full-blown autobiographical narrative. By this time, and partly under the impetus of Byronic rhetorical self-dramatisation, conceptions of the boundaries between private and public discourse generally had changed. A critical year was 1838, when the publication of two works brought the issue of privacy into the foreground. These were an anonymous Diary illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth and Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott. The author of the Diary reflects on 10 February 1811 on ‘the many times in which I have commenced writing a journal’ when something has thrown upon it that check, which diminishes the pleasure of writing and renders the matter less interesting. If nobody is ever to read what one writes, there is no satisfaction in writing; and if any body does see it, mischief ensues. Publication of the diary did indeed cause ‘mischief’. Although it appeared anonymously, under the editorship of John Galt, and was disguised internally as the work of a man, it was immediately recognised as the product of the novelist Lady Charlotte Bury. As Lady Charlotte Campbell, daughter of the fifth Duke of Argyll, she had been lady-in-waiting to the ill-fated Caroline Princess of Wales from 1809 to 1818. The Diary provided a spicy potpourri of gossip, anecdotes, conversations and private letters from aristocratic and literary friends and sketches of well-known society figures. Published in the first year of Victoria’s reign, it revived memories of the scandals surrounding the marriage of George IV and Queen Caroline which had electrified the nation during a previous reign. Its reckless indiscretion and vivacious narrative style won it instant success with ordinary readers, but it was ferociously denounced in the leading literary journals as a disgraceful betrayal of private confidences. Henry Brougham, writing as spokesman for the Scottish literati in the Edinburgh Review in April 1838, made it the centrepiece of an eighty-page diatribe on ‘Abuses of the Press’. He poured vitriol on every aspect of the work, sneering at its errors, inconsistencies, slapdash style and ‘vulgar’ colloquialisms, but reserved his loudest thunder for ‘this high-born gentlewoman’s treachery’ as an egregious example of the ‘detestable conduct’ of someone, in a privileged position, keeping minutes of every unguarded expression, notes of each thoughtless and careless action, and copies of hasty or unreflecting letter, for the purpose of afterwards coining the whole into money, by exposing all to the public gaze. Letters, Journals and Domestic Writing 69 As if prescient, Lockhart in the same year laid down his code of practice as Scott’s biographer, stipulating that he would give no detailed record of Scott’s familiar talk because ‘I never thought it lawful to keep a journal of what passes in private society’. Nor, though Lockhart had defended Boswell’s biographical methods some years earlier, was it his intention to ‘Boswellise Scott’. He was criticised nonetheless for revealing unnecessary and indecorous details of Scott’s life: according to Thomas Carlyle, Lockhart was accused of recording ‘much that ought to have been suppressed’, and worse, of breaching the ‘sanctities of private life’. Ironically, Lockhart had condemned Hogg’s published account of Scott’s private life (1834) for its frankness. Social prejudice doubtless played a part, as Hogg’s modern editor, Douglas Mack, suggests in editing Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (1972): Lockhart would have been offended to see his father-in-law ‘discussed in print by a man of Hogg’s lowly background’. By mid-nineteenth century, the society reflected in earlier domestic writings was extinct, but the urge to preserve its character for posterity stimulated new forms of non-fictional writing, both public, as in Hugh Miller’s autobiography, My Schools and Schoolmasters (1854), and E. B. Ramsay’s Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character (1857), and private, as in Thomas Carlyle’s Reminiscences (compiled 1866–8). Carlyle continued the earlier tradition of domestic writing even as he transformed it. Portraits of individuals are the building blocks for a work which is at once a series of elegies, a powerful evocation of the Scotland of his youth, and an impassioned revisiting of his early life and his marriage. Carlyle intended his reminiscences to be published, after suitable edition, and versions based on his manuscripts duly appeared in 1881 and 1887; but it was only when Carlyle’s complete text was published in 1997 in Reminiscences, edited by K. Fielding and I. Campbell, that its organisation, method of composition and autobiographical character were fully revealed. The central and longest section, ‘Jane Welsh Carlyle’, was written in 1866 in the rawness of Carlyle’s grief and selfaccusations after her death. It is flanked by ‘James Carlyle’, a memoir of his father (written in 1832), recalling Thomas’s childhood, and portraits of Edward Irving and Francis Jeffrey (written 1866–7), recalling his Edinburgh years. The three 1866–7 chapters were composed in diary form, giving them a compelling immediacy as memories of the past are interrupted by present concerns and feelings. Carlyle commented on the Irving and Jeffrey chapters that it ‘was her [Jane Welsh’s] connexion with them that chiefly impelled me’. Carlyle himself is the dominant subject, however, as he is intermittently aware: the Irving chapter, he notes, ‘turns out to be rather, of myself and Irving’. Reminiscences and My Schools and Schoolmasters provide rare accounts of Scottish working people’s lives in this period (James Carlyle, like Miller, was a stonemason). Miller sent a copy of his book to Carlyle, who praised it enthusiastically in a letter to Miller of 9 March 1854: ‘Luminous, memorable; all wholesome, strong, fresh and breezy.’ My Schools does indeed breathe fresh life into Scottish domestic writing, boldly inverting the tradition of private memoirs as a record of upper-class society. It was publicly addressed to ‘working men’, to teach them the value of ‘self-culture’ in contrast to school education, but also offered readers of ‘higher’ classes ‘glimpses [. . .] of the inner life of the Scottish people’ and a ‘journey through the districts of society not yet very sedulously explored’. Late in life, Henry Cockburn burnt all his old letters, ‘seeing’ – as he observed in his Journal of Henry Cockburn; being a continuation of the Memorials of his time, 1831–1854 (1874) – ‘the future use that is often made of papers especially by friendly biographers who rarely hesitate to sacrifice confidence and delicacy to the promotion of sale or excitement’. He thus simultaneously protected his privacy and advertised to future readers of the published journal his control over his posthumous self-representation. The perennial fascination of letters, 70 Karina Williamson journals and domestic writing lies in their conscious and artful renegotiation of the boundaries between private and public spheres. Further reading Anderson, Howard, Philip B. Daghlian and Irvin Ehrenpreis (eds) (1968), The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century, Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. Bronson, Bertrand H. (1946), ‘Boswell’s Boswell’, in Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 53–99. Fyfe, J. G. (ed.) (1942), Scottish Diaries and Memoirs, 1746–1843, Stirling: Eneas Mackay. McMillan, Dorothy (1997), ‘Selves and Others: Non-fiction Writing in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in D. Gifford and D. McMillan (eds), A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 71–90. McMillan, Dorothy (ed.) (1999), The Scotswoman at Home and Abroad, Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Ponsonby, Arthur (ed.) (1927), Scottish and Irish Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, London: Methuen. 