SCOTTISH CULTURAL NATIONALISM, 1760-1832:

THE HIGHLANDIZATZON OF SCOTTISH NATIONAL IDENTITY

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of Graduate Studies

of

The University of Guelph

by THERESA SOREL

In partial fhlfilment of requirements

for the degree of

Master of Arts

June, 1997

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SCOTTISH CULTURAL NATIONALISM, 176001832: THE HiGHLANDIWI"I'0N OF SCOTTISH NATIONAL IDENTITY

Theresa Sorel Advis or: University of Guelph, 1997 Professor R. Sunter

This thesis is an investigation of the 'highlandization' and romanticization of Scottish national identiw in James Macpherson's The Poens of Ossian (1760-1763),Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry CZinker

(Vil), Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotlund (1775),

James Boswell's Journal of a Tour with Samuel Johnson, LLD. (17851, and

Walter Scott's The Heart of Midothian (1818). The Highlands were used by these wrîters to represent what the perceived as Scottishness. However, it was a mythologized, romantic Highlands they constructed, which only has a loose comection to the 'real' Highlands. The mythical image of the Highlands, which was mostly constructed by Lowland Scottish writers and English travellers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gradually became equated with all of . This thesis is dedicated to Judy Briand, who fist instilled in me a love of history.

1would like to thank my advisors, Dr. R. Sunter, Dr. C. Kerrigan, and Dr. E.

Ewan for their invaluable support and who helped guide me in the right direction. 1 would also like to thank the staff of Rare Books, McLaughh

Library, and Michael Hall, the curator of the Slide library, Department of Fine

Art, for their help and assistance. An especial th& to my mother, Linda

Sorel, who helped proofFead my thesis. And hally, 1 am indebted to my family and friends, David, Linda, and Evan Sorel, J. Keeping, Emily Ferguson and Natalie Coulter for their emotionai support, who helped keep me sane. TABLE OF CONTENTS

introduction 1-22

Chapter 1: Ossian, Primitivism, and Eighteenth-Century Society. 23-49

Chapter II: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker: Scotophilia and Scotophobia. 50-72

Chapter III: Boswell and Johnson's Highland Tour, 73-101

Chapter TV: Scott and The Head of Midlothian: Scottish History and the Romance of the Highlands. 102131

Conclusion 132x35 INTRODUCTION 1 INTRODUCTION

Scottish cultural nationalism of the late eighteentldearly nineteenth

century reveals both a process of romanticization and 'highlandization'. Since

the Iate eighteenth century, the Highlands have had (and continue to have) a

tremendous fascination and evocative apped for visitors (Lowland Scots and

tourists alike). The romantic image of the Highlands has been constructed in

the imaginations of mostly non-Highlanders. This image is one of poetic

romance, ddsublimity, and picturesque beauty. Highlanders were imagined

as possessing a heroic and poetic "Celtic spirit". Scottish writers of this period

used the Highlands as a potent symbolic locus for representing Scottishness.

This thesis dlexamine the role of James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian

(1760~1,Tobias Smollett's The Expedition ofHumphry Clinker (1771), Samuel

Johnson and James Boswell's Highiand tour (1775 and 1785), and Walter

Scott's (1818), in forining Scottish cultural

nationalism, focusing on their perceptions of the HighIands. Although Scotland

and had been amalgamated for over half a century by the time of

Macpherson and for over a century by the time of Scott, Scottish writers still

exhibited a concern with the repercussions of the Union of 1707. Macpherson,

Smollett, Boswell, and Scott were all engaged in determinhg what constituted

Scottishness. Macpherson envisioned an ancient mythical Scottish past, glor-g the heroic martial spirit of the ancient Scots, the Caledonians.

Smollett, Boswell, and Scott represented a Scottish national identity within a 2 wider British one, as well as portraying a mythical Highlands. Samuel

Johnson, although an Englishman, went searching the Highlands and

Hebrides, looking for the distinctively Scottish culture of the Highland clans.

The time period 1760-1832 witnessed monumental changes worldwide, moving towards urbanization and industrialization and away from rural and traditional modes of life, what Jerome Blum characterized as a "switch Fom communalism with its collective controls to individualism with its private rights of property and its individual fkeedom of action".' Changes included an emphasis on rationality, progress, and modernity by intellectuals of the

Enlightenment, contrasted with a burgeoning Romanticism and emphasis on the imagination, the emotions, and the past, and an increased historicity and sense of nationahW. Historical change was especially intensxed in Scotland.

David Hume wrote in 1770 "1 believe this is the historical age and this the historical nati~n".~Scott wrote in his "Postscript which should have Been a

Preface" to Waverley (1814)

There is no European nation which within the course of half a cent- or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this ". The effects of the insurrection of 1745,--the destruction of the patriarchal power of the heritable

Jerome Blum cited in T. M. Devine, "Social Responses to Agrarian 'hprovement': The Highland and " in R. A. Houston and 1. D. Whyte, eds., Scottish Society 1500-1800 (: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 148. Hume cited in Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scott. The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), p. 9. jurisdictions of the Lowland nobility and barons,-the total eradication ofthe Jacobite party . . . The gradua1 influx of weaïth and extension of commerce have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different fkom their grandfathers as the existing English have f=om those of Queen Elizabeth's timem3

Despite the national partisanal enthusiasm of these comments, Scotland

(especially the Highlands) was racked by great social and economic upheavd, witnessing the beginnings of industrialization in the Scottish Lowland cities, a rising population, new and more productive techniques in , technological advances in transportation, and the disintegration of the clan system and Highland way of life as a distinct culture &om Lowland Scotland.

Nationalism suggests an intense love of one's country as well as one's language, culture, customs and institutions and has a powerful, emotional appeal. It has a dynamic power to intens* the raw emotions of a people.

This national feeling consists of a sense of belonging to a community and an interrelatedness which is often based on a sense of uniqueness. Historically, literature has had a central role in forming national consciousness and ideology. Traditionally, the study of nationalism has begun with the very successfid revolutions in France and Arnerica in the late eighteenth century.

Georg Lukacs writes of the awakening of national sensibility: "It was the

French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon,

Walter Scott, Waverley, or 'Tis Skty Years Since (: Ward, Lock and Co., Limited, 18821, p. 465. 4 which for the &st time made history a mass e~tperience."~This precipitated

a whole series of movements and national uprisings for political independence

throughout Europe during the nineteenth century, "the age of nationalism".

The liberal and democratic principles of the French Revolution inspired many

nations and nations to be, as well as stirring up national feelings in a

reactionary, conservative response to these democratic ideals.

There was a general change in attitude towards the nation fi-om the

eighteenth to the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, theories on

the state were formulated by writers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu,

defining the limits on the power of the monarch and government and securing

civil rights for the people. However eighteenth-century nationalism was

counter-balanced by Enlightenment humanism, a deep interest in not just

national history but the history of human development, and by

cosmopolitanism, an awareness of belonging to an international community

which went beyond national borders, a "citizenry of the ~orld".~Nineteenth-

century nationalism was directed more towards individual fieedom and the

sovereignty of the nation-state, and by the latter half of the nineteenth century

was increasingly politicized.

"eorg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: MerLin Ress, 1962), p. 23.

5 Johan Herder, Gotthold Lessing, Oliver Goldsmith and James Boswell considered themselves "citizens of the world. Boyd C. Shafer, Faces of Nationalism. New Realities and Old Myths, (New : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., 1972), p. 112. 5 In the late eighteenthlearly nineteenth century, nationalism was fonned

in conjunction with Romanticism, which emphasized the emotional, the

individual, the imagination, and the sublime, as well as national history and

literature. Marlon B. Ross comments that nationalism

crossbreeds the notion of territorial acquisition, born during the Renaissance, with the notion of historical progress, born during the Enlightenment, and gr& both onto the notion of the folk as an organic entity with a natural relation to the nurturing place, the motherland, or the place of dissemination, the fatherland, a notion born during the Romantic period.6

For instance nineteenth-century German nationalism was stimulated by the

German Romantic movement (as well as by the Napoleonic occupation).

Germany's cultural Romantic-nationalism became politicized in the later

nineteenth century and helped lead to the unification of Germany. Herder, the

"philosophic founder of cultural history, the prophet of cultural romantic

nationali~rn",~developed the concept of organicism, the almost mystical belief

that everything, including the nation, was part of an organic creative process

and unity. Herder championed national folklore, language, and literature as

representing the spirit of the people, the Volksgeist, the source of al1 vitality,

creativiw, and growth: "a nation . . . has nothing more valuable than the

6 Marlon B. Ross, "Romancing the Nation-State: The Poetics of Romantic Nationalism". Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalisrn, Exoticism, Imperialism (Philadelphia: University of Pemsylvania Press, 19911, p. 56.

7 Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Romantic Mouement and the Study of History (London: The Athlone Press, 1969), p. 10. 6 language of its fathers. In it lives its entire spiritual treasury of tradition, history, religion, and principles of life, all its heart and so~l".~His concept of

Volksgeist was adopted by later Romantics and nationalists.

Modern critics of nationalism stress its 'fictional', 'constructed' and

'Magined' nature. A. D. Smith defines nationalism as "the shared community of mythic values" and the nation as "humanpopulations with shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having an association with a specific territory and a sense of solidarity"? Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Comrnunites, defines 'nation-ness' as "an imagined political community", and a "culturd artefact", with "deep, horizontal comradeship" and f?aternity.'O He analyzes the imagined qualities of the national community: "[Mlembers of even the smallest nation dlnever know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their

~ommunion".~'The idea of the nation exists in the minds and individual imaginations of the nation's people. He states that the "new imagined national

William A Wilson, "Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism" Journal of Popular culture 6 (1973), p. 827.

A. D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, 1986, cited in John Foster, "Nationality, Social Change and Class Transformations of Nationd Identity in Scotland, in The Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change, eds. David McCrone Stephen Kendrick, and Pat Shaw (: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), p. 36.

'O Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition (London: Verso, 19911, p. 6, 4, and 7. cornmunities" arose out of the "erosion of the sacred imagined community" of world religions such as Christendom or the nation of Islam.12 He places the pivotal role of this change at the time of "print-capitalism" or "print-as- cornmodity", the book-publishing industries which created a new form of propagating to the masses, and brought about a new national vision, "which made it possible for rapidy growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways".13

These print languages were written in the vernacular and "laid the bases for national consci~usness".'~Print-capitalism created "unified fields of exchange and communications"--national Ianguages. Speakers of national languages

gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language field, and at the same tirne that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were comected through print, formed in their secular, particular, visible invisibdity, the embryo of the nationdy imagined co~nmunity.'~

Print-capitaiism created "languages-of-p0wer",1~and a linguistic hierarchy.

Less dominant languages were subordinated or deIegated to obscurity.

'* Ibid. p. 41-42. Cairns Craig in his review of Anderson comments that the "essence of this imagined communiw, however, is the same as the essence of a religious cornmuni@-it is a continuity beyond death. In the case of nationalism, a continuity through history". In "Nation and History", Centrastus (Winter 1984, no. 191, p. 16.

l3 Anderson, Imagined Comrnunities, p. 36. National traditions are often represented as 'natural', 'morai', and

'right',17 and as having a historical continuity with the past. Hobsbawm

observes that many modern nations claim to be rooted in the rernotest

antiquiw; however, such assumptions are often based on 'invented' traditions,

human as opposed to 'natural' communitie~.'~These mythic structures can

be used in an attempt to establish or symbolize social cohesion, legitirnize

authoriw, or inculcate "beliefs, value systems, and conventions of beha~ior".'~

Anthony Smith points out that these traditions are not so much invented as

rediscovered, revived, and reconstructed fkom pre-existing elements of ethnic

hi~tory.'~He observes that traditions were adaptable and their success was

dependent upon "popular re~onance".~' Ernst GeIlner is critical of

nationalism and states that it is "not the awakening of nations to self-

consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exi~t".~~David McCrone

17 Alan Butt Philip, "European Nationalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" in The Roots of Nationalism, ed. Rosalind Mitchison (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd., 1980), p. 1. '' Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions" in The ~nuention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)' p. 14.

l9 Ibid, p. 9.

'O Anthony D. Smith, "The Nation: Invented, Irnagined, Reconstructed?" in Reimagining the Nation, eds. Mq-orie Ringrose and Adam J. Lerner (Buckingham: Open University Press, 19931, p. 14.

22 Gellner cited in David McCrone, "Representing Scotland: Culture and Nationalism", The Making of Scotland, p. 169. 9 writes that "It is a convenient but distorted truth of nationalism that the

nation is 'natural', that every nation deserves a state"."

The place of Scotland in the movement towards the nation and within

Romanticism is compIex and not easily defined. Scottish writers of this period

developed a highIy romanticized national identity, but did not develop a

Romantic movement; they developed a strong sense of Scottishness, but this did not develop into political nationalism. It is ironie that Scotland firndamentdy contributed to European Romanticism and the romanticization of Scotland without reaUy developing a Romantic tradition. Simpson writes of this paradox:

The fate of Scottish culture is inseparable from Scotland's experience of Romanticism, an experience that was quite singular among the countries of Europe. At first glance the potential for seems considerable. CeItic emotionalism, both a record and a love of heroic achievement; a scenic grandeur; a folk-tradition and a vernacular--these seem the very breeding-grounds of Romantici~m.~~

Really only Macpherson and Scott exhibit any Romanticism, but neither exhibits a non-ambivalent Romanticism. Ossian is stilI fi.amed by the

Enlightenment and Scott's romantic tendencies are qualified by his historical realisrn. Both of their Romanticisms are very conservative and non-

23 M.

24 Simpson, The Protean Scot, p. 9. 10 revolutionary "offering no kind of threat to established society"."

Nor does Scotland seem to be overly affected by European national revolts. The more central issue is its relation with England as part of Britain.

The Act of Union of 1707 was a pivotal event in . The loss of political identiw led to the creation of a cultural one. The Union was pushed through despite hostile opinion and protests. What was gained was the opening up of EnglishBritish markets and the resources of the British Empire, industry, and occupations for Scottish soldiers in British wars. What was lost was the , with only nominal representation in British parliament: 16 peers out of 206 in the House of Lords and 45 members of parliament out of 568 in House of C~mmons.*~This was hardly a strong voice. Scottish nationalism seems to have been subsumed within British nationalism, in what Anthony Smith terms "concentric loyaltie~".~'Many

Scots in this period considered themselves both British and distinctly, uniquely, and proudly Scottish.

Several theories have been written to explain this anomaly, why

25 Andrew Hook, "Scotland and Romanticism: the International Scene", The History of Scottish Literature, Volume 2 1600-1800 ed. Andrew Hook (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), p. 311.

26 T. C. Smout, A History of the 1560-1830 (London: Fontana Press, 19871, p. 200. '' A. D. Smith cited in T. C. Smout, "Problems of Nationalism, Identity and Improvement in late Eighteenth-Century Scotland, Improvement and Enlightenrnent, ed. T. M. Devine (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, Ltd., 1989), p. 2. 11 Scotland did not realize self-determination and political independence in an

'age of nationalism'. Anderson blames the peculiarities of Scotland's non- existent nationalism, despite a thriving literary and publishing tradition, on the dying out of the , which was being assaulted by both linguistic and cultural forces of assimilation. With the advent of the

Reformation and the Union of the Crowns in 1603, southern English began to make inroads as the language of the church, court, administration, and upper classes.28 With increased exposure to English contact through commercial and social interaction, the Scots dialect was slowly being anglicized, refined, and "ci~ilized".~~T. S. Eliot wrote that the last Scottish author to use the

Scots dialect "with the same feeling towards the language, the same conviction, as an Englishman writing English was during the Tudor peri~d.~'Many

Scots became self-conscious of their accent as a sign of provincidi@, and attempted to eradicate Scotticisms from their speech and writing. With the increased power of the Lowland and English authorities in the Highlands,

Gaelic-speakers were slowly being assimilated. The disintegration of a distinctive Scottish language eliminated "'before' the age of nationalism, any possibility of a European-style vernacular-specific nationalist ~novernent".~~

- Anderson, Imagined Cornmunities, p. 89.

