Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

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SENTIMENTAL LITERATURE AND ANGLO-SCOTTISH IDENTITY, 1745–1820 What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the Parliamentary Union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers understood nationhood. She argues that, in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of nationhood. ju l i e t s h i e l d s is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington.

cambridge studies in romanticism Founding Editor professor marilyn butler, University of Oxford General Editor professor james chandler, University of Chicago Editorial Board john barrell, University of York paul hamilton, University of London mary jacobus, University of Cambridge claudia johnson, Princeton University alan liu, University of California, Santa Barbara jerome mcgann, University of Virginia susan manning, University of Edinburgh david simpson, University of California, Davis This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s, a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those “great national events” that were “almost daily taking place”: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad, and the reform movement at home. This was an enor mous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion, and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content, and style by the Lakes School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of comment or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of “literature” and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. For a complete list of titles published, see end of book.

SENTIMENTAL LITERATURE AND ANGLO-SCOTTISH IDENTITY, 1745–1820 JULIET SHIELDS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521190947 © Juliet Shields 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN 13

978 0 511 74459 4

eBook (EBL)

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Hardback

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Contents

Acknowledgments

page viii

Introduction: The politics and sentiments of union

1

1 The Ossian controversy and the racial beginnings of Britain

24

2 British masculinity and Scottish self-control

55

3 Sentimental correspondences and the boundaries of British identity

83

4 National tales and the domestication of the Scottish Highlands

110

5 Rebellions and re-unions in the historical novel

139

Notes Bibliography Index

173 204 221

vii

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank the people who helped me to write this book. Penny Fielding’s graduate course at the University of Pennsylvania first inspired my interest in eighteenth-century Scottish writers. Toni Bowers provided expert guidance during the project’s beginning as a dissertation, and my readers, Michael Gamer, Suvir Kaul, and John Richetti, also offered valuable suggestions. Several portions of the manuscript benefited from Nancy Henry’s and Roxann Wheeler’s careful reading. Their thoughtful comments encouraged me to refine my arguments and their generous collegiality continues to inspire me. A James M. Osborn postdoctoral fellowship in British Studies at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library provided me with resources and time to finish the book. I appreciate the assistance of the staff at the Beinecke, who made my year in New Haven enjoyable and productive. A section of Chapter 2 reworks material from “Smollett’s Scots and Sodomites: British Masculinity in Roderick Random,” The Eighteenth Century (2005) and part of Chapter 4 appeared as “From Family Roots to the Routes of Empire: National Tales and the Domestication of the Scottish Highlands” in ELH (2006); I thank both journals for allowing me to reuse material. I am grateful to the anonymous readers at Cambridge University Press, whose comments helped me to tighten the focus of the manuscript, and to Linda Bree and Elizabeth Hanlon for their expertise in overseeing the final stages of the project. My deepest thanks go to my family and friends for their support, encouragement, and companionship. The book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Mary Rose Wills.

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introduction

The politics and sentiments of union

On January 16, 1707, Scotland’s Parliament ratified the Treaty of Union that would incorporate the Scottish into the English Parliament to form a new British state. On this momentous occasion, the Duke of Queensberry, one of the prime players in negotiating the Union, urged his fellow Scots “to become one in Hearts and Affections, as we are inseparably joyn’d in Interest with our Neighbour Nation.”1 Queensberry would be one of sixty-one Scots in the newly created 764-person British Parliament. He also stood to gain a large portion of the money that the English treasury had promised to pay Scottish peers in return for their acceptance of the terms of union outlined by England’s Parliament. Despite his personal investments in the formation of a British state, Queensberry counseled Scots to understand the Union not merely as an economic and political partnership, but also as a sentimental or affective alliance. He implied that Scotland’s and England’s shared political and economic interests should foster a mutual, even familial, fondness among the inhabitants of the newly established Great Britain. This book argues that Scottish writers from Tobias Smollett, Adam Smith, James Macpherson, Henry Mackenzie, and James Boswell in the middle of the eighteenth century to Christian Isobel Johnstone, Susan Ferrier, Walter Scott, James Hogg, and John Galt in the early nineteenth century responded to Scotland’s loss of independent sovereignty by seeking in sentiment, or virtuous feeling, a compensation for political dispossession. These writers explored the potential advantages and limitations of defining the nation as a community united by sympathy rather than by shared blood or common political and economic interests. In doing so, they did not envision an apolitical alternative to the state; rather, they explored the political implications and uses of feeling. Most of the writers I discuss in this book were from Lowland Scotland and were part of an educated, professional class that generally, although not uniformly, hoped to make the Union work because it provided the mercantile Lowlands 1

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The politics and sentiments of union

with access to England’s already sizeable commercial empire. However, even the Union’s strongest supporters could not ignore Scotland’s gratingly subordinate role in what was glossed as an egalitarian partnership. To varying degrees, these writers sought to create a distinctive Scottish identity while also participating in the formation of an inclusive British identity. Recent studies of the emergence of British identity after the 1707 Union between Scotland and England have been dominated, anachronistically, by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century paradigm of the nation-state, an entity in which political, territorial, and cultural boundaries are aligned. For instance, Linda Colley’s Britons, Leith Davis’s Acts of Union, and Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism assume the nation-state as the inevitable telos of a newly formed Great Britain comprising multiple ethnic and regional communities that were governed by shared political institutions but that lacked the shared traditions, behaviors, and feelings that might create a sense of shared British identity.2 By exploring the importance of sentiment in British nation formation, I seek to recover understandings of nationhood preceding the model of nation-state-based nationalism that has dominated literary studies of nation formation in recent years.3 I take as my lens of analysis two closely related concepts through which the writers I discuss themselves understood nation formation – sensibility and sympathy. I will explore the meanings of each of these notoriously slippery terms in greater depth below. They can be distinguished at the most basic level through a preposition: sensibility connotes feeling for someone or something, and sympathy implies feeling with someone. While Scottish writers did not create single-handedly the culture of feeling that, according to Adela Pinch, defined the long eighteenth century, they certainly played a disproportionately prominent role in exploring the moral workings of sensibility and sympathy.4 They did so, I will argue, to empower a politically and economically disadvantaged Scotland. By envisioning a Great Britain divided by political, economic, and ethnic conflicts as a nation united by shared feeling, Scottish writers not only explored possible means of negotiating these conflicts, but also imagined a British identity to which Scotland could contribute. During the early decades of the eighteenth century, pro-Union propagandists such as Daniel Defoe confidently predicted that, as Queensberry had hoped, shared political and economic interests soon would foster a more heartfelt attachment between the Scots and the English. However, the 1715 and 1745–6 Jacobite rebellions dramatically challenged the Treaty of Union’s efficacy in integrating these two peoples. In 1745 Charles Edward

The politics and sentiments of union

3

Stuart rallied Scots to support his efforts to recover the British throne from the Hanoverian monarchy by questioning whether Scotland and England did in fact share economic and political interests, let alone mutual affections. Declaring that Scotland had been “reduced to the condition of a Province, under the specious Pretence of an Union, with a more powerful Neighbour,” Charles Edward promised to restore “Honour, Liberty, and Independency” to Scots.5 However, the Jacobite troops’ defeat at Culloden in 1746 only further “reduced” Scots’ liberties. Parliament enacted measures intended to bring the Highlands, where the rebellion had originated, under the control of centralized British authority: heritable jurisdictions were abolished; landowners who had participated in the uprising forfeited their estates; and weapons were prohibited along with the traditional forms of dress and music thought to inspire Highlanders’ martial spirit. While Lowlanders suffered less dramatic consequences than Highlanders, the uprising increased English prejudices against Scots and led to various forms of discrimination, from the flurry of anti-Scottish propaganda published in the wake of the ’45, to Parliament’s refusal to include Scotland in the 1757 Militia Act for fear of another uprising. Mid-century anti-Scottish propaganda, which I will discuss in further detail in Chapter 2, demonstrates that the ’45 had the unfortunate effect of coupling the terms “Scot” and “Jacobite” in English popular culture. England had sought union with Scotland at the end of the seventeenth century largely to ensure that the two countries would continue to share the Protestant monarchy that had been established with the exile of James II and the importation of William and Mary in 1688. The Jacobites’ efforts to restore the Catholic and Scottish Stuart monarchy thus signaled Scotland’s treasonous breach of contract. The acrimony and anxieties dredged up by the ’45 inspired the predominantly pro-Union Scottish writers I discuss in this book to reconsider the importance of “Hearts and Affections” in Anglo-Scottish relations. While these writers realized that they would need to undertake damage control if any semblance of Anglo-Scottish harmony was to be salvaged, they also resented Scotland’s denigration and disempowerment and sought to protect it from English calumny. Accordingly, they claimed sentiment as a peculiarly Scottish trait that differentiated a hospitable, even familial, “North Britain” from the unfriendly, economically driven, English metropolises to suggest that Scots could and, given the chance, would, heal the breach they had supposedly created. Ironically, however, the sentimental rhetoric that these predominantly pro-Union Scottish writers employed to imagine

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The politics and sentiments of union

an amicable and even affectionate Anglo-Scottish Union was derived largely from Jacobite literature and culture. The Scottish Enlightenment’s philosophical contributions to eighteenthcentury discourses of feeling have been well documented by Pinch, John Dwyer, John Mullan, and others.6 Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and others minutely dissected sympathy in their attempts to discover not simply how it works, but also whether it is innate or acquired, laudable or potentially pernicious. Their philosophical inquiries are not antithetical to, but rather, as the following chapters will demonstrate, an outgrowth of a less openly acknowledged Jacobite culture of sentiment. The devastation of Highland and Jacobite cultures in the wake of the ’45 ironically became a source of literary and national regeneration for Scottish writers in the eighteenth century and beyond. Murray Pittock, one of the foremost scholars of Jacobite literature and culture, has pinpointed the suppression of the ’45 as the moment when Jacobitism became more feeling than action, more sentimental nostalgia than political threat. With a certain justice, Pittock has accused early nineteenthcentury writers of further sentimentalizing Jacobitism, that is, with misrepresenting it as an ideology grounded in emotion rather than in carefully calculated political principles and reasoned arguments.7 Thus, for instance, in Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), the eponymous hero is seduced into joining the Jacobite army in part by the seeming glory of its cause and by the charming valor of its representatives, Flora, Fergus, and Charles Edward. With the benefit of historical hindsight, Scott can represent Jacobitism as inevitably doomed by its “absurd political prejudice” while also valorizing Jacobites’ “singular and disinterested attachment to the principles of loyalty which they received from their fathers, and of old Scottish faith, hospitality, worth, and honour.”8 Pittock dismisses this sentimentalization as a Romantic revision of a supposedly authentic political Jacobitism; yet William Donaldson has shown that, on the contrary, seventeenth-century Jacobite literature evoked “golden ages of political independence, social autonomy, and pure uncomplicated heroism tragically compromised and lost.”9 In other words, seventeenthcentury Jacobite literature was already sentimental. By exploiting virtuous feeling for political ends, Jacobite writing shows the distinction between the political and the sentimental to be untenable. The dangers of supporting the Stuart monarchy openly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries forced Jacobite culture underground. Poems, songs, and proclamations transmitted orally or in manuscript attempted to sustain a sense of purpose in their audiences by

The politics and sentiments of union

5

appealing to their feelings of loyalty, courage, generosity, and heroic self-sacrifice. Frequently, Jacobite writing makes these sentimental appeals through gendered images of familial and romantic affection. For instance, in his royal proclamations, Charles Edward repeatedly represents himself as a benevolent father, undoubtedly in an effort to undercut the Stuarts’ reputation for arbitrary tyranny. Similarly, an anonymous poem compares Charles Edward’s generous forgiveness of his ungrateful subjects to the Biblical story of the prodigal son: “Such Love a Parent’s Heart, for Sons ingrate, / Keeps dormant till Repentance, even tho’ late; / Restores the unduteous Offspring to his Arms, / And all his Race with filial Tears disarms.”10 Such virtuous tears punctuated Jacobite writing. Another poem urges Scots to join the Jacobite cause by reminding them of Britain’s repeated ill-treatment of the valiant Stuart monarchs during the preceding century: “Weep Brittons, Weep, the Royal Martyr’s Blood / For Vengeance or Repentance calls aloud.”11 The Jacobites’ decisive defeat at Culloden elicited grateful sorrow from Charles Edward, as he proclaimed, “with tears we remember our warm and sincere Love for [our subjects], and the just sense which we have of their Fidelity, Zeal, and Courage will never be effaced from Our Hearts.”12 While the would-be monarch most often casts himself as the paternal guardian of his people, some Jacobite writing casts Charles Edward as the chivalrous suitor of a feminized Scotland. Thus a poem celebrating the Jacobites’ victory at the Battle of Gladsmuir depicts Scotia, the spirit of Scotland, gratefully praising “the gallant youth,” Charles Edward.13 Whether Charles Edward figures as a father or a lover, Jacobite writing emphasizes the bonds of loyalty and affection uniting the Scottish people and their king. Jacobites’ copious literary tears certainly did not win them much pity in the decades after the ’45. On the contrary, Whig satirists seized on Jacobite displays of feeling to ridicule and feminize their opponents. The Stuarts’ detractors depicted women, with their supposed emotional susceptibility, as Charles Edward’s strongest supporters, and they implied that his escape from Scotland disguised in women’s clothing accurately reflected his lack of manly courage. Although the Jacobites’ defeat at Culloden contributed to Scotland’s disempowerment, and to the feminization through which that disempowerment was symbolized, proUnion Scottish writers such as James Boswell, Tobias Smollett, and Walter Scott began to incorporate Jacobitism’s positive associations with martial qualities – heroic courage, noble self-sacrifice, loyal devotion, and generous compassion, into a sentimental but re-masculinized Scottish identity. While historians and literary critics understandably have equated

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The politics and sentiments of union

Jacobitism with Scottish resistance to the Union, I will suggest to the contrary that Jacobitism was compatible with support for the Union.14 Just as anti-Unionists were not by default Jacobites, pro-Unionists were not necessarily anti-Jacobites. Many of the writers that I discuss in this book reconcile Jacobitism and Unionism by dislocating sentiment from its Jacobite origins and transforming it at once into a marker of Scottish national character and Scots’ particular contribution to a united Britain. By 1823, the year that concludes my study of British nation formation, this displaced Jacobite sentiment had been reinvested to some extent in Anglo-Scottish unity under the Hanoverian monarchy. George IV’s 1822 visit to Edinburgh did not so much symbolize Scots’ belated acceptance of Hanoverian rule as confer legitimate authority on the king by associating him through a tartan-infused spectacle with the Stuart monarchy.15 The strongly pro-Union Blackwood’s Magazine, which seized the occasion to examine in detail the transformation of Anglo-Scottish relations since 1707, emphasized Highlanders’ prominence both in the pageantry surrounding the visit and in the legitimation that it symbolically performed. Blackwood’s recalled that in 1745 the Highlanders following Charles Edward “had pierced with their claymores into the very heart of England.” Yet less than a hundred years later, their descendants recognized George IV “as the heir and descendant of ‘Scotland’s royal race’,” and welcomed him to Edinburgh with pride “as a kinsman.”16 Blackwood’s rhetorical conflation of sentimental ties and blood bonds was repeated incessantly throughout the king’s visit. Edward Said describes affiliation, or the volitional formation of community founded in shared feelings, beliefs, and values, as a compensation for the failure of filiation, or the breakdown of community founded in the “natural” bonds of “genealogical descent.”17 Yet, as I shall demonstrate in Chapters 3 and 4 in particular, sentimental and racial nationhood were in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing often two sides of one coin, with sympathetic yearnings signaling hitherto undiscovered blood ties, and with consanguineous bonds in turn cultivating shared sympathies. Eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Scottish writers employ this coincidence of sentimental and blood ties, or “metaphysics of blood,” to define the nation as an affective community.18 Thus Blackwood’s explains the formerly treacherous Highlanders’ attachment to the British monarch by comparing it to the familial affections structuring the clan system: “Scottish loyalty partakes of the nature of the domestic ties; in its higher sentiments, it is something akin to filial reverence, and in its familiar, to fraternal affection.”19 Although George IV’s visit to Edinburgh seemed

Sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy

7

to celebrate the transformation of Scottishness into Britishness, giving performative closure to the process of union, my final chapter’s examination of two novels published in 1823, John Galt’s The Entail and James Hogg’s Three Perils of Women, will suggest that the sentimental legacies of Jacobitism continued to trouble Anglo-Scottish relations.20 sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy Since the publication of Jane Tompkins’ Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 in 1985, sentiment’s importance to nation formation has been generally acknowledged in American studies, a field that is virtually defined by the concept of nationhood. Julia A. Stern’s The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel and Elizabeth Barnes’ States of Sympathy, among other recent studies, have examined how late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury American writers employed discourses of feeling to represent the transformation of Britain’s former colonies into an independent and internally united nation as a movement from disorderly fragmentation to organic harmony.21 Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity examines the British precedents for American writers’ negotiation through sympathy of political conflicts. The relatively recent interest in nationhood in British, as compared to American, studies perhaps attests to the success of eighteenth-century writers in naturalizing Britishness, or alternatively to our tendency to conflate English and British, to assume that we are discussing Britain when in fact we are only discussing England. Literary critics and historians have traced the theories of sympathy circulating in post-Revolutionary American literature and culture to David Hume and Adam Smith, citing the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on early America’s university curriculums as one of the sources of transmission.22 Yet studies of British nation formation thus far have neglected to examine why eighteenth-century Scottish writers might have been so interested in sympathy. Evan Gottlieb’s Feeling British: Sympathy in Scottish and English Writing 1707–1832 argues that Scottish and English novelists and poets drew on eighteenth-century theories of sympathy to envision a united Great Britain, a project in which both were mutually invested.23 While Gottlieb follows Davis’s Acts of Union in representing literary nation formation as a dialogic, give-and-take process between English and Scottish writers, I contend that Scottish writers played a much larger part than English writers in the literary imagining of British identity. It is perhaps because Scots’ opportunities to contribute to the

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The politics and sentiments of union

political aspects of nation formation were so limited that they explored in such depth the sentimental dimensions of nationhood. Moreover, participating in the construction of Britishness enabled Scots to distinguish themselves from Britain’s colonized populations abroad, groups that had neither stake nor voice in British nation formation. Yet Scottish writers did not only draw on discourses of feeling to imagine a British identity, as Gottlieb suggests. They also constructed a sentimental Scottish identity distinct from, and sometimes incompatible with, a unified Britishness. In attending primarily to Scottish writers, this book emphasizes that British nation formation was not in fact dialogic. Instead, it explores Scotland’s position as at once an integral part of the British imperial center and a disempowered and internally divided periphery, as a stateless nation and a part of a nationless state. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scottish writers defined discrete Scottish and British identities in large part by exploring the gendered connotations of sentiment, demonstrating that, as Ania Loomba reminds us, “If the nation is an imagined community, that imagining is profoundly gendered.”24 Although Scotland produced very few women writers compared to the proliferation of authoresses in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century England, male writers sought to define national identities by fixing gender identities. Loomba explains that “during the early modern period, gender and sexuality provided a language for expressing and developing ideas about religious, geographic, and ultimately racial difference.”25 Scottish writers used gender not only to examine the forms of difference that Loomba describes but also to explore possible configurations of Anglo-Scottish relations and to contest discrepancies in Scotland’s and England’s respective access to political and economic power. Gender functions in their writing symbolically, by signifying relationships of power, and literally, by negotiating between an older but still current understanding of the nation as race or consanguineous community and a newer concept of the nation as sentimental community. Literary critics and cultural historians working in British studies have tended to relegate discourses of feeling to the realm of the domestic and familial much as Scotland has been relegated to the margins of British studies.26 In moving Scotland to the center of British studies, I explore how discourses of feeling in fact shaped and were shaped by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century nation formation. While Gottlieb’s otherwise persuasively argued book follows our contemporary practice in using the term “sympathy” to refer to various modalities of fellow-feeling, I have tried to attend to the subtle but crucial

Sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy

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eighteenth-century distinctions between sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy in order to explore the gendered implications of these forms of feeling. In its broadest sense, the term “sentiment” referred simply to virtuous feeling; but by the 1770s, the decade in which sentimental novels reached the height of their popularity, it often referred to one mode of feeling in particular – sensibility.27 Sensibility connoted “extremely refined emotion,” and was sometimes used synonymously with compassion or pity.28 Women were widely believed to be more sensible or compassionate than men because, according to eighteenth-century medical theory, their bodies contained more nerves than men’s.29 On one hand, sensibility was venerated as a distinctively feminine virtue, one of the qualities that suited women to be wives and mothers. Yet, on the other hand, sensibility seemed to indicate weakness, justifying women’s confinement to the safety of the domestic sphere. A man who was too compassionate and too easily moved to tears was considered effeminate both because he exhibited moral or behavioral traits that did not align properly with the physiological sex of his body and because he lacked the supposedly masculine qualities of judgment and self-control necessary to regulate his feelings. For instance, after a period of melancholy in which he “even in public could not refrain from groaning and weeping bitterly,” James Boswell compared himself to a “hysteric lady” and reminded himself of the importance of “preserving a manly fortitude of mind.”30 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, middle- and upper-class men had incorporated sensibility – although not the serious depression that Boswell experienced – into an ideal of benevolent patriarchy. At the same time that this “‘masculinization’ of formerly feminine gender traits” situated sensibility as foundational to patriarchal authority and social order, women, supposedly lacking self-control, were accorded the aberrant and rebellious passions associated with Jacobinism.31 In contrast to sensibility, or the ability to feel compassion for someone, sympathy designates the ability to feel with someone, or to share in another’s feelings. While sensibility is a uni-directional feeling, sympathy is a morally neutral mechanism that enables the transmission of any sentiment, from outrage to joy, among two or more people. The writers I examine in this book understand sympathy as a complex social behavior that is learned rather than innate, and that requires the complementary exercise of sensibility and self-control. I am going to explain the workings of sympathy here using Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments simply because, as a philosophical treatise, it explains most explicitly and abstractly a process that other works explore in socially embedded

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The politics and sentiments of union

instances, and sometimes also through their narrative forms. However, I do not mean to imply that the novelists, poets, and essayists I discuss in the succeeding chapters simply borrowed from or responded to Smith’s philosophy. Nor do I mean to privilege philosophy above what we now describe as literature – a term that for eighteenth-century readers would have included philosophical works like The Theory of Moral Sentiments. On the contrary, Chapter 1 returns more fully to The Theory of Moral Sentiments as one of many mid-eighteenth-century explorations of Great Britain’s historical and racial origins, and Chapter 2 shows that Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, published ten years before The Theory of Moral Sentiments, constructs a British masculinity that foreshadows Smith’s emphasis on the importance of balancing sensibility with selfcontrol. As the ensuing chapters will illustrate, The Theory of Moral Sentiments is only one of many texts by Scottish writers that emphasizes self-control as a necessary compliment to sensibility and as an essential element of sympathy. These writers’ common understanding of sensibility and self-control as acquired skills rather than natural responses suggests that for many Britons, cross-cultural sympathy did not come easily. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is in part a response to David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (1739), which argues that the communication of feelings among individuals is facilitated by relations of contiguity and resemblance. Hume posits that we most readily share in the feelings of those who are near us and who are most like us. Consequently, our natural propensity for sympathy explains “the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation.” Hume’s representation of sympathy as a natural, almost contagious, “communication” of “inclinations and sentiments” among already likeminded individuals raises the question of whether sympathy that transcends cultural, political, or national boundaries is possible.32 It also leaves unanswered the question of how feelings run amok might be controlled. Smith, writing after the ’45 had demonstrated just how dangerous such contagious feelings might be to Britain’s security and stability, proposes some answers to these questions in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith defines sympathy as a correspondence or concurrence of sentiments between two people: a spectator and an actor. To achieve this concord, the spectator must “change places in fancy” with the actor and try to “bring home to himself every little circumstance of distress which can possibly occur” in order to imagine how he would feel in the actor’s situation.33 However, Smith acknowledges that the limitations of imagination prevent us from ever fully appreciating the intensity of emotions

Sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy

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that we do not experience immediately. Even when the spectator “endeavour[s], as much as he can, to put himself in the situation of the other” he “will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer.”34 If the spectator judges the actor’s feelings to be disproportionate or inappropriate to the situation that caused them, he will respond with disgust, disinterest, or amusement rather than by sharing in those feelings. Thus, in order to win the consolation that the spectator’s sympathy affords, the actor must in turn “change places in fancy” with the spectator and moderate his feelings so that they appear to the spectator appropriate to the situation that produced them. In Smith’s words, the actor must “flatten . . . the sharpness” of the pitch of his passions “in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him.”35 This concord of feelings constitutes sympathy. Of course, no individual is ever purely a spectator or actor; we all must learn to navigate both positions simultaneously. David Marshall explains, “we must imagine ourselves as an other who looks upon us as an other and tries to imagine us.”36 Self-fragmentation is a normative condition, necessary to maintain the state of social harmony that for Smith is the ultimate purpose of sympathy. As we learn to see ourselves through others’ eyes, we begin to regulate our feelings and behaviors by anticipating others’ judgments. Sympathy requires both the self-control necessary to regulate or moderate emotion and the sensibility necessary to imaginatively change places with others.37 The writers I discuss in this book represent sympathy as the condition of possibility for the formation of community in a civilized, commercial state like eighteenth-century Great Britain. Yet pro-Union Scottish writers’ understanding of sympathy as sensibility or fellow-feeling regulated by rational judgment also reflects their divided allegiances to Scotland and Britain. Although they claimed sensibility as a peculiarly Scottish trait with Jacobite and Celtic origins, writers including James Macpherson and Henry Mackenzie expressed anxiety about the perceived decline of Scots’ capacity for self-control following the Union. While the civic traditions that had been central to seventeenth-century Scottish culture encouraged citizens to develop fortitude by participating in the defense and government of their country, the Union severely curtailed opportunities for such participation.38 By suggesting that self-control was as necessary to sympathy as to heroic courage, pro-Union Scottish writers domesticated or feminized classical ideals of civic virtue. If sympathy was to serve as the social glue uniting the Scots and the English, shared feelings would need to be regulated discriminately. Only by cultivating the

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The politics and sentiments of union

self-control necessary to regulate their sensibility could Scots become Britons and transform an unequal union of interests into a harmonious union of sympathies. “scotland’s to be a bryde”: gender, race, and nation before 1745 Discourses of sentiment arguably did not become central to British nation formation until the middle of the eighteenth century, after the suppression of the ’45. However, gender offered a lens for representing nationhood in general, and Anglo-Scottish relations in particular, even prior to the 1707 Union of Parliaments.39 A striking number of pro- and antiUnion pamphlets either implicitly or explicitly constructed an analogy between political union and marriage, using the economic, legal, and affective relationships between husband and wife to imagine various possible configurations of the political relations between England and Scotland.40 By turning here to the pamphlet literature surrounding the Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments, I aim to show how the analogy between marriage and political union established relationships between gendered, national, and racial difference to which writers would return repeatedly in the ensuing century. Although pamphlet literature may have constituted “little more than a campaign of rationalisation and propaganda” that had a negligible impact on the Parliamentary negotiation of the Union, I suggest that it did participate in the consolidation of an emerging concept of the nation as a sentimental community.41 Whether they were pro-Union or anti-Union, pamphleteers frequently invoked marriage as a transparently natural bond to respectively justify or denounce what seemed to many an unnatural political contrivance. For instance, the 1706 pro-Union pamphlet by Francis Cullen, Lord Grant, The Patriot Resolved, describes marriage as “a Familiar Idea, for introducing to [the] Understanding, a New Thing, of great Compass.”42 Marriage brought the Union from the realm of the political into that of the familiar – in the sense of both the domestic and the comprehensible. But although marriage may have been a more familiar concept than union, the rights and duties of husband and wife were no less contested at the beginning of the eighteenth century than they are now.43 Thus, while some pamphleteers, like Daniel Defoe, depicted marriage as an egalitarian relationship founded in affection, others, like William Wright, represented it as a hierarchal relationship founded in economic and political interest. It was precisely the indeterminacy of conjugal relations

Gender, race, and nation before 1745

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that allowed marriage to function as such a useful analogy for writers who took very different positions on the prospective union. Marital analogies provided a framework within which to configure the distribution of political and economic power between Scotland and England and to weigh the comparative merits of incorporating and federal union. The incorporating union implemented in 1707 absorbed the Scottish and English Parliaments into a single British Parliament; federation, by contrast, simply would have renegotiated the terms of the 1603 Union of Crowns, allowing each nation to retain its separate Parliament while continuing to share a monarch. While England’s Parliament firmly favored incorporation as the surest guarantee of a Protestant monarchical succession, Scots were divided over which form of union would best protect Scotland’s political and economic prerogatives.44 The one aspect of the marriage analogy that remains uniform throughout the pamphlet literature regardless of the author’s political agenda is the assignment of gender roles: Scotland is always, in the words of a popular song, “to be a bryde,” with England cast as her suitor.45 Scotland’s representation as a woman, and often as a virgin mother, derived most immediately from a seventeenth-century tradition of martial poetry.46 Partaking of this tradition, An Elegye Upon the never Enough to be Lamented Decease of that Ancient Illustrious and Venerable Lady Princess Scocia (c. 1707) describes Scotland as a “Princess Rare, of Ancient Pedegree,” and praises her “Signal Vertues,” foremost among which is her chastity: Tho’ oft by Wiles, as well as Violence, Rapes were Attempted on Her Innocence, Her Prudence, Fortitude, and Sanctity, Her Matchless Valour and Antiquity, Deserve first place in Calendars of Fame.47

This feminized Scotland is weak insofar as she may be penetrated and defiled by invasion or conquest; nonetheless, her virtues, and more specifically her chastity, constitute a source of strength by inspiring the “Martial Exploits and Heroick deeds” of her chivalric sons. In pro- and anti-Union pamphlets, Scotland’s feminization similarly is a sign at once of weakness and of strength. It represents Scotland’s economic and political disempowerment relative to England while at the same time reminding readers that, according to the conventions of courtship, an as yet unmarried Scotland must be wooed and won. In addition to its obvious gendering of Anglo-Scottish relations, the marriage analogy also reveals the more subtle racial implications of the

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The politics and sentiments of union

Union. Among Europe’s nobility, marriage was a political tool, forging important alliances between family lineages. Union, conceived of as a political alliance of the genealogically distinct Scottish and English nobilities, raised fears about the effects of mixed blood on national character. The analogy between marriage and union exposes competing definitions of the nation as on one hand a people united by shared blood and on the other as a community bound by shared affections. The equation of nation with lineage or race had a long history in Scotland prior to the eighteenth century.48 While seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historians traced the origins of English identity through political institutions to the AngloSaxons’ ancient constitution, they traced Scotland’s origins through bloodlines to the possibly mythical fourth-century King Fergus, and through Fergus to Noah and Adam.49 In keeping with these narratives of origin, the Scottish aristocracy claimed that the purity of its lineages ensured the nobility of its virtues and distinguished them from England’s families of rank, with their heterogeneous racial origins and corresponding moral debasement. Pro- and anti-Union pamphlets often equated this racial and moral purity with a feminized Scotland’s “chastity.” For instance, pamphleteers Lord Belhaven and William Wright each compared Scotland to an unmarried “Noble Heiress” possessing an “Ancient Estate.”50 The strongly anti-Union Belhaven asked the members of the Scottish Parliament whether they would allow the blood of this chaste and venerable woman to be defiled through admixture with “English Cabbage-Stock and Colliflower,” invoking the commonness of these vegetables to denigrate the “mongrel half-bred race” of true-born Englishmen celebrated by Daniel Defoe.51 If genealogy determines the nation’s moral character, Scots could preserve their martial virtues within a united Great Britain only by ensuring that the ancient bloodlines of Scotland’s nobility remained unadulterated. William Wright draws a similar contrast between Scotland’s racial purity and England’s racial heterogeneity in his allegorical pamphlet, The Comical History of the Marriage Betwixt Fergusia and Heptarchus (1706), which recounts a discussion between Fergusia (Scotland) and Heptarchus (England) concerning the possibility of their union. Fergusia, a feminized version of Fergus, is “a Lady of Venerable Antiquity, of a Competent Estate and Fortune, and a Sovereign over a Bold and Hardy People.” Heptarchus’ name, in contrast, emphasizes the disparateness of his origins, alluding to the heptarchy, or seven kingdoms, out of which England was formed. This “young and lusty” gentleman has “all the Blood of [his] annexed people in his Veins, and

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also all their conquering Vigour.”52 Heptarchus, whose mixed blood flows from the rapacious and violent barbarians of Europe, threatens Fergusia’s sexual purity, and thus the racial and moral purity of future generations of Scots. As The Comical History illustrates, political pamphlets that represented marriage as a patriarchal bond founded in political and economic interest also tended to define the nation as an entity delimited by filiation or race. The Comical History advocates a federal union, suggesting that much as marriage deprived a woman of property and rights by subsuming her legal identity into her husband’s, an incorporating union would divest Scotland of political and economic power by absorbing its Parliament into England’s. Fergusia rejects the conditions of incorporation on which Heptarchus offers her marriage, retorting: “It’s plain by this Union all I have becomes Yours, and is perfectly at Your Disposal, and nothing You have becomes Mine, so as to be at my Disposal, because there is no Ballance of Power in my hand, as it will be in Yours, afterwards.”53 She is understandably hesitant to join herself to a man who has kept his sister Juverna, or Ireland, “as a conquered slave for ages,” fearing that Heptarchus might treat her with similar neglect in the future.54 Since there would be no higher authority to which Scots, vastly outnumbered in a nominally British Parliament, could appeal to redress such mistreatment, an incorporating union might leave Scotland a powerless and impoverished province. Fergusia’s objections to incorporation also have a racial dimension. She accuses Heptarchus of desiring to “burie Me in the midst of Your self, [so that] I be turned into Your very Flesh and Blood.”55 Fergusia’s fear of corporeal and sanguineal absorption is more urgent than Belhaven’s mocking reference to English “Cabbage-Stock” because she associates racial purity with political prerogative. Fergusia suggests that the mingling of Scottish and English blood will not simply sully Scotland’s ancient virtues; it also will fragment its political interests and dissolve its identity. Quite simply, she fears the disappearance of a racially and politically distinct Scottish nation, warning that “it can never be in the Interest of a Weaker and smaller People to incorporate with a greater; for then they lose themselves . . . Even as a small Rivulet [does], when it’s incorporate[d] with a large River.”56 Wright thus condemns an incorporating union because it would deprive Scotland of political independence by assimilating both its Parliament and its people into England’s. In contrast to Wright’s representation of a Scottish nation defined by blood, pamphlets that depicted marriage as an egalitarian, companionate relationship tended to envision the nation as a community united by

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The politics and sentiments of union

sentimental or affective bonds. Whereas the patriarchal marriage of interests offered a descriptive analogy for union, the companionate marriage of affections offered a prescriptive and perhaps rather idealistic one. Daniel Defoe, whose copious pro-Union pamphlets prefigured his later novels in their exploration of commercial society’s conflation of sentimental and economic bonds, was foremost among those who predicted a happily-ever-after ending for a united Great Britain. He argued that by establishing “mutual Security, mutual Improvement, and mutual Prosperity,” the Union would in time cultivate “mutual Confidences and mutual Affections” between the Scots and the English.57 A “Union of Policy” he declared, must precede a “Union of Affections.”58 However, others questioned the desirability of a Parliamentary union precisely because of the time and effort it might take to foster shared affections between the Scots and the English. In a 1705 anti-Union pamphlet, Alexander Pennecuik gloomily suggested that the antipathy between the two peoples might be innate and insurmountable. He declared that “A true Union consists, and is founded Chiefly, on the oneness, and sympathy of Tempers, both of Nations and of Persons.” He went on to ask, “From what Ground then, are we [Scots] supposed to hope for such an Union, with a Nation, who at once Despise, Hate and . . . Fear us.”59 For Pennecuik, nations united through filiation preceded, and were in a sense more natural or organic than, those formed through affiliation. Although he did not reject the theoretical concept of a nation united by sentimental ties, he argued that the Scots and the English were too disparate in character to achieve such an ideal. Historians and literary critics have continued to use marriage as a metaphor for the 1707 Union without recognizing the historical baggage that it carries or considering the political inequalities that it inscribes. Thus Howard Weinbrot wittily declares that after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, Scotland and England sought “to achieve fantasized matrimonial concord. To avoid a shotgun wedding, however, Scotland needed to cleanse the taint of its former suitor” Charles Edward. Explaining the motives behind early eighteenth-century England’s push for union, David Allan states, “The problem of the succession and the need for a consistent foreign policy finally aroused England, long the most reluctant of spouses, into a state of unquenched ardour” that precipitated “a marriage of convenience.”60 Weinbrot and Allan should perhaps have heeded Daniel Defoe’s prescient dismantling of the marriage analogy in a 1713 pamphlet called The Scots Union and Nation Vindicated. This pamphlet was published partly in opposition to disgruntled Scots’ efforts to dissolve

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the Union, and partly in opposition to Jonathan Swift’s The Publick Spirit of the Whigs (1713), which was censured for its libelous depictions of Scots. Among other insults, The Publick Spirit of the Whigs characterizes Scotland as a gold-digger, comparing England to “a Person of Quality” who was tricked into marrying a “Woman much his inferior and without a Groat to her Fortune.”61 In a response that mockingly employs the very analogy it criticizes, The Scots Union and Nation Vindicated notes that the author of this offensive pamphlet “knows little of the Laws of Matrimony” and sets out to remove Scotland’s “Complaints against her Spouse.”62 Despite his own use of the rhetoric of marriage in some of his earlier pro-Union pamphlets, Defoe had emphasized consistently that an incorporating union would not subsume Scotland into England, as William Wright had feared, but instead would join the two nations as equal partners. The Scots Union and Nation Vindicated goes one step farther by arguing that union differs from marriage in that it does not constitute a relationship between two distinct entities; rather, it is a creative process that generates a new political totality. Defoe explains that “in a Marriage the Woman is a subject, an inferiour; Promises Obedience, and is call’d by the Name of her Husband: But here [in the case of Union] is an entire Dissolution of the former Capacities and Circumstances, and both [Scotland and England] become subjected equally to a new Constitution, and take up a new Name.”63 Union, for Defoe at least, effectively dismantled England’s and Scotland’s political institutions to create in their place a completely original and integral political entity – the British state. The Scots Union and Nation Vindicated suggests that as a metaphor for union, marriage ironically might hinder the cultivation of affection between the Scots and the English by implying a disparity in their relationship that, according to Defoe, should not in fact exist. Defoe thus disavows the marriage analogy precisely because he wants to rescue and to promote a concept of the nation as a community bound by shared sympathies and affections. He concludes dismissively, “the Simily or Allusion of Marriage is lame and halts in the Case very much.”64 Although race remained central to eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury ideas of nationhood, it was variously supplemented and contested by discourses of feeling, much as the patriarchal marriage of interests was challenged and modified by middle-class ideals of companionate marriage. Defoe’s vision of a nation united by sentimental ties was one that pro-Union Scottish writers adopted and continued to advocate, albeit with modifications, as they reassessed Anglo-Scottish relations during the

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The politics and sentiments of union

century that followed the publication of Defoe’s work. However, as Chapters 2 to 5 will illustrate, novelists in particular returned repeatedly to the marital analogies that Defoe condemned, re-inscribing gender and racial identities in order to define Scottish and British identities. Chapters 1 and 2 explore in greater depth the gendered and racial connotations of sensibility and self-control, the complementary moral qualities deemed essential to the sympathy that might integrate Scotland and England into a united Britain. Chapter 1 compares conjectural and antiquarian accounts of the historical and racial origins of sensibility and of Great Britain. Focusing on James Macpherson’s Works of Ossian (1760–63) and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), among other texts, I trace sensibility’s discursive transformation from a historically contingent trait into an essential racial trait. While Macpherson mourns the death of a racialized and heroic Scottish sensibility, Smith celebrates the triumph of a deracinated and domesticated British sensibility. However, both writers understand patriotism as familial affection writ large, and both describe the patriot as a man who has learned to unite courage with compassion. Chapter 2 examines how in the mid-century novel this feminized or sentimental masculinity became an indicator of British identity. Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), James Boswell’s London Journal (1762–3), and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) suggest that to achieve a moral and economic independence implicitly coded as British, Scots must learn to regulate carefully their supposed tendencies to excessive feeling. Roderick Random, a passionate and profligate Scot, cultivates the self-control necessary to become a Briton by taking advantage of post-Union Scotland’s access to Britain’s commercial empire. His success suggests that Scots might transform a union of interests into a union of sympathies somewhat paradoxically by acquiring economic and moral independence from England. In contrast, Boswell and Mackenzie call into question the practicability of British masculinity, suggesting that moral and economic independence, like Scottishness and Britishness, ultimately may be irreconcilable for the man of feeling. The three works that I discuss in Chapter 2 are all varieties of picaresque, narratives in which the peripatetic protagonist searches for a sanctioned social identity – in this case, Britishness. While Boswell did not intend his journal to be published, Smollett and Mackenzie employ the conventions of the picaresque to encourage their readers – Scottish and English – to become Britons. In their efforts to cultivate sensibility and self-control in readers, Roderick Random and The Man of Feeling resemble the novels discussed

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in the remaining three chapters. Each of these chapters examines how one subgenre of fiction – the epistolary novel, the national tale, and the historical novel – explored, and variously tried to extend or contract, the limits of sympathy and the boundaries of sentimental nationhood. These forms of fiction integrate historiography’s diachronic exploration of national origins with the picaresque’s synchronic exploration of national geography. The novel takes precedence over other genres in my study because novels did not simply represent sentimental community; their formal explorations of the workings of sympathy also engaged readers in creating sympathetic bonds. This is not merely to restate Benedict Anderson’s assertion in Imagined Communities that novels are central to nation formation because they represent readers to themselves as a part of a community of like individuals sharing similar experiences at roughly the same time.65 On the contrary, the novels I discuss in the following chapters reveal the fissures and friction in a newly formed Great Britain by representing to a largely metropolitan English reading public the unfamiliar places and peoples contained within the nation’s boundaries. As Lynn Festa explains, the novel “was at the vanguard of sentimental fashion” in part because its “lack of rigid conventions made it particularly suited for representations of marginal figures,” whether Highlanders, American Indians, or prostitutes.66 For Anderson, novels simply reflect a shared reality. I argue in contrast that the novels discussed below attempted to enact what they described, to engage readers in cultivating sympathetic bonds with characters, and thus to prepare them to become citizens of a sentimental community. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, even those whose works we might not deem sentimental, “accepted the importance of sympathy, not only as the basis of social relations, but also as the essential bond that shapes the way readers enter into and experience a text.”67 Moreover, they shared with readers the assumption that, although reading could inflame the passions and lead the young and inexperienced astray, it could also participate in moral reform. Recent studies of sentimental fiction have emphasized its claims to exercise and even increase readers’ sensibility by encouraging them to pity suffering characters.68 They have overlooked the equally important ways in which sentimental novels teach readers to regulate their feelings, either by illustrating the dangers of sensibility run awry or by discouraging readers’ identification with overly emotional characters. This oversight is due in part to the primacy that these studies give to Hume’s understanding of sympathy as the passive communication of feelings.69

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The politics and sentiments of union

Yet, as the following chapters will demonstrate, Smith’s spectatorial theory of sympathy also influenced sentimental fiction, much of which explicitly urges readers’ active moral engagement with the narrative. Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres offers “a striking analysis of subjective effects in narrative that reflects his deep interest in issues of sympathy and spectatorship” and that reveals similarities between readers and the sympathetic spectator described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.70 The Lectures on Rhetoric contrasts direct description of an object or event with indirect description, which describes the effects of the object or event “on those who behold it.”71 Smith explains that “when we mean to affect the reader deeply . . . we must have recourse to the indirect method of description, relating the effects the transaction produced both on the actors and Spectators.”72 As second-degree spectators – the spectators of spectators within the narrative – readers must judge the moral responses of both characters involved in an event and characters or narrators observing and describing it.73 While providing ample exercise for readers’ capacities for sympathy, second-degree spectatorship also keeps readers at a critical distance from the narrative, and encourages them to use sensibility and reason in judging the propriety of characters’ thought and actions. By asking readers to exercise both sensibility and self-control, the novels I discuss below urge their audience to feel like Britons. These novels’ didacticism rests in part on the “performative notion of representation” that Ina Ferris has ascribed to the national tale. They are “less a portrayal of something than a presentation to someone”; and their audience – the “someone” to whom they present their intersubjective and interactive narratives – is located primarily in metropolitan England.74 Indeed, the novel’s relatively late arrival on the Scottish literary scene might be attributed to the lack of a substantial Scottish version of the middle-class reading public that, according to Ian Watt, was so important to the novel’s rise.75 Although the novel developed slightly later in Scotland than in England, its generic emergence in the early eighteenth century was temporally and politically intertwined with the formation of Great Britain, and its conventions developed to accommodate the tensions of nation formation. By addressing, often quite selfconsciously, a metropolitan English reading public, the novels that I examine encouraged readers to join a sentimental community that was not only or even especially Scottish, but that included all those who volitionally embraced British manners and mores. Chapter 3 explores the epistolary novel’s formal embodiment of sympathy as a “correspondence of sentiments.”76 The epistolary novels

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I discuss – Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) – responded to Britain’s imperial anxieties in the late eighteenth century, including its loss of the American colonies and the revelation of the East India Company’s corrupt dealings, in part by turning their gaze inwards from the outskirts of empire to England’s economic, political, and cultural relationships with Scotland. Humphry Clinker and Evelina look to the family, a community united by ties of affection rather than by the bonds of economic and political interest, as a model for a selectively insular British nation. In both novels, Scots’ incorporation into an English domestic circle through sentimental and epistolary exchange strengthens and enriches a newly British family. Hamilton’s Translations, in contrast, is written from the perspectives of two colonial subjects who present readers with defamiliarized depictions of Englishness that impede sympathetic identification between correspondents. Hamilton situates Scots, along with the eponymous Rajah, beyond the pale of Englishness but within the realm of civilized society. Together, these three novels question whether Scots are insiders or outsiders, British or foreign. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, war against France helped to unify England and the Scottish Lowlands;77 yet the Highlands remained culturally and economically marginalized. I argue in the fourth chapter that the Scottish national tale, a genre developed primarily by women, responded to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Highland Clearances by domesticating Highlanders. During the Napoleonic Wars, sheep farming became economically more remunerative than crop farming in the Highlands, leading landlords to clear their estates of tenants to provide more land for grazing. National tales situate the Clearances in the context of British imperial expansion, suggesting that metropolitan England’s relations with its Celtic peripheries (Scotland, Ireland, and Wales), and moreover, the peripheries’ relations with each other, have been shaped by a broader network of colonial and military activity. Depicting the much-maligned Highlanders not as backward savages, but as models of sensibility and domestic virtue, national tales envision various means of integrating an insular Celtic nation united by shared blood into a heterogeneous British nation united by shared sympathy. Through family histories and marriage plots, national tales like Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin (1815) and Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818) prescribe a gendered division of national labor that promises to recuperate traditional, clan-based

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The politics and sentiments of union

Highland society while also exploiting Highlanders’ domestic virtues in the service of empire. Whereas national tales represent sensibility as a form of social glue that binds together the races of Great Britain, the historical novels that I examine in the final chapter reveal sensibility’s potential to disrupt national unification. Walter Scott, John Galt, and James Hogg question the viability of sentimental nationhood by attributing unruly feelings and rebellious tendencies to their female characters, and to the Jacobite culture that these characters preserve. Their relegation of feeling to the realm of the feminine and pre-modern illustrates its gradual devaluation in the early nineteenth century as it became associated with Jacobinism and working class unrest in the wake of the French Revolution. The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and Saint Ronan’s Well (1824) suggest that Scott was more ambivalent about the desirability of progress, and less ready to relegate Scotland’s Jacobite traditions to the past than most critics allow. Nonetheless, both novels position women, sensibility, and folk tradition outside history. Galt’s The Entail (1822) and Hogg’s The Three Perils of Man (1822) and The Three Perils of Women (1823) position women’s passions and folk traditions as sources of historical change and national regeneration. They fuse Enlightenment historiography with Jacobite myth to synthesize new Scottish and British identities. The work of British nation formation certainly did not end in the 1820s but continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the 1998 Scotland Act restored a Scottish Parliament with limited domestic prerogatives to Edinburgh, the devolution of the Union did not signal the simple “break-up of Britain,” but rather, as in 1707, the need to rethink the relationship between nation and state.78 The suspicion that Scott expressed towards sensibility in the Waverley novels meant that discourses of feeling no longer played a prominent role in mediating Anglo-Scottish relations after the 1820s, but they did not disappear entirely from literary geography. Instead, they migrated westward as they were appropriated by nineteenth-century writers in Ireland and the United States who were engaged in the work of literary nation formation that had occupied eighteenth-century Scots. Thus, for instance, Sidney Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl (1806) depicts the Irish as a naturally feeling people in contrast to the dour but economically productive Scots and the frivolous and degenerate English to argue that the Anglo-Irish Union of 1800 would restore moral health and balance to all three peoples. Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) criticized Andrew Jackson’s removal of American Indians from their lands between 1814 and 1824 by endowing

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Native American characters with a refined appreciation for beauty and a capacity for poetic expression that softens the overly rigid Puritanism of New England settlers. And Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) famously argued for the abolition of slavery in the United States by depicting slaves as people with whom only the most hard-hearted and inhumane of readers could not sympathize. Moving Scotland from the peripheries to the center of British literary history thus might enable us not only to understand better the formation of Britishness but also to identify ways of thinking about nationhood that transcend the geographic and temporal boundaries of this study.

chapter 1

The Ossian controversy and the racial beginnings of Britain

Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments defines sensibility as “exquisite fellow-feeling.”1 This capacity to share imaginatively in another’s feelings, Smith contends, is a product of historical progress and a symptom of enlightened civilization. Only in flourishing commercial nation-states like eighteenth-century Britain might women and men enjoy the security and prosperity necessary to cultivate their own finer feelings, let alone to attend to the feelings of other people. Less than a year after the publication of the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, James Macpherson completed his Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), a collection that he represented to readers as his English translations of Gaelic songs composed by the third-century Celtic bard, Ossian, and transmitted orally across generations to eighteenth-century Scottish Highlanders. The immense popularity of the Fragments encouraged Macpherson to produce translations of Ossian’s epics, Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763). Widely suspected to be Macpherson’s own creations, these poems, which in 1765 were published together with a slew of dissertations, prefaces, and textual commentary as The Works of Ossian, offered a counter-narrative to Smith’s history of sensibility in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.2 Macpherson depicted an ancient Celtic society that, uncorrupted by false appetites and affected manners, exhibited a refined sensibility and a chivalric martial valor unparalleled in enlightened commercial Britain. From the moment of the Fragments’ publication, critical discussions of Ossian perhaps inevitably have been dominated by the issue of authenticity, the question of whether Macpherson did in fact translate, or even loosely adapt, third-century Gaelic originals. The often vitriolic debates over this question continued well into the nineteenth century, engaging writers as well known as David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Walter Scott, and as now obscure as John Pinkerton, William Shaw, and Malcolm Laing. Although the Highland Society of Scotland issued a 24

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lengthy and supposedly conclusive report on “the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian” in 1805, it is only in the last few decades that scholarship has begun to move beyond the issue of authenticity. While Gaelic scholars have thrown a mantle of legitimacy over Macpherson by demonstrating that his poems adapt Gaelic ballads collected in manuscripts dating back at least to the twelfth century, Howard Gaskill and Fiona Stafford’s recent edition of the poems has enabled non-Gaelic speakers to examine Ossian as a cultural and literary phenomenon central to the development of European Romanticism.3 Nonetheless, the debates over the poems’ authenticity remain important to our understanding of the cultural and literary implications of Ossian’s popularity during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this chapter I return to the issue of authenticity, not to inquire once more whether Ossian derives from genuine Gaelic originals, but instead to explore why the poems’ authenticity or lack thereof was so important to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century readers. Taking Macpherson’s diverse writings on Ossian and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations as key texts among the many explicit and implicit contributions to the Ossian debate, I suggest that the controversy surrounding the poems’ dubious status as faithful translations of third-century Gaelic originals was largely historiographic, revealing an uncertainty about the compatibility of sensibility and barbarism. Adam Potkay has argued that Ossian’s synthesis of military might and genteel manners responded to the growth of a class of “gentry, professionals, well-to-do tradesmen, and moderate clericals” that sought membership in the British polity, and concomitantly, to changing ideals of citizenship.4 By situating the Ossian debates in the context of eighteenth-century theories of racial difference, this chapter shows that the capacity for refined feeling was an indicator not just of class, but also of race. The poems’ reconciliation of civilized feeling with primitive fortitude raised the question of whether sensibility was an innate trait or an acquired, historically contingent capacity, and consequently whether Britishness was an innate or acquired identity. The refined sentiments expressed by Macpherson’s third-century Celts were arguably the primary reason that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers doubted the poems’ authenticity. For instance, in 1805, the year of the Highland Society’s investigation, Walter Scott addressed Ossian’s suspicious “elegance, refinement, and sensibility” in the Edinburgh Review. Scott did not doubt that Macpherson’s translations were derived from Gaelic originals. All reasonable people, he asserted, must agree that

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The Ossian controversy and racial beginnings

there exists “a general basis of tradition, on which the poems, whether collected or composed by [Macpherson] himself, appear to have been founded.”5 However, Scott conceded that there is “every reason to suspect the affected sentimentality of Macpherson’s Ossian,” asking, “Did Macpherson’s translation of these poems . . . correspond to the tone and spirit of the original; or were the expressions, the sentiment, the descriptions, in the greater part of them, his own; the story and the names alone adopted from the Gaelic?”6 Scott finds it odd that Fingal, the eponymous hero of Macpherson’s first epic, and the chief of a clan renowned for its military victories, exhibits not merely “all the strength and bravery of Achilles” but also “the courtesy, sentiment, and high-breeding” of Samuel Richardson’s epitome of genteel masculinity, Sir Charles Grandison. Scott questions the authenticity of the poems’ sentiments rather than the existence of their sources, reluctantly concluding that Macpherson may have introduced “a train of picturesque and sentimental effusion, of which there is not the least trace in any Gaelic originals.”7 Scott’s distinction between the verifiability of sources and the authenticity of sentiment reveals the ideological tensions between conjectural and antiquarian models of history during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To judge Ossian’s authenticity, it was necessary to determine the origins and meanings of sensibility, a task that in turn entailed evaluating competing methods of historical inquiry, namely conjectural and antiquarian historiography. While critics have tended to view antiquarianism as a Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment’s conjectural histories,8 these historiographic modes occupied simultaneous and complementary roles in the Ossian controversy, each seeking to identify the origins of Britishness and to explain Britain’s historical development into a commercial and imperial power. Conjectural histories such as Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the Origins of Civil Society (1767) assumed a fundamental uniformity of human nature and of historical progress. These narratives aimed to identify and explain general, possibly universal patterns of development common to temporally and spatially disparate societies. Conjectural histories posited that all societies passed through relatively discrete stages as they progressed from primitive tribal origins towards commercial civilization, an assumption that allowed historians to assume similarities among geographically and historically disparate peoples. If all primitive peoples share similar customs, institutions, and manners, as do all civilized peoples, once historians had determined the traits of a primitive society like eighteenth-century Mohawk Indians, they could guess the traits of other primitive peoples

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like ancient Gauls. As William Robertson explained in his History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth (1769), “the human mind, whenever it is placed in the same situation, will in ages the most distant, and in countries the most remote, assume the same form, and be distinguished by the same manners.”9 According to the principles of conjectural history, a people’s capacity for refined feeling depended upon its place on a stadial continuum of progress. Consequently, Ossian might be authentic if the sentiments expressed in the poems were appropriate to the supposedly primitive state of third-century Celtic society. Antiquarian histories, in contrast, sought to recover and reconstruct the origins of particular peoples by quite literally piecing together fragments of cultural artifacts, from weapons and jewelry to manuscripts and oral traditions. While antiquarian inquiries into the origins of Great Britain predate Ossian by several centuries, eighteenth-century antiquarianism was given new direction and new urgency by the 1707 Union and the 1745 Jacobite uprising, events that called into question the extent to which the Scots and the English shared a common heritage. Antiquarians sought to provide a united Great Britain with a narrative of origins, although not necessarily one that, as Nick Groom has argued, would “assert a single nationalist ideology over the whole of Great Britain.”10 In fact, these narratives produced multiple and conflicting ethnic and national identities – Celtic and Anglo-Saxon; Scottish, English, and British. With its emphasis on the particular and the concrete, antiquarianism provided the “factual ballast” from which conjectural historians might derive their general principles.11 Much as antiquarians located truth in sources rather than principles, they situated sensibility in bodies rather than in states of society, representing it as an innate or original quality belonging to some peoples more than to others. Antiquarian histories embraced not only a different methodology from conjectural histories, but also a different understanding of race. Regardless of their historiographic methodology, eighteenth-century writers understood race as a bloodline, lineage, or stock rather than a biological category. Accordingly, they defined race not primarily by skin color or other physical markers like hair texture or skull size, but rather by manners and morals, or behavioral characteristics, foremost among which was the capacity for feeling, or sensibility.12 Conjectural historians tended to represent these characteristics as malleable, superficial, and fluid, something that changed as people progressed towards civilization. Stadial progress entailed gradual deracination: as a society develops manufactures beyond agriculture, its division of labor becomes more complex, migration

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increases, and the ties of shared blood are replaced by ties of economic interdependence. In contrast, antiquarian historians tended to regard racial traits as innate and possibly unalterable.13 Within the framework of antiquarian history, Ossian’s authenticity was judged by the supposed racial characteristics, or the morals and manners, of third-century Highland Celts rather than by their conjectured place on a continuum of progress. The historiographic debates over Ossian’s authenticity participated in the transformation of an older concept of the nation as a community defined by shared blood into an understanding of the nation as a community defined by shared sensibility. At the same time, however, antiquarian conceptions of race as innate and fixed won out over conjectural understandings of race as fluid and malleable. Consequently, the Ossian controversy contributed to the construction of a racialized, primitive Celtic sensibility that was compatible with a deracinated, civilized British sensibility. conjecturing the history of sensibility Hayden White has argued influentially that history, as much as fiction, is written through a limited array of tropes and narrative structures.14 The basic principle of stadial theory – that all peoples move, albeit at very different rates, through discrete stages from savagery to civilization – constituted one such structure that enabled writers in a variety of genres to organize and interpret the “rapidly increasing flow of historical, anthropological, and sociological data” generated by global exploration.15 However, “the same” narrative structure can produce different meanings depending upon the materials that it structures and the context in which it narrates them. White explains that in “historical narrative, story is to plot as the exposition of ‘what happened’ in the past is to the synoptic characterization of what the whole sequence of events contained in the narrative might ‘mean’ or ‘signify’.”16 The Ossian controversy demonstrates that the “plot” of conjectural history could allow for very different stories. Working from a limited set of data, conjectural historians produced notably different interpretations of savagery and civilization, and of the teleological progression from one to the other. Basically, these conjectural histories fall into two categories: I term those that described the transition from tribal barbarism to commercial civilization as a gradual process of moral refinement “progressive” and those that described the same transition as a process of moral corruption “degenerative.”

