David Pae, the Newspaper Novel, and the Imagined Community of North Britain Graham Law

As the title suggests, this chapter engages with Benedict Anderson’s ideas on the role of novels and newspapers in the formation of national identity. Anderson, in his analysis of the origins and spread of nationalism, draws attention to these new media as the ‘two forms of imagining which [...] provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation’,1 situating them within developments in ‘print-capitalism, which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways’.2 However, Anderson conceives novels and newspapers as distinct modes of communication, failing to recognize that, during the lengthy phase of transition, novels in newspapers became an increasingly prevalent phenomenon, playing a crucial role in identity formation. And the serial fiction encountered in nineteenth-century newspapers suggests that the new identification with an imagined national community still often had to compete with affiliations more diverse and local in character. Here, I am concerned particularly with the role of Scottish newspaper novelists not only in fostering a competing ideology of Scottish cultural identity, often by contributing to the process termed the ‘invention of tradition’,3 but also in creating a broader sense of association with the more modern image of a community of North Britain. According to the OED, the noun form ‘North Britain’ emerged only after the union of the crowns in 1603, referring to the northern kingdom itself as a geographical entity. By the nineteenth century such usage was becoming archaic, and the broader meaning of ‘the northern part of Great Britain’ was taking over, with scientific usage by natural historians and anthropologists to the fore. Moreover, this recognition of the historical distinctness of the regions north of the Trent river in both geographic and ethno-linguistic terms, was being reinforced by the increasing importance of modern socio-economic links between, say, Dundee and Sheffield to the east, or Glasgow and Manchester to the west. My chapter thus returns to the prolific career as a newspaper novelist of David Pae (1828-1884), who wrote at least forty-five lengthy serials between 1855 and his death. The main focus is on Pae’s construction of his reading public in both material and cultural senses. The first refers to his pioneering methods of self-marketing which created a wide circle of over forty client newspapers with local or regional readerships, centering on the Scottish lowlands but extending outwards to cover the whole of Scotland, Ireland, and northern England, though only rarely reaching south of the Trent. The second refers to Pae’s steady reliance on narrative initially shaped for particular client newspapers and embedded in specific settings at once historical and geographical. Thus his preference for the melodramatic style is tempered by a commitment to local realism, which encourages extensive use of documentary materials. Following a brief survey of newspaper fiction in Victorian Scotland, the earlier part will thus have a bibliographical focus. The later part will concentrate on the narrative contents of Pae’s novels, with particular attention to his late serial, Grace Darling. * * * * * A number of London weekly newspapers had experimented briefly with the idea of carrying original serial fiction as early as the 1840s. But the still heavy burden of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ had forced them either to price themselves out of the popular market, like the sixpenny Sunday Times, or to risk legal penalty in the case of unstamped papers like the Penny Sunday Times. As a result, by the end of the decade, the penny weekly magazine, which contained no news and thus escaped the tax, was found to be the format best suited to bringing serial fiction to a broad popular audience.4 But things were rather different further north. William Donaldson, the first scholar to study Pae’s writings in any detail, proposes as a working definition of popular literature in Victorian Scotland, the phrase ‘material which has been written specifically for publication in newspapers’.5 According to Donaldson, a major reason for the earlier rise to prominence there of the newspaper serial novel is to be found in the increasing orientation of the Scottish bourgeoisie towards English metropolitan culture, and the concomitant slump in the indigenous book and magazine markets.6 With the removal of the taxes on knowledge at the mid-century, the newspaper press in Scotland moved quickly to fill this gap with new miscellaneous weekly journals costing only a penny and combining news summaries, political discussion, and literary material. They were distinctively Scottish in tone and content, predominantly