29 Simpson, The Protean Scot, p. 9.

30 Ibid, p. 4.

31 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 90. 12 Tom Nairn in the Break-up ofBritain argues fkom a materialist Marxist point of view on Scotland's belatedness in fonning a politicdy active nationalism, which he believes was a recent development of the 1920s. He questions why it was "absent for virtually the whole of the 'founding period' of

European nationalist str~~~ie"?~Nairn argues that nationalism was a product of underdevelopment arnong the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie: "The new middle classes, awakening to the grim dilemmas of backwardness . . . have (usuaIly) to get rid of an anachronistic ancien régime as well as to beat

'progress' into a shape that suits their own needs and class ambitions".33 To achieve their ends they need to arouse and harness the latent energies of the masses and "turn to the people"?4 Scotland was a Ithistory-hl" nation and despite its loss of political independence, had kept its civil society-,

Presbyterianism, their education system, and to some extent, lang~age.~~

Despite a dynamic middle class, a rising bourgeoisie, "one of the most distinguished intellectual classes", a popular anti-English tradition, and a canon of national heroes and foIklore of repression and resistance, nationalism was "conspicuous only by its absence in ~cotland".~~Nairn contends that

32 Tom Na-, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalisn (London: NLB, 1977), p. 95. 13 Scotland suffered fkom overdevelopment and a content middle class, who were the motor force of nationalism. The "startlingprogress" of Lowland Scotland, which began to accelerate in the 1760s, created a nation which was prosperous and imperhl rather than theoretic and backward: "Duringthe prolonged era of Anglo-Scots imperialist expansion, the Scottish ruling order found that it had aven up statehood for a hugely profitable junior partnership in the New

Rome."37 The Highlands, however, did not participate in this prosperity, and in fact suffered fiom underdevelopment. Because the Highlands had no middle class, few towns, and were too marginal, they were unable to build a powerful collective national movement of resistance aRer their defeat at C~lloden.~~

Nairn labels Scotland's strictly cultural nationalism as "cultural sub- nationalism": "It was cultural, because of course it could not be political . . . a direct substitute for political action . . . It could ody be 'sub-nationalist' in the sense of venting its national content in various crooked ways--neurotically, so to speak, rather than dire~tly"?~Another explanation for Scotland's non- political nationalism lay with her relationship with Romanticisrn and Walter

Scott. Nairn believed that Romanticism could be a positive force in forming nationalism and mobilizing the people, for it was "far closer to the people, to their real ethnic and historical character, their language and modes of

37 Ibid, p. 129.

38 Ibid, p. 111-112; 148.

39 Ibid, p. 156. e~pression"!~He found that

The politico-cultural necessities of nationalism . . . entail an intimate lînk between nationalist politics and Romanticism. Romanticism was the cultural mode of the nationalist dynamic, the cultural language' which alone made possible the formation of the inter-class communities required by it.41

However, Sir Walter Scott showed us "how not to be nationalists during an age

of ascendant political nationalism".* His national tendencies were rendered

"politicallyvoid, nullined by his elegiac, valedictory nationalism of the pa~t,''~

Anderson's and Nairn's theories point to several problems with Scottish

nationalism, the anglicization of Scottish languages, Scots and Gaelic,

Scotland's decidedly cultural nationalism, and Scotland's relationship with

Britain. Another aspect of Scottish nationalism was the Lowlands' relationship

with the Highlands, which were transformed by both English reprisais fier

the 1745 Jacobite Rebelli~n~~and Lowland enlightened "improvers". This

transformation operated at both an ideological and a material- level."'

" Ibid, p. 143.

42 Ibid, p. 149.

'' Punitive legislation after the Forty-five included the Disarming Act (17461,which prohibited the bearing of arms and the wearing of the and the plaid, and the Abolition of Heritable Jurisdictions (1747), which broke the feudal and legal power of the Highland Chiefs over their tenants. 45 Charles Withers, Gaelic Scotland. The Transformation of a Culture Region (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 14. Through econornic improvement, political legislation and , the hprover's mandate was to bring to the Highlands the virtues of civilization:

That spirit of industry which begins to take place among them, together with a more fkee education, will soon, it is to be hoped, polish their manners, take off the rest of barbarity, sloth, ignorance, and convert the uncouth savage into an industrious and useful member of society!"

The improving ideology of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had its roots in the seventeenth century. Gaelic was seen by the Crown and the

Lowland government as the symbolic barrier to the effective control of the

Highlands. In 1616 the Lord Commissioners for the AfFairs of the Isles considered Gaelic "one of the cheif and principal1 causes of the continewance of barbaritie and incivilitie amongis the inhabitantis of the Es and

Heylandi~"!~In the eighteenth century one of the principal organizations for civilizing the Highlands, was the SSPCK (Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge) founded in Edinburgh in 1709. Lowland

Presbyterians were determined to missionize and anglicize the Highlands and convert the savage, violent, idle, popish Highlanders into loyal, industrious, godly English-speaking Scottish citi~ens."~Linda Colley comments that

46 Monthly Review, 1754, cited in Womack, Improvement and Romance. Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 19891, p. 4.

47 Withers, Gaelic Scotland, p. 113.

48 This opinion was not restricted to Lowland Scots. Daniel Defoe writes in his tour of Scotland that he hopes "Ignorance, Popery and the Irish laquage", will be displaced by "Virtue, Loyalty, and Industry". A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain cited in Withers, Gaelic Scotland, p. 110. "Lowland Scots traditionally regarded their Highland countrymen as members of a different and inferior race, violent, treacherous, poverty-stricken and backward", calling them "savages" and ab origine^".^^

This ideological assault was accompanied by economic improvement, which helped speed up the disintegration of the clan system. Agricultural improvers, members of the Scottish upper and landed classes like the Dukes of Argyle and Sir John Sinclair, set out to transform and modernize the

Highland economy and make the Highland estates commercially viable and prosperous. Agrarian capitalism and comrnercialism radicalized the rural agricultural structure of clan society. Changes, beginning around the last half of the eighteenth century, included idated rents, , the consolidation of holdings, , the introduction of the potato and the turnip, and by the nineteenth century, the clearance and eviction of whole comrnunities and tenants in favor of commercial sheep farms and mass emigration. The 1760s and 1770s marked an acceleration in the rate of social change, intensimng the social pressures felt in the Highlands.so

The negative stigmatism attached to the Highlands by seventeenth- and

49 Linda Colley, Britans, Forging the Nation 1707-1837.(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 15. It is interesting to note that these were the same slurs the English used on the Scots. 50 A war-time boom increased the demand of Highland and Island resources: cattle, kelp, fish, whisky, wool, mutton, timber, and slate. However, by 1810, the 'boom' turned into 'bust', with the collapse of the kelp industry and the drop in fishing and cattle prices. Devine, Clanship to Crofters War,p. 32 and 52. 17 early eighteenth-century Lowland Scots was reversed by the Iate eighteenth century. The Highland Society of London was founded in 1778, which sought the preservation of Highland traditions. At first membership required fluency in Gaelic, but this requirement was reduced in 1778 to Highland descent. Sir

John Sinclair wrote in 1813 that "the true qualification is not so much the distinction of "Highland Birth" . . . but, the possession of a "Highland

It was the Highland Society's agitation that led to the repeal of the

Disarming Act in 1782.5~ It was Lowlanders, the Scottish regiments, and

George IV who made the kilt respectable. The kilt was rehabilitated and became fashionable arnong the Lowland and English elite, the dress of the

Scots and those with "Highland Spirit", not just of the Gael~.'~'At the same time as the economic hardships hit the Highlands, Lowland Scots and members of the English aristocracy were celebrating the "Highland Spirit".

The economic realities of Highland Life were typicdly ignored by travellers to the Highlands. John Prebble writes very critically of this silence or distortion of Highland culture:

51 Withers, "The Historical Creation of the " in The Manufacture of Scottish History, ed. Ian Donnachie and Christopher WhatIey (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), p. 151.

52 Devine, Clanship to Crofter's War, p. 87.

53 Ibid. This was especially so fier George IV's visit to Scotland in 1822, who wore a kilt with flesh-colored hose. However, certaialy not everyone was as enthusiastic by this Highland 'mania'. Lockhart called this pageantry a "hallucinaton", and wrote that the Highlands "always constituted a small and always an unimportant part of the Scottish population". Devine, CZanship to Crofter's War, p. 88. No laments were heard-or none beyond the bounds of the Gaidhealtachd-for the evictions, the burnings and the white- sailed ships that were emptying the glens while the men who profited f?om this diaspora formed their Highland societies and solemnly debated the correct hang of a kilt and the exact drape of a plaid."

In fact most travellers, including LowIand Scots, knew very little about the real Highlands. However, Charles Withers notes that "it is not a question of

'false perceptions' in opposition to a 'real' history for the region for the simple reason that many of the generdy understood images of the Highlands were held to be 'real' by people at the The Highlands were given a life of their own, and remade into a Lowland image. Leneman notes that

"Lowlanders may not have known anythhg about the Gaelic tradition, but it was their idealization of Highland virtues and their appropriation of Highland accoutrements . . . which helped to create a new Scottish identity".j6 Grant

Jarvie writes of this process of 'Highlaadization':

The Highlander was rendered safe for assimilation into the imagination of the Lowland Scot and the Scottish way of life in general. A culture was destroyed der Culloden, and yet, precisely because of this, its symbols became available not only to a nascent European Romantic movement, of which Walter Scott was a part, but also to a Scottish cultural identity in general. Because of the obscurity of Highland history and because of the

j4 John Prebble, The King's Jaunt, cited in Withers, "The Historical Creation of the Scottish Highlands", p. 153.

55 Ibid, p. 155.

56 Leah Leneman, "A New Role for a Lost Cause. Lowland Romanticization of the Jacobite Highlander" in Perspectives in Scottish Social History: Essays in honour ofRosalind Mitchison, ed. Leah Leneman (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), p. 120. 19 popdar tide of feeling at the time towards the Highlanders, the literati had relatively few problems locating a sentimental Scottish nationalism north of the Highland line.57

Perceptions of the Highland landscape also went through a transformation in the late eighteenth century. In 1727 Daniel Defoe, labelled the Highlands a "fnghtful country full of hideous desart [sic] rno~ntains".~~

Edward Burt in 1730 described the mountains of Inverness as "of a dismal gloomy Brown, drawing upon a di* Purple; and most of alI disagreeable when the Heath is in ~loorn".~~By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Highlands' wild barren heaths and mist-shrouded mountains were considered the site of sublimity. The mythical Highlands is consistently represented in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Highland travel accounts and print illustrations. However many travellers' descriptions of the

Highlands displayed an ambivalence to the landscape, betraying feelings of both admiration and disgust. Even tourists who set out specificdly to enjoy the grandeur of the Highlands were only to be repelled by the barren heath.

Mrs. Anne Grant of Laggan, boni in the Highlands but raised in America, was at Gst "repelled and disappointed by the Highland landscape on her return:

57 Grant Jarvie, "Culture, Social Development and the Scottish ", The Making of Scotland, p. 198.

58 Daniel Defoe cited in Leah Leneman, "The EEects of Ossian in Lowland Scotland, p. 357.

59 Edward Bu.cited in Womack, Improuement and Romance, p. 1. 20 "In vain 1 tried to raise my mind to the tone of s~blimity".~~This

ambivalence Womack labels, the "negative ~ublime".~'Wumack believes that

the Scottish Highland landscape cuts across the coherent tradition of aesthetics

of the sublime, picturesque, and the bea~tiful.~~The sublime, as defined by

Burke, was an experience which arose out of fear and danger. When viewed

f?om a safe distance, it produces a sense of pleasure, which he termed

"delightful horror, a sort of tranquiLity tinged with terr~r".~~The sublime

evokes feelings of awe, dread, and horror. It was believed to stir the soul with

grand ideas. The picturesque was a category in-between the sublime and the

beautiful. William Gilpin, the definitive picturesque tourist, defined the

picturesque as a quality in painting which made a scenic landscape a suitable

picture for painting. These qualities were compositional: simplicity and

variety. More simplicity brought it closer to the sublime, and more variety,

closer to the beautiful. The picturesque was also defined by contrast-

60 Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders in Scotland (1811) cited in Leah Leneman, "The Effects of Ossian in Lowland Scotland in Aberdeen and the Enlightenrnent, eds. Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), p. 359.

61 Ibid, p. 76.

" Womack, Improuement and Romance, p. 64. " Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime. A Study of Critical Theories in XV7II- Century England (AmArbor: The University of Michigan, 1960),p. 97. 21 mountains, trees, foliage, and watersa The clifference between the

picturesque and the beautifid was that the picturesque was rougher, with

rugged edges and lines; while the difference between the picturesque and the

sublime was that the picturesque was somewhat tamed. Tourists, however,

often used the aesthetical terminology rather indiscriminately, conflating the

terms when describing a landscape.

By the mid-nineteenth century the popular image of ScotIand was

equated with the Highlands, and not the historic Highlands, but the mythical

Highlands. The gradua1 romanticization of the Highlands and the

"highlandization" of Scotland occurred roughly during the same time, and was

perpetuated mostly by outsiders, Lowland Scots and English travellers.

Withers observes that the Highlands

figure as a major part of Scottish national identiw because of the attention given to the mythic creation of the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The created Highlands semed to justify a self-sustaiuing larger myth about the cultural and national development of Scotland itself. The Highlands then (in the eighteenth century especiaily) were what al1 Scots once were: 'before and der' readings dominated the reading of every Highland phenornen~n.~~

Highlandism also had an appeal for non-Scots who found in the mythical

Highlands an idyllic, neo-feudal pastoral and patriarchal sirnplicity, which

Christopher Smout, "Tours in the Scottish Highlands fiom the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries", Northern Scotland 5 (19831,p. 103- 105.

65 Withers, "The Historical Creation of the Highlands, p. 156. 22 contrasted greatly with the urbanized, industrialized, "dissolute"society and the dangerous democratic tendencies of the masses. Highland customs, although no longer a vital force in the Highlands, were resurrected as national syrnbols for Scotland. The creation of 'Highlandism' answered a need among

Scots for a distinctive, independent Scottish culture, a sense of uniqueness, which could survive despite the loss of political independence. CHAPTER 1: OSSIAN, PRIMITMSM, AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYSOCIETY 23 CHAPTER I

James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian can be read in several

opposing perspectives: as a quintessential product of the eighteenth century

Enlightenment, or as a precursor of Romanticism; as a literary work based on scholarship and antiquarianism, or as a work motivated by opportunism and pragmatic self-interest; as an expression of Scottish nationalism or an example of narrow partisanship or clannishness. What this chapter will argue is that the Ossianic controversy is not as important as the process of cultural / rnythic construction of Scottish national identie and the romanticization of the

Highlands. The Poems of Ossian responded to and stimulated a growing national consciousness and a new romantic sensibility. Macpherson not only rewrote Celtic myth and early Scottish history, he also mythologized the

Scottish past (and present). His mythopoeic Ossianic heroes are "Iess ideal types of the primitive past than symbolic models for a sentimenta1 present".'

In the heroic ancient culture of Ossian, Macpherson posited the ideals and values of late eighteenth century society. Because Macpherson's Ossian wrote in the third century, his Scottish Caledonians appeared exceptional, possessing al1 the heroic ideals of primitive society, as well as al1 the qualities of

"civilized" sociee. Macpherson helped construct a fiction of national identie which could provide the Scots with a symbolic identification with a mythical

' John, Dwyer, "The Melancholy Savage: Text and context in the Poems of Ossian", Ossian Revisited, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 170. 24

Highland, as well as a heroic, past2

Born and raised in the Highlands in a Jacobite, Gaelic-speaking

community, but educated in the Lowlands at Aberdeen, Macpherson acted as

a kind of interpreter of the two cultures, a self-made ambassador of the

Highlands, tramferring his sympathy for a disintegrating culture to his

Lowland, English, European, and American audience. The poems had a

considerable impact on intellectuals and the reading public, as well as creating

tremendous controversy. Ossian invoked a wide-range of responses, £kom wild

enthusiasm to damning accusations. Readers were divided into three disparate

groups: those who embraced them as authentic Gaelic poetry (Hugh Blair,

Anne Grant of Laggan), those who denounced them as forgeries (Samuel

Johnson, ), and those who felt that the authenticity debate was

irrelevant and accepted the poems on their own merit. Ossianic poetry greatly

influenced German writers, significantly Herder and Goethe3 as well as the

major English Romantics. Ossian had a pivota1 role in forming Herder's

theories on 'I'oksgeist". Napoleon was such an admirer of Ossian that he carried a copy on his campaigns.' Macpherson popdarized the "romantic"

Goethe's romantic hero in The Sorrowings of Young Werther (1774) cited passages from the "Songs of Selma"; Herder included one of the poems in a collection of folksongs Voices of the Nations in Song (1778-1779)and wrote several iduential articles on Ossian, "Über Ossian und die Lieder alter Volker" (1773), and "Homer and Ossian" (1795). Paul J. de Gategno, James Macpherson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), p. 67, 120, 154 note 16. view of the Highlands and of GaeIic culture- Andrew Erskine wrote to Boswell in 1762 on the effect of the poems on him: "He transports us by the grandeur of his sublime, or by some sudden start of tenderness he melts us into distress.

. . . at particular passages 1 felt my whole fiame trembling with ecsta~y".~In

1854, Lady Jane Wilde named her son Oscar Fingal Wilde, writing, "1s not that grand, misty, and Ossianic?"! Ossian readers "responded to the vision of a strange, remote, exotic ancient world, peopled by grandly heroic characters who move with a kind of stately dignity across wild and barren landscapes of rnountains, crags, rivers, seas, clouds, and mists".' In the century following its publication, the poems were translated into twenty-six languages.' J. J.

Dunn notes that the collected Pwms of Ossian went through forty-five editions

Andrew Erskine cited in J. J. Dunn, "The Role of Macpherson's Ossian in the Development of British Romanticism", unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Duke University, 1966), p. 105. Lady Jane Wilde cited in Fiona Stafford, "Introduction: The Ossianic Poems of James Macpherson" in James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian And Related Works, ed. Howard GaskiI1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 19961, p. v.