7 Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment Ian Duncan The term ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ was coined by W. R. Scott in 1900 to designate the great eighteenth-century flowering of moral philosophy and the human sciences in the university towns of Lowland Scotland. Recent critiques have challenged the category’s exceptionalism, arguing that Scotland already enjoyed a thriving literary and scientific culture in the decades before the Union, or that the attention lavished on Scottish developments has obscured the larger, general field of a ‘British Enlightenment’. Nevertheless the Scottish Enlightenment, as traditionally conceived, retains its integrity as a distinctive and coherent epoch of intellectual modernisation, its local achievements closely enough interlinked to constitute a general ‘project’. That project, which David Hume called ‘the science of man’, includes the establishment of human nature as both foundation and object of philosophical enquiry. Although many of its proponents were affiliated with the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the thrust of this ‘science of man’ was essentially secular, towards the articulation of modernity as a historical, socio-economic and cultural condition. Inaugurated with Francis Hutcheson’s enquiry (after Shaftesbury) into the sentimental and aesthetic grounds of morality, the Enlightenment took off with Hume’s masterwork, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). However few people read the Treatise in its original form, and Scottish philosophy in Hume’s wake – led by Thomas Reid – devoted itself to refuting his most radical argument: that our knowledge is founded on the imagination, and its objects are works of fiction. Nevertheless, Hume set the terms for the scientific projects that followed, and provided a philosophical matrix for the emergent (Romantic and modern) equation of ‘literature’ with fictional discourse – with novels, plays and poetry. This chapter will begin by looking briefly at the institutional formation of literature in the Scottish university curriculum, before going on to consider the new account of the status and function of the imagination in the Enlightenment science of man. By recognising the imagination as the ‘sensitive faculty’ upon which all knowledge of the world and of our selves is founded, Scottish philosophy opens theoretical space not only for a heightened and amplified social realism but also for fiction as the authentic discourse of that realism. The anti-Jacobin reaction of the 1790s effectively stifled the liberal projects of Enlightenment, although an Edinburgh-based revival took place in the early nineteenth century, in the booksellers’ genres of periodicals and fiction. What distinguished the Scottish Enlightenment proper both from this post-Enlightenment sequel and from the contemporaneous London-based literary culture of ‘the Age of Johnson’ was its civic and academic rather than purely commercial infrastructure. Particularly after 1746, when the 72 Ian Duncan failure of the Jacobite challenge to the Hanoverian succession renewed political ability in the Lowlands, post-Union Scotland supplied the conditions for philosophical autonomy in an improving urban habitat with ‘national’ institutions that sustained a strong professional-class intelligentsia (professors, lawyers, clergymen), and the hospitable ideological climate of a Moderate ascendancy in the Church of Scotland. Its enquiries occupied the curricular domains of natural philosophy and mathematics as well as the emergent disciplines of the ‘natural history of man’: history (Hume, William Robertson), sociology (Adam Ferguson, John Millar), anthropology (Lord Kames), political economy (Sir James Steuart, Adam Smith), and rhetoric (Smith, Hugh Blair, George Campbell). Its printed works, such as Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and the histories of Hume and Robertson, were incubated in the universities and accessory institutions (such as, in Edinburgh, the Speculative Society and Faculty of Advocates Library) and published in London by the Scottish booksellers who dominated the metropolitan trade (Strahan, Miller, Cadell). Lecture courses on ‘Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres’ initiated the study of English literature as a university discipline. Adam Smith’s pioneering course (in Edinburgh and then Glasgow, 1748–63) framed literacy in English as a repertoire of techniques of self-fashioning for Scotsmen ambitious to enter careers in imperial administration and the professions opened up by the Union. Literary examples, drawn from modern as well as ancient writers, constitute a stock of resources for stylistic imitation. More than that, reading and writing in English – a linguistic medium formally distinct from everyday life – furnish moral habits of attention, reflection, representation and self-discipline premised upon a capacity for selfobservation. Smith’s lectures specify the techniques of mixed narration, ‘indirect’ discourse and sympathetic identification perfected in the ascendant genre of the novel. Hugh Blair (appointed Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at Edinburgh, 1762: the first chair in the new discipline) shifted the emphasis further towards the formation of taste, an aesthetic training in techniques of appreciation and discrimination. Influential as these lectures were, both as published texts (especially Blair’s, 1783) and as pedagogic models exported to the British colonies for well over a century, they stood in a problematic relation to the literary canons and values shaped through Romanticism. The rhetoric curriculum valued metropolitan English, and the normative authority of Anglo-British writers, at the expense of Scots, which it banished to a ‘rustic’ and ‘barbarous’ hinterland. At the same time, the principles of an Enlightenment natural history of society which informed the discipline brought primitive cultural states into a newly meaningful, anthropological focus – casting poetry itself, for example, as the characteristic invention of societies close to nature. The new rhetoric cut indigenous traditions off from modernity even as it opened up philosophical space for their appreciation and revival. The resulting ambivalence is exemplified in Blair’s interventions in two of the major literary sensations of the age. Blair promoted James Macpherson’s controversial translations of ancient Gaelic poetry into English prose, defending their authenticity on the grounds of their faithful rendition of a pre-feudal warrior culture. And, as Robert Burns’s mentor during the poet’s sojourn in Edinburgh, he encouraged Burns’s writing in Scots. The university rhetoric courses instituted a ‘Scottish invention of English literature’ that was disciplinary in every sense. The Scottish Enlightenment also contributed to the theoretical formation of modern literary discourse. Humean empiricism produced a philosophical account of ‘common life’ and its representational basis in the imagination that would govern the practice of nineteenth-century realist fiction in Scotland and beyond. ‘Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres’ frames literary discourse as a historical object and a socialising practice. Hume stages the subjective emergence of the literary voice, as expressive Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment 73 utterance of ‘the human’, in the famous conclusion to the first book of the Treatise of Human Nature. The author, hitherto a sheerly notional, conventional figure, suddenly enters the field of reading as Hume turns from philosophical argument to a fictional, dramatic, confessional mode of representation. ‘I’ becomes the signature of a psychologised, reflexive, contingent self, afflicted by ‘philosophical melancholy and delirium’: I am at first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human commerce, and left utterly abandon’d and disconsolate. Fain wou’d I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity. I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me. Every one keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me from every side. Not only will the philosopher’s heretical conclusions make him a ‘monster’ in the view of society – a view that the pressure of sympathy, or social conditioning, obliges him to share – but they churn up a vertiginous confusion within himself, as he strives to reconcile the selfsubverting work of reason with the ‘illusion of the imagination’ that constitutes experience. The crisis resolves itself in a spontaneous re-entry into ‘the common affairs of life’: Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour’s [sic] amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them further. Here then I find myself absolutely determin’d to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life. Intercourse with others, ‘the commerce and society of men’, produces the reality in which we live. The force of ‘nature’ is constitutively social and customary. The world is recharged with the positivity of social and emotional exchange. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Adam Smith describes a kind of white noise of affective gratification through which ‘common life’ keeps itself going: It is decent to be humble amidst great prosperity; but we can scarce express too much satisfaction in all the little occurrences of common life, in the company with which we spent the evening last night, in the entertainment that was set before us, in what was said and what was done, in all the little incidents of the present conversation, and in all those frivolous nothings which fill up the void of human life. Nothing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness, which is always founded upon a peculiar relish for all the little pleasures which common occurrences afford. We readily sympathize with it: it inspires us with the same joy, and makes every trifle turn up to us in the same agreeable aspect in which it presents itself to the person endowed with this happy disposition. Such language describes a reality that is customary and continuous, reproduced by microscopic transactions of exchange, so smoothly as to go unremarked. A subconscious 74 Ian Duncan sympathetic medium ‘makes every trifle turn up to us’, or reflexively constitutes the texture of everyday life as present and self-evident. Smith’s language also acknowledges the absence of a metaphysical ground beneath this phenomenology. The transactions of ‘commerce and society’ are ‘frivolous nothings’ that ‘fill up the void of human life’: we glimpse the abyss of scepticism behind Smith’s bourgeois mimicry of a gentlemanly sprezzatura. Why ‘nothings’, why a ‘void’? Because Humean scepticism posits this continuous, habitual world of ordinary relations as a work of fiction. ‘The memory, senses, and understanding,’ Hume insists in the Treatise, are ‘all of them founded on the imagination.’ The imagination fills in the gaps between discrete ‘impressions’ and writes phenomena into an intelligible text of experience. Less a ‘cogitative’ than a ‘sensitive’ (aesthetic) faculty, it provides the framework for cognition, as it structures an empirical reality empty of metaphysical forces. Articulating the relations of resemblance, contiguity and causality which constitute (in Susan Manning’s phrase) its ‘grammar’, the imagination produces the necessary illusions of spatial and temporal continuity, and – by extension – subjective as well as objective identity in space and time. The identity of an object over time is a ‘fiction of the imagination’; ‘we have a propensity to feign the continu’d existence of all sensible objects; and as this propensity arises from some lively impression of the memory, it bestows a vivacity on that fiction; or in other words, makes us believe the continu’d existence of a body’. ‘The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to bodies.’ This imaginary production of reality is customary, that is, habitual and social, rather than solipsistic. ‘[All] our reasonings concerning causes and effects are deriv’d from nothing but custom’: custom alone – repetition and habituation – produces the effects of continuity and consistency that weave together an intelligible, familiar world and our identities in it. In the second and third books of the Treatise Hume explores this domain of the social and customary, representing the basis of morality in the emotions rather than reason. Adam Smith, Hume’s friend and disciple, devoted his career to a systematic mapping of the domains and disciplines that make up the ‘sphere of common life’: moral psychology, rhetoric, jurisprudence and political economy. Smith identifies exchange as the foundational principle of social life, and makes it the key trope of his philosophy. Economic exchange (commerce), linguistic exchange (conversation) and sentimental exchange (sympathy) provide the structures of mediation and continuity that sustain a shared empirical world. Smith’s essay on ‘the first formation of languages’ (drawn from his rhetoric course) offers a conjectural account of the primal scene of linguistic usage: Two savages, who had never been taught to speak, but had been bred up remote from the societies of men, would endeavour to make their mutual wants intelligible to one another, by uttering certain sounds, whenever they meant to denote certain objects. Language comes into being as dialogue, the utterance of ‘mutual wants’. The Theory of Moral Sentiments shows how sympathetic exchange generates the ethical and social imagination. And if, according to The Wealth of Nations, there exists a fundamental ‘propensity in human nature [. . .] to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’, then commercial society, the economic form of modernity, represents human nature’s fulfilment rather than its corruption. Smith’s account of modernity may be contrasted with another major Scottish Enlightenment analysis, Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Ferguson and Smith share the view of modernisation as a structural amplification and Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment 75 complication of economic and social relations: the ‘separation of arts and professions’, the ‘division of labour’. For Ferguson, the sheer aggregation of different functions and competing interests threatens the coherence of the social body, disintegrating ‘the national spirit’. Smith, however, replaces the human body as the figure of a social totality (the ‘body politic’) with the abstract principle of exchange. The ‘propensity in human nature [. . .] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’ renders abstraction from the body in terms of gain rather than loss. Smith represents socio-economic modernisation as a geometrical, ‘metaphysical’ increase in formal complexity which brings, instead of fragmentation and atomisation, a multiplication of connections and mediations, binding together a potentially planetary totality. The first chapter of The Wealth of Nations unfolds a remarkable meditation on the condition of the object in a commercial society. The philosopher’s vision illuminates the ‘coarse and rough’ woollen coat of the humble workman with an aura of almost infinitely extensive and intricate relations of production: Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilised and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world! Wealth has become an imaginary condition, generated by a global network of relations of production and exchange that remains invisible to the subject on the ground, although it is legible in the register of the political economist. What appears present to the senses – the primitive simplicity of the woollen coat – is an illusion. Reality inheres in a fantastic glamour of complicities and connections, in a sublime, dynamic system rather than in solid bodies or objects. It is (and thus Smith displaces the work of weaving from the labourer’s coat to his own representation of it) textual and figurative. Scientific methodology itself is ‘founded on the imagination’, Smith argues in an early, unpublished essay on ‘The principles which lead and direct philosophical inquiries: illustrated by the history of astronomy’. This gives a more explicitly Humean account of the mode of representation licensed by philosophical empiricism. ‘Philosophy is the science of the connecting principles of nature.’ But nature in its raw, empirical state consists of ‘solitary and incoherent’ phenomena that ‘disturb the easy movement of the imagination’: Philosophy, by representing the invisible chains which bind together all these disjointed objects, endeavours to introduce order into this chaos of jarring and discordant appearances, to allay this tumult of the imagination, and to restore it, when it surveys the great revolutions of the universe, to that tone of tranquillity and composure, which is both most agreeable to itself, and most suitable to its nature. Philosophy, therefore, may be regarded as one of those arts which address themselves to the imagination. 76 Ian Duncan Historically, ‘different systems of nature’ gain cultural acceptance to the extent that they ‘sooth the imagination, and [. . .] render the theatre of nature a more coherent, and therefore a more magnificent spectacle, than otherwise it would have appeared to be’. Aesthetic principles of ‘Wonder, Surprise, and Admiration’, appealing to and informing a social consensus, govern the development of scientific knowledge. The Theory of Moral Sentiments analyses the subjective equivalences of the economic principles of exchange-value and the division of labour that constitute commercial society. The enquiry into social knowledge – the reciprocal inventions of self and other – produces an extraordinarily refined account of the imagination as morally constructive faculty that has had a formative effect on modern psychology. Following Hume, Smith identifies sympathy as a work of imaginary exchange that forges intersubjective bonds in a modern (implicitly urban) society of strangers and regulates the boundaries between self and other. But where Hume emphasises the involuntary, contagious force of a sympathy activated by physical expression, Smith invests sympathy with a disciplinary will gained on abstracting passion and sensation from their chaotic origins in the body. Sympathy is a moral technology that maintains society as the ‘cool’, affectively weak or neutral domain of ‘propriety’. It ‘flattens’ and ‘brings down’ (in Smith’s musical metaphor) the potentially violent and anarchic energy of the passions by passing them through the imaginary medium of another mind. Sympathy thus consists not of ‘the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer’, but the spectator’s own ‘consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same [. . .] situation’. Our senses ‘never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are [another person’s] sensations’. As a work of the imagination, sympathy finds inadequate material in those ‘passions which take their origin from the body’ and moulds itself, rather, upon ‘the shape and configuration of the imaginations’ of others. The ‘imaginary change of situation’ involves a complex set of reflections on ‘the whole case’ of the other person’s condition: In all such cases, that there may be some correspondence of sentiments between the spectator and the person principally concerned, the spectator must, first of all, endeavour, as much as he can, to put himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself every little circumstance of distress which can possibly occur to the sufferer. He must adopt the whole case of his companion with all its minutest incidents; and strive to render as perfect as possible, that imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded. Sympathy abstracts the companion’s suffering through a kind of virtual reading and writing – making it into a ‘case’, a text. For the process to be morally productive, however, it turns out that the ‘sufferer’ has first to have sympathised with the ‘spectator’: bringing down the expression of his distress to match the latter’s basic condition of ‘insensibility’, since human nature will recoil from a violent outcry. Only then, through this prior act of moderation, will the spectator be capable of extending to the sufferer the solace of his sympathy. Reciprocally, we form our conduct by imagining ourselves as objects in another person’s point of view. Society is a ‘mirror’, or, rather, an imaginary hall of mirrors: ‘When I endeavour to examine my own conduct [. . .] I divide myself, as it were, into two persons’, spectator and agent, self and other. The sympathetic act that appropriates other to self at the same time converts self into other, doubling and dividing. Smith’s argument insists that this imaginary alienation, the formation of conscience through the exchange between self and other, is morally salutary as well as functionally necessary to social life. Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment 77 The doubling or dividing of consciousness turns out to be crucial to the modern theory of fiction wrought through Humean empiricism. In the conclusion to Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature Hume insists on the dialectical structure of the thinker’s fall into ‘philosophical melancholy’ and his sentimental recovery through a reattachment to ‘the commerce and society of men’. The return to common life is not conclusive. If ‘nature’ drives the philosopher to seek relaxation in social cheer, nature will also eventually, just as surely, drive him to resume his lonely ratiocination – since the motive for philosophical enquiry, the desire to think through the fabric of everyday life, is no less pleasure-oriented. Truth belongs neither to alienated reflection nor to forgetful habituation, nor to some cognitive synthesis of the two, but to the open-ended, temporal oscillation between them. ‘A true sceptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical conviction; and will never refuse any innocent satisfaction, which offers itself, upon account of either of them.’ Instead of a higher wisdom, Hume’s ‘mitigated scepticism’ offers (with ironical modesty) a melancholic enjoyment in the lesson that ‘pleasure’ drives the turn to philosophical reflection as well as the return to common life. Hume tests this dialectical scheme in an account of what he calls the hypothesis of ‘the double existence of perceptions and objects’, the strategy by which thoughtful persons reconcile their reflections with the practice of everyday life: This philosophical system [. . .] is the monstrous offspring of two principles, which are contrary to each other, which are both at once embrac’d by the mind, and which are unable mutually to destroy each other. The imagination tells us, that our resembling perceptions have a continu’d and uninterrupted existence, and are not annihilated by their absence. Reflection tells us, that even our resembling perceptions are interrupted in their existence, and different from each other. The contradiction betwixt these opinions we elude by a new fiction, which is conformable to the hypothesis both of reflection and fancy, by ascribing these contrary qualities to different existences: the interruption to perceptions, and the continuance to objects. Nature is obstinate, and will not quit the field, however strongly attack’d by reason; and at the same time reason is so clear in the point, that there is no possibility of disguising her. Not being able to reconcile these two enemies, we endeavour to set ourselves at ease as much as possible, by successively granting to each whatever it demands, and by feigning a double existence, where each may find something, that has all the conditions it desires. This is not merely an ideological delusion entertained by other, mystified thinkers. Hume’s irony, characteristically, implicates himself and his readers in the ‘monstrous’ conceit he exposes. The ‘new fiction’ allows us to ‘elude’ the contradiction opened up by reflection – not by closing it but by mentally occupying it, in the equivocation between reflection and belief. Consciousness, ‘feigning a double existence’, becomes doubled itself – at once interrupted and continuous, renewing the commitment to an illusion upon the knowledge of its illusoriness. Recognition of its fictive status makes the difference between this ‘philosophical system’ and Hume’s commentary. The recognition does not deliver us to an objective point of knowledge outside the system. Instead, it affords us a view – intermittent, itself subject to the temporal logic of ‘double existence’ – of our condition inside it. Our sentimental investment in common life and in the authority of custom is framed by the fitful, uneven knowledge of their fictiveness. This doubled consciousness – oscillating between alienated reflection and absorption in the ‘illusion of imagination’, mediating rather than resolving a radical contradiction, generating a melancholy enjoyment – characterises the subjective effect of a work of 78 Ian Duncan fiction. Readers of a realist novel ‘identify’ with the characters and accept the substantiality of their world at the same time as they know it is all a verbal invention. In Hume’s account, the traditional association of fiction with the falsification of reality recedes into the mist of a pre-modern, metaphysical world-view. Hume provided theoretical legitimacy for fiction as the mode of representation authentic to social reality at the very moment when ‘the rise of the novel’ was consolidating itself in Britain with the achievements of Fielding and Richardson. Yet the gap remained open between Hume’s theory and the status of the novel in eighteenth-century culture. Novels continued to claim for themselves the legitimating title of ‘history’, just as history retained its prestige among literary genres. Hume himself, when it came to applying his philosophical principles to writing narrative, turned to history and not the novel as the authoritative discourse of social reality. The continued preference for history over fiction reflects the status of ‘belief’ as the scandalous crux of Hume’s philosophy. Hume’s claim that belief consists in the superior degree of ‘vivacity’ with which an impression strikes the imagination, according to his critics, eroded the categorical distinction between truth, especially revealed truth, and error. Another sceptical associate of Hume, Henry Home, Lord Kames, in his Elements of Criticism (1762), conflated the subjective realisation of a fiction, which he called ‘ideal presence’, with the psychology of belief; but this was an exceptional view. Kames enthusiastically grants fiction imaginative dominion by virtue of its technical command of the ‘vivacity of ideas’, but in doing so obliterates the crucial doubled consciousness between absorption and reflection activated in Hume’s theory. A more influential position was staked out by Thomas Reid, who made the question of belief central to his ‘confutation’ of Humean scepticism. In An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) Reid attacks Hume’s argument that all knowledge proceeds from the imagination. Far from expressing only a more intense degree of imaginative vivacity, belief is an original, intrinsic faculty of human nature, ‘a simple act of the mind’, irreducible to other terms or operations and immediately available to everybody. The evidence of our senses is authentic, and sceptical reflection the inauthentic delusion of philosophers out of touch with common life. Reid thus reaffirmed the traditional antithesis between reality and fiction that Hume had destabilised. Hume’s theory of fiction would find its influential realisation in a later generation, in the novels of Walter Scott. Scott’s novels resolve the traditional antithesis between ‘romance’ and ‘real history’, and claim discursive autonomy for the work of fiction, by their dialectical embrace of both categories. Fiction and history are mutually constituted through the fictional re-creation of historical scenes and events. Through Scott, Humean empiricism generated a ‘novelistic’ model of the imagination that posed a fertile alternative, as Cairns Craig has suggested in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (2004), to the Kantian–Coleridgean transcendental model, associated (in modern academic criticism) with English Romantic poetry. Affirming the imagination’s epistemological primacy and endowing it with socially productive and normative functions, Hume established the philosophical matrix for the ascendancy of fictional realism in British literature. Further reading Brewer, John (1997), The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, London: HarperCollins. Crawford, Robert (ed.) (1998), The Scottish Invention of English Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment 79 Davis, Leith, Ian Duncan and Janet Sorensen (2004), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manning, Susan (2002), Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Wood, Paul (ed.) (2000), The Culture of the Book in the Scottish Enlightenment, Toronto: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. 8 Ramsay, Fergusson, Thomson, Davidson and Urban Poetry Sören Hammerschmidt Urban poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries articulated the experiences of modern city life. It was also involved in the imaginative construction of the city, contributing to the formation of languages in which to imagine urban spaces and urban lives. Treatments of the city often focused on the changing economic situations of its inhabitants, and on social, political and cultural conditions perceived as specifically urban. In his preface to the anonymous first publication of The Battel, or Morning-Interview (1716), Allan Ramsay (1684–1758) made an early plea for urban poetry: ‘This City, as Narrow it is, is the Scene of many Adventures which may be proper Subject for both Poet and Philosopher: But the Humour of undervaluing Home-Manufactory, discourages Publications.’ Linking the representation of urban scenes to the consumption of local or regional products, Ramsay promoted Edinburgh’s spaces and inhabitants as proper subjects for literature, and as subjects of national importance and interest. This contention set the mood for much of the poetry about cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ramsay himself followed his declaration with the publication of several elegies on Edinburgh characters (such as the ‘Elegy on Maggy Johnston’) in 1718. His strategy of mixing traditionally elevated poetic forms with subjects conventionally perceived as vulgar subsequently served as a model for Robert Fergusson, James Thomson (‘B.V.’), John Davidson and other writers with particular interests in urban subjects as they attempted to find languages adequate for the representation of city environments. Pastoral developed in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries into a preferred poetic mode for the representation of these emerging concerns. Outwardly portraying a more or less idealised view of the lives and loves of shepherds (independent from and frequently scornful of the societies and economies of the city), pastoral implicitly renegotiated the boundaries of urban and rural spaces. At the same time, it developed as a means for citybased writers to critique their environment by contrasting it with a supposedly simpler, more natural life in the countryside. Some poets also utilised pastoral in order to celebrate rather than condemn the city. ‘Urban pastoral’ set out to discover (human) nature, its life cycles and influences within urban societies. The pastoral eclogue became a favoured form for rendering disparate urban voices, mediating and potentially resolving their contesting views, while allowing each side to stake its claim independently. During the eighteenth century, this urban multiplicity of views and voices found its equivalent in the traffic of verse epistles between urbane writers, and in the communication networks set up and performed in these exchanges. Ramsay, Fergusson, Thomson and Davidson 81 Ramsay has been credited with the transformation of the Scots verse epistle for the needs of metropolitan social commerce. Born in Leadhills, Lanarkshire, he moved to Edinburgh around 1700; by 1718 he had established himself as an important bookseller and publisher. Ramsay also became sufficiently renowned as a poet for William Hamilton of Gilbertfield to commence an epistolary exchange with him in 1719, which was published independently that year and included in Ramsay’s Poems of 1721. Ostensibly engaged in scurrilous, self-mocking praise, the seven epistles revived both the seventeenth-century poetic form called ‘standard Habbie’ (first employed by Robert Sempill of Beltrees in his mock-heroic elegy ‘The Life and Death of Habbie Simpson’) and the Scots language for the formation and display of sociable interchange between individuals of polite tastes and metropolitan understanding. Since the relocation of the Jacobean court to London in 1603, Scots as a poetic language had been relegated to the popular forms of ballads and songs, and to occasional comic writings such as Sempill’s ‘Habbie Simpson’. Ramsay, in collaboration with correspondents like Hamilton, showed that Scots could still be a language of elevated poetic diction, and at the same time modified both language and poetic form to suit the needs and interests of emerging Scottish urban middle classes with pretensions to British sociality and cosmopolitan sophistication. These poetic exchanges represented the prototype of social and cultural networks that Ramsay not only gladly participated in but also actively sought to establish. In his poems to Hamilton he adopted the Horatian epistle’s idealisation of the writer’s rural retreat from the vagaries of city life, yet at the same time placed strong emphasis on the joys of urban sociability: cities function as centres of polite cultural commerce as well as of trade and politics in Ramsay’s poetry. Ramsay endeavoured to connect Edinburgh and Scotland to metropolitan, imperial and colonial hubs of power, and at the same time return to the city some of that consequence it had lost between the southward migrations of crown and parliament. Not only the verse epistles exchanged with poetical correspondents throughout the British Isles and North America, but also lyric poems addressed to Scottish nobility and gentry, to English poets like John Gay and Alexander Pope, or to sociable associations like the Whin-Bush Club, attested to this desire. The Ever Green (1724), an important antiquarian collection that made available to the public a large number of Middle Scots poems for the first time in three centuries, participated in both ventures by asserting the vibrancy of a specifically Scottish literary tradition in a publication designed for a pan-regional, British market. Ramsay’s urban visions had always incorporated Edinburgh’s relations with the surrounding countryside and its local or regional, social and economic infrastructures. In ‘Edinburgh’s Address to the Country’, ‘Edina’ encourages rural inhabitants to ‘forsake the withered grove’, to shelter from the elements and seek sociable entertainment within her walls. The poem specifically targeted landed gentry and nobility, for the entertainments represented in the poem – among them ‘witty Clubs of Mind’ and ‘Schools of Law’ – were decidedly those of a cultural and economic elite. Ramsay here also inverted the Horatian ideal, painting the countryside as the source of (meteorological) disturbances, and the city as a haven from its vicissitudes. Ramsay’s apostrophes to groups and individuals identified sociable interaction as a central element of city life. ‘To the Phiz [Club] an Ode’ and drinking songs like ‘Up in the Air’ celebrated urban sociability as they gestured towards the convivial atmosphere of urban social gatherings. Throughout the eighteenth century, clubs and societies in fact played an important part in the civilising mission and the process of cultural sophistication that urban sociability was supposed to bring about. Ramsay himself had helped found the Easy Club in 1712, where members adopted first English and subsequently Scottish 82 Sören Hammerschmidt literary figures as pseudonyms and cultural patrons, in order to signal their distinguished, polite social and cultural status. The publication of Ramsay’s four-volume collection of Scottish and English songs The Tea-Table Miscellany (1724–37) further linked this ideal of conviviality to the development of private entertainments organised around the performance of traditional tunes and lyrics, which were designed for an urban, bourgeois or aristocratic social elite eager to signal its rootedness in regional as well as national cultures. Ramsay also demonstrated a keen interest in the ‘Improvement’ of Edinburgh through expansion and modernisation of the city in the cause of a contribution to the larger advancement of civilisation (such urban developments would contribute to Edinburgh’s reputation in the early nineteenth century as the ‘Athens of the North’). His struggles in the 1730s to establish a permanent and recognised theatre