radical in political affiliation, and aimed mainly at the working and lower-middle classes. Of course, David Pae was not the only novelist to have fiction serialized in Scottish newspapers. We can here broadly distinguish two groups: first, local authors writing fiction with regional settings for the subscribers to specific town and country journals, often employing local vernacular, whose work was rarely reprinted in volume form; and second, Scottish authors writing typically in standard literary English primarily for a metropolitan literary audience, whose work was often broadcast initially in newspapers via central syndication agencies operating throughout the United Kingdom, before appearing in book form from London houses. With few exceptions, the first group wrote anonymously and has been entirely forgotten, though the wholesale digitization of provincial newspaper archives now offers ample opportunity for the recuperation of this lost chapter of literary history. Among those exceptional authors whose names have not been entirely extinguished, we might note: the Perth antiquarian Robert Scott Fittis (1824-1903), whose writing career was divided between historical romances and narrative history proper;7 the Aberdeen journalist William Alexander (1826-1894: ODNB), whose career as a novelist, reflects a ‘lifelong interest in the shaping power of heredity and the environment on human character’;8 and William McQueen (1841-1885), a former industrialist from Glasgow, whose most widely read work was Mark Main, Miner, a tale of Glaswegian proletarian life, by turns comic and brutal, set in and around Dixon’s colliery and ironworks at Hutchesontown.9 The range of the metropolitan group can also be represented by three writers: George Macdonald (1824-1905: ODNB), prolific in several genres including domestic realism and historical romance, though now best remembered as a fantasist; William Black (1841-1898: ODNB), whose typical novels are strong on setting and tragically juxtapose northern provincial and southern metropolitan mores, with A Daughter of Heth (1871) a good example; and S.R. Crockett (1860-1914: ODNB), whose affiliation to the rustic sentimentality of the ‘kailyard’ school encouraged him to cultivate a mode of Scots vernacular accessible to an English audience. All three were handled regularly by prestigious London houses,10 and were serialized from time to time in upmarket metropolitan weeklies like the Graphic. Their Scottish newspaper appearances were typically arranged by English agencies,11 and in middle-class papers with wide regional readerships like the Glasgow Weekly Herald. * * * * * The pioneer of fiction serialization in Scottish papers, exceptional alike in quantity of output and frequency of appearance, Pae fits comfortably into neither of these two groups. Scanning quickly through the cheap Scottish urban weeklies leaves the impression that approaching half the full-length serial stories there are from Pae’s pen.12 However, popularity was by no means limited to Caledonia, as Pae’s readership quickly spread like the ripples on a pond. From Jessie Melville in 1855, Pae’s early serials appeared independently in Edinburgh in the North Briton, one of the first penny news miscellanies to emerge on the abolition of the stamp. Beginning with Lucy, the Factory Girl in 1858, Pae persuaded editors in Glasgow (first at the Glasgow Times, then the Penny Post) to share his offerings with the North Briton. From 1860 his work began to appear in northern Irish papers, with Norah Cushaleen and Biddy Macarthy (both 1862) written with shared publication in the Ballymena Observer and (Belfast) Banner of Ulster in mind. In the summer of 1863, Pae arranged for Lucy to be reprinted in the (Dundee) People’s Journal, and this developed into a long-term contract with the proprietor John Leng, whereby all Pae’s forthcoming serials were to appear initially in the Dundee weekly.13 At the same time, Leng encouraged Pae to supply fiction, with a brief delay, to popular weekly papers in the industrial north of England, beginning with the Ashton Reporter in Lancashire and the Sheffield Telegraph in Yorkshire, then owned by his brother William Leng. By around 1870, the author had refined his techniques of self-syndication and was broadcasting printed publicity so that his old stories remained in circulation while new ones were serialized in up to a dozen major weeklies all over Scotland, Ireland, and northern England.14 Indeed, his practice of selling the same stories either in series or in parallel to a number of papers with complementary circulations provided the model for the professional fiction syndication agencies emerging in England from the early 1870s. It is significant that when Tillotson began to carry fiction in his Bolton