Andrew Hook, "Scotland and Romanticism: the International Scene", The History of Scottish Literature, Volume 2: 1600-1800, ed. Andrew Hook (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), p. 315. Not every one was won over by their sublirnity. One contemporary critic wrote in the European Magazine (1796): "In many passages, one meets with a strange incoherence of confusion . . . The reader in almost every page, finds nothing but heroes strutting in amour, warriors flouncing to battle, winds roaring, streams tumbling, storms raging, blue-eyed maids fainting, and woods and rocks echoing to the clang of arrns, and shouts of conquerors; objects too sublime for regularity, and too poetic for modern conception". Monk, The Sublime, p. 129.

Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage. A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 19881, p. 1. 26 from its publication in 1765 to 1830: This reveds the enormity of the poems' popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In understanding the impact of Ossian, one also must consider al1 the dissertations which preface the works of Ossian and which would have shaped the reader's response. The antiquarian nature of the dissertations, and the referencing of classical learning add validity and credibility to the poem's authenticity. These dissertations also "prep" the readers and provide a certain mind-set, informing the audience beforehand how these poems should be read and how they should be appreciated. The Latin quote from Lucan's Pharsalia on the title page of Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), Macpherson's notes which point out parallels with classical authors, and Blair's cornparison of

Ossian with Homer in bis Critical Dissertation (1765), show off Macpherson's classical scholarship, set the poems in the epic tradition, and provide vocabulary, rules, themes, and ideas, for learned discussion. The quote from

Lucan also ties into a nationalistic discourse. An eighteenth-century English translation reads as:

You, too, ye Bards, whom sacred raptures fie, To chaunt you Heroes to your Country's lyre; Who Consecrate in your immortal Strain, Brave Patriot Souls in righteous Battle slain, Securely now the tunefid Task renew And noblest Themes in Deathless Songs pursue."

Dunn, "The Role of Macpherson's Ossian", p. 107-108.

'O Stafford, The Sublime Savage, p. 100. 27 A nationalistic reading also explains the rationde behind the choice of the format for Fingal and Temora. The epic poem was considered the pre-eminent form of poetry and a source of national pride and proPaganda.'' The Greeks had their Homer and the Riad, and the Romans had their Aeneid. Where was the Scottish epic? As Macpherson was a classicaI scholar and well aware of this epic tradition and the desgoverning epic poetry, he "fouad", "translated and helped author a epic which rivalled and predated the Irish or British culture, Scotland would seem to have produced an epic while the other barbarian tribes were still unlettered.

Fundamentally, the works of Ossian are nationalistic texts. James

Macpherson as the translatodauthor, under the auspices of Ossian, re-wrote or re-interpreted history. He imaginatively reconstructed his Gaelic sources, locating in the ancient Caledonians and CeIts what he and the enlightened eighteenth-century society perceived as the vistues and values of the Scottish national character. Macpherson and Hugh Blair, the champion of

Macpherson's Ossian, reversed the traditionally accepted scholarship on the origins of the Scots, who were believed to be emigrants from Ireland. Using interna1 evidence based on the authenticiw of Ossian, which was self- validating and circulatory, they stated that Ireland, in fact, was colonized by

lL Simpson, The Protean Scot, p. 52-53. The Aeneid in particular had a certain nationalizing tendency which Macpherson would have been aware of, gloriwng the Roman Empire and the virtues of the Roman people, symbolically represented in the virtus of Rome's national hero, Aeneas. the Caledonians and that it was Mand which was culturally dependent on

Scotland, not the other way amund. Macpherson believed that the vicinity and correspondence of manne= and laquage between the two countries were

"sufncient proofs" of this clah of origind2 Macpherson called the Irish historians Keating and O'Flaherty, who promoted the Irish origin of the Scots,

"ide fab~lists"'~;and the Ossianic tales of the Irish bards he labels

"erroneous orthography"l4 and "spurious pieces1'.15 He believed that it was the Irish who appropriated Ossian from the Scots. He magnanimously stated with national pride: "Had the Senachies of lreland been as well acquainted with the antiquities of their nation as they pretended, they might derive as much honour fkom Fingal's being a Caledonian, as if he had been an Irishman; for both nations were almost the same people [the Celtae] in the days of that herott. l6

Macpherson not only "founded"a Scottish epic tradition fkom the Late

l2 James Macpherson, "A Dissertation", in The Poerns of Ossian, p. 208- 209.

l3 Ibid, p. 211.

l4 Macpherson, Temora (T.Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 17631, p. 226, note in Appendix.

l5 "Preface"to Fingal, The Poems of Ossian, p. 37. Macpherson writes of the Iiish annalists: "They are entirely writ in that romantic taste, which prevailed two ages aga-Giants, enchanted castles, dwarfs, palfi.eys, witches and magicians fkom the whole circle of the poet's invention", "A Dissertation1', p. 217-218.

l6 "Prefacet' to Fingal, The Poems of Ossian, p. 37. Classical period, he also constructed and documented a whole history and mythology based on his neo-historical 1 neo-imaginary ~orld.'~Macpherson in his two dissertations, "A Dissertation Concerning the Antiquity, &c. of the

Poems of Ossian" which prefaced Fingal (1761), and then more Myin his "A

Dissertation" in the 1765 edition of Temora, placed his poems in what he believed to be the historical context. What his "pseudo-history" does is validate the antiquity of the Caledonians over the Irish and over all of Europe'', validate the antiquity of the Highlanders, and explain the cultural divisions between Highland and Lowland which resulted f?om the Lowland intermixture with the Britons and Saxons. He believed that the ancient Celts originated from Gad, settled in Britain, and migrated first from South Britain to

Scotland, and then proceeded to Ireland. lg Macpherson contended that the natives of Britain, both north and south, were originally the same race, disputing the belief that the Picts (the native Caledonians) and the Scots were two distinct racial groups. However, he did beiieve that the Caledonians were

l7 This imaginative reconstruction is something which Scott would later use in his Waverley Novels. However, Scott acknowledged that his works were his own fictions, and based on history, not history itself. l8 Macpherson wrote in his "A Dissertation" that "No kingdom now established in Europe can pretend to equal antiquity with that of the Scots", p. 215.

l9 Macpherson "A Dissertation Concerning the Antiquity of the Poems of Ossian", The Poems of Ossian, p. 44; These Celts of Gaul were the same Caledonians, located in the western coast of Scotland, who resisted the Romans. He traces the etymological derivation of the Latin name for Scotland, Caledonia, from the Gaelic Caël (CeltsIGauls) and dun (Don or hill) referring to the "Celts of the hi11 country", "A Dissertation", p. 207. 30 divided into two nations, the Picts in the fertile agrarian plains of the

Lowlands, and the Scots in the Highland~.~*The contrast of the two regions, one fertile plains, and the other barren mountains, formed two different national characters. Because society, government, and laws were fïrst established among the Picts, this "produced so great a difference in the manners of the two nations, that they began to forget their common origin, and alrnost continual quarrels and animosities subsisted between them".21 The

Picts were eventually incorporated back into the Scots. After the Romans abandoned their British outpost, the Scots and the Picts invaded the Britons who were "enervated by the slavery of sever al centuries, and those vices wbich are inseparable fkom an advanced state of ~ivility".~~The Britons, thus weakened, called upon the aid of the Saxons. Intermingling of Britons, Saxons and the Caledonians of the Lowlands occurred. The seat of government of the

Caledonians was moved to the southern plains and gradually the southern

Lowland Caledonians lost their ancient customs and language in favor of those of the Saxons. Only in the Highlands did the manners and language survive with its "original pu rit^"^^ since their country was "so fkee of intermixture with foreigners, and among a people so strongly attached to the memory of

20 "A Dissertation", p. 207-208.

21 Ibid, p. 208.

22 Ibid, p. 212.

23 mid, p. 213. 31 their ance~tors".~~

Ossian was not completely fictitious, but was iargely and loosely based on a compilation of fkagmentary Gaelic sources (as in his Fragments), and on the Gaelic oral bardic tradition. In Fingal and Temora, which Macpherson asserted were each based on an original epic, he imposed a uni@ which did not exist. The 1805 Highland Society's Report on the authenticity of Ossian laid to rest the accusations of forgery which had plagued the poems since their first publication. It conclusively stated that Macpherson added "what he conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the original composition, by striking out passages, by softening incidents, by re&g the language, in short by changing what he considered as too simple or too rude for a modern ear, and elevating what in his opinion was below the standard of good poetry".25 The report stated that there was an Ossianic tradition in Scotland, but not a single original epic.

Macpherson had taken liberties in translating / editing the poems, which changed the tone of his sources. Macpherson internalized much of his Gaelic material, and keeping his intended audience very much in mind, he irnaginatively reconstructed a history and mythic people and culture fkom an era for which we have few historical records.

24 ItPrefacet1to Fragments, Poems of Ossian, p. 5.

25 Henry MacKenzie, ed., Report of the Cornmittee of the Highland Society of Scotland appointed to inquire into the nature and authenticity of the poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Archibald Constable and Co., 18051, p. 152. 32 AU the writers discussed in this thesis (Smollett, Johnson and Boswell, and, of course, Scott) were touched by the Ossianic debate and had something to Say about it." Almost no one among people of taste could escape the

Ossianic debate, and were unaffected by Macpherson's image of the Gaels.

Certainly not everyone was convinced of Ossian's authenticity. Johnson was probably one of the most outspoken of critics. He remained convinced that the ancient Highlanders were illiterate and incapable of writing epic poetry.27

David Hume also remained unconvinced of the authenticity of Ossian's poems, although he did not publicly condemn them until much later.*' Wdter Scott defused much of the Ossianic controversy in a review article on the Report of the Highland Society and Laing's edition of The Poems of Ossian in the

Edinburgh Reuiew. He recognized that the romantic primitivism in The Poems of Ossian was a construction of Macpherson and represented the values of the late eighteenth century. Macpherson "added to the tales a system of mythology and a train of picturesque description and sentimental efission, of which there is not the least trace in their Gaelic originals"." Scott

26 Smollett's journal the Critical Review supported Ossian; Johnson condernned Macpherson as a fiaud; Boswell and Scott were more conciliatory, although both accepted that they were more than just translated.

27 See Chapter three, p. 85-89, on Johnson's opinions on Ossian.

28 Stafford, The Sublime Savage, p. 156.

29 Scott, "Report of the Highland Society upon Ossian, &c . . . The Poems of Ossian" Edinburgh Review vol. 6: No. XII (1805), p. 446; Scott does add that "We would not wish the Gael to misunderstand. We do not afErm that their ancestors were incapable of generous or kindly feelings; nor do we insist 33 commented that the original ballads had "no splendid scenery, no sentimental exclamations, no romantic effusions of tenderness or ~ensibility".~~He stated

"Why should the whole fame of Highland poetry be made to depend upon

Ossian alone, whom, after d,the Highlanders claim as a countryman on very obscure and dubious grounds? . . . Let us therefore hem no more of

~ac~herson".~'It is revealing that Johnson and many of the critics of Ossian could not get past the authenticity issue (especiaIly aRer 1805), and appreciate the poems on th& own merit, as poetry: "Had it [Fingal] been really an ancient work, a true specimen how men thought at that tirne, it would have been a curiosity of the first rate. As a modern production, it is n~th.in~".~*

The poems could only be appreciated as history. Ossian became a very politicized and charged issue of nationalism, and Scotland's literary and cultural i~~de~endence.~~

James Smart noted that Macpherson "enlisted upon his omside the patriotism and partiality of his countrymen, and made his defence seem a that their poetry, to be authentic should be devoid of occasional sublimity, or even elegance", p. 447.

30 %id, p. 441. English translations of Gaelic Ossianic poetry were included in the Highland Society's Report.

32 James BosweU, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL-D.,ed. R. W. Chapman (London: University Press, 1957),p. 320-321. 33 And also a personal one between Johnson and Macpherson, aRer Macpherson threatened Johnson with force unless he retracted certain damning statemeats in the Journey. 34 national Many Scots defended Macpherson's Ossian simply out of response to English accusations of forgery and patronage by such critics as

Johnson and Horace Walpole, who wrote in 1782 of "those Scotch impostures and their Some of these attacks on Ossian were motivated by

English politics and anger against the Bute ministry, Fingal having been dedicated to the Earl of Bute, in appreciation of his patronage. Although

Walpole's comment exhibits definite signs of anti-Scots prejudice, there is an element of tnith. Macpherson's Ossian would not have been published without the enthusiastic support (both financially and literary) of the Scottish literati-

Hugh Blair, Alexander Carlyle, Adam Ferguson, John Home, William

Robertson, Lord Elibank, Sir Adam Fergusson, and Robert ch al mer^.^^

However, not every Scot embraced Ossian, nor was every Englishman's response as Scotophobic or vitriolic as Johnson's or Walpole's. Some Gaelic scholars objected to Macpherson's anglicization of names, Oisin to Ossian,

Cuchullain to Cuth~llin.~~James Macdonald in a letter to Bottiger in 1797 wrote that he was disappointed in the epic form of Ossian for it was "not the

34 James Smart, James Macpherson: An Episode in Literature (1905) cited in Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scot. The Crisis of Identity irz Eighteenth Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen:Aberdeen University Press, 19881, p. 59. 35 Horace Walpole, Letter to George Mason cited in Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenrnent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 254

37 Simpson, The Protean Scott, p. 169. 35 national dress of Ossian".38 However, to many readers, the question of

authenticity was irrelevant. Charles Cordenir wrote in 1780: "Whether the

memory of lapsed ages was preserved by the bards, or if only, like a morning-

dream, yet . . . Zovely are tales of other ti~nes"'.~~

The extent to which the poems of Ossian were a response to the Forty-

five has been questioned by some critics. Womack believes that Ossian fails

to display and "is in fact prohibited f?om displaying by terms of its production",

"a historical and national consciousness".40 Ossian had to be rooted in the far

distant, shrouded, remote past, with no references to the present eighteenth-

century society in order to maintain its authenticity. Therefore, Womack

believes that Ossian offers "no definite parallels with eighteenth century hi~tor~".~'1 would argue with Fiona Stafford that Macpherson was certainly shaped by his experiences in post-Culloden Baden~ch.~'As a native Gaelic speaker, he certainly had an insider's perspective on Gaelic cdture and

popular ballads and oral tradition. As a response to the miIitary and cultural disintegration of Highland society, Macpherson's poems of Ossian could be seen

38 James Macdonald cited in Ibid, p. 179.

39 Charles Cordiner, Antiquities &c. Scenery of the North of Scotland in a series of Letters to Thomas Pennant, (London, 1780), p. 77. " Peter Womack, lmprouement and Romance. Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 19891, p. 104.

42 Stafford, "Introduction", The Poems of Ossian, p. viii-x. as his attempts at preseming Gaelic language and customs. In his

"Dissertation" prefacing Fingal, Macpherson comments on the present and recent history of the Highlands:

The genius of the highlanders has suffered a great change within these few years. The communication with the rest of the island is open, and the introduction of trade and manufactures has destroyed that leisure which was formerly dedicated to hearhg and repeating the poems of ancient times. Many have now learned to leave the mountaùis, and seek their fortunes in a milder climate; and though a certain arnorpatriae may sometimes bring them back, they have, during their absence imbibed enough of foreign manners to despise the customs of their ancestors. Bards have been long disused and the spirit of genealogy has greatly subsided. Men begin to be less devoted to their chiefs, and consanguinity is not so much reg~~rded."~

Macpherson is describing the problems of cultural and economic assimilation and the disintegration of Highland society. On one level, then, "Ossian was a reply to political repre~sion",~~and the pressures of social transformation.

Ossian's sense of loss and the overall melancholic spirit are somewhat reflective of the mood after the Forty-five and Ossian, the last of a heroic race, codd be symboiic for the Highland clans, a culture which was being assaulted by economic and social change. However, Macpherson more than tried to

43 His statement on the demise of genealogy, though, is somewhat exaggerated. "A Dissertation", p. 52-53. 44 Murray Pittock, The Invention of Scotland. The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London: Routledge, 19911, p. 75. However, Ossianic society is so removed and elegiac it would hardy have been a rallying cry for the clans to rise up against British oppression: "Such were the words of the bards in the days of Song; when the king heard the music of harps, and the tales of other times", "The Songs of Selma", The Poems of Ossian, p. 170. This has a certain "Once upon a time . . . " effect. preserve Gaelic culture; he helped to invent or re-create it, reshaping the past to reflect and serve the needs of the present.

The Poems of Ossian was both a product of the Enlightenment as well as the beginnings of Romanti~ism.~~Ossian is reaUy the fist "romantic" text which stimulated both German and English Romanticism. Despite accusations of forgery, Ossian "was the very voice of authenticity for the developing sentiments of Romanticism in E~ope"?~Hook writes, "The Ossianic vogue is at the heart of the emergence of the new romantic sensibiliw; Macpherson's work both helps to create, and is sustained by, the new romanti~ism".~~

Walter Scott recognized the impact of Ossian on Romanticism:

But, while we are compelled to renounce the pleasing idea "that Fingal lived, and that Ossian sung", our national vanity may be equally flattered by the fact, that a remote, and almost barbarous corner of Scotland, produced, in the eighteenth century, a bard, capable not only of making an enthusiastic impression on every mind susceptible of poetic beauty, but of giving a new tone to poetry throughout al1 Eur0pe.4~

The Poems of Ossian reflect and respond to the eighteenth-century ideology or code of Improvement which sought the assimilation and incorporation of the Highlands into the rest of Scotland. On one level Ossian is an opposing response to this "civilizing", "improving" creed of the Scottish

" Hook, "Scotland and Romanticism", p. 309. " Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 19781, p. 42.