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The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a paradigmatic progressive conjectural history. Smith depicts savagery, the initial state of all peoples, as a scene of bleak deprivation and constant struggle. The obstacles that primitive peoples must overcome merely to meet their basic needs require them to develop courage, fortitude, and self-command, virtues that Smith characterizes as “masculine.”17 Savages are “inured to hardship,” and the very “hardiness demanded of [them] diminishes their humanity” (205, 209). Taken to the extremes sometimes necessary for survival, their otherwise admirable self-discipline requires a callousness and even cruelty that would be considered offensive, if not immoral, in more refined societies. For instance, infanticide, a practice that, according to Smith, “prevails among all savage nations,” is excusable only because the “extreme indigence” of barbaric peoples often leaves parents unable to care for their children (210). “Before we can feel much for others,” Smith explains pragmatically, “we must in some measure be at ease ourselves” (205). As a tribal society progresses towards the telos of commercial civilization, its members acquire the prosperity, security, and leisure necessary to cultivate refined sentiments and to attend to the feelings of others. The martial, masculine virtues proper to primitive peoples are gradually tempered by sensibility, “the virtue of a woman” (191). The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ gendering of savage virtues as masculine and civilized virtues as feminine suggests that the latter are more valuable; and indeed, for Smith, self-control is the foundation on which all other virtues are built. However, Smith represents sensibility as a natural product of historical progress rather than a perversion or degeneration of originary masculine virtue. He suggests that sensibility should not so much replace as complement and moderate self-command. Grounding his history of sensibility in stadial theory, Smith claims that “the style of manners which takes place in any nation, may be commonly said to be that which is most suitable to its station” (209). A nation’s character – its virtues, customs, and manners – is shaped in part by its “station” or stage on a continuum between the primitive and the civilized. Commercial nations are more prosperous than primitive tribes; hence it is “suitable” and even natural that their inhabitants should exhibit greater refinement. Yet Smith admits that “the delicate sensibility required in civilized nations sometimes destroys the masculine firmness of the character” (209). The general conditions of commercial society – security, luxury, leisure – “afford little exercise to the contempt of danger, to patience in enduring labour, hunger and pain” (205). Fortunately, the careful regulation of sensibility offers a new scope for the exercise of

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self-command. For Smith, sensibility is a passive virtue that constantly threatens to dissolve into unregulated and self-indulgent emotional excess. To avoid such moral effeminacy, the members of a civilized society must learn to moderate their “delicate sensibility” with the stoic self-control that in earlier ages was exerted in heroic feats of courage.18 Smith explains, “Our sensibility to the feelings of others, so far from being inconsistent with the manhood of self-command, is the very principle upon which that manhood is founded” (152). Sensibility, rather than self-control, is the foundation of civilized manliness because, without sensibility, self-command would be largely unnecessary in a refined, commercial society. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, sensibility and self-control work dialectically. Sensibility moderates the potentially offensive harshness of martial virtues, while self-command in turn prevents the degeneration of “exquisite fellow-feeling” into the emotional excess that would “destroy the masculine firmness of character.” In doing so, self-control transforms sensibility from a passive virtue into the basis of the “virtues which are founded on humanity,” namely benevolence or charity (204). The Theory of Moral Sentiment’s representation of a commercial society characterized by the exchange of virtuous feeling and good deeds seems to contradict The Wealth of Nations’ depiction of the morally and intellectually debilitating and socially isolating effects of a highly specialized division of labor. The factory laborer’s work “renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment.”19 The working class, in other words, degenerates into or remains in a state of savagery even while the middle class acquires the wealth and prosperity necessary to cultivate the finer feelings that will then, according to Smith, impel them to assist and instruct the poorer members of society so that they too can enjoy the pleasures of “exquisite fellow-feeling.” Smith perhaps intended his history of sensibility to distance post-Union Scotland from a martial heritage that the Lowland literati increasingly regarded as the embarrassing remnant of a barbaric past, which had most recently reared its ugly head in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. At the same time, his claims about the effeminacy to which civilized peoples tend implicitly criticize the 1757 Militia Act. This Act excluded Scots from the mandatory military training imposed on English and Welsh landowners, denying them the opportunity to cultivate martial virtue by participating in the defense of Great Britain and leaving Scotland unprepared for possible French invasion.20 Ossian responded, albeit from a very different perspective, to these same events. The Jacobites’

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defeat at Culloden in 1746 occurred when James Macpherson was nine years old and living in Badenoch in the Highlands. The Macphersons supported Charles Stuart with three hundred men, and Macpherson would probably have witnessed not only their victorious sacking of the Ruthven Barracks, where Hanoverian troops were stationed, but also the “humiliation of his Chief and Clan” and the “scenes of appalling violence carried out by British soldiers” at Culloden.21 It is thus unsurprising that, in contrast to Smith’s celebration of civil society, Macpherson mourned Scotland’s degeneration from a heroic past that Ossian depicted as in many ways more civilized than commercial eighteenth-century southern Britain. The Works of Ossian ascribes to third-century Highland Celts several of the indicators of refined sensibility that Smith attributed exclusively to commercial peoples. Moreover, Macpherson suggests that the constant warfare characterizing primitive society rendered habitual to these Celts the courage and self-command lacking in civilized societies, and that in the mid-eighteenth century Britain required active cultivation through militia service. Macpherson’s Celts thus restrain their native sensibility so that it inspires rather than impedes martial valor. Although they inhabit a primitive rather than a civilized society, Ossian’s Celts are in fact the embodiment of Smith’s feminized masculinity.22 In Fingal, a poem that describes the invasion of Ireland by the Scandinavian King Swaran, Fingal and his men exhibit not only stalwart courage, but also, as Walter Scott and other readers noted with surprise at the seeming anachronism, compassion. For instance, before a battle, Fingal cautions his grandson, Oscar: “bend the strong in arms: but spare the feeble hand. Be thou a stream of many tides against the foes of thy people; but like the gale that moves the grass to those who ask thine aid.”23 The Celts’ refinement and the Scandinavians’ relative barbarism also are evident in their respective treatment of women, an accurate measurement, according to conjectural historians, of a society’s progress towards civilization. In his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), Adam Smith’s student John Millar drew on The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ gendered history of virtue to develop a progressive conjectural history of women’s status, or lack thereof, in various stages of society. Millar hypothesizes that in primitive societies women tend to be “degraded below the other sex” because traditional feminine virtues such as compassion and domesticity are of little use in warfare and hunting. In contrast, commercial societies enjoy the luxuries and leisure necessary to “set a value upon those female accomplishments and virtues which have so much influence upon every species of improvement.”24 Consequently, as a society moves from

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savagery towards civilization, women are accorded greater respect and moral authority. Macpherson’s Celts challenge Millar’s conjectural history because, despite their warlike ways, they reverence women with a chivalric and even civilized devotion. Noting the frequent female deaths in Ossian, Potkay argues persuasively that “Macpherson purifies his text of living women in order to feminize his male heroes.”25 Yet the female characters’ self-sacrificial deaths not only make their feminine virtues symbolically available to Fingal and his men; they also inspire the warriors’ masculine, martial virtues. For instance, by defeating Swaran, Fingal also avenges the death of his beloved Agandecca, Swaran’s sister. Many years before the action of Fingal takes place, Agandecca had saved Fingal’s life by warning him of a treacherous plot orchestrated by her father, Starno. Upon discovering that Agandecca had revealed the plot to Fingal, Starno cruelly stabbed her to death. When Fingal approaches Swaran in battle, he invokes Agandecca as his inspiration: “come to my dreams, my fair one, and shew thy bright face to my soul” (79). Fingal’s love ultimately inspires his clemency towards Swaran, whom he recognizes almost fondly as the “brother of Agandecca” (101). While Starno’s readiness to kill his own daughter illustrates the patriarchal tyranny supposedly common to primitive peoples, Fingal’s undiminished love for Agandecca and his generosity towards the defeated Swaran on her behalf reveal his refinement. The sensibility of Macpherson’s Highland warriors leaves readers with two alternatives: either third-century Celts had already attained a high level of civilization, a possibility that seems incompatible with their constant and brutal warfare, or primitive peoples must be capable of refined feeling. Those who doubted that Ossian consisted of faithful translations of third-century Gaelic poetry adopted a progressive model of conjectural history to challenge both of these alternatives. They questioned how ancient Celts, widely known to be a primitive, tribal people preoccupied with war, were capable of experiencing the refined sentiments expressed in the poems. Foremost among these skeptics was David Hume, who, as David Raynor has explained, believed in the poems’ authenticity but not in their antiquity. In other words, Hume believed that Ossian comprised translations of Gaelic songs currently circulating in the Highlands.26 In his posthumously published essay, “Of the Authenticity of Ossian’s Poems,” Hume claimed that material hardships must have prevented third-century Gaels from cultivating sensibility, let alone from transmitting their refined feeling in poetic form across generations. Describing ancient Celts as “a people, who from the miserable disadvantages of their soil and climate,

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were perpetually struggling with the greatest necessities of nature; who, from the imperfections of government, lived in a continual state of internal hostility,” he asked, “Have such a people leisure to think of any poetry, except perhaps a miserable song or ballad, in praise of their chieftain or to the disparagement of his rivals?”27 Three decades later, Malcolm Laing, one of the most vitriolic of Macpherson’s disparagers, similarly claimed that Ossian could not possibly be genuine because the poems express “a civilization inconsistent with an utter ignorance of the arts of life . . . a humanity that refinement never equaled.”28 Laing invoked a progressive model of conjectural history when he declared the impossibility that any primitive people “possessed a correct taste, a polished diction, a cultivated and sublime poetry, enriched with the choicest images of classical antiquity and intermixed with all the sentimental affectation of the present times.” If a society’s progress from savagery to civilization should refine its morals and manners, Laing wondered, why did Highlanders no longer resemble their eminently polished ancestors? Why had they seemingly become “more barbarous in proportion as they became more civilized?”29 Macpherson attempted to answer the type of questions that Hume and Laing asked in “A Dissertation concerning the Poems of Ossian,” which he included in the 1765 edition of The Works of Ossian. The “Dissertation” is a degenerative conjectural history that represents historical change not as the gradual moral refinement that Smith described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but instead as a process of moral decay or corruption. Macpherson explained: The nobler passions of the mind never shoot forth more free and unrestrained than in these times we call barbarous. That irregular manner of life, and those manly pursuits from which barbarity takes its name, are highly favorable to a strength of mind unknown in polished times. In advanced society the characters of men are more uniform and disguised. The human passions lie in some degree concealed behind forms, and artificial manners; and the powers of the soul, without an opportunity of exerting them, lose their vigor. (205)

The “Dissertation” describes the capacity for sensibility as coeval with the origins of human society rather than as the by-product of civilization. Unlike commercial nations, primitive societies are racially homogeneous, united by consanguinity or blood ties. The tribe or clan is at once a familial and a political entity. Macpherson claims that in such familial societies, refined sentiments develop organically from “the natural affection of the members of a family to one another”; these feelings are

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strengthened through constant warfare, the aim of which is to protect familial ties and preserve familial honor (211). For Macpherson, sensibility is hardly “the virtue of a woman.” Unlike the nervous delicacy and feigned pity with which it is confused in civilized society, genuinely compassionate feeling is not merely compatible with, but inseparable from, dauntless courage and self-sacrificial loyalty. As a consanguineal society progresses towards civilization, the introduction of personal property and the development of a more complex division of labor corrode originary social bonds. Yet Macpherson contends that civilized peoples can consciously recover, at least in simulated form, the sensibility proper to primitive peoples: they “have leisure to cultivate the mind, and to restore it, with reflection, to a primaeval dignity of sentiment” (211). The necessity for “reflection” signals a fall from an irrevocable sentimental plenitude. The “Dissertation” suggests that eighteenth-century Britons must consciously exercise the capacity for refined feeling – for instance, by reading The Works of Ossian – that their ancestors developed naturally through their “manly pursuits.” Conjectural histories frequently served as theoretical litmus tests for Ossian’s authenticity, offering a framework of stadial progress against which third-century Celts could be measured. Circularity was inevitable. Those who believed that Ossian was at best a debased adaptation employed a progressive reading of historical progress as moral refinement to argue that third-century Celts could not have experienced the refined feelings expressed in Macpherson’s supposed translations. In contrast, those who believed that Ossian constituted faithful translations of genuine third-century Gaelic poetry adopted Macpherson’s rendition of historical progress as moral regress to argue for the poems’ authenticity. For instance, Patrick Graham’s Essay on the Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian (1807) compared Highlanders to Egyptians, a people that, according to Graham, similarly had regressed from a state of refined virtue to one of brutish vice.30 By arguing that Egypt’s regression was the result of external conquest, Graham insinuated that southern Britain’s gradual legal and commercial encroachment upon the Highlands during the eighteenth century may have impelled Highlanders from their primitive innocence into the second stage of society, a stage characterized, in Macpherson’s words, by “compleat barbarism and ignorance” (211). Perhaps because the Ossian debates revealed the circular and hypothetical nature of arguments based on conjectural history, early nineteenthcentury writers began to express increasing doubts about stadial theory’s utility and validity. Although the Highland Society’s 1805 report failed to

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answer the question of Ossian’s authenticity satisfactorily, it did privilege antiquarian evidence over conjectural arguments. The committee appointed to carry out the investigation declared that proof of the poems’ authenticity must take the form of “testimonies” rather than “arguments.”31 Unverifiable theories about the traits of primitive societies would not satisfy them; instead they sought “hard” evidence that Ossian’s poems had been transmitted orally across fifteen centuries. As Kenneth McNeil has noted, although the Highland Society did procure some manuscripts and additional translations of Gaelic poetry, ironically, they had to rely ultimately on oral testimony and oral tradition for “concrete” proof of Ossian’s authenticity.32 For antiquarians, Macpherson’s poems could be authentic only if they could be traced to a body of poetry from which they had been translated. In shifting the method of proof from conjectural arguments to original sources, the committee faced the challenge of determining what constituted an accurate and faithful translation. Its members were left to wonder with Walter Scott whether the “style of manners and sentiments exhibited by the poems in question” were proper to the originals or were Macpherson’s fabrications.33 They answered this question in part by appealing to innate racial differences: “The Committee, in all the ancient Celtic poetry which it has heard or seen, perceives a distinction made between the Fingalian race and their invaders or enemies; uniformly assuming to the former a degree of generosity, compassion, and in particular of attention and delicacy towards the female sex, which they do not allow in the latter.”34 Although arguments from racial difference had preceded the Highland Society’s report by several decades, its publication marks the decisive rejection of conjectural theories, in which a people’s characteristics changed over time, and the ascendance of antiquarianism’s representations of race as innate and intransigent difference. Race was still understood in terms of behavioral rather than physical traits, but these traits were assumed by antiquarians to be essential, fundamentally distinguishing Celts from other peoples. We can see the impact of the report in Patrick Graham’s Essay, published only two years after the results of the committee’s investigation. Graham strongly contested one of the foundational assumptions on which conjectural histories rested – that all peoples in a given stage of social development will exhibit similar traits. Even while employing Macpherson’s model of historical change to defend Ossian’s authenticity, Graham undermines his own theoretical arguments, cautioning, “we are not warranted, by any just principle of reasoning, in forming conclusions beforehand concerning the various shades of distinction, which, under

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different circumstances, may mark the manners of any particular nation, or period of society.”35 No abstract theory of historical change, he acknowledges, could account for the many “different circumstances” or variables informing the manners, customs, and institutions of every society to provide a universally valid model of stadial progress. antiquarianism and the racialization of celts General interest in British antiquity increased markedly following the publication of Ossian, to which Thomas Percy speedily responded with his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).36 Although antiquarianism focused intensely on the local, the shift from conjectural to antiquarian conceptions of race in the Ossian debates was informed by Britain’s rapid imperial expansion during the time when the controversy was at its height. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, “the general influence of imperialism and slavery” and the “emergence of modern, human and biological sciences” generated a plethora of competing theories of racial difference.37 The evidence gathered from global exploration also discredited stadial theory, suggesting to Britons that all savage and all civilized peoples might not necessarily share similar characteristics, and that all societies might not progress uniformly through discrete stages from tribal origins to commercial telos. Accordingly, they began to seek alternative explanations for difference in manners and mores among various peoples. Whereas stadial theory attributed these differences between peoples to environmental causes ranging from climate and diet to political organization and mode of subsistence, antiquarian historians suggested that racial differences might be inherent and ineradicable. In the seventeenth century, writers developed what Colin Kidd has described as “an ethnic theology” to argue that Britain contained within it at least two racially distinct nations, or two discrete lineages: the Celts, who inhabited northern Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and the AngloSaxons or Goths, from whom Lowlanders and the English claimed descent.38 The geographic distribution of these racial communities thus did not align neatly with national boundaries internal to Great Britain. The 1707 Union raised the question of whether a multi-racial and multinational Great Britain could develop a unified identity. The vitriolic controversy surrounding the question of Ossian’s authenticity impelled antiquarians to seek an answer to this question not by investigating the origins of sensibility, as conjectural historians had done, but rather by exploring the racial origins of Great Britain. Before turning to these

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antiquarian histories, I first want to explore in greater detail the deeply embedded racial tensions to which Ossian responded and which it exacerbated. As Samuel Johnson, perhaps the most famous of Macpherson’s detractors, illustrates, English skepticism concerning Ossian’s authenticity often took the form of racial antagonism towards Celts and sometimes, in an indiscriminate conflation of the Highlands and the Lowlands, towards Scots in general. Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1773) attributed Scots’ belief in what Johnson considered the “improbable fiction” of Ossian’s authenticity to their “fondness for their supposed ancestors.”39 Seen through Johnson’s eyes, a culturally and economically impoverished post-Union Scotland did not have much to be proud of except some forged fragments of poetry. Consequently, he assumed, not entirely erroneously, that Scots wanted to claim Fingal’s chivalric martial valor and Ossian’s refined sensibility as their native inheritance. Scots turned a blind eye to Ossian’s inconsistencies and improbabilities because, in Johnson’s words, “A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist, who does not love Scotland better than truth.”40 Although Johnson here invokes Scotland as a coherent whole, his frequent references to the “Earse nation” remind readers that Scotland comprised two genealogically distinct communities: the relatively cosmopolitan and prosperous Anglo-Saxons in the Lowlands, and the comparatively isolated and impoverished Celts in the Highlands. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that not all “Scotchmen” were blinkered by the national and racial pride that Johnson ascribed to them. Many Lowlanders and even some Highlanders were quick to denounce Ossian’s authenticity. Ossian was not only the “lightening rod of mid-century Scottish/ English culture wars,” but, as McNeil has demonstrated recently, was also a source of conflict within Scotland.41 Johnson acknowledged to his English readers that “lowlanders are at least as ignorant as ourselves” regarding “the past and present state of the whole Earse nation.”42 Although perhaps not entirely ignorant of the state of Highland society, Lowlanders frequently were reluctant to acknowledge it as part of the Scotland that they were supposed to love more than the truth. John Pringle, an eminent Scottish physician who corresponded with Hume about the Ossian controversy, summed up the opinions of these Lowlanders when he declared, “I am not interested in this affair for the honour of my countrymen; for tho’ a Scotchman, I am no Highlander, being born near the banks of the Tweed, of a race composed of the Saxons & Danes, and without the least knowledge of the Gaelic language.”43

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Pringle’s evident eagerness to differentiate himself from Highlanders and to claim kinship with the English suggests that some Scots may have regarded the Ossian controversy as an impediment to Scotland’s successful integration into a united Great Britain. Indeed, some Highlanders also regarded Ossian as a national embarrassment and took pains to demonstrate their Britishness by disparaging the poems. Most notable among these was William Shaw, a Highlander and native Gaelic-speaker who investigated Ossian’s authenticity under Samuel Johnson’s no doubt very biased patronage. Shaw staked his claim to membership in polite and enlightened British society by ostentatiously distancing himself from the racial pride that Johnson denounced and by embracing instead the “civilized” values of honesty and objectivity that the Journey to the Western Islands had found so abundantly lacking among Highlanders.44 Shaw declared in his scathing Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems Ascribed to Ossian (1781), “truth has always been dearer to me than my country; nor shall I ever support an ideal national honour founded on an imposture.”45 Although truth undoubtedly was dearer to Shaw than his native Highlands (as most things were), his readiness to dismiss Ossian as entirely Macpherson’s creation suggests that truth was not dearer to him than his inclusion in genteel southern British society. While Shaw is an extreme example, he suggests that other Scots’ skepticism of Ossian’s authenticity may have been incited by Johnson’s slander. Thanks to Johnson, their expressions of skepticism paradoxically could be at once a demonstration of Scottish pride and an assertion of their Britishness. Late eighteenth-century antiquarian histories must be read in the context of the intranational racial tensions exacerbated by the publication of Ossian. Antiquarian inquiries into the origins of Great Britain attempted to reconcile race and nation by constructing a unified British identity. These histories represented the moral capacities that conjectural histories had accorded to a certain stage of political and economic development as innate traits found to different extents in various lineages or peoples. In doing so, they transformed sensibility from historically contingent into a racially inherent trait. Rather than seeking the temporal origins of feeling, as conjectural histories had done, antiquarian histories sought the racial origins of Great Britain. The ensuing racialization of the peoples of Great Britain seems to have preceded by a couple of decades changes in the perception of race beyond Britain’s borders.46 Domestic racial distinctions gave birth to colonial discourses of race. Because recent studies of eighteenthcentury and Romantic understandings of race have focused on racial differences between Britons and non-European peoples, rather than those

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within Britain’s borders, they have tended to see racial essentialism as an early to mid-nineteenth century phenomenon, conflating it with a Romantic and Victorian propensity to regard skin color and other physical traits as the markers of race.47 While eighteenth-century antiquarians did not remark extensively on Celts’ and Anglo-Saxons’ physical differences, they did assign them innately different moral characters at a time when Britain still justified its imperial rule of regions such as India and the West Indies as an effort to “improve” less civilized peoples, to transform them gradually into Britons. The belief that the races of Britain could be innately different eventually had ramifications for imperial policy and colonial discourses of race: if Africans and Indians were, like Celts in Britain, inherently incapable of improvement, they might require permanent governance by supposedly essentially superior Anglo-Saxons.48 The antiquarian histories that participated in the Ossian debates overwhelmingly agreed that Celts possessed an innate sensibility; however, they disagreed over the moral connotations of sensibility as, alternatively, a sign of civilized refinement or of moral degeneracy. Some antiquarians, like Lord Kames, depicted sentimental Celts as the founders of civilized, commercial Great Britain while others, most infamously John Pinkerton, argued that Celts’ sensibility signaled their irremediable racial inferiority and led to their marginalization on the outskirts of modern Britain. Antiquarian histories offered a means not only of explaining eighteenthcentury Britain’s national character, but also of justifying the political disempowerment of Scotland and the marginalization of the Highlands. Lord Kames’ Sketches of the History of Man (1774) claims a refined, heroic sensibility for ancient Celts by interpreting racial purity as a sign of historic originality. For Kames, ancient Britain’s original racial unity prefigured its post-Union political unity, and the ancient Celts’ innate sensibility explained eighteenth-century Britons’ valorization of sentimental refinement. To support his assertion that Celts were and always had been an inherently refined people, Kames cites a number of Roman authorities, including Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, who described the Celtae as a people “kind and compassionate to the suppliant and unfortunate”; “altogether void of malignity”; and “far removed from deceit and duplicity.”49 He further claims that the original inhabitants of Britain all “were of Celtic extraction” and that the Celts’ noble qualities had enabled them to spread “gradually from south to north.”50 Kames depicts the subsequent recolonization of southern Britain by later peoples including the Romans and Anglo-Saxons as a process of racial mixture and moral degeneration. While southern Britons thus are descended from racially

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heterogeneous and morally debased ancestors, Highlanders, in contrast, are the direct descendents of the Celtic tribes that first peopled Britain. Highlanders have preserved their ancestors’ “disinterested, generous, noble, kind and compassionate” manners “pure and untainted” many centuries after southern Britons lost them, because they have been “less exposed to the oppression of foreigners, and farther removed from commerce.”51 Their insular, pre-commercial ways of life meant that eighteenth-century Celts had not been exposed to the corrupting influence of luxury; yet it also marked them as “profoundly non-British” at a time when commerce was the “central shibboleth defining British society and identity.”52 The Sketches responded to this marginalization by attempting to move Celts from the geographic peripheries of Great Britain to its historic center. By claiming Celtic origins for all Britons, Kames encouraged English and Lowland readers to regard the sentiments celebrated by Ossian as fundamental to an age-old British identity. While Kames depicts eighteenth-century Highlanders as the endangered remnants of a noble race, the Scottish antiquarian John Pinkerton argued in his Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths (1787) that Celts’ geographic marginalization and failure to achieve commercial civilization revealed their inferiority to other races, and particularly to the Scythians or Goths. Indeed, he declared that the Celts were to the Goths “as a negro to an European.”53 Pinkerton claimed that Highlanders’ racial purity, far from preserving their original Celtic virtues intact, signified their unfitness for survival. Hostility towards interracial marriage, particularly between Britons and non-European peoples, seems to have increased towards the end of the eighteenth century, with some writers arguing, all evidence to the contrary, that mixed-race offspring must be sterile.54 In contrast, Pinkerton implies that racial hybrids, like the Anglo-Saxons, for instance, are stronger than racially pure peoples. Blending stadial and racial theory, Pinkerton’s Dissertation argues that the progress from savagery towards civilization requires the diversification, through an increasingly complex division of labor, of originally racially homogeneous communities. Driven to the outskirts of Great Britain because of their inherent moral weaknesses, Celts have failed to intermingle with other peoples and to diversify. Hence they have also failed to progress from their original state of barbarism towards civilization: “they are savages, have been savages since the world began, and will be forever savages while a separate people; that is, while themselves and of unmixed blood.” If anyone should doubt the Celts’ inferiority, Pinkerton contends, “he has only to step into the Celtic parts of Wales, Ireland, or Scotland,

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and look at them, for they are just as they were, incapable of industry or civilization.” For Pinkerton, Celts’ “unmixed blood” explains why “they are just as they were” several centuries earlier: only hybridization can remedy the seemingly innate savagery of this “vanquished and confined people.”55 Although Pinkerton arrived at conclusions entirely opposite to Kames’, both writers derived their claims about Celts’ innate sensibility, or lack thereof, from two sources: theories of polygenesis and Whig histories. Polygenesis, which posited the separate creation of multiple races rather than tracing all races back to the single creation of the Biblical Adam, was in the late eighteenth century a fairly radical and even heretical doctrine, most often invoked in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the context of slavery.56 Polygenists argued that each race of people was created to suit its environment physically and morally, and accordingly each possessed distinctive characteristics, with the AngloSaxons’ suiting them for imperial rule, and the Africans’ for slave labor.57 Whereas stadial theory assumed that all primitive peoples would share similar characteristics that would change over time, polygenesis allowed that primitive peoples from different regions of the world could possess very different traits that would persist over time, regardless of how civilized these peoples might become. Kames explained the innate sensibility of Celts, and hence the authenticity of Ossian, through the polygenic theory. He asserted that the poems’ representation of Celtic sensibility is “so counterintuitive” to popular perceptions of primitive peoples as “fierce and cruel” (430) that Ossian, along with the evidence of Celtic sentiment found in ancient Roman histories, must prove the existence of innate racial differences. No one hoping to mask a forgery, he argued, would have had the audacity to attribute “so unsavage” a trait to an otherwise savage people (448). Pinkerton agreed that the differences among various races “are radical; and such as not climate or chance could produce” (33). Yet he regarded Ossian as unquestionable evidence that Celts were unalterably “weak and brutish” (92) and “deficient in understanding” (102), traits that were often assigned to Africans to justify their enslavement. Pinkerton did not try to deny that Celts were perhaps an innately sentimental race; instead, he represented their inherent sensibility as a moral weakness, claiming that they lacked the rational judgment necessary to effectively regulate their feelings. By embracing polygenesis, Pinkerton could argue that this flaw was ineradicable, dooming Celts to exile and degeneration at the peripheries of civilized Britain. As Kames and Pinkerton demonstrate, writers who drew on theories of racial

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difference to prove or disprove Ossian’s authenticity debated not the temporal or stadial origins of sensibility, but rather its moral valences as on one hand a form of weakness and degeneracy and on the other hand a laudable virtue inspiring self-sacrificial courage and generosity. Polygenesis was compatible with what Christopher Hill has termed “Whig histories,” narratives that traced England’s enduring liberties to the values and institutions of the Goths or Anglo-Saxons prior to their conquest by the Normans in 1066.58 But while polygenesis proved equally useful to Ossian’s defenders and detractors, Whig accounts of Gothic liberties posed an obstacle to those who argued for the poems’ authenticity. For instance, Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1766), both antiquarian responses to Ossian, located the origins of England’s refined manners, poetic genius, and constitutional liberties in its Gothic roots, and legitimated England’s imperial projects by mythologizing “the conquered but re-emergent Anglo-Saxon folk race.”59 In proposing a Celtic rather than Gothic origin for Britain, Macpherson and his defenders implied either that supposedly Anglo-Saxon values and institutions were actually Celtic, or that Anglo-Saxon and Celtic values and institutions were in fact one and the same. They espoused what Kidd has called a “Celtic whiggism,” claiming racial equality, or even superiority, for a race that prior to the publication of Ossian had been widely considered barbaric.60 While Macpherson’s “Dissertation” provided a stadial argument for Highlanders’ sensibility, his Introduction to the History of Great Britain (1772) offers an antiquarian account of Britain’s origins. The Introduction describes Celts’ contributions to the ideals of liberty and the forms of mixed government that previous historians had considered distinctively Gothic, or Anglo-Germanic: “In the midst of barbarity they [Celts] formed as just notions of liberty as other free nations have done in the most cultivated times. They were convinced, that they not only had a right to elect their magistrates, but also to prescribe those laws by which they chose to be governed.”61 Like Kames, Macpherson moves Celts from the peripheries to the center of British identity, claiming for them a share in cultivating the distinctive manners and institutions that characterized a civilized, post-Union Great Britain. Macpherson’s efforts to write Celts into English Whig history led David Hume to claim that Macpherson “has the most antihistorical Head in the Universe,”62 and John Pinkerton to accuse Macpherson of hiding his ignorance behind a “Celtic mist” of sentimental fancy (92). Pinkerton’s own Dissertation brings together the

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principles of polygenesis and Whig history, declaring Anglo-Saxon liberties to be not merely the foundation of English national identity, but also a sign of the Goths’ inherent racial superiority to the Celts. By arguing that it was the Goths rather than the Celts who first peopled Britain, Pinkerton sought to re-align the racial and cultural roots of eighteenth-century Britain that had been sundered by Ossian. The Ossian controversy illustrates the extent to which racial identities and prejudices troubled a newly formed British nation-state, which contained not only the territorial nations of England, Scotland, and Wales, but also several ethnically defined nations that traversed geographical boundaries. While debates over whether Macpherson’s Ossian constituted faithful translations of third-century originals quickly developed into investigations into the origins and meanings of sensibility, the transition from conjectural to antiquarian understandings of sensibility was neither smooth nor uniform. enlightened sentiment and romantic racialism Antiquarianism’s racial essentialism won out ideologically over conjectural history’s stadial relativism in early nineteenth-century discussions of race. Similarly what Ian Duncan has described as Macpherson’s “scandalous invention of lost cultural origins” became the literary prototype of European Romantic nationalism.63 Ossian appealed to European readers who, however little they might know about the Scottish Highlands, “knew what it was to feel despondent over seemingly inexorable national decline.” The poems’ nostalgic recovery of origins, a paradoxical recovery that preserved folk traditions by mourning their loss, was emulated by writers in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere. In some of these countries, select fragments of poetry were translated for popular reading as early as 1762; but in many it took twenty or thirty years for substantial translations of Ossian to appear.64 The dissemination of Ossian throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries thus occurred simultaneously with the development of nationalist movements that sought to recover a people’s right to rule their native land, movements represented most obviously by the French Revolution.65 Much as Ossian presented the Celtic bard as a figure with whom eighteenthcentury Britons could identify, early nineteenth-century European nationalist movements mobilized the “myths, memories, values, and symbols” particular to one ethnicity to create a sense of shared history and identity among a broader group of disparate people who were not in fact

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united by blood.66 By eliding race and culture, this form of nationalism in some cases encouraged people to seek the alignment of political and cultural boundaries, so that each state comprised one culture, and supposedly, one race. Indeed, Ossian inspired the antiquarian recovery of racial and cultural origins throughout Europe, and its influence is evident in nationalist texts like Germaine de Stae¨l’s Corinne; ou Italie (1807), Franc¸ois-Rene´ de Chateaubriand’s Rene´ (1802), and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s Hermanns Schlacht: Ein Bardiet fu¨r die Schaubu¨hne (1769), to give just a few of the most well-known examples.67 Yet the nineteenthcentury “triumph” of racial essentialism and Ossianic nationalism obscures an alternative eighteenth-century form of patriotism: one that is founded not in the myth of shared blood, but rather in the construction of shared sentiments. This sentimental or domestic patriotism grew out of civic humanist traditions that eighteenth-century writers modified through stadial theory to suit the conditions of the commercial, civilized nation-state.68 Both Ossian’s antiquarianism and The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ conjectural history envisioned the nation as a sentimental community, one bound by shared feeling in addition to political and economic bonds. Yet it is unsurprising, given the turn to racial essentialism as an explanation for national character in the early nineteenth century, that the Ossianic model, which ultimately traced sensibility to race, would, temporarily at least, win out. Before I describe these two models of sentimental nationhood in greater detail, I need to explain briefly the terminology I am using. Although I am following critics like Duncan in referring to Ossian as the forerunner of Romantic nationalism, it is important to note that Ossian did not inspire a nationalist movement in Scotland in the political sense of the term.69 Although its claims to antiquity irked some Scots, Ossian offered Scotland a heroic martial past on which to build a sense of national pride following the disempowerment of union, the embarrassment of the ’45, and the parliamentary snub of the 1757 Militia Act. However, it did not impel Scots to seek parliamentary independence from England, or to draw political borders around their supposedly shared culture. Nonetheless, Ossian embodied what would become fundamental to patterns of nationalist thinking: the remains of a racially pure origin from which a myth of descent could be derived. Anthony Smith has described the narrative of origins as the sine qua non of nineteenth-century ethnic nationalism, explaining that the truth of such narratives is insignificant. What is important is that they provide “a myth-symbol complex” with which people can identify, and from which they can argue for the

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alignment of cultural and political boundaries.70 I have avoided using nationalism to describe the model of civic participation advocated by Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments because it does not conform to these patterns of thinking. Instead, I am using “patriotism,” a term with which Smith, and indeed, Macpherson, would have been familiar, and which derives from the civic tradition within which both writers worked. Historians and literary critics have associated this philosophical tradition with Enlightenment thought and have tried to differentiate it from Romanticism’s interest in national origins and identities, in the particular and local rather than the cosmopolitan and universal. However, the similarities in the forms of sentimental nationhood imagined in The Works of Ossian and The Theory of Moral Sentiments call into question the discreteness of these categories, suggesting that, in Scotland at least, Enlightenment and Romantic, like conjectural and antiquarian histories, are mutually constitutive and interdependent. In disrupting the periodization of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture, Scottish writing also calls into question the history of nationalism that at once derives from and underwrites this periodization. It reveals a continuum, even a simultaneity, between Enlightenment patriotism and Romantic nationalism. Critics generally have understood the Ossian poems as a reactionary response to the ’45. Ossian celebrated the communal loyalty and noble self-sacrifice valorized in Jacobite poetry, and sought to preserve the Highland traditions suppressed after the uprising.71 While Ossian’s celebration of third-century Celts’ military prowess may have offered eighteenth-century Scots a heroic (and implicitly Jacobite) past that they could counter to England’s present political hegemony, Macpherson’s literary ambitions extended well beyond the Highlands and even beyond Scotland, and he had strong economic and political motives for supporting Anglo-Scottish Union.72 It most certainly was not in his interest to alienate his predominantly Lowland and English readership. As we have seen, Macpherson argued that civilized peoples could cultivate through reflection the refined and noble sentiments that were stadially, and perhaps racially, proper to third-century Celtic warriors. Southern Britons may have refused to trace their genealogical roots and ancestral liberties to a Celtic origin, but they did identify with the sensibility exhibited by the blind bard, Ossian. Ossian’s nostalgia for an irrevocable past offered an ideological model, rather than a racial origin for these Britons; in other words, readers did not yearn for the Celtic community that Ossian mourns, rather they yearned for his yearning. Ossian, as “the last of the

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race of Fingal,” figured the fate of Celtic society in a modern, mercantile Great Britain, and Macpherson’s poems allowed readers to demonstrate their claims to a refined sensibility through their sympathy with the blind bard’s grief (PO 18). Fragments of Ancient Poetry reveals Ossian’s own status as a fragment: his son Oscar and father Fingal have both been killed in battle, and Ossian himself has gone blind in his old age. In “Fragment VIII,” Ossian reflects on his isolation, exclaiming, “where are all my race? Alas! in the earth they lie. I feel their tombs with my hands. I hear the river below murmuring hoarsely over the stones. What dost thou, O river, to me? Thou bringest back the memory of the past” (PO 18). Visions of battles fought long ago are quite literally all Ossian can see, and his senses of touch and hearing connect him to a landscape emptied of living beings and filled with memorials to the past. Ossian’s invocation to the river initiates his recollections of Fingal and Oscar, whose heroic deaths signaled the failure of Ossian’s lineage and the demise of the Celtic race. The nostalgic voice of tradition has replaced the heroic “voice of war” which once enlivened the landscape. Even Ossian’s songs, however, are silenced for eighteenth-century readers, muted by transcription from oral to written form and by translation from Gaelic to English. Hugh Blair, a professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh University and Macpherson’s most staunch supporter among the Scottish literati, undertook the task of instructing fallen readers in reading a fallen text. His Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, which was included with most editions of the poems after its initial publication in 1763, taught eighteenth-century readers how to respond appropriately to Ossian’s sublime scenes and heroic virtues precisely, or how to restore their corrupted sensibility to something resembling its original nobility.73 Blair’s Critical Dissertation represented the poetic fragments as a litmus test of sensibility, predicting in rather erotically charged language that they would cause properly sensitive readers to “glow, and tremble, and weep” (PO 398). Whereas third-century listeners had been inspired by the oral recitation of the poems to emulate their ancestors’ courage, eighteenth-century readers, removed from the state of society in which such courage was necessary, merely should find themselves “warmed with the sentiments of humanity” (PO 399). Indeed, Blair made it quite clear that the reader who responded appropriately to the poems would sympathize more deeply with Ossian’s pathetic feelings of loss than with the awe-inspiring martial virtues that the bard celebrates in his poems. The admiration that readers might feel for Fingal’s military heroism, Blair explained prescriptively, “is a cold feeling, in comparison of that deep

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interest, which the heart takes in tender and pathetick scenes; where, by a mysterious attachment to the object of compassion, we are pleased and delighted, even whilst we mourn” (PO 396). As Ossian recalls the heroic feats of his deceased companions, he lauds the “joy of grief,” or the pleasures of sentimental indulgence. By taking Ossian the blind bard, rather than Fingal the courageous warrior as their “object of compassion,” readers might experience this pleasure vicariously as they mourn for Ossian mourning the decline of the “sons of Fingal.” Ossian thus doubly distanced eighteenth-century readers from a heroic past by offering them the poetic fragments of a primitive martial culture that was in Ossian’s time already in ruins. Blair’s Dissertation mitigated the politically subversive implications of Ossian by encouraging readers to cultivate a nostalgic rather than a heroic sensibility, a form of feeling divorced from generous action, a mode of reflection that turned inwards into the mind rather than outwards into the world. Ossian firmly relegates the martial patriotism to the past, memorializing a classical form of public spirit expressed through the defense of a community united by shared blood. The poems and the textual apparatus surrounding them represent this memorialization as itself a form of patriotism predicated on the demise of both consanguineous community and martial virtue. Most eighteenth-century readers of Ossian would have been southern Britons, who, unlike Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, could not claim to be “sons of Fingal.” They could, however, claim to share Ossian’s sensibility, a quality that distinguished them as civilized Britons, by mourning the dissolution of heroic Celtic society, whether thirdcentury or post-Culloden. Shared sensibility thus becomes a substitute for shared blood, and the demise of nations founded in race becomes the condition of possibility for those founded in sentiment. By lamenting the demise of a nation united by shared blood, Ossian models a sentimental patriotism suited to a nation united by shared feeling. While Macpherson may have intended Ossian to celebrate and revive Celtic traditions, his poems also participated in the formation of a British identity defined by refined sensibility, an identity that ironically was founded upon the ruins of the consanguineous Highland clan system and its martial traditions. Although The Theory of Moral Sentiments was published only a few months before Ossian, critics have overlooked its response to the ’45, perhaps because of the text’s claims to be an abstract theory. Yet The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as much as Ossian, is a historically embedded text that accrued contextual relevance as Smith revised it repeatedly over the three decades following its initial publication. Smith added his

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discussion of patriotism to the sixth edition of 1790 in a section that he described as providing readers with “a practical system of Morality.”74 The Theory of Moral Sentiments thus responds not only to the ’45 but also to the 1789 French Revolution, and to the fears of popular rebellion that it aroused in Britain.75 Admittedly, Smith rarely refers to Scotland, Britain, or France in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, instead describing “civilized society” in the abstract. Nonetheless, we can read this work, like other philosophical texts, as what Fredric Jameson has termed a “symbolic index” of its political and cultural context.76 Smith’s discussion of sympathetic community, like Edmund Burke’s similarly familial rhetoric in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791), may have constituted a conservative reaction to political upheaval in France, but his emphasis on active social virtue also responded to the passive, recollective model of sentimental patriotism advocated by Ossian. While Macpherson relegated Celts’ heroism to the past, creating a myth of origins for a Great Britain united by shared sensibilities, Smith’s version of British nationhood is bound by synchronic sentimental ties that, theoretically at least, encompass present cultural differences. By domesticating the martial virtues proper to primitive peoples, The Theory of Moral Sentiments prescribes a form of patriotism suited to the ordinary activities of men and women living in a civilized, commercial state encompassing diverse communities within its boundaries. As we have seen, Smith’s model of stadial progress from savagery to civilization locates the origins of sensibility not in the tribal communities of the primitive past, but in civilized, commercial society, which affords people the leisure and luxury to cultivate “exquisite fellow-feeling.” While the family remains central to Smith’s account of patriotism, it is what Naomi Tadmor has called the household-family, rather than the consanguineous or kinship family proper to primitive society. As the term implies, the household-family was not limited to kin or to a conjugal couple and its children, but instead comprised all the people living in a single household, “including its diverse dependants, such as servants, apprentices, and co-resident relatives.”77 In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith similarly defines the family as “the persons whom we are obliged to live and converse a great deal with” and who “all consider one another as persons to and from whom certain affections are due” (224, 221). This concept of the family as contingent rather than natural, sentimental rather consanguineous is, according to Smith’s conjectural history, suited to commercial civilization. Among primitive peoples like Ossian’s third-century Celts, family and nation are identical; the head of

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the family is also the tribal patriarch. However, the gradual specialization of a social division of labor fragments these familial communities by enabling the centralization of government, the creation of a standing army, and increased social and geographical mobility. Governed and protected by the state, “the descendants of the same family, having no motive for keeping together, naturally separate, and disperse” (223).78 The household-family is thus the by-product of historical progress. Although the identity between kin and nation gradually dissolves as a people progresses towards commercial civilization, Smith suggests that the family remains central to the cultivation of public spirit as the fundamental building-block of the nation-state. In prescribing a form of patriotism compatible with the mundane lives of men and women living in commercial society, Smith looks to the household-family, a community united by mutual responsibilities and sympathies rather than by the primitive ties of shared blood, as a model for British nationhood. Domestic interactions teach individuals how to sympathize with others by nurturing in each family member a “disposition to accommodate and to assimilate, as much as we can, our own sentiments, principles, and feelings, to those which we see fixed and rooted in the persons whom we are obliged to live and converse a great deal with” (224). To maintain harmonious relations with those around us, individuals must learn to share in others’ feelings, or, like the spectator discussed in the introduction, to change places with others “in fancy.” This skill requires not only sensibility but also self-control, or the ability to temper our self-interested desires and passions so that we can “accommodate” the feelings of others. Whereas Ossian encourages readers to indulge in sentimental nostalgia, The Theory of Moral Sentiments reminds readers that without self-control, sensibility can become debilitating and solipsistic. Smith suggests that it is as members of a household-family that we first develop sympathy, or the complementary exercise of sensibility and self-control that allows us to establish “a correspondence of sentiments” with others. While the close proximity and constant communication among family members “renders their mutual sympathy of the utmost importance to their common happiness,” Smith argues, “the same situation, by obliging them to accommodate one another, renders the sympathy more habitual” (220). The habit of accommodating others’ feelings contributes to the harmony and prosperity of the household-family, an end that the individual learns to consider more important than his or her personal happiness. Familial affection, seemingly the most natural of bonds, is thus “more the effect of the moral than of the supposed physical connection” between relations (223).