Weekly Journal from 1871, he turned to Pae for the first three stories. In 1873 he founded the ‘Fiction Bureau’, the first and most successful of the English agencies, while his biggest rival from the mid-1880s was the ‘Editor’s Syndicate’ run by William Leng at the Sheffield Telegraph. As shown in detail elsewhere,15 by the later 1870s the dominant mode of instalment publication had shifted unmistakably from serialisation in single metropolitan magazines – whether monthlies like Temple Bar or weeklies like Chambers’s Journal – to syndication in groups of provincial weekly papers with complementary circulations, and this dominance was to last into the 1890s, when the metropolitan press once again began to regain the ascendancy. In the process, authors as distinguished as Mary Braddon and Wilkie Collins, or Margaret Oliphant and Thomas Hardy, were attracted into the newspaper market with some regularity. Yet even in this company Pae’s stories seemed able to hold their own. The fine detail of the author’s career as a serialist is outlined in a lengthy table entitled ‘David Pae’s Newspaper Novels’.16 There the total of identified source newspapers is forty-two: sixteen Scottish, five Irish, and twenty-one English, of which only three are located south of the Trent river. This demonstrates clearly how Pae’s developing methods of self-syndication served materially to construct a North British readership. The assembled data also helps to illustrate how this was effected in the cultural sphere through the settings and other narrative contents of the forty-five serials viewed collectively. If we match titles against initial newspaper venues, in addition to the two ‘Irish Tales’ already mentioned, we can find other examples of the principle of ‘horses for courses’.17 The table also shows a number of cases where the popularity of a local newspaper appearance led to the same novel being issued in volume from a local publisher, typically linked to the newspaper itself.18 Moreover, Pae relied on narratives embedded in specific North British settings at once historical and geographical, so that his preference for the melodramatic style is tempered by a commitment to local realism.19 Many stories are framed around specific historical events,20 while others center on legendary local heroes or villains.21 Here particular interest lies in Pae’s frequent employment of documentary materials.22 * * * * * We can illustrate these general points by analysing Grace Darling, the Heroine of the Longstone Lighthouse; or, The Two Wills, Pae’s retelling of the ‘Tale of the Wreck of the Forfarshire’ in autumn 1838 on its journey from Hull to Dundee, which works to reconstruct the young Northumbrian girl as a distinctively North British heroine.23 The principle setting is less the Farne Islands, where the wreck of the Forfarshire took place, than the Carse of Gowrie, the low-lying fertile land on the north bank of the Tay between Perth and Dundee, where the plot concerning the two wills of the sub-title works itself out. Grace herself only appears in nine of the forty chapters, where three separate shipwrecks are recounted.24 Meanwhile, the main protagonists are a Scots couple, Percy Westbrook, the true heir to Dunmore, an estate on the Carse, and Caroline, the sister of Henry Travers, Percy’s university friend and a prospective minster of the Kirk. The couple meet in the first chapter, become engaged in the fifth, are married in the eighteenth, but take over the estate only in the thirty-ninth, the delay being due to the hiding of the new will benefitting Percy, by his uncle’s ward Mildred Runciman, and the promotion of an old will benefitting herself. The two strands of the narrative are woven together seamlessly and to fine dramatic effect. In the first wreck on the Farne rocks, of a sailing yacht out of Tynemouth, Percy, Caroline, and her brother are rescued and become firm friends with Grace and her family. In the second, during Caroline and Percy’s honeymoon visit to the Longstone, the latter assists in the rescue of a single sailor from a vessel bound from Sunderland to Aberdeen, who turns out to have knowledge of the whereabouts of the true will which has been carried overseas. During the third, that of the Forfarshire itself, one of the villains of the piece drowns in the disaster, while one of the few survivors, an agent of Percy Westbrook, manages to preserve the will and bring it to shore. Such is the main outline of the plot, though this omits several subordinate threads, particularly in the scenes set in Perthshire. While Percy, Caroline and their families speak in standard literary English, there are several minor comic characters, such as Simon Reid, the sexton of the kirk at Dunmore, or John Prentice, the landlord of its local inn, who talk in a