47 Hook, "Scotland and Romanticism", p. 314.

" Scott, "Review of Report of Highland Society", p. 462. Enlightenment, with its emphasis on primitivism, emotion, and the barren land~cape.4~On another level, Macpherson internalizes this ideology of improvement in his poetry. The fact that Ossian is written in English is significant. Macpherson sidesteps the language barrier and foreignness of

Gaelic and the eighteenth century's aversion to Scotticisms, by "translating" the poems into English. He improved, civilized, and rehed the language of the Gael, and not only made it comprehensible to his English-speaking readers, but he also appealed to the Neo-Classical and the new sentimental tastes of the educated elite of England and Lowland Scotland. His prose is melodic, rhythmic, and stately. Characters speak in an exalted language of a state of high emotion. The poems are as much fdled with action and battles, as scenes of death, woe, and countless examples of pathos axid heightened emotion:

Darthula stood in siIent grief, and beheld their fall: ber lover Nathos and his two brothers] no tear is in her eye: but her look is wildly sad. Pale was her cheek; her trembling lips broke short an half-formed word. Her dark hair flew on the wind. . . . Her shield fell from Dar-thula's arm, her breast of snow appeared. It appeared, but it was stained with blood for an arrow was fmed in her side. She fell on the fallen Nathos, like a wreath of snow. Her dark hair spreads on his face, and their blood is mixing round.50

At the core of the issue is eighteenth and nineteenth century society's preoccupation with the state of primitivism and the process of civilization.

" Dwyer believes that the language of sensibility in the poems "provided the essential counterpoint to the movement for economic and social improvement during the eighteenth century", "Melancholy Savage", p. 171.

'O "Dar-thula", Poerns of Ossian, p. 146-147. Macpherson divided human society into three stages, that of consanguinity (the

family) which was the most natural and noble, that of property (community

and mutual defence), which was a state of barbarism and ignorance, and that

of laws and government, where it was possible to "have leisure to cultivate the

mind, and to restore, with reflection, to a primaeval dignity of ~entiment".~'

AIthough he "civilized" the language and image of the Gael, he also stressed

the virtues of nâtmral man and natural poetry. Macpherson writes "The

Nobler passions of the mind never shoot forth more fiee and unrestrained than

in those times we cal1 bar bar ou^".^^ These noble passions gave primitive man

a "strength of mind unknown in polished times" and "an exalted chara~ter".~~

The Critical Dissertation of Hugh Blair (1765) was very much concemed with

the cult of primitivism":

Among the monuments remaining of the ancient state of the nations, few are more valuable than their poems or songs. . . . the most natural pictures of ancient manners are exhibited in the ancient poems of nations. They present to us, what is more valuable than the history of such transactions as a rude age can afford, the history of human imagination and passion. They make us acquainted with the notions and feelings of our fellow- creatures in the most artless ages . . . before those refinements of society had taken place, which enlarge indeed and divers* the transactions but disguise, the manners of rnankind.%

51 Macpherson, "A Dissertation", p. 211.

52 Ibid, p. 205.

53 -Ibid.

54 Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, Poems of Ossian, p. 345. 40 Although these poems were unpolished they were "abounding at the same time, with that enthusiasm, that vehemence and fie which are the sou1 of p~etry".~~Ossianic poetry, however, described a civilized primitivism, a fierce primitive warrior society whose thoughts and feelings were elevated "with the highest ideas of magnanimity, generosity, and true heroi~rn".~~The poems also expressed great tenderness, nobility, refinement of sentiment, purity of mords, and emotional integrity which was remarkably similar to the values and virtues admired and idealized by eighteenth-century socie~.~'Ossian was "The Poetry of the Heart . . . It is a heart penetrated with noble sentiments, and with sublime and tender passions; a heart that glows and lrindles the fancy: a heart that is fid, and pours itself f~rth".~'Blair believed that "philosophical observers of human nature" and "persons of taste" would be able to retrieve these civilized virtues of primitive society, and revitalize eighteenth century ~ociet~.'~Mrs. Anne Grant of Laggan also commented in

1810 on the civilizing effects of the primitivism of Highlanders on Lowland

Scotland:

The importance and necessity, in a country thus enervated by luxury, thus lost in frivolous pursuits and vain speculations to

55 Ibid.

bid, p. 349.

57 Simpson, The Protean Scot, p. 55.

58 Blair, A Critical Dissertation, p. 356.

59 Blair, A Critical Dissertation, p. 345. cherish in whatsoever remote obscurity they exist, a hardy manly Race, inured to suffering, fearless of danger, and careless of poverty, to invigorate society by their courage, and to adorn it with those virtues that bloum in the shade, but are ready to wither away in the sunshine of pro~~eriQ-~

Richard Sher points out that one aspect of the appeal of Ossianic poetry, with its emphasis on the ancient Scottish martial spirit, was the militia issue.

Some Scots were angry and felt "wounded pride" that Scotland was not included in the militia act of 1757." Job Gregory, a member of the Poker

Club, whose purpuse was to "poke" support for a Scottish militia, wrote that in the poems of Ossian "[tlhere we see displayed the highest martial spirit, exerted only in the defence of their riends and their

The naturd and moral virtues of the Ossianic heroes are not unlike the uirtus or pietas of Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid, the epic poem of Rome, which eulogized and glorified the moral values and traditions of the Roman pe~ple."~

" OeGrant of Laggan, Highlanders and Other Poems, cited in Leah Leneman, "The Effects of Ossian in Lowland Scotland", Aberdeen and the Enlightenment, eds. Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), p. 360.

61 Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, lg), p. 259.

63 hterestingly enough, though, Blair states that Virgil's "perfect hem, Aeneas, is an unanimated, insipid personage, whom we may pretend to admire, but whom no one can heartily love. But what Virgil has failed in, Ossian to our astonishment, has successfidly executed. His Fingal, though exhibited without any of the common human failings, is, nevertheless, a real man; a character which touches and interests every reader", Critical Dissertation, p. 364. 42 The Ossianic warrior culture was imbued with the military values of honor, loyalty, and bravery in battle, as well as the emobhg virhies of tnendship, compassion for others, and extreme sensitivity and sensibility, the prominent ideals of the eighteenth century. The heroes of Ossian were depicted as moral paragons of virtue, obeying the dictates of their conscience and acting in the interests of humanity and benevolent paternali~rn~~.Fingal instructs Oscur

bend the strong in arms: but spare the feeble hand. Be thou a stream of many tides against the foes of thy people, but Live like the gale that moves the grass to those who ask thine aid . . . My arm was the support of the injured; and the weak rested behind the lightning of my

Friendship was an important social virtue of the Ossianic culture. This included men's fi-iendship with women, as well as fkiendship with virtuous enemies, for instance Ossian's fi-iendship with Malvina, his daughter-in-law, and with Mal-orchol, a Scandinavian, the Celts' traditional enemy. .In the

"Battle of Lora", Fingal allows bis foe to withdraw after their leader, Aldo, is slain: "[Sltop the hand of death.--MighQ was he that is now so low! and much is he mourned in S~ra!"~~The enemies of Fingal and Temora, Swaran and

Starno, on the other hand, are depicted as deceitful, treacherous and bloodthirsty. Starno described his father, Annir, as "pour[ing] death Eom lis eyes dong the striving fields. His joy was in the fall of men. Blood to him was

Dwyer, "The Melancholy Savage", p. 195-198.

65 Fingal, Book III, Poems of Ossian, p. 77. "Battle of Lora", p. 122. 43 a summer stream, that brings joy to the withered vales, from its own mossy

rock".67

In contrast to Annir's "joy . . . in the faU of men" is the "joy of grief'

which affects the virtuous of heart. This "joy of grief' seems to have had a

therapeutic or cathartic effect on the early Celts, and by extension on

eighteenth century readers. Melancholy is given a certain noble and romantic

appeal in the person of Ossian, and romanticized as a virtue of noble suffering.

For Henry MacKenzie, author of Man of Feeling, the "joy of grief' illustrated

the functions, ethics, and the "morality of memory"." The poems are

presented as tales and songs of Fingal and the celtic warriors, when Ossian

was in his youth. Ossian as the narrator/'ard, the Iast of a heroihardic

culture, reflects on his memories of dead fnends and of a heroic ethos, a

"Golden Agen of battles and the "feast of shells". AU these memories and

ghosts only exist now in Ossian's memory. The world of Ossian was a cult or

religion of ghosts with the poetslbards as their priests69whose poems were

responsible for the civilizing effect on Celtic society. Blair believed that the bardic culture of the ancient Caledonians, which was preserved and sung in

the Highlands, had somewhat of a didactic influence on the people, inculcating

and "propagatingamong them real manners nearly approaching to the poetical;

67 "Cath-Loda", Poems of Ossian, p. 319. Henry MacKenzie cited in Dwyer, "The Melancholy Savage", p. 165.

69 Womack, Improvement and Romance, p. 100. 44 and in forming even such a hem as Fingal"?' For it is the remembrance of past glories that stirs the heart of the warrior and listener ofboth the Ossianic past and the eighteenth century present. Reciprocally, the early Celts wodd wage war and perfom acts of bravery, so that their name wodd be

Ossian distinguishes between virtuous melancholy and the destructive over-powering grief: "There is a joy in grief when peace dwells in the breast of the sad. But sorrow wastes the mournful, O daughter of Toscar, and their days are few"." This corresponds with Edmund Burke's ideas on "Joy and

Grief' in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ldeas of the Sublime and the Beautifil (1754). The sublime, for Burke, arose through pain and danger. He stated that grief results when pleasure is "so totally lost that there is no chance of enjoying it agaix~~~This grief is endured with stoic acceptance and is accompanied with the pleasure of reliving past mernories, which was the function of bards in Celtic sociew. However, distance was needed to obtain this joy which cornes fkom the tale of death, not directly from death itself:

"When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of givii~a an Y delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain

70 -%id.

71 Ibid.

72 "Croma", Poems of Ossian, p. 187. 73 Lamy L. Stewart, "Ossian, Burke, and the 'Joy of Grief" English Language Notes, W (1977-78),p. 30. 45 modScations, they may be, and are delightfid, as we every day e~perience"?~

The Ossianic poems are the embodiment of the sublime, which was

especially located in the Highlands of Scotland: %ut amidst the rude scenes

of nature, amidst rocks and torrents and whirlwinds and battles, dwells the

sublime. It is the thunder and lightning of genius. It is the o&pring of nature, not art".75 The sublimity of the poems was considered by Blair as one of its highest qualities, possessed of an "air of solernnity and seriousness" and in the "high region of the grand and the patheti~k".'~Ossianic landscape is composed of heaths, rnist-shrouded mountain, torrents, oaks, rnoss-covered tombs, which brought about "a solemn attention in the ~nind".'~The emotive and evocative Iandscape is described using metaphorical images. Fingal describes the "joy of grief' as "like the showers of spring, when it softens the branch of the oak, and the young leaf Lifts its green head." The Ossianic heroes are also described in terms of sublimity. Fingal is described as

"Terrible was the gleam of the steel: it was like the green meteor of death, setting in the heath of Malmor, when the traveller is alone, and the broad

74 Ibid, p. 31.

'5 Blair, A Critical Dissertation, p. 394-395.

ï6 Ibid, p. 356.

77 -Ibid.

78 "Carric-thurat', Poems of Ossian, p. 158. 46 moon is darkened in hea~en'"~.The image of Cuchullin is equdy sublime and fierce: "He rushed, in the sound of bis arms, like the temble spirit of

Loda, when he cornes in the roar of a thousand storms, and scatters battles from his eyes.-He sits on a cloud over Lochlin's seas: his mighty hand is on his sword, and the winds lift his flaming locks. So terrible was Cuchullin in the days of his fame".sO

Womack believes that Ossian represents the "definitive negative

The Ossianic landscape is described in terms of "blasted",

"withered", and "aged". Although there are countless references to naturd life, they only give an outline of the forms. They are deprived of their spatial relation~hip.~~The repetitive imagery and phrases produce a monotonous effect. The Ossianic world is fidl of barrermess, emptiness, and sterility. It is full of ghosts and taies of death, leaving a sense of the inhuman, and of isolation and alienation. Womack points out that there are no births, children, mothers, or sexud fulfïlment, only virgins, longing, and death.83 Ossian is often considered a poet of defeatism, a syrnbol of despair, decay, and old age,

- -

79 Fingal, Book II, The Poems of Ossian, p. 76.

"Death of Cuchullin", p. 138. The 1773 edition reinforced the sublimity of Cuchullin, adding "The waning moon half lights his dreadful face. His features blended in darkness arise to view", p. 450, note 30. Womack, Improvement and Romance, p. 78.

52 Womack, Improvement and Romance, p. 78. 47 offering no hope for the future,a backward looking vision lookuig forward only to deathea

The Poems of Ossian had a tremendous infiuence on the way future travellers and tourists would view Scotland and the Highlands. Leneman has remarked that in post-Ossianic society, everyone knew how to respond to

Scottish scenery.8' The Highlands oEered to Lowland and English urban intellectuals a primitive and exotic cuIture to mythologize, yet one which was accessible. The Highland clans became the symbolic inheritors of the heroic culture of Ossian when the threat of was no longer a political reality; then began the "highlandization" of Scottish culture. Ossian spawned a whole series of scenic landmarks and Ossianic tourism: Glen Coe, the land of Morven, Ossian's birthplace; Ossian's grave; Fingal's Cave at Staffa;

Ossian's Cave, and the Hermitage at Dunkeld, which was renamed in 1783 as

Ossian's Ha1La6 As As. Barre1 has stated "contemplating the landscape was not . . . a passive activity: it involved reconstructing the landscape in the

g4 Stafford, "'Dangerous Success': Ossian, Wordsworth, and English Romantic Literature" in Ossian Revisited, p. 66-67.

85 Leneman "The Effects of Ossian in Lowland Scotland",Aberdeen and the Enlightenrnent, ed. JederJ. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Universi@ Press, 1989), p. 359. Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, p. 214-217; John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold, Imagining Scotland. Tradition, Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism Since 1750 (Scolar Press, 19951, p. 55-56. 48 imaginati~n".~~Anne Grant of Laggan described the Highlands in Letters fiom the Mountains (1807) using Ossianic images: "[Elvery blast seemed to touch a viewless harp; and every passing cloud, brightened with the beams of the moon, appeared to my mind's eye a vehicle for the shades of the lovely and the brave, that live in the songs of other time~".~~Charles Cordiner described in 1780 a crag in Sutherland, named after Carril, the bard of Cuchullin, in

Ossianic language: "But the light and joy of the song are fled; the halls of the renowned are left desolate and solitary, amidst rocks that no longer echo to the sound of the He was a connaisseur of ruins, and his comments refiect this reconstructive imagination.

Matthew P. MacDiarmid remarks that "Ossian exploits rather than illustrates traditionary Celtic poetry, fkom which it Mers strikingly in content, spirit and for~n".~~Certainly one aspect of the influence of Ossian was to divert attention away fkom contemporary Gaelic poetry. Conversely the debate on authenticity also prompted scholars to search for Gaelic manuscripts and the "real"Ossian, as well as renewing interest in Gaelic culture at the

87 J. Barre1 cited in Stana Nenadic, "Land, the landed and relationships with England: Literature and perception 1760-1830" in Conflict, Identity and Econornic Development. Ireland and Scotland 1600-1939, eds. S. J. Connolly, R. A. Houston and R. J. Morrish (Carnegie Pub., 1995), p. 153.

88 Andrews, Search for the Picturesque, p. 202.

89 Cordiner, Antiquities, p. 77

M. P. MacDiarmid "Ossian as Scottish Epic" Scottish Literary News (vol. 3, no. 4, 1973), p. 4. 49 popular level. Ossian did encourage efforts to preserve Highland culture; however the real Highlands were displaced by his imaginative reconstruction of Ancient Caledonia, which had no relevance on the lives of modern

Highlanders. Macpherson's mythopoeic images obscured the real issues of the

Highlands, the economic~socialupheaval, the beginnings of industrialization, the clearances, and emigration. After Ossian, there was a growing discrepancy between the "real" Highlands and the mythical Highlands. It was the mythical

Highlands that tourists sought fier and were conditioned to see. As well, it was the mythical Highlands which became symbolic for Scotland and was often invoked by later writers when representing Scottishness. CHAPTER II: THE EXPEDZTION OF HUMPHRY CL-R: SCOTOPHILIA AND SCOTOPHOBIA 50 CHAPTER II

Tobias Smollett's last novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, published a few months before his death in 1771, was a passionate response to EngIish anti-Scottish bigotry and prejudice and an expression of Anglo-

ScottisM3ritish nationalism. In this fictional journey of a group of Welsh travellers corn Bath to Scotland, Smollett, a Scot living and writing in London, defends his native country and depicts it in a more positive and sympathetic light. Although not moralizing, there is a slight didactic tone, which Smollett mockingly alludes to in his prefacing frame-letter. Revd. Jonathan Dustwich, the fictional editor of the letters, justines his underhanded publishing of these travel letters, as they are for the "information and edification of mankind"'.