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Relegating the “force of blood” to the realm of romance, Smith claims that “what is called affection, is in reality nothing but habitual sympathy” (222, 220). Smith thus divorces kinship from affection, and, in doing so, deracinates the fellow feeling that Macpherson attributed to the consanguinity of primitive peoples. He envisions a form of community united by sentimental ties that do not depend upon prior blood ties. True to the civic humanist tradition from which it derives, Smith’s conception of public spirit requires individuals to learn to see themselves as integral components of a larger community, the welfare of which depends upon each member’s moral conduct, and the boundaries of which are defined not by blood but by sympathy. The Theory of Moral Sentiments figures public spirit simply as the extension of familial affection. Much as sentimental ties develop through habit and proximity, individuals who interact frequently but who do not happen to be related by blood often form “a friendship not unlike that which takes place among those who are born to live in the same family” (223–4). From family and friends our sympathies extend to the “different orders and societies” with which our interests are connected and into which “every independent state is divided” – for instance religious sects, political parties, or regional communities (230). This concentric and overlapping system of sympathies culminates in an allegiance to the state, “the greatest society upon whose happiness or misery, our good or bad conduct can have much influence” (227). We do not feel sympathy with political institutions; rather the state is united through a vast network of shared sympathies and affections. Smith’s vision of a nation-state united by bonds of sympathies builds on the claim of his mentor Francis Hutcheson that “national Love, or Love of one’s native Country” is compounded of “Associations, Friendships, Familys [sic], natural Affections, and other human Sentiments.”79 Smith insists that such “national Love” or patriotism is neither a purely abstract sentiment nor a facet of humanity’s potentially universal benevolence. He asserts, “We do not love our country merely as a part of the great society of mankind: we love it for its own sake” (229). This affection, however, is mediated through local attachments: “Not only we ourselves, but all the objects of our kindest affections, our children, our parents, our relations, our friends, our benefactors, all those whom we naturally love and revere the most, are commonly comprehended within [the state]; and their prosperity and safety depend in some measure on its prosperity and safety” (227). The state is at once a political abstraction, distant from the consciousnesses of common men and women, and a sentimental community built

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upon familial ties, friendships, and local allegiances. The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ system of concentric and overlapping affiliations renders Scottish patriotism compatible with a sense of Britishness by suggesting that local and regional sympathies are not simply consistent with, but in fact essential to, a broader allegiance to the nation-state. Marlon Ross and Laura Doyle have remarked upon a similar system of concentric allegiances in the writings of Edmund Burke and William Wordsworth respectively; but both Burke and Wordsworth describe a “concentrically ordered web of kinship” as organic, extending outwards through “a natural process of accretion” that is “based on the prototype of the patriarchal clan.”80 In conceiving of concentric sympathies as organic and kin-based, Burke and Wordsworth re-racialize a system that Smith presents as contingent and volitional. For instance, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791), Burke claimed in a statement that seems to echo The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen.”81 However, as Burke’s use of the word “relation” suggests, he grounds familial affection in blood ties. Moreover, Burke conceived of patriotism as the prerogative and the duty of the aristocracy, the nation’s purest lineages, arguing that the nation’s noble families guaranteed the rights and liberties of all Britons. In making this argument, Burke aimed to prevent the spread of Jacobinism from France to Britain. Smith’s 1790 additions to The Theory of Moral Sentiments share this aim, but rather than restricting patriotism to the nobility, he suggests that it is equally the duty of Britain’s growing middle class to cultivate the virtues that will ensure the stability of a hierarchical social order. Smith’s deracination of the family, or his divorce of blood from sympathy, extends the privilege and responsibility of civic virtue to the middle classes. The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ domestication of the heroic, martial form of patriotism valorized in Ossian makes civic virtue accessible to the mercantile and professional classes. In contrast to Ossian’s passive sentimental recollection, The Theory of Moral Sentiments represents sympathy as an active process, and as the foundation of the “virtues founded on humanity” (204). Smith argues that the “order which nature seems to have traced out for the distribution of our good offices, or for the direction and employment of our very limited powers of beneficence” (219) follows the concentric pattern of our sympathies. Consequently, our “good offices” primarily must be performed not on the battlefield or in Parliament but within a limited domestic and social circle. This domesticated form of public spirit would have been particularly well suited to

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Scotland’s position as a stateless nation lacking the independent political institutions necessary to cultivate classical ideals of civic virtue. Smith argues that heroic martial patriotism is inappropriate and even useless in a civilized nation-state where a highly specialized division of labor allocates the government and defense of the community to select individuals. Yet he points out that men and women can, and indeed should, exercise the same capacities for sensibility and self-control “in the humble paths of private and peaceable life” that Macpherson’s Celtic warriors exercised in feats of self-sacrificial courage (242). Even mundane acts of generosity require us “to feel much for others and little for ourselves . . . to restrain our selfish, and indulge our benevolent affections”; and it is these mundane acts, rather than extraordinary heroic feats, that ensure social harmony and stability (25). Smith argues that “the patriot who lays down his life for the safety, or even for the vain-glory of [his] society” has simply perfected the habit of regulating a refined sensibility with self-control, and of privileging the welfare of others above personal desires and interests (228). His virtue differs in degree and not in kind from the generous patron or compassionate neighbor. By domesticating a heroic, martial virtue, Smith also binds Jacobite sentiments to the stability and security of the nation-state. Exercised in a limited social sphere, the loyalty and self-sacrifice once valorized by Jacobites are divested of political threat and become instead marks of upstanding citizenship. In redefining the scope and expression of civic virtue to include domestic and social virtues, Smith also redefines the nation as a community bound by shared sympathies rather than by shared blood. While Ossianic sentimental recollection may have won out historically in Europe as the prototype of Romantic nationalism, pro-Union Scottish writers in the mid- to late eighteenth century tended to embrace instead a domestic patriotism or feminized civic virtue of the sort that Smith describes. Because he revised The Theory of Moral Sentiments repeatedly between 1759 and 1790, Smith’s ideas both influenced and were influenced by writers in a variety of literary forms, including pamphlets, sermons, periodicals, and, as the following two chapters will demonstrate, sentimental novels. For instance, several years prior to Smith’s 1790 additions, Hugh Blair’s vastly popular Sermons (1777) pointed out that while few people will ever have the chance to prove their patriotism through public exhibitions of courage and self-sacrifice, our social, and particularly our domestic interactions, offer ample opportunities to promote the common good of society. Blair warns readers: “Years may pass over our heads without affording any opportunity for acts of high

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beneficence, or extensive utility. Whereas not a day passes, but in the common transactions of life, and especially in the intercourse of domestic society, gentleness finds a place for promoting the happiness of others, and for strengthening in ourselves the habit of virtue.”82 Mackenzie reiterated Blair’s claim almost word for word in his periodical, The Lounger (1785–6) when he declared that “’Tis but a very small proportion of men who can move in the sphere of government or of greatness; but scarce anybody is exempted from performing a part in the relations of ordinary life.”83 Of course, Mackenzie’s periodicals, Blair’s sermons, and Smith’s moral philosophy were not addressed solely to a Scottish audience, but disseminated the tenets of domestic patriotism throughout Britain. In addition to prescribing a form of patriotism particularly suited to Scotland’s statelessness, these works implicitly imagined a Great Britain built upon the solid foundation of familial affection and domestic virtue. As a debate about the origins and meanings of sensibility, the Ossian controversy not only reveals the transformation of late eighteenth-century understandings of race; it also exposes changing constructions of masculinity. We have seen that despite their contradictory conjectural histories of sensibility, Smith and Macpherson both valorize a sentimental masculinity characterized by carefully controlled sensibility or by a subtle balance of courage and compassion. Their idealization of a feminized martial virtue reflects mid-eighteenth-century fears that a stateless Scotland might become an effeminate nation. The Theory of Moral Sentiments warned that civilized, commercial society offered few opportunities for cultivating masculine, martial virtues, and Ossian similarly relegated martial heroism to an idealized past. Alexander Carlyle, a Presbyterian clergyman and a leading member of the Poker Club, an organization founded to stir up agitation for a Scottish militia, argued in his Question Relating to a Scots Militia Considered (1760) that Scotland’s subordinate position within Great Britain exacerbated the general decline of martial virtue in commercial society.84 By divesting Scotland of independent political institutions, the Union had limited Scots’ participation in the government of Great Britain. By excluding Scots from militia service, the 1757 Militia Act limited their participation in the defense of Great Britain. Scots thus were denied the classical means of cultivating civic and martial virtue. Carlyle excoriated his fellow citizens’ apathetic response to the 1757 Act that denied them the right to participate in the defense of Great Britain and left Scotland exposed to the incursions of French troops. He noted with disgust that “when every county and every borough in England . . . called loudly for arms as their only security,”

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Scots “remained silent and spiritless, like the effeminate inhabitants of a conquered province.”85 For Carlyle, Scotland’s apparent lack of public spirit indicated the disparity of Scots’ supposed partnership with the English. Scots were effeminate because they were refused opportunities to develop the manly qualities of courage and self-command; and, in a vicious cycle, their effeminacy hindered them from asserting their right to take part in the government and defense of their country. While Ossian memorialized a heroic military virtue, it also encouraged readers to indulge vicariously and solipsistically in “the joy of grief.” The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in contrast, advocated the internalization of the self-command that was in earlier ages exerted in heroic feats of courage. Smith suggests that the means of re-empowering Scotland following the 1707 Union, the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, and the 1757 Militia Act lies neither in futile attempts to resuscitate the martial traditions of feudal society nor in the sentimental idealization of those traditions, but rather in the domestication of civic virtue and Jacobite ideals of heroic courage and noble self-sacrifice. The following chapter examines how sentimental masculinity became an indicator of British identity during the eighteenth century, tracing its evolution from Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) through James Boswell’s writings of the middle of the eighteenth century to Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771). These works question whether sensibility is compatible with masculinity, and whether Scottishness is compatible with Britishness.

chapter 2

British masculinity and Scottish self-control

James Boswell described his battle with hypochondria or melancholy by invoking Ossian: “I have said to the Demon of Hypochondria, as the bold Highlander in Fingal says to his Deity of fanciful conjecture, ‘Show thyself to me, and I will search thee with my spear.’ ”1 In comparing himself to the “bold Highlander,” Boswell claimed a courageous selfcommand that he seems to have felt rarely; indeed, his bouts of what George Cheyne’s 1733 treatise on nervous disorders termed “The English Malady” often left him feeling less than heroic.2 Thus, during his yearlong stay in Utrecht, Boswell attempted to contain his frequent spells of depression by urging himself to “be manly.” Boswell later described the symptoms of hypochondria as “a disordered imagination” – the Highlander’s “fanciful conjecture” – fretfulness, gloom, a reluctance to activity or exertion, and a tendency to violent passions.3 That these feelings were real is unquestionable, but that Boswell strategically and rhetorically manipulated them to shape various public personae from the blackguard to the man of feeling is equally undeniable. One of Boswell’s acquaintances noted that his accounts of his melancholy were “so laconic and sententious that had I not been too well convinced of the reality of your complaint, I should certainly have taken it for an ingenious essay upon what a man may feel in that unaccountable malady.”4 In attempting to compose his mind, Boswell also composed his identity, engaging in an “inveterate parasitism on the lives and personalities of others” as he tried on diverse personae.5 Critics including Philip Carter, Felicity A. Nussbaum, and David Weed have examined the gendered aspects of these personae, attending to Boswell’s highly self-conscious construction of various masculine identities such as “the man of economy” and “the man of pleasure.” Christopher Loar and Kenneth Simpson, in contrast, have explored Boswell’s efforts to negotiate between Scottish and British identities as a post-Union Scot living in London.6 As recent Boswell criticism 55

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demonstrates, masculinity and nationality have remained largely distinct fields in studies of mid-eighteenth-century Scottish writing. This chapter examines the intersection of masculinity and nationality in Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and Boswell’s The London Journal and Hypochondriack Papers (1777–83). It argues that Britishness, as well as Scottishness and Englishness, was marked by gendered behaviors and traces the emergence of a British identity characterized by the masculine virtue of self-control through these works. If, as Nussbaum has argued, “masculinity increasingly prevails as an index to an authentic national identity” during the eighteenth century, it should not be surprising that post-Union Scottish writers, with their particular investments in creating a British identity, also were concerned with constructing a form of masculinity suited to a commercial and imperial power like Great Britain.7 In considering the qualities necessary to govern a still precariously united Great Britain, midcentury Scottish writers suggested that a nation led by men lacking sensibility must be barbaric and backward, while one governed by men of too much feeling must be susceptible to invasion from without and moral degeneration from within. Smollett, Mackenzie, and Boswell join Smith and Macpherson in embracing a feminized or sentimental masculinity defined by the complementary exercise of sensibility and selfcontrol. However, while Ossian’s heroes and Smith’s patriot easily unite these two virtues, Smollett, Mackenzie, and Boswell point to a divided and divisive Britishness by identifying self-control with commerce, modernity, and England, and sensibility with feudalism, the pastoral, and Scotland. This divisiveness is embedded in the narrative structure of the picaresque, a form that correlates the picaro’s wanderings with moral disorder and his return home to the restoration of order and that is used by all three writers to recount a young man’s journey from Britain’s rural outskirts to the metropolitan center, from backwardness to modernity, and from ignorance to experience. In his discussion of the “placebound nature of literary forms” Franco Moretti designates the novel as the “symbolic form of the nation-state,” not because, as Benedict Anderson has suggested, it represents a culturally homogeneous national community to itself, but on the contrary because it reveals the “nation’s internal divisions.”8 The picaro’s frequent re-encounters with the same characters, or at least character types, at different stages of his journey registers these internal differences while also transforming the nation into a “space of ‘familiarity’, where human beings recognize each other as members of the

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same wide group.”9 Roderick Random, The Man of Feeling, and The London Journal make use of such chance re-encounters to envision Great Britain as both a familiar space and a familial community; yet, at the same time, these works foreground the shock of unexpected re-unions, which are often a reminder of loss, change, alienation, and national dissension. They also call into question the permanence of the domestic harmony with which the picaresque often concludes and of the national harmony that the restoration of domestic order metonymically invokes. While Boswell’s picaresque journal, to which I will return at the end of the chapter, explores the compatibility of Scottish, English, and British masculinities, Roderick Random and The Man of Feeling illustrate two seemingly opposing but fundamentally similar stereotypes of Scottish masculinity. The initially uncouth and uncivilized Roderick in many ways seems the opposite of Harley, the polite, charitable, and pathologically sensitive man of feeling. However, the former’s aggressive ambition and the latter’s excessive emotion each deviate from the masculine selfcommand proper to a civilized, commercial nation like Britain. The Man of Feeling is in many ways an inverted rewriting of Roderick Random that illustrates the tenuousness of the genteel masculinity, and also of the British identity, that Roderick finally achieves. Together, the novels’ representations of British masculinity reflect the political decline of Jacobitism in mid-century Great Britain. In the years immediately following the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, representations of Scotsmen as uncouth, cunning, greedy, and sexually promiscuous barbarians reflected English anxieties about Scots’ southward migration. The English had long feared that Scots would regard the Union as sanctioning their dependence on England’s affluence, comparing Scots who migrated south to “Swarms of Locusts” come to destroy the land.10 To many, the 1745 Jacobite rebellion seemed to embody this plague, as Charles Edward’s army of hungry Highlanders straggled towards London, the center of commerce and government. For instance, a song in an antiJacobite manuscript described how, “From barren Caledonian Lands, / Where Rapine uncontroul’d commands, / The Rebel Clans in Search of Prey, / Came o’er the Hills and far away.”11 As this song illustrates, Jacobites were conflated with Highlanders and Highlanders with Scots, who were represented not merely as lacking self-control, but also as uncontrollable, accustomed to rule by might rather than by law. Popular representations of Jacobites in various states of savage undress – “With Buttocks bare they did not care / Neither for Wind nor Weather” – similarly situate Scotland as pre-modern, commercially underdeveloped,

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and impoverished in contrast to its prosperous partner in union.12 Despite their mockery of Scottish barbarity, the English did not necessarily want Scots to become their economic equals or rivals. They feared that Scots’ prosperity, whether achieved through their own efforts or through dependence on their southern neighbors’ wealth, would pose an increasing threat to England’s political hegemony. The Scottish Earl of Bute’s appointment as First Lord of the Treasury in 1762 seemed proof that Scots were in fact taking over Britain’s government. Bute’s enemies frequently alluded to his alleged but improbable affair with George III’s mother, the Princess Dowager, as evidence of his lust for political power; and English anti-Union and anti-Jacobite propagandists more generally figured Scottish greed and ambition as unbridled sexual potency.13 Whereas pro- and anti-Union pamphlets had emphasized Scotland’s disempowerment relative to England by portraying Scotland as a bride-tobe, mid-century anti-Scottish propaganda revealed England’s fear of Scotland’s gradual empowerment by ascribing to Scots an uncouth masculinity. This shift from feminine to masculine national iconography was not as contradictory as it might seem, since femininity and barbarism both were morally inferior to the civilized masculinity claimed by the English.14 Charles Churchill’s The Prophecy of Famine: A Scots Pastoral (1763) illustrates the proximity between femininity and savage masculinity, describing the “low subtle arts” through which “poor, mean, despis’d, insulted” Scots sap English “vigour to increase their own.”15 Although Churchill portrays Scotland as a country so impoverished that genteel manners could not possibly flourish there, the poem indicts English apathy as much as Scottish subtlety. It figures the Scots’ usurpation of English wealth and political prerogative as an insidious form of emasculation, a covert attack on John Bull’s hale and hearty “vigour.” Yet Scots usurp English “vigour” not because they are more manly than the English, but because they are less so. While Scots’ supposed subtlety and uncouth virility reflected the perceived economic and political success of immigrants, these traits also signified Scots’ savagery, and hence Scotland’s inferiority to a polite and prosperous England. Yet England’s civility was widely believed to leave its middle and upper classes particularly susceptible to nervous diseases such as hypochondria. As the English mercantile middle class began to rival the gentry and aristocracy in wealth and social influence, it also claimed an emotional refinement that hitherto had been represented as the exclusive and perhaps inherent prerogative of the upper classes.16 Boswell surmised that his Hypochondriack Papers would be particularly welcome to the inhabitants

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of England, “where the malady known by the denomination of melancholy, spleen, or vapours has been long supposed almost universal” (23). Whether the melancholy claimed by the English was real or simply a fashionable affectation is less important than the question of what it signified. Hypochondriacs claimed to possess an excess of sensibility. While Adam Smith had argued that it is impossible for an individual ever to share completely in another’s feelings and to experience them as strongly as his own, Boswell claimed that hypochondria is marked by the tendency to feel imagined distress as strongly as actual misery, and others’ sorrows as deeply as one’s own.17 The hypochondriac could not discriminate between proper and improper, real and unreal, recipients of compassion. Sensibility was valuable insofar as it incited men to rectify social injustice and to ameliorate the plight of the suffering. However, in excess, sensibility could prevent benevolent action, overwhelming and effectively paralyzing the man of feeling. Thus when Boswell confessed to Samuel Johnson his predisposition to melancholy, Johnson, who himself purportedly suffered from hypochondria, advised “constant occupation of mind” and the adoption of regular and moderate habits as an antidote for the effeminacy of inaction.18 While melancholy was perceived as an English malady, or an abnormal condition, the excessive sensibility associated with the disease was configured in the second half of the eighteenth century as a normative condition of Scottish manhood. The representation of Scottish masculinity as effeminate rather than barbaric reflects Jacobitism’s transformation from an active political threat into a conservative nostalgia for the feudal ideals associated with the Stuart monarchs. Despite Mackenzie’s efforts to dissociate himself from his production, The Man of Feeling undoubtedly played a significant role in shaping late eighteenth-century representations of maudlin Scottish masculinity. These stereotypes also were informed by lachrymose Jacobite poetry and by Ossian’s mourning bard, with their shared valorization of a noble but irrevocable past. Like the earlier figure of the greedy, ambitious Scotsman, the sentimental Scotsman paid a backhanded compliment to Scots. Although the Scottish man of feeling’s sensibility ostensibly suited him to participate in polite, civilized, English society, his inability to control or regulate his feelings signaled his unfitness to govern others. ‘roderick random’’s sentimental journey In the fourth number of his journal, the Briton (1762–3), Tobias Smollett bitterly declared “Scotchman” a slur more opprobrious than “sodomite,” connoting “every thing that is vile and detestable” (256). Smollett

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intended this polemical comparison to denounce the virulent Scotophobia kindled by Bute’s recent appointment. Yet The Adventures of Roderick Random suggests that the Briton’s juxtaposition of Scot and sodomite is not as random as it initially might seem. Both Scots and sodomites were regarded as foreigners or outsiders, who threatened to penetrate a vulnerable English body politic.19 While the mid-century stereotype of the uncouth Scot in many ways seems the antithesis of a simpering, sophisticated sodomite like Roderick Random’s Captain Whiffle,20 Smollett suggests that the Scot’s vulgar aggression and the sodomite’s degenerate effeminacy similarly deviate from the genteel masculinity proper to a commercial nation like England. Roderick Random depicts Scot and sodomite as self-interested and grasping, and as lacking economic and moral autonomy. The novel explores the dynamics of anti-Scottish prejudice through a protagonist who in many ways embodies the early eighteenth-century stereotype of the avaricious and ambitious Scot. Rather than simply refuting Scottish stereotypes with a counter-example, Roderick Random illustrates the productive power of the bigotry that Smollett himself endured.21 Roderick is by birth a gentleman; however, Roderick’s father was disinherited when he married a woman well beneath his rank. After his mother dies and his father mysteriously disappears, Roderick is left to make his own way in the world. Seeking to escape poverty and ignominy in Scotland, Roderick concocts a number of cunning schemes to attain wealth and prestige in London. When he finds himself, as he so often does, an innocent victim, “deserted to all the horrors of extreme want, and avoided by mankind as a creature of a different species” (25), he responds by attempting to degrade his enemies in their turn – sometimes through physical violence, sometimes through sexual humiliation, but most often through the crafty exploitation of others’ hypocrisy. This pattern of what one critic has characterized as “victimization and vindication” suggests that Roderick’s frequent feelings of “pride and resentment” function as a survival mechanism (200), motivating his determination to triumph over the prejudice and poverty that he faces as a Scot in England.22 Through Roderick’s reactions to repeated degradation, Smollett suggests that English anxieties regarding Scottish ambition are not entirely unfounded, but that this national tendency is only exacerbated by efforts to exclude Scots from sharing in England’s, and potentially Britain’s, prosperity. Roderick’s patriarchal disinheritance and his efforts to recover his lost status link him to another disinherited gentleman, the “Young Pretender,” Charles Edward Stuart.

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Unlike his Jacobite prototype, however, Roderick learns that to become a Briton he must avoid the Scot’s aggressive ambition and the sodomite’s corrupt dependence, embracing instead an autonomous masculinity that is feminized yet not effeminate. Roderick initially shares with the Earl Strutwell – a sodomite – an excessive self-interest. Although the novel suggests that some degree of self-regard is essential to economic prosperity, Smollett implies that the countervailing virtue of compassion is equally necessary both to Scots’ betterment and to the harmony and stability of a newly united Great Britain. Accordingly, Roderick must learn to restrain the sodomite’s extravagant self-interest with the feminine virtue of compassion before he can attain the economic self-sufficiency and moral agency defining heterosexual British masculinity. Although Roderick refuses to obtain patronage by engaging in sodomy with Strutwell, his attempts to prosper in England – first by taking advantage of his friend Strap’s beneficence, and later by seeking to ensnare a wealthy English heiress – simply mimic the sodomite’s self-serving exploitation of others. Only when he falls in love with the beautiful, virtuous, and wealthy Narcissa Topehall, an Englishwoman who teaches him to temper selfish aggression with compassion, and cunning ambition with sober industry, does Roderick learn to distinguish between interest and affection, and between economic and social commerce. Roderick’s feminization entails his Anglicization: as he becomes an affluent trader and a loving husband, the proud Scot renounces his selfinterest for the masculine independence proper to civilized, commercial English society. As an allegory of the making of Great Britain’s political economy, Roderick Random suggests that only by ceasing to demand a share in England’s prosperity and by instead seeking economic selfsufficiency might Scots become Britons, and transform an unequal Union into a cooperative partnership. Published only three years after the 1745 rebellion had exacerbated tensions between the Scots and the English, Roderick Random transforms pro- and anti-Union pamphlets’ marital analogies, and the gendered imbalance of power that they depict, into a national romance. Smollett reconfigures Anglo-Scottish relations by redefining marital relations: he represents the Union as a companionate marriage founded in mutual affection rather than a patriarchal marriage of interests. While pro- and anti-Union pamphlets cast Scotland as the bride-to-be, reflecting its disempowerment relative to England in the negotiation of this “marriage,” Smollett casts a Scot in the role of suitor. In doing so, he does not simply call attention to Scotland’s increasing political sway within a

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united Britain. He also suggests that much as a suitor must show himself worthy of his beloved’s affections before she will marry him, Scots must gain the trust of a powerful and wealthy England in order to cultivate national harmony after the embarrassment of the ’45. The conventions of the romance plot require the lover to prove his mettle before he can marry, and prejudice and poverty constitute the obstacles that Roderick must overcome to demonstrate his devotion to Narcissa. Smollett’s earlier literary response to the ’45, “Tears of Scotland” (1746), had represented a feminized Scotland grieving over the deaths of her valiant sons, “ravish’d virgins,” and “helpless orphans.” While this poem had urged Scots to revenge the unjustifiable wrongs suffered by the innocent in the aftermath of Culloden,23 Roderick Random concedes that fostering such resentment can only perpetuate discord between the Scots and the English. Representing Roderick’s courtship of Narcissa as a conquest through affection, the novel counsels Scots, already the disempowered party, to undertake the task of national reconciliation. Much as Roderick Random explores Anglo-Scottish relations through the conventions of the romance, many of its protagonist’s stereotypically Scottish traits are also characteristic of the picaresque hero. Roderick Random employs plots and character types from the romance and the picaresque to explore political and economic tensions that could not be discussed openly by a Scottish writer in 1748.24 Smollett’s preface to Roderick Random declares that the work’s difference from the romance and the picaresque lies in its realism, and consequently, its didacticism. By turning from the realm of “monstrous hyperbole” to “facts, which are all true in the main,” Smollett rewrites mid-eighteenth-century Anglo-Scottish relations and encourages his readers – both Scottish and English – to become Britons (xxxiv, xxxv). The preface argues that realism promotes the reader’s identification with a work’s protagonist, which in turn facilitates moral instruction. Significantly, the particular protagonist with whom Smollett asks the reader to identify is, as Robert Crawford has pointed out, the first Scottish hero in a work written for a British audience.25 As the source of many of his misfortunes, Roderick’s Scottishness furthers Smollett’s design “to represent modest merit struggling with . . . selfishness, envy, malice and the base indifference of mankind” (xxxv) and to encourage readers’ compassion for his hero. As the reader “gratifies his curiosity, in pursuing the adventures of a person in whose favour he is prepossessed” (xliii), he learns vicariously through Roderick’s experiences and thus must eventually reject identification for the independence that Roderick finally acquires. Through Roderick’s

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sentimental and sexual education, Roderick Random encourages male readers, arguably its intended audience, towards autonomy and Britishness. Roderick himself achieves this British manhood by learning to eschew sodomitical self-interest for the heterosexual love that allows him to cultivate a union of affections. Smollett defines masculinity in opposition to femininity and effeminacy through Roderick’s encounters with Miss Williams, a prostitute, and Earl Strutwell, a sodomite.26 When Roderick first meets Miss Williams, the daughter of a country squire, she has been seduced by promises of marriage and subsequently abandoned by her profligate suitor. She is “resolved to be revenged on the sex in general, by practicing their own arts upon themselves” (127), and almost succeeds in luring Roderick into marriage. Both from Britain’s rural outskirts, and both of genteel birth, Roderick and Miss Williams naı¨vely fall prey to metropolitan hypocrisy, and are left impoverished outcasts in a hostile London. But while each is subjected to disdain and mockery, only Miss Williams is reduced to economic dependence on the whims of her oppressors. Roderick, in contrast, is confident in his abilities to support himself honorably in London despite the obstacles that poverty and prejudice place in his way. Deeming Miss Williams’ lot “a thousand times more wretched” than his own, he explains: “If one scheme of life should not succeed, I could have recourse to another, and so to a third, veering about to a thousand different shifts, according to the emergencies of my fate, without forfeiting the dignity of my character, beyond a power of retrieving it, or subjecting myself wholly to the caprice and barbarity of the world” (136–7). Roderick’s schemes allow him to move with relative ease among social classes, as he adopts throughout the novel the roles of surgeon, servant, soldier, merchant, and gentleman.27 The contrast between Roderick’s and Miss Williams’ prospects suggests that self-fashioning is a masculine prerogative. Yet Roderick’s capacity for self-determination is not an inherent function of his sex, and to maintain it he must elude the “caprice and barbarity” of those more powerful and cunning than himself. When Roderick applies to Earl Strutwell for assistance in obtaining a government post, he, too, is almost seduced into prostitution. The near loss of his sexual autonomy exposes the precariousness of his economic and moral independence. After a seemingly promising interview with Strutwell, Roderick learns with horror that the Earl routinely entertains young men “with such assurances and caresses as he had bestowed upon me, until he had stript them of their cash and every thing valuable about them;—very often of their chastity” (313). Strutwell’s desire is economic as

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much as sexual: even as he offers to assist Roderick, and treats him with a “seemingly paternal affection” (309), the Earl is plotting to divest Roderick of the little wealth he possesses, and to leave him, like his numerous other catamites, “a prey to want and infamy” (313). Strutwell’s schemes emphasize that sexual relations between men, like those between men and women, are not egalitarian, but instead are structured through patterns of dominance and subservience. In contrast to Roderick Random’s depiction of marriage, however, mutual affection has no place in the novel’s largely economic characterization of sodomitical relations. Roderick rejects the Earl’s advances and, quipping a line from Smollett’s Juvenalian dialogue Advice (1747), condemns sodomy as an unnatural vice that “poisons genial love, and manhood stains” (310).28 Smollett does not deny that “genial” – or sympathetic, generous, and mutual – love can exist between men, as well as between men and women, but offers heterosexual, rather than sodomitical, relations as a model for male friendship. Like many of his contemporaries, Smollett saw sodomy as a particularly aristocratic practice that disturbed a social hierarchy in which rank and virtue should coincide. His critique of sodomy in both Advice and Roderick Random urges the upper ranks of British society to adopt the self-control and the compassion proper to the mercantile and professional middle classes. Similarly to Roderick’s encounter with Strutwell, the poet’s encounter with a sodomitical patron in Advice suggests that the sodomite’s incapacity for moral and sexual self-government infects those who depend upon him for subsistence. Sodomy thus “stains” the sodomite’s and the pathic’s manhood by undermining the economic self-sufficiency and moral agency of each. Roderick Random is described by Paul-Gabriel Bouce´ as “very much of a man’s book, written mostly with men in mind” (xxv) because Smollett celebrates the exclusively male friendships fostered at sea and in coffeehouses. Yet Roderick’s conflicted camaraderie with his fellow Scot Hugh Strap situates these friendships on a continuum with the sodomitical relations that Roderick considers a threat to masculine independence. His friendship with Strap undermines Roderick’s autonomy by inverting the patronage relationship between the landowning gentleman and the tradesman, as Strap is a cobbler’s son and a barber by trade. Unable to obtain employment as a surgeon, owing to the surplus of medically trained Scottish immigrants looking for work in London, Roderick commands Strap’s loyalty and his purse. Even though Roderick chafes at his “miserable dependance [sic]” on a “poor barber’s boy” (95), he accepts Strap’s earnings on the grounds that “it was more reasonable and decent

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that he should depend upon me who was a gentleman, than that I should be controlled by him” (73). Through a transparent sleight of hand, Roderick appropriates Strap’s money in order to instate himself in the position of patron rather than parasite. He imitates Strutwell by exploiting those he pretends to patronize. Before the taint of deviance can be cleansed from this friendship, Roderick must learn to distinguish between economic interest and affection in his relations with others, and to reject sodomitical exploitation for the improving moral influence of “genial love.” Given his fear of becoming, in essence, a male prostitute, it is appropriate that Roderick’s elaborate efforts to penetrate the upper ranks of genteel English society culminate in his matrimonial schemes. However, because Roderick’s attempts to secure the affections of an English heiress are motivated by self-interest, they merely reproduce the emasculating dependence defining Strutwell’s relations with his catamites. For Roderick, marriage initially offers a means of overcoming “the malice and contempt of the world” (303), or of symbolically triumphing over his oppressors by acquiring the economic and cultural capital of which they seek to deprive him. When Strap receives a small inheritance, he and Roderick settle upon marriage as the most profitable investment for two Scots laboring under “want of friends and powerful opposition” in London (254). Using Strap’s money to disguise himself as a wealthy gentleman, Roderick plans to propose to “some lady of fortune who can render [him] independant [sic] at once” (255). An affair with Earl Strutwell would leave Roderick dependent upon another man’s debauched whims whereas marriage will allow him to retain his masculine prerogative of self-determination by granting him legal control of his wife’s fortune. Marriage promises to make not only Roderick, but also Strap, “easy for life” by placing Roderick in a position to patronize his friend (254). While their concerted endeavor to find Roderick a wealthy wife seems to offer a way of restoring a proper socio-economic hierarchy between the two men, it in fact only cements their mutual dependence. If affection figures anywhere in Roderick’s conception of marriage, it is in his sense of obligation to Strap; women are merely the means through which he will obtain the wealth and status he desires. Reflecting national politics in miniature, Roderick’s motives for marriage seem to justify the belief prevalent among the English that Scots sought union only to gain access to England’s wealth. In carrying out his matrimonial schemes, Roderick not only resembles the self-interested sodomite, but also embodies contemporary stereotypes of the Scot on

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the make epitomized by stage characters like Sir Archy Macsarcasm in Charles Macklin’s Love a` la Mode (1759), who competes for the hand of the heiress to a wealthy English merchant. In contrast to Roderick’s own ambitious and grasping marriage plots, Roderick Random’s romance plot envisions the transformation of an unequal Anglo-Scottish Union resembling a marriage of interest into a harmonious, cooperative partnership modeled on companionate marriage and cemented, ideally, by “genial love.” Roderick’s matrimonial schemes go awry when Narcissa Topehall, whose marriage settlement unfortunately depends upon her brother’s consent to the match, arrives in Bath, and Roderick finds self-interest at odds with love. Narcissa’s “endearing protestations of eternal love” render a marriage of interest repugnant to Roderick by showing him the value of love and by teaching him to temper his uncouth passions with compassion (363). For instance, the former rake acquires a chivalric respect for female chastity and virtue, endangering his own life in order to save Narcissa from an attempted rape by a boorish neighboring squire. While Roderick’s love for Narcissa tames the vengeful ambition motivating his attempts to ensnare an English heiress, his efforts to exercise self-restraint feel uncomfortably like effeminacy to Roderick. Indeed, his desire to win Narcissa’s approbation keeps Roderick quite literally in a state of servitude and “tame resignation” to poverty, as he initially falls under the spell of her exemplary influence while he is employed as a footman in Squire Topehall’s household (228). Roderick eventually remedies the economic, and perhaps more importantly, the moral, unworthiness that separates him from Narcissa through his trading ventures aboard his uncle Bowling’s slave vessel. Roderick cannot prosper in trade through cunning, nor can he rely on his prerogatives as a gentleman, but instead must learn to exercise prudence and self-control. Rather than considering marriage merely as a means of promoting his economic interests, Roderick now regards money as a prerequisite to attaining the marriage that he desires. Although inspired by his “transporting hopes of enjoying Narcissa” (410), Roderick’s economic pursuits are contained within Bowling’s vessel, a form of transport that is isolated from, yet essential to, his prospects of domestic happiness. Ironically, his moral reformation is predicated not merely upon commerce, a means of separating affective and economic relationships, but upon the trade in human beings, which dramatically transforms potential sentimental bonds into purely economic ones. Roderick’s tendency to use other people as instruments to further his own interests is perfectly acceptable in the slave trade. In crude terms, he becomes a

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self-sufficient man, a virtuous husband, and, ultimately, a Briton, by exploiting Africans, instead of women, as a source of income. While Scots were treated as second-class citizens in mid-eighteenthcentury England, the Union opened up to them a wealth of opportunities for betterment by allowing Scotland to trade freely with Britain’s colonies. Roderick Random suggests that by exploiting these opportunities abroad rather than competing for a share in England’s domestic economy, Scots might coexist equitably with the English, if not earn their friendship.29 Colonial trade offers an alternative to the political independence that some Scots sought to recover in 1745 by instead enabling Scotland’s economic independence from a metropolitan England that made no attempt to hide its disdain for all things Scottish. Roderick’s commercial success suggests that if restrained by prudence and industry, Scottish ambition could possibly render Scots, if not the more powerful party in the Anglo-Scottish Union, then at least equal and autonomous partners. Roderick’s participation in the slave trade also challenges recent representations of eighteenth-century Scotland as a country colonized by an England that failed to acknowledge the Union as a political partnership by revealing important distinctions between such “internal colonialism” and Britain’s imperial projects overseas.30 Although he endures English indifference and even antipathy, Roderick’s experiences of oppression as a Scot obviously are very different from those of the slaves whom he buys and sells for profit. Roderick becomes a Briton in part by differentiating himself from other marginalized figures like the sodomite and the slave. He finally attains the economic and moral independence defining British masculinity by circumnavigating the prejudices and poverty that he faced in England. Although Roderick Random frequently has been read in autobiographical terms, critics have overlooked Smollett’s own involvement in the slave trade. His wife, Anne Lascelles was “a Creole, with a dark complexion,” who belonged to a family of planters and slave-owners in Kingston, Jamaica. Smollett profited throughout their marriage from the sale of land and slaves belonging to her “comfortable, though moderate estate in the island.”31 While Smollett’s opinions on plantations slavery are unclear, Roderick Random suggests that he saw colonial enterprise as one of the few ways that Scots like himself could prosper without depending on uncertain English patronage. Roderick’s mastery of mercantile virtues seems to champion commercial modernity over feudal hierarchy; yet his voyage ultimately prepares him to assume his birthright in Scotland as a landed gentleman by reuniting him with his father, who has amassed a vast fortune as the

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overseer of a plantation in Paraguay. Whereas Strutwell’s feigned affection disguised his design to strip Roderick of his worldly possessions, Don Rodriguez realizes Strutwell’s “seemingly paternal affection” by lavishing Roderick with money. Together, Roderick’s paternal inheritance and commercial ventures rectify or “heterosexualize” his relations with other men so that they no longer mimic the self-interested dependence of sodomite and pathic. They also prepare him to act as a generous but prudent landowner after he reclaims his family’s estate in Scotland. Once he is instated in his rightful position as patron, Roderick rewards Strap’s loyalty by subsidizing his marriage to the reformed prostitute, Miss Williams, for whom Strap confesses a “sneaking kindness” (435), much as Don Rodriguez expresses his paternal affection by enabling Roderick to marry Narcissa. The conferral of women, like that of money, is a sign of affection, affirming the friendships between men.32 Roderick and Narcissa’s marriage superficially resembles the marital analogies of pro- and anti-Union pamphlets but becomes a much more complex and ambivalent representation of union when we view it as the culmination of Roderick’s former matrimonial schemes. Even after he returns to England a wealthy gentleman, marriage remains to some extent a symbolic form of conquest for Roderick. Rather than offering a means of exploiting others’ wealth, however, marriage now allows him to demonstrate his own triumphant independence. When Squire Topehall persists in refusing his consent to Narcissa’s marriage, Roderick is pleased by this “opportunity of shewing [his] disinterested love” (428) for her – an opportunity, likewise, of asserting his disdain for English prejudices, and his independence of English wealth. Yet although Roderick is willing to marry a “poor forlorn beggar” (428), his pursuit of Narcissa is not entirely disinterested. As a member of the aristocratic English society from which Roderick is still excluded, Narcissa embodies the cultural capital that he desires; and when he speaks of “possessing” her, this sexual euphemism acquires a more literal meaning. While she symbolically provides the Englishness that her husband lacks, Narcissa, as her name suggests, also reflects back to Roderick his prosperity and magnanimity. Narcissa’s ideality is perhaps not so much a symptom of Smollett’s much-criticized inability to create vaguely lifelike female characters as a sign of her value for Roderick.33 In Roderick’s new understanding of marriage as a state of “endearing fondness” requiring an “intimate connexion and interchange of hearts” (435), Smollett offers a prescriptive model of Anglo-Scottish union. The transformation of Roderick’s conception of marriage suggests that a union

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of policy and interest – marred by English prejudice on the one hand, and Scottish “pride and resentment” on the other – might eventually become an egalitarian partnership, or even a union of affection. Roderick and Narcissa’s “interchange of hearts,” however, is dependent upon Roderick’s reformation. Although both must make sacrifices before they can marry – she of her fortune and he of his pride – only Roderick must prove himself economically and morally worthy of Narcissa’s affection. The cultivation of an “endearing fondness” between the Scots and the English, Smollett implies, rather ironically requires the former to assert their economic selfsufficiency and their moral independence from the latter. Roderick’s reformation advises Scots to counter English prejudices with neither resentment nor resignation, but instead by proving them misguided. While Roderick’s reformation could be interpreted as a sign simply of his Anglicization, it more positively signals his ability to negotiate a new identity in response to English prejudices and to exercise the sensibility and self-control that mark him as British. Roderick does not experience Anglicization as a “form of political and cultural imperialism”; instead, he engages in a process of adaptation, selectively appropriating metropolitan English manners and values to transform his native Lowlands.34 He brings the prudence developed through his mercantile ventures and the compassion cultivated by Narcissa to his paternal estate in “the northern part of this united kingdom,” where he can at last enjoy economic and moral independence as the landlord to grateful and affectionate tenants (1). Nonetheless, the Britishness that Roderick embodies at the novel’s end is far from an egalitarian commingling of Scottish and English values and manners. Roderick mentions early in his narrative that some of the people he encountered in London claimed to be unable to understand his speech, but his retrospective narration of his history is unmarked, illustrating his assimilation of English linguistic norms as well as English virtues. Much as Smollett purged all Scotticisms from the fourth edition of Roderick Random, editing it into a British novel, Roderick’s Britishness – or more accurately, his Anglo-Britishness – is defined through the absence of conspicuously and stereotypically Scottish traits.35 ‘the man of feeling’’s english malady In a similar way to Smollett, Henry Mackenzie went to great lengths to ensure that neither The Man of Feeling nor Harley, its protagonist, was marked as Scottish, carefully eliminating from the second edition of the novel the Scotticisms that reviewers had noted disparagingly in the first.

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Harley lacks linguistic or cultural markers of regional identity, but his melancholy suggests that if he is to be assigned a nationality of any sort, it should be English. Yet Mackenzie’s own nationality seems to have played a role in forging a connection between Scottish masculinity and sentiment; for, during the last third of the eighteenth century, owing in no small part to The Man of Feeling and Ossian, excessive sensibility was configured as a peculiarly Scottish tendency.36 While Mackenzie’s writing helped to establish Scotland’s cultural refinement and literary authority in the eyes of its southern neighbors, Mackenzie did not claim Harley’s delicate sensibility either for Scots or for himself. On the contrary, in a letter to his cousin, Elizabeth Rose, he gently mocked some of his Edinburgh acquaintances who “believ’d [Harley] to have been actually meant as a Representative of myself ” and praised the “Sagacity” of those who “pronounced decisively on another Character being designed for the Author’s Portrait,” implying that he was more like the misanthrope of Fragment XXI.37 The Man of Feeling demonstrates that anxieties about the relationships between masculinity and nationality, and between moral and economic autonomy, permeate novels that are not ostensibly concerned with the Anglo-Scottish relations. Harley, like Roderick, is a gentleman by birth, and his journey to London, is motivated by economic necessity. Although the income from his estate is reduced to a “bare 250 l. a year,” Harley refuses to endure what he perceives as the degradation of commercial exchange and insists upon exercising the munificent charity that traditionally had been the prerogative of the aristocracy and gentry.38 He understands compassion as a reliable emotional indicator that the object of his pity is deserving of economic reward; but his sensibility is naı¨ve and indiscriminate, and his charity does little to mend a commercial society corrupted by self-interest and hypocrisy. Harley’s failure to cultivate the judgment, prudence, and self-command necessary to regulate his sensibility and his inability permanently to reconcile economic and moral autonomy – for instance, by participating in a morally compromised colonial economy, as Roderick Random does – suggest that the man of feeling is unfit to participate in the government of a post-feudal, commercially thriving Great Britain. The Man of Feeling’s exploration of the solipsistic tendencies of sensibility challenges recent critical accounts of the didactic function of late eighteenth-century sentimental fiction. Markman Ellis, John Mullan, and others have argued that this fiction’s value lay in its claim to cultivate readers’ capacity for refined feeling by encouraging “a vicarious empathy

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between character and reader” that would prepare readers for interpersonal interactions.39 Just as importantly, however, sentimental novels attempted to teach readers to regulate their feelings, or to empathize discriminately. Mackenzie’s essay “On Novel Reading,” published in The Lounger in 1785, criticized sentimental fiction on the grounds that it developed readers’ capacity to feel at the expense of their capacity to judge. “On Novel Reading” faults sentimental novels for exalting extraordinary “exertions of generosity, of benevolence, and of compassion” over the mundane but necessary “virtues of justice, of prudence, of economy.”40 The latter qualities “have an appearance less dignified and heroic” than the former; and, accordingly, they are less likely to engage the attention of readers and to inspire emulation. Despite their relative unattractiveness, however, these so-called “lesser” virtues are in fact far more important to the welfare of a community than their extraordinary counterparts because, as Mackenzie explains in another essay for The Lounger, “’Tis but a very small proportion of men who can move in the sphere of government or of greatness; but scarce anybody is exempted from performing a part in the relations of ordinary life.”41 Sentimental fiction threatens to disrupt these relations by encouraging readers to substitute “certain impulses and feelings of what may be called the visionary kind, in the place of real practical duties.” Sentimental fiction’s idealism, in short, promotes “the separation of conscience from feeling,” or of judgment from sensibility, dissociating two qualities that should work as complements.42 Mackenzie’s disparagement of sentimental fiction ironically foreshadows the charges that recent critics have leveled against The Man of Feeling. For instance, Mullan has argued that “with all its talk of virtue,” The Man of Feeling distances itself “from any politics of criticism and analysis” and fails to “reflect at all on the problems of conduct, the practices of any existing society.”43 Mullan’s reading of The Man of Feeling as an unqualified and decontextualized celebration of refined feeling echoes Mackenzie’s complaint that sentimental novels fail to emphasize the importance of “practical duties.” While it may seem that “On Novel Reading” contradicts “almost every tenet of Mackenzie’s practice as an imaginative writer,” the essay in fact serves as a corrective to misreadings like Mullan’s.44 The Man of Feeling, far from endorsing the unmitigated indulgence of sensibility, illustrates the importance of the lesser virtues through Harley’s lack of them. Harley’s whimsical indifference to the advice offered by his “grave and prudent friends” (9) emphasizes the impracticability of the feelings that lead him to do “things frequently in

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a way different from what other people call natural” (63). Harley’s aristocratic but anachronistic notions of honor are of little use in a prosperous but impersonal Great Britain and its expanding empire. The Man of Feeling encourages its readers to cultivate self-control by presenting them with a protagonist whose excessive sensibility jeopardizes his moral and economic autonomy. While Roderick Random’s retrospective first-person narrative invites readers to identify with Roderick and to develop their own moral independence by learning from his reformation, The Man of Feeling’s fragmented and mediated narrative frustrates readers’ efforts to sympathize with Harley. The novel consists of a series of sentimental tableaux derived from the remains of a manuscript that a parish curate, apparently lacking any reverence for Harley’s refined feelings, has torn into wadding for his gun. Together, these fragments narrate Harley’s journey to London, where he unsuccessfully attempts to acquire the lease of some land adjacent to his paternal estate; his encounters with metropolitan hypocrisy; his retreat to the country; and his decline and death. The Man of Feeling’s narrative form seems to exemplify the critical consensus that sentimental fiction encouraged readers to fill in textual gaps with their own emotional responses, and thus to exercise the sensibility that would enable them to form sympathetic bonds in actual social interactions.45 However, in a letter to Elizabeth Rose, Mackenzie expressed his hope that readers who chose to take “the Pencil into their own Hands” would exercise “Propriety” in imaginatively filling the gaps in the texts.46 Propriety is one of the “lesser virtues,” closely allied to prudence and moderation, that readers might develop by judging Harley’s emotions contextually rather than identifying with them uncritically. Mackenzie’s caution suggests that he conceived of reading as an exercise not in empathy, but rather in moral judgment. The Man of Feeling warns against the dangers of empathetic reading in a narrative told by Emily Atkins, a fallen woman whom Harley encounters in London. Emily has received her education from “plays, novels, and those poetical descriptions of the beauty of virtue and honour, which the circulating libraries easily afforded” and she is seduced by a rake named Winbrooke because he resembles the “warm ideas of an accomplished man” that these works have taught her to admire (42). Rather than preparing her to avoid real dangers, Emily’s reading has fostered romantic, idealized expectations of the world beyond her father’s house. Through her mistake, Mackenzie condemns the habit of identifying uncritically with fictional characters, or of exercising sensibility without judgment. In contrast to Emily’s romances, however, The Man of Feeling

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is “a man’s book, written mostly with men in mind,” not because, like Roderick Random, it describes traditionally masculine domains or employs Smollett’s bawdy diction and bodily humor, but rather because it invites readers into an exclusive, masculine sentimental community. Even while The Man of Feeling’s fragmentation frustrates any facile sympathetic identification with Harley, the novel’s frame narratives implicate readers in Harley’s solipsism. Harley’s story becomes gun wadding because only a select few can appreciate and sympathize with his sensitivity, and the curate, who prefers logic to feeling, is not one of them. The remnants are rescued from the curate’s gun by the “editor,” who possesses enough sensibility to find himself “a good deal affected” by passages of the narrative and to consider it worthy of publication; and the narrative itself is written by a friend of Harley’s in the belief that Harley’s sensibility “did honour to humanity” (97). This framing device presents The Man of Feeling to a select audience – implicitly male, genteel, and relatively prosperous – whose already refined feelings will enable them to appreciate Harley’s sensibility. Yet the novel addresses this audience only to illustrate the dangers of its position. One of the fragments that most strongly criticizes Harley’s sensibility and most obviously reveals Mackenzie’s ironic distance from his protagonist is the episode in which Harley encounters Edwards, a character that even Boswell, who strongly disliked the novel, described as “admirable.”47 The contrast between Harley’s excessive feeling and Edwards’ stoicism calls into question the propriety of Harley’s displays of sensibility and the prudence of his charity. Harley encounters Edwards, an old man whom he recognizes with great fondness, on his journey home from London. Edwards’ tale of unmitigated misfortune describes the sacrifice of rural virtue to metropolitan greed and the destruction of close-knit feudal bonds by impersonal economic exchange. Edwards’ troubles began when he was driven by a rapacious “London-attorney” from “the farm that had been possessed by [his] father, grandfather, and great-grandfather”; after they moved to a smaller and less arable piece of land, Edwards’ son, Jack, was press-ganged; Edwards insisted on taking Jack’s place in the army and was sent to India, where he was brutally whipped for protesting the abuse of imperial power. He has finally returned home only to find that his son has died during his absence, leaving two orphaned grandchildren. But the detail that utterly shatters Harley’s composure as he listens to this tale of woe is the fate of Trusty, Edwards’ blind and aged dog: as Edwards was leaving his ancestral farm, Trusty, whose name associates him with the affective bonds of agrarian paternalism destroyed by the London attorney,

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lay down in his favorite spot outside the farmhouse, “gave a short howl, and died!” (67). While Harley’s face is by this point in the story “bathed in tears,” Edwards “dropped one tear and no more” in remembrance of Trusty (67). His exemplary ability to restrain his grief seems only to increase Harley’s maudlin pity. As Boswell remarked scathingly on this episode, “The grief of Harley . . . is out of bounds & grows really ridiculous.”48 Although his sphere of influence is small, Edwards’ conduct is consistently marked by the same sacrifice of personal interest that, in the republican tradition, defines civic virtue and characterizes a military hero or a great statesman. Mackenzie wrote of Edwards, “Heroes amidst the Blaze of War, or the Glare of Courts, have been in every one’s Hands; I have sought one unattended by those adventitious Circumstances; I have found him in a simple Farm-house; yet I flatter myself he is not the less a Hero.”49 Edwards’ determination to take Jack’s place in the army because he has “but little life to lose” evinces the same generosity that inspires him to free an abused Indian prisoner regardless of the punishment that he knows he will incur (69–70). Through Harley’s lachrymose response to Edwards’ narrative, Mackenzie differentiates the appreciation of virtue from virtuous action. Rather than attempting to emulate Edwards, Harley seeks to passively absorb the fruits of his friend’s experiences, begging, “let me hold thee to my bosom; let me imprint the virtue of thy sufferings on my soul” (71). Harley’s lack of self-command prevents him from restoring his paternal estate by either marrying Miss Walton, the heiress to £4000 per year whose father’s estate borders Harley’s own and with whom Harley is secretly in love, or going to London to request “a lease of some crownlands” which similarly “lay contiguous to his paternal estate” (11). To obtain the lease Harley must acquire “some interest with the great” by cultivating the favor of a baronet in London (11). Yet Harley cannot overcome his retiring modesty and the estate goes to a footman turned gauger who agrees to pimp his sister to the baronet in exchange for the lease. The footman-gauger, whom Harley naı¨vely mistakes for a gentleman, has no qualms about engaging in either the commercial exchange or the aggressive self-fashioning that Harley shuns; and the baronet also sanctions a social order that defines worth through wealth rather than virtue, and in which class has become a question of passing. Even while Mackenzie condemns this corruption, he relegates Harley’s moral sensitivity to “the margins of normal masculine behavior” by situating him “outside the pale of normal economic relations” defined by reciprocal exchange.50

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Harley’s sensibility not only prevents him from obtaining the lease and increasing the revenue of his estate; it also prevents him from declaring his love to Miss Walton. Although, as April London has argued, women in The Man of Feeling are a form of mobile property, and thus are associated with the instability and corruption of commercial society,51 Miss Walton’s prudence also highlights the impracticability of Harley’s excessive sensibility. Miss Walton shares Harley’s compassion, but she also advocates self-restraint and the exercise of the “lesser virtues” celebrated in “On Novel Reading.” When Harley falls ill, Miss Walton gently pleads with him to conquer his longing for death by reminding him of the spiritual value of mundane virtues: “your good sense, Mr. Harley, will own, that life has its proper value.—As the province of virtue, life is ennobled; as such it is to be desired” (96). Miss Walton joins a Christian ethic of worldly suffering with a secular theory of moral propriety to encourage Harley to regulate his feelings. But when, to encourage Harley’s recovery, she confesses her affection for him, he seemingly is unable to control his passion, and promptly dies. Harley’s opportune death is not simply perhaps “the most dramatic example of sexual avoidance in Western literature”; it also marks the failure of the romance plot that, in Roderick Random, compels the hero’s cultivation of self-control.52 The Man of Feeling represents sensibility as an impediment to affective and economic exchange, revealing that both forms of commerce require self-restraint. In rejecting a commercial order that distinguishes economic from sentimental bonds, Harley clings to a patriarchal system of patronage that conflates the economic and the affective. Harley’s ready charity is the antithesis of the self-interested exploitation defining sodomitical relations in Roderick Random. Yet even though he occupies the privileged position of benefactor rather than a feminized position of dependence, Harley’s sensibility prevents him from forming “genial” relationships. Feeling becomes a source of alienation rather than union, rendering his interactions with others solipsistic and self-reflexive. Nowhere is Harley’s conflation of the economic and the sympathetic more evident than in his simultaneously paternal and filial relationship to Edwards. After he returns disillusioned from London, Harley decides that he “was not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the dissipation of the gay” (94). Harley can achieve the illusion of the restoration of order with which the picaresque conventionally concludes only by turning his back on the moral ambiguity of the metropolis. Harley’s geographic retreat to the country is also a historical regression to a feudal order in which identity is fixed by

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the possession of land across generations. He finds a vacant plot on his estate for the use of Edwards and his two grandchildren, and “set[s] about improving its neatness and convenience” for its new inhabitants (75). The diminutive scale of the resulting farm reflects Harley’s diminished means as he reconstitutes the hierarchical bonds between landowner and tenant. Mackenzie introduces Edwards’ new farm, replete with bubbling brook and miniature mill, in a tableau that features Harley gazing at Edwards’ happy grandson, “the smile of conscious satisfaction on his cheek; while the old man, with a look half-turned to Harley, and half to Heaven, breathed an ejaculation of gratitude and piety” (76). Harley’s smile presumably springs from the knowledge that this idyllic scene is the product of his benevolence, while Edwards’ pious gratitude endorses Harley’s self-satisfaction. Edwards’ split gaze elevates Harley to the position of a demi-god, the worldly representative of a compassion that ultimately springs from a higher source. The tableau also positions Harley between grandson and grandfather so that he is flanked by an older and wiser version of himself and a young man of feeling in training. Within the domestic community he has created, Harley at once inhabits a paternal and a filial position. This position is reflected in his ambiguous plea to Edwards, “let me cherish thee as a father” (70), the grammar of which leaves it unclear whether Harley or Edwards occupies the paternal position. While Harley reveres Edwards as he would a father-figure, admiring his many virtues, Harley’s pecuniary advantages also allow him to assume the paternalistic position of benefactor to the older man. Situated comfortably between grandfather and child, Harley indulges in the solipsism of sensibility, seeking out those who most resemble himself. Notably, women are entirely absent from Harley’s rural sanctuary, indicating its insularity. Although Edwards’ little farm embodies “the consolations of an exclusively male communion” and resists the flux and disorder symbolized by women in the novel, Harley’s sentimental community cannot adapt or endure because it cannot reproduce itself, but, like the feudal order it represents, seems destined to die out. Harley’s simultaneous roles as father and son create the patrilineal continuity that ordinarily would require marriage and the production of an heir; yet his sensibility is as much an obstacle to genial love, an egalitarian rather than hierarchical tie, as are Roderick Random’s self-interested ambition and avarice. By rejecting genial love for solipsistic sensibility, Harley has created a refuge from worldly hypocrisy and corruption that is locked in stasis. A surprise visit from Miss Walton reveals that although static, Harley’s refuge is not impermeable either to women or to the instability

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and moral corruption with which they are associated. Perhaps in the hope of meeting Harley, Miss Walton brings a gift of new clothes for Edwards’ grandchildren. The boy’s enchantment with his new “finery” suggests that Miss Walton may have succeeded, however inadvertently, in sowing the seeds of worldly desire in Harley’s young prote´ge´ (78). Edwards utters profuse thanks, while Harley is assailed by “a thousand sentiments;—but they gushed so impetuously on his heart, that he could not utter a syllable” (78). Harley’s frequent moments of intense emotional speechlessness may, as Stephen Ahern has suggested, represent a transcendent form of communion, but they also illustrate the solipsism of a sensibility so strong that it impedes more functional communication.53 In this particular instance, moreover, Harley’s “thousand sentiments” may include, along with gratitude and admiration, indignation at this invasion of his sanctuary through an act of charity that undermines his own prerogatives as Edwards’ benefactor. Mackenzie indicts the widespread moral contamination that drives Harley into solitude, but he also represents Harley’s retreat as an inefficacious and impracticable response that reveals his unfitness to participate in the government of a modern, commercial Britain and its expanding empire. Harley’s critique of Britain’s imperial policy in India, which at the time of the novel’s publication was controlled by the East India Company, illustrates the paradoxes of his retreat. Harley’s revulsion towards mercantile imperialism foreshadows Edmund Burke’s argument that the East India Company’s rule extended the vices of England’s commercial metropolises throughout Britain’s empire.54 In place of the East India Company’s exploitative practices, Harley envisions an imperial rule modeled on the hierarchical bonds of obligation and gratitude uniting the landed gentleman and his tenants. He berates those Britons who go to India not to bring “peace and happiness to the conquered,” but rather because they aspire to wealth and the “fame of conquest” (77). They are motivated, Harley implies, by the same greedy self-interest that leads the squire at South-hill to turn the schoolboys’ playing green into farmland and the footman-gauger to trade his sister for the lease of an estate. But those who, like Harley, “live sequestered from the noise of the multitude” can “applaud benevolence and censure inhumanity” precisely because of their distance from metropolitan vices (78). Their applause and censure has no appreciable effect on imperial practices. Harley’s own diminishing moral and economic autonomy attests to the fact that imperial wealth and commercial mores have already infiltrated the rural regions of Britain, endangering the last bastions of humanity and

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benevolence. Most of the estates in Harley’s neighborhood are no longer owned by hereditary nobility, but are now “in the hands of merchants, who had got rich by their lawful calling abroad, and the sons of stewards, who had got rich by their lawful calling at home” (9). Mackenzie warns that with the expansion of Britain’s empire, the possibility of escaping moral contamination will contract as the circulation of goods and people communicates vice from the metropolis to its rural outskirts. The Man of Feeling refuses Roderick Random’s utopian resolution, arriving instead at an impasse from which Harley’s death mercifully releases him: commerce cultivates vice, yet retreat does nothing to mitigate its viciousness and merely serves to isolate virtue. Roderick’s moral reformation and economic restoration incorporate commercial self-interest and self-fashioning into a traditional patriarchal order. By the end of his narrative, Roderick has developed the self-control necessary to participate in the government of a Britain united by sentimental and economic ties. Harley, however, does not change; until the moment of his death his sensibility remains a source of alienation that prevents him from entering into either sentimental or commercial exchange. The Man of Feeling finally questions the possibility of reconciling economic and affective ties in a commercial Great Britain, suggesting that Queensberry’s and Defoe’s ideal of nation sharing both economic interests and “Hearts and Affections” might be unrealizable. Nonetheless, perhaps because of its criticisms of London and its idealization of rural retreat, The Man of Feeling was lauded by Scottish writers from Robert Burns to Walter Scott, who dedicated Waverley to Mackenzie. While Burns’ bouts of debauchery would seem to render him more similar to Roderick Random than to Harley, he described The Man of Feeling as a book he prized “next to the Bible,” and claimed to carry a copy of the novel with him at all times.55 However, Burns’ public tribute to the book may have owed much to Mackenzie’s assistance in introducing him to Edinburgh’s literary elite; as he claimed in a letter, “with all my admiration of McKenzie’s [sic] writings I do not know if they are the fittest reading for a young Man who is about to set out, as the phrase is, to make his way in life.”56 A close and frequent reader of The Man of Feeling, Burns could admire Harley’s sensibility while acknowledging its impracticability. Harley’s evident wistfulness for an irrevocable feudal social order also echoed Ossian’s mourning for ancient Celtic heroism and Jacobite nostalgia for an exiled monarch. It is perhaps not surprising, given the man of feeling’s refusal to adopt the standards of British masculinity, that Scots embraced his sensibility as a national trait.