broad Scots vernacular.25 Of course, Pae’s serial was far from being the first narrative of Grace Darling’s famous ‘deed’, and attention to his sources tells us a good deal not only concerning his literary skill but also his thematic focus. The first biography of Grace Darling by Jerrold Vernon (1839) freely mixed reality and fantasy, with the latter predominating.26 The scenes of the wreck, rescue and subsequent reactions are relatively reliable: the author often refers to William Darling’s lighthouse journal (pp. 116-17), and records events ‘as they appeared in the local periodicals of the day’ (p. 314), including the detailed account of the rescue from the Newcastle Chronicle of 15 September 1838 (pp. 209-18).27 Yet it was still clearly a struggle for Vernon to fill his allotted space. The initial expansive mechanism is the description of a couple of wrecks on the Farne rocks prior to that of the Forfarshire (described in Chs. 18-20). The first, allocated to September 1832 and occupying Chapters 2-3, seems to be entirely fictional, involving the rescue of the occupants of a pleasure yacht caught in a storm: Caroline Dudley (daughter of the English earl of Dudley and his noble Spanish wife), plus her brother and his companion, who befriend the Darlings. However, Caroline is soon called away on family affairs, only to return to the Longstone in the final scene for a brief reunion with the now famous Darlings. However, this does not prevent almost half of the intervening chapters from being devoted to the unrelated and inconsequential meanderings of the Dudleys around southern England and continental Europe. The second of the rescues (in Chs 6-7), however, concerning James Logan, the solitary surviving crewman of the ‘Autumn,’ a sloop carrying coal from Newcastle to Peterhead, in fact had a documentary basis.28 Altogether, Vernon’s biography offers an extremely rambling and disjointed narrative, which led one reader to write to Grace Darling inquiring whether the affairs of Caroline and her companions were ‘historical memorial facts’ or ‘mere novelty’, with Grace responding that she was ‘quite unacquainted with the persons mentioned’ who gave the biography ‘the appearance of Romance altogether’.29 Despite its incoherence, Vernon’s book became a primary source for two later accounts of Graces’s life, by Thomas Arthur (1875) and Eva Hope ([1876]), both afterwards widely reprinted from the original plates.30 Though the latter volume was considerably longer, there are a number of puzzling parallels between the two works, including shared publishing house, similar title, and identical dedication to Grace’s surviving sister Thomasin. Both describe the rescues from the Longstone of Caroline Dudley’s party and James Logan, and both follow Vernon’s romantic account of the Forfarshire rescue.31 The surviving family members were aggrieved by this disregard for the evidence, and, during the 1880s, Thomasin Darling (Grace’s sister) arranged for the issue of two slim volumes of edited family papers to redress the balance.32 These provided documentation not only of the sentimentality of Vernon’s version of the rescue, but also of the ‘mere novelty’ of Caroline and her companions. Discerning which sources were available to Pae must remain somewhat conjectural. It seems safe to assume that both volumes issued by Grace’s sister appeared too late to be consulted by Pae, who closely follows the romanticised version of Grace’s ‘deed’. But his reconstruction of the character and role of Caroline and her companions, proves that Pae must have been familiar with at least one of the Vernon, Arthur and Hope lives, and possibly all three. Without further specification, following the account of the main disaster, Pae notes: The particulars of the wreck of the Forfarshire embedded in the two preceding chapters are gathered from the narratives of those who were deeply concerned in the catastrophe, and which were published at the time of the occurrence. (Ch. 36) This would doubtless include the detailed report in the Newcastle Chronicle of 15 September, among other press accounts, and it would obviously have been much easier for Pae to consult these in Vernon rather than go back to the original newspaper files.33 In sum, when penning the scenes in which Grace Darling herself appears, Pae had to rely on highly romanticized sources, but, in profoundly transforming the fictitious events concerning Caroline and her companions, he succeeded not only in unifying the plot of the two wills with that of the wreck, but also in recreating the material to serve his own ideological purposes and to suit his target audience of newspaper readers in North Britain. Before turning specifically to Pae’s framing of Grace as North British heroine, we need to address the incorporation