Smollett, through the letters of his travellers, comments on the shamefd

English prejudice against Scots and the potentially restorative powers of

Scotland (simplicity and rural industriousness) to cure the social and moral ills of England. Humphry Clinker, although it raises many issues of Scottish nationalism, is resolved in British nationalism. This chapter will explore aspects of this ScottishlBritish nationalism, as weU as perceptions of Scotland, the contrast between the romanticizing of the Highlands and the realities of

Highland Me, the anglicization of the Scots laquage, and the negative and

- I Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 27. Subsequent references to Humphry Clinker, will be fkom this edition and will give the name of the Ietter-writer, the letter's date, and page number. 51 Highland image of Scots in the perïodical press.

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker counteracts and combats the virulent, abusive, and racist Scotophobia of the 1760s to which Smollett was exposed as editor of the Briton. The Bnton, published between May 1762 and

February 1763, was a pro-British magazine which supported George III, his new first minister, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, and theïr policy to quickly bring an end to the Seven Years War. The propaganda war that ensued between the Bnton and the North Briton, an anti-Bute, anti-Scots, anti-British, pro-Engiish paper, edited by a former fnend of Smollett's, John Wilkes, was fierce and highly p~liticized.~The bitter unpopularity of the Bute ministry dong with the accusations of Scottish patronage and favoritism fed the flames of faction and prejudice.

However, Smollett was not just a proponent of Scotophilia, and the exaltation of all things Scottish, he advocated a British nationalism which included a Scottish identity within and subordinate to a British identity.

Robert Crawford stated of three prominent eighteenth-century Scottish authors, Smollett, Boswell, and Burns, that "[ilt is the nature of their

Britishness which marks out these writers as peculiarly Scotti~h".~Humphry

Clinker is quintessentially a British novei. Earlier British eighteenth-century

Robert Crawford, Deuoluing English Literature, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 63.

Ibid, p. 55. 52 novels were essentidy English and offered "no interrogation of the nature of

Britishness" or "profound codrontation with the issue of being British as

opposed to English? For many English writers Britain was synonymous with

Engl~ind.~For post-Union Scottish writers who were experiencing a cultural

identity crisis6 after the dissolution of their national independence with the

1707 Union of Parliaments, the term British allowed them to retain their sense

of Scottishness within a British context without becoming English. Rather,

they could become part of a larger whole, a part of the cultural mosaic of the

British Empire.

Humphry Clinker, written between 1765 and 1770, was based on a

compilation of sources, both written material and personal experience.

Certainly Smollett's last Scottish tour of 1766 which covered the same route

as his fictitious travellers, provided much creative materialm7He also drew

upon his own experiences in Bath's healing waters, and in London, as a Scot

abroad with poor health, residing and writing in England. Many of his factual

descriptions are based on his Present State of Al1 Nations (1768-17691 and

travel literature and other accounts he had read. From these he created an

p. 46 and p. 45.

Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scott. The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 19881, p. 3; 15-16. George M. Kahrl, Tobias Smollett Traveller-Novelist (New York: Octagon Books, 19681, p. 120. 53 imaginative but realistic synthesis of recent history.8

The structure of the novel follows the epistolary format of travel literature, and the vogue and popularity of tours, including his own A

Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages (1756) and Travels through France and Italy (1766). Smollett mockingly alludes to this in his opening fiame-letter between Jonathan Dustwich and the bookseller, Henry

Davis: "there have been so many letters upon travels lately published, what between Smollett's, Sharp's, Derrick's, Thicknesse's, Baltimore7s, and

Barretti's, together with Shandy's Sentimental Travels, the public seems to be cloyed with that kind of entertainment" (p. 29). This fictional journey is told through the voices of five letter-writers, which allows for five distinctive perceptions and perspectives of their journey, with fkequently contradictory juxtapositions, and comic results. However fkom this multiplicity of voice, we form an overall composite impression of Scotland, as his characters embark on a comic "voyage of discovery" and expedition of self-revelation which humorously explores and exposes cultural prejudice. In between the humourous and satirical anecdotes, Smollett provides quite detailed descriptions of Scotland and the rapidly fading cultural divisions between the more urbanized Lowlands and the wild rural Highlands.

Horace Waipole attacked Humphry Clinker as "aparty novel written by

Louis L. Martz, The Later Career of Tobias Smollett (Hamden: Archon Books, 1967), p. 125-135. 54 that profligate hireling Smollett to vindicate the Scotsvg, referring to his involvement in pro-Bute politics and patronage. Certainly in many respects

Humphry Clinker glowingly portrays Scotland as a refuge fi-om the corruption, folly, and contagion found in London and Bath, and condemns English churlishness, inhospitality, the levelling mobs, Iwrury and vice which assauit the senses. Smollett, through Matt Bramble, is at his most acidic and splenetic in London and Bath. In his Present State of Al1 Nations, Scotland is not portrayed to good advantage in comparison with England. Smollett corrects this in Humphry Clinker, which has been seen as more of a vehicle for the denunciation of England and the glorious praise of S~otland.'~However,

Smollett is not completely uncritical of Scotland, nor are al1 his comments on

England negative. Goldberg observes that Smollett is more of a cultural relativist, pointing out both the positive and negative aspects of both sides.

EngIand was more civilized, urbanized and refined, as well as far wealthier with better agriculture, commerce, and industry, yet it was also the victim of social and moral disorder. Smollett saw unqualified and unrestrained progress, leading to over-civilization and over-development. Scottish simplici@, integrity and hospitality-, the virtues of primitivism, are extolled, but the

Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George 111 (1845)cited in M. A. Goldberg. Smollett and the Scottish School: Studies in Eighteenth Century Thought (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1959), p. 144.

'O Martz, The Later Career of Tobias Smollett, p. 129. 55 problems of poverty and under-development are also pointed out.'' Jery notes the clifference between the peasants across the Tweed: "The boors of

Northumberland are lusty fellows, fkesh complexioned, clearly and well-clothed, but the labourers of Scotland are generay lank, lean, hard-featured, sallow, soiled, and shabby . . .The cattle are much in the same stile with their drivers, meagre, stunted, and ill-equipt" (Jery, July 18, p. 250). However, bis statement is followed by a comment fiom Matt that "[tlhough al1 the Scottish hinds would not bear to be compared with those of the rich counties of South

Britain, they would stand very well in cornpetition with the peasants in

France, Italy, and Savoy-not to mention the mountaineers of , and the red-shanks of Ireland (Jery, July 18, p. 250).

A textual analysis of the Scottish section of Humphry Clinker will reveal several perspectives on Scotland and the Scottish people.'2 Matt is the improving landlord and Jery the romantic Scottish enthusiast, both of them

Odord graduates and members of the educated elite. Win is the earthy, frank servant whose writing is full of malapropisms ('Wirnisms'), but clearly voicing the concerns of the lower working class. Tabitha is a rather ignorant, prejudiced, and parsimonious spinster, who is more concerned with the costly

l' Goldberg, Smollett and the Scottish School, p. 165.

l2 Of the eleven letters written in Scotland, five are written by Matthew Bramble, three by Jery Melford, two by Win Jenkins, one by Lydia Melford, and none by Tabitha Bramble, although we do hear about her Scottish impressions shortly after their re-entry into England. Lydia's letters are not al1 that informative, as she is more preoccupied with Wilson than Scotland. 56 consumption of the household staff and with nabbing a husband, than with

Scottish culture. However, it is the letters of Matt and Jery that are the most

numerous and the most full of information, dense with descriptions of the

Scottish landscape and Scottish traditions.

The htimpressions of the travellers upon entering Scotland are of the

fortifIed castles of the Border regions. This "shews what dangerous neighbours

the Scots must have formerly been to the northern counties of England (Matt,

July 15, p. 243), referring to the past history of hostility between England and

Scotland, when the Scots were "dangerous" enemies. The travellerslreaders

are crossing borders and boundaries into another country and culture (and

tirne). MerBerwick, they cross "a frightfid moor of sixteen miles" (Jery, July

18, p. 250), "a brown desert" of heath and fern which acts as a natural "barrier

between two hostile nations". (Matt,July 18, p. 252).

The first perception of Edinburgh, the urban metropolis, is described as

romantic by Jery despite the "nameless odors" of the city. But again we cross cultural barriers as Jery notes the foreignness of the Scottish people: "their looks, their language, and their customs, are so different fkom ours, that 1 can hardly believe myself in Great Britain" (Jery, July 18, p. 251). Matt points out the unsavoury, filthy, unsanitary aspects of the city, especially the practice of throwing "irnpurities" out the windows which "offend the eyes, as well as other organs of whom use has not hardened against al1 delicacy of sensation"

(Matt, July 18, p. 254). Win's impression of "Haddingborrough and of the 57 Scots dispels her prejudices towards Scotland, and her belief that their diet consisted only of oatmeal and "seeps-heads". Scots were "civil end for our money, thof 1 don't speak their lingo" (Win,July 18, p. 257). She observes that the "sarvants" are "poor drudges, many of them witbout shoes or stockings" (p.

257).

Jery and Matt act as cdtural interpreters to their correspondents. They are certainly more enthusiastic and more fùlI of praise in Edinburgh than in any other part of their journey. This Scottish section does much to dispel negative English stereotypes and myths. Jery even crosses the cultural boundary by ever so slightly "turning native", stating that "[ilf 1 stay much longer at Edinburgh, 1 shall be changed into a downright Caledonian--My uncle observes, that 1 have already acquired something of the country accent" (Aug.

8, p. 258). Both are strvck by Scottish hospitality and fkiendliness. Matt himself is won over and his comments lose their peevish edge. Of his stay in

Edinburgh, he states that "1shuuld be very ungratefui, dear Lewis, if 1did not find myself disposed to think and speak favourably of this people, arnong whom

1have met with more kindness, hospitaliw and rational entertainment, in a fe'yti weeks, than ever 1 received in any other country during the whole course of my life." (Matt, Aug. 8, p. 267-268). Although following this statement, he does note that his glowing praise was somewhat biased: "Perhaps, the gratitude excited by these benefits may interfere with the impartiality of my remarks; for a man is as apt to be prepossessed by particular favours as to be 58 prejudiced by private motives of disgust. If 1 am partial, there is, at least, some merit in my conversion from illiberal prejudices, which had grown up with my constitution" (Matt, Aug. 8, p. 268). However Scotland still cannot be compared with England:

The %rst impressions which an Englishman receives in this country, will not contribute to the removal of his prejudices; because he refers every thing he sees in comparison with the same articles in his own country; and this comparison is unfavourable to Scotland in al1 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. (Matt, Aug. 8, p. 268).

Edinburgh society cannot compete with London in the scope and breadth of cultural diversions and the hâute couture of civilized society. Culture is evident, therefore, on a more scaled down fashion, "in a small compass" (Jery,

Aug. 8, p. 260). In his letters Jery mentions theatre, concerts, balls, the gentlemanly sport of golf, the Leith races, and riotous social outings. Matt reports positively on Scots Law, the , the charitable organizations, and the Scottish Kirk. He further comments on Scotland's intellectual contribution to the Enlightenment: "Edinburgh is a hot-bed of genius", noting the great Scottish writers, philosophers and historians, David

Hume, John Home, William Robertson, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, Adam

Ferguson, William Wilkie, and William Wallace. (Matt, Aug. 8, p. 269-270).

Matt always mixes his praise with criticism: On the number of noble houses,

"monuments of grandeur", he writes "[ilf 1 may be allowed to mingIe censure with my remarks upon a people 1 revere, 1 must observe, that their weak side seems to be [email protected] am ahid that even their hospitality is not quite free of ostentation" (Matt, Aug. 8, p. 271).

Both Matt and Jery also cross the cultural border of the Highland divide, rambling through the mountains and glens of Argyllshire, and venturing forty miles into Islay, Jura, Md, and fcolmkill (Iona), which according to Matt before their departure, "appear Like a vast fantastic vision in the clouds inviting the approach of. . ." (Matt, Aug. 28, p. 287). The words romantic, picturesque and sublime appear fkequently. Jery describes Dr.

Smollett's seat in Cameron as "situated like a Druid's temple, in a grove of oak" on the shores of Loch Lomond. (Jery, Sept. 3, p. 275). He describes a highly romanticized and Ossianic landscape, the ideal of the sublime:

These are the lonely hills of Morven, where Fingal and his heroes enjoyed the same pastirne [hunting]; 1 feel an enthusiastic pleasure when 1 survey the brown heath that Ossian [sic] wont to tread; and hem the wind whistle through the bending gras+- When I enter our landlord's hall, 1look for the suspended harp of that divine bard, and listen in hopes of hearing the aerial sound of his respected spirit.--The poems of Ossian are in every mouth. (Jery, Sept, 3, p. 277).

This seems to be a drastic change from his earlier criticism of the brown heath he remarked on upon crossing over into Scotland. The landscape of the

Highlands appears to them as much more interesting and romantic than in the

Lowlands. Matt comments that the rnountains make a "stupendous appearance of savage nature, with hardly any signs of cultivation, or even of population. AU is sublimity, silence, and solitude" (Matt, Sept. 6, p. 290).

Although they describe the Highlands with romantic enthusiasm for the 60 sublimity of the Highland landscape, some of this romanticization is dispelled

by the description of Dougal Campbell, who feels an "invincible antipathy to

the sound of the Highland bag-pipe, which sings in the nose with a most

alarming twang", sdering the "diurnal annoyance" of his hereditary piper.

(Jery, Sept. 3, p. 278-279).

This mountainous sublimity is contrasted by their descriptions of

Highland abundance. Der, game, sheep, goats, and black cattle abound.

Highlanders "delight in hunting" (Jery, Sept 3, p. 276). The seas are teeming with fish. This vision of "Scotch Arcadia" (Matt, Sept. 6, p. 295) is fùrther advanced by the inclusion of Smollett's "Ode to Leven-Water" which paints a picturesque portrait of rural simplicity and fecundity (varieties of fish, herds, flocks, as well as lasses and shepherds):

And ancient faith that knows no guile, And industry imbrown'd with toil, And hearts resolv'd, and hands prepar'd, The blessings they enjoy to guard (Matt, Aug. 28, p. 287)

The travellers dso examine the internal divisions in Scotland itself. On the Lowland / Highiand divide, Jery writes that "the people are as different from the Low-land Scots, in their looks, garb, and language, as the mountaineers of Brecknock are from the inhabitants of Herefordshire". (Jery,

Sept. 3, p. 275). Matt is somewhat critical of the difference between the

Lowland spirit of industry and the virtues of manufacturing which he admired in (Matt, Aug. 8, p. 284), and Highland "idleness and want of industry". He also notes that the Highlanders "are undoubtedly a very distinct species from their fellow subjects of the Lowlands, against whom they indulge an ancient spirit of animosity . . . The Lowlanders are generally cool and circumspect, the Highlanders fiery and ferocious: but this violence of their passions serves only to infiame the zeal of their devotion to strangers, which is truly enthuslastic" (Matt, Sept. 6, p. 291).

Matt and Jery penetrate the wild mists of the Highlands and Islands, which "appears more and more wild and savage the further we advance" (Jery,

Sept. 3, p.2751, to educate their correspondents in the customs and traditions of the HighIands, and some of the changes after the Forty-five. Jery writes on the Disarming Act and its effects on Highlanders: "mhat is a greater hardship still, they are cornpelled to Wear breeches, a restra.int which they cannot bear with any degree of patience: indeed, the majority Wear them, not in the proper place, but on poles or long staves over their shoulders" (Jery,

Sept. 3, p. 276). This hardship resulted in "manifest marks of dejection". Matt felt that "the government could not have taken a more effectua1 method to break their national spirit" (Jery, Sept. 3, p. 277).

The Forty-five is still quite fresh in Matt's mind:

We have lived to see four thousand of them, without discipline, throw the whole into confusion. They attacked and defeated two armies of regular troops accustomed to service. They penetrated into the centre of England; and afterwards marched back with deliberation, in the face of two other armies . . -1know no other people in Europe who, without the use or knowledge of arms will attack regular forces sword in hand, if their chief will head them in battle. When disciplined, they cannot fail of being excellent soldiers. They do not walk like the generality of mankind, but trot and bounce Iike deer, as if they moved upon springs . . . they are incredibly abstemious, and patient of hunger and fatigue, so steeled against the weather, that in travelling, even when the ground is covered with snow, they never look for a house, or any other shelter but their plaid, in which they wrap themselves up, and go to sleep under the cope of heaven. (Matt, p. 291-292, Sept. 6).

This is stated with a certain kind of pride in the military spirit of the Highland warriors of the Forty-five, and of the Highland regïments which were formed to fight in Britain's wars. Smollett had earlier written a poem on the violent aftermath of the For@-five, "The Tears of Scotland, (1746) which expressed his sense of national pride, tragic loss, and anger at England's actions:

Mouni hapless Caledonia, mouni Thy banish'd peace, thy Iaurels tom! Thy sons, for valour renown'd, Lie slaughter'd on their native ground; Thy hospitable roofs no more Invite the stranger to the door. In smoky ruins sunk they lie, The monuments of cruelty. ..* Yet when the rage of battle ceas'd The victor's soul was not appeas'd: The naked and forlorn must feel Devouring flames, and murd'ring steel! ... While the warm blood bedews my veins And unimpair'd remembrance reigns, Resentment of my country's fate, Within my filial breast shall beat; And, spite of her insulting foe, My sympathising verse shall flow: "Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn 63 Thy vanish'd peace, thy laurels torn!"I3

Matt is not nearly as accusing of England's actions. Humphry Clinher, der all, was written to sel1 to an English audience.