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how boswell became british Born five years before Culloden, James Boswell was both a witness to and a participant in changing constructions of Scottish and British masculinity in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The Boswell that we encounter in his journals, notes, and memoranda is in many senses as fictional a creation as Harley and Roderick Random; these materials document Boswell as a work in progress, as fragmented and fluid rather than stable and whole. This fragmentation is particularly evident in Boswell’s conflicted national allegiances – his self-identifications as Scottish, English, and, more rarely, British.57 For instance, in his notes for a single journal entry, Boswell categorizes himself as a “worthy Scot” and as one of “us English” apparently without the least self-consciousness.58 Yet if we examine Boswell’s writings over a stretch of years, a discernable shift in his national identifications becomes evident. As young man, Boswell sought to perform an English masculinity that he associated with refined feeling, but he later embraced a British masculinity that united feeling with prudence. Upon arriving in London in 1762, Boswell declared his intention to eschew the “low jocularity” associated with Scots and “to have nothing but English ideas, and to be as manly as I possibly could.”59 At this point in his life, being manly and having English ideas were virtually synonymous for Boswell, as both manliness and Englishness connoted politeness. His ability to penetrate genteel English society left Boswell, rather like Roderick Random, astounded with his powers of self-fashioning. Yet while he took care to avoid “Scotch tones and rough and roaring freedom of manners,” he was plagued by a hypochondria or melancholy that left him feeling conflicted and unmanned.60 Hypochondria was desirable insofar as it generally was considered a genteel affliction,61 and for Boswell it held additional value as a sign of Englishness. Indeed Boswell’s strenuous efforts to integrate himself into London society may have helped to induce his melancholy. For instance, Boswell records experiencing “a fit of the English malady” after meeting Dr. Taylor, a prebendary of Westminster, whose “manly, plain English character” so impressed Boswell that he was left with a sense of inadequacy about his own manliness and Englishness.62 Although Boswell continued throughout his life to praise English civility, he also came to distinguish between refinement and melancholy, and to associate British masculinity with the ability to restrain sensibility within the bounds of sociability. Samuel Johnson, from whom Boswell sought counsel about his melancholy, encouraged him to regard

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self-control as a more laudable quality than sensibility. Boswell relates in his Life of Johnson that by the time he was twenty, Johnson “felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible Hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience, and with a dejection, gloom and despair, which made existence misery.” Lest his readers might be tempted to crow at finding a flaw in the great man, Boswell warns, “But let not little men triumph upon knowing that Johnson was an hypochondriack, was subject to what the learned philosophical and pious Dr. Cheyne has so well treated under the title of ‘The English Malady.’ Though he suffered severely from it, he was not therefore degraded.” On the contrary, Johnson was further exalted in Boswell’s eyes because he “strove to overcome” his hypochondria “with forcible exertions.”63 As in Boswell’s analogy of the “bold Highlander in Fingal,” who seeks to attack “the Deity of his fanciful conjectures,” Johnson valiantly battled the elusive “Demon of Hypochondria.” In contrast to those “little men” who neither shared Johnson’s great intellect nor suffered his great despair, Johnson suffered and conquered, becoming for Boswell a “model of self-mastery.”64 Boswell sought to emulate Johnson’s self-mastery, and his journal notes written while studying law in Utrecht reveal the strategies he used to overcome his anxiety and dejection and to become “prudent and retenu.”65 Foremost amongst these was Boswell’s internalization of external monitors, including Johnson, his friend William Temple, and his father, Lord Auchinleck. Like Johnson, the latter two men also suffered from melancholy, but largely managed to control it, Temple through regular and studious habits and Auchinleck through constant attention to his estate. By imagining how these monitors would judge his conduct, Boswell learned to perform for their approval and to become an impartial spectator of his own behavior by seeing it through the eyes of those he aimed to imitate. For instance, after a serious breakdown upon arriving in Holland, Boswell wrote to Temple, “Mr. Johnson is ever in my thoughts when I can think with any manliness.” He finds solace in Johnson’s Rambler, which “insists on preserving a manly fortitude of mind, and maintains that every distress may be supported.” The Rambler, he declares happily, seems “to have been just written for me,” and serves in the absence of Johnson himself as “the ablest mental physician that I have ever applied to.” Boswell asks Temple to assist him in attaining Johnson’s standards of fortitude by keeping a “constant check” on his behavior.66 In eschewing the melancholy he associated with Englishness, Boswell aimed instead to embody a less easily attained ideal of manhood that he would later characterize as British.

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Whereas Boswell’s journals and notes chronicle his private struggles with the English malady, the column that he wrote for The London Magazine between 1777 and 1783 in the character of “The Hypochondriack” participated in the public construction of a British identity characterized by carefully controlled sensibility. The monthly deadline for the Hypochondriack Papers helped Boswell to practice the selfregulation that he preached by encouraging him “to acquire that best of all habits – a promptitude in execution” even when he felt too dejected to write.67 Boswell envisioned the implicitly male readers of his essays as people “in easy circumstances, who are arrived at the age of serious thinking . . . whose existence is compounded of reason and sentiment; who can judge rationally, yet feel keenly,” as people, in other words, who shared his own self-critical capacity for refined feeling.68 His aim as “The Hypochondriack” was similar to Smollett’s in Roderick Random and Mackenzie’s in The Man of Feeling – to teach readers to balance judgment and feeling. Boswell is quick to affirm the necessity of both sentiment and self-control: “without a good share of sensibility,” he declares, “how dull or insipid is life!” Yet he also asserts that prudence, or “the habit of acting wisely to the best of our abilities,” must complement sensibility.69 While Boswell’s depiction of a masculinity defined by the complementary exercise of sensibility and self-control was hardly original by the 1780s, the way that this masculinity allowed him to reconceptualize his nationality is striking. Boswell’s unpublished “Memorabilia Notebooks” suggest that he considered his divided loyalties to Scotland and England as particularly relevant to his writings as the Hypochondriack. He congratulates himself, “I am a singular man [:] I have the whim of an Englishman to make me think and act extravagantly and the coolness and good sense of a Scotsman to make me sensible of it.”70 Whereas the young Boswell had regarded his Scottish attributes as a liability that marked his inferiority to metropolitan Englishmen, he here configures them as an asset that enables him to perform a British rather an English identity. Possessing Harley’s fanciful feeling and Roderick Random’s shrewd self-interest, Boswell is truly a “singular man,” one who has fashioned himself, as the Hypochondriack, into a Briton. The Hypochondriack Papers, The Man of Feeling, and Roderick Random explore the qualities necessary for participation in the government of a commercial Great Britain and its empire, and attempt to cultivate these qualities in their readers. But while their ideal of a feminized or sentimental masculinity might be accessible to both Scottish and English readers, it effectively excludes women from sharing in a British identity.

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Although they imagine a nation united through sentimental and economic exchange rather than through the political interests of the landed classes, both forms of exchange occur primarily between men. Women’s exclusion from a national sentimental community identity in part reflects the gendered conventions of the picaresque, which in the second half of the eighteenth century more often featured a male than a female rogue. It also reflects the gendered biases of eighteenth-century moral psychology, which assigned sensibility to women and self-command to men.71 By exploring the relationships between family and nation, and between sentimental ties and blood bonds, the texts discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 acknowledge women’s participation in the creation of Scottish and British identities.

chapter 3

Sentimental correspondences and the boundaries of British identity

In the second half of the eighteenth century, novelists turned to epistolary narratives to explore the workings of sympathy and the formation of sentimental community because letters were considered a particularly genuine and intimate form of writing. The letter’s generic claims to credibility, authenticity, and emotional intimacy are epitomized in Samuel Johnson’s half-joking assertion in one of his own epistles to Hester Thrale that “in a Man’s Letters . . . his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirrour of his breast.”1 Epistolary fiction not only exploits the letter’s generic connotations; it also formally embodies Smith’s definition of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a “correspondence of sentiments” by assuming the existence of a recipient to whom the letter-writer bares his soul and from whom replies may be received. The epistolary novels that I will discuss in this chapter – Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) – explore the workings of sympathy through the exchange of letters that propels their plots. These novels imagine a Great Britain united by shared sentiments even while they illustrate the dangers that indiscriminate sympathy poses to national order and integrity. However, they are not simply imaginative narrativizations of Adam Smith’s definition of sympathy. Instead, like The Theory of Moral Sentiments, they participated in eighteenth-century debates about who was worthy of sympathy and why. While readers must determine whether they sympathize with letter-writing characters, these characters in turn must determine whether they sympathize with the unfamiliar individuals they encounter, including, importantly for my argument, Scots. The late eighteenth-century epistolary novel’s exploration of the work required to establish a “correspondence of sentiments” marks a rejection of David Hume’s representation of sympathy as the almost contagious communication of feeling from one person to another. Epistolary fiction’s structural dialogism emphasizes the active emotional give-and-take 83

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between spectator and actor that, for Smith, is the essence of sympathy. Smith’s spectator functions similarly to what narrative theorist Janet Gurkin Altman has dubbed the “internal reader,” the explicit or implicit respondent to a correspondent’s letters.2 In a novel like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8), the internal readers are fully developed characters and correspondents; Anna Howe explicitly responds to Clarissa’s letters, as Belford does to Lovelace’s. In Humphry Clinker, Evelina, and Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, in contrast, the internal readers are implicit. We know that Matthew Bramble writes to Dr. Lewis, Evelina to the Reverend Villars, and Zaarmilla to Maandaara, but we don’t know exactly what Lewis, Villars, and Maandaara write in return because we are not privy to their replies. By supplying readers primarily with outgoing letters, Humphry Clinker, Evelina, and Letters of a Hindoo Rajah invite them to occupy the position, in Altman’s terms, of the internal reader, and, in Smith’s terms, of the spectator who judges the sentiments of the letter-writing characters. Despite the absence of explicit replies, however, readers’ judgments are not entirely free from internal textual constraints. Eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals emphasized that a well written letter should “mirror” the one it answered by reproducing the substance, although not the language, of each point that the original made. Eve Tavor Bannet explains, “This rule made it possible to read one side of a correspondence and get a fairly good idea of what had been said in the letter or letters one had not seen.”3 Mirroring allows us to infer the internal reader’s reply from the letter-writing characters’ outgoing mail, and to compare the sentiments of letter-writer and internal reader. As a narrative strategy in epistolary fiction, the open-ended or one-sided correspondence, which collapses the distinction between internal and external reader, invites readers selectively to “change places in fancy” with letter-writing characters and to determine whether they share these characters’ feelings. In other words, an open-ended correspondence encourages readers to establish selective sympathies with letter-writing characters. If Smith’s definition of sympathy as a “correspondence of sentiments” may have informed late eighteenth-century epistolary fiction, The Theory of Moral Sentiments in its turn may have been influenced by earlier epistolary fiction such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), whose request that we change places in fancy with a highly literate teenaged servant girl seems to have challenged the imaginative capacities of some readers. Smith’s explanation of sympathy allows for the difficulty that some readers experience in sympathizing with Pamela, as it reveals a much greater skepticism about our ability and desire to share in others’ feelings

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than do earlier moral theorists such as Francis Hutcheson or Hume. Smith acknowledges that no matter how hard a spectator tries to “render as perfect as possible, that imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded,” he can never fully experience another person’s feelings.4 The irremediable subjectivity of experience requires that “I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love.”5 Humphry Clinker, Evelina, and Letters of a Hindoo Rajah reflect Smith’s skepticism about the limitations of our ability to sympathize with the unknown or foreign by mediating readers’ access to unfamiliar, and particularly to un-English, characters through more readily familiar correspondents. These novels invited their primary audience of metropolitan English readers selectively to “change places in fancy” with an array of correspondents who, in the course of each novel, interact with a range of potentially unfamiliar individuals. In contrast to The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ fairly abstract explanation of sympathy, epistolary novels situate the process of sentimental exchange in fully articulated social contexts, raising the question of how gendered, racial, and national identities might influence the formation of sentimental correspondences. In the examples that Smith uses to illustrate his theories, the spectator and actor invariably are male, and while they may differ in terms of their social class and moral conduct, they are rarely marked by national or ethnic distinctions. Yet in the mid-eighteenth-century British republic of letters, an unmarked subject is perhaps implicitly an English subject. Critics recently have suggested that the actor’s internalization of the supposedly impartial spectator’s perspective “figures the self-estrangement of the assimilating Scot,” a reading that aligns the spectator with metropolitan English mores and manners.6 Luke Gibbons and Evan Gottlieb each have developed this reading of The Theory of Moral Sentiments as an allegory of mid-eighteenth-century Anglo-Scottish relations at length, arguing that the spectator’s power to bestow or withhold sympathy replicates in miniature England’s cultural authority over its Celtic peripheries and its imperial possessions farther afield.7 Much as Smith’s actor performs for a spectator, Scotland had “to adjust itself and curb its excesses so as not to give offence to its more temperate, civilized neighbors,” the English.8 Gibbons and Gottlieb conclude that although Smith does not overtly advocate conformity to English manners and morals, his model of sympathy reflects the assimilationist predilection for improvement characteristic of mid-eighteenth-century Scottish intellectuals and promotes cultural homogenization.

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I do not want to dismiss entirely Gibbons’ and Gottlieb’s reading of the impartial spectator as a quasi-imperial spectator, since many Scots undoubtedly did seek to emulate English manners. However, Scots cannot be taken as prototypical British colonial subjects, representative of those in India, the West Indies or elsewhere, because they participated so conspicuously in perpetuating Britain’s imperial power. Scots may have played the actors to English spectators, but they assumed the position of spectators and judges in relation to colonial subjects throughout Britain’s growing empire. The novels that I discuss in this chapter elucidate the complexities of Anglo-Scottish sympathies by attending closely to Scots’ shifting positions as insiders and outsiders, familiar and unfamiliar, Britons and foreigners, authoritative spectators and actors hungry for approval, by situating Scots among an array of other non-English figures – French, Welsh, Native American, West Indian, and East Indian, among others. The ambivalent position of the Scots as at once strange and familiar, British but not English, renders them in Humphry Clinker, Evelina, and Letters of a Hindoo Rajah a source of the uncanny. The previous chapter explored Franco Moretti’s claim that the picaresque configures the nation as a familiar space through the picaro’s encounters with long-lost friends or kin (like Harley’s father-figure, Edwards, or Roderick’s father, Don Rodriguez). The novels I discuss in this chapter employ the picaresque’s basic narrative structure, but their protagonists repeatedly experience the familiar, and the literally familial, as initially strange or foreign and unrecognizable. The family, itself a contested community, becomes the locus within which the boundaries of Britishness are defined. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, enlightenment historiography relegates blood-based kinship networks to pre-modern, even “savage” stages of society; progress towards modernity scatters these networks and reconstitutes the family and the nation as affective communities bound by affinal bonds. Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations argues that eighteenth-century novelists sentimentalized consanguineal ties because they were the remnants of an archaic patriarchal society that seemed to offer a security and orderliness that the vagaries of commerce could not provide.9 While the novels that I examine in this chapter do romanticize blood ties, they are less nostalgic for consanguineous community than Perry’s argument might lead us to expect. They suggest that whether at the familial or the national level, shared sympathies form a stronger bond than shared blood because they are volitional rather than given.10 Humphry Clinker, Evelina, and Letters of a Hindoo Rajah assess the boundaries of Britishness by examining the extent to which sympathy can render unfamiliar individuals familiar.

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While Humphry Clinker’s expanding party of travelers suggests that the cultivation of sentimental correspondences among northern and southern Britons might transform an insular Englishness into a more inclusive British identity, Evelina’s family romance warns that such integration requires the erasure of cultural difference, Scottish and otherwise. Where we might expect to see an increasing acceptance of Scots in England from the early 1770s to the mid-1790s, Letters of a Hindoo Rajah suggests instead a growing skepticism about the extent to which Scots are like the English, and a concomitant readiness to confine them, along with Britain’s imperial subjects, to the margins of Britishness. ‘humphry clinker’’s enlightened sensibilities The Expedition of Humphry Clinker reassesses Roderick Random’s attribution of England’s anti-Scottish prejudices to Scots’ dependence upon English wealth, tracing the persistence of these prejudices a quarter of a century after the ’45 to southern Britons’ ignorance regarding their northern neighbors. Jery, one of the novel’s five letter-writing Welsh travelers, declares, “between want of curiosity, and traditional sarcasms, the effect of ancient animosity, the people at the other end of the island know as little of Scotland as of Japan.”11 Humphry Clinker suggests that this “ancient animosity” can be overcome only through a process of familiarization: the English must develop a historically contextualized understanding of Scottish culture, while Scots in turn must strive to make their manners, customs, and speech readily comprehensible to the English. Through the novel’s Welsh characters, Smollett invokes the 1536 Union between England and Wales as an example of the unity that might develop between nations over time and suggests that a similarly harmonious union between Scotland and England requires the gradual formation of sympathetic correspondences among northern and southern Britons.12 Humphry Clinker’s epistolary form, a departure from the first- or thirdperson narration of Smollett’s previous novels, represents Anglo-Scottish reconciliation as a dialogic process. The narrative comprises the letters of five correspondents, in which those of Matthew Bramble and Jery Melford, Bramble’s Oxford-educated nephew, predominate in terms of sheer volume and moral authority.13 Although its multiplicity of correspondents requires readers to judge the trustworthiness of each one’s perceptions, I agree with Aileen Douglas that the “extent to which the novel honors multiple viewpoints . . . has been exaggerated.”14 Smollett

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does not endorse each letter writer’s perceptions uniformly or accord them equal moral weight; instead, he invites us to laugh at the misspellings and misinterpretations of Tabitha Bramble and her maid, Win Jenkins, and to humor the romantic musings of Jery’s sister, Lydia. Moreover, two of the major characters whom the travelers encounter – Humphry Clinker, who becomes the Brambles’ servant, and Lismahago, a Scottish soldier who joins them for part of their journey – do not write any letters; instead, their voices are filtered through others’ correspondence. Bramble’s moral authority derives not simply from his masculinity, as Douglas argues, but more specifically from his economic autonomy as an estate owner and his political knowledge as a former Member of Parliament.15 By encouraging readers to develop a correspondence of sentiments with Bramble and, to a lesser extent, Jery, Humphry Clinker at once attempts to contain their sensibility within a gendered hierarchy of political and moral authority, and to employ it in the work of British nation formation. Humphry Clinker embodies Smith’s notion of sentimental correspondences through its epistolary correspondences. For instance, Bramble apologizes to his physician and friend, Dr. Lewis: If I did not know that the exercise of your profession has habituated you to the hearing of complaints, I should make a conscience of troubling you with my correspondence, which may truly be called the lamentations of Matthew Bramble. Yet I cannot help thinking that I have some right to discharge the overflowings of my spleen upon you, whose province it is to remove those disorders that occasioned it; and let me tell you, it is no small alleviation of my grievances, that I have a sensible friend, to whom I can communicate my crusty humours, which, by retention, would grow intolerably acrimonious. (62)

In his customary conflation of bodily illness and mental distress, Bramble represents his epistolary correspondence with Dr. Lewis as the transmission of “humours” – the bodily fluids that early modern medicine associated with emotional states – from writer to recipient. This passage also reveals Humphry Clinker’s concern with the infectiousness of sensibility, which Smith described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments as “the cause of the contagious effects of good and bad company.”16 Smollett warns that unless it is judiciously controlled, sensibility indiscriminately transmits vicious and benevolent passions, and corrupt and honorable inclinations, throughout the social body. In Bath, for instance, Bramble observes middle-class visitors exhausting their funds aping the ostentatious finery and manners of the rich (65–6). Of course, Bramble communicates

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his feelings not only to Dr. Lewis but also Humphry Clinker’s readers. His condemnation of unreflecting sensibility encourages readers to cultivate the judgment necessary to establish discerning sympathies. Bramble’s interactions with the Scotsman, Lismahago, not only model for readers the judicious regulation of feeling; they also illustrate the challenges of forming the sentimental correspondences that might transform an Anglo-Scottish union of interests into a union of sympathies. Lismahago, with his Quixotic appearance and stubborn argumentativeness, is at first an unfathomable curiosity to Bramble’s party of travelers. His accounts of his valiant and unrewarded military service during the Seven Years War and his subsequent travails among the Miami Indians immediately elicit their admiration. Yet Jery concludes from their brief acquaintance “that this Caledonian is a self-conceited pedant, aukward, rude, and disputacious” (225). The travelers are unsure how to interpret Lismahago’s strange mannerisms, so they dismiss them as peculiarly Scottish traits. After a few days in the travelers’ company, however, Lismahago responds to their friendly overtures by assuming a vague semblance of affability which suggests that his odd mannerisms are perhaps neither distinctively Scottish nor innate. Bramble’s frequent altercations with Lismahago remind readers that the cultivation of sympathetic ties is a lengthy and precarious process. It requires patience, self-restraint, and an imaginative form of traveling, a willingness to relinquish personal prejudices and to enter into another’s feelings, which is reflected in the letter-writers’ geographical travels. Jery notices that when one of the men “began to wax warm, the other prudently cooled in the same proportion,” thus averting a clash of tempers that might end in “an abrupt dissolution of their society” (226). Lismahago’s figurative familiarization through sympathy makes possible his literal incorporation into the family through marriage. As Lismahago and Tabitha’s nuptials approach, Jery reports that the Scotsman’s “temper, which had been soured and shriveled by disappointment and chagrin, is now swelled out, and smoothed like a raisin in plumb-porridge . . . He cracks jokes, laughs, and banters, with the most facetious familiarity; and, in a word, enters into all our schemes of merriment and pastime” (389). In retrospect, Jery realizes that Lismahago’s seeming rudeness was not an essentially Scottish trait, but rather the effect of his past experiences of anti-Scottish prejudice. Lismahago’s familial assimilation through sympathy perhaps offers a prescriptive model for Scots’ integration into Great Britain. As the Welsh travelers grow to understand and admire Scots, their newly established sympathies are confirmed by the lingering remnants of

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an ancient kinship between the Welsh and the Scots. Bramble informs us that both are “descendents of the Britons,” or the Celtic peoples who originally settled Great Britain; but both have mixed with later Anglo-Saxon settlers, who pushed these original inhabitants out to the peripheries of the island (284). Jery similarly observes distinctions between Anglo-Saxons and Celts in both Scotland and Wales, explaining that Highlanders are “as different from the Low-land [sic] Scots, in their looks, garb, and language, as the mountaineers of Brecknock are from the inhabitants of Herefordshire” (275). Lismahago and Tabitha’s marriage symbolically reconstitutes a Great Britain united by blood, as each comes from an ambiguous border region where Anglo-Saxon has mixed with Celtic blood for centuries. However, the couple’s age, and the probable infertility of their marriage, suggests that blood alone is no longer a sufficient basis for national unity. Instead, the travelers’ journey through Scotland, and the friendship cultivated between Lismahago and Bramble, offers sympathy as a more lasting and fruitful foundation for national union. By familiarizing themselves with Scotland and its inhabitants, Humphry Clinker’s travelers begin to overcome the prejudices and ignorance that, Smollett implies, have thus far impeded the transformation of an Anglo-Scottish union of interests into one of affections. The novel seeks to involve its readers in this transformation by bringing both English and Scots into a mediated, vicarious proximity with each other, and illustrating their respective duties in the process of nation formation. First, Smollett warns English readers that they must not to expect to find another England in “North Britain.” Shortly after arriving in Edinburgh, Bramble writes to Dr. Lewis: “The first impressions which an Englishman receives in this country, will not contribute to the removal of his prejudices; because he refers every thing he sees to a comparison with the same articles in his own country; and this comparison is unfavourable to Scotland in all its exteriors, such as the face of the country in respect to cultivation, the appearance of the bulk of the people, and the language of conversation in general” (268). Bramble’s initially underwhelming impressions of Scotland suggest that familiarization first requires defamiliarization. Like The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Humphry Clinker implies that before we can sympathize with others, we must abandon our habitual assumptions and preconceptions, and attempt to surmount our ultimately insurmountable subjectivity. Accordingly, visitors from the south must form their judgments of Scots contextually by taking into consideration the economic and political conditions in which they live. Recognizing the difficulties of

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imaginative place-changing, Smollett does not ask English readers to see Scotland directly through a Scot’s eyes, but instead through the eyes of southern Britons who learn to sympathize with Scots. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English had perceived the Welsh as simpletons and savages; by the middle of the eighteenth century they saw them as virtually English.17 Humphry Clinker’s Welsh travelers thus stand on one hand as models of successful assimilation for Scots and on the other hand as southern Britons with whose perspectives English readers can identify. Even so, Smollett’s efforts to elicit sympathy for Scots were compromised by his own national origins. His accounts of Scotland’s learning and virtue were deemed “exaggerated,” and The Universal Magazine’s reviewer declared his fear that Smollett’s “flagrant partiality to Scotland” might “tend rather to widen than heal the breach that at present subsists betwixt the South and North Britons.”18 Smollett insists that southern Britons make an effort to learn about Scotland, but he acknowledges that they cannot forge a union of affections without Scottish cooperation. Precisely because Scots’ ways of life might appear crude and barbaric to the English, they must take steps to make themselves more comprehensible in the most literal sense – by, as Bramble advises, adopting “English idioms and pronunciation” and thereby avoiding the “clownish air” that the Scottish dialect gives “even to sentiments of the greatest dignity” (268). Notably, Lismahago’s speech is unmarked as it is rendered in Jery’s and Bramble’s letters, suggesting either that they have “translated” it for their correspondents, or, perhaps less likely given his pride in the Scots language, that Lismahago has adopted English pronunciation. Bramble’s advice seems slightly less patronizing when he admits, “I know, by experience, how easily an Englishman is influenced by the ear, and how apt he is to laugh when he hears his own language spoken with a foreign or provincial accent” (268). Although he considers himself an Englishman, Bramble’s reference to “experience” implies that he may have learned this lesson through others’ mockery of his own formerly “provincial” accent.19 Despite advocating linguistic homogenization, arguably a form of cultural imperialism, Bramble by no means seeks the complete Anglicization of Scotland. On the contrary, he contrasts the “licentiousness, insolence and faction” (319) of Bath and London with Edinburgh’s “kindness, hospitality and rational entertainment” (267–8), and Glasgow’s “noble spirit of enterprise” (284). Smollett suggests that the metropolitan Lowlands’ virtues are due in large part to Scotland’s relative poverty. As Lismahago points out, Scots’ limited means have prevented them from

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developing the “false taste, false appetites, false wants, profusion, venality, contempt of order” that Bramble witnesses in Bath and London (319). The preservation of Scottish virtues thus requires Scotland’s isolation from or active repudiation of urban England’s consumption patterns.20 Smollett implies that as the politically and economically weaker but morally stronger party in an Anglo-Scottish partnership, Scots must win the acceptance of their more affluent neighbors without becoming “servile imitators of [their] modes and fashionable vices” (259). Learning to speak in an English accent and idiom thus becomes a metaphor for the kind of cultural translation that Scots must undertake if they want to obtain English sympathy. Rather than simply changing their manners and behavior to win English approbation, Scots instead must learn to explain why they do what they do in terms that the English can understand. By emphasizing the disparate perspectives and experiences of northern and southern Britons, the Scottish section of Humphry Clinker reminds readers that the cultivation of mutual sympathies between nations, as between individuals, is a gradual and tenuous process. Moreover, the differences between the two peoples suggest that the diseased and excessive sensibility fostered in the English metropolises threatens Lowland Scots’ as yet uncorrupted virtues. The Theory of Moral Sentiments declares that sympathy with the rich is the “most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments,”21 and in Bath Bramble is shocked to see “every upstart of fortune” – from “the wives and daughters of low tradesmen” to “clerks and factors from the East Indies, loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces” – displaying their finery “without taste or conduct” (65–6). The facility with which newfangled manners and mores spread in Bath recalls Hume’s representation of sympathy as the almost effortless “communication” of “inclinations and sentiments” among individuals situated in close proximity, rather than the onerous process of judgment implied by Smith’s definition of the term.22 Bramble declares that the “portentous frenzy” of vanity and greed instigated by imperial expansion “is become so contagious that the very rabble and refuse of mankind are infected” (87). Consequently, there “is no distinction or subordination left” (119) among the various members of a society which, in Bramble’s horrified eyes at least, totters on the brink of chaos. The primary threat to English identity comes not from Scotland, which promises to contribute to the nation’s stock of virtue, if not of wealth, but rather from Britain’s empire farther abroad.23 In addition to the tradesmen and officers who have benefited from British imperialism, women, with their supposedly natural tendency towards

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excessive sensibility, are particularly implicated in the communication of ostentation and vice. Although The Theory of Moral Sentiments describes sensibility and self-command respectively as feminine and masculine virtues, Smith’s analysis of sympathy dissociates these gendered traits from sexed bodies. Humphry Clinker, in contrast, seeks to re-align gendered moral capacities with sexed bodies. Much as sensibility ought to be regulated by judgment, Smollett suggests, so women ought to submit to the guidance of men – but only if they possess the judgment necessary to regulate their feelings and to justify their authority. Humphry Clinker’s ending affirms a gendered hierarchy of authority headed by landowning gentlemen like Bramble, whose economic and political independence at once privileges and obligates them to develop the carefully controlled sensibility that, as the previous chapter argued, characterized British masculinity during the eighteenth century. After leaving Scotland, the travelers visit two estates, one enjoying the luxury that characterizes England and the other embracing Scotland’s Stoic virtues.24 These estates are not only models or symbols of the nation, but also, Smollett reminds us, integral parts of Great Britain. A well-run estate like Dennison’s contributes to Britain’s prosperity and harmony, and supports a social hierarchy in which birth and virtue are aligned. A poorly managed estate like Baynard’s, in contrast, spreads dissipation and dissension beyond its boundaries. Baynard has been ruined by a wife who makes no effort to share his sentiments and who refuses to submit to his judgment. While Baynard exhibits “a taste capable of the most refined enjoyment, a heart glowing with all the warmth of friendship and humanity, and a disposition strongly turned to the more rational pleasures of a retired country life” (329), his wife is infected with the “portentous frenzy” that Bramble observed in Bath. Mrs. Baynard, unreflectingly adopting the neighboring women’s enthusiasm for “shew and ostentation” (326), has frittered away her husband’s fortune in ever more lavish displays of wealth. She epitomizes the “association of the female figure with accumulation, consumption, and the products of trade” that Laura Brown and Charlotte Sussman have described as one of the ideological effects of eighteenth-century Britain’s imperial expansion.25 Her conspicuous consumption also recalls the ostentation that Lismahago noted among the “savage” Miamis. Bramble describes the “female tyranny” exercised by Mrs. Baynard as an epidemic, estimating that “nineteen out of twenty [gentlemen], who are ruined by extravagance, fall a sacrifice to the ridiculous pride and vanity of silly women” (334). The chaos of Baynard’s financial affairs reveals his own moral failings as much as his

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wife’s; his overly indulgent love for Mrs. Baynard prevents him from countering her equally excessive passions. In contrast, Dennison’s enduring prosperity and happiness is largely the result of his marriage to a woman “whose disposition is suited to his own in all respects; tender, generous and benevolent” (362). Like Baynard’s wife, Mrs. Dennison has exchanged the entertainments of London for her husband’s country estate; yet because she “possesses an uncommon share of understanding, fortitude and discretion” (362) and has learned to share her husband’s simple tastes, she finds pleasure in “the management and avocations of her own family” (326). While Mrs. Baynard’s conduct implies that women’s unruly sensibility renders them susceptible to vanity, greed, and other moral defects, Mrs. Dennison demonstrates that women can learn to control their sensibility so that it becomes the source of harmonious union. Although Mrs. Dennison is eminently capable of moral self-government, Smollett implies that her greatest virtue is in adopting her husband’s tastes and sentiments. To protect their domestic harmony, Dennison has purposefully limited his own and his wife’s circle of acquaintances, avoiding their fashionable neighbors’ potentially pernicious influence. Never at home to a “gay equipage,” the Dennisons associate only with “individuals of moderate fortune, who gladly adopted [their] stile of living” (369). As a model of benevolence, prudence, and industry, Dennison takes advantage of sensibility’s contagious tendencies to promote virtue. Dennison forms sympathetic ties with his wife and neighbors by eliciting their deferential emulation of his virtues. In contrast, Lismahago and Bramble develop shared sympathies through a mutual process of negotiation and compromise. This distinction has important implications for Humphry Clinker’s vision of a Great Britain united by sentimental correspondences. Humphry Clinker seems, at the level of plot, to reject the analogy between marital and political union, replacing marriage with Bramble’s and Lismahago’s sometimes contentious friendship as a model for egalitarian and cooperative Anglo-Scottish relations. Yet, Baynard’s marital misery and the Dennisons’ domestic harmony suggests that many, perhaps most, sentimental correspondences are not formed between equals, but rather require a morally weaker party to defer to the judgment of a morally stronger party, much as Jery, Tabitha, Lydia, and perhaps also Humphry Clinker’s readers, learn to defer to Bramble’s. It is no accident that the journey to “North Britain” is orchestrated, and largely narrated, by a benevolent patriarch who, as a self-described “British freeholder” (96), assumes the moral responsibility of familiarizing himself,

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his family, and the readers of his letters with Scottish manners and customs. Much as the three marriages that conclude the novel are formed under Bramble’s guidance and with his blessing, Bramble also helps to oversee the cultivation of a union of sympathies between Scotland and England. Although Bramble himself remains a bachelor, his travels have offered him a new and broader scope for benevolent action, from helping Baynard to gain command over “the infirmities of his nature,” to finding employment for Humphry Clinker (384). The moral continuum that Humphry Clinker establishes between the family, the estate, and the nation suggests that the cultivation of Anglo-Scottish harmony requires the gradual extension of sympathy beyond the immediate confines of the home and, consequently, the expansion of the family’s boundaries to include initially unfamiliar individuals. Humphry Clinker’s epistolary form seeks to include readers in this expanding community. By positioning readers as the recipients of its characters’ unanswered correspondence, Humphry Clinker asks them to participate in completing the Union. family feeling in ‘evelina’ In her preface to Evelina, Burney names Smollett as one of her “predecessors” whose works have dignified the novel, citing his “humour” in particular as an influence on her own writing (9–10). Humphry Clinker and Evelina share other similarities – both contrast metropolitan artifice with rural virtue, both are satirical in tone and epistolary in form, and both recount their protagonists’ travels to places that are new to them (Scotland and London respectively). However, Evelina eschews the multiple voices and perspectives comprising Humphry Clinker’s narrative; like Richardson’s Pamela, it is dominated by the heroine’s letters, which are addressed primarily to her guardian, Arthur Villars. Whereas Matthew Bramble’s age, birth, and masculinity recommend his authority as a narrator even before we witness his virtues, Evelina’s youth, femininity, and utter lack of worldly experience call her authority into question. Yet it is precisely because of her sheltered innocence that Evelina is struck by the hypocrisy and affectations of polite London society, which is almost as unfamiliar to her as it is to Letters of a Hindoo Rajah’s eponymous correspondent, Zaarmilla. Although Evelina is the novel’s primary correspondent, her guardian, Reverend Villars, arguably occupies the moral center of the novel, as it is through his eyes that Evelina views and judges her actions. Some critics have labeled Villars a weak and ineffectual father-figure;26 yet, given his

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role as the internal reader of Evelina’s letters, his impotence is perhaps valuable to Evelina and to Evelina’s reader, as it allows both to exercise the moral judgment that Villars withholds. When Evelina begs Villars to “think for me . . . my dearest Sir” (124), he cautions her, “you must learn not only to judge but to act for yourself ” (166). The infrequency of Villars’s replies and the omission of his advice from the narrative allow external readers, also the recipients of Evelina’s correspondence, simultaneously to identify with the heroine and to assume Villars’ position as her judge. Evelina’s relatively monologic, open-ended epistolary structure encourages readers to imaginatively change places with Evelina the actor, and to occupy the position of Villars the spectator, replicating the self-division through which, according to Smith, the individual judges the propriety of his own sentiments. In addition to their similarities in tone and form, Humphry Clinker and Evelina share an interest in exploring Britishness. While British nation formation obviously is central to Humphry Clinker, critics have overlooked its importance in Evelina despite Burney’s mockery of longstanding antagonisms between the English and the French. Instead, they have followed the instructions that Burney perhaps misleadingly lays out in her preface by reading the novel as a didactic female Bildungsroman.27 Burney’s contemporaries recognized that Evelina was not only a “History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World,” but also “a History of National Manners.”28 Evelina is an amateur ethnographer, describing for Villars the manners and mores of late eighteenth-century London’s coarse, small-minded merchants and effete, aimless lords and ladies. Her observations are embedded in the family romance that unravels after she leaves Berry Hill and that is also a national romance, defining the boundaries of Britishness through Evelina’s discovery of her kin.29 Evelina’s mother, Caroline, had married John Belmont, “a very profligate young man,” against her family’s wishes (16); Belmont abandoned Caroline and “burnt the certificate of their marriage” when he was “disappointed of the fortune he expected” to gain from the union. After her mother’s death, Evelina, unrecognized by her father, Belmont, and her grandmother, Madame Duval, is consigned to Villars’ care and “must owe all her rational expectations to adoption and friendship” (20–1). Like Humphry Clinker, Evelina privileges volitional sentimental bonds over natural blood ties as the foundation of familial and national community. Although in the course of her history Evelina is re-united with blood relations including her English cousins, the Branghtons, her Scottish half-brother, Macartney, and her French grandmother, Duval,

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the familial community that she gathers around her at the novel’s end is united by sympathy rather than blood. In the context of my argument, the political implications of Evelina’s family romance are more significant than the psychological ones because they allow me to complicate Gerald Newman’s reading of the novel as a tool of English “nationalist ideology.”30 Newman argues that England’s fraught relations with France during the eighteenth century precipitated the development of what we might today identify as English nationalism. England was at war with France for much of the eighteenth century, yet the cultural antagonism between the two nations was at least as important in fashioning an English national identity as were military conflicts. English depictions of the French as over-civilized, and thus as effeminate and affected, may have masked what Alok Yadav describes as a sense of “provincial secondariness,” or a fear that England was by comparison not culturally refined enough.31 For Newman, Evelina helped to consolidate English nationalism by valorizing English “sincerity” – a term that for Newman encompasses innocence, honesty, originality, and frankness – and by illustrating the “final triumph of what is English-sincere-good over its enemy, what is frenchified-insincere-corrupting.”32 Newman’s interpretation, based on a binary opposition between Englishness and Frenchness, neglects England’s post-Union position as part of a larger Great Britain. It also problematically takes the assertions of Captain Mirvan, Evelina’s primary spokesman for anti-French feeling, at face value, ignoring the fact that Mirvan’s “fixed and most prejudiced hatred of whatever is not English” is as much a target of Burney’s satire as are Madame Duval’s ignorant criticisms of English “ill-politeness” (51–2).33 Although the Captain is certainly frank and open to the point of brutality in his hatred of the French, he is far from sincere in the deception he uses to abuse Madame Duval, one of the novel’s primary representatives of all things “frenchified.” I suggest that rather than simply opposing a debased Frenchness to an idealized Englishness, Evelina contrasts these equally parochial and exclusive identities to a more inclusive British identity characterized by complaisance. In its eighteenth-century usage, complaisance connotes an attentiveness to and consideration for the feelings and welfare of others. Complaisance implies the tendency to “change places in fancy” with others not just in order to judge the propriety of their feelings but also to show compassion to them and relieve their suffering. By defining Britishness through complaisance, Burney emphasizes the performativity of national character, revealing that, as David Hume argued in his essay “On National Character,” it consists of superficial morals and manners

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rather than innate, intransigent, essences. The epitome of Britishness in Evelina is Lord Orville, who “is most assiduous to please and to serve all who are in his company” (74), and who is always “calmly sociable, and politely chearful” (63). Burney dissociates class and nationality by suggesting that complacency is not solely the prerogative of rich and titled men like Orville, but that “in all ranks and all stations of life . . . characters and manners differ” (114). For instance, Evelina notes that Orville’s “present sweetness, politeness, and diffidence, seem to promise in future the same benevolence, dignity, and goodness” possessed by Villars, a clergyman of no great wealth (74). Conversely, Lord Merton’s and Sir Clement Willoughby’s purposeful efforts to discomfort Evelina teach her that “a nobleman, accustomed in all probability, to the first rank of company in the kingdom, from earliest infancy” can yet be “deficient in good manners,” and “faulty in morals and principles” (107). In a novel in which morals and manners are highly gendered, complaisance is one of the virtues that, in Villars’ words, is “as noble and as becoming in women as in men” (218). Mrs. Mirvan’s valiant although often ineffectual efforts to mitigate her husband’s outrageous rudeness with her own politeness indicate that complaisance is no less a function of gender than of class. Evelina notes that Mrs. Mirvan “seems eternally studying my happiness and advantage” (104); similarly, Lady Howard’s “kindness and hospitality cannot fail of making every body happy, who is disposed to be” (121). Evelina’s attentiveness to the manners of Orville, Villars, Mrs. Mirvan, and Lady Howard reveals her own amiability, as she realizes how necessary this virtue is to social harmony. English and French identities in Evelina are marked by brutish insensitivity to others’ feelings, and Captain Mirvan and Madame Duval are both notably lacking in complaisance. Although Madame Duval is English by birth, she has adopted what she believes to be authentically French manners and speaks with an accent that makes it “difficult to discover whether she was an English or a French woman” (51). Duval establishes her claims to be French through her frequent remarks upon the “unpolitenesses of you English” (61). However, the “bluntness and severity” with which Madame Duval loudly relates “the most cruel and secret particulars” of Evelina’s history to all and sundry suggests that she too is lacking politeness (71, 123). Duval’s indelicacy only increases Evelina’s show of consideration towards her grandmother. Villars warns her that “the more forcibly you are struck with improprieties and misconduct in another, the greater should be your observance and diligence to avoid even the shadow of similar errors” (56). Whereas Evelina becomes British by attempting to avoid her

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grandmother’s carelessness of others’ feelings, Captain Mirvan champions Englishness by returning Duval’s rudeness in kind. Mirvan’s travels with the British navy seem to have fostered in him a desire to insulate England from contamination by one of Britain’s greatest imperial rivals, France. He demonstrates his patriotism through his colorful denunciation of all things French, including the infiltration of what he perceives as French mannerisms into England. After spending the evening at the Pantheon in the company of the foppish Lovel and the dissolute Merton, the Captain complains, “I’m almost as much ashamed of my countrymen as if I was a Frenchman, and I believe in my heart there i’n’t a pin to chuse between them” (114). Mirvan associates effeminacy – whether marked by Merton’s lascivious interest in women, or by Lovel’s affected disinterest in them – with Frenchness. He asserts his Englishness through displays of aggressive masculinity, whether by publicly chiding his daughter and wife or by orchestrating elaborate physical pranks to humiliate Madame Duval. In doing so, however, Mirvan ironically substantiates his fear that Englishness and Frenchness are virtually indistinguishable: he shows as little concern for others’ happiness and comfort as does Madame Duval. Complaisance is British rather than simply English not only because it is incompatible with Captain Mirvan’s jingoism but also because it is cultivated by Macartney, a character referred to by the Branghtons as a “Scotch mope” and by Evelina as “the unfortunate North Briton” (190, italics in original). While Roderick Random may have been the first Scottish protagonist in a novel written for a post-Union British reading public, Macartney is one of the earliest sympathetic Scottish characters in a novel by an English author.34 Macartney’s Scottishness, like Duval’s Frenchness and Mirvan’s Englishness, is highly performative, and foregrounds the malleability of national traits. When Evelina first observes Macartney, who lodges with her plebeian cousins, the Branghtons, he is “in deep mourning, leaning against the wall, with his arms folded, and his eyes fixed on the ground, apparently in profound and melancholy meditation” (177). Macartney here embodies the Ossianic stereotype of the sensitive, unworldly Scotsman who pours forth his tortured feelings in fragments of poetry. Macartney’s emotional refinement, although a stereotype, is evidently meant to humanize him in comparison to the unfeeling Branghtons and hence to evoke readers’ compassion for the Scot. The Branghtons reveal their own parochialism as mercantile city-dwellers in their anti-Scottish prejudices. They declare that their lodger is “as proud as he’s poor,” and, like all Scots, has only come to England “for what [he] can get” (177). Their derisive treatment of Macartney awakens Evelina’s pity, and in an attempt to differentiate herself from her ill-bred cousins, she declares

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herself “determined to take every opportunity in my power, to shew civility to this unhappy man” (193). Evelina does much more than behave civilly to Macartney: she shows her concern for his spiritual and material welfare by preventing him, as she believes, from committing suicide, and by discreetly offering him the money he needs to live. The unraveling of Evelina’s family romance as she discovers blood relations in Duval, Macartney, and others, delimits the boundaries of a British identity defined by shared sympathies rather than shared genealogy. Only those characters who acquire the complaisance necessary to establish sentimental bonds are assimilated into Evelina’s familial community. Evelina’s acquaintance with Duval increases her sense of duty towards but not her affection for her grandmother. After witnessing Duval’s “wrangling and ill-breeding” Evelina is “amazed, frightened, and unspeakably shocked” “to discover so near a relation in a woman who had thus introduced herself” (53, 60). In the manuscript draft of Evelina, the protagonist is not simply “unspeakably shocked” to realize that she cannot approve of her grandmother’s manners. Instead, her “Blood chill’d” upon realizing Duval’s kinship, a physiological response that embodies the distinction between mere blood ties and the warmth of affection.35 In contrast, Evelina’s sympathies with Macartney are cemented by the discovery of their shared blood and his increasing complaisance. While he is still a lodger with the Branghtons, Evelina goes out of her way to show attention to Macartney’s feelings, whether by offering him a chair when the Branghtons make him stand or by inviting him to join them on an outing. Evelina’s attentions arouse Macartney from self-absorption and encourage him to consider his duties to others. He later writes to Evelina: “You have awakened me to a sense of the false pride by which I have been actuated,—a pride which, while it scorned assistance from a friend, scrupled not to compel it from a stranger, though at the hazard of reducing that stranger to a situation as destitute as my own” (232). Although Macartney does not share Duval’s and Mirvan’s cruelty, his solipsistic pride similarly prevents him from considering others’ happiness and comfort until Evelina’s discreet charity reveals to him the nobility of complaisance and begins his transformation from overly sentimental Scot into properly sympathetic Briton. Learning to regard himself through others’ eyes also teaches Macartney the importance of attending to others’ feelings. The revelation of Macartney and Evelina’s shared paternity not only affirms their prior sympathies; it also indicates Evelina’s good judgment in showing him compassion. Evelina’s initially unsuccessful efforts to draw Macartney into her domestic circle are rewarded when she learns that Macartney is Belmont’s illegitimate son, and that,

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accordingly, they “are not merely bound by the ties of friendship, but by those of blood” (363). When Macartney asks in disbelief, “Oh Madam, can you indeed, and without a blush, condescend to own such an outcast for a brother?”, Evelina is quick to assure her new-found sibling, “I feel for you, already, all the affection of a sister—I felt it indeed, before I knew I was one” (363). As Margaret Doody has observed, the characters’ shared paternity situates Macartney as “Evelina’s male counterpart”: both are seemingly fatherless and “without fixed social identity.”36 As a Scot, Macartney is an “outcast,” and as a bastard, he is legally “kin to nobody.” Evelina’s obscured origins similarly lead some of her acquaintances to believe her a “poor, wretched adventurer” seeking wealth and status.37 Macartney is not just Evelina’s double, but also Orville’s. In Evelina’s romance plot, Macartney and Orville for a time occupy interchangeable positions as brothers and suitors to Evelina. This triangulated relationship complicates Ellen Pollack’s claim that in eighteenth-century literature and culture “the question of incest,” as it was understood in the eighteenth century, “rested squarely at the heart of British nationalism.”38 Pollack explains that “heterosexual marriage – the most sanctioned of sexual relations – is constituted within the substitutive structure of incest economy.”39 As fathers-in-training, a woman’s suitor and brother each can claim greater access to and authority over her than can other male acquaintances. For instance, when an inebriated Lord Merton pesters Evelina, Orville offers his protection, begging her to “think of me as if I were indeed your brother, and let me entreat you to accept my best services” (314). Orville regards his offer of fraternity as a contract. In return for his “best services,” he claims the right to converse freely with and advise Evelina. Thus, when she seeks a meeting with Macartney, Orville declares “I shall not suffer my sister to make a private appointment” (318, italics in original). Orville fears that Macartney, who has written an elaborate poem in praise of Evelina, is a rival suitor; for, as Doody points out, “Macartney’s feelings toward Evelina at first seem (to other characters as well as to the reader) to have some erotic content.”40 The irony, of course, is that Evelina wants to inform Macartney that he is in fact her half-brother – a revelation that finally quiets Orville’s uneasiness regarding the mysterious Scotsman. The potential for an incestuous relationship between Evelina and Macartney, however muted, is certainly not “merely a cliche´, a plot device, a problem lending drama” as most critics have assumed.41 Even Doody’s and Susan C. Greenfield’s otherwise astute explorations of the sexual politics of Evelina’s relationships with her brothers/lovers, Macartney and Orville, overlook the symbolic significance of Macartney’s assumed nationality and

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hence of his transformation from Scot to Briton.42 While the idea of Anglo-Scottish union historically had been represented symbolically through marriage, the incest taboo prohibits union between Macartney and Evelina, rendering it legally impossible as an ending to the novel. Precisely because the Scottish-identified Macartney and the English-identified Evelina are related by blood, they are not different enough to marry. In a novel that privileges volitional, sympathetic ties over blood relationships, Evelina’s sibling relationship to Macartney takes second place to her affinal relationship to Orville. Yet Macartney nonetheless marries an Englishwoman: Belmont’s eventual recognition of Evelina as his daughter resolves a second triangulation between Macartney, Evelina, and Polly Green, the young woman whom Belmont has raised as his daughter, and whom Macartney loves. When it is revealed that Polly is in fact the daughter of Evelina’s former nurse, Dame Green, Polly and Macartney’s love is legitimated. Macartney and Evelina’s kinship thus multiplies the affective ties between Scots and English by freeing him to marry another Englishwoman. The discovery of Macartney’s paternity thus illustrates Francis Hutcheson’s claim in his Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1742) that the divine law against incest probably was intended “to diffuse further among many families that good-will and endearment which frequently arises from consanguinity and affinity” and to oppose “that insociability which is so apt to grow up between distinct families and states.”43 Exogamous marriage, in other words, separates sentimental bonds to some extent from blood ties, extending sympathy beyond the bounds of the consanguineal family and across national borders. Yet the two marriages that conclude the novel also reveal the limits of Scots’ incorporation into Great Britain, suggesting that Scots are less British than the English. Macartney and Evelina’s shared paternity might seem to imply that Burney envisions an egalitarian relationship between England and Scotland, a “natural” equality founded in shared blood. But the incest taboo works in Evelina to align class and national identities, reserving Anglo-Scottish intermarriage for the lower classes, and creating a hierarchy of sympathies in a united Great Britain. The marriages of Evelina to Orville and Polly to Macartney keep the English gentry free from the taint of Scottishness, illegitimacy, and poverty while permitting the cultivation of nation-building sympathies among the lower classes under Lord Orville’s benevolent guidance. By the end of the novel, Evelina has formed a familial community through “adoption and friendship,” or through affinal rather than blood ties. For Evelina, blood relations repeatedly turn out to be disappointing. Even after Belmont recognizes Evelina as his daughter, he acknowledges

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their relationship by giving her money rather than affection, and continues to refuse to see her. In contrast, Evelina extends her sympathies to Polly Green, declaring, “She is entitled to my kindest offices, and I shall always consider her as my sister” (375). Both Madame Duval and the Branghtons fade into obscurity, having failed to transform their blood relationships to Evelina into either the sympathetic correspondences that she desires or the economic boons that they seek. Macartney’s transformation from solipsistic Scot to sympathetic Briton facilitates his inclusion in Evelina’s domestic circle. Yet the extent to which he was “really” Scottish to begin with is debatable, not simply because he is born to English parents, but also because nationality in Evelina is purely performative and superficial. In his discussion of the theatricality of Adam Smith’s model of sympathy, David Marshall notes that The Theory of Moral Sentiments envisions “a society in which we feel surrounded by an audience” and in which we constantly perform to win others’ approval.44 Macartney’s emulation of Evelina’s complaisance wins him the approbation of the British audience for whom he performs. While Homi K. Bhabha has explained mimicry as a metonymic form of imitation through which a colonized people challenge their colonizers’ claims to cultural superiority,45 in Evelina, it is not so much a form of colonial adaptation or subversion as a normative condition of nationality. Evelina’s Britishness arguably is as much a performance as is Macartney’s; and in both cases the audience consists of men like Orville whose education and birth fits them to assume the role of spectator and to judge the contextual propriety of others’ performances. Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah features a protagonist who inverts the conditions of mimicry, as he more closely approximates a British ideal of sensibility and self-control than do the English characters he describes. Through the Rajah’s letters, Hamilton eschews Smollett’s dialogic model of Anglo-Scottish cooperation and Burney’s univocal assimilationist ethic. Instead, Letters of a Hindoo Rajah offers a correspondence in which the internal reader’s sentiments never quite coincide with the letter-writing protagonist’s, and which consequently defamiliarizes Britain, representing it as a collection of fragments that do not create a whole. translation and the cultural limits of sympathy The Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah was published in 1796, but is set in the late 1770s, when anxieties about Britain’s imperial government ran high. While the novel alludes to the tensions between

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Britain and its American colonies, which culminated in the War of Independence from 1776 to 1783, its central concern is British rule of India, where the East India Company had begun to acquire governmental functions in 1757. The East India Company’s reputation for economic extortion and profiteering, and for the mistreatment of native Indian sovereigns resulted in a parliamentary inquiry into the financial activities of the company’s former Commander-in-Chief Robert Clive in 1772, and the even more contentious impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India, which ran from 1786 to 1795. Letters of a Hindoo Rajah seeks to diminish the charges against the East India Company by suggesting that the corruption of British imperial government in India indicates the much greater dissolution of England’s ruling class at home. Hamilton’s support for British rule of India was nurtured by her elder brother Charles, who joined the East India Company as a cadet in 1772 and who in 1786 was commissioned by the Asiatic Society of Calcutta to translate the Hedaya, or code of Muslim laws, from Persian into English.46 Hamilton’s views on British colonial policy also reflect her anti-Jacobinism, as she believed that it was Britain’s moral duty “to protect traditional cultures against the dangerous innovations of both Islam and the French Revolution.”47 She thus regarded Britain as Hindu India’s liberator rather than its oppressor and represented the Rohilla war with which Letters of a Hindoo Rajah begins as a noble effort to free the Hindus of Rohilkhand from tyrannical Islamic rule and restore their native social order. Yet I will suggest that Hamilton’s moral certainty about the justice of British rule in India was not as unshakeable as critics have argued. Letters of a Hindoo Rajah implies that, together, Jacobinism and commerce have so undermined the traditional values of the English ruling class that it is unfit to govern itself, let alone others. For Hamilton, as for her fellow anti-Jacobin, Edmund Burke, the family is the source of national unity and stability, the bastion of tradition and patriotism.48 Letters of a Hindoo Rajah’s Ardent family is a microcosm of a socially fragmented and morally irresponsible England in which new and untested systems of belief, such as those endorsed by Doctor Sceptic and Mr. Vapour, have replaced traditional civic virtues and sentimental bonds. Sir Caprice Ardent’s whimsies jeopardize his property and fortune; and his son is sickly and spoiled, unfit to inherit what little remains of the family’s property. Hamilton suggests that just colonial rule in India requires moral reform at home, beginning in the family and extending