of his theological concerns in the narrative. In common with other contemporary accounts, Vernon, Arthur, and Hope pay lip service at least to the Christian faith underpinning the altruistic actions of the Darlings in the rescue, though typically in sentimental style.34 Pae, in contrast, works more concertedly to associate the heroine with his own long-held commitment to the liberal evangelical creed known as Arminianism, which rejects the Calvinist concept of election by God prevalent in the presbyterian Kirk and instead preaches the universality of the Atonement. This is achieved particularly through the introduction of Caroline’s brother Henry Travers as a prospective minister of the kirk on the Dunmore estate.35 There the sitting clergyman is the aging Doctor Wilson, who embodies Pae’s ideal (“father and friend of the whole parish,” ch. 7) of a minster serving a rural community. Throughout the narrative Henry resides at the manse and acts as the doctor’s assistant, so that, at the denouement, with the passing of Wilson and the recovery of the true will, Percy Westbrook is finally in a position to appoint him as incumbent. The clearest expression of the Arminian principle is the full forgiveness offered, when her evil actions are revealed, to the repentant Mildred Runciman by all the residents of the manse, which thereafter becomes the outcast’s own home. With the growing friendship between Caroline and Grace, these values are shown to be held in common with the Darling family living in isolation on the Longstone, where, deprived of the social institutions of school and church, the lighthouse keeper acts as teacher and minister as well as father to his own children.36 The theological theme thus also serves to foster a community of faith shared between southern Scotland and northern England. Both the route plied by the Forfarshire between Hull and Dundee, and the patterns of human loss caused by its destruction, are in themselves proof of the social and commercial intercourse between the two regions. Moreover, Pae’s narrative goes out of its way to emphasize that, even before the development of the railways (see Ch. 6), such exchange was facilitated by transportation over land as well as by sea. The opening scene shows Percy Westbrook about to board the mail coach from Newcastle to Berwick en route to Dunmore, before his intentions are changed by a chance encounter with Henry Travers. And, among the climactic scenes in Chapters 30-32, there is a lengthy account of the urgent journey of Percy’s factor George Dixon from Edinburgh to Hull, as he strives to reach the Yorkshire port before the Forfarshire sails, so that he can secure the true will and foil the Dunmore usurper. Despite the drama Pae devotes a good deal of space to describing the various staging posts on the journey south,37 as well as to evoking the changing landscape along the way.38 In sum, Pae’s serial works consistently to recreate Grace Darling as far more than a narrowly English hero; at the close of the narration of the rescue of the survivors of the wrecked paddle-steamer, he writes: ‘That day’s deed [...] made her thenceforth reverenced as one of the noblest of British heroines.’ (Ch. 35). * * * * * This is not, of course, to suggest that Pae’s novels never appeal to the sense of affiliation to Anderson’s imagined national community. Indeed, the final lines of Grace Darling, the Heroine of Longstone Lighthouse itself do precisely that, declaring: ‘[...] the name of Grace Darling is a household word in the British Isles, and on all the continents of earth where the English language is spoken’ (ch. 40). Rather, the point is that such evocations of Union and Empire exist in tension with, but in the end are subordinate to, those affirming more local commitments.39

Notes

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 24-25. 2 Anderson, p. 36. 3 See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), especially, Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’, pp. 15-41. 4 See Graham Law, ‘“Nothing but a Newspaper”: Serializing Fiction in the Press in the 1840s’, in Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers, ed. by Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 29-49. 5 William Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland: Language, Fiction and the Press (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), p. 154n31. 6 Donaldson, p. 14. 