Matt views the Highland clan system as "a very dangerous influence operating at the extremity of the island, where the eyes and hands of government cannot be supposed to see [and] act with precision and vigour".

(Matt, Sept. 6, p. 292) He also discusses the nature of clanship:

The comection between the clans and their chiefs is, without al1 doubt, patn'archal. It is founded on hereditary regard and affection, cherished through a long succession of ages. The clan consider the chief as their father; they bear his name, they believe themselves descended fiom his family, and they obey him as their Lord, with al1 the ardour of filial love and veneration; while he, on his part exerts a paternal authority, commanding, chastising, rewarding, protectbg, and maintainhg them as his own children" (Matt, p. 292-293).

Matt proposes two methods to break clan ties, which he irnplies are in the way of progress and preventing improvement: "The most effectua1 method 1 know to weaken, and at length destroy this influence, is to employ the commonality in such a manner as to give them a taste of property and independence--In vain the government grants them advantageous leases on the forfeited estates, if they have no property to prosecute the means of improvement". (Matt, p.

There is a duality in Smollett's attitude towards the Highlands in

l3 Tobias Smollett, The Works of Tobias Smollett, Volume 1, ed. John Moore, (London: B. Law, et al., 1797), p. 221-223. 64 Humphry Clinker. The Highlands are romanticized by both Matt and Jery, but are also viewed pragmatically by Matt as needing improvement. Idealism and realism exist side by side. However, the romanticization and mythologization of the Highlands is still predominant. Also, Matt/Smollett fails to mention (or realize what later historians have investigated) that the clans as a living cultural, socio-econornic system were pretty much a disintegrating culture and were not that dangerous.

Matt dehnitely supports irnprovement- His first observations of the fertile Lowlands, is economic and agricultural. He notes that the wheat is plentiful although raised in an open, unenclosed field. Scottish agriculture "is not yet brought to that perfection which it has attained in England" (July 18,

Matt, p. 252). Matt fiequently discusses the need for and modern agricultural methods: "Agriculture cannot be expected to flourish where the farms are small, the leases short, and the husbandman begins upon a rack rent, without a sdlicient stock to answer the purposes of improvement" (Matt,

Aug. 28, p. 282-283). He also suggests more usage of rye and potatoes, and the creation of a fishery, to improve the subsistence kevel of poor Highlanders,

"who have not meal enough to supply them with bread through the winter"

(Matt, Aug. 28, p. 285). Smollett's characterization is visual and müch indebted to caricature.14 His characters invoke, and are based on, national

- -

l4 Later illustrators/caricaturists Rowlandson (1791 edition) and Cruikshank (1831 edition), translated his verbal images into visual ones. 65 stereotypes- Micklewhimmen is the wily, devious Scottish lawyer. Lismahago is the dour, polemical, and argumentative Scottish soldier. Matthew Bramble is the irritable but End-hearted landlord. His characters both exhibit and counter prejudice. These caricatures invoke laughter, but also behind the laughter is a reality provoking his readers "to question such automatic prejudicesL1.l5 Smollett explores the nature of prejudice and misunderstandings which "develop as characters translate each other into their own perceptions and idiolect".'"e writes a self-mocking satire on the

Scottish national character as weIl as showing that English attitudes were so prevalently based on stereotyping. In Jery's second last letter, he writes:

1 am, however, mortined to reflect what flagrant injustice we every day commit and what absurd judgement we form, in viewing abjects through the falsifying medium of prejudice and passion. . . Without all doubt, the greatest advantage acquired in travelling and perusing mankind in the original, is that of dispelling those shamefid clouds that darken the faculties of the mind, preventing it fiom judging with candour and precision. (Jery, Oct. 14, p. 374).

Behind the humor is a message, a plea for cultural tolerance.

In the popular press and political prints, anti-Scottish stereotyping and

Scotophobia were particulary high during the early 1760's, the period of the

Bute ministry. M. Dorothy George estimates that four hundred extant auti-

Bute prints exist, one of which sold over sixteen thousand copies, with only

l5 Crawford, Deuolving English Literature, p. 69.

l6 n3id, p. 67. 66 four in support of him-l7 Smollett, hirnself, as a Scot and patronized by Bute, was a victirn of these prints, In The Montebank, Smollett is caricatured as

Bute's clown with the Briton under his arm, and the North Briton and the

Monitor tom by his feet.18 Bute's Scottish birth became the focus of anti-Bute propaganda, which allowed for the targeting and scapegoating of al1 Scots.

Bute was accused of patronage and handing all political and military posts to

Scots and, more viciously, as gaining his position by seducing the Dowager

P~cessof Wales, the King's mother. Scots were ridiculed as disloyal rebels, as unconstitutional monarchists for their support and influence on George III, as Jacobite conspirators intending to subvert the constitution, and for the speedy end of the Seven Years War and peace concessions to the French, which were again attributed to Jacobite infl~ence.'~Scots were equated with Tories and Jacobites: "Al1 Scots are Highlanders, all Highlanders are rebels, and all rebels are out for Z~ot".~~AU Scots in prints, therefore, were pictured as

Highland Scots in Highland dress, indicated by criss-cross lines of plaid.2'

WeaLthier Scots would be dressed in eighteenth-century fashions with only a

l7 M. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature to 1792: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19591, p. 121.

'' Byron W. Gassman, "Smollett's Briton and the Art of Political Cartooning" Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (vol. 141, p. 246. 19 Peter Womack,Improvement and Romance. Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 18.

20 Ibid, p. 19. *' Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth, p. 210. 67 piece of tartan, while poor Scots had wild, strïngy hair, tattered clothing, and thin, bony feat~res.'~ Scots were also associated with the "itch" and scratching posts (lice and scabies, as a result of their filthiness), beggarly immigrants, and bared buttock~.~~Bared buttocks were either a result of poverty, a reference to kilts, or to the Disarming Act which forbade kilts. This association of buttocks and Scots, Smollett dehsed through the character of

Humphry Clinker, who is described as a "beggerly rascal", whose breach of breeches was a result of poverty. Matt mockingly scorns the %einous offence" and crime of poverty: "Heark ye, Clinker, you are a most notorious offender-

You stand convicted of sickness, hunger, wretchedness, and want." (Matt, May,

24, p.113).

Another issue is that of language and the relationship between the

English language and the forces of anglicization, and Scots dialect and scotti~isms.~~Lismahago contends that the Scottish dialect is a puer fom of Old English than modern English, which had been refined, weakened, and corrupted "by throwing out the guttural sounds". Thus the works of Chaucer,

Spenser, and Shakespeare were more intelligible to the Scots who retained "the

23 Eric Rothstein, "Scotophilia and Humphry Clinker: The Politics of Beggary, Bugs, and Buttocks" University of Toronto Quarterly (vol. 52, 1982), p. 63.

24 Gaelic is not really mentioned and is only briefly alluded to by Matt, that the inhabitants of Iona, "speak the Erse or Gaelick in its greatest purity". (Matt,Sept. 6, p. 295). 68 antient Ianguage" and understood these authors "without the help of a glossary". (Jery, July 1, p. 235-236). Matt insists that contrary to Lismahago's arguments for the Scots' dialect, Scots should adopt English pronunciation and

idioms if they were to succeed in London: "1 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! . . . the

Scottish dialect . . . certainly gives a clownish air even to sentiments of the greatest dignity and decorum" (Matt, Aug. 8, p. 268). One of the guests of

Smollett's Sunday afternoon dinner parties in Humphry Clinker was a Scot who gave lectures on the pronunciation of the English language, showing the prejudice against the Scots accent. (Jery, June 10, p. 159).

Scots, Scotticisms, and Gaelic "irnpregnated English with signs of differen~e".~' Smollett, as well as David Hume, Lord Kames, William

Robertson, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and James Boswell were proponents of purimg and regulating the English language to eliminate al1 traces of their provincial, impure heritage. Many eighteenth-century writers felt self- conscious about their Scottish accent. Hume, in a letter to John Home of

Ninewells, wrote that the disadvantage of having a Scottish education for his son was the acquirement of a Scots accent "as he will never be able to cure

25 Crawford, Devolving English Literature, p. 43. of'.26 English, as the language of the dominant culture, is presumed to be superior and more correct. William Robertson in his , dated the decline of Scots to the Union:

If the two nations had continued distinct, each might have retained idioms and forms of speech peculiar to itself . . . and in many cases, might have been used promiscuously by the Authors of both nations. But by accession, the English naturally became the sole judges and Lawgivers in Language and mjected, as solicisms every form ot speech to which their ear was not ac~ustorned.~~

Smollett in his Critical Review, corrected authors' language and pointed out

Scotticisms, indicating his insecurities with his Scotti~hness.~'In a letter to his &end John Moore, Smollett apologized for the harsh treatment of two works by Home and Wilkie in the Critical Review:

Notwithstanding the Censures that have been so fkeely bestowed upon these and other Productions of our Country, the Authors of the C. Review have been insulted and abused as a Scotch Tribunal. The Truth [is] there is no Author so wretched but he will meet with Countenance in England if he attacks our Nation

26 Simpson, The Protean Scot, p. 6. Yet in another letter to John Wilkes, Hume romanticizes Highland primitivism: Tou would have seen human nature in the golden Age, or rather in the silver. For the Highlanders have degenerated somewhat fkom the primitive simpliciw of mankind. But perhaps you have so corrupted a Taste as to prefer your Iron Age, to be met with in London & the south of England; where Luxury & Vice of every kind so much abound.", Ibid, p. 100.

28 James G. Basker, "Scotticisms and the Problem of Cultural Identity in Eighteenth century Britain" in Sociability and Society in Eighteenth Century Scotland, ed. John Dwyer and Richard B. Sher (Edinburgh: The Mercat Press, 19931, p. 87. 70 in any shape."

The heated debates between Lismahago and Matt are most revealing in

contrasting the tensions still felt about the Union, and Scotland's dual

contrasting identities, Scottish and British. Lismahago voices the national

dissatisfaction with the Union, while Matt points out the benefits and

advantages of it. Lismahago cornplains that English soldiers are given

preference for entry into the army and navy over a Scot, and that the military

service and parliament are rife with corruption and patronage. One needed

connections, power, and money "to smooth the way to success". The British

parliament was the "rotten part of the British constitution", referring to the

practice of buying boroughs and canvassing for votes. (Matt, July 15, p. 239-

240). Lismahago argues that Scotland did not really benefit from the Union,

nor from the supposed benefits of increased prosperity, improvement in

agriculture and Iiving conditions, and a flourishing economy and commercial

trade. (Matt, Sept. 20, p. 314-319). He reminds Matt of the thriving trade

Scotland had with France which was lost to them after the Union (p. 3151.~'

She lost her independence, "the greatest prop of national spirit", with the loss

of her parliament. (p. 316). With a sardonic grin he mocks the power of the

" Jan. 2, 1758, Smollett, The Letters of Tobias Smollett, ed. Lewis M. Knapp (Oxford: Clarendon F'ress), p. 65.

30 Although Matt in an earlier letter dated Aug. 8, mentioned that the towns of Fife were "if the truth must be told . . . have been falling to decay ever since the union, by which the Scots were in a great measure deprived of their trade with France." (p. 270). 71 Scottish representation in the British parliament: "l'rue . . . in debates of national cornpetition, the sixteen peers and forty-five commoners of Scotland must make a formidable figure in the scale against the whole English legislature". (p. 316) The Union was pushed through to shut off the possibility of invasion from within Britain's borders, to supply a "nursery of seamen, soldiers, labourers, and mechanics; one million useful subjects", and to settle the protestant succession, "a point which the English ministry, drove with such eagerness, that no stone was leR unturned, to cram the union down the throats of the Scottish nation, who were surprisingly averse to the expedient". (p. 316-

317). To Matt's argument on the privileges and immunities Scots received as

British subjects (careers in the rnilitary and the colonies), Lismahago replied that these men "are in a great measure lost to their mother-country" (p. 316) and that "[nlot one in two hundred that leave Scotland ever return to settle in his own country" (p. 317)- Lismahago points out the evils of mercantilism, and the fact that England got the better end of the deal, receiving more revenues from Scotland than was put into the Scottish economy.

At the end of al1 this "dogrnata", Matt states that "[tlhough 1 did not receive all his assertions as gospel, 1 was not prepared to refute them" and conceded that "the contempt for Scotland, which prevails too much on this side of the Tweed, is founded on prejudice and error". (p. 318). Although it appears that Lismahago wins the argument, this is partly explained by his polemical argumentative nature, and by his training in law, which enables him to play 72 devil's advocate. 1 believe that Smollett does not advocate the repeal of the

Union. Rather, Lismahago's character allows him to point out many problems with the relationship between Scotland and England?'

Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker is a penetrating examination of English anti-Scots prejudice. Through the adventures and discussions of his fictional characters, he tries to imaginatively rect* the economic and cultural irnbalances that exist between the two countries. This reconciliation and lessening of prejudice occurs in the mythical, romantic

Highlands, the symbolic source of Scottishness. Humphry Clinker is a strong pro-Scottish statement. However, the novel concludes on a note of Britishness, with the symbolic marriages uniting Scotland, England and Wales.

31 It is telling that Lismahago leaves Scotland to live in England. CHAPTER IE BOSWELL AND JOHNSON'S HIGHLAND TOUR 73 CHAPTER III

Two years after the publication of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker,

two intrepid travellers, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, embarked on an

adventurous ramble, roving the Highlands and Islands of Scotland fkom

August to November 1773, travelling dong the coast fkom Edinburgh to

Inverness, and then among the Inner Hebrides. Johnson and Boswell's journey, published separately as Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

(1775) and Journal of A Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL-D.

(1785) was very infiuential in fonning Iate eighteenth-century travellers'

perceptions of the Highlands. These two travelogues, one by an Englishman

and the other by a Lowland Scot, were quite different, though complementary,

travel accounts providing late eighteenth-, as well as nineteenth- and

twentieth-century readers, with a dual perspective on the same tour.

Johnson's account is mainly interested in moralizing on the 'real' Highlands.

He displays some Scottish prejudice (mostly against James Macpherson and

Lowland Scots), which Boswell's account-attempts to mitigate by emphasizing

their enthusiasm for Highland traditions. However, 1 will be using Boswell's

account more as a supplement to Johnson's Journey. Most significantly, these

two accounts allow us to see the gradud construction of the tourist/outsider

image of Highland life and the romanticization of the Highlander.

Johnson's Journey , especially, was very controversial, and raised the ire

of many Scots, as well as a few of the English. In fact, several Highland tours 74 were publisbed in direct response to his Journey, with the explicit purpose of reiûting bis account. Johnson was seen as being blatantly prejudiced against the Scots. Donald iM'Nicol's Remarks on Dr. Samuel Johnson's Journey to the

Hebrides (1779) was quite scathing of Johnson's intentions. He writes "Mt is somewhat surprising, indeed, that a man who, as he terms himself, came purposely 'to speculate upon the country' should return so very ill informed in a matter of so much consequence".' He goes through the Journey page by page and points out all the mistaken judgements, inaccuracies and contradictions. Mary Anne Hanway's A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland, with Occasional Remarks on Dr. Johnson's Tour (1775) was undertaken only a few months after Johnson's publication in order to vindicate Scotland fiom

"those illiberal a~~ersions".~William Goodfd in 1775 commented on the

"objectionable passages" of Johnson's "dogrnatical account": "1 am one of those tidido~sEnglishmen who entertain an opinion of the country and its inhabitants, widely different fkom that of Dr. Johnson, and men who have

' Donald M'Nicol, Remarks on Dr. Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Hebrides, (London: T. Cadell, 17791, p. 189. Mary Anne Hanway cited in Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760- 1800 (Stanford: University of Stanford, 1989), p. 198. Other travel accounts such as those by John Knox, A Tour through the Highlands of Scotland and the Hebride Ides, in 1786 (1787), John Lettice, Letters on a Tour through various Parts of Scotland in the year 1792 (1794) and William Gilpin Observations, relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, made in the Year 1776, On several Parts of Great Britain; Particulary The High-Lands of Scotland (1789) censure Johnson's account. imbibed early and unjust prejudices against Scotland.3 Not every response to Johnson's Journey was negative. Some travellers carried a copy of his account on their tours, travelling in the footsteps of this famous English literary figure.'