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throughout England and its empire. She further questions the efficacy of British colonial rule by drawing comparisons between rural Scotland and India that challenge simple distinctions between rude and civilized states of society. Hamilton’s most famous depiction of Scotland is her didactic tale, The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), a biting account of rural Scottish life that she claims to have “written solely with a view to shame my good country folks into a greater degree of nicety with regard to cleanliness, and to awaken their attention to the source of corruption in the lower orders.”49 In contrast, Letters of a Hindoo Rajah accords Scotland the domestic affections and virtues that England, corrupted by Jacobinism and imperial luxury, has lost. Letters of a Hindoo Rajah situates Scots, along with Hindus, in an ambivalent space beyond the pale of Englishness but within the realm of civilized society, suggesting that both Scots and Hindus are more virtuous than the English. While Balachandra Rajan has argued that Hamilton failed to “make anything like full use” of the potentials of the epistolary form,50 I suggest that Letters of a Hindoo Rajah’s narrative structure foregrounds the difficulties of forming sentimental correspondences across cultures. The novel consists of two sets of letters: one written from Zaarmilla, the eponymous Rajah of Almora in Rohilkhand, to Maandaara, a noble landholder who resides near Almora, and the other from Sheermal, a Brahmin who also writes to Maandaara. At the novel’s opening, Rohilkhand, a traditionally Hindu region conquered by Muslims of Afghan origin, has just been devastated by a second Muslim invasion, this time aided by the British. During the invasion, Zaarmilla happens upon an injured English soldier, Percy, whose accounts of English virtue, honor, and rationality, inspire in Zaarmilla a desire to learn more about England. In an effort to rectify the idealized portrait of England that Percy painted before his death, Maandaara forwards to Zaarmilla a series of letters written by Sheermal during his recent visit to Britain. Zaarmilla attributes Sheermal’s criticisms of the English to the Brahmin’s own narrow-minded bigotry and determines to visit England to discover “by the unerring answers of experience” whether Percy’s or Sheermal’s representation is the most truthful.51 As a critic for The Monthly Review explained, by representing England through Zaarmilla’s eyes, Hamilton invites readers to “place [themselves] in the situation of this stranger; admire and wonder at objects which we have before viewed without either wonder or admiration; and possibly withdraw our reverence from others which we have hitherto considered with respect.”52 Zaarmilla’s continually frustrated efforts to understand English manners and mores

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suggest that such perspectival shifts are not easily performed. He criticizes Sheermal’s accounts of English vice and irreligiosity when he asks of the Brahmin, “Can he be a proper judge of the peculiar customs of remote nations, who measures everything by the narrow standard of his own prejudices? Can he who, instead of making observations on the variety of human character, pronounces sentences of condemnation on whatever he does not understand; can he be qualified for communicating information to others?” (139). Zaarmilla’s criticisms of Sheermal also serve as a warning to Hamilton’s British readers, who might be inclined to condemn the “peculiar customs” of India before they have learned, through Zaarmilla’s commentary, to understand them. Zaarmilla decides to go to England despite Sheermal’s warnings because he considers the acquisition of knowledge, particularly knowledge of other peoples, a divine imperative. Even while Zaarmilla’s letters to Maandaara defamiliarize English society, they familiarize readers with an India that, despite the growth of orientalist literature in the late eighteenth century, would be as strange to many Britons as England is to Zaarmilla. The narrative challenges eighteenth-century English representations of India as either ineluctably and unalterably different from England, or an underdeveloped England requiring colonial guidance to reach a state of civilized political and cultural maturity.53 Hamilton’s efforts to win her readers’ sympathy for Britain’s Indian subjects requires that Zaarmilla, the lens through which readers perceive India, must also be to some extent recognizable, and even admirable, to readers. Despite his naı¨vete´, Zaarmilla suspiciously resembles the ideal of British masculinity discussed in the previous chapter. In contrast to the morose, self-consuming sensibility of the English Delomond, Zaarmilla displays properly regulated feeling through which the heart “leads the hands to afford relief, and benevolence becomes a principle of action” (278). As an effort to “minimize the sense of cultural dissonance” between England and India, Hamilton’s anglicization of her Hindu protagonist at once counteracts the orientalist discourses that represented Indians as insurmountably different from Britons and troublingly remakes the colonized in the ideal image of the colonizer.54 In his travels through England, Zaarmilla easily assumes the role of the country gentleman, while an Englishman plays the part of his “sircah,” the Indian servant who would accompany an English nabob (250). If Zaarmilla were not already a model of British masculinity, his critique of English society arguably would be ineffectual; yet, as Kate Teltscher points out, Hamilton cannot allow her protagonist to be morally superior to her readers without calling into question the necessity of Britain’s presence in

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India. Hamilton resolves the potential discrepancy between Zaarmilla’s status as a colonial subject and a moral satirist by making his critique of English society performative rather than analytical. Zaarmilla exposes the hypocrisy and vices of English society through his own sincerity and morality, or in other words, through his inability to fully perceive the flaws in the English: Teltscher observes that “as an unwitting critic, he cannot lay claim to any substantial moral authority over the society criticized.”55 Readers must read around, as well as through, Zaarmilla by recognizing the moral failings that he cannot understand. An early and metafictional instance of this performative critique occurs during Zaarmilla’s voyage to England, when he passes the time by reading the epistolary novels belonging to one of his fellow passengers. He reports to Maandaara, “Never before did my heart refuse its sympathy to human misery; but the distresses of the Lady Hariots, and the Lady Charlottes, which called forth the overflowings of compassion, in the breasts of their fair correspondents, were of a nature too refined and delicate to be discernable to any save the Microscopic eye of European sensibility” (192). While Zaarmilla believes himself lacking in sentimental refinement compared to Europeans, he inadvertently suggests that these characters are too ridiculously overwrought to deserve his compassion. His failure to sympathize with the petty distresses of sentimental heroines reveals his own worthiness of the sympathies of Hamilton’s readers. Despite his British virtues, Zaarmilla remains an outsider throughout his stay in England. Hamilton’s familiarization of Zaarmilla stops short of the discovery of shared blood that cements shared sympathies in Evelina, Humphry Clinker, and a number of other eighteenth-century sentimental novels. Hamilton metafictively draws attention to her repudiation of this romance convention through Zaarmilla’s comments on the so-called histories he reads aboard ship. He remarks that with surprising regularity, “a period is put to [the characters’] misfortunes, by the discovery of the real parents,” and, “with the marriage of the hero, the history of his life concludes!” (190, italics in original). By mocking these “histories,” which are of course in fact novels, Hamilton warns readers that there will be no discovery of long-lost relatives and no reconciliatory marriage for her protagonist. Sure enough, the friendships that Zaarmilla forms in England are never cemented by blood or marriage, an omission that becomes evident as such only when we observe the ubiquity of this convention in other late eighteenth-century sentimental novels. Zaarmilla’s racial and religious differences from Britons may render him, for Hamilton, ultimately unassimilable. Yet his isolation also reflects

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the attenuation of social ties in England, an attenuation that Hamilton attributes to the pernicious influence of Jacobinism, with its emphasis on individual rights and the perfectibility of reason. When Zaarmilla visits the Ardent family, he is struck by the disorderliness and dissension of the household. Mr. Vapour, the Ardents’ guest, looks forward to a time when sentimental bonds will dissolve altogether, declaring that “when man is no longer corrupted by the tender and endearing ties of brother, sister, wife, and child, how greatly will his disposition be meliorated!” (260). Sir Caprice Ardent’s self-indulgent individualism suggests that, on the contrary, the dissolution of affective bonds will only exacerbate irrational and vicious behavior. Scotland, according to Sheermal, is the only place in Britain where domestic virtues and affections still flourish. Since Zaarmilla never visits Scotland, readers have only Sheermal’s less trustworthy perceptions through which to compare Scotland to England. The very obviously biased Sheermal prefers Scotland to England because its “characteristic virtues, and peculiar customs . . . are so evidently of Hindoo origin, that nothing, but the most willful blindness, could make any one assert the contrary” (124). While Sheermal evidently intends this attribution of Hindu origins as a compliment to Scotland, Hamilton’s readers would probably have understood it ironically, as a comment on Scotland’s backwardness. By emphasizing similarities between Scots and Hindus, Hamilton also highlights these peoples’ shared cultural and moral differences from the English. In “the northern regions of this united kingdom of Britain, where mountains, more stupendous than those of upper Tartary, heave their bare brown backs to the merciless arrows of the keen-edged wind” Sheermal discovers “a people, whose origin is more ancient than the rocks” (122). These people are still divided into the two “original Casts” – “people of family and people of no family” but many “people of family” are forced to “work for their subsistence” even while they continue to exhibit a proper degree of contempt for “the people of an inferior Cast” (124). As Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell note in their introduction to Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Sheermal’s praise for Scotland’s hierarchical society is intended to mock Scots’ supposed obsession with genealogy and with national antiquity, an obsession that the Brahmin evidently shares.56 Yet Hamilton also suggests that rural Scotland’s traditional social hierarchies and subsistence-based economy foster admirable domestic virtues and affections. Like Humphry Clinker, Letters of a Hindoo Rajah represents a Scotland that is in Sheermal’s words, unspoiled by “the

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golden stream of commerce” and whose inhabitants accordingly cherish traditional “principles of piety and virtue” (131). Scotland has resisted the moral corruption that imperial rule threatens to spread throughout India. However, Sheermal learns that Scots are gradually adopting the fashions of their southern neighbors, so that “the daughter of a mountain Rajah, will soon be as amiably frivolous, as engagingly ignorant, as weak in body and in mind, as the pupil of the greatest boarding school in London” (131). If Scots soon will be corrupted by anglicization and the growth of commerce, Hamilton asks, where does this leave India, which was dominated to a greater extent than Scotland by England’s cultural and political power, but which was also governed disproportionately by Scots like Charles Hamilton? The Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah’s triangulation of Scotland, India, and England troubles the simple oppositions between civilized and uncivilized peoples, and between imperial center and peripheries. Scotland, like Zaarmilla, is foreign or un-English, yet possesses virtues that challenge England’s claims to cultural and moral superiority and its right to governance both of its peripheries at home and of its imperial possessions abroad. Disappointed in England, but attributing his disappointment to his own lack of understanding, Zaarmilla returns to India, having decided that “only in retirement” are “Wisdom and Virtue” to be found (306). His retreat is a sign of his disillusionment with England and an indication of the limitations of sympathy when challenged with cultural difference. In Letters of a Hindoo Rajah the “impartial” spectator is not the imperial spectator but instead the imperial subject.

chapter 4

National tales and the domestication of the Scottish Highlands

In the 1770s, Humphry Clinker’s extensive descriptions of Scotland and Evelina’s inclusion of a markedly Scottish character were unusual. By the 1820s the ubiquity of novels about Scotland had become remarkable. Scotch Novel Reading; or Modern Quackery (1824) illustrates the pernicious effects on English readers of the “showers of Scotch novels” with which, according to its author, Sarah Green, England has been “for some years, inundated.”1 The novel’s title page declares it to be written “by a Cockney,” an “anti-Blackwoodian pseudonym” that manifests the author’s ideological opposition to the Edinburgh literary culture whence the showers of Scotch novels fell.2 Claiming to be “really founded on facts,” Scotch Novel Reading charges Scottish novelists with misleading readers through their romantic idealization of a region and a people both of which were in fact poor and uncivilized. Its heroine, Alice, is an avid reader of Scotch novels, who imitates a Scottish dialect, arrays herself in plaid dresses, and longs to marry a Scotsman and retire to the Highlands – until she meets some dirty, impoverished, and ill-mannered Highlanders who quickly cure her diseased imagination. Scotch Novel Reading gives the anxieties concerning sentimental fiction’s romanticization of real life a particularly national cast by implying that Scotch novels encourage English readers to indulge in a misguided sympathetic identification that might eventually erode distinctions between Londoners and Highlanders, much to England’s detriment. Walter Scott’s immensely popular Waverley novels contributed significantly to the literary deluge that Green describes, and her insistent punning on Scott-ish places Scott at the forefront of a band of primarily female followers whose names and works now are almost as little known as Green’s own. Several recent studies of Romantic fiction have recovered these women’s “Scotch novels” from critical obscurity and have categorized them as “national tales,” a genre that, as Ina Ferris explains, “takes national matters or manners for its subject,” and “locates itself in a 110

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contentious zone of discourse in order to articulate the grievances of a small people.”3 To a greater extent than Scott’s historical novels, national tales position domesticity as central to Britain’s national and imperial interests: they explore the conflicted relationships between metropolitan England, its Celtic peripheries, and an expanding British empire through marriage plots and family histories. Ferris’s The Achievement of Literary Authority shows that although early nineteenth-century readers and reviewers distinguished among “Scotch novels” using oppositions between feminine and masculine, domestic and political, they did not recognize the national tale as a coherent genre in its own right. Instead, as Scotch Novel Reading illustrates, they regarded women’s novels about the Celtic peripheries as feminized and somewhat inferior imitations of Scott’s Waverley novels.4 By designating the national tale as a genre in its own right, Ferris and Katie Trumpener, among others, legitimated the academic study of these long-neglected narratives of British nation formation by early nineteenth-century Irish and Scottish writers, and particularly women writers. This is not to say that critics invented the genre ex nihilo, but rather that they have retrospectively identified some novels as national tales because they share the conventions of a relatively small number of novels that specifically called themselves national tales – for instance, Sidney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl; a National Tale (1806).5 The national tale owes its recognition as a genre to the gradual integration of women writers into the literary canon and to our slowly expanding acknowledgment of the Britishness of British literature. Patrick Parrinder’s discussion of the linkages between family genealogy and national identity in novels from Pamela (1740) onwards reminds us that national tales developed organically out of a largely English canon of domestic fiction and differ from their predecessors primarily in turning their attention to the Celtic peripheries.6 Ferris and Trumpener have examined the national tale’s generic affiliations with historical novels, gothic novels, and travel writing, and its role in the articulation of early nineteenth-century nationalisms. Focusing almost exclusively on Ireland, however, their valuable investigations of the genre’s literary genealogy tend to either homogenize Britain’s Celtic peripheries and their literary productions, or neglect the Scottish national tale entirely.7 My aim in this chapter is not to dispute, but rather to extend and complicate, the critical paradigm of the national tale by examining what was at stake in the very specific cultural work that the genre performed in Scotland. The national tale’s development in Scotland responded to the large-scale emigration of Highlanders now known as the

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Clearances by attempting to render Highlanders sympathetic and even admirable to a Lowland and English audience and thus to establish a more discerning version of the sympathetic identification that Green condemned. Scottish national tales sought to enable, through sensibility, the integration of a racially and culturally homogeneous and distinct Highland people into a heterogeneous British nation and empire. Ferris has argued that the national tale emerged in Ireland as a means of addressing the political, religious, and cultural conflicts surrounding the Anglo-Irish Union of 1800. This literary negotiation was necessary, she contends, because Ireland “confounded [England] in a way that Scotland in general did not.” While the circumstances of England’s unions with Scotland and Ireland differed dramatically, Ferris’s assertion that the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments neatly produced “a new national whole” must be qualified.8 Eighteenth-century Scotland comprised two vastly disparate cultures – the relatively commercial, cosmopolitan, and “enlightened” Lowlands, and the feudal, agrarian, and isolated Highlands. Rather than creating a cohesive British nation, the 1707 Union arguably exacerbated tensions and disparities between southern Britain and the Gaelic-speaking Highlands. If, by the end of the eighteenth century, the southern regions of Scotland did share a new sense of unity with metropolitan England, it was largely because, as Janet Sorenson has argued, Lowlanders enlisted “as junior partners in Britain’s global imperial project.”9 While Lowland Scots in the second half of the eighteenth century capitalized on the commercial, military, and political opportunities for assimilation and unification with England that British empire building offered, Highlanders remained geographically and ideologically on the peripheries of a united Britain, derided by Lowlanders and English alike as backward savages and Jacobite rebels.10 Between the middle of the eighteenth century, when William Pitt first turned to the Highlands to supply Britain’s demand for military manpower during the Seven Years or French and Indian Wars, and the middle of the nineteenth century, southern Britain’s imperial projects drove thousands of Highlanders from their homes to the outskirts of an expanding empire. As landowners transformed the Highlands’ agricultural economy to supply the needs of the southern metropolises, Highlanders often chose between emigration to one of Britain’s burgeoning colonies, or enlistment in the army.11 Serving as a source of manpower and cannon fodder, Highlanders thus assisted the national pursuit of new sources of wealth by peopling the settlements and fighting in the regiments of the gentry and aristocracy who had forced them from their homes.

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Whereas Irish national tales, as Ferris has shown, responded to the tensions immediately surrounding the Anglo-Irish Union, their Scottish counterparts reassessed the Union of Parliaments from the temporal distance of roughly a century in light of what Anne MacVicar Grant’s Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland (1811) called “the crime of depopulation.”12 The earliest Scottish national tales appeared in the 1790s, when Britain’s war with France completed the devastation of traditional modes of Highland agriculture that the suppression of the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions had begun. Landowners benefited from the temporary cessation of importation of wool by replacing their tenants with sheep and thereby contributing to “the conditions of clan decline.”13 Early Scottish national tales, like Elizabeth Helme’s Duncan and Peggy: A Scottish Tale (1794) and Albert; or the Wilds of Strathnavern (1799), do not directly address the Clearances, but advocate the preservation of Highland traditions by contrasting metropolitan corruption and affectation with the virtues and affections fostered by the Highlands’ feudal clan system. A noticeable change in the tenor and number of Scottish national tales written after 1815 reflects an increasing anxiety about the Clearances. For the Highlands, 1815 marks “the end of an era, when confident planning gave way to nervous attempts to hold together the existing agrarian system.”14 At this time, wool prices dropped sharply after the dramatic inflation caused by the wartime interruption of trade, and struggling landowners desperately sought to rid themselves of their remaining tenants, whom they could no longer support. Christian Isobel Johnstone’s The Saxon and the Gael; or the Northern Metropolis, published in 1814, and Clan-Albin: A National Tale, published only a year later, illustrate the effects of this change on the tone and aims of the national tale. As its subtitle explains, The Saxon and the Gael offers its readers a “View of the Lowland and Highland Character,” examining cultural tensions within Scotland. In contrast to The Saxon and the Gael ’s satirical analysis, Clan-Albin is urgently prescriptive, seeking a means of rehabilitating a rapidly disintegrating Highland society. Examining the Highland Clearances in terms of Britain’s imperial expansion, the novel reveals how metropolitan Britain’s relations with its Celtic peripheries, and the peripheries’ relations with each other, have been shaped by a broader network of imperial and military activity. Taking Johnstone’s Clan-Albin and Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818) as its primary examples, this chapter argues that Scottish national tales imagined alternatives to the very real dispossession or “unhoming” caused by the Clearances by figuratively domesticating Highlanders.15

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The predominantly female authors of national tales drew on their own domestic authority to justify what might be construed as an unwomanly intervention in political discourses of nation-formation and to domesticate Highlanders in two senses. First, at the most literal level, these writers represented Highlanders as paragons of domesticity and familial affection. In doing so, they suggested that Highlanders hitherto had been seriously misunderstood and maligned. They were not the thieving, belligerent, uncouth savages governed by blind allegiance to a lawless chieftain so often depicted in anti-Jacobite and anti-Scottish writing. Nor were they even the courageous but doomed warriors of Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian. Instead, they embodied the social virtues most cherished by civilized southern Britons – including a refined sensibility. National tales’ depictions of Highland domesticity promoted a second, more figurative kind of domestication. In rendering Highlanders familiar and admirable to a Lowland and English reading public, national tales quite explicitly argued for their integration into a supposedly already united Great Britain through a national division of moral labor according to which Highland sensibility would provide a moral antidote to the corruption engendered by southern metropolitan Britain’s imperial activities even while Highlanders also participated as soldiers and settlers in the expansion of empire.16 Scottish national tales’ distinctive project of Highland domestication differentiates them from Scott’s historical novels, which tend to depict the demise of a “backwards” Highland society as an inevitable, albeit regrettable, side-effect of southern Britain’s commercial prosperity and imperial expansion. They also differ from James Hogg’s autoethnographic “rural and traditionary tales,” which describe the customs, speech, and manners of the Scottish peasantry while eschewing the artificial conventions of the novel. Ian Duncan uses Friedrich Schiller’s distinction between the naı¨ve and the sentimental to differentiate Hogg’s “naı¨ve” tales, which offer readers “the ethnographic raw material of the national tale, not yet ideologically and aesthetically processed,” from “sentimental” national tales, in which this raw material appears “filtered by intellect, subject to critical scrutiny.”17 Although national tales’ aesthetic polish is arguably as dubious as Hogg’s stories’ authenticity and immediacy, the former do privilege literary form in a way that Hogg’s traditionary tales, with their claims to represent “nature” and “real life” do not. Their authors profess an intimate knowledge of, but also a cultural distance from, the Highland society they describe. National tales are not only sentimental in Schiller’s sense, but also in the more conventional sense that they celebrate

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sensibility. Moreover, in comparison to the epistolary novels discussed in the previous chapter, national tales offer few cautionary tales against indulging in feeling. National tales participated in sentimental fiction’s late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transformation from a didactic literary mode that attempted to morally reform readers while preserving existing social institutions and hierarchies into a radical one that attempted to mobilize readers’ feelings for revolutionary political ends. Scottish national tales mediate between two nations and two concepts of nationhood: a Highland nation bound through filiation, or the ties of birth and blood and a British nation united through affiliation, or through shared sympathies. According to the tenets of Enlightenment historiography discussed in Chapter 1, nations united by blood would, with the development of industry and trade, gradually be replaced by communities united by shared feeling. While the division of labor necessary to commerce breaks up traditional societies united by the ancient ties of birth and blood, it also creates the luxury and leisure necessary to cultivate polite manners and tastes, thus enabling the formation through affiliation of sentimental communities. Roxann Wheeler has shown that, within this model of historical change, the terms “civilized” and “savage,” “polite” and “unpolished,” marked racial as much as cultural difference.18 Refined manners, tastes, and virtues signified civility, and hence also racial superiority. In domesticating Highlanders, then, national tales not only examine the values defining Britishness, but also argue for the viability of the Celtic race. The demise of the Highlands’ feudal social structure following the suppression of the ’45 had opened this viability to debate. Charles Churchill, Samuel Johnson, and John Pinkerton, among others, employed the principles of Enlightenment historiography to argue that eighteenth-century Celts’ renowned racial purity proved them a static, even recidivist, race that had “not yet advanced even to a state of barbarism,” and that was “incapable of industry or civilization.”19 While some writers compared Celts to spoiled, unreasonable children in need of the guidance of enlightened southern Britons, others simply dismissed Highlanders as a “vanquished people,” destined through their incapacity to die out.20 The authors of national tales argued in contrast that the clan system encouraged Highlanders to cultivate polite virtues such as compassion, benevolence, and sociability, as well as hardier ones such as industriousness and self-restraint. Highlanders’ civility in turn underlies the national tale’s implicit call for empathy: readers should attend to the predicament of the Highlanders who have been brutally forced from their

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homes because these supposedly savage Celts in fact share the moral values of civilized southern Britons. Whereas Enlightenment historiography predicted the inevitable differentiation or destruction of communities defined by the original ties of filiation, national tales suggested that the moral health and military strength of the British nation depends upon the preservation and integration of the Celtic race. By intervening in the teleology of exclusively male-authored conjectural histories, the authors of national tales questioned not only who counts as British, but who possesses the authority to decide who counts as British. In fact, national tales were only one of many forms of writing that addressed the Highland Clearances. Peter Womack and Matthew Wickman have divided these works into the perhaps overly neat categories of “romance” and “improvement.” Romantic discourse idealized the Highlands as the primitive site of authentic and sublime feeling while improving discourse sought to bring the “backward” Highlands into enlightened British modernity.21 The militarization of the Highlands following the defeat of Jacobite troops in 1746 generated a third form of discourse, perhaps best termed patriotic, that acquired immense ideological force by combining romantic and improving ideologies. Anne Grant’s Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland, a paradigmatic example of this patriotic discourse, represents Highland Celts as a naturally heroic people, who could be assimilated into Great Britain through their participation in the defense of the nation and its expanding empire. Robert Clyde has documented a dramatic and disproportionate increase in the number of soldiers recruited from the Highlands between 1745, when measures were implemented to draw the clans under the authority of centralized government, and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The Highlands became known, in John Knox’s words, as a “nursery for soldiers and seamen,” a phrase that domesticates the Highlanders and naturalizes military recruitment, hiding the fact that this nursery was actually “little more than an imperialmilitary reservation.”22 Thanks to their substantial and visible role in Britain’s mid-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century military victories, “the common view of the Gaels as bloodthirsty rebels” gave way to a growing belief that they were Britain’s “most staunch defenders.”23 During the Seven Years War, General James Wolfe recommended sending Highland troops to North America on the grounds that “they are hard, intrepid, accustom’d to a rough country, and no great mischief if they fall.”24 Only a few years later, an anonymous pamphlet argued that Parliament should take measures to prevent Highland emigration

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by pointing out that Highland soldiers “had no inconsiderable share in making our most important conquests: The reduction of Louisburgh, Quebec, Crown Point, Montreal, Niagra, and Fort du Quesne, the taking of Guadaloupe, the conquest of Martinico, the Havana, the plains of Germany and our conquests in India, will all tell what assistance the government received from the Scots Highlanders.”25 Although national tales were not alone in depicting Highlanders as both courageous and compassionate, they perhaps were unique in using Highlanders’ purported sensibility to criticize the militarization of the Highlands, and to challenge a national division of labor that counted on Highlanders as a supply of manpower for Britain’s imperial projects. Before turning to Clan-Albin and Marriage, I will explore in further detail the national division of labor described by Grant’s Essays, a text that reconciles Highland domestication and Highland militarization. The Essays forms a bridge between the overtly imperial agenda of works like John Knox’s View of the British Empire, More Especially Scotland, which unabashedly endorsed the use of Highlanders as human cannon fodder, and the generally anti-imperial stance of national tales, which aimed to humanize Highlanders and to integrate them into Great Britain. Although Grant seeks to win southern Britons’ sympathies for her domesticated Highlanders, she nonetheless recommends the continued militarization of the Highlands as a viable alternative to the Clearances. anne grant’s highland nursery Grant’s Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland has been celebrated by critics for its prescient representation of cultural hybridity and for offering an account of early nineteenth-century Highland life that seems “less certain and imperialist” than most.26 Less remarked upon, however, is the fact that Grant used her self-proclaimed insights as someone who has “lived in and out of polished society” (ii: 159) and who is consequently neither a native nor a stranger (i: 10) in the Highlands to justify the military exploitation of Highlanders that was ongoing at the time of the Essays’ publication. Grant’s descriptions of the Highlands’ sublime scenery and curious legends are a form of early ethnography, and their influence on Waverley, which Scott acknowledged, illustrates James Buzard’s claims for the peripheral origins both of anthropology and of nineteenth-century realist fiction.27 Grant explains that previous writers, misled by their “illiberal, ignorant, bigotted prejudice,” have represented Highlanders falsely as uncouth brutes (i: 34). She is

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particularly well suited to remedy their mistakes and thus to forge a closer union between southern Britons and Highlanders because she “is not absolutely a native nor entirely a stranger” in the Highlands, “but has added the observant curiosity of the latter to the facilities of enquiry enjoyed by the former” (i: 10). By transforming the negative space between the two seemingly mutually exclusive categories of native and stranger into a productive position from which to write, Grant promises her readers a picture of Highland life that is at once authentic and objectively distanced. This negative space, she suggests, is not simply a synthesis of two pre-existing subject positions, but rather an entirely unique perspective that transcends the ideologically limited positions of both. Grant traces her adeptness as a cultural mediator, and hence her authority to write about Highlanders, to both her unusually mobile childhood and her gender. As she recounts in her Memoirs of an American Lady (1806), Grant was born in Glasgow in 1755 and emigrated to Albany in present-day New York at the age of three when her father received a commission in the Earl of Eglinton’s regiment. During the next ten years, she lived among Dutch settlers and Mohawk Indians, until her family returned to Scotland – this time to the Highlands – in 1768.28 Her marriage to the Reverend James Grant, a minister in the parish of Laggan, facilitated Grant’s assimilation of Highland traditions, since her duties as the minister’s wife and the mother of twelve necessitated close interaction with the community. Grant explains: “The language, the customs, the peculiar tone of sentiment, and manners of the people – the maxims, traditions, music and poetry of the country I made my own with all possible expedition. I learned them in the fields, the garden, and the nursery, in such a manner as to promote than interrupt my necessary avocations” (ii: 338). While her duties as wife and mother encouraged her daily interactions with Highlanders, Grant’s womanly sensibilities enabled her to appreciate Highlanders’ hitherto overlooked domestic virtues. Grant traces these virtues to the patriarchal Highland clan, which is at once family and nation. Until Parliament abolished heritable jurisdictions in 1746, Highland clans were virtually politically independent units, in which the chief had complete authority over the lives and property of his people. As Womack has observed, early nineteenth-century writers such as Grant refashioned this feudal community into “the image of the bourgeois family, with its depoliticised domesticity, its gentility, its consciously cultivated artlessness, and its ultimate reference to patriarchal

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authority.”29 Blurring the distinction between political and domestic, public and private, the clan is an integral political, cultural, and racial unit. Because the boundaries of family and community are perfectly aligned, familial affection blends seamlessly into public spirit. Grant explains, “No highlander ever once thought of himself as an individual. Amongst these people, even the meanest mind was in a manner enlarged by association, by anticipation and by retrospect. In the most minute, as well as the most serious concerns, he felt himself one of many connected together by ties the most lasting and endearing” (i: 51). Grant’s use of the past tense to speak of Highlanders reminds readers of the damage that, by the turn of the nineteenth century, had already been done to traditional Highland communities, in part by the militarization that she endorses. The Essays offers the clan as a prescriptive model of organic community for the British nation, yet it also encourages southern readers to forge sentimental bonds around the figure of the already absent Highlander. Whereas travel writers and historians tended to ascribe Highlanders’ supposed bellicosity to their savagery, Grant and the authors of national tales attribute their martial, like their domestic, virtues to the clan. Rooted in domestic affection, Highlanders’ heroism is for Grant an indication of their refined – albeit sometimes misguided – sensibilities, rather than of their bloodthirsty barbarism. In contrast to historiographers like Hume and Smith, who argued that sensibility can be cultivated only in refined, commercial society, Grant follows James Macpherson and Adam Ferguson in suggesting that the material hardships encountered by primitive peoples do not preclude, but rather encourage the cultivation of refined emotion and strengthen the ties of affection. Sensibility is thus the most natural of virtues because its origins are coeval with the origins of society. Grant explains that the clan’s “shared hazards and sufferings” foster a veritable “fervour of filial and fraternal affection” among its members and strengthen their “pride, courage, patriotism, and independence” (i: 14–15). By endowing her Highlanders with familial affections, Grant divests them of their reputed brutality. Although the feminine connotations of sensibility seem to rest uneasily with her insistent use of the masculine pronoun to refer to “the Highlander,” Grant suggests that it is precisely this sensibility that inspires their heroic, self-sacrificial devotion to the safety of the clan. Her Highlanders demonstrate Smith’s claim in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that “sensibility to the feelings of others, so far from being inconsistent with the manhood of self-command, is the very principle upon which that

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manhood is founded.”30 Without sensibility, Highlanders’ martial skill would not be patriotic courage, but merely brute violence. After explaining the causes of Highlanders’ distinctive combination of sensibility and courage, Grant surveys possible solutions to the “crime of depopulation,” including Highlanders’ migration to the Lowlands or abroad. Grant shares the belief of many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anti-emigration writers that population is a nation’s greatest wealth;31 but she further adds that it is not merely their number, but rather Highlanders’ particular moral qualities, that make them necessary to national prosperity. She cautions that migration, whether within Britain or abroad, imperils Highlanders’ traditional virtues by forcing them too quickly to assume the habits of modern, commercial society. Once exposed to metropolitan luxuries and refinements, Highlanders learn to despise their native manners and customs as the relics of a barbaric age. They possess neither the education nor the skills to assimilate successfully into commercial society, and are left to “wander like discontented shades, along the dividing stream . . . The highlands have lost, and the lowlands have not found them” (ii: 134–5). Grant’s “dividing stream” marks the cultural and the geographic boundaries between Highlands and Lowlands, and her wraithlike Highlanders are homeless – ideologically as well as literally – on either side. While the Essays celebrates Grant’s own geographical mobility as an advantage of Britain’s imperial expansion, it also exposes Highlanders’ migrancy as a tragic consequence of the same cause. Grant proposes military service in the British army as a palatable alternative to migration, ostensibly because it preserves Highlanders’ distinctive virtues, but implicitly also because it employs those virtues on behalf of Britain’s national and imperial security. If anything can revive the exiled Highlander whose heroic sensibilities have begun to decay, Grant declares, it is “the martial pipe of his ancestors, calling him to the field of honourable strife” (ii: 135). Through military service, “the highlander resumes the energy of his character, and finds room to display once more the virtue of habit and of sentiment; for here he is generally associated with beings like himself. Here his enthusiasm finds an object: his honourable feelings, his love of distinction, his contempt for danger, and what is of equal importance in the military life, his calm fortitude, stern hardihood and patient endurance all find scope for exercise” (ii: 135). Military service re-directs Highlanders’ customary loyalty from the clan to the British nation, which accordingly becomes a substitute for the kin group. Far from signaling their insurmountable

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primitiveness or warranting their exclusion, Highlanders’ distinctive traits make them ideal British patriots – courageous, compassionate, and devoted to the collective welfare of the nation. Yet Highlanders, for Grant as for many of her contemporaries, were also foreigners within Britain’s borders. It is thus questionable, as Andrew Mackillop points out, whether Highlanders’ military participation in empire building “served to unify and assimilate, or, instead, to perpetuate the reality and perception of regional particularism.”32 If Highlanders’ military virtues are the product of their geographic and ethnic insularity, they must remain segregated in order to preserve the qualities that southern Britain needs to build its empire. Grant implies that the army, with its growing corps of Highland regiments, could preserve Highlanders’ ethnic purity while also preparing them, should they be so fortunate as to survive the duration of their military service, to assimilate into a civilized society. Grant emphasizes “the importance of preserving, unmixed and undebased, a race so fit to encounter those perils and labours, worse than death, which the defence of our wide-extended empire demands” (ii: 142). Yet even while she asserts that Highlanders must remain a genealogically and culturally intact nation if they are to serve as a renewable resource for the British army, she argues that military service should prepare Highland soldiers to become members of metropolitan British society. Warning that “improvements, to be really such, must be gentle, gradual, and voluntary” (ii: 130), Grant points out that the army offers Highland soldiers opportunities to better themselves economically and intellectually and engages them in simultaneously acquiring and protecting the values of civilized British society.33 Grant explains Highlanders’ place in a national division of moral labor through a telling analogy between the British nation and an individual mind. In a healthy mind, she claims, reason maintains a firm but gentle ascendancy over feelings or passions. So long as “feeling and imagination continue to be the lawful subjects of reason, like other subjects, they are resources of wealth and power to their ruler; but when they become slaves, they are, like other slaves, spiritless and impoverished, without energy or volition (ii: 74). In Grant’s analogy, reason and feeling are not merely metaphors for southern Britons and Highlanders respectively, but rather attributes of those peoples. Like the women and children they resemble, Grant’s Highlanders have not yet fully developed their capacity for reason, and must submit to the guidance of southern Anglo-Saxons’ reasoning until they are capable of self-government. Pursued to its logical conclusion, Grant’s argument implies that Highlanders should remain in

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an arrested state of moral and intellectual adolescence not necessarily because they are happier that way, but because it is in this state that they best perform their role within a national division of labor. Despite her purportedly unique perspective as neither a native nor a stranger, Grant proposes the same solution to the emigration problem as many of her less sympathetic contemporaries. Without openly acknowledging that Highlanders’ political empowerment depends upon their participation in the disempowerment of other peripheral peoples, Grant reconfigures the opposition between core and periphery on a global scale so that the Highlands would become part of an imperial center. Johnstone’s Clan-Albin and Ferrier’s Marriage condemn the militarization of the Highlands and reject a national division of moral labor that would place a culturally and racially insular Highland nation under the paternalistic guidance of a southern metropolitan Britain. Yet, like many authors of national tales, Johnstone and Ferrier adopt Grant’s perspective as neither a native nor a stranger to argue for the integration of the Highlands into Great Britain. By representing a national division of labor through a domestic division of labor, Clan-Albin and Marriage not only use marriage as a metaphor for political unification and the family as a model for the nation; they also explore the functions of matrimonial alliances and kin relations in cultural transmission and national integration. Through family histories and marriage plots, Johnstone and Ferrier envision various means through which their domesticated Highlanders might be integrated into Great Britain. While Clan-Albin depicts a culturally distinct but self-governing Highland community as a moral refuge for those who wish to embrace Highlanders’ traditional values, Marriage envisions a hybrid Anglo-Celtic identity and prescribes an egalitarian division of moral labor that acknowledges cultural difference. ‘clan-albin’: from family roots to the routes of empire Like most of the women who developed the genre of the national tale in Scotland, Christian Isobel Johnstone spent part of her life in the Highlands and part in the Lowlands, drawing upon her familiarity with both regions to explain the former to the latter. Her national tales share affinities not only with her highly didactic domestic fiction, but also with her series of anti-slavery articles written for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, which she edited from 1834 until 1846. Both her journalism and her national tales employ economic arguments as well as sentimental rhetoric

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to evaluate Britain’s exploitation of its politically and geographically peripheral peoples. Clan-Albin describes the clearance of the Macalbin clan from their home in Glenalbin, and the ultimate repopulation of the glen through the combined efforts of its chief, Norman, and his Irish wife, Monimia. Clearance and repopulation are interwoven with, and in fact enabled by, British imperial activities, and particularly by the lengthy war with France, which had just ended when the novel was published in 1815. If metropolitan Britain’s empire building caused the Highland Clearances, Johnstone contends that imperialism also offers an alternative to forced emigration by opening up new opportunities for cultural assimilation and unification. The clearance with which the novel opens motivates the protagonist Norman to restore Glenalbin to the Macalbin clan and thus to recreate a community united not only by blood, but also “by similarity of pursuit, of condition, of hopes, of enjoyments, of recollections, and of sufferings – by every affection that endears, – and by every bond which links society in harmonious union.”34 Johnstone argues that by fragmenting such closeknit Highland communities, the Clearances endanger the moral health of the nation as a sentimental community, and its military strength as a growing imperial power. Mass emigration damages Britain’s collective moral character both by exporting, like so many surplus goods, Highlanders and their virtues, and by sanctioning the greed of the landowners who drive them away. Privileging economic interest over affective bonds, the rapacious landlord of Glenalbin evicts the Macalbins and repopulates his estate with sheep in order to capitalize on the wool shortage caused by war with France. Clan Albin’s matriarch, and Norman’s adoptive mother, Lady Augusta, argues that this unfeeling pursuit of material wealth in fact impoverishes Britain, depriving the nation of producers and consumers, of laborers and defenders. Because “the best riches of a state consist in the number of its industrious and useful members,” Lady Augusta explains, the Clearances “must be perfectly inimical to the true interests of our country; – its sinews must be weakened, – its strength undermined; – it will soon resemble a splendid building whose cumbrous decorations are not proportioned to the solidity of its foundation, – it must speedily totter and fall to ruin” (85). Suggesting that forced emigration threatens not only Britain’s economic interests but, perhaps more importantly, its moral integrity, Lady Augusta’s mixed metaphor transforms the nation from an organic body into an elaborate edifice, more ornamental affluence than substantive virtue. If a contented and productive population is the nation’s greatest wealth, the Clearances

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reveal a marked lack of foresight and good sense – not to mention humanity – on the part of supposedly morally and intellectually enlightened southern Britons. Yet for Johnstone, forced emigration is a far lesser evil than the military service that Grant proposed for displaced Highlanders. Although emigration rudely uproots Highlanders from their ancestral homes, it nonetheless allows entire communities to transplant their familial ties intact. By preserving their traditional social structure, emigrants can also “retain their ancient manners, which are so intimately connected with all their characteristic virtues” (86), as the Macalbins do in their new home in North America. The army, in contrast, is according to Lady Augusta, “a poor exchange for . . . domestic joys, and kindred charities” (57). Moreover, it accommodates only a small segment of the Highland population, for, as Grant fails to acknowledge, “neither old men, nor women or children can be soldiers” (57). While Clan-Albin praises Highlanders’ performance in the army, it represents military service as a form of untenable exploitation, tarnishing virtues hitherto preserved in pristine purity among the sheltered northern mountains. Johnstone objects to Grant’s military alternative to emigration not only because it fails to provide for Highland women and children, but also because it implicates Highland soldiers in the very imperial corruption that has caused the Clearances. Although Highlanders’ domesticity makes them the most valiant of soldiers, the army’s impersonal and dehumanizing mechanization is completely antithetical to the values cultivated by the clan, instead reflecting the “uncouth and repulsive manners,” and the “coldness and suspicion” that Norman notices in industrialized England (237). Unlike Grant, Johnstone does not perceive military service as a means of gradually improving Highlanders until they can be integrated into “civilized” society. Instead, she accuses the army of incorporating Highlanders as human fuel for an imperial power that has displaced and demeaned its own people. Britain’s amorphous military machine not only fails to provide a sentimental community to replace the familial ties that it severs, but also erodes the noble virtues that bind an individual to his fellow beings. In the army, Highland recruits are “welcomed to glory, and tacitly told, that, though driven from their paternal fields, another field was opened, where they might toil, and bleed, in defence of the lives, properties, and freedom, of those who had torn them from all they loved” (58). By obligingly exchanging their family plots for Britain’s battlefields, Highlanders unwittingly become party to the unscrupulous endeavors of the southern Britons whom they serve.

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Once “placed beyond the influence of those salutary restraints, imposed by customs of society,” the Highland soldier becomes “a solitary part of a vast machine, estimated only by its aggregate force . . . the blind instrument of pitiful intrigue or lawless ambition (255). Only the most principled recruits, like Norman, can avoid contamination. Clan-Albin situates Highlanders’ exploitation within its broader exploration of the expansion of the early nineteenth century’s strongest imperial powers – Great Britain and France. The novel traces the gradual dispersal, differentiation, and disempowerment of a transnational Celtic community bound by ancient blood ties to French and British military and economic pursuits. Norman uncovers the vestiges of this racially and culturally homogeneous Celtic community while serving in the British army, as the routes of empire reveal his family roots – a mixture of Irish, Highland, and Basque blood. While traveling through the mountainous regions between France and Spain, he recognizes among the Basques the music, dress, and manners of Scottish Highlanders (467–8). The resemblance is even more marked in Ireland, where he finds “the same language, the same manners, the same graceful frankness, and openhearted hospitality, that distinguished his native land (240). Yet, Norman finds that Britain’s colonial rule of Ireland has eroded some of the similarities between Highland and Irish Celts. The resemblance, though striking, “was not complete”: “the Highlander was wiser and more gentle than the Irishman only because he had been less unfortunate” (240). Although she takes pains to differentiate the Highland Clearances as the result of economic depression from the colonial oppression experienced by the Irish, Johnstone implies that the Celtic peripheries generally have been losers in Britain’s imperial games. Their racial insularity has weakened Celtic peoples, rendering them susceptible to exploitation by global powers that have benefited from centuries of cultural and economic exchange. Yet the ancient kinship ties among Celts also offer an alternative model of transnational community, and, as the potential basis for political and economic cooperation, a means of resisting Britain’s and France’s power. Johnstone condemns Britain’s imperial projects because they fragment Highland society and devalue domestic affections and virtues; however, she also allows that imperial expansion might enable the rehabilitation of the Highlands by creating opportunities for cultural comparison and assimilation. She suggests that through its feminization, the clan might be transformed from a homogeneous community delimited by filiation, or shared blood, into a heterogeneous community formed through

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affiliation, or shared feeling. Anne K. Mellor and Gary Kelly have argued that Romantic women novelists sought to feminize a patriarchal political sphere by advocating “an ethic of care which insists on the primacy of the family” and which “extends the values of domesticity into the public realm.”35 As we have seen, the Highland clan nurtures domestic virtues and affections; yet its patriarchal structure renders Highland society virtually impermeable to those who are not of Celtic origin. By extending its domestic values beyond its hereditary boundaries, however, the clan might be transformed from a community defined by diachronic ties of birth and blood into a community formed through synchronic ties of affection and economic interdependence. Contrary to Grant’s Essays, Clan-Albin suggests that cultural integrity does not necessitate racial purity. Instead, Johnstone implies that the traditional familial structure of Highland society might be rehabilitated to provide a haven for all Britons who, though not Highlanders by blood, wish to adopt their social virtues and to share their domestic affections. Norman and Monimia’s marriage is central to Clan Albin’s transformation from a consanguineous to an affinal community. At the opening of the novel, the patriarchal Highland order has already begun to crumble: the Macalbins were left without a chief when Lady Augusta’s brothers fled to France to avoid prosecution for their role in the 1745 Jacobite uprising, and the clan thus has become a matriarchy by default. Although Lady Augusta assumes the duties of chieftain and attempts to preserve traditional ways of life, she is unable to retain control of the Glenalbin estate and, consequently, to prevent the clan’s clearance.36 It is left to Norman, who turns out to be Lady Augusta’s grandson, and Monimia to end the economic and cultural paralysis that followed the demise of Highland feudalism. Norman and Monimia’s marriage embodies Clan-Albin’s vision of cooperation between the Highlands and Ireland, affirming the original kinship ties between Britain’s Celtic populations. Monimia refuses Colonel Gordon, the avaricious Anglo-Scottish landlord responsible for the clearance of Glenalbin, for Norman, whose unadulterated Celtic genealogy parallels, and perhaps produces, his impeccable virtues. Norman and Monimia’s marriage is in many ways a companionate partnership: his plans for repopulating and improving the glen are inspired by her virtues and aided by the fortune that her father acquired as an officer in India. In Monimia, Norman finds “a creature formed to dignify and sweeten every stage of life, – to enliven solitude, – and to embellish society, – to share his counsels, as well as to refine his pleasures, – to be the companion of his understanding as well as the object

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of his admiration and tenderness” (290). In short, he finds someone who embraces the domestic virtues fostered by traditional Highland society, and who consequently can assist him in forming a new community founded on the values of the old but peopled by diverse individuals through cultural affiliation. Even as she promotes the Highlands’ integration into a united Great Britain, Johnstone makes a powerfully subversive argument for Celtic cooperation. Whereas England formed unions with Scotland and Ireland primarily to increase its wealth and political power and to ensure its security, the Celtic peripheries are joined by the “natural” bonds of shared blood. Clan-Albin suggests that ties of filiation should form a foundation for political and economic cooperation and for the cultivation of mutual affections between Highlanders and the Irish.37 By placing her rehabilitated Highland society under the guidance of a man who has proved his allegiance to Great Britain through commendable military service, Johnstone at once emphasizes Highlanders’ importance to the stability of Britain’s empire and contains the radical potential of Celtic cooperation. Although she suggests that such cooperation might enable the peripheries to resist military and imperial exploitation, Johnstone does not advocate Celtic separatism or isolation. Indeed, she implies that Celts should turn such exploitation to their own advantage by reaping the fruits of empire for the use of the peripheries rather than the metropolis. The rehabilitation of the Highlands thus requires the subjugation of Britain’s more distant imperial peripheries such as India and the West Indies – both areas where Scots played a disproportionately large part in colonization and government administration.38 Like Grant, Johnstone reconfigures the conflict between core and periphery on a global scale so that the Highlands become part of an imperial center. After using Monimia’s fortune – itself the spoils of the empire – to redeem Glenalbin from Colonel Gordon, Norman determines to recreate a familial community by implementing a number of improvements that will attract new tenants to the region: Mills were constructed, roads were opened, trees were planted by millions, implements of labour were improved, and every mode of useful cultivation quietly exemplified on his own farm, for the advantage of his people . . . Servitudes and thirlages of all kinds, and the cheerless and listless exertions of occupation at the will of a superior, were forever banished from Glenalbin. Its Chief chose to be the friend of prosperous and active men, not the master of needy, abject and desponding slaves. (556)39

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While Norman substantially modernizes the agricultural methods employed on his estate, he makes only two changes to the traditional structure of Highland society. First, Norman’s improvements are designed to encourage his tenants to make their own improvements, and hence to foster their moral and economic independence. The bonds of affection uniting the Glenalbin community are now egalitarian, among friends, rather than hierarchical, between superior and inferiors. Secondly, these friends are no longer “all connected by blood or marriage” (22). Norman’s rehabilitated Highland community welcomes those who have suffered in the service of British imperial power, and those who, like Monimia, simply seek an escape from metropolitan corruption in a life of “quiet, contentment” and “unostentatious usefulness” (344). Glenalbin’s new inhabitants embrace all of the moral sentiments fostered by the familial structure of the clan, but are related merely through a sense of kinship rather than by actual blood ties. We learn that the spacious cottages Norman has built on the site of the Macalbins’ former village “were now occupied by MAC’S of all clans and kindreds” (557), offering a home not only to Highlanders who would otherwise have been forced to emigrate, but also to other outcasts and voluntary exiles from throughout Britain. For instance, Ellis, an English soldier who lost his leg in the battle of Corunna, finds a new career as Norman’s bailiff; and Patrick Leary, another of Norman’s military friends, becomes the village blacksmith, happily escaping a life of squalid drunkenness in Ireland. In Norman’s words, Glenalbin’s new inhabitants are Highlanders “if not in blood, in heart” (399). Similarly, in their new home in North America, the Macalbins’ ties of birth and blood have gradually been supplemented by cultural affiliation. As the emigrants mingled with other settlers, Johnstone explains, “The pride of Highland descent was grafted onto the vigorous stem of American independence” (557). Even though Clan-Albin deplores the moral ambiguities engendered by Britain’s global military activities, imperialism and the rehabilitation of the Highlands finally turn out to be economically and ideologically interdependent. Johnstone prescribes a national division of moral labor according to which the metropolitan south oversees the dubious work of imperial expansion, while the Highlands, like the home, cultivate the sentimental bonds necessary to restrain the south’s economic and political pursuits within the bounds of humanity. In addition to offering a refuge from metropolitan corruption, Clan-Albin’s feminized Highland society promises to nourish the empire that it feeds off by disseminating its virtues throughout the British army, nation, and empire in its capacity

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as a “nursery” for soldiers. In the terms of Lady Augusta’s analogy, Highland domesticity might form the solid foundation of virtue that will prevent the edifice of empire from crumbling. Johnstone’s proposed alternative to emigration requires the cultural, although not the racial, segregation of the Highlands: Glenalbin offers a refuge to the dispossessed from all regions of Britain only on the condition that they sympathize with traditional Highland values. The novel’s distribution of moral labor thus allows Highlanders to retain their distinctive traditions and values even as they contribute morally, economically, and militarily to the collective national good. ‘marriage’ and ‘destiny’: from cultural hybridity to cultural conservation Susan Ferrier’s Marriage shares Clan-Albin’s project of Highland domestication, but revises its national division of moral labor, suggesting that the Highlands’ integration requires racial and cultural admixture. Ferrier envisions a hybrid Anglo-Celtic Britishness formed not through a facile synthesis of Highland and metropolitan values and manners, but through an open-minded and observant toleration of cultural difference. Hybridity, as Homi K. Bhabha defines it, is not simply a process of cultural mixing “that resolves the tension between two cultures,” and in Marriage, Britishness is not created by the simple commingling of English and Scottish cultures or Anglo-Saxon and Celtic races.40 Instead, hybridization entails a process of cultural alienation or defamiliarization that allows for the emergence of neither/nor or interstitial identities between clearly defined subject positions – colonizer and colonized for Bhabha, southern Britons and Highlanders for Ferrier. Although, as Bhabha explains it, the more powerful of two groups may experience such cultural alienation (for instance by recognizing “their own” traits in the supposedly inferior group), hybridization is often a subversive strategy through which the less powerful group undermines or challenges cultural and racial hierarchies.41 Thus, in Marriage, those who experience hybridization are politically disempowered, whether because of their ethnicity (they are of Highland ancestry), or because of their gender (they are almost all women). However, much as Anne Grant represents her cultural liminality as a privilege, Ferrier transforms this disempowerment into a position of empowerment: her Highland characters’ cultural dislocation and defamiliarization prepares them to undertake the important task of cultural mediation between southern metropolitan Britain and the Highlands.