7 See A.H. Millar, ‘Robert Scott Fittis: An Introductory Biographical Sketch’, in Robert Scott Fittis, The Mosstrooper: A Legend of the Scottish Border (Perth: Wood & Son, 1906), pp. v-xv. Fittis composed his first works of serial fiction, The Mysterious Monk (1842) and The Mosstrooper (1844), for the local literary weekly Perth Saturday Journal while still in his teens. Following the abolition of the newspaper stamp, in addition to many of shorter tales, he wrote around ten further full-length romances at a rate of at least one a year. These were generally set in and around Perth, but serialized in the new generation of popular penny newspapers, notably the Glasgow Penny Post (The King of the Cairds, 1864, etc.), the Dundee People’s Journal (The Legacy; or, The Secret Witness, 1866, with the scene laid in the Carse of Gowrie), and the Edinburgh North Briton (Aggie Lyon, 1866, etc.). Though he was to produce around a dozen scholarly historical volumes before his death, only a single novel appeared in book form during his lifetime. This was Gilderoy, a fictionalized life of the seventeenth-century Scottish outlaw, which appeared as a yellowback in London in 1866 in George Routledge’s Railway Library following serialization during 1865 in the short-lived Glasgow weekly literary miscellany, the Scottish Journal. Many of his subsequent newspaper serials thus appeared as by ‘the Author of “Gilderoy”’. 8 Donaldson, p. 103. The descendant of generations of tenant farmers in Aberdeenshire, Alexander spent much of his working life as an all-purpose journalist at the local newspaper, the Daily Free Press. In addition to his more mundane duties, there he composed for the weekly companion paper a lengthy series of powerfully naturalistic tales and novels. Several of the titles – Sketches of Rural Life in Aberdeenshire (1852-53), The Laird of Drammochdyle and His Contemporaries (1865-66), and the two series of Ravenshowe and the Residenters Therein (1867, 1867-68) – take the form of independent tales in series, while others present a more novelistic shape. These include The Authentic History of Peter Grundie (1855) and My Uncle the Baillie (1876-77), and his best-known work, Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk (1869-70), a grimly humorous third-person narrative laced with dialogue in broad dialect, concerning changing agricultural life at the time of the Disruption. Unsigned as a serial in the Aberdeen Free Press, Johnny Gibb was republished in 1871 as a volume over the author’s name by the Aberdeen house of Walker & Smith. 9 See ‘Death of a Scottish Novelist’, (Dundee) Evening Telegraph, 9 March 1885, p. 3. Formerly a managing clerk in a Glasgow power-loom factory, McQueen’s health had been damaged by a lengthy trip to the Americas at the time of the Civil War, and around the mid-1870s he was forced to abandon his career in business and take up literary pursuits. Employed as a journalist at the Glasgow Weekly Mail, he first published a booklet of simple poems in the vernacular entitled Songs and Rhymes (1875), and went on to write fiction for the columns of his own paper. Though he also seems to have attempted narratives set in the Americas, most of his novels had local settings and extensively featured the local vernacular. Gipsy Nell; or, the Kintyre Smugglers (1874); The Packman’s Courtship (1877), Peter Sannox’s Heir (1879), and Mattie Duncan; or, Left by the Tide (1880) are among those serialized in the Weekly Mail, with the penultimate title reprinted in volume the same year by Gray & Co. of Edinburgh. McQueen died prematurely after a lengthy pulmonary illness at the age of only forty-four. 10 Hurst & Blackett, Macmillan, and Unwin, respectively. 11 All three were client authors at some point of Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau. 12 See Andrew Stewart, ‘Memorial Papers on the Late David Pae, Esq of Craigmount, Newport, Fifeshire’, in David Pae, Eustace the Outcast; or, The Smugglers of St Abb’s (Dundee: John Leng, 1884), pp. 385-96 (p. 389): David Pae may therefore be credited with the origination of newspaper story-writing, at least in Scotland, and by the wondrous success and popularity of his stories he has given an impetus to this important branch of literature that is felt over the length and breadth of the land. 13 With only a single exception when, presumably, Pae’s supply exceeded Leng’s demand: The Heiress of Dunfordle; or, The Child of the Cave, which seems to have first appeared in the (Lancashire) Ashton Reporter from 1874. 14 See List of Serial Stories, Written by David Pae for Publication in Newspapers (Ardrossan: Ayrshire Evening News Office, [1870]), found among the Pae family papers held by Tricia Englert of Watford, to whom grateful thanks.. 15 Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 16 This represents a comprehensively updated version of that found in Appendix D1 to David Pae, Lucy, the Factory Girl, ed. by Graham Law (Hastings: Sensation Press, 2001), pp. 345-48, which was compiled without the benefit of access to digital newspaper archives. For reasons of space, the table cannot be included here, but is freely available at the following URL: .