The Highlands have been a popular destination for tourists since the late eighteenth century, and have generally been esteemed as highly romantic, sublime, and picturesque. The sheer number of travel accounts to the

Highlands published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attests to the popularity of the Highland tour. There are a number of reasons for the

Highlands becoming such a tourist attraction. By the time of Boswell and

Johnson's journey, almost thirty years had passed since the pacification of the

1745 Jacobite Rebellion. The clans were considered broken and no longer a real threat to unwary travellers. Wade's Roads, military roads surveyed by

General Wade after the 1715 Uprising, opened up the Highlands, and made them more accessible to the traveller. The three major forts, Fort Augustus,

Fort George, and Fort Wlliam often were used as staging posts for travellersS5

Tourists came to the Highlands for a variety of reasons. Early Highland

Letter to Caleb Whitefoord, cited in Pat Rogers, Johnson and Boswell: the Transit of Caledonia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 209. * Johnson and Boswell themselves carried a copy of Martin Martin's A Description of the Western Ides (1695) on their journey. John R-and Margaret M. Gold, Imagining Scotland, p. 44.

Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, p. 201. 76 travellers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, such as Martin

Martin and Thomas Pennant (1769 and 17721, a zoologist, were more interested than tourists in charting this virtudy unknown region and culture.

Boswell and Johnson were influenced by the scientifïc and geographical discoveries of the age, especially Captain Cook's expeditions, which reflected the expansion of the British Empire into the Pacific, Africa, and Lndia. Later in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Highlands attracted

"Picturesque" and Romantic tourists, like William Gilpin (1776) and Dorothy

Wordsworth (1803), who went looking for the sublime and picturesque experience, and the noble savage. Their focus was on nature and the emotive quality of the wild Highland landscape. Antiquarians, such as Charles

Cordiner, found in the Highlands a wealth of Scottish antiquities, cades, and r~ins.~HistoricaVliterary tourists followed in the footsteps of such figures as

Ossian, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Johnson, Burns, and Scott, pilgrimaging to the places with which these figures were associated. Later Highland tours became conventionalized into the Short Tour, with an itinerary of established sights in the central and south-west Highlands-the seats of Athol, Breadalbane at

Taymouth, and Argyll at Inveraray; F'yers (Foyers) Falls, the Hermitage at

Dunkeld, Loch Lomond, Loch Katrine and Loch Coruisk.'

-- - -- Charles Cordiner, Antiquities &c Scenery of the North of Scotland (1780) and Remarkable Ruins and Romantic Prospects of North Britain (1795). ' Charles Withers, "The Historical Creation of the Scottish Highlands" in The Manufacture of Scottish History, eds. Ian Donnachie and Christopher Boswell and Johnson's tour was quite dif5erent fiom these picturesque tours in both scope and vision. Their tour was more comprehensive, with its main focus on the remote islands of the berHebrides. It was also held in the

Fall, a very stormy season in the Islands, rather than in the Summer. The purpose of their tour is stated most explicitly in Boswell's Tour. M&

Martin's account had given them the impression that they

might there contemplate a system of We almost totally different fkom what we had been accustomed to see; and to fïnd simplicity and wildness, and dl the circumstances of remote the or place, so near to our native great island, was an object within reach of reasonable curiosity.'

They were interested in the people, not the landscape. They most wanted to see and record the feudal, primitive, and patriarchal traditions and customs of the Highland clans. Unfortunately they arrived at a time too late to achieve this goal.

Johnson's Journey is more of an introspective, generalized reflection on the Highlands than a detailed day-by-day account of their journey. Johnson used the Highlands as a springboard to investigate broader moral issues. In a letter to Mrs. Thrale, Johnson states his philosophic conception of the

Whatley (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), p. 147; Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance. Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 19891, p. 62-63.

Johnson, Samuel and James Boswell, Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswelh Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D, ed R, W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 167. Subsequent references to both of these works wiU be fiom this edition, and will be abbreviated to Journey and Tour. benefits of travel: "The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are".g

Johnson's purpose was to examine the realities of Me, not the romantic idealizations of the Highlands. He f!kequently points out the contrast between these two perceptions.1° Johnson's curiosity about the Highlands is rather that of a socid and cultural anthropologist. Christopher Smout notes that

Johnson had a genuine humanistic concern for the Highlanders." Some of his comments reflect a strong compassion for the lives of the Highlanders," and especially for the effects of poverty. This contrasts with later picturesque tourists. For Gilpin, Highlanders, the human element, are decorations,

"picturesque appendages", which add to the compositional beauty of the landscape, like flocks or herds.I3 Gilpin's Highlander is divorced from reality

Sept. 12, 1773, cited in Clark, Samuel Johnson, p. 220.

'O In the same letter he contrasts what he imagines she would imagine to be the Highland landscape, where he would be "surveying Nature's magnificence from a mountain", with the barren desolation he finds there. m. " Christopher Smout, "Tours in the Scottish Highlands fi-om the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries", Northern Scotland (Vol. 5,19831, p. 105.

l2 The term Highlander is used by Johnson and by many other eighteenth and nineteenth century travellers rather vaguely to refer to the Gaelic- speaking residents of the Highlands and Islands: "Under the denomination of Highlander are comprehended in Scotland all that now speak the Erse language, or retain the primitive manners, whether they live among the mountains or in the islands; and in that sense 1 use the name, when there is not some apparent reason for making a distinction" (Journey, p. 44)- l3 William Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1776, On Several Parts of Great Britain; Particularly the High-Lands of Scotland. Reprint of fist edition, 1789, Vol II. (The Richmond 79 and "imagined to be harmoniously in tune with the remainder of the scene, but not a real person one could talk too . . . indeed could apparently only moo ba~k''.~~

Boswell's Tour is largely based on the journal he kept while on the journey, most of which Johnson read when writing his travelogue. His travel account is much longer than Johnson's (almost double), and is much more detailed, "chatty", and humorous, quoting word for word, in most cases,

Johnson's conversations and witticisms with some of Scotland's finest men of letters. Boswell's focus is Johnson, whom he idolizes, "the great English

Moralist" (Tour p. 386). His final comment at the end of his travel account singles out its chief merit, as "preserving so much of the enlightened and instructive conversation" of Johnson. (Tour, p. 443). His account is more of a conversational tour, or a monument to Johnson, who had died the year before the publication of Boswell's account.

Boswell's Scottishness is quite ambivalent. He was another Scottish literary figure who went to London. His Scottish nationality was qualified by his Britishness, as well as by his cosmopolitanism: "1 am, 1 flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world" (Tour, p. 172). In London, he dissociated himself &om his Scottish background, avoiding associating with Scots whenever he could. He tried to remould himself to fit into English Society,

Publishing Co. Ltd, 1973), p. 135.

l4 Smout, "Tours in the Scottish Highlands", p. 105. 80 angliwg his accent and language. He, like many ambitious and genteel

Lowland Scots, found broad Scotch vulgar. In a letter to Rev. W. J, Temple, he wrote "it required some philosophy to bear the change from England to

Scotland. The unpleasing tone, the rude familiarity, the barren conversation of those whom 1 found here, really hurt my feeli~~gs".'~When asked to return home, he replied that he found "narrow provinciality" unbearable.I6 Boswell records in Life of Johnson, that Johnson called him "the most unscottified of his ~ountrymen".~~Bosweil footnotes several examples of Scotticisms in his

Tour. But Boswell seems to balk at losing al1 signs of Scottishness. On

Alexander Wedderburn, he writes that he "got rid of the coarse part of his

Scottish accent, retaining only as much of the "native woodnote wild" as to mark his country which, if any Scotchman should affect to forget, 1 should heartily despise him".18 Boswell believed it was "unnaturd to hear a

Scotsman speaking perfect English. He appeared a machine".lg Boswell admits to feeling some anxiety and uneasiness with his Scots background. In

l5 Letters of James Boswell addressed to the Reu. W. J. Temple (1857)cited in Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scott. The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 19881, p. 7.

l6 Ibid, p. 8-

" Rogers, Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia, p. 186. l8 Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19921, p. 82. l9 1775 conversation with Burke in Rogers, Johnson and Bosulell: The Transit of Caledonia, p. 182. Life of Johnson, he writes that he had told Johnson on their fist meeting "'I do indeed corne fiom Scotland, but 1 cannot help it.' 1 am dhgto flatter myself that 1meant this as light pleasantry to soothe and conciliate him, and not as humiliating abasement at the expense of my Boswell displays this ScottishBritish nationalism of many of the Scottish literati of this period. He writes in his travel account that he favored placing English public officials in Scotland, which would bring about "a beneficial mixture of manners, and render our union more complete" (Tour, p. 177). Some of his pro-British comments in his Tour are an example of his currying favor with the

English literary establishment and the Crown, to foster his advancement in

English society:

1found every where amongst them a high opinion of the virtues of the king now upon the thrones, and an honest disposition to be faithful subjects to his majesty, whose family has possessed the sovereignty of this country so long that a change, even for the abdicated family, would now hurt the best feelings of his subjects (Tour, p. 293).

It is unlikely this sentiment was expressed by any of the Jacobites he met on his tour. He, however, was on one occasion embarrassed by Johnson's

Scotophobic rantings on the Union:

Dr. Johnson expatiated rather too strongly upon the benefits derived from the union, and the bad state of our people before it. 1am entertained with his copious exaggeration upon that subject; but 1 am uneasy when people are by, who do not know him as well as 1 do, and may be apt to think him narrow-minded (Tour, p. 240).

Crawford, Deuoluing English Literature, p. 83. 82 Boswell also expresses "old Scottish sentiments" on the loss of in his Tour (which usually act as a foi1 to Johnson's John Bullish witticisms). Boswell was quite anxious that Johnson see Edinburgh in the best light, and that they converse with many of the major luminaries. He vacillates between being embarrassed about his heritage and being proud of his heritage.

In a footnote he mentions that he is descended fkom the blood of Bruce (Tour, p. 175) and his Account of Corsica (1768) has an epigraph on the title page from the Declaration of Arbroath.*' Boswell's nationalistic staternents, however, were a "warm regret, that by our union with England, we were no more; our independent kingdom was lost" (Tour, p. 184), an expression of nostalgia, and not meant seriously or politically.

Much emphasis is placed on Johnson's prejudice against S~otland.~

In the opening pages of Boswell's Tour, Boswell mentions this averred prejudice, which he says dates back to "alrnost as soon as he began to appear in the world of letters" (Tour, p. 172). Johnson's Scotophobia, as perceived by

Boswell, was the result of Scots' success in London which "exceeded their due proportion of their real merit" (Tour, p. 172). Boswell portrays Johnson as the

21 Ibid, p. 77.

22 He is reputed to have expounded on the difference between the Irish and the Scots: "The impudence of a Scotsman is the impudence of a leech, that fixes and sucks your blood". The impudence of the Irish was the impudence of a fly. Arthur Murphy, An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson (17931, cited in J.C.D.Clark, Samuel Johnson. Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics Rom the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 66. 83 definitive "John Bull", the "blunt true-boni Englishman" (Tour, p. 172), who views all other peoples as barbarians. Bosweil seemed to take great delight in letting Johnson loose in the proverbial china-shop, so to speak, among the

Scottish literati and EghIand Jacobites. Boswell records a number of

Johnson's anti-Scots barbed witticisms, and "fitsof railing at the Scots" (Tour, p. 326), most notably: "Sir, the noblest prospect that a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to London" (Tour, p. 422). The arrogant assumption of the superiority of England and the benefits Scotland received fkom the Union, are pretty much unquestioned. Some of his anti-Scots comments or slurs are quite c~ndescending.~~He believed that Scotland had had hardly any trade, money, or elegance before the Union and that they did not receive the conveniences oflife until after it: "We have taught you . . . and we'll do the same in time to all barbarous nations,--to the Cherokees,--and at last to the Ouran-Outangs" (Tour, p. 326).24 He patro,zingly puts the Scots in their place, in an inferior, provincial status:

Yet men thus ingenious and inquisitive were content to live in total ignorance of the trades by which human wants are suppiied and to supply them with the grossest means. Till the Union had acquainted them with Engiish manners, the culture of their lands was unskilful, and their domestick life unformed, their tables were coarse as the feasts of Eskirneaux, and their houses filthy, as the cottages of Hottentots. Since they have known that their

23 On observing barefooted Highlanders, Boswell notes that Johnson said "1 suppose you dl went so before the Union" (Tour, p. 194).

24 The barb on this comment, however, is lessened, with the last laugh on James Buniet, Lord Monboddo. condition was capable of improvement, their progress in usehl knowledge has been rapid and uniform. What remains to be done they will quickly do, and then wonder, like me, why that which was so necessary and so easy was so long delayed. But they must be for ever content to owe to the EngIish that elegance and culture which, if they had been vigilant and active, perhaps the English might have owed them (Journey,p. 24).

Johnson also felt a common prejudice against the Scots accent.25 However,

Johnson's response to Scotland in his tour of the Hebrides shoisld not be understood as just an expression of Scotophobia.

Boswell reports tLat at the end of their journey, Johnson returned to

England, "with bis prejudices much lessened," (Tour, p. 173). This mellowing of behavior attributed to the Highlands of Scotland offers some similarities with that of Matthew Bramble's jouniey in Expedition of Humphry Clinker.

However, Johnson's feelings towards the Scots and the Highlands at the end of his Journey are much more complex and ambivalent than a simple

"lessening" of prejudice. His anti-Scots bis in his Journey, though, is much toned down by his underlying sympathy for Highlanders. On many issues

(ernigration, trees, abolition of hereditary jurisdictions, role of tacksmen)

Johnson makes an effort to show both sides of the issue as a detached observer. However, when it came to Ossian, Presbyterianism and the Scottish

Reformation, and the Lowland literati and universities, Johnson was

25 IIThe conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities Wear fast away; their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustic, even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain al1 cultivate the English pronunciation" (Journey, p. 147). 85 adamantly opinionated, judgmental, and close-minded.

Johnson is very critical of the Lowland literati. Very little of his account, only a few pages, is on the Lowland cities." He dismisses both

Edinburgh and Glasgow as being too well known to require either description or discussion. This was deemed a snub by some Lowland which

Boswell rectifies by the inclusion of the intellectual discussions between

Johnson and the Edinburgh literati. Johnson flagrantly dismisses all Scottish universities, stating that "[m]en bred in the universities of Scotland cannot be expected to be oRen decorated with the splendeurs of ornamental emdition, but they obtain a mediocrm of knowledge, between leamhg and ignorance, not inadequate to the purposes of cornmon Me" (Journey, p. 146). After this condernnation he briefly mentions that he met with "men of learning" in his return stay in Edinburgh, "whose names want no advancement fkom my cornmernoration" (Journey, p. 147). This could be considered a feeble excuse not to lavish praise, or part of his generalizing tendency to exclude specific details. However, the study of civilized life was not his purpose.

When it came to Ossian, Johnson was at his most John Bullish. He

26 He excuses the inclusion of a description of Aberdeen with the comment "[tlo write of the cities of our own island with the solemnity of geographical description, as if we had been cast upon a newly discovered coast, has the appearance of very fiivolous ostentation; yet as Scotland is Little known to the greater part of those who may read these observations . . ." (Journey,p. 12).

" M'Nicol, Remarks on Dr. Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Hebrides, p. 15. 86 makes no attempt at objectivity and this is his most blatant example of

Scotophobia. Johnson was completely unwilling to believe that the ancient

Scots were capable of producing a sophisticated literature on par with Homer's

Riad. One of the purposes of his Joumey was as a platform for him to denounce James Macpherson and to expose the poems of Ossian as modern

Lterary forgeries. He, in no uncertain terms, passes sentence on the Ossian issue:

1 suppose my opinion of the poems of Ossian is already discovered. 1 believe they never existed in any other form than that which we have seen. The editor, or author, never could shew the original; nor can it be shewn by any other; to revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence, with which the world is yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge ofguilt (Journey, p. 107).

After asking only a few people, he makes the verdict that Gaelic was a pre-

Iiterate lang~age.~~In a direct snipe at Macpherson, he states: "1 believe there cannot be recovered, in the whole Earse Ianguage, five hundred lines of which there is any evidence to prove them a hundred years old. Yet 1 hear that the father of Ossian boasts of two chests more of ancient poetry, which he suppresses, because they are too good for the English" (Journey, p. 106).

Johnson not only attacks Ossian, he also condemns bardic and oral

M'NIcol cites numerous written Gaelic manuscripts to disprove Johnson's accusation of preliteracy. He even names a person in London whom Johnson codd consult who had possession of Gaelic manuscripts. Ibid, p. 303. 87 culture.29 He labels the Highland bard as "a barbarian among barbarians"

(Journey, p- 1051, condemning him for what he perceived to be Es ignorance and illiteracy. He completely mistrusts the oral bardic literary traditions, trusting only manuscripts and books: "Books are faithfùl repositories which may be a while neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will impart their instruction: memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled

(Journey, p. 101). A pre-literate society lacked books, a sign of refïnement, and therefore, culture. AIthough he admits that he does not understand Gaelic, he condernus it as "the rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express" (Journey, p. 104). Welsh and Irish tongues were considered cultivated because they were written languages (Journey, p. 105). Yet earlier he had commented that he listened to Gaelic songs "as an English audience to an Italian opera, delighted with the sound of words which 1 did not understand" (Journey, p. 53). Earlier he had spoken more positively of the importance of oral culture. Referring to a story told him behind a bagpipe tune, he writes, "[nlarrations like this, however uncertain, deserve the notice of the traveller, because they are the only records of a nation that has no historians, and aord the most genuine representation of the life and character

29 It is interesting to note that Johnson believed more in Second Sight than Ossian or Gaelic manuscripts. He writes on Second Sight that "1 never could advance my curiosiQ to conviction; but came away at last only willing to believe" (Journey, p. 100). He certainly was never willing to believe in Ossian. He also was "exhilarated" by bagpipe music (Journey, p. 93) and learns about a piping college on Skye, but not about bardic colleges. 88 of the ancient Highlanders" (Journey, p. 44). Johnson lost all perspective when it came to Ossian, which was a bhd spot for him.

