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Scotland and the Novel

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Scotland and the Novel 14 IAN DUNCAN Scotland and the novel Scottish fiction, meaning at once fiction produced in Scotland and fiction that made Scotland its topic, became one of the leading genres of European Romanticism in the decade after Waterloo. Its distinctive forms, the three- volume historical novel, magazine tale and fictitious regional memoir, were the product and fuel of a spectacular Edinburgh publishing boom in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, which was also characterized by innova- tions in the periodical genres of quarterly review and monthly magazine. The proportion of British fiction titles produced in Scotland rose steeply from a mere 0.5 percent in the first decade of the century to 4.4 percent in the 1810s and then to 12 percent in the 1820s, reaching 15 percent, or 54 out of 359 titles, in the peak years of 1822–5.1 Following a nationwide financial crash in 1826, booksellers cut back the production of new novels, especially in Scotland, and invested instead in miscellanies, serials, reprints, and the genres of ‘‘useful knowledge.’’ ‘‘Our publishers of the proud northern metro- polis seem to have lost all pluck since the lamented death of their great father, Mr Constable,’’ remarked Fraser’s Magazine in 1830: ‘‘the vaunted Modern Athens is fast dwindling away into a mere spelling-book and primer manufactory.’’2 The meteoric career of Scottish fiction, as everyone at the time acknowl- edged, traced the career of an individual author, Walter Scott. The publica- tion of Waverley in the summer of 1814 accelerated a modest rate of growth into a regional bonanza. The ruin of Scott and his principal publisher, Archibald Constable, in the 1826 crash precipitated a general decline of Scottish fiction, with little of note appearing after Scott’s death in 1832. Meanwhile, the great series of Waverley Novels (as they came to be called) established the major trends in British Romantic fiction publishing: the displacement of poetry from the summit of the genre system by the novel, the heightened formal definition of the novel, the professionalization of production and marketing, the standardization of format for new works (three volumes, post-octavo, 31s./6d. the set), and even a masculine takeover 251 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009 IAN DUNCAN of what had hitherto been characterized as a feminine kind of writing.3 The formal predominance of Scott’s novels, shaping as they were shaped by the infrastructures of Regency-era literary production and reception, accompa- nied the commercial predominance recently analysed by William St Clair. Scott sold more copies of his novels ‘‘than all the other novelists of the time put together.’’4 The unprecedented print-runs of new titles such as Rob Roy (1818, 10,000 copies) were followed not just by reprints but by reissues in different formats, culminating in the publishing innovation of Scott’s last years, the appearance of all his novels (followed, posthumously, by his other works) in a uniform edition corrected and with new introductions and notes by the author in a series of five-shilling monthly ‘‘small octavo’’ volumes, the so-called ‘‘Magnum Opus’’ edition (1829–33). ‘‘Scott and his partners achieved an ownership of the whole literary production and distribution process from author to reader, controlling or influencing the initial choice of subjects, the writing of the texts, the editing, the publishing, and the printing of the books, the reviewing in the local literary press, [and] the adaptations for the theatre,’’ comments St Clair, with slight hyperbole.5 ‘‘We have been now, for some years, inundated with showers of Scotch novels, thicker than the snow you see falling,’’ complains the English narrator of Sarah Green’s satire Scotch Novel Reading (1824). If the works of the ‘‘Great Unknown’’ seemed ubiquitous, their famous author’s insistence on formal anonymity gave that ubiquity an uncanny cast, as though commercial mass- production were a kind of haunting. Scott’s own preface to The Fortunes of Nigel (1821) stages an encounter with ‘‘the Eidolon, or Representation, of the Author of Waverley’’ in the inner labyrinth of Constable’s shop: this phantasm, at once weird and humdrum, defends his right to be considered ‘‘a productive labourer’’ whose ‘‘bales of books’’ are as ‘‘profitable [a] part of the public stock’’ as ‘‘the goods of any other manufacture.’’ The characterization of a ‘‘close vertical and horizontal concentration of media ownership’’6 on the part of Scott and his associates suggests an aesthetic and ideological as well as commercial monopoly that could be expected to have stifled rival projects, and some commentators have cast Scott’s impact on the Romantic novel in such terms. This essay considers the antithetical claim, that Scott’s massive success encouraged rather than deterred the production of alternative forms of Scottish fiction. The experi- mental richness of Scott’s novels – by no means confined to the first in the series – opened up the literary field, provoking further innovations, quite as much as their industrial predominance may have closed other possibilities down. The demand stimulated by the Waverley Novels made room for a proliferation of Scottish fiction by other hands, some of which consisted of more or less mechanical imitations (Sir Thomas Dick Lauder’s 252 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009 Scotland and the novel Lochandhu: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century, 1824, and The Wolfe of Badenoch: A Historical Romance of the Fourteenth Century, 1827), and some of which made claims to a rival originality. The most notable authors of ‘‘secondary Scottish novels’’ (in Francis Jeffrey’s slighting phrase7) were James Hogg, John Galt, Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, John Gibson Lockhart, John Wilson, and Christian Isobel Johnstone: all of whom were associated, at one time or another, with the publisher who arose to challenge Constable’s ascendancy in the postwar Edinburgh book trade, William Blackwood. (Two other novelists, Elizabeth Hamilton and Mary Brunton, produced Scottish variants of the Irish ‘‘national tale’’ before the appearance of Waverley.) Following a temporary takeover of Scott from Constable (with the first series of Tales of My Landlord, 1816), Blackwood launched Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1817 as a rival to Constable’s brace of Whig period- icals, and began publishing book-length works of fiction (Ferrier’s Marriage, Hogg’s Brownie of Bodsbeck) the following year. Blackwood went on to become the most prolific publisher of novels and tales – some of which first appeared in his magazine – in Scotland in the 1820s. Modern critics have described a Blackwoodian school of Scottish Romantic fiction in competi- tion with Scott’s, flourishing in the years when Scott himself forsook the making of modern Scotland for more exotic matter (after Ivanhoe, 1820). It typically consisted of comic and sentimental depictions of traditional, rural or small-town settings and manners, or of a materialist rather than super- natural mutation of Gothic exploring states of extreme sensation.8 In the early 1820s Hogg and Galt emerged as the most original authors of Scottish prose fiction next to Scott, masters of the distinctive genres developed in the Blackwood orbit, regional tale and fictional autobiography. Blackwoodian regionalism and ‘‘tales of terror’’ would shape English-language fiction of the 1830s and 40s, from Dickens and the Bronte¨s to Poe, while the historical novel remained the prestigious form of the novel as such in Britain in the decade or so following Scott’s death. Anglo-Irish writers had developed the national tale, a fiction addressing the internal formation of modern Britain upon the political and cultural absorp- tion of its ‘‘Celtic fringe,’’ in the decade or so before Waverley. Nevertheless it was Scott who established the ‘‘classical form of the historical novel’’ (as Georg Luka´cs defined it in The Historical Novel) as not just a national but a planetary genre. Across continental Europe (Alexander Pushkin to Alessandro Manzoni), from North America to the Indian subcontinent, distinctively colo- nial and anticolonial variants of Scott’s national historical novel took root through the nineteenth century. Nor was Scott alone in reconstituting Scottish literature as a worldwide medium, coterminous with the commercial and administrative networks of empire. Blackwood’s capitalized on its distribution 253 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2009 IAN DUNCAN throughout the settler colonies to address specifically colonial concerns and to redefine the miscellany as a quintessentially imperial genre.9 Contemporary reviewers noted this spectacular if belated rise of Scottish fiction. The novel, observed one, has assumed the role of classical epic to represent ‘‘the different modes of national existence ...in modern times.’’10 Another, writing the same year (1819), summed up what he understood to be the ‘‘important change’’ that had taken place ‘‘within these few years in the general taste and literature of Scotland’’: in a strange reversal of ‘‘the usual progress of the human mind,’’ the ‘‘grave and metaphysical propensities of our countrymen’’ have succumbed to a ‘‘rage for works of fancy.’’11 The reviewer characterizes a shift from the curriculum-based genres of the so-called Scottish Enlightenment – moral philosophy, the human and natural sciences – to the bookseller’s genres of periodicals and fiction that flourished in Edinburgh after 1800. The shift tracks a general devolution of Scottish literary production from the academic infrastructure of the Enlightenment disciplines to the recognizably nineteenth-century conditions of an indus- trializing literary marketplace. Politics hastened if it did not by itself drive the change. The Anti-Jacobin reaction of the mid-1790s broke up the ‘‘Moderate’’ Whig consensus that had supplied the ideological medium of Enlightenment, as Pitt’s Tory government tightened its regional monopoly over Scottish patronage and institutions. The founding of The Edinburgh Review in 1802, during the ‘‘thaw’’ of the Peace of Amiens, marks a watershed.
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