17 These would include: Helen Armstrong (‘A Tale of the Borders’) ‘written expressly’ for the Berwick Journal; Lucy, the Factory Girl (‘A Glasgow Tale’) as Pae’s first appearance in a Glaswegian journal; Very Hard Times (‘A Tale of the Lancashire Distress’) his first story in the Ashton Reporter; and, of course, Grace Darling (whose ‘deed’ occurred off the Northumbrian coast) as an early offering to the Northeastern Daily Gazette. 18 Notable examples are: Jessie the Bookfolder in Leeds (1865) on serialization in the Express; The Heir of Douglas in Ardrossan (1865), after appearing in the Ayrshire Weekly News; and Hard Times: A Tale of the Cotton Famine in Ashton-under-Lyne (1886) following its run in the Cotton Factory Times. 19 Specific locations employed most typically represent either the edenic rural (for example, Glenlee in The Smuggler Chief, the Strath in Jeannie Sinclair, or the Carse of Gowrie in Grace Darling) or the infernal urban (notably, the Tontine and Black Boy Closes in Glasgow, and Murdoch’s Close in Edinburgh). 20 As recorded in descriptive sub-titles such as, ‘A Tale of the Covenanters’, ‘A Story Founded on the “Great Douglas Cause”’, ‘A Tale of Highland Eviction’, ‘A Tale of the Great Glasgow Bank Robbery’, ‘A Tale of the Crimean Campaign’, etc. 21 These would include Burke and Hare, Clanranald, Rob Roy, Paul Jones, Deacon Brodie, and again Grace Darling. 22 See the editor’s introduction to David Pae, Mary Paterson, or the Fatal Error, ed. Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Glasgow: ASLS, 2015), pp. xi-xvii. 23 The serial was first issued in the weekly (Dundee) People’s Journal from 21 August 1880 to 7 May 1881, and reprinted, among other locations, from 24 September to 30 December 1881 in the North-Eastern Daily Gazette, based in the Teesside area along the coastal route followed by the Forfarshire. The novel finally appeared in yellowback book form in Dundee only in 1888, several years after the author’s death. 24 That is, Chapters 3-5, 18-20, and 35-36, each group recording a different rescue from the Longstone, plus Chapter 40, concerning Grace’s public recognition. 25 The following is Reid’s response to a question about the arrival of Percy and Henry at Dunmore early in the novel: [...] I can tell ye, him and the preacher cam’ tae the manse last nicht when it was late. They are auld college freends, it seems, and, foregatherin’ at Newcastle, they gae’d on a pleasure sail to the Farne Islands, when the storm cam’ on them, and if they hadna been helped by the keeper o’ the lichthouse thay wad hae been baith drooned. (ch. 6). 26 Grace Darling, the Maid of the Isles (Newcastle-on-Tyne: W. & T. Fordyce, 1839), unsigned but evidently by Jerrold Vernon, a volume of 480 pages dedicated to the Duchess of Northumberland, was published in a single volume in late 1839, following weekly issue from February of the same year in thirty-six sixpenny numbers. In other words, its serial publication had begun within half a year of the Forfarshire disaster. 27 Strangely, Vernon also included a comprehensive list of subscriptions to the Grace Darling fund from the inhabitants of Newcastle (pp. 276-82), and an entire portfolio of documents submitted to the coroner’s enquiry regarding the causes of the wreck (pp. 315-32). 28 Though even here the date is moved forward two years to December 1832, and a link is manufactured between Logan and the Dudley family. 29 Cited in Constance Smedley, Grace Darling and Her Times (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1932), p. 218, the first scholarly biography. 30 See Thomas Arthur, The Life of Grace Darling, the Heroine of the Farne Isles (London: Adam & Co., 1875), and Eva Hope (pseudonym of Marianne Farningham), Grace Darling: Heroine of the Farne Islands (London: Adam & Co., [1876]). 31 In particular, they had: 1) Grace woken in the middle of the night by the cries of the survivors, 2) her father only agreeing to act because of her passionate entreaties, and 3) their rowing out to the wreck only once, thus rescuing all nine survivors at a single attempt. 32 See Grace Darling, her True Story: from Unpublished Papers in Possession of her Family, ed. [Daniel Atkinson] (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1880); and The Journal of William Darling, Grace Darling’s Father: From 1795-1860, ed. [Daniel Atkinson] (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1887). 