can be understood with reference to this ideal; though initially frustrated by kirk opposition in pulpit and court, Ramsay’s efforts turned out to be first steps in the founding and wider social acceptance of a professional theatre in Edinburgh. He had displayed his general interest in Scottish improvements in poems such as ‘The Pleasures of Improvements in Agriculture’ and ‘The Prospect of Plenty’, and more specifically in Edinburgh’s urban improvement in ‘The Address of the Muse, to the Right Honourable George Drummond, Esq., Lord Provost; and Council of Edinburgh’. Ramsay had celebrated Drummond in a number of his earlier poems, and Drummond appeared with other city worthies in the lists of subscribers for Ramsay’s Poems of 1721 and 1728. Ramsay’s concern in ‘The Address’ lay primarily with the imagination and exposition of future projects: if enough money were set aside for urban improvements, the poem suggested that Edinburgh might be able to compete with Britain’s metropolitan centre and ‘bring the Best and Fairest down, /From England’s Northern Counties, nigh as far/Distant from Court, as we of Pictland are’. The same Lord Provost whom Ramsay had identified as an emerging leader in Edinburgh’s improvement represented for another Edinburgh poet an ideal, or at least idealised, paternalistic civil servant, who had sent the city of Edinburgh on its path to national prominence with the projection of the New Town and other improvements. Born in Edinburgh in Cap-and-Feather Close (a lane that had to give way to the building of the North Bridge to connect the Old and New Towns), Robert Fergusson (1750–74) lived just long enough to witness and celebrate the beginnings of the New Town. At a time when the Old Town remained home to the vast majority of Edinburgh’s inhabitants, however, his poetry dealt primarily with the energy and sociability of life in that quarter. Fergusson’s position in Auld Reikie: A Poem (1773) is mainly that of a reviewer appraising and praising Drummond’s posthumous achievements. Most of the poem is dedicated to the spectacle of Edinburgh’s social harmony and cultural greatness, produced and realised by the urban improvements Ramsay, Drummond and others had envisioned and initiated in the preceding five decades. The various appearances and voices of ‘Servant Lasses’, chairmen, lawyers and traders, ‘WHORES and CULLS’, tavern revellers, church-goers and ‘dandring Cits’ all combine to form a motley yet integrated image of social community and commerce. Incongruous voices and spaces remain, but, as with Fergusson’s representations of urban communities and revelries in ‘Hallow-Fair’, ‘The Daft-Days’ and ‘The King’s Birth-Day in Edinburgh’, discord merely serves to produce alternative forms of sociability, which are then reintegrated into national society through their literary representation. Towards the end of Auld Reikie, Fergusson even revives the trope of Edinburgh as a shelter from ‘canker’d biting Show’r’ and rural solitude. As in ‘The Daft-Days’, the city provides spaces for the enjoyment of social commerce, organised around the sociable conviviality of Edinburgh’s taverns and urban crowds. In a section added to Auld Reikie after its initial publication, however, Ramsay, Fergusson, Thomson and Davidson 83 Fergusson accused Drummond’s successors to the office of Lord Provost of corruption, and of their neglect of communal in favour of personal interests. Local and national social cohesion falter when individual interests are pursued at the expense of urban improvements, and when selfish commerce supersedes the demands for social responsibility. Fergusson may be read as the poet of an improving, modernising Edinburgh, with its growing New Town, its developing theatrical scene (he contributed songs and a prologue to plays staged at the Canongate and Royal Theatres) and its increasing commercial and cultural importance within the consolidating British nation and its empire. Yet he noted as well the losses sustained by Edinburgh (and more generally by Scotland) in the processes of improvement, not least in his fiercely regionalist poems such as ‘The Rivers of Scotland’, ‘Hame Content’, or the unambiguously named ‘Elegy, On the Death of Scots Music’. His poetry made clear that urban improvements entailed the displacement of older structures: the demolition of Old Town buildings like the Luckenbooths and the Netherbow, and the gradual obsolescence of popular rituals and customs. Like his contemporary James Wilson (c.1730–87), who published mock-elegies on Old Town edifices under the pseudonym ‘Claudero’, Fergusson’s burlesque poem ‘The Canongate Play-House in Ruins’ fondly memorialised a disappearing cityscape, while marking its outdated incongruity with Edinburgh’s new urban spaces. A similar effort of comic commemoration underlay Fergusson’s carnivalistic poems – ‘The Daft-Days’, ‘Hallow-Fair’, ‘Leith Races’ and ‘The Election’, among others – not least because in all but the first of these he employed the Middle Scots ‘Christis Kirk’ stanza. These representations of annual raucous fairs and celebrations also retained a seasonal rhythm, another reminder that the modern city remained involved in or incorporated rural and traditional forms of sociability and commerce. Pastoral lyrics like ‘The Town and Country Contrasted’ or ‘On Seeing a Butterfly in the Street’ wittily rehearsed the conventional condemnation of urban vices and the praise of rural virtues, sentiments that also informed the georgic domestic idyll presented in ‘The Farmer’s Ingle’. Fergusson’s view of urban sociability in his carnivalistic poems was less that of a polite than of a raucous, rebellious and at times violent community. ‘Hallow-Fair’ represents voices and spaces that escape the homogenising effects of polite social commerce and instead establish social cohesion on alternate terms. The tensions between individual desires and social interests might be held in suspension in the production and representation of urban sociabilities, but Fergusson’s popular gatherings were frequently at odds with official notions of social order, and led to clashes with the City Guard and the tastes of polite readers alike. This is most apparent in ‘The King’s Birth-Day’, in which the city celebrates the holiday in orthodox fashion, with ringing of bells, military salutes and parades calculated to instil a sense of national social belonging and community. The riotous Edinburgh mob, however, soon disrupts these activities, throwing fireworks and dead cats at city worthies, ‘Which lays his honour on the ground/As flat’s a flounder ’. Class antagonisms turn into bloody brawls with the City Guard, in the course of which the mob consolidates itself in narrative and print as an articulate and coherent social body. Fergusson also adapted the pastoral eclogue by joining it with the Middle Scots ‘flyting’ tradition, to render the contesting voices of urban debates over social and cultural, national and regional issues. In ‘The Ghaists: A Kirk-yard Eclogue’, the ghosts of Edinburgh philanthropists George Watson and George Heriot condemn in unison contemporary economic politics detrimental to Scottish charity schools. ‘A Drink Eclogue’ and the ‘Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey, in their Mother-tongue’, on the other hand, present speakers who are strongly at odds: ‘Whisky’ and ‘Brandy’ decry each other’s detrimental effects on Scottish culture, while the pavement and the cobblestone street each claim their 84 Sören Hammerschmidt particular suffering at the hands (or feet) of Edinburgh’s population and city council in the ‘Mutual Complaint’. Although each text clearly promotes a specific attitude towards its central issue, the sometimes extremely disparate opinions of their speakers are generally left unchallenged by any interventions of an authoritative narrator. Although ‘Brandy’ is unmasked as an impostor bottle of ‘WHISKY tinctur’d wi’ the SAFFRON dye’ to pass for a more expensive liquor, his charges against ‘Whisky’ are not necessarily negated by this discovery. The complaints of ‘The Ghaists’, too, though similar to each other in tone and sentiment, retain an element of divergence that is never quite resolved. This contest and balance of opinions resembled the publication context of Fergusson’s poetry, most of which first appeared in Walter Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement. Readers found his poems between advertisements, news items, opinion pieces and reports; his writings had to contend for readerly attention with those other articles, but also attracted a potentially wider, more socially and culturally varied urban readership than they would in their later incarnations in book form. The journalistic multiplicity of voices found in the Magazine corresponded with the poetic multi-vocality of Fergusson’s macaronic compositions, texts that combined elements of neo-classical English and vernacular Scots diction. He announced this linguistic strategy explicitly in the dog-Latin subtitle of ‘The Election’ and the epigram for ‘The King’s Birth-Day’, taking the latter from William Drummond of Hawthornden’s macaronic Polemo-Middinia (1642–50?). The macaronic mode here draws attention to the confusion of voices during these urban festivities, as the lines of ‘The King’s Birth-Day’ switch back and forth between elevated English and colloquial Scots expressions: ‘O Muse, be kind, and dinna fash us’. The form also emphasises Fergusson’s position as an Anglo-Scots poet, perpetually renegotiating tensions between regional and metropolitan languages, at a time when Scots was increasingly identified with provincial or pastoral topics, and a newly standardised English was becoming the linguistic norm for social, cultural and political elites in a British Empire. Interweaving the two idioms, Fergusson’s poetry often refused exclusive identification with either regional or national voices; it rather signalled the position of the Anglo-Scot astride a linguistic and cultural divide, seeking simultaneous advancement in the metropolitan centre and recognition at home. Like Ramsay and Fergusson, many Anglo-Scots remained in Scotland, pursuing flourishing careers in its towns and cities. For a considerable number of young ambitious writers, however, economic success and cultural significance seemed inextricably tied to London, and to their acquisition of a linguistic presence appropriate for their residence in the heart of the nation and the Empire. David Malloch (1705–65) (whose move to London was deplored by Ramsay in his Poems of 1728) not only reformed his literary style, but also changed his name to Mallet and eradicated his regional accent entirely. Others were less fastidious: while James Thomson (1700–48), Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) and John Davidson (1857–1909) developed their writing according to contemporary metropolitan normative styles, and in the process helped evolve new poetics for a British nation and empire, they retained more or less pronounced Scottish accents in their everyday speech. Thomson’s poetry has by now become almost synonymous with the writing of a British national and cultural compromise. In his long narrative poem Liberty (1735–6), he envisioned the rise of the British state largely in terms of urban development, of an expansion and aggrandisement of the city that demonstrated not only the funds available for projects of urban improvement, but asserted and signified the cultural prominence and civilising mission of Britain more generally. This is the optimistic, historically and materially progressive perception of the city that Ramsay had already hinted at in ‘The Address of the Muse’, and on which Fergusson drew in Auld Reikie. Yet Fergusson also tempered this Ramsay, Fergusson, Thomson and Davidson 85 enthusiasm for improvements with images of corruption, poverty and decay, thereby anticipating topics identified by succeeding generations of poets with urban environments. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Romantic poetics and aesthetics (themselves in part a reaction to the increasing industrialisation and urbanisation of the 1780s and 1790s), urban poetry was affected in two ways. On the one hand, an increased focus on settings and subjects in the countryside made the city, even as a repository for negative elements of society and human nature, less of a poetic topic. The Horatian view of the city was displaced by a general disregard of urban spaces, although Baillie sought to contradict this trend in her poem ‘London’ by representing ‘England’s vast capital in fair expanse’ not only in the conventional language of improvement, but also by discovering signs of a divine order in this human-created space, ‘Of restless, reckless man, and years gone by, /And time fast wending to Eternity’. On the other hand, the attention of poets and other social commentators was increasingly drawn to the plight of the urban poor, to the conditions of work and life in and around factories and inner-city slums across Britain. Next to these attitudes, the concept of the city as a marker of the progress of civilisation remained current, though in a society gripped by theories of evolution this notion could encompass images of decline as well as of improvement. Scotland’s rapidly urbanising areas were no exception. In the Lowlands, Janet Hamilton (1795–1873) commented in poems and essays of the 1860s on the drastic changes to landscape and social relations brought to her native North Lanarkshire by the establishment of iron mills, and condemned the influence of alcohol on workers and their families. William Thom (1798–1848) wrote satires and scathing social critiques on the conditions of Aberdeenshire weavers in the 1840s, while Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl’ (c. 1835–73), did the same for weavers and other factory workers between Dundee and Glasgow in her Autobiography, Poems and Songs (1867). A decade later, the Glasgow-based writers Marion Bernstein (fl. 1876) and Jessie Russell (b. 1850) were analysing women’s conditions in the domestic spaces of the city and in society at large, topics also of considerable interest to Edinburgh-born Isabella Craig-Knox (1831–1903), who began publishing her poetry in The Scotsman under the pen-name ‘Isa’ and continued to focus on women’s rights and the plight of industrial workers after her move to London in 1859. Over the course of the nineteenth century, poets like these came to express sentiments and opinions that could be shared by an increasing number of readers. Not only did a rising literacy rate enable and depend on a growing number of newspapers and magazines with ever-expanding circulations, most of which were published out of urban centres, but life in the city became the defining experience for a majority of British subjects for the first time. No wonder then that many aspiring poets, especially those based in the metropolis, decided to begin their careers with submissions to such papers and magazines. James Thomson was born in Port Glasgow on 23 November 1834; aroun