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At once a national tale and a Bildungsroman, Marriage participates in nation building through the personal Bildung of its protagonist, Mary Douglas. Eve Tavor Bannet has argued that the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman “was designed to effect the Bildung of its readers and thus to effect changes in the manners and morals of the times.”42 By illustrating the dangers of cultural insularity and by offering metropolitan British readers a glimpse of their own culture from a critical distance, Marriage encourages them towards cultural hybridity. As a Bildungsroman, Marriage represents a marriage based on rational affection as the culmination of Mary’s moral development; as a national tale, its multiple marriages refract the Anglo-Scottish Union into variously distorted forms. Marriage begins by contrasting three types of union – those made to further the parties’ political and economic interests, those made in the heat of passion, and those founded in rational affection – each of which acquires national implications. The English Earl of Courtland regards marriage as a political and economic alliance, warning his daughter, Juliana, that she must “marry for the purpose for which matrimony was ordained amongst people of birth – that is, for the aggrandisement of her family, the extending of their political influence – for becoming, in short, the depository of their mutual interest.”43 Juliana, however, is sure that she cannot live with a man whom she does not love. Rather than submitting to her father’s choice of a querulous, hunch-backed, but extremely wealthy duke for her husband, she follows the dictates of her heart, and runs off with Henry Douglas, a handsome but virtually penniless Highland soldier. When the Earl disowns Juliana, the couple is forced to seek shelter with Henry’s family at Glenfern Castle in the Highlands, where Juliana expects to find “balls, and sailing parties, and rowing matches, and shooting parties, and fishing parties, and parties of every description” (8). Disgusted with the dirt roads, drafty castle, crude food, and lack of genteel society that she finds instead, Juliana’s romantic ardor for both Henry and Scotland is soon replaced by as ardent a loathing. Marriages founded in unrestrained passion, Ferrier implies, are just as injudicious and unstable as are those made to further the parties’ political and economic interests. Only a union founded in rational affection will produce lasting harmony. Henry and Juliana’s marital misery, like the unhappy union between the English Lady Waldgrave and the Highland chieftain Glenroy in Ferrier’s Destiny; or The Chief ’s Daughter (1831) suggests that even a century after the Union, insularity and prejudice prohibit any facile synthesis of Highland and southern metropolitan

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cultures. Before separating from Henry, Juliana gives birth to twin daughters: Adelaide returns with her mother to London while Mary is raised in the Highlands by her aunt and uncle. Much as Juliana reacted to her own father’s loveless marriage, it is left to the children of this failed union to rectify or to repeat their parents’ mistakes and to overcome the mutual prejudices between Scotland and England that Juliana and Henry’s separation symbolizes. Ferrier contrasts Juliana and Henry Douglas’s passionate but shortlived union to the lasting affection and domestic tranquility shared by Mary’s aunt and uncle, Alicia and Archibald Douglas. Alicia, herself the child of an Anglo-Celtic marriage, has experienced the “heartlessness of fashion and the insipidity of elegance” in London (89), the “communion of intellect” in Edinburgh (90), and the “calm seclusion of domestic life” in the Highlands (92). Although she was forbidden to marry her first love because of her “base Scotch blood” (78), she “diligently strove, not only to make up her mind to the lot which had devolved to her, but to bring to it such a frame of cheerfulness, as should enable her to contribute to her husband’s happiness” (92). Alicia’s self-restraint, and indeed selfeffacement, preserves domestic tranquility not only by furthering her husband’s happiness but also by enabling her to dissipate cultural tensions between the Highland and English members of her family. Like Anne Grant, Alicia is equally familiar with the frivolousness of metropolitan society and the parochial prejudices of the Highlands; however, she shares neither. Consequently, she manages to calm the hysterical Juliana and to placate the ludicrous old aunts of Glenfern, who cannot understand why their delicate niece refuses to eat herring and shrieks at the sound of a bagpipe. Marriage reveals that the qualities that distinguish Alicia as a good wife – self-sacrifice, tolerance, and attentiveness to others’ feelings – are also those of an effective cultural mediator. Ferrier allocates the task of preserving national harmony to cultural and racial hybrids, assigning them the role of “wives” in an Anglo-Scottish union. Marriage represents racial hybridity, or mixed blood, as a potential form of cultural hybridity that must be realized through a process of dislocation. Although Mary is Anglo-Celtic by birth, she must experience both Highland and southern metropolitan cultures before she can become a successful cultural mediator like her aunt Alicia. Ferrier revises what Trumpener has identified as the national tale’s conventional movement from the English metropolis to the Celtic peripheries by describing Mary’s journey from the Highlands to Bath.44 Mary’s perspective assumes the peripheral and “exotic” Highlands as culturally normative, instead

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placing the manners and mores of urban English society under scrutiny. Mary’s Highland upbringing has left her “full of simplicity and feeling” (159), but perhaps a little too sheltered and too emotionally refined. Alicia determines to counteract the effects of Mary’s insular childhood by sending her to visit her mother and sister in Bath, where “new scenes will give a stimulus to her mind; the necessity of exertion will brace the languid faculties of her soul” (182). Upon leaving Glenfern, Mary promises her great-aunts, “I will come back to you your own ‘Highland Mary.’ No Englishman, with his round face and trim meadows, shall ever captivate me” (192). Yet Mary does not return home unchanged; instead, she learns to see herself and the Highland society from which she has come through the eyes of those living in metropolitan England. As the manners of metropolitan England become increasingly familiar to her, those of the Highlands conversely are defamiliarized until she is at home in both cultures and in neither. Although this unhoming is painful, revealing to Mary the fictionality of all nationalities, it also suits her to participate in the creation of a hybrid British identity. Mary’s visit to Bath, a hotbed of frivolous pleasures and petty vices, teaches her to regulate her sometimes excessive sensibility by viewing herself through others’ eyes, or becoming, in the terms of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments an impartial spectator of her own and others’ moral conduct. When she first arrives in Bath, the highly sensitive Mary feels alienated by the self-interested sophistication of her new acquaintances and the luxurious ostentation of her surroundings. Finding herself “surrounded by all that wealth could purchase, or luxury invent . . . her thoughts reverted to the pious thanksgiving, and affectionate meeting that graced their social meal in the sweet sunny parlour at Lochmarlie” (225). Only after her mother’s coldness and her sister’s affectations have brought her to tears does Mary come to appreciate the warm affections and open countenances that she had taken for granted in the Highlands. Yet she later laughs at her own over-wrought sensibilities and narrow-minded expectations: “What a fool I was . . . to view so seriously what, after all, must be merely difference of manner; and how illiberal to expect everyone’s manners should accord exactly with my ideas” (231). Mary soon realizes that she must be tolerant of differences in custom and manner if she is to appreciate the good in metropolitan society – the opportunities it provides for learning, entertainment, and conversation. Whenever she fails to understand her new environment, she reminds herself, “it can only be the difference in our manners” (225). Although she retains her dislike of affectation and ostentation, Mary gradually grows accustomed

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to the conventions of polite society and even appropriates some of its manners herself. When Mary’s great-aunt Grizzy arrives in Bath from the Highlands several months later, Mary recognizes the extent to which she has internalized metropolitan English standards of propriety: Mary’s taste was somewhat startled, even while her heart warmed at the sight of the good old aunt . . . . absence had dispelled the blest illusions of habitual intercourse; and, for the first time, she beheld her aunt freed from its softening spell. Still her heart clung to her as to one known and loved from infancy; and she soon rose superior to the weakness she felt was besetting her, in the slight sensation of shame as she contrasted her awkward manner and uncouth accent with the graceful refinement of those with whom she associated. (372)

The English manners that were once so alienating are now second nature to Mary. Yet the sense of shame she feels for finding Great-Aunt Grizzy less than graceful and refined signals Mary’s ideological distance from both Highland and English cultures. She can no longer regard either as “natural” or normative. Mary’s hybridization prepares her to become both a wife and a cultural mediator. Her marriage to the Anglo-Celtic Colonel Lennox is a revision of her parents’ short-lived union, which suggests that that the achievement of Anglo-Scottish harmony must be a lengthy process, initially fraught with misunderstanding and conflict. Mary’s great-aunts, members of an older generation, insist that Mary must marry a “true Highlander” (216), and that her children “maun a’ be Scots” (220). Mary initially shares their antipathy to an English husband. However, Colonel Lennox, the son of a Highland soldier and an Englishwoman, calls into question what it means to be a “true Highlander.” Before Mary meets Lennox, her cousin warns her that he “is as brave as a real Highlander, though he has the misfortune to be only half a one” (263). Implicitly mocking Mary’s prejudices, Ferrier pointedly does not attempt to answer the question of what makes a “real Highlander” real. Instead, Marriage dismisses such authentic and homogeneous national identities as untenable fictions. Lennox’s mixed parentage and his travels with his regiment have acquainted him with a diversity of cultures. After various proofs of Lennox’s outstanding moral integrity, Mary realizes that the ethnicity of her future husband does not matter; instead, she hopes to marry “a man on whose judgment I could rely for advice and assistance, and for whom I could feel a certain deference that I consider due from a wife to her husband” (384). Rejecting the national prejudices of an older generation, Mary learns to value individual moral character over racial and cultural identity. While Juliana and Henry’s

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Anglo-Scottish union failed because each was too narrow-minded to tolerate the other’s differences, Mary and Lennox’s domestic harmony suggests that Highlanders can be incorporated into a united Great Britain only through a gradual erosion of cultural insularity, or through multiple instances of the unhoming that Mary and Lennox have experienced. Marriage’s representation of Anglo-Celtic hybridization reconfigures Clan-Albin’s national division of moral labor. Johnstone appoints Celts the guardians of Britain’s moral character, suggesting that imperial security and prosperity depend on the preservation of traditional Highland culture. Ferrier, in contrast, relegates the task of integrating the Highlands and southern Briton to those who are neither natives nor strangers in the Highlands and in metropolitan England, and whose open-minded adaptability suits them to mediate between two equally prejudiced and insular peoples. Marriage’s purely English and Highland characters are markedly unwilling to abandon their customary perspectives and to adapt to new ways of life. It is left to those characters whose mixed Anglo-Celtic ancestry links them to two cultures to perform the work of mediation and nation formation. Regardless of their gender, these culturally and racially liminal characters play the role of “wife” in a national union. As a critique of the profound national disunity revealed by Highland emigration, Ferrier’s insistence on the erosion of cultural insularity is in a way more radical than Johnstone’s anti-imperial and anti-English vision of Celtic cooperation. While the pro- and anti-Union pamphlets of 1705–7 depicted Scotland as England’s bride largely in order to illustrate its economic and political disempowerment, Marriage suggests that the position of “wife” is a burdensome but privileged one. Although cultural defamiliarization is necessarily painful, and although it requires a degree of self-effacement, or at least the loss of a stable sense of identity, it also permits the articulation of new identities built on the tolerance of cultural difference. Ferrier’s last novel, Destiny; or the Chief ’s Daughter (1831), revises, and perhaps even retracts, Marriage’s vision of a hybrid Britishness by foregrounding the threat that cultural and racial mixing pose to an already disempowered Highland society. Ferrier’s increasing ambivalence towards hybridization as a means of national integration reflects the decreasing viability of Highland communities between 1818 and 1831. While Ferrier was writing Marriage, the Highland economy was just emerging from its brief period of prosperity during the Napoleonic Wars, and Highlanders were widely celebrated as military heroes. Yet by the time Destiny was published, wool prices had plummeted, population growth had increased

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exponentially, and landowners were desperately trying to rid themselves of these loyal defenders.45 Destiny indicts these landowners through the character of Glenroy, a Highland chief who shows little concern for his impoverished tenants and attends to the cultivation of his estate only so that he can continue to fund his extravagant debauchery. Without the moral and economic guidance of their patriarch, Glenroy’s tenants look to the south for new ways of making a living. They aspire to metropolitan luxuries and abandon their traditional values and customs. Destiny suggests that the moral and economic regeneration of Highland society requires a precarious combination of modernization and tradition, of hybridization and preservation. In words that smack of anti-miscegenation, Destiny seeks a way to “mend the breed, which has degenerated and is still degenerating.”46 When Glenroy’s daughter, Edith, marries her first cousin, Ronald, the purity of their shared blood resembles the strength of their affection for the Highlands. Their affection is tested by their experiences of cultural unhoming, Ronald’s as a sailor enslaved by Algerians, and Edith’s, less dramatically, by her sojourn with her plebian and mercantile aunt and uncle in London. When they return to the Highlands, their exposure to other ways of life has prepared them to oversee the running of their newly improved estate, and thus to “mend the breed” culturally and economically, as well as racially. In contrast to Marriage’s celebration of an Anglo-Celtic identity, Destiny questions the desirability of cultural and racial hybridization given the rapid transformations of the Highland economy and landscape in the years after the Napoleonic Wars. In Destiny, Ferrier reverts to the national division of moral labor prescribed by Clan-Albin, in which the familial structure of Highland society cultivates the social and domestic virtues while southern metropolitan Britain oversees a dubious program of imperial expansion. Although this distribution of moral labor seems to promote the segregation rather than the integration of the Highlanders, it nevertheless promises to mediate between cultural insularity and complete homogenization by permitting Highlanders to retain their distinctive traditions and values while contributing morally, economically, and militarily to the collective national good. As James Steuart argued in his Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767), the purpose of a division of labor, whether in a home or a nation, is “to employ the inhabitants . . . in such a manner as naturally to create reciprocal relations and dependencies between them, so as to make their several interests lead them to supply one another with their reciprocal wants.”47 By prescribing

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the integration of Highlanders through a national division of labor, Scottish national tales sought to expose and exploit pre-existing networks of dependency between the Highlands and the rest of Great Britain and to represent the danger that the Clearances posed to national and imperial security and prosperity. domesticated highlanders and women writers Scottish national tales configure a national division of labor within a gendered matrix of power structured through oppositions between the domestic and the political, and the private and the public. Yet if these novels map the nineteenth-century separation of spheres onto the geography of Great Britain, with the Highlands representing the domestic and southern Britain the political realms, they also reveal the fundamental centrality of the family to the nation, and expose the political import of domesticity.48 By domesticating Highlanders, national tales attribute to them virtues typically considered feminine; yet these feminine virtues form the basis of a masculinity at once heroic and refined, courageous and compassionate. Highlanders’ feminization thus does not necessarily signal their disempowerment or imply a need for their subordination to the firm control of enlightened metropolitan Britain, although as Grant’s Essays demonstrates, it can do so. And Highlanders by no means renounce their political prerogative by serving as the angels in the house of empire. Quite to the contrary, national tales feminize Highlanders in an effort to re-empower them by illustrating their crucial importance to the moral health and military strength of Great Britain.49 In arguing for Highlanders’ integration into a supposedly already united Great Britain, Scottish national tales performatively repositioned another politically marginalized group as central to British nation formation – the women who wrote them. National tales accord women a form of authority that transcends the boundaries of the domestic sphere. For instance, in The Saxon and the Gael (1814), Mary, an unmarried and independently wealthy woman, articulates a Scottish identity that incorporates Lowlanders and Highlanders. Uniting in her own demeanor “an indifferent mixture of the calm calculating shrewdness and suspicion of the low-country, and the wild-fire of the mountains,” Mary assumes the role of translator, undertaking to explain the Saxon and the Gael to each other and, implicitly, to the novel’s readers.50 She justifies this undertaking by arguing that mores and manners, the special province of women, define national identity: “men give laws to a country” but “in this age of

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refinement, when manners are all in all, women give it manners” (i: 193). Using her social status to influence the novel’s younger female characters, Mary encourages them to value themselves upon “personal virtues” (i: 38), and to avoid both Lowlanders’ narrow-minded “purse pride” and Highlanders’ equally bigoted pride in birth and blood. The young women whom Mary advises are emblems of a formative Scottish identity that transcends the distinction between Saxon and Gael. They embody “the first charm of Scottish society; – the artless gaiety of the heart which has nothing to conceal, – the unrestrained burst of native feeling, which, true to the touch of native sympathy, unfolds itself in happy confidence” (i: 191–2). Through her supposedly natural prerogative as an arbiter of manners and morals, Mary remakes a racially divided Scotland into a community bound by shared sympathies. The authors of national tales, like Mary, invoked their moral authority as women to mediate among the races and cultures of Great Britain. By situating domesticity as central to national and imperial interest, these novelists invested themselves with the authority to intervene in political discourses that traditionally were considered the province of men. Suggesting that their own refined sensibilities enabled them to appreciate Highlanders’ hitherto unrecognized virtues and authorized them to explain this seemingly savage people to a Lowland and English readership, the authors of national tales implicitly staked their claims as citizens of a sentimental nation. In fact, their own infiltration into a masculine sphere of public discourse was arguably more successful than their attempts to promote the assimilation of Highlanders. Johnstone, for example, was lauded for pursuing the “profession of authorship” with “absolutely no sacrifice or loss of feminine dignity.”51 The literary domestication of the Highlands, in contrast, ultimately did nothing to help the tens of thousands who were cleared out of their homes besides possibly generating compassion for them. And as Scotch Novel Reading suggests, it was difficult for authors to control and direct their readers’ sensibilities. Readers’ identification with and compassion for the domesticated Highlanders and the pastoral ways of life represented in national tales easily could make a mockery of the very real hardships that Highlanders faced. Alternatively, sensibility could function as a form of aesthetic reification completely divorced from charitable action. Indeed, Johnstone claims in the preface to Clan-Albin that the aim of her “simple delineation of Scottish manners and scenery” is merely to “meliorate the heart” of her reader, presumably by eliciting admiration for Highlanders’ virtues, and compassion for their plight (1). Perhaps attempting to

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conceal, or at least mitigate, the all too obvious political import of her novel, Johnstone designates as its beneficiaries not Highlanders, but its Lowland and English readers. Whereas the army exploited Highlanders as a source of manpower, national tales employ them as a source of moral instruction, rendering them the objects rather than the recipients of the sympathies of a community of readers from which they were excluded. The radical and utopian alternatives to depopulation proposed by national tales constituted a conservative reaction to the Clearances – conservative in its efforts to preserve a disappearing people, and also in its tendency to elicit sympathy rather than prescribe action. National tales’ fantasies of an Edenic, domestic Highland society, in other words, were produced by the imperialist ideologies underlying the Clearances themselves.

chapter 5

Rebellions and re-unions in the historical novel

Walter Scott’s Waverley novels might seem to epitomize this book’s claim that pro-Union Scottish writers employed discourses of feeling derived from both Jacobite culture and Enlightenment historiography to envision a Britain united by shared sympathies. Waverley paradigmatically describes “the total eradication of the Jacobite party,” which the novel conflates with Highland culture, as necessary to Scotland’s transition from feudalism to modernity and thus to the harmonious British union seemingly symbolized by the English Waverley’s marriage to the Lowland Scot Rose Bradwardine at the end of the novel. Given this marital allegory of an Anglo-Scottish union of affections, it is unsurprising that, since the early nineteenth century, the Waverley novels’ readers have remarked upon Scott’s encouragement of the “social sympathy” proper to a civilized post-Union Britain.1 Recently, Evan Gottlieb has described the Waverley novels as “saturated with sympathetic discourse”; Andrew Krull has claimed that Scott’s protagonists show a “commitment to the ideal of a community based on the affections”; and Ian Duncan and Ina Ferris have argued that Scott appropriated and transformed traditionally feminine “domestic discourses of sentiment” to perform the work of British nation formation.2 Contrary to these critics, I will argue that Scott, along with his contemporaries James Hogg and John Galt, questioned the viability of sentimental nationhood during an era of foreign revolution and national unrest by exploring a feminized sensibility’s potential to disrupt the process of British unification. The Waverley novels thus represent the culmination of the sympathetic nation formation described in the preceding chapters only insofar as they perform its critique. This chapter departs from, but is much indebted to, recent critical discussions of the different ways in which Scott’s, Hogg’s, and Galt’s historical fiction negotiates between the feminized genre of romance and implicitly masculine historical discourses to represent the relationships between Scotland’s independent past and its British present.3 Like the 139

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genres that these writers employed, the literary landscape in which they located themselves was highly gendered. In Scott’s Shadow, Duncan describes early nineteenth-century Edinburgh as constituting a “force field of local conditions of production and reception – a charged proximity of works, authors, publishers, and reviewers in a relatively confined political economy.”4 This field was dominated by Scott’s Waverley novels; Waverley was initially published anonymously, and the subsequent novels were attributed simply to the Author of Waverley, until financial difficulties impelled Scott to confirm his already widely suspected authorship in 1827. Ina Ferris has shown that reviewers perceived Waverley and its successors as re-invigorating the novel – a genre that during the 1790s had become increasingly associated with women writers and readers – by subjecting romance to history and eschewing moral didacticism for detailed description. By the early 1820s, under the Waverley novels’ over-arching influence, Edinburgh’s vibrant literary life had acquired a distinctly “masculine cast.” It was not simply that patronage and publication were controlled to a great extent by the relatively small circle of men associated with Blackwood’s Magazine and the Edinburgh Review, or that female authorship showed a proportionally greater decline in Scotland than in England during the early nineteenth century, as Duncan has noted.5 The “masculine cast” of early nineteenth-century Scottish writing also derived from Scott’s appropriation and masculinization of the discourses of feeling that the authors of national tales had employed to imagine a united Britain, and his simultaneous devaluation of women’s capacity for reason. In their revaluation of women’s sensibility as a powerful and potentially regenerative historical force, as in so many other aspects of their writing, Hogg and Galt must be seen as responding to Scott’s encroachment and as positioning their works in early nineteenthcentury Edinburgh’s gendered literary landscape. While Duncan, Ferris, and Miranda J. Burgess, among others, have thoroughly explored the gendered production and reception of novels by Scott and his contemporaries, they have largely overlooked the representation of women in these novels.6 Accordingly, I will turn from questions of the gendering of historical fiction to examine how gender functions in historical fiction. Despite their differing configurations of the relationships between romance and history and between Scotland and England, Scott’s, Hogg’s, and Galt’s novels share in common female characters who challenge early nineteenth-century ideals of feminine propriety. These novelists revisit early eighteenth-century pro- and antiUnion pamphlets’ representation of Scotland as a woman to explore the

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wayward tendencies of sensibility and its potential to disturb rather than consolidate the social bonds that, by the early nineteenth century, supposedly united Great Britain. Political pamphlets had feminized Scotland to emphasize “her” disempowerment relative to England in the negotiation of the 1707 Union. Mid-eighteenth-century sentimental fiction had explored the positive connotations of femininity, associating British identity with a feminized but not effeminate masculinity; and national tales in their turn had emphasized Highlanders’ sensibility and domesticity to argue for their integration into a united Britain. In contrast, Scott’s, Hogg’s, and Galt’s historical novels depict women’s passions as threats to sentimental community. Representing women’s emotional capacity as a function of their sexuality, these novelists suggest that if unchecked, refined feeling easily devolves into disruptive passion.7 Even while women’s sensibility supposedly suited them for civilizing or domesticating savage peoples, their predisposition to excessive feeling could render them savage. In the historical novels that this chapter will discuss – Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and Saint Ronan’s Well (1824), Hogg’s Three Perils of Man (1822) and Three Perils of Woman (1823), and Galt’s The Entail (1822) – female characters’ ungovernable passions affiliate them with Scotland’s feudal, Jacobite past, itself a historical zone of savagery that was all the more threatening because of its location within Great Britain. Whereas male characters in these novels attempt futilely to restore the political institutions and economic practices of feudal Scotland, women, somewhat more successfully, protect Jacobite traditions and sentiments.8 The sentimental legacies of Jacobite culture represented by Scott’s, Hogg’s, and Galt’s female characters challenge the stability of a postUnion British identity from which women and Jacobites were excluded. The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century demonization or pathologization of women’s capacity for feeling was hardly confined to Scotland. Claudia Johnson has argued persuasively that the French Revolution played an important role in transforming the gendered connotations of sensibility, as anti-Jacobin writers claimed refined feeling as the prerogative of the male ruling class and a bulwark of social order in Britain. They left women, according to Johnson, “without a distinct gender site,” stripped of what had formerly been regarded as a feminine virtue.9 Women increasingly were accorded extravagant, and in some cases diseased, forms of feeling; their disruptive passions aligned them with social disorder and political revolution. Scott’s, Galt’s, and Hogg’s novels did not respond only, or even primarily, to the French Revolution, but also to the earlier rebellions that it recalled for Britons – particularly

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the 1688 revolution and the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions – and to the more recent working-class uprisings in post-Waterloo Britain and Ireland.10 They explored the connotations of revolution as, on one hand, a dissociative break in a linear teleology of historical progress and, on the other hand, the regenerative turning of a wheel that has no origin and no end point.11 Through its heroine’s death, The Bride of Lammermoor privileges the first model of revolution, suggesting that the Stuarts’ 1688 exile ruptured a Scottish past from a British present and initiated a Union that destroyed the social bonds of feudal culture. For Scott, revolution radically disrupts a teleological process of “improvement,” or of progress towards civilized modernity, that ideally should be gradual and organic. Both of The Three Perils and The Entail favor the second model of revolution, imagining the revivification of the feudal chivalry and Jacobite ideals of honor and courage that flourished in Scotland before 1688. In this nonlinear understanding of historical change, multiple versions of the past can co-exist with and be incorporated into the present. Historical fiction situated revolution firmly in the past and thus could explore its reverberations without challenging the illusion of national stability in the past, an illusion that was perhaps particularly necessary following years of war with France. The end of the Napoleonic Wars did not alleviate local and national anxieties raised by land enclosure, clearances, industrial depression, and poverty; on the contrary, it exacerbated working-class unrest and prompted new demands for parliamentary reform. While Peterloo is the best known of the working-class protests, Scotland experienced its own Radical War, a series of organized riots in 1819 and 1820, occurring primarily in the industrialized city of Glasgow and its environs.12 George IV’s reconciliatory visit to Edinburgh in 1822 was thus perhaps less a celebration of actual Anglo-Scottish integration than an effort to perpetuate the illusion of national unity and stability. Some of the king’s Scottish advisors felt that his visit to Scotland would weaken the Radical movement by demonstrating the king’s interest in the welfare of his Scottish subjects. By domesticating Jacobite and Highland iconography, the spectacle surrounding the king’s visit seemed to celebrate the achievement of a stable, secure, and prosperous Great Britain. Orchestrated largely by Walter Scott, this spectacle demonstrated the combination of pro-Union sentiments and Scottish pride evident in Waverley. While previous commentators have represented the king’s visit as a moment of historical closure signifying the renunciation of a Scottish past for a British present, Caroline McCracken-Flesher’s account reveals that Scott and his contemporaries were very much aware of the fragility of

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this Anglo-Scottish unity and of the performativity of the Scottish identity that the visit staged.13 Scott not only turned all Lowland Scots temporarily into Highlanders and incorporated Highlanders, sometimes against their will, into his pageantry of Scottishness; he also rendered all Jacobites staunch supporters of the Hanoverian monarchs, and conversely made all Hanoverians into Jacobites. Scott represented the visit as George’s return to his people, thereby claiming the king, by right of his Stuart ancestry, as Scotland’s own, and making Scotland rather than England the origin of British greatness. Indeed, Scott’s entreaties to Highland Chieftains to arm their men in honor of the king’s arrival in Scotland were reminiscent of 1745, when Highlanders armed themselves to welcome Charles Edward Stuart. Although the novels I discuss in this chapter do not address the king’s visit explicitly, they all suggest that laying the past to rest paradoxically entails reviving the past, and that, consequently, historical closure is impossible. They remind readers that reconciliation is necessary only because of a previous rebellion; resolution and revolution each necessitate the other. The Bride of Lammermoor, written during the Radical War, and Saint Ronan’s Well, written a year after the king’s visit, reveal Scott’s increasing pessimism about the possibility of establishing an enduring Anglo-Scottish union of affections on one hand or of reconstituting an authentic Scottish identity on the other. Much as the pageantry that Scott organized to welcome the king revived rather than buried Jacobite sentiments, The Bride of Lammermoor awakens Scottish folk traditions while seeming to disavow them. Through the arranged marriage of its protagonist, Lucy Ashton, The Bride of Lammermoor explores the psychological and cultural violence underlying a seemingly harmonious Anglo-Scottish Union. Like The Bride of Lammermoor, Saint Ronan’s Well features a female protagonist who is associated with a seemingly “authentic” or “natural” Scottishness that is destroyed by political schemes. But in contrast to Lucy, Clara Mowbray is found unmarriageable, and the Scottish identity with which she is associated is rendered suspect, a facade that, like the pageantry of the king’s visit, conceals tensions and flaws. Hogg’s and Galt’s marginalization by the Edinburgh literary establishment is reflected in their exclusion from the inner circle of those involved in welcoming the king to Scotland. Galt’s account of the king’s visit in a Blackwood’s sketch called “The Gathering of the West” adamantly claims a part for the denizens of western Scotland in welcoming the monarch.14 The weavers who had figured prominently in the Radical War are shown joining in the general descent of western Scots on Edinburgh; and while

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they appear to be loyal patriots, their very presence in Galt’s sketch infuses the celebratory crowds with the possibility of mob violence. Hogg’s The Three Perils of Man and The Three Perils of Woman, and Galt’s The Entail challenged the visit’s fiction of British unity and historical closure by representing Anglo-Scottish Union as a continual work in progress and by revealing the fault lines in the national cohesiveness that Scots performed for the king. Much as their female characters revive Scotland’s Jacobite past, The Perils and The Entail challenge the teleology of Enlightenment historiography with the narrative patterns of Jacobite history, which, as William Donaldson explains, “took the form of a series of heroic legends” that were continually re-incorporated into the present through “mythogenic” processes.15 Hogg’s and Galt’s regeneration of feminized Jacobite sentiments position their novels as less “manly” than the Waverley novels, with their seeming disavowal and domestication of Jacobitism; yet their celebration of women’s passions also violates the conventions of feminine propriety governing national tales and other fiction by women. Through their unconventional female characters, Hogg and Galt explore what McCracken-Flesher, in reference to Scott’s novels, has called “possible Scotlands” – versions of Scottish identity that acknowledge their own constructedness. scotland’s to be the “bryde” of lammermoor In the introduction to the 1830 edition of The Bride of Lammermoor, Scott explains that he fashioned the novel from one of his mother’s tales and from Law’s Memorials, a seventeenth-century history of “The Memorable Things That Fell Out within this Island of Brittain from 1638 to 1684,” edited and annotated by Scott’s friend Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe in 1818.16 Scott claims to have learned not only the story of The Bride, but also his skill in bringing history to life, from his mother. “If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the past times,” he acknowledged, “it is very much from the studies with which she presented me.”17 Thus he wondered “if I shall make [The Bride of Lammermoor] so effective in two volumes as my mother does in her quarter of an hour’s crack by the fireside?”18 By the time Scott wrote The Bride of Lammermoor, which occupied the first two and a half volumes of the third series of Tales of My Landlord, the Author of Waverley had clearly established his ability to make “effective” use of the genre of the multi-volume novel. The Waverley novels’ marriage of romance and history pleased readers and reviewers alike. Yet Scott’s query is perhaps not merely false – or even

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genuine – modesty. Instead it hints at the complexities of the Waverley novels’ union of romance and history, of oral tradition and written records, and suggests Scott’s awareness of the gendered implications of these modes of telling stories. The Bride of Lammermoor’s double origins in Scott’s mother’s tale on the one hand, and Law’s Memorials on the other, might explain its depictions of unnatural mothers, supernatural mothers, and the tragic effects of silencing and usurping female voices.19 Ironically, critics have perpetuated this silencing by suggesting that the novel’s oppositions – Jacobite and Whig, aristocracy and new money, feudalism and commerce, Scottish independence and British unity – are played out through Ravenswood, one of Scott’s typically wavering heroes.20 I will argue instead that these conflicts, and particularly that between Scottish past and British present, are enacted upon and through Lucy Ashton, the eponymous but critically neglected bride of Lammermoor. Lucy is significant among Scott’s wide array of female characters because she stands as a figure for Scotland in what Peter Garside has termed his “Union novel.”21 The Bride of Lammermoor is set against the backdrop of the political conflicts surrounding the 1707 Union of Parliaments, and Lucy’s role as bride-to-be invokes the common early eighteenth-century analogy between marriage and political union. Like the Scotland of these early analogies, Lucy is reduced to an object of exchange in a complicated political barter. Lady Ashton, a Whig, and Edgar Ravenswood, a Jacobite, each employ Lucy as a weapon in their struggle for political power and familial revenge. Ravenswood’s father lost the Ravenswood estate when he was convicted of treason for supporting the Stuart monarchy in 1688. In place of the estate that he regards as his rightful property, Ravenswood has inherited only a “legacy of vengeance,” an overwhelming desire to recover his familial honor (19). The forfeited Ravenswood estate has been purchased by the Puritanical Sir William Ashton, who has risen with the Stuarts’ demise to become Keeper of the Great Seal of a disorderly and divided Scotland. His wife, Lady Ashton, a descendant of the ancient and powerful Douglas family, counters Ravenswood’s efforts to recover the past with her own schemes to restore her family’s former glories. Whereas Ravenswood’s “legacy of vengeance” is shaped by the momentous historical events described in Law’s Memorials, Lucy Ashton takes refuge from these incidents in a culture of legend and romance seemingly divorced from the political entanglements in which Ravenswood and her parents are mired. With her ambitious and politicking mother frequently

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absent in Edinburgh or London and her father occupied by his duties as Lord Keeper, Lucy finds a surrogate parent in Alice, an aged and blind tenant who has lived on the Ravenswood estate since it belonged to Edgar’s father. A “queen of gossips, so far as legendary lore is concerned” (30), Alice uses her knowledge of the past to foretell the future. Under her tutelage, Lucy has developed an insatiable appetite for “old legendary tales of ardent devotion and unalterable affection, chequered as they so often are with strange adventures and supernatural horrors” (25). These stories refine Lucy’s feelings, cultivating in her a “submissive gentleness” and an “indifference to the tinsel of worldly pleasure” that her ambitious parents lack (117, 25). They also leave her with a “romantic cast” of mind that leads her to believe that she might marry Ravenswood in spite of their families’ political differences (25). By effectively opting out of the history of political and religious conflict in which her ancestry is implicated, Lucy discovers instead a culture of folk traditions of which Lord Ashton, a parvenu landlord, is entirely ignorant, and which Ravenswood discounts as the outmoded trappings of a barbaric past. Lucy represents a Scottish identity built on the Jacobite ideals of chivalry, loyalty, and honor that she acquires both from Alice’s stories and from her own romance reading. Yet, unlike Alice, Lucy is not immersed in Jacobite culture as a form of immediate, lived, or “naı¨ve” experience. Instead, she initially approaches its folk traditions like the romances she reads, as amusements to be enjoyed rather than beliefs to be lived, and as an escape from the political and familial conflicts that surround her. Indeed, it is only because she avoids these entanglements that Lucy is able to learn, in the Lord Keeper’s words, “the special history of every boor about the castle” (29). By collecting these histories and mingling with their narrators, Lucy fulfills her longing for the community that her family does not provide. A remnant of decaying feudalism, this community is bound by immediate and authentic ties of affection. Although the Scottish folk identity that Lucy represents appears to transcend distinctions of party, Scotland’s feudal past is, for Scott, indelibly associated with Jacobitism. The Bride of Lammermoor suggests that the ancient bonds of loyalty between landlord and tenants only began to weaken when James II was thrust from his throne and Lord Ravenswood from his family estate. The “gentle, soft, timid” Lucy thus evokes the fragility and impotence of a feudal culture deprived of its hereditary leaders (25). By the turn of the eighteenth century, Jacobite culture already is morphing into the “legendary lore” that Lucy, like Scott himself, collects.

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Despite their political opposition and mutual hatred, Ravenswood and Lady Ashton share a derision for Lucy’s “romantic cast of mind.” Known as “the Lord Keeper’s Lady Keeper” (170), Lady Ashton has an obsession with restoring her family’s former honor that makes her a domineering wife and an unnatural mother, one “to whom the qualities of her children’s hearts, as well as the prospect of their domestic happiness, seemed light in comparison to their rank and temporal greatness” (27). Lady Ashton, who ridicules Lucy’s seeming “want of spirit” and refers to her mockingly as the “Lammermoor Shepherdess,” is uninterested in a daughter who can do little to further the family’s interests except by making a good marriage (26). Instead, she focuses her schemes for the family’s political advancement on her son, Douglas, “on whom had descended a large portion of her own ambitious and undaunted disposition” (26). Although Lady Ashton’s political machinations constitute a deviant usurpation of her husband’s patriarchal prerogatives, she is, Scott implies, only too womanly, ruled by her “violent passions” rather than by reason or law (17). She illustrates the disruptive tendencies of unregulated sensibility, as her efforts to restore the past ultimately destroy the family that she hopes to raise to new heights of power. Ravenswood, for his part, rejects Lucy’s “legendary lore” as the cultural remnants of an unenlightened and uncivilized past even while he seeks to restore his family’s feudal prerogatives. The literal-minded Ravenswood is troubled by Lucy’s “softness” of mind, or her impressionability, and warns her that “in poetry there is always fallacy, and sometimes fiction” (164). Ravenswood’s dismissal of fiction prevents him from recognizing the relevance of legendary lore to his own “legacy of vengeance.” His refusal to learn from his family’s past destines him to repeat it. In repudiating the authority of the women who preserve tradition, he inadvertently thwarts his efforts at regaining his estate. Alice, who retains her intense feudal allegiance to the Ravenswood family even after Lord Ashton has acquired the Ravenswood estate, repeatedly warns Ravenswood that, according to family tradition, his love for Lucy will lead to his own demise. Yet Ravenswood dismisses this “ancient feudal vassal,” as a superstitious hag, commanding her, “Be silent, woman!” (150). Taking him at his word, Alice abandons speech as a medium of communication: when Ravenswood next meets Alice, cloaked in a shroud, “her withered lips moved fast although no sounds issued from them” (188). After learning that Alice died only a few minutes before he had encountered her apparition, Ravenswood wonders, “why was that manifest to the eye which could not unfold its tale to the ear?” (190). The answer to

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his question lies in his prior refusal to listen to Alice’s tale. Alice cannot or will not speak because Ravenswood will not acknowledge the authority of tradition. Precisely because he scorns the “ordinary prejudices about witchcraft, omens, and vaticinations, to which his age and country still gave such implicit credit” (193), Ravenswood unwittingly fulfills the prophecies surrounding his ancestry. According to tradition, his ancestor inadvertently had caused the death of a beautiful Naiad who lived in a fountain on the estate, rendering the site “fatal to the Ravenswood family” (40). “From this period,” the narrator coolly informs us, “the house of Ravenswood was supposed to have dated decay” (40). Whereas he initially suggested that the Ravenswood family’s decline was precipitated by the overturning of the Stuart monarchy in 1688, the narrator now offers an alternative history. By refusing to arbitrate between them, the novel endorses both as valid narratives of the Ravenswoods’ demise. By dismissing one of these histories as mere superstition, however, Ravenswood forecloses possible interpretations of the present, becoming a poor reader of his own actions. Realizing that his growing affection for Lucy is incompatible with his desire for revenge on her family, Ravenswood meets her at the fateful fountain with the intention of parting with her forever. With an omniscience that transcends Ravenswood’s blinkered perspective, the narrator explains, “To a superstitious eye, Lucy Ashton, folded in her plaided mantle . . . might have suggested the idea of the murdered Nymph of the Fountain. But Ravenswood saw only a female exquisitely beautiful” (155). Because he lacks a “superstitious eye,” Ravenswood interprets the situation literally: he sees it as dangerous not because of the legend pertaining to the fountain, but rather because of the political conflicts that render marriage to Lucy problematic. His inability to see the similarities between the legend of the fountain and his tryst with Lucy causes Ravenswood to repeat his ancestor’s history. Seduced by Lucy’s beauty, he declares his love “out of the impulse of the moment” (157), initiating a chain of events that will end in her death and his own. Together, Ravenswood’s refusal to credit tradition and Lady Ashton’s clever manipulation of tradition destroy Lucy and, by implication, the Jacobite culture that she represents. After their meeting at the fountain, Lucy and Ravenswood seal their betrothal by breaking a piece of gold – “an emblematic ceremony of their troth-plight,” the narrator informs us, “of which the vulgar still preserve some traces” (158). When Lady Ashton learns of Lucy’s engagement, she turns Ravenswood’s ethic of revenge against him, determining to strike “a blow of deep and decisive vengeance

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upon one, whom she esteemed as her mortal enemy,” even though “she knew that the wound must be dealt through the bosom of her daughter” (235). Lady Ashton dictates that Lucy must marry Bucklaw, the boorish squire of a neighboring estate who promises to further the Ashtons’ political interests. To ensure Lucy’s compliance, Lady Ashton exploits her daughter’s belief in “legendary lore.” She employs Ailsie Gourlay, an old woman suspected of witchcraft, ostensibly to nurse her ailing daughter, but in reality to render Lucy’s customary comforts a source of terror and loathing. Ailsie, as her name suggests, is Alice’s double, “a female agent of hell” (242). Her dark tales of the Ravenswood family’s past convince Lucy “that an evil fate hung over her attachment . . . and the gloom of superstition darkened a mind already sufficiently weakened by sorrow, distress, uncertainty, and an oppressive sense of desertion and desolation” (240). If Ravenswood dismisses folk traditions too readily, Lucy sanctions them with an equally unthinking ease, allowing horror to overcome reason. By transforming the tales that once offered Lucy an escape from domestic and political conflict into a source of anxiety and alienation, Lady Ashton maneuvers Lucy into an engagement to Bucklaw. In contrast to many of the Waverley novels, and to the national tales with which they share a number of conventions, The Bride of Lammermoor refuses the closure of a recuperative marriage that would symbolically reconcile Scotland’s independent past with its British present, and a Scottish cultural identity with a British political identity. Lucy’s engagements are not simply fragmented and distorted reflections of the Union of Parliaments; they are inextricably implicated in the political conflicts surrounding the negotiation of that union.22 Her disempowerment in the negotiation of her own marriage reflects that of the common people of Scotland as their nation was, in Robert Burns’ words, “bought and sold for English gold,” or treated as a commodity in the corrupt transactions of the Scottish and English nobility.23 Reduced, through fear and despair, to a state even more passive than Scott’s passive heroes, Lucy is deprived of all agency in choosing a marriage partner or in determining the conditions of her marriage, as Lady Ashton attends her daughter’s meetings with Bucklaw to serve as an “interpreter” between Lucy and the tongue-tied squire. Interpretation becomes pre-emptive when Lady Ashton assures Bucklaw that Lucy’s reluctance to the proposed match is merely prompted by feminine modesty: “I tell you, in her presence, that she has already consented to be guided by her father and me in this matter” (230). Whereas Ravenswood silenced Alice by refusing to listen to her, Lady Ashton stifles Lucy’s voice by speaking not simply in Lucy’s presence, but

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in her place. Ravenswood is complicit in this silencing, as he privileges the authority of legal and political documents over that of tradition. Despite the “tremulous irregularity” of Lucy’s “incomplete, defaced, blotted” handwriting on the marriage contract that her mother forces her to sign (246), Ravenswood regards Lucy’s signature as an indisputable sign of her consent, “an undeniable piece of evidence,” as he puts it, more expressive of Lucy’s true feelings than the piece of gold that she still wears next to her heart (252). If not a critique of the Union itself, The Bride of Lammermoor is at least an indictment of the motives that inspired it and the conditions under which it was negotiated.24 As her marriage to Bucklaw drives her to a state of madness, Lucy’s bloody, cowering figure contrasts grotesquely with the array of nationally representative female characters in early nineteenth-century Scottish novels.25 Antony Hasler has argued that these characters’ moral development tends to reflect Scotland’s gradual improvement and empowerment within a united Britain.26 By contrast, Lucy’s degeneration into madness suggests that Scotland’s incorporation into a British state silenced, and possibly even destroyed, Scottish folk culture. Lucy becomes the victim of her own sensibility as she no longer consumes legendary lore but is rather consumed by it, interpreting Ailsie’s superstitious prophecies as unmediated reality. The community that once seemed to offer her authentic, immediate affection becomes a source of terror and self-alienation. Lucy begins to resemble the passionate sybils like Meg Merilees and Madge Wildfire who inhabit many of Scott’s novels, as she morphs from a timid, sensitive girl into a “female agent of hell.” Yet Lucy is not a simple example of what Judith Wilt has described as Scott’s “ritual en-witching,” or scapegoating of women who transgress the conventions of domestic femininity; after all, Lucy has all along desired to escape the public and political realms that such women occupy.27 While the arrangement of Lucy’s marriage represents Scots’ disempowerment in the negotiation of union, her subsequent desperate actions remind readers that disempowerment may incite rebellion. After Lucy stabs Bucklaw in their bridal chamber, physically wreaking upon him the psychological violence that she herself has suffered, she is discovered by the wedding guests in a state reminiscent of Alice’s wildly mouthing specter. Lucy “gibbered, made mouths, and pointed at them with her bloody fingers, with the frantic gestures of an exulting demoniac” (260). Her final words, “So you have ta’en up your bonny bridegroom?” (260), are spoken uncharacteristically in dialect and situate her within the demotic folk culture of which she was formerly just an appreciative admirer.28 Her violent resistance to her

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forced marriage demonstrates the potential disruptiveness of her seemingly benign “romantic cast of mind,” as the cultural remnants of Scotland’s feudal past threaten the possibility of peaceful union. Indeed, these traditions ultimately trump Ravenswood’s self-destructive “legacy of vengeance.” Falling prey to the legends he disregarded, Ravenswood is deprived of his final revenge – a duel with Lucy’s brother. Instead, he dies on the morning of the duel when his horse sinks into the quicksand of the Kelpie’s Flow, fulfilling yet another of the ancient prophecies pertaining to the Ravenswood family. Rebellion was much in Scott’s thoughts in 1819, when working-class unrest in England erupted in Peterloo, and weavers’ strikes in Scotland threatened to result in similar violence.29 However, Lucy’s rebellion not only links her to the working class of an industrializing society, as James Chandler’s and Caroline Franklin’s readings of the novel suggest; it is more clearly implicated in the collapse of feudal society. It condenses into a relatively short sequence of events a much more gradual devastation of local traditions and feudal customs as Scotland became part of a modern, commercial Great Britain. Lucy’s death suggests that although the 1707 Union might seem like a marker of progress and civilization for Scotland, the formation of Great Britain also stifled Scotland’s feudal traditions and divorced Scotland’s independent past from its British present. Ravenswood’s and Lucy’s deaths at the end of The Bride of Lammermoor preclude the cultural and historical reconciliation symbolized by Rose Bradwardine and Edward Waverley’s marriage in Waverley. This symbolic resolution instead is displaced onto the form of the novel, which mediates, as Lucy and Ravenswood fail to do, between the literal and the uncanny, between official history and legendary lore. Scott’s appropriation and novelization of his mother’s tale circumscribes the challenge that folk traditions pose to the authority of official historical discourse like Law’s Memorials. Much as Scott’s staging of the king’s visit resurrected Jacobite iconography and Highland traditions to celebrate British unity, The Bride of Lammermoor revives Jacobite culture and traditions even while adamantly asserting the demise of feudal ways of life. The novel thus subverts the British modernity that it seems to affirm. But although it revives Jacobite traditions, The Bride of Lammermoor cannot reconstitute the feudal community of affections that has begun to deteriorate even before the novel’s action begins. While Scott cannot recover sentimental community from a Scottish past, he will not commit to an alienated British present. Rather than seeking to recreate and extend a feudal community founded in

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shared affections and loyalties, as did the national tales discussed in the previous chapter, therefore, Scott attempts to at once evoke and delimit readers’ nostalgia for such community. The Bride of Lammermoor does not consign sensibility to the ahistorical domestic sphere that Burgess, Duncan, Robert Irvine, and others have designated as the repository of sentiment and the realm of reconciliation in the Waverley novels;30 instead, it relegates affective ties to the past. If The Bride of Lammermoor envisions a sentimental community for its early nineteenth-century readers, it is one formed through the shared commemoration of and mourning for the authentic and immediate social bonds of feudal Scotland. James Macpherson, in his Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, argued that civilized peoples “have leisure to cultivate the mind, and to restore it, with reflection, to a primaeval dignity of sentiment.”31 Scott encourages his readers, like the readers of Ossian, to cultivate their finer feelings by reflecting on Scotland’s Jacobite history. However, as Ossian, the last of his race, illustrates, such reflection tends to solipsism; it fails to restore the affective ties of the culture on which the modern individual meditates. Although The Bride of Lammermoor compensates for “the material destruction of a traditional culture” through its “sentimental and aesthetic reconstruction” of that culture, the feelings that it seeks to arouse in readers are pale reflections of those passions exhibited by Lucy and the novel’s other female characters.32 james hogg’s perilous women Hogg’s and Galt’s novels pose alternatives to the linear, teleological model of history that critics have attributed, sometimes misguidedly, to the Waverley novels. Galt represents history as cyclical, comprising repeating patterns that occur on micro- and macro-levels so that the past is continually absorbed into the present. Hogg, in contrast, conceives of history as simultaneous, suggesting that past and present coexist in a mutually influential relationship.33 Until the very recent re-evaluation of their works by Duncan, Ferris, and others, Hogg’s and Galt’s failure to imitate the Waverley novels closely enough ironically caused their critical devaluation or dismissal, often expressed in gendered terms. If Scott occupied an initially uncontested position of proper masculine authority in Edinburgh’s literary culture, the alternative to servile imitation was to inhabit a feminized position. And indeed, according to Ferris, Galt’s and Hogg’s novels were perceived by early nineteenth-century readers as “feminine” in comparison with the Waverley novels because they failed

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to achieve Scott’s masterful subjection of romance to history and called into question the triumph of modernity that the Waverley novels, superficially at least, seem to endorse.34 I suggest that the relatively central and active position women occupy in Hogg’s and Galt’s representations of historical change also may have contributed to the comparative feminization of their novels. For Hogg and Galt, the ardent sensibilities and vibrant traditions fostered by a feminized Jacobite culture cannot be laid to rest as neatly as Scott at times suggests. In Hogg’s Three Perils of Man and Three Perils of Woman, women’s ungovernable passions dictate the vagaries of historical change. Together, these novels trace the connections between women’s historical agency and Scotland’s cultural identity from medieval border wars into the decimated Highlands of 1745 and prosperous but stagnant early nineteenth-century Edinburgh. They may be usefully read as companion texts, “neither randomly paired in the author’s mind, nor thrown together solely for commercial convenience.”35 While in The Three Perils of Man women function as historical agents, assuming a masculine prerogative to direct military and political action, in The Three Perils of Woman, women are the victims of historical change. From The Three Perils of Man’s depiction of feudal warfare to The Three Perils of Woman’s representation of Edinburgh’s manners and mores, Hogg reveals a decrease in women’s social and political agency that parallels the decline of Scotland’s folk traditions and customs. Together, the Perils illustrate James Macpherson’s claims, seconded by Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), that the “passions of the mind never shoot forth more free and unrestrained than in these times we call barbarous.”36 Hogg suggests that modernization destroys the very possibility of sentimental community by requiring the repression of feeling beneath the forms and conventions of polite society. Although Hogg had published stories and even novellas in Blackwood’s Magazine and collections such as The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Other Tales (1818) and Winter Evening Tales (1820), The Three Perils of Man was his first multi-volume novel. Hogg’s poetry had received some acclaim, but both The Three Perils of Man and The Three Perils of Woman were unpopular in part because readers perceived Hogg as intruding, poorly, upon Scott’s territory. Readers were willing to allow that a purportedly uneducated and sometimes uncouth farmer like Hogg, or the Ettrick Shepherd as Blackwood’s dubbed him, might be able to write verse. After all, Blair, Kames, and other writers on rhetoric had argued that savages spoke in metaphors and that poetry was one of the earliest and most

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natural art forms known to humanity. They were less willing to accept that Hogg could write novels, a genre that required knowledge of polite society. Hogg’s extensive use of dialect, depictions of the peasant class, and incorporation of the conventions of oral storytelling confused readers, who did not recognize these elements as proper to the novel.37 Hogg wrote The Three Perils of Woman while struggling to understand the disappointing sales and critical neglect of The Three Perils of Man. The later novel not only demonstrates Hogg’s stubborn refusal to alter his methods of storytelling to win critical approbation; it also formalizes and helps to elucidate The Three Perils of Man’s representation of history as simultaneous and multiple. The Three Perils of Woman’s structural division into circles rather than chapters might be traced to “techniques of oral performance” that emphasize history’s non-linearity by invoking “a world in which the same old follies are perpetrated again and again, from generation to generation.”38 Subtitled “a Series of Domestic Scottish Tales,” The Three Perils of Woman juxtaposes the stories of Gatty Bell, a sheep-farmer’s daughter who falls in love with a Highland laird in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh, and Sally Niven, a flirtatious Lowlander who falls in love with a Highland peasant while living in the parish of Balmillo, near Inverness, during the 1745–6 Jacobite uprising. The Three Perils of Woman follows Waverley in exploring the ’45 as a moment of national trauma that devastated traditional Highland culture and precipitated Scotland’s modernization. However, by beginning in the early nineteenth century with Gatty’s story and ending in 1746 with Sally’s, The Three Perils of Woman challenges the “linear fixity of print” and the teleology of Waverley’s narrative trajectory.39 Although the novel moves by a “retrograde motion,” from present to past, the narrator promises to create a “complete circle” and to “come again to the very beginning of my story.”40 The Three Perils of Man does not employ the formal device of “circles” but instead comprises two closely interwoven plots – one historical and one legendary – that “occupy the same narrative dimension, the same ontological register.”41 It was perceived as an encroachment on Scott’s territory not only because it was a novel but because these plots, set during the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anglo-Scottish border wars, recall Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805).42 The historical plot describes the Scots’ efforts, under the Earl of Douglas, to recover Roxburgh Castle from the English and win Princess Margaret of Scotland as a reward for his labors. The legendary plot begins when Sir Ringhan Redhough, who hopes to increase his already large swath of land on the Scottish side of

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the border, sends a deputation of vassals to Aikwood Castle, the home of “the great enchanter Master Michael Scott” to find out from the wizard how to defeat the English rather than simply joining Douglas’s efforts (457). Both narratives are “taken down” (2) from the manuscript of an old curate named Isaac by an anonymous, enlightened, and fictional editor who prefigures the more obtrusive editor of Hogg’s later novel, Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The editor evinces irritation and embarrassment at Isaac’s “tell-tale manner” (2), but ascribes the curate’s narrative wanderings to his desire to tell the truth: “He was one of those wise and downright men who know that truth tells always the best, and to that maxim he adhered. But the worst of it was, there were so many truths, that any body may see it was scarcely possible to get them all narrated in their proper places” (222). Although The Three Perils of Man is set during the “days of chivalry and romance,” it is in many ways an anti-romance that parodies rather than celebrates the ideals of chivalry, particularly through its representation of women. Of the three titular perils – war, women, and witchcraft – women are the original, and perhaps the most dangerous, peril in the novel insofar as they inspire war and seem to exercise witchcraft. The stouthearted vassal, Charlie Scott, who has braved the latter two perils with relative intrepidity, is terrified of the “interference of women” in military and political affairs, declaring that “whenever [women] get a finger in a pye, there will some ane burnt in the opening o’t” (477). The great Lord Douglas similarly fears “the controul of petticoat-government” (100), and Sir Ringan Redhough chooses to be governed by magical prophecies rather than submitting to his wife’s “high spirit and proud unyielding temper” (111). Despite these men’s efforts to avoid women’s interference, the “siege and perils of Roxburgh” are caused entirely by women’s extravagant passions, and particularly by their vanity, which Hogg represents as a perverted and narcissistic form of sensibility (41). “As in all things that run to a fashionable extremity,” the narrator explains, “the fair sex took the lead in encouraging . . . deeds of chivalry” (2). The English Sir Philip Musgrave has captured Roxburgh at the request of his beloved Lady Jane Howard, who has charged him to prove his love by maintaining control of the castle until the end of the Christmas holidays. King Robert of Scotland attempts to stir a similar spirit of chivalry among his knights by promising, “I will give my daughter, the princess Margaret, to the knight who shall take the castle of Roxburgh out of the hands of the English before the expiry of the Christmas holidays” (4). The prospect of

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such a worthy prize promises to inspire the Scottish knights to action until Margaret objects to her own commodification, asking whether it is fit that the daughter of a king “should be given away to every adventurer without her own approval . . . or that the risk should be all on one side” (4). In contrast to Lucy Ashton’s passivity in her marriage negotiations, Margaret tests the knights’ mettle and transforms herself from commodity into bargainer by demanding that if her champion should fail to capture the castle, he must “forfeit all his lands, castles, towns, and towers to me” (4). While Musgrave fights merely for “love and chivalry” (74), Douglas, who eventually accepts Margaret’s conditions, fights for “the very existence of [his] house and name” (79). Women in the Three Perils of Man are not content to remain the passive inspiration for male chivalry, but attempt to influence the outcome of military conflict by becoming active players on the field of battle. Jane and Margaret each believe that her suitor’s success depends upon the strength of his infatuation and thus on the desirability of her own person (41). To ensure the success of her champion and the preservation of her own reputation, each woman disguises herself as a man and journeys to the borders. Upon discovering that Lord Jasper Tudor is in fact the disguised Lady Jane Howard, Margaret, in her own disguise as Prince Alexander of Scotland, arranges for this precious prize to be delivered to Lord Douglas, thereby increasing his power over Musgrave. Margaret proceeds to advise, encourage, harass, and threaten Douglas in her subsequent disguises as the Highland page Colin Roy and the monk Benjamin. Margaret is to some extent a stereotype, rather than a rounded and realistic individual, perhaps derived from seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury ballads like those analyzed by Dianne Dugaw, many of which feature women who disguise themselves as men.43 Although Hogg’s representation of women has been justly called “manifestly sexist,” he reserves his most scathing mockery for the men who fail to realize the extent of women’s agency.44 Douglas repeatedly declares his resolve that “no woman shall sway me” even as he is governed by a woman in disguise throughout the siege (85). Hogg represents the passions that motivate Margaret’s actions as the engines of military and political history, and she acquires a historical agency that Scott denies his heroines. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Hogg’s most ardent Jacobites in The Three Perils of Woman are women who are motivated by “wild principles” of honor, loyalty, and by a “violent attachment” to the handsome Charles Edward (312). Women are invested in resurrecting the chivalry of Stuart Scotland because it was in feudal times, according

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to Hogg, that they enjoyed the greatest power. As in its predecessor, passion in The Three Perils of Woman is highly politicized. In the novel’s Highland families of rank, men openly profess allegiance to King George while harboring secret Jacobite sympathies; they embrace prudence along with duplicity. Women, in contrast, openly “espouse” the Stuarts’ cause “with an enthusiasm that was only increased by opposition” (308). Inverness, supposedly controlled by the Earl of Loudon’s Hanoverian troops, is in fact overrun by a “club of Jacobite dames” (321), and the routing of Loudon’s army is made possible largely through the combined efforts of Sally Niven and Lady Balmillo. While Lady Balmillo does not go so far as to disguise herself as a man, she wishes it had “pleased Heaven to have cast this slender mould of mine in that of a sterner sex” so that she might better “support the rights of an injured Sovereign” (316). Ultimately, Lady Balmillo doesn’t let feminine modesty stand in her way any more than Princess Margaret does. With a desire for “battle and blood” stronger than any chieftain’s, she leads her clan onto the battlefield (317). The defeat of the Jacobite army at the end of The Three Perils of Woman signifies the demise not only of Scotland’s feudal culture, but also of women’s power. Sally, who had helped to orchestrate Loudon’s defeat, falls into a frenzied fit of grief at the double deaths of her husband and her lover until, exhausted, she collapses into “a sleep with the dead corpses, a sleep as deep and sound as their own” (406). However, the formerly frivolous maid is not permitted to enjoy the refuge of death, and we last see Sally against the frozen landscape, “rocking and sighing over the body of a dead female infant” (407). It is significant that Sally’s dead child is female because The Three Perils of Woman equates the post-1745 modernization of Scotland with the suppression of the feudal culture that had given reign to women and their passions. Although The Three Perils of Woman resembles Waverley in locating the defeat of the Jacobite troops at Culloden as the origin of Scotland’s modernization, Hogg’s circular narrative explores much more ambivalence about the desirability of modernization than does Waverley. The story of Sally’s demise is preceded in The Three Perils of Woman by the much longer narrative of Gatty Bell’s twisted love for a Highlander named M’Ion. In the polite, Anglicized, post-’45 Edinburgh that Gatty inhabits there is no place either for the passions that motivate Sally and Princess Margaret or for the oral traditions that inform The Three Perils of Man’s intertwined magical-historical narratives. Gatty is naturally as exuberant in her passions as Sally – “always in extremes . . . either all coyness, pride, and jealousy, or all tenderness and complacency” (84); however, she has

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been taught that “youthful love is not only sinful, but imprudent in the highest degree” (5), and consequently feels guilty and ashamed of her indecorous feelings. She pours these emotions into intense religious devotion, adopting a rigid self-chastisement that leads her to fixate on her own death. M’Ion warns her, “You are ruining a constitution naturally good by indulging in feelings so intense and vehement that no frame can withstand them for any length of time” (192). Instead of dying, however, Gatty falls into what seems like a coma, remaining for three years in a “drowsy and abstracted state . . . maintaining a mere animal, or rather vegetable existence” without exhibiting any signs of intellect (203). Gatty’s strange sleep dulls her “intense and vehement” feeling, and perhaps represents the cultural stagnation of an early nineteenth-century Edinburgh that has tried to excise traditional forms of Scottish culture in favor of Anglicized decorum. While Duncan has argued that Gatty’s awakening after three years represents Scotland’s cultural healing following the traumatic violence of modernization, I suggest that Gatty’s calmness upon re-awakening is not a form of improvement but rather of loss, specifically the loss of the passions that inspired Hogg’s other heroines to take history into their own hands.45 Gatty, formerly “overheated and irrestrainable” is upon awakening from her vegetative state “better regulated, and not so absolutely under the influence of a keen and incontrollable sensibility” (215). Gatty wonders whether her soul wandered from her body during her deathlike trance, and it is equally questionable whether it has returned at the end of the novel. While Lucy Ashton’s death in The Bride of Lammermoor signifies a relatively neat break between past and present, pre- and post-Union, feudal and modern, Sally and Gatty linger in emotionally damaged states that refuse to relegate historical violence to the past by foregrounding its continuing effects in Scotland’s early nineteenth-century present. The inverted historical ordering of The Three Perils of Woman’s narratives, with Sally’s following Gatty’s, further foregrounds the past’s impact on and presence in early nineteenth-century Scotland. The Three Perils of Woman narrates the demise of Scotland’s feudal traditions and of women’s agency, precisely the factors that enabled Douglas to defeat Musgrave in The Three Perils of Man. Hogg thus counters Waverley’s narrative of postUnion Scotland’s cultural improvement with a narrative of cultural loss and ossification. Moreover, by representing history as consisting of simultaneous and interconnected but non-contingent narratives, Hogg refuses The Bride of Lammermoor’s recuperative gesture whereby the historical novel works aesthetically to synthesize official and traditional

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histories and to reconcile past and present. Hogg instead exposes the jaggedness and illogic of historical change. However, the nonlinearity of history leaves open in Hogg’s works the possibility of rewriting Scotland’s history and regenerating Scottish identity, a possibility that Galt more explicitly explores. Indeed, Galt is more optimistic than either Hogg or Scott about the viability of both sentimental community and a distinctive cultural identity in post-Union Scotland. theoretical histories and the synthesis of modern scotland Whereas the Waverley novels fictionalize history, grounding their authority in references to historical events and personages, John Galt’s “Tales of the West” might be said to historicize fiction. Set near Greenock in the west of Scotland, where Galt was born, “The Tales of the West” offer a much more mundane and satirical portrayal of Scottish life than do the Waverley novels. Galt’s tales explore the transition from feudal to commercial society by representing the effects of national and international historical events on fictitious individuals and communities. Galt refused the label “novel” for his fictions, many of which initially were published serially in Blackwood’s Magazine, undoubtedly in an attempt to prevent their comparison to the Waverley novels. He described his tales instead as “theoretical histories of society.”46 My discussion of The Entail will show that “The Tales of the West,” are “theoretical” because they embody the abstract “principles [and] natural ‘laws’” of historical change formulated by Enlightenment historians,47 and more simply because they are fictional, describing the possible or hypothetical rather than the factual. Galt insisted that his early successes, The Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Provost (1822), lacked “the most material feature of the novel” – a plot.48 Instead, they relate “history in private life,” or the impact of events of national significance on “the events of a circumscribed locality.”49 For instance, in The Annals of the Parish, the Reverend Micah Balwhidder chronicles the changes in the parish of Dalmailing during his incumbency, the dates of which coincide with those of George III’s reign (1760–1810). Balwhidder’s account establishes a reciprocal relationship between the national and the local. It reveals the influence of the American and French revolutions, the Ayr Bank collapse, and the building of Britain’s empire in India and the West Indies on daily life in Dalmailing while also reminding readers that the inhabitants of small communities like Dalmailing have shaped national history by fighting in

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Britain’s wars, working in its mills and factories, and settling in its colonies. Keith Costain has argued that Galt sought to divorce Enlightenment historiography from the romance to which Scott had married it.50 Yet, The Entail, like other “Tales of the West,” not only illustrates the principles of stadial progress; it also explores the mythic dimensions of historical change by depicting on a domestic scale the episodic, cyclical process of degeneration and renewal, dispossession and restoration, proper to Jacobite romance. In The Entail, this cyclical version of history is feminized, generated by a transcendent, disembodied sensibility that undermines the implicitly masculine teleologies of Enlightenment historiography. The Entail departs from Galt’s earlier works – at the insistence of his publisher, William Blackwood – insofar as it has a plot. In fact, The Entail is a novel about plots – plots of land, literary plots, and family conspiracies.51 The story of the Walkinshaws of Kittlestonheugh also depicts competing models of historical change. Even while The Entail describes Lowland Scotland’s evolution from an impoverished post-feudal society into a commercially thriving part of the modern British imperial state, it also represents history as a series of repeating cycles of loss and restoration. The novel’s plots are driven by Claud Walkinshaw’s ultimately successful efforts to recover the estate that his father lost through his investment in the Scottish colony at Darien, the spectacular 1698 failure of which was one of the motives that impelled Scotland’s Parliament to accept England’s terms of union. Claud rises from poverty to become a thriving Glasgow merchant and eventually recovers the family estate of Kittlestonheugh through a legal maneuver that requires him to disinherit his firstborn and favorite son, Charles. He entails Kittlestonheugh on a series of male heirs to ensure the preservation of his property rather than the happiness of his family. It descends to his sons, the half-witted Watty and the self-interested George, before it is restored, through the efforts of two women who are excluded from patrilineal forms of inheritance, to its rightful owner, Charles’ son James. Claud’s own patrimonial disinheritance coincides with Scotland’s loss of political independence in 1707. He is raised after his parents’ deaths by Maudge, a devoted family domestic, who impresses upon Claud the injustice of his disinheritance: “she pointed out to Claud the hills and lands of his forefathers,” and “exhorted him to make it his constant endeavour to redeem them, if possible, from their new possessors.”52 Maudge also provides Claud with a “rich stock of goblin lore and romantic stories” that enables him to begin rebuilding his family’s fortune.

