Sir Walter Scott in the Western District, 1836-1851

Sir Walter Scott in the Western District, 1836-1851 by Robert Bruce Thomson B. Ec., B.A. (Hons). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University January, 2013 1 Acknowledgements Supervisors: Principal Supervisor – Professor David McCooey Assistant Supervisor – Doctor Geoffrey Boucher Associate Supervisor – Adjunct-Professor Stephen Alomes Awards: The A.G.L. Shaw Summer Research Fellowship – State Library of Victoria The Philip Brown History Award – Deakin University Grants: Higher Degree by Research Candidates General Assistance – Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University International Conference Travel Allowance (NeMLA, USA, 2012) – Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University 2 Abstract This thesis, Sir Walter Scott in the Western District, 1836-1851, does not progress smoothly from an initial hypothesis to a neat resolution of predicted results. New explanations were required as the investigation moved from the presumptions of New Historicism and Discourse Analysis to the emerging fields of Reader-History and Affective Reading. The thesis proposal places a series of popular fictional texts, Scott’s Waverley Novels, within a contemporary social discourse, the Doctrine of (economic) Improvement, as a way of extending conventional historicism to include actual reader-response. The research question asks if a discursive link can be established between (1) the first phase of the Highland Clearances from 1790 to 1820, (2) the publication of Waverley, Rob Roy, and Redgauntlet from 1814 to 1824, and (3) Aboriginal Dispossession in the Western District of Victoria from 1836 to 1851. An author- based discursive link is readily established. The research method for ascertaining responses to Scott’s fiction involved the reading of diaries, letters, and memoirs from a sample of 30 ‘Squatters’ who occupied licensed ‘runs’ in the early years of colonial settlement. Tracking the continuing discourse of ‘a polite and commercial people’ was straight forward, with 65% of all data referring to the Squatters’ engagement with matters of political economy. However none of their references to reading literature (10% of data), had any discernible association with that predominant aspect of their lives. From a reader-based perspective, there is no evidence of the ideology of Improvement being transmitted through the author and what he wrote. These quantitative results require a different set of analytical tools for interpretation, drawing on more recent fields of academic endeavour in the history of reading. Concepts such as the affective reading experience, the ‘feeling’ of reading, ‘reverie’, and ‘idle’ reading, are consequently employed in the later chapters of this thesis. 3 Table of Contents Title Page Acknowledgements 1 Abstract 2 PART ONE –WRITING THE NOVELS Introduction 5 Chapter 1: Initial Impressions 10 Chapter 2: A Polite and Commercial People 27 Chapter 3: Scott’s Waverley and Selkirk’s Observations 42 Chapter 4: Scott’s Rob Roy and Sellar’s Trial 58 Chapter 5: Scott’s Redgauntlet and Loch’s Account 74 PART TWO –READING THE NOVELS Chapter 6: Reading the Readers 91 Chapter 7: The Western District 104 Chapter 8: Profiling the Squatters 119 Chapter 9: Categories of Reading 132 Chapter 10: Acts of Reading 149 Chapter 11: Squatters Reading Scott 164 Chapter 12: Other Britons Reading Scott 176 Chapter 13: The Affective Reader 189 Chapter 14: An Affective Reading Experience 203 Chapter 15: Scott’s Influence 220 Conclusion 238 4 Bibliography 250 Appendix A: Maps 265 Appendix B: Tables 268 Appendix C: Images 276 Appendix D: Data 277 Appendix E: Graphs 280 5 Introduction This thesis does not progress smoothly from an initial hypothesis to the neat resolution of predicted results. In the manner of the volcanic cones and calderas that punctuate the basalt plains of the Western District, it bears the signs of its own, contested, construction. The ending challenges the theoretical and methodological assumptions that underpinned its beginning. New explanations were required as the investigation moved from the presumptions of New Historicism and Discourse Analysis to the emerging fields of Reader- History and Affective Reading. Walter Scott in the Western District, 1836-1851 began with the idea that a dominant ideology, or discourse, could be tracked through its informing of popular literary texts, from its genesis in early capitalist Britain to the early colonial settlement of my own local region of south-west Victoria. Much work and discussion has occurred around the ‘imagining’ of Australian identity, with its roots in a defiantly egalitarian and democratic tradition of bush mateship, the birth of trade unions, and Bulletin-style nationalism. An equally potent but less enthusiastically