33 Moreover, in the same paragraph of the serial, in considering the scale of the disaster relative to those occurring before or since, Pae comments: ‘The sinking of the Princess Alice, for instance, in the Thames, the Northfleet in the Mersey, the Royal Charter of the coast of Ireland were greater catastrophes than the wreck of the Forfarshire.’ (ch. 36). The second and third of these accidents occurred respectively in January 1873 and October 1859, and are recounted in considerable detail in ‘The Perils of the Ocean’, the tenth chapter of Eva Hope’s biography (pp. 188-90 and 182-84), while the first occurred in September 1878, after Hope’s life appeared. 34 Hope, in particular, emphasizes this aspect and in her penultimate chapter characterizes Grace as follows: She possessed in herself the three Graces – Faith, Hope, and Charity. She was tender and pure. She impressed all who knew her by the unostentatious faithfulness of her spirit, and purity of her life. She seems to have been actuated every day by the one desire, to do her duty. She wished to serve God, obey her parents, and do any good work that might be in her power. (p. 294). 35 In ‘Chapter 6: A Scottish Sabbath among the Hills’, there is a detailed account of Henry’s first sermon at the kirk on the Dunmore estate, which demonstrates ‘the inherent greatness and transforming power of the office of the Christian ministry when the candidate for that office has right conceptions of its greatness.’ 36 Even in the middle of the climactic description of the wreck of the Forfarshire, Pae pauses to record in particular the (factually accurate) loss of the life of the Revd. John Robb, minster of Dunkeld: ‘Thus did this good man reach the end of his earthly labours, far from his parish among the Perthshire hills, but still in the prosecution of his Master’s work, and while engaged in a ministration of love.’ (ch. 35). 37 From the Black Bull in Leith Street, Edinburgh, via the inn at Bamburgh, Northumberland, where Grace Darling was born at her grandfather’s cottage, to the Nag’s Head in Hull. 38 In Chapter 30, for example: The Fife coast, now far away, lay low and dim in the north-west. Close at hand the Bass Rock reared its round black head above the waters, and beside it, but on the margin of the land, the ruins of Dunbar and Tantallan Castles and the conical summit of North Berwick Law; sea-ward, a white sail gleamed here and there in the deep blue; and in front was ranged the line of dark frowning cliffs extending in many a curve and undulation till they seemed to terminate in the rounded grassy crests of St Abb’s Head. 39 As I have shown elsewhere (Graham Law, ‘Serializing Fiction in the Australasian Press,’ Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (October 2017), DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.291), the newspaper novels of the Victorian era were widely reprinted in the British colonies, most notably in the antipodes. However, this was most markedly the case with metropolitan fiction distributed by central syndication agencies, for which it increasingly represented a significant component of their business model, while local fiction by local authors in local journals was much less likely to travel overseas. Thus, even Australasian newspapers serving communities with a strong sense of Scottish heritage, like the Adelaide Observer, the Inquirer in Perth, and the Otago Witness in Dunedin (which often dwelt on Caledonian affairs in other sections), have very little in this way to offer in their fiction pages. Given the depth and extent of the popularity of Pae’s serials in North Britain, it is remarkable how seldom they reappeared in the columns of colonial journals. ‘Trove’ and ‘Papers Past’, the extensive and freely accessible digital newspaper archives of the National Libraries of Australia and New Zealand, respectively, produce very few results: I have found four Pae serializations located altogether in Australia and only a single case in New Zealand, all but one dating from after the author’s death, while there is no sign of Grace Darling itself.