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Claud shares none of the “taste for adventure” that had impelled his father “to embark in the ill-fated expedition to Darien” (4); however, he finds a use for Maudge’s lore when he becomes a pedlar, selling, among other more practical goods, the ballads and tales that he learned as a child (10). By the time he becomes a flourishing cloth merchant in Glasgow, Claud has exorcised every element of romance from his existence. Similar to Ravenswood’s “legacy of vengeance,” Claud’s drive “to redeem the inheritance of his ancestor” becomes “the actuating principle of his life” (12). Yet, in attempting to rectify his own disinheritance, Claud succeeds only in repeating the past, as he must disinherit his eldest son, Charles, and entail the estate on his second son, Watty, to reconsolidate the divided Kittlestonheugh property.53 The Entail, like The Bride of Lammermoor, condemns attempts to perpetuate Scotland’s feudal institutions and practices as counterproductive. In entailing the Kittlestonheugh estate on Watty, Claud also entails his own disinheritance upon Charles and his “pride and avarice” upon his family, compelling them to repeat, in variously distorted forms, his own actions.54 The Entail thus seconds the New Edinburgh Review’s claim in 1822 that the continuing practice of entailment had “effected a retrograde motion” in Scotland by arresting its progress towards modernity.55 Claud disdains commerce even though his success as a merchant underpins his efforts to restore his family’s honor and, implicitly, Scotland’s feudal past. Ironically, however, he rejects feudal values, privileging economic gain over ties of affection and loyalty. The Walkinshaws’ seemingly compulsive repetition of the act of disinheritance microcosmically reflects national history, tying Scotland’s cultural and political disenfranchisement in 1707 to the royal disinheritance of the Stuart monarchs in 1688. In a novel about disinheritance and restoration, it is surely no accident that three of the male Walkinshaws are named Charles, James, and George – names that clearly evoke the seventeenth-century Stuart and eighteenth-century Hanover monarchs. The historical resonance of Charles’ disinheritance becomes clear when we learn that Claud refers to his favorite son, who was born shortly after the 1745 rebellion, as his “darling chevalier” (61), a term also used to refer to Charles Edward Stuart, the “young Pretender.” Galt’s self-proclaimed interest in commerce and industry, as well as his laudatory biography of George III, has led readers to label him a Whig.56 Yet The Entail calls his political leanings into question. The novel by no means advocates the restoration of the Stuart monarchs; in fact the dedication to George IV presents The Entail as a tribute to “the administration of your Majesty’s Illustrious Family.” However, much like Waverley, it does seek to revive

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the heroic virtues and ardent sensibility associated with Jacobitism. The Walkinshaw family’s monarchical namesakes represent two seemingly disparate strands of Scottish identity. George Walkinshaw is a hardheaded businessman intent upon profit. Under his ownership, which coincides with the reign of George III, the estate of Kittlestonheugh prospers much as Scotland did in the mid to late eighteenth century. Charles and his son James, in contrast, sacrifice personal interest to their heroic ideals of virtue, loyalty, and affection. Their contested exclusion from inheritance of the estate symbolizes both the exclusion of the Stuart monarchs from succession to the British throne and Scotland’s repudiation or repression of a chivalric, martial Jacobite identity after the ’45. James’s ultimate “restoration” as rightful heir of Kittlestonheugh is not an allegorical wish fulfillment, expressing Galt’s desire for the restoration of the Stuarts. Instead, it reflects the emergence of a synthetic, vital postUnion Scottish identity manufactured from Jacobite sentiment. The task of synthesizing Scotland’s past and present falls largely to the novel’s female characters, for whom the name Walkinshaw is as significant as Charles, James, and George are for Claud’s sons. Clementina Walkinshaw, who belonged to a Jacobite Glaswegian family, was Charles Edward Stuart’s mistress, and the mother of his only acknowledged child.57 Clementina Walkinshaw offers a historical precedent for the novel’s strong-willed women, who resist patriarchal practices such as entailment that excluded them from the inheritance of property and political rights and thus from participating in British nation formation. Mrs. Eadie, a belated Highland prophetess, turns to an alternative matrilineal legacy, while Claud Walkinshaw’s wife, Girzy, interferes with the institutions and practices that dictate the patrilineal bestowal of property and political power. Mrs. Eadie’s family of Stuart supporters was forced to forfeit its Highland estate after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. Her only birthright is thus the “hallowed and oracular” gift of second sight (268), an intangible matrilineal inheritance that “comes not to us till earthly things begin to lose their hold on our affections” (283). Mrs. Eadie’s second sight is effectively a sensibility so refined that it enables her to divine the thoughts and feelings of those who are absent. Unlike the family estate, this legacy has survived the ravages of political conflict unharmed; it at once connects Mrs. Eadie to her family’s past and allows her to foresee the future. Since The Entail ’s initial publication, critics have dismissed Mrs. Eadie’s mysticism as a “digression” from the main plot concerning Claud Walkinshaw’s entailed estate, or as a “romantic fillingout” that reveals Galt’s struggle to write a three-volume novel in less than

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six months.58 However, I suggest that Mrs. Eadie’s prophetic second sight functions as a foil to Claud’s backwards-looking attempts to restore and preserve his family’s estate. Claud’s efforts to re-instate the feudal institutions of pre-Union Scotland cause the Walkinshaws’ melancholic repetition of the past. Mrs. Eadie, in contrast, perpetuates the traditional virtues cultivated in feudal Scotland distinct from its institutions, thereby enabling the reconciliation of past and present and the synthesis of heroic sentiment with commercial interest. Mrs. Eadie, who has no children of her own to whom she might bequeath the gift of second sight, “an ancient inheritance of blood” (283), instead relates stories of her family’s Jacobite past to James Walkinshaw – the rightful but excluded heir to Kittlestonheugh. While James cannot inherit Mrs. Eadie’s second sight, he does develop the refined sensibility that it presupposes. Mrs. Eadie’s tales nurture James’ love of virtue, his capacity for affection, and his heroic aspirations, teaching him that “the spirit has more faculties than the five senses, by which, among other things, the heart is taught to love or hate” (214). James imbibes “from the Highland spirit of Mrs. Eadie a tinge of romance and enthusiasm” that develops his finer feelings (222). When he is sent to work in his uncle George’s Glasgow counting-house, James’ “tinge” manifests itself in an aversion to the monotonous and mercenary world of commerce. Instead of repeating the past, he reacts against it. Whereas Claud disavowed his ancestors’ noble but idealistic courage in favor of personal gain, James in turn renounces profit and self-interest when he leaves his position at the counting-house to become an officer in a Highland regiment. James turns to the Highlands to find what Raymond Williams has termed “residual” traditions, in this case the sentiments and virtues that Lowland Scotland, with its prudence and prosperity, fails to cultivate.59 As in Waverley, James’ journey north is also a journey into the past, as the Highlands reveal “ancient domestic traditions” and “monuments of fidelity” in “every feature of the landscape” (306, 308). Unlike the novels discussed in the previous chapter, The Entail is not concerned with the practicalities of rehabilitating “a race that had been rooted out or slaughtered” after the ’45 (306). Yet it also avoids Waverley’s commemoration of Highland ways of life figured as irrevocably past. Instead, Galt depicts residual Highland traditions as a vital cultural resource that might counterbalance the prudent practicality of Lowland Scotland’s commercial society. By introducing these traditions into the Lowlands, Mrs. Eadie prepares James to synthesize Scotland’s past with its present.

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While Mrs. Eadie represents sensibility’s reconciliatory potential, Girzy Hypel, Claud’s wife and James’ grandmother, embodies the disruptive passions that Scott and Hogg also attribute to women. Girzy’s “traffic in legalities” (328) challenges the patriarchal system of inheritance that excludes her, and ultimately restores James to ownership of the Kittlestonheugh estate, to which he is the final and legitimate heir named by Claud’s deed of entail. After her penurious son George cheats Girzy of her widow’s share in the profits of Kittlestonheugh, Girzy determines to investigate Claud’s will, explaining, “the only reason I hae for going to law at all is to mak money by it” (353). Whereas Lady Ashton overidentifies with a patriarchal ethic of revenge and restoration, Girzy aims to undermine the male Walkinshaws’ anachronistic obsession with the perpetuation of their “hereditary grandeur,” or as she puts it, their “bee in the bonnet, anent [about] ancestors and forbears” (257). When the powerful lawyers whom she has outsmarted accuse her of self-interested motives in seeking out the deed of entail, Girzy disingenuously questions what a woman might gain by contesting the inheritance of the estate: “Me! Am I a male-heir? An aged woman, and a grandmother!” (338). In fact, she knows that the kind-hearted James, unlike those who have usurped the estate from him, will ensure that she receives her rightful share of the estate’s profits. Girzy is driven by self-interest, yet she is also a trickster character who simply enjoys outwitting those who regard her legally, politically, and economically as a nonentity. In restoring James as heir, Girzy breaks the patterns of dispossession that have structured the Walkinshaws’ – and, Galt implies, Scotland’s – history. Moreover, Girzy’s intervention in a patriarchal legal and economic system enables the regeneration of sentimental community in a commercially thriving early nineteenth-century Scotland as James takes ownership of Kittlestonheugh. Whereas the national tales discussed in the previous chapter segregate the sentimental and the commercial, locating the former in the Highlands and the latter in southern Britain, The Entail renders them compatible and simultaneous. Through Girzy’s legal triumph, Galt warns that a backward-looking Scotland governed by a patriarchal ethic of recovery and restoration will become moribund, trapped by and in the past. Yet The Entail does not advocate the repudiation of Scotland’s independent past in favor of its British present. On the contrary, James’ restoration as rightful heir to the Kittlestonheugh estate recuperates the heroic virtues that had been neglected during Scotland’s rapid commercial growth in the second half of the eighteenth century. James’ subsequent marriage to Mrs. Eadie’s niece,

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Nell Frazer, symbolizes the synthesis of these Highland, Jacobite virtues with the Lowlands’ prudence and profits. As commander of his Highland regiment, moreover, James demonstrates “the indisputable heroism of the British spirit” (363, my emphasis) as he defends a united Britain’s imperial and commercial interests. Much as Mrs. Eadie, Girzy, and James generate a post-Union Scottish identity that retains continuity with Scotland’s independent past, Galt creates a hybrid history of linear teleology and cyclical myth that foregrounds the relationships between domestic, local, national, and imperial events. The Entail challenges the historical closure symbolized in George IV’s Edinburgh visit; yet, at the same time, it embraces the synthesis of identities that the visit performed so spectacularly. In his Autobiography, Galt declared, “I think no ingenuity can make an entirely new thing. Man can only combine the old together.”60 As his “Tales of the West” illustrate, the past for Galt can be re-combined to create new presents. Galt’s use of the generic “man” here is somewhat ironic, as in The Entail it is women who undertake the work of regeneration. In describing James as an embodiment of the new British identity enabled by Mrs. Eadie’s and Girzy’s resistance to the reification of Scotland’s past, Galt re-masculinizes the feminized work of “combination” and thus of authorship. impossible unions in ‘saint ronan’s well’ While The Three Perils and The Entail challenged the historical closure implied by Scott’s teleological version of history in some of the early Waverley novels, Saint Ronan’s Well in its turn refutes the possibility of the cultural regeneration that Hogg and Galt arguably attempted to inspire. Yet in the Magnum Opus introduction to Saint Ronan’s Well, Scott positions himself not as Hogg’s and Galt’s respondent, but rather as the heir to a venerable lineage of female authors “whose success seems to have appropriated this province of the novel as exclusively their own.”61 In doing so, he at once belittles the novel of manners as a mere “province,” and assumes governorship of this province, suggesting that his depiction of “the shifting manners of our own time” “is perhaps the most legitimate which relates to this kind of light literature” (5). Saint Ronan’s Well, the only one of Scott’s novels set in the nineteenth century, portrays the final dissolution of the sentimental Scottish identity that had begun to disintegrate, according to The Bride of Lammermoor, with the Stuarts’ exile and the Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments. In eschewing the past, Scott also rejects the feminized authority of oral tradition on which he had

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drawn in The Bride of Lammermoor. Scott claimed an authentic cultural origin for The Bride of Lammermoor in his mother’s tale, a remnant of the past that the novel describes and from which it distances readers. These readers may no longer enjoy the unmediated community of feudal Scotland, but they can appreciate the revivification in print of its “legendary lore” and perhaps even share in common a recognition of what they have lost. A novel of manners set in the spa town on the Scottish borders, Saint Ronan’s Well lacks an authenticating cultural origin like Scott’s mother’s tale; it is simply the successor to a series of equally origin-less female-authored fictions that represented for Scott’s reviewers a debased form of feminine authority.62 By adopting the conventions of the novel of manners, Scott trespassed on the territory that had hitherto belonged to Galt, Hogg, Christian Isobel Johnstone, and Susan Ferrier – Scotland’s present. He appropriated a feminized genre not necessarily as a compliment to his contemporaries, but instead to indict an effeminate Scottish society lacking the honor, heroism, and virtue of previous centuries. Saint Ronan’s Well not only marks a generic departure for Scott, but also an ideological turn, according to Miranda Burgess, “from restoration to despair.”63 It calls into question both the possibility of sentimental community and the authenticity of Scottish identity in post-Union Britain. Saint Ronan’s Well suggests that the social bonds of feudal society that in The Bride of Lammermoor were already beginning to break under the pressures of modernization have by the early nineteenth century dissolved entirely. In his introduction to the Magnum Opus edition, Scott explains that he chose a “mineral spring” as his setting because spa towns cultivate “a certain degree of intimacy and sociability” among people of various ranks that has no “duration beyond the length of the season” (6). In implicit contrast to feudal bonds, which united landowner and tenants across generations, “No intimacy can be supposed more close for the time, and more transitory in its endurance, than that which is attached to a watering-place acquaintance” (6). Meg Dods, the owner of the Cleikum Inn and the novel’s voice of local tradition, recalls a time when Saint Ronan’s was a tightly knit community that resisted external intrusions. She compares the “decent” gatherings of her childhood, where “ilk ane ken’d ilk other” but danced only with those of their own social class to the indelicate “jinketting about” of the “flichtering fools” at the Well, where strangers of different classes interact (22). This transient group of strangers is headed by “two jarring and contending factions, who every day eat, drank, danced, and made merry together, hating each other all the while with all the animosity of political party” (27). The affected manners of

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polite society mask a fundamental lack of sympathy and harmony among the inhabitants of Saint Ronan’s Well. Conflicts that in The Bride of Lammermoor originated in political differences have in Saint Ronan’s Well bled into the social sphere. The divisions among the Well’s inhabitants concern nothing as important as national government; they are petty but all-consuming. The contrast between decaying Auld Town, where Meg Dods resides, and the new buildings at the Well raises the question, “wherefore should loves and friendships have a longer date than our dwellings and our monuments?” (17). Indeed, social ties among the Well’s inhabitants are as flimsy as the new-fangled spa town, which by the novel’s end has disappeared into “primitive obscurity” (372). The plot of Saint Ronan’s Well, in a similar way to that of The Bride of Lammermoor, hinges on the marriageability of its Scottish heroine, Clara Mowbray. Her suitors, Valentine Bulmer and Frank Tyrrel, are half-brothers, and whichever one marries Clara will also inherit the English estate of Mowbray-Park and the title of Earl of Etherington. While Tyrrel genuinely loves Clara, Bulmer aims to marry her only because he feels that Mowbray-Park’s continuity to his own property, like Scotland’s to England, “rendered the union of the estates not merely desirable, but constituted an arrangement pointed out by the hand of nature” (239). Clara’s brother in turn hopes that her marriage might help to restore the Mowbray family’s honor and fortunes, which, like the Ravenswoods’, began to decline with the exile of James II. Yet, unbeknown to Mowbray, Clara is in fact not marriageable at all. Several years before the novel’s action begins, a disguised Bulmer deceived Clara into marrying him when she believed she was marrying her lover, Tyrrel. This manipulation of Clara’s affections establishes an analogy between marriage and political union only to travesty it. The marriage has since remained a secret, but the deception, and her thwarted love for Tyrrel, have left Clara’s mind “ill-settled” (82) so that her story in some ways begins where Lucy’s ends. At the novel’s opening, Tyrrel has returned to Scotland to prevent Bulmer’s attempts to claim Clara as his wife. Clara has elicited a range of responses from Scott’s readers. Tara Goshal Wallace has argued that she embodies women’s “grotesque” “will to power,” as she willfully rejects “the feminine values of order, ritual, decorum”; Robert P. Irvine, in contrast, regards Clara as the novel’s model of proper domestic femininity, as she values inward moral qualities over Penelope Penfeather’s and Lady Binks’ outward displays of wealth and power.64 I will suggest that Clara, like Lucy before her, is more

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a victim than either a threat or an exemplar. Again like Lucy, Clara is associated with a Scotland seemingly unspoiled by the processes of modernization, yet she ultimately calls into question the possibility of an original or authentic Scottish identity. Like the Lowland landscape, which defies cultivation and presents itself deceptively to each traveler as if he were “the first discoverer,” Clara possesses a “simple and sylvan beauty” (2). With her mother dead and her father and brother often absent, she spends her days wandering the countryside like a “woodland nymph” or a “tame and unresisting animal” (235, 100). Much as Lucy escaped political conflict in legendary lore, Clara rejects the affected civility that reigns at Saint Ronan’s Well in favor of her solitary rambles. Although the narrator seems to share Clara’s contempt for the hypocrisies of polite society, he implies that her refusal to submit to any guidance other than her own “will and pleasure” is equally injurious to sociability (235). If Clara seems to represent a “natural” Scottishness that transcends social and political distinctions, she also calls into question the possibility of such an authentic or pure identity, as she continually declares herself tainted by her own “disobedience,” “sin,” and “folly” (83). Not just Scottishness, but all forms of identity in Saint Ronan’s Well are founded in performances like the spectacle of George IV’s visit. Mowbray with difficulty acts the part of the generous gentleman when he invites his guests to watch a series of set pieces performed in the garden at the Shaws. Penelope Penfeather, Sir Bingo Binks, and Captain MacTurk are self-parodies, readily recognizable stereotypes of the preposterously learned woman, the uncouth country squire, and the militant Highlander respectively. The disunity or disjunction created by Bulmer and Clara’s union reverberates throughout the novel and impedes any possibility of a redemptive or reconciliatory ending to Saint Ronan’s Well. Tyrrel explains that “were Clara Mowbray as free from her pretended marriage as law could pronounce her, still with me – me, at least, of all men in the world – the obstacle must ever remain, that the nuptial benediction has been pronounced over her, and the man whom I must for once call brother” (274). Tyrrel’s refusal to consider marriage to Clara reflects his sense that Bulmer, whom Tyrrel ordinarily refuses to recognize as his brother, has somehow sullied Clara in claiming her as his own. Although a man could not legally marry his brother’s widowed or divorced wife, the annulment of Clara’s marriage to Bulmer would have overcome this “obstacle,” leaving her legally as free to marry Tyrrel as any other man. Yet a marriage of affections is no longer possible between either Clara and Tyrrel or Clara and Bulmer; and consequently the restoration of social harmony at

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Saint Ronan’s Well and the symbolic reconciliation of Scotland and England, in Irvine’s words, “does not happen, has not happened, and can never happen.”65 The novel’s characters are left in an unsatisfying limbo that Clara’s death does not so much resolve as perpetuate. The possibility of sentimental community in the present is thwarted by the false unions of the past, and The Bride of Lammermoor’s feudal sociability has been replaced by an empty performance of modern civility. The years between the publication of The Bride of Lammermoor and Saint Ronan’s Well appear to have left Scott increasingly doubtful that an Anglo-Scottish union of interests might one day become a union of affections. The latter novel situates the dissolution of sociability firmly in a civilized, commercial, Britain and implies that the sentimental Scottish identity envisioned by earlier writers is untenable, and quite possibly fictional. Scott’s representations of the breakdown of the sympathetic bonds underlying a distinctive Scottish identity helps to explain the Waverley novels’ relative canonicity compared to Hogg’s and Galt’s fiction. David Lloyd’s Nationalism and Minor Literature reminds us of the extent to which, in the contexts of canon formation and nation formation, the aesthetic is political.66 Scott’s depictions of the demise of Scottish sensibility are compatible with a modernized Scotland’s integration into Great Britain and the Waverley novels’ assimilation into a British literary canon. Hogg’s and Galt’s fiction, in contrast, refuses narrative closure to historical change and cultural closure to Anglo-Scottish Union by instead attempting to create or re-create a uniquely Scottish identity founded in Jacobite sentiments and traditions. Their investment in imagining such an identity perhaps reflects the emergence of a Scottish reading public distinct from the Anglo-British readership for which previous Scots, and Walter Scott, wrote. Scott, Hogg, and Galt are particularly fitting writers with which to conclude this study of Scottish and British identities because, together, they mark a moment in literary history after which, owing to the changing connotations of sensibility and of Britishness, Scottish writers turned away from discourses of sentiment in their fashioning of British, although not entirely of Scottish, identities.67 Hogg’s and Galt’s representations of nation formation as a regenerative and potentially endless process may challenge the aesthetic standards of the British literary canon, but they also remind us that the literary negotiation of Scottishness and Britishness continues today. And Scott, despite his reputation as the creator of Scottish identity and Romantic nationalism, reveals the exhaustion of discourses of feeling in post-Union Scotland’s literary culture.

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While this study has concentrated primarily on the Scottish writers who undertook the work of British nation formation, there were of course numerous late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English writers who employed discourses of feeling for other ends, but who shared Scots’ understanding of sentimental literature as didactic and who encouraged readers to reconsider who or what was worthy of their sympathy. Indeed, sentiment arguably transformed the English novel into the British novel. Histories of the novel’s eighteenth-century development have tended to be markedly Anglo-centric in focus. Studies including Michael McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel, 1660–1740 (1987); J. Paul Hunter’s Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (1990); John Richetti’s The English Novel in History, 1700–1780 (1999); and Patrick Parrinder’s Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day (2006), to provide just a few examples, declare their exclusive interest in the English, as opposed to the British, novel in their titles. It is no coincidence that histories of the eighteenth-century novel also have tended to marginalize sentimental fiction. The history of the English novel is also the history of the realist novel, whether that realism resides in Robinson Crusoe’s catalogues of possessions or in Clarissa’s detailed scrutiny of her own thoughts and feelings. Of course, as the preceding chapters demonstrate, the sentimental and the realistic are far from mutually exclusive categories. As John Richetti acknowledges, sentimental novels “differ in degree rather than in kind from what we now think of as the main tradition of eighteenth-century fiction.” Nonetheless, sentimental novels often are dismissed by critics as “insufferably lachrymose, populated by impossible paragons and cardboard villains, deeply improbable by current standards.” 68 At best, sentimental fiction might be relegated to its own chapter in the history of the novel, where it can be considered as a troublesome blip in the novel’s development or a passing literary fad, rather than a form that influenced and was influenced by the works of Fielding, Richardson, Austen and others. Sentimental literature perhaps occupies the margins of an eighteenthcentury canon because sentiment was often the literary tool of the politically dispossessed, or of those who spoke on their behalf. English writers drew on Scottish discourses of sentiment to argue for the abolition of the slave trade, for the rehabilitation of prostitutes, or for the kinder treatment of Britain’s imperial subjects. Despite their stock characters, overt didacticism, and formulaic plots, the ends for which sentimental

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novels attempt to elicit readers’ sensibility were rarely apolitical; and if, as is often noted, they failed to move readers to action, they were no different from most other forms of literature in that respect. It is worth noting that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scottish writers shared their predilection for sentimental fiction with women writers, another politically disenfranchised group that historically has occupied a marginal place in the literary canon, although increasingly less so. This is not to suggest that literary critics over the years have consciously sought to exclude Scottish and women writers from the canon or even that they have held similar prejudices against Scots and women; rather, it suggests that women and Scots turned to sentimental literature to accomplish similar purposes – namely to expand the boundaries of a national community and a literary sphere that were predominantly English and male, and thus to facilitate their own integration. Whether written by Scottish or English, by male or female, authors, eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury sentimental novels assert the value of the rural peripheries over that of the metropolitan center. They privilege simplicity over sophistication, domesticity over urbanity, retirement over cosmopolitanism, and the pastoral over the imperial. J. Paul Hunter has shown that early British novels were overwhelmingly written and set in London, where the greatest number of readers were concentrated.69 Given its ex-centric focus, sentimental fiction’s exclusion from studies of the English novel does make sense. However, its exclusion also has prevented us from recognizing the extent to which the development of the novel and the formation of a British identity were mutually influential processes in which discourses of feeling played an important part. The sentimental novel’s historical centrality to nation formation is confirmed by its prominence in the nineteenth-century United States. American sentimental fiction reveals that there is nothing inherently British or Scottish about eighteenth-century discourses of feeling, which were merely a tool for constructing various forms of community, much as sympathy for Adam Smith is simply a mechanism through which a variety of feelings can be shared. Discourses of feeling were perhaps particularly attractive to writers in the newly independent United States for many of the same reasons that they had been useful to post-Union Scots a century earlier.70 In both post-Union Scotland and post-revolutionary America these discourses allowed writers to represent a formative, unstable, and artificial political entity as an organic familial community. The novel emerged in the United States “at the twilight of Anglo-European literature’s great era of ‘sensibility’”; and the earliest American novels,

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published in the 1790s, were sentimental.71 The belated development of the novel in Scotland and America, as compared to England, attests to these regions’ cultural marginality in an Anglo-centric literary marketplace. The fact that the earliest novels in both Scotland and America were predominantly sentimental suggests that the novel and the discourses of feeling that it privileged emerged in both contexts in response to the pressures of nation formation. Of course American writers did not blindly imitate their Scottish predecessors and contemporaries, but instead adapted discourses of feeling to address the conditions of the new republic, in which sentimental community was imagined as “the disinterested fraternity of men.”72 As they adapted the discourses of feeling that they had inherited from post-Union Scotland to address issues from Indian removal and plantation slavery to temperance and motherhood, sensibility acquired new, but not completely unrelated, gendered and racial implications. That Scottish and American novelists employed very similar discourses of feeling to imagine very different forms of national community attests not only to the malleability of sentiment but also to its political utility. In both eighteenth-century Scotland and nineteenth-century America, writers turned to sentiment not as an alternative to politics but because they recognized feeling’s centrality to politics. Their representations of the nation as a community bound by shared sympathies reveal that well into and even beyond the heyday of Romantic nationalism, nationhood continued to be understood in moral and affective, as well as in cultural and political terms.

Notes

introduction: the politics and s e ntimen t s o f u ni on 1 Minutes of the Proceedings in Parliament, No. 89 (Edinburgh: Andrew Anderson, 1707), not paginated. 2 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Leith Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707 1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 3 The nation state’s entrenchment in literary studies is due largely to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which first offered literary critics a means of intervening in discussions of nationhood through its emphasis on print culture’s role in fostering national consciousness. Anderson argues that the nation is “an imagined political community,” a community that is “both inherently limited and sovereign.” In other words, the nation that, according to Anderson, we imagine through a shared print culture is also a state. See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn. (London: Verso, 1991), 6, my emphasis. 4 Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 11. Pinch argues against the more traditional view that the culture of sensibility flourished briefly in the latter half of the eighteenth century. 5 “His Majesty’s Most Gracious Declaration,” Commonplace Book, c. 1745 6. James Marshall and Marie Louise Osborn Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2, 5. 6 John Dwyer, The Age of the Passions: An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 1998); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 18 56; and Pinch, Fits of Passion, 17 50. 7 Murray G. H. Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1991), 84 90, 99 105. 173

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8 Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. P. D. Garside, The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 363. 9 William Donaldson, The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 11 12. 10 “Prince charles’s Welcome to Scotland, ”A Full Collection of all Poems Upon Charles, Prince of Wales, Regent of the Kingdoms of Scotland, England, France and Ireland, and Dominions thereunto belonging, Published since his Arrival in Edinburgh the 17th Day of September, till the 1st of November, 1745 (n.p., 1745), not paginated. 11 “Prince Charles, His Welcome to Scotland,” Commonplace Book, c. 1745 6. James Marshall and Marie Louise Osborn Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 13. 12 “Given at Paris 17th July 174[6?].” Jacobite Documents. James Marshall and Marie Louise Osborn Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 13 “An Ode on the Victory at Gladsmuir.” Jacobite Documents. James Marshall and Marie Louise Osborn Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 14 For instance, Murray Pittock argues that in eighteenth century Scotland, “the Stuarts were the only available vehicle for anti Union feeling.” See Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 134. 15 On the political symbolism of George IV’s visit, see Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 4 5; Caroline McCracken Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 73 113; and Kenneth McNeil, Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760 1860 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 72 82. 16 “The King,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, September 1822, 264. 17 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 19. 18 The phrase “metaphysics of blood” is Leonard Tennenhouse’s. He observes a similar coincidence of blood and sentiment in early American literature, where it often works to challenge aristocratic kinship systems perceived as outmoded in America. See The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and British Diaspora, 1750 1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 97. 19 “The King,” Blackwood’s, 264. 20 Hugh Trevor Roper emphasizes this performative closure in his account of the king’s visit. See “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 29 30. 21 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Barnes,

Notes to pages 7–11

22

23

24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31

32 33

34 35

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States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: Univer sity of Chicago Press, 1997). See also Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Tennenhouse’s Importance of Feeling English. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 23 9; and the essays collected in Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707 1832 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007). Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 215. Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford Univer sity Press, 2002), 31. See, for instance, R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974); Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability; and Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986). Recently, critics have begun to explore the polit ical import of private feeling in the context of slavery, Jacobinism, and imperial expansion, among other issues. See Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer sity Press, 2006); and Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 100 5. Todd, Sensibility, 7. G. J. Barker Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1 36; and Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 217 28. Boswell in Holland, 1763 1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill, 1952), 7, 389, 28. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 14. On the associations between sensibility and revolution, see also Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993). David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 316. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 10, 21. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 21. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 22.

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36 David Marshall, The Figure of the Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 176; cf. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 110 13. 37 For more extensive analyses of Smith’s concept of sympathy, see Vivienne Brown, “The Dialogic Experience of Conscience: Adam Smith and the Voices of Stoicism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1992): 233 60; and Marshall, The Figure of the Theater, 167 92. 38 On Scotland’s civic tradition before and after the Union see Nicholas Phillipson, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 1981) 19 40; and John Robertson, “The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition,” Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 137 78. 39 See Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590 1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 140 8. 40 On these pamphlets’ relationship to early eighteenth century novels’ repre sentations of marriage, see Toni Bowers, “Representing Resistance: British Seduction Stories, 1660 1800,” A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 142 7. 41 P. W. J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland: A Study in Anglo-Scottish Politics of the Eighteenth-Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 190. 42 Francis Cullen [Lord Grant], The Patriot Resolved. In a Letter To and Addresser, from his Friend; of the same Sentiments with himself; concerning the UNION (Edinburgh, 1707), 3. 43 On eighteenth century debates concerning the socio economic and legal parameters of marriage, see Erica Harth, “The Virtue of Love: Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act,” Cultural Critique 9 (1988): 123 54; Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660 1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500 1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977). 44 For a full account of the pros and cons of incorporating and federal union, see John Robertson, “An Elusive Sovereignty: The Course of the Union Debate in Scotland 1698 1707,” A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 198 227. 45 “The Blythsome Bridal” was remade into “A Song on the Treaty of Union 16th April 1706.” See Pittock, The Invention of Scotland, 37. 46 Examples include the anonymous Scotland’s Teares (1604) and Scotland’s Teares (1625), precursors to Smollett’s Tears of Scotland (1746). As these titles suggest, Scotland’s feminization was implicated in a particularly elegiac sense of national loss, one evoked by a sense of external threat. Lord Belhaven also

Notes to pages 13–19

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employed the image of Scotland as an imperiled and grieving mother in his Speech in the Scotch Parliament, Saturday the Second of November, unfortu nately inspiring more ridicule than militant patriotism. Collected in David Laing, ed., Various Pieces of Fugitive Scotish Poetry, Principally of the Seventeenth Century, First Series (Edinburgh: W. & D. Laing, 1825), not paginated. On the early modern equation of race and nation, see Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 247 64. I will complicate this equation in the following chapter. Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689 c. 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 12 29. William Wright, The Comical History of the Marriage Betwixt Fergusia and Heptarchus (Edinburgh, 1706), 3. John Hamilton, [Lord Belhaven], The Lord Belhaven’s Speech in the Scotch Parliament, Saturday the Second of November, on the Subject-Matter of an Union Betwixt the two Kingdoms of Scotland and England (Edinburgh, 1706), 5; Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman. A Satyr. (London, 1701), 7. Wright, Comical History, 3, 7. Wright, Comical History, 17. Wright, Comical History, 7. Wright, Comical History, 11. Wright, Comical History, 17. Daniel Defoe, An Essay at Removing National Prejudices against a Union with England. Part III. (London, 1706), 29. Daniel Defoe, Union or No Union: Being an Enquiry into the Grievances of the Scots And how far they are right or wrong who alledge that the union is dissolved (London: John Baker, 1713), 3. Alexander Pennecuik, A Pill for Pork-Eaters: Or a Scots Lancet for an English Swelling (Edinburgh: James Watson, 1705), 4, italics in original. Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 517; David Allan, Scotland in the Eighteenth Century: Union and Enlightenment (London: Longman, 2002), 14. Jonathan Swift, The Publick Spirit of the Whigs, set forth in their generous encouragement of the author of The Crisis (London, 1714), 22. Daniel Defoe, The Scots Union and Nation Vindicated from the Reflections cast on them in an Infamous Libel, Entitl’d, The Publick Spirit of the Whigs, &c. (London: A. Bell, 1714), 3. Defoe, Scots Union and Nation Vindicated, 14. Defoe, Scots Union and Nation Vindicated, 14. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25. Festa, Figures of Empire, 9. It is the novel’s generic prominence in the late eighteenth century culture of sensibility that has led me to exclude

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Notes to pages 19–25 Robert Burns from this study, despite his influential reworkings of Jacobite songs and sentiment. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740 1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 126. Festa, Figures of Empire, 17; Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 14 17. See for instance Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 18 56; and Pinch, Fits of Passion, 17 50. Ian Duncan argues for Hume’s influence not just on sentimental fiction, but on the novel more broadly in Scott’s Shadow, 116 44. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 82. Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 67. Smith, Rhetoric, 86 7. Of course second degree spectatorship is not limited to novel reading. Macpherson’s Ossian, in which the blind bard Ossian describes his memories of ancient battles, also positions readers as second degree spectators; but it does not share sentimental fiction’s didactic aims. Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 35 59. Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, 21. Colley, Britons, 283 319. The phrase is Tom Nairn’s. See The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis of Neo-Nationalism, 2nd edn. (London: Verso 1981).

1 t h e ‘ o s s i a n ’ co n t r o v e r sy a n d t he ra cia l beginnings of britain 1 Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, 190. 2 Following the conventions established by Ossian scholars Howard Gaskill and Fiona Stafford, I will refer to the poems collectively as Ossian. 3 The development of Celtic studies as a discipline has been crucial to the critical rehabilitation of Ossian. On the origins of the poems, see Derick S. Thomson, The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s “Ossian” (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1951) and Donald Meek, “The Gaelic Ballads of Scotland: Cre ativity and Adaptation,” Ossian Revisited, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 19 48. On the cultural and literary sig nificance of the poems see Fiona Stafford’s The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988); Howard Gaskill, ed., Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991); and Howard Gaskill and Fiona Stafford, eds., From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998).

Notes to pages 25–9

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4 Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 18 19. 5 Walter Scott, “Review of Malcolm Laing’s Poems of Ossian,” Edinburgh Review 6 (1805), 429. 6 Scott, “Review,” 429, 445. 7 Scott, “Review,” 446. 8 For example, see Ina Ferris, “Pedantry and the Question of Enlightenment History: The Figure of the Antiquary in Scott,” European Romantic Review 13 (2002), 273 83; and Susan Manning, “Antiquarianism, the Scottish Science of Man, and the Emergence of Modern Disciplin arity,” Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 57 76. 9 William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, 3 vols. (Dublin: W. Smith, 1769), iii: 211. The term “conjectural history” was coined by Edinburgh University professor of moral philosophy, Dugald Stewart. See his “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, by Adam Smith, ed. W. P. D. Wightman, J. C. Bryce, and I. S. Ross, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 293. 10 Nick Groom, “Celts, Goths, and the Nature of the Literary Source,” Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the EighteenthCentury Canon, ed. Alvaro Ribeiro, S. J. and James G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 276. 11 Rosemary Sweet, “Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (2001): 188. 12 See Roxann Wheeler’s The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), which describes race as defined by morals and manners, but which does not attend specifically to sensibility. On eighteenth century definitions of race, see also Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race,’” 247 64. 13 Nancy Stepan, writing about race in the first half of the nineteenth century, has assigned these perspectives to monogenist and polygenist writers respect ively, but the distinction does not hold for the eighteenth century; not all conjectural historians were monogenists, and not all antiquarians were polygenists. See The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800 1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 1 5, 29 35. 14 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 51 80. 15 Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 174. 16 White, Tropics of Discourse, 58. 17 Smith, Moral Sentiments, 191. Subsequent references will be made parenthet ically in the text.

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18 For the influence of Stoic philosophy on Smith’s thought, see John Dwyer, “Enlightened Spectators and Classical Moralists: Sympathetic Relations in Eighteenth Century Scotland,” Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, ed. John Dwyer and Richard B. Sher (Edinburgh: Mercat 1993), 96 118; and Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith’s System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue: The Moral and Political Foundations of “The Wealth of Nations” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 29 39. 19 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), ii: 782. 20 The Militia Act, passed at the beginning of the Seven Years War as a means of protecting Britain against potential French invasion, provided domestic support for a standing army that was largely deployed overseas. For the specifics of the Act, see John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985); and J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: the Story of a Political Issue, 1660 1802 (London: Routledge, 1965), 127 54. While the 1745 Jacobite rebellion was undoubtedly an important factor, Parliament offered no explicit justification for Scotland’s exclusion from the act. 21 Stafford, Sublime Savage, 18. 22 On the similarities between Smith’s ideal of feminized manhood and Macpherson’s heroes, see Luke Gibbons, “This Sympathetic Bond: Ossian, Celticism and Colonialism,” Celticism, ed. Terence Brown (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 273 92; and Dafydd Moore, Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson’s “The Poems of Ossian”: Myth, Genre and Cultural Change (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 113 39. 23 James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 77. Subsequent references will be abbreviated to PO and cited parenthetically. 24 John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 3rd edn. (London: John Murray, 1779), 42, 108. On Millar’s history of women, see Miriam Burstein, Narrating Women’s History in Britain, 1770 1902 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 16 49; and Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 9 14. 25 Potkay, Fate of Eloquence, 222. 26 David Raynor, “Ossian and Hume,” Ossian Revisited, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 146 63. 27 John Hill Burton, “Of the Authenticity of Ossian’s Poems,” Life and Correspondence of David Hume (New York: Franklin, 1967), 479. Although Hume emphasized that he did not intend his suppositions about third century Celts to disparage “the manners of the present Highlanders,” he appears to have doubted Macpherson’s own civility. When, in 1763, Macpherson accepted the position of Surveyor General and Secretary to the Governor of Florida,

Notes to pages 33–9

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Hume wrote to Hugh Blair, “I would advise him to travel among the Chickisaws or Cherokees, in order to tame and civilize him.” See Ernest Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 416. Malcolm Laing, The History of Scotland From the Union of the Crowns on the Accession of James VI to the Throne of England, to the Union of the Kingdoms in the Reign of Queen Anne, 2 vols. (London: A. Strahan, 1800), i: 43 4. Laing, History of Scotland, i: 44. Patrick Graham, Essay on the Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian; in which the Objections of Malcolm Laing, Esq. Are Particularly Considered and Refuted (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1807), 37. Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, Appointed to Inquire into the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Constable, 1805), 6. McNeil, Scotland, Britain, Empire, 43 50. Report of the Committee, 148. Report of the Committee, 149. The committee also argued that sentimental refinement must have inhered in the original Gaelic poems because it was common to all modern translations and recitations of ancient sources (128 9). Graham, Essay on the Authenticity of the Poems, 25. See Groom, “Celts, Goths, and the Nature of the Literary Source,” 275 96; Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 193 204; and Samuel Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 8 25. Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race,’” 251, Stepan, Idea of Race, x. Kidd, British Identities, 34 72. Samuel Johnson, “The Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,” in The Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and the Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, ed. Peter Levi (London: Penguin, 1984), 119. Johnson, “Journey to the Western Islands,” 119. Janet Sorensen The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 177; McNeil, Scotland, Britain, Empire, 32 41. My argument extends McNeil’s by introducing the question of race into Scots’ reactions to the poems. Johnson, “Journey to the Western Islands,” 119. Quoted in Raynor, “Ossian and Hume,” 152. On Johnson’s frustration with Highlanders’ evasiveness, see Davis, Acts of Union, 74 106. William Shaw, An Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems Ascribed to Ossian, 2nd edn. (London: J. Murray, 1782), 20; italics in original. On this point see Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 36, 40. See, for instance, Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’”; Stepan, Idea of Race, 45 6; and Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 14 33.

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48 See Peter J. Kitson, “Races, Places, Peoples, 1785 1800,” Romanticism and Colonialism, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 18 20. 49 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1778), 457. 50 Kames, Sketches, 494, 460. 51 Kames, Sketches, 494. 52 Andrew Mackillop, “More Fruitful than the Soil”: Army, Empire, and the Scottish Highlands, 1715 1815 (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell, 2000), 220. See also Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727 1782 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 53 John Pinkerton, Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths. Being an Introduction to the Ancient and Modern History of Europe (London: John Nichols, 1787), 121. 54 Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 143 4, 166 7; Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 9 16. 55 Pinkerton, Dissertation, 92, 69, 123. 56 Peter Kitson, “‘Candid Reflections’: The Idea of Race in the Debate over the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century,” Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, Britain and its Colonies, 1760 1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 11 25. 57 Kames avoids the problems posed by Biblical history by arguing that this polygenesis occurred at the building of the Tower of Babel: “By confounding the language of men, and scattering them abroad upon the face of all the earth, they were rendered savages. And to harden them for their new habita tions, it was necessary that they should be divided into different kinds, fitted for different climates” (Sketches, 78). 58 Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Secker, 1958), 50 122. 59 Laura Doyle, “The Racial Sublime,” Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture 1780 1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 22. 60 Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, 227 34. On competing claims for Britain’s racial origins see also Smiles, Image of Antiquity, 113 28. 61 James Macpherson, Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland, 2nd edn. (London: Becket, 1772), 233. 62 Quoted in Mossner, Life of David Hume, 416 17. 63 Ian Duncan, “Introduction,” Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. 64 Howard Gaskill “Ossian in Europe,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 21 (1994): 662. 65 Laura Doyle explains that “in revolutionary France the noble and peasant classes were understood by prominent thinkers to derive from different races”

Notes to pages 44–8

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so that the “rise of the middle and educated classes in France was often celebrated as the return to power of an unjustly subjugated race.” See Bordering on the Body, 38. Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 15 17. The essays in Howard Gaskill, ed., The Reception of Ossian in Europe (London: Thoemmes, 2004) provide a comprehensive survey of the trans mission and influence of the poems. On the influence of civic humanist thought on seventeenth and eighteenth century Scottish writers, see Phillipson, “The Scottish Enlightenment”; and John Robertson,“The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition.” For discussions of Romantic nationalism more generally see Roger D. Abrahams, “Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in Folkloristics,” The Journal of American Folklore 106 (1993): 3 37; and Marlon B. Ross, “Roman cing the Nation State: The Poetics of Romantic Nationalism,” Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 56 85. Anthony Smith, Ethnic Origins, 24, 147. On Ossian as a response to the ’45, see Moore, Enlightenment and Romance, 142 6 and Stafford, Sublime Savage, 18 20. Macpherson held government appointments as Surveyor General and Secre tary to the Governor of Florida between 1763 and 1765 and later with the East India Company. On Macpherson’s self positioning in the British literary marketplace, see Peter T. Murphy, “Fool’s Gold: The Highland Treasures of Macpherson’s Ossian,” ELH 53 (1986): 567 91. On the Dissertation’s significance for Ossian’s reception, see Steve Rizza, “A Bulky and Foolish Treatise?,” Ossian Revisited, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 129 46. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, “Introduction,” in Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 43. On Smith’s revisions see Evan Radcliffe, “Revolutionary Writing, Moral Philosophy, and Universal Benevolence in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (1993): 221 40, esp. p. 224. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), 54. Anand C. Chitnis, explains that the Enlightenment literati’s reluctance to discuss Anglo Scottish relations in their work did not necessarily imply that “they were unaware of and unin volved in Scotland’s circumstances in the eighteenth century, but rather that to dwell on Scotland might have been regarded as provincial.” See The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 91 2. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19.