discussed foundation myth in Australian history is that of ‘private enterprise’, the ethos of individual competition, economic self-interest and ‘free market’ capitalism. In the historical context of British occupation of Australia felix in the 1830s and 1840s, this discourse was known as the Doctrine of Improvement, and its most prominent activists were called ‘squatters’; small-venture investors with mobs of sheep as their ‘capital’, who ‘squatted’ on Aboriginal land until their claims to its economic use were recognised by officers of the Crown. The first task in identifying the progress of this discourse through contemporary fiction was to examine its Enlightenment inception and then the incorporation of its principles into what were later to become the most ubiquitous titles in printed literature, the Waverley Novels by Sir Walter Scott. Using a technique from the practice of New Historicism, certain documentary ‘traces’ from the ‘circulation of social energy’ at that time, representative of and resonating with those 6 particular community tensions, were applied as critical ‘pressure-points’ on three of Scott’s ‘historical romances’. The application of these contemporary documents against the novels Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1818), and Redgauntlet (1824), form part one of this thesis. The method employed is a relatively orthodox approach to literary criticism, in that it is essentially ‘author- based’. It focuses on what elements went into the making of narrative, the social and discursive influences that are understood to have contributed to the writing of a book. The second task was to extend the inquiry beyond the author, taking into account the readers’ reception of the text as a more complete measure of the interaction of discourse and literature. Using the resources of the La Trobe Collection of colonial documents in the State Library of Victoria, I researched a sample of personal manuscripts from 30 Western District ‘squatters’. Their diaries, letters, and memoirs, were read principally for evidence of their reading habits, but also their thoughts and actions on the related topics of political economy and Aboriginal dispossession. When these reader-responses were collated, it became obvious that the existence of comments on reading, and those on the everyday and more pressing affairs of commerce, were quite distinct. In fact, there was no discernible expressed link between the ‘world’ of the squatters as keen readers of British fiction, and their lives as entrepreneurs and managers. One question arising from this unexpected result concerns the usefulness of conventional methods towards understanding what reading books means to the society in which they are read. The sort of theoretical constructs that are conventionally applied to the analysis of literary texts are author-based, and in this case, are unable to explain actual reader-responses to those texts. This undermines claims that conventional literary analysis, particularly New Historicism, can provide much guidance on the contemporaneous political impact of reading novels. The area of Reader-History, of reviewing recorded reading experiences, requires a different set of skills to interrogate imaginative narratives than those more commonly relied on. The assumptions of New Historicism and Discourse Analysis, for example, do not successfully translate 7 from the zone of literary production into the subsequent environment of literary consumption. Consequently, part two of this thesis does not produce a neatly linear aspect. It follows a sometimes episodic path of iterative discovery, a long thematic diversion that gradually becomes the main thrust of its own investigation. The act or affective experience of reading becomes the central focus of the project, not the outworking of discourse or ideology, latent or otherwise. New Historicism and Discourse Analysis emphasise what goes into the making of text, pre-consumption methodologies that imply that any such input or influence is largely what comes out of that text when it is read. (Or, perhaps more accurately, they are methodologies that are largely indifferent to the political and affective realities of actual reading). This presumption of obliging or sub- conscious reader-reception is not adequately tested by criticism using the historicist model in its present form. Readers in this survey do not appear to have approached the novels of Walter Scott in a discursively receptive frame of mind. Their expectations of reading fiction do not match historicist predictions of mental passivity and ideological absorption. As readers of literature, desiring distraction from everyday circumstances, and occasional opportunities for introspection, their actively expressed reader-responses avoid

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