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78 See also Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 151 9. 79 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 2nd edn. (London: J. Darby, 1726), 160, italics in original. 80 Ross, “Romancing the Nation State,” 58. See also Doyle, Bordering on the Body, 45. 81 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 198. Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 53 4 reads The Reflections as a response to Smith. 82 Hugh Blair, Sermons, 15th edn., 4 vols. (Dublin: William Colles, 1790), i: 159. 83 Henry Mackenzie, Works, 8 vols. (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1808), v: 109 10. 84 Anxieties over the spread of effeminacy among the nobility and gentry were by no means confined to Scotland. On the relationship between construc tions of masculinity and English national identity, see Felicity Nussbaum, “Effeminacy and Femininity: Domestic Prose Satire and David Simple,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11 (1999): 421 44; and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715 1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 185 205 and 212 28. 85 Alexander Carlyle, The Question Relating to a Scots Militia Considered (Edinburgh: Hamilton and Balfour, 1760), 26 7. 2 b r i t i s h m a s c u l i n i t y an d s c o t t i s h s e l f co n t r o l 1 Boswell in Holland, 282. 2 Mary Floyd Wilson traces the figure of the “melancholy Englishman” to early modern “ethnographic humoralism.” See English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 67 86. 3 Boswell’s Column: Being his Seventy Contributions to the london magazine under the pseudonym the hypochondriack from 1777 to 1783 here First Printed in Book Form in England, ed. Margery Bailey (London: William Kimber, 1951), 44; see also 25, 49, 80. Allan Ingram discusses the symptoms of melancholy at length in Boswell’s Creative Gloom: A Study of Imagery and Melancholy in the Writings of James Boswell (London: Macmillan, 1982), 11 17. 4 Boswell in Holland, 247. 5 Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in EighteenthCentury Scottish Literature (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 117. 6 On Boswell’s masculine role playing, see Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain 1660 1800 (Harlow, England: Longman, 2001), 183 97; Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 103 26; and David M. Weed, “Sexual Positions: Men of Pleasure, Economy, and Dignity in Boswell’s London Journal,” Eighteenth-Century

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Studies 31 (1998): 215 34. On his fragmented sense of nationality see Christopher Loar, “Nostalgic Correspondence and James Boswell’s Scottish Malady” Studies in English Literature 44 (2004): 595 615; and Simpson, The Protean Scot, 117 43. Nussbaum, “Effeminacy and Femininity,” 431. Masculinity was also central to the creation of an American national identity in the decades following the United States’ independence from Great Britain. See, for instance, Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800 1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 51. Moretti, Atlas, 51. William Murray, [Earl Mansfield], The Thistle: A Dispassionate examine of the Prejudice of Englishmen in general to the Scotch Nation; and particularly of a late arrogant Insult offered to all Scotchmen, by a Modern English journalist (London: H. Carpenter, 1746), 43. “Collection of Songs. Numb. ii. Song v,” Rebellion Papers, MS 488, fol. 95, National Library of Scotland. “An Excellent song on the present Times, by a Country Hind,” Rebellion Papers, MS 488, fol. 61, National Library of Scotland. Vincent Caretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 59. On sexualized Scottish stereo types, see Linda Colley, Britons, 121 2. The British Antidote to Caledonian Poison (London: Pridden, 1762) and The Scots Scourge: or, Pridden’s Supplement to the British Antidote to Caledonian Poison (London: Pridden, 1763) offer a lurid sampling of mid century anti Bute and anti Scottish propaganda. On the proximity of femininity and savagery see Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 7 14. Charles Churchill, “The Prophecy of Famine: A Scots Pastoral,” The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 199 200. On sensibility as a marker of social class see Robert Markley, “Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue,” The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 210 30; Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740 1800: The Price of a Tear (London: Macmillan, 1999); and Beth Fowkes Tobin, Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770 1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 8 28. Boswell, Hypochondriack Papers, 30. James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal 1762 1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill, 1950), 319. Sodomy was considered a practice of Italian, or sometimes French, origin. See G. S. Rousseau, “The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: ‘Utterly Confused Category’ and/or Rich Repository,” Eighteenth-Century Life

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Notes to pages 60–3 9 (1985): 137; and Randolph Trumbach “London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Social History 11 (1977): 11. Captain Whiffle, whom G. S. Rousseau has designated “the first authentic description of the enduring male homosexual stereotype” (147), evinces his sodomitical tendencies in his elaborate and bejeweled attire, “languishing air,” “squeaking tone,” nervous disorders, and his reputation for “maintain ing a correspondence with his surgeon, not fit to be named.” See Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Paul Gabriel Bouce´ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 195 9. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically. On Smollett’s depictions of sodomites, see Steven Bruhm, “Roderick Random’s Closet,” English Studies in Canada 19 (1993): 401 15; Cameron McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire 1660 1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 108 44; and Rousseau, “Pursuit of Homosexuality,” 145 51. On Smollett’s representations of Scots and Scotland, see, among others, Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 55 75; Gottlieb, Feeling British, 63 72; Alfred Lutz, “Representing Scotland in Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker: Smollett’s Development as a Novelist,” Studies in the Novel 33 (2001): 1 17; Eric Rothstein, “Scotophilia and Humphry Clinker: The Politics of Beggary, Bugs and Buttocks,” University of Toronto Quarterly 52 (1982): 63 78; and Simpson, The Protean Scot, 14 40. For Smollett’s encounters with prejudice, see Paul Gabriel Bouce´, The Novels of Tobias Smollett, trans. Paul Gabriel Bouce´ and Antonia White (London: Longman, 1976), 21 3; and Lewis M. Knapp, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 149, 167. Richard Bjornson, “Victimization and Vindication in Smollett’s Roderick Random,” Studies in Scottish Literature 13 (1978): 196 210. Tobias Smollett, “Tears of Scotland,” in Poems, Plays and “The Briton,” ed. Byron Gassman (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 23 6, lines 15, 44, and 51. While Roderick Random was published anonymously, Smollett made no secret of his authorship among his acquaintances. See, for instance, his letters to Alexander Carlyle in The Letters of Tobias Smollett, ed. Lewis M. Knapp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 6 7. Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 60. My reading is indebted here to Michael Mckeon’s argument in “Historiciz ing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660 1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1995): 295 322, which argues that “the modern category of masculinity” emerged from between the interstices of femininity and effeminacy as class identities were dissociated from blood and gender identities conversely were reconfigured as biological. John Barrell similarly has argued that by familiarizing him with the various ranks and trades of which English society is composed, Roderick’s various efforts at self fashioning ultimately enable him to acquire a gentleman’s “comprehensive view” of that society, unfettered by the blinkers of profession

Notes to pages 64–70

28 29

30

31 32

33

34

35

36

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or class. See English Literature 1730 80: An Equal, Wide Survey (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 179 200. See “Advice: A Satire,” in Poems, Plays and “The Briton,” lines 93 4. In addition to Roderick himself, Bowling, Thomson, and Don Rodriguez, all Scots, acquire their wealth through trade with Britain’s colonies. On eighteenth century Scotland’s role in the creation of Britain’s commercial empire, see Colley, Britons, 117 32; and Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), esp. 70 83. Michael Hechter’s Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536 1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) explains internal colonialism as the economic and political exploitation of a nation’s peripheries by its industrialized core (7 39). Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism offers a cultural rather than an economic model of internal colonialism, arguing that Scottish nationalism developed in reaction to the Anglicization of Scottish culture, where Anglicization is understood as a “form of cultural and political imperialism” perpetrated by a coterie of Enlightenment thinkers who sought a British “future severed from the [Scottish] past” (x, 30). Robert Chambers, Smollett: His Life and a Selection from his Writings (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1867), 42. For a closer reading of women’s role as commodities in the novel see T. G. A. Nelson, “Smollett’s Representation and Critique of the Traffic in Women: A Narrative Strand in Roderick Random,” Philological Quarterly 78 (1999): 283 300. In fact, we are never sure whether “Narcissa” is the heroine’s real name. Upon her first appearance in the narrative, Roderick refers to “the young lady, whose name for the present shall be Narcissa” (219). For a summary of criticism concerning Smollett’s female characters, see the introduction to Robert Spector’s Smollett’s Women: A Study in an Eighteenth-Century Masculine Sensibility (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1994). Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, x. In arguing for an understanding of Anglicization more nuanced than Trumpener’s, I am drawing on Nicholas Phillipson’s “Politics, Politeness and the Anglicisation of Early Eighteenth Century Scottish Culture,” Scotland and England 1286 1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 226 46. Phillipson contends that the upper classes of Scottish society regarded Anglicization as a process in which they exercised a considerable amount of agency. On Scottish writers’ efforts to avoid Scotticisms, see James G. Basker, “Scotticisms and the Problem of Cultural Identity in Eighteenth Century Britain,” Eighteenth-Century Life 15 (1991): 81 95. Kenneth Simpson claims that Mackenzie encouraged this association by consciously “adopting and then projecting the persona of the man of feeling” (Protean Scot, 144), but Mackenzie’s letters suggest otherwise. Maureen Harkin bases her assumption of Harley’s Scottishness on details in the novel that suggest a Scottish context, such as the verses scratched on inn

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38 39

40 41 42 43 44

45

46 47

48 49 50 51 52

53 54

Notes to pages 70–7 windows, and Harley’s dependence upon the political favors of “great men.” See “Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling: Embalming Sensibility,” ELH 61 (1994): 317 40. Henry Mackenzie, Letters to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock: On Literature, Events and People, 1768 1815, ed. Horst W. Drescher (Mu¨nster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1967), 95. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically. Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 17. On sentimental novels’ didactic claims, see also Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 119 20; and Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 116 25. Mackenzie, Works, v: 182. Mackenzie, Works, v: 109 10. Mackenzie, Works, v: 183. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 118, 126. Simpson, Protean Scott, 175. Like Mullan, Simpson doubts Mackenzie’s ironic distance from the narrative and argues that The Man of Feeling endorses, rather than criticizes, Harley’s sensibility. On narrative fragmentation and sensibility see Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 98 121; and Anne Patricia Williams, “Description and Tableau in the Eighteenth Century British Senti mental Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8 (1996): 465 84. Letters to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock, 29. “Reading,” M. 240, Boswell Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Boswell disparagingly noted several Scotti cisms in the novel, and called Harley’s behavior in London “quite unnatural even in a simpleton.” “Reading,” M. 240. Letters to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock, 37. Tobin, Superintending the Poor, 9. April London, “Historiography, Pastoral, Novel: Genre in The Man of Feeling,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10 (1997): 43 62. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in EighteenthCentury English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 129. On Harley’s death as an avoidance of sexual consummation and form of emas culation, see also Leo Braudy, “The Form of the Sentimental Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 7 (1973): 1 13 and G. A. Starr, “ ‘Only a Boy’: Notes on Sentimental Novels,” Genre 10 (1977): 501 27. Stephen Ahern, Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel (New York: AMS, 2007), 120 4. See Burke’s “Speech against Mr. Fox’s East India Bill,” in Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Peter J. Stanlis (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1968), 367 80.

Notes to pages 78–84

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55 “Some Account of the Life and Writings of Robert Burns,” Scots Magazine 59 (1797): 3. 56 Letters of Robert Burns, ed. G. Ross Roy, 2nd edn. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), ii: 25. 57 On Boswell’s complicated feelings about Scotland, See Pat Rogers, “Boswell and the Scotticism,” New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of “The Life of Johnson,” ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 56 71; and Gordon Turnbull, “Boswell and the Idea of Exile,” Boswell in Scotland and Beyond, ed. Thomas Crawford (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1997), 89 103. 58 Boswell in Holland, 275. 59 Boswell’s London Journal, 272, 145. 60 London Journal, 202. In suggesting that Boswell associated melancholy with Englishness rather than Scottishness, I am arguing against Christopher Loar. See “Nostalgic Correspondence,” 600. 61 On the class connotations of hypochondria, see Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 205 7. 62 Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774 1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill, 1950), 300. 63 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 48. 64 Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, 117. 65 Boswell in Holland, 95. 66 Boswell in Holland, 17, 28, 24. 67 Hypochondriack Papers, 48. 68 Hypochondriack Papers, 198. 69 Hypochondriack Papers, 41, 230. 70 “Memorabilia,” M. 175, Boswell Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 71 On the gendered biases of Smith’s moral psychology, see Lucinda Cole, “(Anti)feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wolles tonecraft, and More,” ELH 58 (1991): 107 40; and Maureen Harkin, “Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Sympathy, Women, and Emulation,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 24 (1995): 175 90. 3 s e n t i m e n t a l c o r r e s p o n d en c e s a n d t h e b o u n d a r i e s o f b r i t i s h id e n t i t y 1 The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. R.W. Chapman, 3 vols. (Oxford: Claren don Press, 1952), ii: 228. On the letter’s generic connotations see Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the EighteenthCentury Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 83 9. 2 Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 1982), 89.

190

Notes to pages 84–7

3 Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688 1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 78. 4 Smith, Moral Sentiments, 21. 5 Smith, Moral Sentiments, 19. 6 Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire, 6. 7 Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 92 8 and Gottlieb, Feeling British, 42 9. 8 Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland, 86. 9 Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748 1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1 13. 10 For instance, Evelina affectionately addresses her guardian Arthur Villars as “my more than father,” implying that the elective tie of adoption supersedes the blood she shares with her birth father, the neglectful Sir John Belmont. Frances Burney, Evelina; or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Edward Bloom and Vivien Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 131, emphasis in original. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically. Cindy Weinstein and Leonard Tennenhouse have noted a similar privileging of sentimental over consanguineal ties in late eighteenth and nineteenth century American sentimental novels. See Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 8 9; and Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English, 45 6. 11 Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985), 250. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically. On Humphry Clinker’s efforts to combat anti Scottish prejudices see also Sharon Alker, “The Geography of Negotiation: Wales, Anglo Scottish Sympathy, and Tobias Smollett,” Lumen 21 (2002): 89 103; Gottleib, Feeling British, 83 98; Lutz, “Representing Scotland”; and Roth stein, “Scotophilia and Humphry Clinker.” 12 The 1536 Anglo Welsh Union was motivated by factors similar to those leading to the Anglo Scottish Union of 1707, namely, the desire to ensure Welsh support for the Tudor monarchs, and the belief that feudal lords in the hinterlands of Wales posed a threat to the legal and political control of a centralized English government. See J. Gwynfor Jones, Early Modern Wales, c. 1525 1640 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1994), 47 91. On Humphry Clinker’s representation of Wales, see also Alker, “Geography of Negation,” 89 103. 13 Jery writes twenty eight letters and Bramble twenty seven. John Vladimir Price points out that together their letters constitute 83 percent of the narrative. See Tobias Smollett: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 9. 14 Aileen Douglas, Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 165. Those critics who read Humphry Clinker as

Notes to pages 88–95

15

16 17 18

19

20

21 22 23

24

25

26

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a celebration of multiple voices include Jerry G. Beasley, Tobias Smollett: Novelist (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 185 212; Bouce´, The Novels of Tobias Smollett, 191 9; Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 57 80, among others. Douglas, Uneasy Sensations, 165; on Bramble’s authority see also John Zomchick, “Social Class, Character and Narrative Strategy in Humphry Clinker,” Eighteenth-Century Life 10 (1986): 176. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 224. See Peter Lord, Words with Pictures: Welsh Images and Images of Wales in the Popular Press, 1640 1860 (Aberystwyth: Planet, 1995). Review of Humphry Clinker, Every Man’s Magazine, or the Monthly Repository, of Science, Instruction, and Amusement (1771): 34; Review of Humphry Clinker, The Universal Magazine 49 (1771): 257. Although his name did not appear on the title page, Smollett’s authorship of Humphry Clinker was an open secret. In 1700 90 percent of the inhabitants of Wales spoke Welsh as their first language; however, no Welshman could hold any political or legal office unless he was proficient in English. See Jones, Early Modern Wales, 80 91. On Humphry Clinker and the consolidation of standard English, see Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire, 104 37. For Smollett’s views on luxury and material consumption see Susan L. Jacobsen, “‘The tinsel of the times’: Smollett’s Argument against Conspicuous Consumption in Humphry Clinker,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1996): 71 89; and John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 135 54 and 283 90. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 61. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 316. Britain’s imperial possessions often were represented as a source of moral “infection” that threatened English integrity. See Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600 1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 168 9; and Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6 7. Byron Gassman explores Dennison’s and Baynard’s estates as symbols of the real and ideal state of the nation under George III in “Humphry Clinker and the Two Kingdoms of George III,” Criticism 16 (1974): 95 108. Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early EighteenthCentury English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 18. Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713 1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 9 11. See for example Joanne Cutting Gray, Woman as “Nobody” and the Novels of Fanny Burney (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 24 6; Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 101 6.

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Notes to pages 96–102

27 See, for instance, Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 35 65; and Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 23 78. 28 Quoted in Langford, Englishness Identified, 10. 29 Following Christine Van Boheemen I use Freud’s term “family romance” to describe narratives of familial relations that “designate identity in terms of relation to origin.” See The Novel as Family Romance: Language, Gender, and Authority from Fielding to Joyce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), ix. 30 For psychological readings of Evelina as family romance, see Doody, Frances Burney, 62 5; and Susan C. Greenfield, Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 35 56. 31 Alok Yadav, Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 2. 32 Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740 1830, revised edn. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 136. 33 Recent explorations of national identity in Evelina have perpetuated Newman’s over simplified opposition between Englishness and Frenchness. See Leann Maunu, “Quelling the French Threat in Frances Burney’s Evelina,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 31 (2002): 98 125; and Mary Severance, “An Unerring Rule: The Reformation of the Father in Frances Burney’s Evelina,” The Eighteenth Century 36 (1995): 119 38. Although I disagree with Epstein’s reading of Evelina as disingenuous, her argument offers a potential challenge to Newman’s association between sincerity and Englishness. See Iron Pen, 95 100. 34 Macartney is preceded by the rakish Baron Glencairn in Eliza Haywood’s The Agreeable Caledonian (1728), the nondescript “Earl of L , a Scotsman” in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753 4), and by a number of stereotypically miserly and uncouth stage Scots like Sir Archy Macsarcasm in Charles Macklin’s Love a` la Mode. 35 Quoted in Doody, Frances Burney, 51. 36 Doody, Frances Burney, 62. 37 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765 9), i: 447. 38 Ellen Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684 1814 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 173. 39 Pollak, Incest, 160. 40 Doody, Frances Burney, 62. 41 Perry, Novel Relations, 375. 42 Doody sees the incest taboo as fulfilling “feminist fantasy in which the masculine, the male heir, is set aside as illegitimate, and the female is legitimated” (Frances Burney, 62). In contrast, Greenfield sees the double possibility of incest in Evelina as an indictment of Belmont’s paternal failures in his inability to keep track of his offspring (Mothering Daughters, 40).

Notes to pages 102–11

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43 Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Glasgow: Robert Foulis, 1747), 264. 44 Marshall, The Figure of the Theater, 187. 45 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85. 46 Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from her Correspondence and other Unpublished Writings, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1818), i: 48, i: 103. Born in Belfast to Scottish parents, Hamilton was raised near Stirling by her aunt and uncle, and lived in England only for a few years of her adult life. She returned to Scotland in 1804 and resided in Edinburgh until her death in 1818. 47 Teltscher, Inscribing India, 139. Gary Kelly suggests in Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790 1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), that we might read Za¯a¯rmilla as a figure for the French e´migre´s who flooded into England, and his war torn land of Rohilkhund as a parallel to Revolutionary France (135). See also Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, 101. 48 Despite their shared anti Jacobinism, Elizabeth Hamilton strongly disagreed with Burke’s views on colonial policy in India, and caricatures his contribu tions to the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings. See Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999), 244 5. 49 Benger, Memoirs, ii: 73. 50 Balachandra Rajan, “Feminizing the Feminine: Early Women Writers on India,” Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780 1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 159. 51 Hamilton, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 142. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically. 52 Quoted in Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 313. 53 See Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1 22; and Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1 23. 54 Teltscher, Inscribing India, 208. 55 Teltscher, Inscribing India, 142. 56 Perkins and Russell, “Introduction,” Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 44. 4 national tales and the domestication o f t h e sc o t t i s h h i g h l a nd s 1 Sarah Green, Scotch Novel Reading, or Modern Quackery. A Novel Really Founded on Facts, 2 vols. (London: Newman, 1824), i: 4 5. 2 Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 32. 3 Ferris, Ireland, 50. Most important among these studies are: Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ina Ferris, The Achievement

194

4 5

6 7

8 9 10

11

12

Notes to pages 111–13 of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) and The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland; Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism; and Julia M. Wright, Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 2007). Ferris, Achievement, 105 33. Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl was the first novel subtitled “A National Tale.” Other novels to adopt the subtitle include Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale (1815), Elizabeth Appleton’s Edgar: A National Tale (1816), and Owenson’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale (1827). Some novels designated themselves more specifically as tales of a particular nation, for instance: Elizabeth Helme, Duncan and Peggy: A Scottish Tale (1794); Susannah Gunning, Delves, A Welch Tale (1797); and Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent: A Hibernian Tale (1800). Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 26 32. See Ferris, Ireland, 46 101; and Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 128 57. While Ferris limits her study of the national tale to Ireland, Trumpener’s broad survey of the genres of Romantic nationalism overlooks the importance of the very different political contexts to which Irish and Scottish national tales responded. Moreover, Trumpener effectively nationalizes the genres of historical novel and national tale, relegating the former to Scotland and the latter to Ireland. Ferris, Ireland, 30, 2. Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire, 3. On representations of Highlanders in eighteenth and early nineteenth century art and literature, see Robert Clyde, From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander, 1745 1830 (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 1995), 1 17; and Murray G. H. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 26 35. This transformation entailed the privatization of land that previously had been communally farmed and the introduction of large scale sheep farming. For a history of the usage of the term “clearance” and an overview of the debates surrounding the causes of the Highland Clearances, see Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000), 3 12. In discussing the Clearances, it is tempting to depict Highlanders as the unqualified victims of Britain’s uneven eco nomic development. J. M. Bumsted has argued that prior to 1815 emigration from the Highlands was often voluntary, but as Andrew Mackillop has shown, this voluntary decision may have been simply the least offensive of several inadequate options for survival. See Bumsted’s The People’s Clearance: Highland Emigration to British North America, 1770 1815 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982) and Mackillop’s“More Fruitful than the Soil.” Anne Grant, Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1811), ii: 150. Subsequent references will be made paren thetically to this edition.

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13 Richards, The Highland Clearances, 53. 14 Malcolm Gray, The Highland Economy, 1750 1850 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1957), 155. 15 Additional examples of Scottish national tales include: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Cottagers of Glenburnie: A Tale for the Farmer’s Inglenook (1808); Mary Brunton’s Discipline (1814); Mary Johnston’s The Lairds of Glenfern; or the Highlanders of the Nineteenth Century. A Tale (1816); Robert Mudie’s Glenfergus (1819); and Felix Macdonogh’s The Highlanders: A Tale (1824). These novels’ acknowledgement of Highlanders’ grievances, and shared project of domestication and integration distinguish them from those like Mrs. Barnby’s The Rock; or Alfred and Anna. A Scottish Tale (1798) and Caroline Lamb’s Graham Hamilton (1822), which use the contrast between Highland virtue and metropolitan corruption simply as a plot device. 16 While his novels share many of the national tale’s plots and conventions, Scott took great pains to differentiate them from the works of his female contem poraries, as Ferris has shown in The Achievement of Literary Authority, 104 33. 17 Friedrich Schiller, Naı¨ve and Sentimental Poetry; and, On the Sublime: Two Essays, ed. and trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966), 12. In applying Schiller’s terms to Scottish Romantic fiction, I am following Ian Duncan’s use of these categories in his introduction to James Hogg, Winter Evening Tales (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), xxiii xxvii. 18 Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 177 90. Wheeler argues that throughout the eighteenth century, the opposition between savage and civilized behavior, as much as the opposition between white and black skin, organized ideas of racial difference (1 48). National tales suggest that this behavioral concept of race persisted into the nineteenth century, coexisting with a formative under standing of race as innate difference manifest outwardly in physical difference. 19 Pinkerton, Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, 69. 20 Pinkerton, Dissertation, 121. 21 Matthew Wickman, The Ruins of Experience: Scotland’s “Romantick” Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 71 85; Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1989). 22 John Knox, A View of the British Empire, More Especially Scotland (London: J. Walter, 1784), 14 15; Mackillop, “More Fruitful than the Soil,” 218. 23 Clyde, From Rebel to Hero, 150. 24 Quoted in Jenni Calder, The Story of the Scottish Soldier 1600 1914 (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 1987), 16. 25 Anon., The Present Conduct of the Chieftains and Proprietors of Lands in the Highlands of Scotland, Towards their Clans and People (n.p., 1773), 6. 26 Ina Ferris, “Translation from the Borders: Encounter and Recalcitrance in Waverley and Clan-Albin,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1997): 204. For discussions of Grant’s hybridity, see Ferris, “Translation,” and McNeil, Scotland, Britain, Empire, 148 65.

196

Notes to pages 117–30

27 James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Auto-Ethnographic Work of NineteenthCentury British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 37 59. 28 Grant records these events in her Memoirs of an American Lady (1806). 29 Womack, Improvement and Romance, 40. 30 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 152. 31 See Charlotte Sussman, “The Emptiness at the Heart of Midlothian: Nation, Narration, and Population,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15 (2002): 103 26. 32 Mackillop, “More Fruitful than the Soil,” 222. 33 Mackillop’s research suggests that Grant’s depiction of military service as “a means of social and material advancement” is fairly accurate for Highlanders who were already relatively prosperous, and particularly for the landowning elite. Even for this population, however, the army often provided a stepping stone, rather than offering an alternative, to emigration. See Mackillop, “More Fruitful than the Soil,” 185. 34 Christian Isobel Johnstone, Clan-Albin: A National Tale, ed. Andrew Monnickendam (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2003), 22. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically to this edition of the text. 35 Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. See also Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 173 86. 36 After it was forfeited by Lady Augusta’s father, the Glenalbin estate was held in wadset by Colonel Gordon. A Scottish legal term, wadset describes the conveyance of land in temporary satisfaction of a debt or obligation; the debtor can recover his lands on payment of a stipulated sum, or on the performance of the obligation. The Macalbins’ estate thus could be redeemed by “any legitimate descendant of the family of Macalbin” after a certain time had elapsed (533). 37 Johnstone’s vision of Celtic unity responds to debates over the genealogical and geographical origins of Britain’s Celtic populations described in Chapter 1. Clan-Albin attempts to shut down such potentially divisive debates by invoking a sense of unity that rests on present identity rather than historical priority. Thus we learn that during his time in Ireland, “Norman found no time to investigate, whether St. Patrick had stepped from Carrickfergus to the port which bears his name, and peopled all Scotland in one morning with his own hands, or whether, according to the equally rational theory of zealous Caledonians, the emerald isle was peopled from the bleak north. He was wisely contented to feel himself at home in Ireland” (409, italics in original). 38 See Fry, The Scottish Empire, 70 95. 39 A number of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers on the Clearances advocated similar projects. See, for examples, James Anderson, The True Interests of Great Britain Considered; or, a Proposal for Establishing the Northern Fisheries (Edinburgh, 1783). 40 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 114. 41 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 113 15. 42 Eve Tavor Bannet, “Rewriting the Social Text: The Female Bildungsroman in Eighteenth Century England,” Reflection and Action: Essays on the

Notes to pages 130–6

43 44

45

46 47 48

49

197

Bildungsroman, ed. James Hardin (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 196. Lorna Ellis argues that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century female Bildungsroman culminates in the heroine’s ability to reconcile her self perceptions with others’ expectations and percep tions of her. In Marriage, this self reflexivity again acquires national dimen sions, as Mary learns to see not only her own emotional responses, but also her native culture, through the eyes of an outsider. See Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750 1850 (London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 23. Susan Ferrier, Marriage, ed. Herbert Foltinek (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 2. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically to this edition. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 141. Ferrier was not the first novelist to enact such an inversion of center and peripheries. Elizabeth Helme’s Peggy and Duncan: A Scottish Tale (1794) and Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1810) also depict a young woman’s journey from the Highlands to London, as does Ferrier’s last novel, Destiny (1831). In these novels the heroine’s exposure to the vices and affectations of urban society similarly is crucial in tempering her naı¨ve sensibility, and in teaching her, as the title of Brunton’s novel makes clear, some self control. Even as wool prices dropped and the Highland economy began to collapse after 1815, there occurred what Richards terms a “Malthusian nightmare” in the western Highlands and islands, leaving landlords utterly unable to support their tenants. Exact figures are uncertain, but Richards estimates that in the northwestern Highlands, the population increased by 53 percent between 1800 and 1841. See Richards, The Highland Clearances, 189, 46. Susan Ferrier, Destiny; or the Chief ’s Daughter, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1882), i: 98. James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, ed. Andrew S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1966), i: 17. My argument here is influenced by Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), which contends that the ideological formation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of separate domestic and political, feminine and masculine, spheres allowed women new, albeit disguised, forms of political influence (38 58). Feminization performed a very different function in later nineteenth century discussions of the Celtic peripheries, in which Enlightenment discourses of civilization and savagery were modified by the developing science of ethnol ogy. Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), for instance, attributes to Celts all the negative connotations of nineteenth century femi ninity, describing them as sensual, maudlin, and incapable of self restraint. The Celt’s “feminine idiosyncrasy” justifies for Arnold the Anglo Saxon race’s government of Celtic peoples, although he argues that this government should be based in “love and admiration” rather than “material interests.” See “On the Study of Celtic Literature” and “On Translating Homer” (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 76 82.

198

Notes to pages 136–44

50 Christian Isobel Johnstone, The Saxon and the Gael; or, the Northern Metropolis: Including a View of the Lowland and Highland Character, 4 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1814), i: 193. 51 Thomas De Quincey, Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: J. M. Dent, 1923), 157. 5 r e b e ll i o n s a n d r e u n i o n s i n t h e hi sto r ica l no vel 1 Ferris, Achievement, 93. 2 Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 182; Ferris, Achievement, 93 8; Gottlieb, Feeling British, 189; Andrew Krull, “Spectacles of Disaffection: Politics, Ethics, and Sentiment in Walter Scott’s Old Mortality,” ELH 73 (2006): 699. 3 Among others, Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 96 245; Ferris, Achievement, 137 94; and Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 148 57. 4 Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 42. 5 Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 42 3. 6 Miranda J. Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 186 234; Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 51 62; Ferris, Achievement, 79 104. Judith Wilt offers what is still one of the most thorough discussions of Scott’s female characters in Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 116 52. 7 On female sexuality and sensibility see Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 7 14. 8 On the feminization of tradition, and particularly oral forms of folk culture, see Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 27 30. 9 Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 11. See also Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 33 9; and Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 165 91. 10 On the French Revolution’s influence on the development of the historical novel, see Georg Luka´cs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 23 7. 11 R. C. Richardson discusses these concepts of revolution in The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited (London: Routledge, 1988), 65 86. 12 On the Radical War see James D. Young, The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 72 103. 13 McCracken Flesher, Possible Scotlands, 73 113. For an account that empha sizes the reconciliatory aims of the visit, see John Prebble, The King’s Jaunt: George IV in Scotland, August 1822, ‘One and twenty daft days’ (London: Collins, 1988). 14 John Galt, “The Gathering of the West,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, September 1822, 306 32. 15 Donaldson, The Jacobite Song, 15. See also Pittock, The Stuart Myth, 41 72.

Notes to pages 144–50

199

16 Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor, ed. Fiona Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1. Except where noted, subsequent refer ences will be made parenthetically to The Bride of Lammermoor, ed. J. H. Alexander, The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). The Edinburgh edition reproduces the 1819 version of the novel rather than the Magnum Opus edition on which the Oxford edition is based. 17 The Letters of Walter Scott, Ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932), vi: 118. 18 Letters, v: 186. 19 Scott had a history of borrowing women’s words. James Hogg’s mother accused Scott of damaging her songs by writing them down for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, claiming “there war never ane o’ my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’ an’ ye hae spoilt them awthegither. They were made for singin’ an’ no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung mair. An’ the worst thing a’, they’re nouther right spell’d nor right setten down.” See Hogg, Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott and Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Jill Rubenstein (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 38. 20 See, for example, Caroline Franklin, “Feud and Faction in The Bride of Lammermoor,” Scottish Literary Journal 14 (1987): 18 29; and James Kerr, Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 86 96. 21 Peter Dignus Garside, “Union and the Bride of Lammermoor,” Studies in Scottish Literature 19 (1984): 88. 22 Garside notes that Lucy’s betrothal to Bucklaw is frequently described in political and legal terms such as “alliance,” “treaty,” and “contract,” (“Union and The Bride of Lammermoor,” 80). 23 The line is from Burns’ “Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation.” Burns, like Scott, attributed the Union to the Scottish aristocracy’s treacherous greed, which overcame centuries of popular resistance to England: What force or guile could not subdue, Thro’ many warlike ages, Is wrought now by a coward few, For hireling traitors’ wages. 24 Critics have debated whether Scott’s so called Union novel is pro or anti Union. The debate is complicated by changes that Scott made in the Magnum Opus edition of the novel that date the action after the 1707 Union, rather than before it, as in the 1819 edition. For a summary of the differences between the two editions, see Jane Millgate’s “Text and Context: Dating the Events of The Bride of Lammermoor,” Bibliotheck 9 (1979): 200 13. 25 See, for instance, Laura Montreville in Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1810), Mary Douglas in Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818), and Jeanie Deans in Scott’s Heart of Midlothian (1818). Helen Small situates Lucy in a tradition of literary

200

26

27 28

29

30

31 32 33

34

35 36

Notes to pages 150–3

madwomen in Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel and Female Insanity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 128 37. Antony Hasler, “Introduction,” The Three Perils of Woman, or Love, Leasing, and Jealousy, a Series of Domestic Scottish Tales, by James Hogg, ed. David Groves, Antony Hasler, and Douglas S. Mack (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), xxviii xxix. Wilt, Secret Leaves, 48. Lucy’s last words are taken from an old family tale that Scott describes in the introduction to the Magnum Opus edition as the “real source” of the novel. They therefore emphasize her connection to oral tradition not only in their dialect but also through their extratextual origin. See The Bride of Lammermoor, ed. Robertson, 1. In commending the Manchester Yeomen for their handling of Peterloo without “unnecessary violence” Scott remarked in a letter to his son that Scotland “shall not be many degrees better if the Radical Reformers be not checked.” This represents a departure from his earlier claims that the Radicals were not to be feared because a “mere mob will always be a fire of loose straw.” See Letters, iv: 483, iv: 467. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 340 7 and Franklin, “Feud and Faction in The Bride of Lammermoor” discuss The Bride of Lammermoor as a response to working class unrest. Burgess, British Fiction, 189; Duncan, Modern Romance, 53; and Robert P. Irvine, “Gender and the Place of Culture in Scott’s Saint Ronan’s Well,” Scottish Studies Review 2 (2001): 47. Macpherson, Poems of Ossian, 211. Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 71. Duncan has described Hogg’s fiction as magical realism (Scott’s Shadow, 169). The Perils also conform roughly to Amy J. Elias’s definition of the metahis torical romance, a supposedly postmodern genre that creates a “fictional universe in which historical epochs, characters, or events appear together on the same historical plane.” See Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 139. For an account of Galt’s and Hogg’s critical reception, see Ferris, Achievement, 137 94. Some critics have questioned whether the term “historical novel” accurately describes Galt’s and Hogg’s fictions. But if, as Avrom Fleishman has argued, “what makes a historical novel historical is the active presence of a concept of history as a shaping force,” Galt’s and Hogg’s novels certainly exemplify the genre. See The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 15. Meiko O’Halloran, “Treading the Borders of Fiction: Veracity, Identity, and Corporeality in The Three Perils,” Studies in Hogg and His World 12 (2001): 41. Macpherson, Poems of Ossian, 245. See also Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 99.

Notes to pages 154–60

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37 On Hogg’s use of orality see Fielding, Writing and Orality, 74 98; and Valentina Bold, “Traditional Narrative Elements in The Three Perils of Woman,” Studies in Hogg and His World 3 (1992): 42 56. 38 Antony Hasler, “The Three Perils of Woman and John Wilson’s Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life,” Studies in Hogg and his World 1 (1990): 42; and Douglas S. Mack, Scottish Fiction and the British Empire (Edinburgh: Edin burgh University Press, 2006), 107. 39 Hasler, “The Three Perils,” 42. 40 James Hogg, The Three Perils of Woman, or Love, Leasing, and Jealousy, a Series of Domestic Scottish Tales, ed. David Groves, Antony Hasler, and Douglas S. Mack (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 25. Subse quent references will be made parenthetically. 41 Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 202. The historicity of the historical plot is questionable; for, as Douglas Gifford notes, Hogg selectively combines incidents from various thirteenth and fourteenth century border skirmishes. See The Three Perils of Man: War, Women, and Witchcraft, ed. Douglas Gifford (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), 540 4. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically. 42 On the relationship between The Three Perils of Man and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, see Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 194 207. 43 The Three Perils of Man incorporates several of the conventions that Dugaw attributes to ballads, including the trials of the disguised woman, the tests imposed on her lover and parents, and the happy resolution. See Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 93. 44 Jason Marc Harris, “National Borders, Contiguous Cultures, and Fantastic Folklore in Hogg’s The Three Perils of Man,” Studies in Hogg and his World 14 (2003): 42. 45 Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 207 12. 46 John Galt, Autobiography, 2 vols. (London: Cochrane and M’Crone, 1833), ii: 220. 47 Keith M. Costain “Theoretical History and the Novel: The Scottish Fictions of John Galt,” ELH 43 (1976): 350. On Galt’s “theoretical histories” see also John MacQueen, “John Galt and the Analysis of Social History,” Scott Bicentenary Essays, ed. Alan Bell (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 332 42. 48 John Galt, The Literary Life and Miscellanies of John Galt, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1834) i: 155. 49 Autobiography ii: 220, ii: 238. 50 Costain, “Theoretical History”; see also Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 216. 51 In a letter to Blackwood, Galt explains: “The story will grasp nearly a century, as it comprehends three generations and . . . will embrace a great deal of matter similar in impress to the Annals and the Provost, besides being complete as a romantic plot within itself.” National Library of Scotland MS 4008, fol. 182.

202

Notes to pages 160–6

52 John Galt, The Entail; or the Lairds of Grippy, ed. Ian A. Gordon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 5. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically. 53 Mark Schoenfield explains that the practice of entailing land was intended to “preserve the family as an abstract entity” over any particular family member’s interests. See “The Family Plots: Land and Law in John Galt’s The Entail,” Scottish Literary Journal 24 (1997): 63. 54 For instance, after Claud’s death, Watty, the heir to Kittlestonheugh, refuses to care for either his widowed mother, or Charles’ widow and children, on the grounds that he does not want to repeat his father’s error. While he consciously seeks to avoid re enacting his father’s cruel treatment of Charles by saving all the revenue of the estate for his daughter, Watty neglects his duties towards other members of his family, depriving them of a share in his inheritance. Driven by personal interest, rather than by “family policy,” or a desire to preserve the Walkinshaw name and property, Claud’s third son, George, wrests the estate from Watty by proving his brother “fatuous” or mentally incompetent before a jury. 55 Observations Upon Scotch Entails. Being Article IX of No. VI of the New Edinburgh Review for October 1822 (Edinburgh: Balfour & Clarke, 1822), 4. Entails had been abolished in England three centuries earlier. On eighteenth century reformations of Scottish entail law, see Robert Burgess, “Perpetuities in Scots Law,” Publications of the Stair Society 31 (Edinburgh: The Stair Society, 1979). 56 See for instance, Galt’s Autobiography, i: 84 5 and ii: 242 3. 57 Maggie Craig, Damn’ Rebel Bitches: The Women of the’ 45 (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1997), 66 71. 58 Ruth I. Aldrich, John Galt (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 70; Ian A. Gordon, John Galt: The Life of a Writer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 26. While pressuring Galt to produce a longer novel than his previous works, William Blackwood similarly criticized Mrs. Eadie as overly romanticized. See National Library of Scotland MS 4008. 59 Williams argues that residual traditions rectify omissions in a dominant culture in The Entail, the Anglicized commercial Lowlands. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115 24. 60 Galt, Autobiography, 229. 61 Walter Scott, Saint Ronan’s Well (New York: Harper, 1829), 5. Burgess reads this preface as signaling Scott’s transition from writing romances of legitim ation to writing the legitimation of romance and of professional authorship (British Fiction, 217 34). Except where otherwise noted, subsequent refer ences will be made parenthetically to Saint Ronan’s Well, ed. Mark Weinstein, The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), which is based on the first edition of the novel. 62 Ferris, Achievement, 35 59.

Notes to pages 166–72

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63 Burgess, British Fiction, 218. 64 Tara Ghoshal Wallace, “Walter Scott and Feminine Discourse: The Case of St. Ronan’s Well,” Journal of Narrative Technique 19 (1989): 233; Irvine, “Gender and the Place of Culture,” 52. Clara had shocked Scott’s earliest readers. Scott removed from the editions published in his lifetime the indications that Clara and Tyrrel had consummated their relationship because James Ballantyne felt that Clara’s sexual indiscretion might scandal ize and alienate Scott’s audience. See Mark Weinstein, “Essay on the Text,” Saint Ronan’s Well, ed. Mark Weinstein, The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 390. 65 Irvine, “Gender and the Place of Culture,” 59, 48. On the failed marriage plot see also Joan Pittock, “Scott and the Novel of Manners: The Case of St. Ronan’s Well,” The Durham University Journal 66 (1973): 1 9. 66 David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 19. 67 Sentiment enjoyed a literary resurgence in Scotland at the end of the nineteenth century in the work of the Kailyard school. The novelists associ ated with the Kailyard movement, including J. M. Barrie, S. R. Crockett, and Ian Maclaren, responded to the disease, poverty, and urban crime accom panying Scotland’s industrialization with “sentimental and nostalgic treat ment of parochial Scottish scenes, which often centred on the church community” and the “comfort and security of the native hearth.” In contrast to eighteenth and early nineteenth century Scottish writers, who wrote for an Anglo centric literary marketplace, the Kailyard writers addressed a pre dominantly Scottish audience. Their idealized portrayals of rural Scottish communities governed by traditional forms of religious and aristocratic authority were intended to evoke nostalgia in readers, and perhaps also to inspire a reactionary effort to preserve or recover traditional ways of life. See Thomas D. Knowles, Ideology, Art and Commerce: Aspects of Literary Sociology in the Late Victorian Scottish Kailyard. Gothenburg Studies in English 54 (Gothenburg: Minab, 1983), 13. 68 Richetti, The English Novel in History, 248, 247. 69 Hunter, Before Novels, 110 30. 70 It is unsurprising that the nineteenth century United States should inherit, in modified form, Scotland’s discourses of feeling. The writings of the Scottish literati, including Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, David Hume, William Robertson, and others figured prominently in American university curricula, and Ossian enjoyed immense popularity among American readers. See Franklin E. Court, The Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in Early America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Andrew Hook, From Goosecreek to Gandercleugh: Studies in Scottish-American Literary and Cultural History (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 1999). 71 Stern, The Plight of Feeling, 6. 72 Crain, American Sympathy, 2.

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Index

Allan, David 16 Altman, Janet Gurkin 84 Anderson, Benedict 19, 173n.3 Anglo-Saxons 36, 39, 40, 42, 90 Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments 2, 12, 27, 44, 53, 67, 112, 113, 141, 145, 149, 151, 161 1707 Treaty of 1 compared to marriage 12–18, 61–2, 65–6, 68–9, 94, 122, 126, 130–1, 133–4, 139, 145, 149–50, 150–1, 167 incorporating versus federative 13, 15 marks the decline of feudalism in Scotland 139, 142, 151–2 and pamphlet literature 12, 58, 61–2, 68–9, 140 racial implications of 15, 36 and sympathy 7–8, 9–11, 16, 17, 89, 90–2, 95, 169 antiquarianism, see historiography anti-Scottish prejudice 57–8, 60, 87, 90, 99 Arnold, Matthew 197n.49

Carlyle, Alexander 53 Carter, Philip 55 Celts 31, 36, 39–42, 90, 115 see also Highlanders Chandler, James 151 Child, Lydia Maria 22 Churchill, Charles 58 civil society 31 division of labor in 27, 30, 49 Clyde, Robert 15 Colley, Linda 2 commerce 40, 67, 86, 163, 165 see also feudalism, sentiment complaisance 97–8, 99, 100 Crawford, Robert 62

Bannet, Eve Tavor 84, 130 Barnes, Elizabeth 7 Belhaven, Lord ( John Hamilton) 14 Bhabha, Homi K. 103, 129 Bildungsroman 130 Blackwood’s Magazine 6, 140, 143, 153, 159 Blair, Hugh 46–7 Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian 46–7 Sermons 52 Boswell, James 55, 73, 74, 79–81 Hypochondriack Papers, The 58–9, 81 London Journal, The 18 Brown, Laura 93 Burgess, Miranda J. 140, 152, 166 Burke, Edmund 48, 51, 77 Burney, Frances 53, 96 Evelina 21, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 Burns, Robert 78, 149

Edinburgh 110, 140, 157 George IV’s visit to 6, 142–4, 165 Edinburgh Review, The 25 Ellis, Markman 70 Enlightenment 4, 45 epistolary fiction 20, 83–5, 87–8, 95–6, 105, 107 ethnography 117

Bute, Earl of 58, 60 Buzard, James 117

Darien 160 Davis, Leith 2, Defoe, Daniel 16–18 Donaldson, William 4, 144 Doody, Margaret 101 Douglas, Aileen 87 Dugaw, Dianne 156 Duncan, Ian 43, 44, 114, 139, 140, 152, 158

family 48, 49 consanguineous 48, 86, 100–1, 102 sentimental 48, 49–50, 86, 95, 102 see also nation family romance 96, 97, 100, 192n.29

221

222

Index

Ferguson, Adam 26, 153 Ferrier, Susan 122 Destiny; or the Chief ’s Daughter 130, 134–5 Marriage 21, 113, 129–34 Ferris, Ina 20, 110–12, 139, 140, 152 Festa, Lynn 19 feudalism 75–6, 142, 151–2, 158, 166, 169 contrasted with commerce 56, 67, 70, 73, 160, 161, 163 in the Highlands 113, 115, 118 and Jacobitism 59, 78, 146 see also Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments France 96, 97, 98–9 Franklin, Caroline 151 Galt, John 139, 152, 159–60, 161, 169 Annals of the Parish, The 159 Entail, The 22, 142, 144, 159–65 “Gathering of the West, The” 143 Provost, The 159 Garside, Peter 145 George IV 6, 142–4, 161 Gibbons, Luke 85 Gothic novel 111 Gottlieb, Evan 7–8, 85, 139 Graham, Patrick 35–6, 174 Grant, Anne MacVicar 117–18 Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland 113, 116–22 Memoirs of an American Lady 118 Grant, Lord (Francis Cullen) 12 Groom, Nick 27 Hamilton, Elizabeth 104, 193n.49 Cottagers of Glenburnie, The 105 Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, The 21, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 95, 103–9 Hasler, Antony 150 Hechter, Michael 187n.30 Highland Clearances 21, 112, 113, 123–4, 134–6, 138, 194n.11 and British imperialism 112, 113, 114, 120, 122, 125, 127 Highland Society of Scotland 24, 34–5 Highlanders 6, 143, 163 clan system 48, 113, 118–19, 120, 123–4, 125–6, 128 domestication of 113–14, 115, 119–20, 121, 125–6, 136, 137 excluded from British identity 112, 121 militarization of 116–17, 119–20, 120–1, 124 Hill, Christopher 42 historical novel 22, 110–11, 139, 152, 159–60 inheritance plot in 145, 147–8, 151, 160–2, 164, 167

representation of women in 140, 145, 146, 147, 153, 155–8, 162–3, 164, 167–8 revolution in 22, 142 see also national tale historiography 19, 139, 144, 160 antiquarian 18, 26, 27, 28, 35, 36–7 conjectural 18, 26–7, 28, 31, 32, 33–6, 116 and stadial theory 27, 28, 29, 36, 40 Whig 41, 42 Hogg, James 114, 139, 152, 153–4, 169 Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The 155 Three Perils of Man, The 22, 142, 144, 153–9, 165 Three Perils of Woman, The 22, 142, 144, 153–9, 165 Hume, David 42, 83, 85, 92, 97 “Of the Authenticity of Ossian’s Poems” 32–3 Treatise on Human Nature, A 10–11 Hunter, J. Paul 171 Hutcheson, Francis 50, 85, 102 hybridity 129 and British identity 129, 131–2 and cultural mediation 117–18, 122, 129, 131–2, 133–4, 135 racial 131, 135 hypochondria 55, 58–9, 79 imperialism, British 2, 77, 92, 93, 104–5 Scottish participation in 67, 86, 109 see also Highland Clearances, race incest 101–2 India 77, 104–5, 106, 108–9 Ireland 22, 111, 112, 125 Irvine, Robert 153–9, 167, 168–9 Jacobinism 105, 108 Jacobite uprising of 1715 113, 142 of 1745 2–3, 16, 27, 44, 57, 113, 142, 143, 154, 157 Jacobitism 4–6, 59, 139, 141, 156–7 and Scottish identity 146, 162, 169 see also sentiment Jameson, Fredric 48 Johnson, Claudia 141 Johnson, Samuel 59, 79–80, 83 Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, A 37–8 Johnstone, Christian Isobel 21, 122 Clan-Albin 113, 122, 123–8 Saxon and the Gael, The 113, 136 Kailyard writing 203n.67 Kames, Lord (Henry Home) 39–40, 41

Index Kelly, Gary 126 Kidd, Colin 36, 42 Knox, John 116 Krull, Andrew 139 Laing, Malcolm 33 Lloyd, David 169 Loar, Christopher 55 London, April 75 Loomba, Ania 8 Mackenzie, Henry 69–70 Lounger, The 53, 71 Man of Feeling, The 18, 70–8 Mackillop, Andrew 121 Macpherson, James 31, 153 “A Dissertation concerning the Poems of Ossian” 33–4, 152 Introduction to the History of Great Britain Ossian 18, 24, 31–2, 34, 36–8, 45–7, 55; authenticity of 24–8; and nationalism 43–4; and race 37–8; and readers’ sensibility 46; women in 31–2 marriage 90 companionate 15, 126 patriarchal 15, 16 see also Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments Marshall, David 11, 103 masculinity 63, 64, 70 and self-control 63, 64, 66, 69, 70, 93 and sentiment 18, 53, 54, 56, 59, 61, 70 McCracken-Flesher, Caroline 142 McNeil, Kenneth 35, 37 Mellor, Anne K. 126 Militia Act, The 30, 44, 53, 180n.20 Millar, John 31 Monthly Review, The 105 Moretti, Franco 56 Mullan, John 70, 71 nation 2, 22 and blood 8, 14, 15, 28, 36, 38, 47, 90, 96–7, 115 and family 48, 49, 86, 95, 96–7, 104, 136 and gender 12 and sentiment 8, 12, 15, 16, 17, 28, 44, 45, 47, 48, 52, 96–7, 102, 115, 123, 139, 172 national identity British 7–8, 38, 40, 42, 43, 48, 56, 57, 61, 63, 66, 69, 79–81, 83, 93, 96, 97–8, 100, 106, 129, 131–2, 141, 165 English 98–9 performativity of 79, 81, 85, 97, 99, 103, 143, 168

223

Scottish 8, 57, 58, 59–60, 70, 78, 99, 100, 108–9, 144, 146, 150–1, 151–2, 159, 162, 164, 165, 166–7, 168, 169 national tale 20, 21, 110–12, 113–16, 131 and Bildungsroman 130 compared with historical novel 140, 144, 149, 164 female authorship of 111, 114, 126, 136–7 marriage in 122, 126, 130–1, 133–4 promotes the assimilation of Highlanders 112, 114, 116, 122, 125, 134, 135, 137 representation of division of labor in 114, 122, 128, 129, 134, 135–6 nationalism 6, 7–8, 43–4, 44–5, 169 English 97, 99 see also patriotism Newman, Gerald 97 novel 159 dangers of reading 71, 72, 107, 110 a feminized genre 140, 165–6 literary histories of 170 role in nation formation 19–20, 170, 171 Nussbaum, Felicity 55 oral tradition 145, 146, 150, 151, 154 devaluation of 147–8, 148–9, 165 Owenson, Sidney (Lady Morgan) 22, 111 Parrinder, Patrick 111 patriotism 18, 44, 45, 47 and the civic humanist tradition 44, 51–2, 53–4 as a form of sympathy 50–1, 51–2, 52–3 and social class 51 Pennecuik, Alexander 16 Perry, Ruth 86 Peterloo 142, 151 picaresque 18, 19, 56–7, 62, 82, 86 Pinkerton, John 40–1, 42 Pittock, Murray 4 Pollack, Ellen 101 Potkay, Adam 25, 32 Pringle, John 37 Queensberry, Duke of 1 race 27–8, 35, 37–8 and imperial expansion 36, 38–9 and polygenesis 41–2, 43 Radical War 142, 143, 200n.29 Rajan, Balachandra 105 Revolution 142, 143, 151 French 141 Glorious 142, 148 Richardson, Samuel 84, 95 Richetti, John 170

224

Index

Robertson, William 27 romance 139–40, 145, 155, 160 Romanticism 43–4, 45 Said, Edward 6 savagery 29, 31, 33 Schiller, Friedrich 114 Scotch Novel Reading; or Modern Quackery 110, 137 Scotland Anglicization of 61, 69, 109, 187n.30 feminization of 13, 58, 61, 140, 145, 146, 150–1, 153, 155–8, 166, 168 as an internal colony 67, 85–6, 187n.30 racial divisions within 14, 36, 37–8 see also Anglo-Scottish Union Scott, Walter 25–6, 78, 139, 142 Bride of Lammermoor, The 22, 142, 143, 144–52, 158, 165, 169 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The 154 St. Ronan’s Well 22, 143, 165–9 Waverley 117, 139, 142, 151, 154, 157, 158, 161, 163 Waverley novels 110–11, 114, 139, 140, 144, 149, 152–3, 159, 169 Scotticisms 69 sensibility 2, 9, 24 and femininity 8, 9, 29, 76, 92–4, 119, 139, 141, 150–1, 153, 155–8, 160, 162, 164 histories of 29, 30, 31, 33–4, 53 and masculinity 18, 29–30, 53, 54, 56, 59, 61, 70–8, 140 nineteenth-century devaluation of 22, 141, 169 as a racial trait 25, 28, 38–43, 47 regulation of 9, 10, 29–30, 59, 71, 72–5, 88–9, 92–4, 132, 147, 150, 153, 164 see also sentiment, sympathy sentiment in American nation formation 7, 22, 171–2 in British nation formation 7–8, 48, 61, 83, 97–8, 100, 112, 139 and commerce 61, 65, 66, 69, 74, 75, 78, 123 and consanguinity 6, 86, 100–1, 102, 107, 123–4, 125–6, 128 and Jacobitism 3–6, 59, 141, 144, 146, 153, 162, 163, 165 relegated to the past 45, 47, 151–2 and Scottish identity 8, 78, 99, 100, 108–9, 151–2, 164, 165, 166–7, 169 sentimental fiction 19, 70–1, 72, 107, 110, 170 marginalized in histories of the novel 170–1 and nation formation 170–1 political utility of 170–1, 172 and revolution 115 Shaw, William 38

Simpson, Kenneth 55 Smith, Adam 47–8, 84–5 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres 20 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The 9, 18, 29–30, 83, 84–5, 85–6, 88, 90, 92, 93, 103, 119; definition of sensibility 24; definition of sympathy 20; and epistolary fiction 83–5; gender in 29–30; impartial spectator in 132; patriotism in 47–52 Wealth of Nations, The 30 Smith, Anthony 44 Smollett, Tobias 60, 67, 95 Adventures of Roderick Random, The 10, 18, 60–9, 75, 78, 87 “Advice” 64 Briton, The 59 Expedition of Humphry Clinker, The 21, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87–95 “Tears of Scotland, The” 62 sodomy 59–60, 61, 64, 68 Sorensen, Janet 112 Sterne, Julia A. 7 Steuart, James 135 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 23 Stuart, Charles Edward 2, 5, 60, 161 Sussman, Charlotte 93 Swift, Jonathan 17 sympathy 2, 9–11, 50–1, 83 see also Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments Tadmor, Naomi 48 Teltscher, Kate 106–7 Tennenhouse, Leonard 174n.18 Tompkins, Jane 7 travel writing 111 Trumpener, Katie 2, 111, 131, 187n.30 uncanny, the 86 United States 7, 22, 171–2 Wales 87, 90, 91, 190n.12 Wallace, Tara Goshal 167 Weed, David 55 Weinbrot, Howard 16 Wheeler, Roxann 115 White, Hayden 28 Wickman, Matthew 116 Williams, Raymond 163 Wilt, Judith 150 Wolfe, James 116 Womack, Peter 116, 118 Wordsworth, William 51 Wright, William 14–15 Yadav, Alok 97

cambridge studies in romanticism General Editor james chandler, University of Chicago 1. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters mary a. favret 2. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire nigel leask 3. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760 1830 peter murphy 4. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution tom furniss 5. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women julie a. carlson 6. Keats, Narrative and Audience andrew bennett 7. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre david duff 8. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780 1832 alan richardson 9. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790 1820 edward copeland 10. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World timothy morton 11. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style leonora nattrass 12. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762 1800 e. j. clery 13. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716 1818 elizabeth a. bohls 14. Napoleon and English Romanticism simon bainbridge 15. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom celeste langan 16. Wordsworth and the Geologists john wyatt

17. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography robert j. griffin 18. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel markman ellis 19. Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709 1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth caroline gonda 20. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774 1830 andrea k. henderson 21. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth Century England kevin gilmartin 22. Reinventing Allegory theresa m. kelley 23. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789 1832 gary dyer 24. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789 1824 robert m. ryan 25. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission margaret russett 26. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination jennifer ford 27. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity saree makdisi 28. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake nicholas m. williams 29. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author sonia hofkosh 30. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition anne janowitz 31. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle jeffrey n. cox 32. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism gregory dart

33. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764 1832 james watt 34. Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism david aram kaiser 35. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity andrew bennett 36. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere paul keen 37. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780 1830 martin priestman 38. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies helen thomas 39. Imagination Under Pressure, 1789 1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility john whale 40. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, 1790 1820 michael gamer 41. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species maureen n. mclane 42. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic timothy morton 43. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740 1830 miranda j. burgess 44. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s angela keane 45. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism mark parker 46. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780 1800 betsy bolton 47. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind alan richardson 48. The Anti Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution m. o. grenby 49. Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon clara tuite

50. Byron and Romanticism jerome mcgann and james soderholm 51. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland ina ferris 52. Byron, Poetics and History jane stabler 53. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790 1830 mark canuel 54. Fatal Women of Romanticism adriana craciun 55. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose tim milnes 56. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination barbara taylor 57. Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic julie kipp 58. Romanticism and Animal Rights david perkins 59. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History kevis goodman 60. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge timothy fulford, debbie lee and peter j. kitson 61. Romantic Colonization and British Anti Slavery deirdre coleman 62. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism andrew m. stauffer 63. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime cian duffy 64. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760 1845 margaret russett 65. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent daniel e. white 66. The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry christopher r. miller 67. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song simon jarvis

68. Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public andrew franta 69. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790 1832 kevin gilmartin 70. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London gillian russell 71. The Lake Poets and Professional Identity brian goldberg 72. Wordsworth Writing andrew bennett 73. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry noel jackson 74. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period john strachan 75. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life andrea k. henderson 76. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry maureen n. mclane 77. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750 1850 angela esterhammer 78. Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760 1830 penny fielding 79. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity david simpson 80. Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790 1890 mike goode 81. Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism alexander regier 82. Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770 1840: Virtue and Virtuosity gillen d’arcy wood 83. The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge timothy milnes 84. Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange sarah haggarty

85. Real Money and Romanticism matthew rowlinson 86. Sentimental Literature and Anglo Scottish Identity, 1745 1820 juliet shields