Another area of contention for Johnson on the Ossian issue was

"Caledonian bigotry" (Journey, p. 107). Donald M'Queen, the minister in Skye, avoided stating whether he believed in the poems' authenticity, but remarked to Johnson that he wished they would be deceived "for the honour of his country" (Journey, p. 107). Johnson attacks what he perceives as Scottish partiality in ail national issues: "A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist, who does not love Scotland better than truth: he will always love it better than inquiry'' (Journey, p. 108). Boswell criticizes this remark in an authorial footnote in his Tour. He writes that if Johnson had let hirn read over bis account before it was published, he would have suggested a few alterations where Johnson would be open to attack, sofkening such statements, "for 1really think it is not founded, and it is harshly said (Tour, p. 229). Johnson does not trust the Lowland opinions on the issue either, "for the past and present state of the whole Earse nation, the Lowlanders are at least as ignorant as ourselves" (Journey, p. 108).

Johnson gives all these opinions with the assurance of certaine, yet gives scanty evidence or proof of his assertions. He leaves the "diligent" inquiry to Boswell. Boswell's efforts involved comparing Ossianic passages remembered by M'Queen, with Macpherson's version. Of three passages, one was "pretty like", another slightly like, and a third "nothing like" (Tour, p. 321- 89 322). However, neither of their efforts provides conclusive evidence, and neither is terribly thorough.

Boswell's references to Johnson on Gaelic culture are somewhat softened in his travel account. Johnson in a conversation with M'Queen says he is "not disputing that you may have poetry of great merit" (Tour, p. 320). There is little reference to Johnson's appreciation of GaeIic poetry in his Journey, let alone acknowledgment of the thriving existence of contemporary Gaelic poetry.

He only condescendingly praises an illiterate poet who versified the Bible stating that, when translated to him, it "had more meaning than 1 expected fkom a man totally uneducated (Journey,p. 105-106). Boswell, himself, does not really express an opinion on Ossian in bis account. In a footnote to one of

Johnson's Ossian rantings, he w-rites that "1 desire not to be understood as agreeing entirely with the opinions of Dr. Johnson, which 1 relate without any remark (Tour, p. 422). He does not want to totally alienate hirnself from the

Scottish literati. He diplomatically states that,

1 do not think it incumbent on me to give sny precise decided opinion upon this question, as to which 1believe more than some, and less than others. The subject appears to have now become very uninteresting to the publick.30 Fingal is not fkom begiiming to end a translation fiom the Gallick, but that some passages have been supplied by the editor to comect the whole, 1 have heard admitted by very warm advocates for its authenticity (Tour, p. 423).

This is a more moderate, and indeed, accurate response.

30 It was soon to get a f?esh generation of critics-Wordsworth, Henry McKenzie, and Malcolm Laing. 90 M'Nicol makes a very insightful statement on Johnson's Journey, that

"[tlhe poor Highlanders must be moulded into dl shapes, to conform with his

~iews".~' Johnson uses his travelogue to voice his ideas on Ossian, primitivism, and man in the state of nature. To combat romantic idealizations of Rousseau's "noble savage", Johnson reveals the negative realities of

Highland Me. Thus in this sense, Johnson moulded the Highlanders into the images he needed, a preliterate people (to combat Ossian) living in hopeless poverty (to counteract the romantic primitivism). The philosophical issue comparing primitive society with civilized society, determining who had the better life, the London shopkeeper or the savage, recurs in conversations recorded by Bo~well.~~Johnson, Boswell states, was "always for maintaining the superiority of civilized over uncivilized men" (Tour,p. 239). When BosweIl and Johnson were treated to a carriage near the end of their journey, Boswell records that they "had a pleasing conviction of the commodiousness of civilization, and heartily laughed at the ravings of those absurd visionaries who have attempted to persuade us of the superior advantages of a state of nature" (Tour, p. 407). Johnson reports somewhat facetiously that the effectiveness of the disintegration of the clans means "that a longer journey than to the Highlands must be taken by him whose curiosity pants for savage

32 Johnson of course sides with the London shopkeeper, but Boswell states that he might have taken the side of the savage if someone had taken the shopkeeper's side (Tour, p. 211). virtues and barbarous grandeur" (Journey, p. 151).

Johnson displays a dual reaction to the Highlands: "Who can like the

Highlands?-1 like the inhabitants very well" (Tour, p. 416). He makes a distinction between the landscape and its economic situation, and the people.

Johnson gives an overd compassionate response to Highlanders' Lives, and especidy to the lower class tenants. Tt was by the Iiving conditions of the common folk that he judged the social and economic well-being of the

Highlands:

The true state of every nation is the state of common Me. The manners of a people are not to be found in the schools of learning, or the palaces of greatness, where the national character obscured or obliterated by travel or instruction, by philosophy or vanity; nor is public happiness to be estimated by the assemblies of the gay, or the banquets of the rich. The great mass of nations is neither rich nor gay: they whose aggregate constitutes the people, are found in the streets, and the villages, in the shops and farms; and £kom them collectively considered, must the measure of general prosperity be taken. As they approach to delicacy, a nation, at least a commercial nation, must be denominated wealthy (Journey, p. 20).

This genuine concern with the povem he encountered mitigates somewhat his

Scotophobic reactions to certain issues. However, his compassionate response becomes obscured by his attacks on Ossian and by the lack of trees.

Johnson is always adjusting his judgement on the Highlands. On the issue of trees, his first initial judgements undergo several adjustments.

Throughout the Journey, Johnson is repeatedly commenting on Scotland's barre~essand lack of tress. He sees the Highlands as a land of stone and heath, where [flewvows are made to Flora" (Journey, p. 72). He writes in Fife, that "1 had now travelled two hundred miles in Scotland, and seen only one tree not younger than myself' (Journey, p. However, Johnson exaggerates for effect. Trees become a metaphor for civilization and cultivation, the barremess of the land and of a written culture and history, emblematic for the "failure of cultural rnern~ry".~~Pre-literate societies have no historical memory, and the failure to plant trees is a failure of foresight.

Planting trees, he at fist believes, is the least expensive method of improvement: "To drop a seed into the ground can cost nothing, and the trouble is not great of protecting the young plant, till it is out of dangertt

(Journey, p. 10). However, Johnson later seriously modifies these initial judgements of "the speculationist" (himself) who "hastily proceeds to censure that negligence and laziness that has omitted for so long a time so easy an irnprovement" (Journey, p. 126). He reiterates how easy it is to plant seeds, but adds a crucial mitigating amendment:

But there is a Fightfid interval between the seed and timber. He that calculates the growth of trees, has the unwelcome remembrame of the shortness of life driven hard upon him. He knows that he is doing what will never benefit himself; . . . He that pines with hunger, is in little care how others shall be fed.

- -

33 Boswell reports that this "tree incident" was based on a statement by Colonel Nairn, that there were but two large trees in the county of Fife. (Tour, p. 202). Boswell defends Johnson, saying that he really means "trees of good size", and that there were few trees on the east coast. BosweU makes up for Johnson's exaggerations by mentioning whenever he finds a good-sized tree. 34 Karen O'Brien, "Johnson's View of the Scottish Enlightenment in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland" The Age of Johnson, vol. 4 (199l), p. 73. . . . It may soon be discovered why in a place, which hardly supplies the cravings of necessity, there has been little attention to the delights of fancy, and why distant convenience is unregarded, where thoughts are turned with incessant solicitude upon every possibility of immediate advantage (Journey, p. 126- 127).

Johnson leaves in his first response, when it could have been so easily LeR out to highlight the shaped process of forming a judgement. Johnson proposes a few improvements, such as draining an extensive stretch of moorland, which he thinks could be done without expense or difEculty. But he then moderates this suggestion, stating that "diaiculty and expense are relative tems, which have different meanings in different places" (Joumey, p. 60).

Johnson paints a grim, somewhat exaggerated, picture of Highland poverty, economic subsistence, famine and misery, which greatly contraçts with the Highlands of Ossian or Humphry Clinker:

Life unimproved and unadorned, fades into something little more than naked existence . . . if to the daily burden of distress any additional weight be added, nothing remains but to despair and die . . . The consequence of a bad season is here not scarcity but emptiness; and they whose plenty was barely a supply of natural and present need, when that slender stock fails, must perish with hunger (Journey, p. 125).

This would explain why the Highlands, in his opinion, were backward, with little "philosophical curiosity" or "commercial industry" (Journey, p. 73).

Johnson also mentions, though, that this poverty was abating as a result of the

Union. He provides a ray of hope with young COU, Donald Maclean, who studied English agricultural methods, yet still was loyal to clan traditions: "By such acquisitions as these, the Hebrides may in time rise above their annual 94 distress" (Journey, p. 113). We only learn in Boswell's Tour that Coll died the year following their journey (Tour, p. 383). Johnson's account of his journey ends with a description of a college for the deaf and dumb in Edinburgh, and with a moralizing message of philanthropy: "It was pleasing to see one of the most desperate of human calamities capable of so much help: whatever enlarges hope, will exalt courage; &er having seen the deaf taught arithmatick, who would be ahidto cultivate the Hebrides?" (Journey, p. 149).

Johnson's response to the Highlands and to Highlanders, is diffirentiated hmthat to Lowland Scotland. Johnson displays a certain antipathy to Lowland Scotland:

To the southern inhabitants of Scotland, the state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown with-that of Borneo or Sumatra: of both they have only heard a Little and guess the rest. They are strangers to the language and wants of the people, whose life they would mode1 and whose evils they would remedy (Journey, p. 79).

The Highlands, in his estimation, fare better in his account than the Lowlands.

He shows some understanding and sympathy for the Highlanders which diminishes his judgement on them, but this does not excuse his judgement on

Lowland Scotland, where he doubts "whether before the union any man between Edinburgh and England had ever set a tree" (Journey, p. 9). Aithough

Johnson reflects on the positive effects of the break-up of the clans, the end of violence, blood-feuds, and IawIessness, and the bringing of equal justice with the abolition of the heritable jurisdictions, he and Boswell both are guilty to a certain degree of a romanticization of their own. Both extol the virtues of loyalty and hospitality of feudal patriarchal society.

Johnson is not immune to the attractions of the mythical Highlands and their feudal, pastoral, and martial vision. Although Johnson speaks of the

Highland clans living in a "muddy mixture of pride and ignorance" (Journey, p. 81), he writes with an almost mournful sense of loss on their disintegration, and certainly with more sympathy for Gaelic:

There was perhaps never any change of national manners so quick, so great, and so general as that which has operated in the Highlands, by the last conquest, and the subsequent laws, we came hither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated He. The cians retain little now of their original character, their ferocity of temper is softened, their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their contempt of government subdued and their reverence of their chiefs abated. Of what they had before the late consequence of their country, there remain only their language and their poverty. Their language is attacked on every side. Schools are erected in which English only is taught, and there were lately some who thought it reasonable to refuse them a version of the holy scriptures, that they might have no monument of their mother-tongue (Journey, p. 5 1).

He writes critically of both Lowland and English policy of anglicization. He states that this patriarchal pride was "crushed by the heavy hand of a vindictive conqueror" (Journey,p. 81). He has sympathies for this patriarchal system of life which he was too late to see in its full glory. He imagines what the Highlands were like in the beginning of the eighteenth centwy:

It affords a generous and manly pleasure to conceive a Iittle nation gathering its fruits and tending its herds with fearless confidence, though it lies open on every side to invasion, where in contempt of wds and trenches, every man sleeps secureIy with his sword beside him; where al1 on the fist approach of hostility came together at the cdto battle, as a summons to a festal show; and. . .engage the enemy with that cornpetition for hazard and for glory (Journey, p. 82-83).

He speaks highly of the military spirit of the Highlands, where " [elvery man was a soldier, who partook of national confidence, and interested himself in nationd honour. To lose this spirit, is to lose what no smail advantage will compensate" (Journey, p. 83).

Boswell's account is very revealing of what was absent from Johnson's account of their journey, the suppression of overt Jacobite references. We learn from Boswell the names of the Jacobite Highlanders whom they met on their tour. It has been suggested that Boswell purposefully arranged their tour to correspond as much as possible with the flight of Prince Charles Stuart, and to visit the people still living who were most directly involved in this event, Flora Macdonald and Malcolm Macleod, in a sort of pilgrimage.35

From Boswell, we learn of both their sentimental Jacobitism and their avid interest in the details of the romantic and tragic lost cause. Johnson slept in the bed the Prince slept in while under the care of Flora Macdondd. At

Kingsburgh he asked for the story of the Prince's flight, and responded that

Flora's recital does so much honour to the humanity, fidelity, and generosity, of the Highlanders" (Tour, p. 282). Boswell, who is moved to tears by the account of "that ill-advised, but brave attempt" (Tour, p. 2491, inserts a

35 Rogers, Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia, p. 140-145. 97 thirteen page summary of the details (Tour,p. 282-295).

To some degree, both Johnson and Boswell are "highlandized". Johnson, although an Englishman who was prejudiced against Lowland Scotland, enthusiastically responds to the Highlands, abating some of his Scotophobic comments. In Coll, Johnson exhibited the "spirit of the Highlander" (Tour, p.

379), and "strutted about with a broadsword and target, and another time wore a bonnet, appearing the image of a "venerable Senachi" (Tour, p. 379).

Boswell reports that "however unfavourable to the Lowland Scots, he seemed much pleased to assume the appearance of an ancient Caledonian" (Tour, p.

379). He expresses a certain amount of Highlandized nationalism:

There is a certain association of ideas in my mind upon that subject, by which 1 am strongly aBected. The very Highland names, or the sound of a bag-pipe, will stir my blood, and fiil me with a mixture of melancholy and respect for courage; with pie for an Uzlfortunate and superstitious regard for antiquity, and thoughtless inclination for war; in short, with a crowd of sensations with which sober rationality has nothhg to do (Tour, p. 249).

He somewhat undergoes a cultural transformation of his identity: "For myself, though but a Lowlander, having picked up a few words of their language, 1 presumed to mingle in their mirth, and joined in the choruses with as much glee as any of the company" (Tour, p. 261). Boswell regretted that he was not a chief of a clan, "however, though not possessed of such an hereditary advantage, I would always endeavour to make my tenants follow me. 1 could not be a patriarchal chief, but 1 would be a feudal chief' (Tour, p. 246). Both

Boswell and Johnson attempted "to rouse the English-bred ChieRain 98 [Alexander Macdonald] . . . to the feudal and patriarchal feelings" (Tour, p.

2561, which obviously they had about clanship. Johnson is pleased when

Boswell tells him he would make a good chief and he inddges in thoughts of

"Were 1 a chief . . ." (Tour,p. 251). Both became "full of the old Highland spirit" (Tour, p. 255) and expressed "feudal enthusiasm" (Tour, p. 309) at the rack-renting abuses of Sir Alexander Macdonald and to Lady Macleod, encouraging her to keep Dunvegan castle the principal residence of the

Macleods (Tour, p. 309).

Johnson in the Tour fkequently imagines that he was the owner and laird of an island. This wish is Grst heard about Inch Keith (Journey, p. 4,

Tour, p. 194). Later, Johnson states that if he was in the place of Sir

Alexander Macdonald, he "would make this an independent island. 1 would roast oxen whole and hang out a flag as a signai to the Macdonalds to corne and get beef and whisky" (Tour, p. 256). Johnson proposes that he and

Boswell should buy a small island off the coast of Scdpay, found a school, an episcopal church and a printing press, where Johnson would print al1 the Erse that could be found" (Tour, p. 265). M'Leod offers the island of Isa in the Loch of Dunvegan to Johnson, if he would reside there at lest one month of the year, Johnson imagines building a house there, fo-ng it, and cultivating the land, and "how he would sally out, and take the ide of Muck (Tour, p. 327).

Although Boswell and Johnson's tour is certainly not a "picturesque tour", they are not completely unappreciative of the Highland landscape or of the sublime. In an earlier edition of the Tour, Boswell described the mountains around Loch Moidart where Prince Charles first landed, as "black and wild in an uncommon degree. 1 gazed upon them with much feeling.

There was a rude grandeur that seemed like a consciousness of the royal enterprize, and a solemn dreariness as if a melancholy remembrance of its events had rernai~~ed".~~Johnson wrote that the countryside around the bridge at the Fa11 of Fiers "strikes the imagination with all the gloom and grandeur of Siberian solitude" (Tour,p. 29). They, however, had visited the falls at the wrong time of the year, so it was "divested of its dignie and terror"

(Journey, p. 29). He therefore imagines what it would be like:

We were left to exercize our thoughts, by endeavouring to conceive the effect of a thousand streams poured from the mountains into one channel, struggling for expansion in a narrow passage, exasperated by rocks rising in their way, and at last discharging all their violence of waters by a sudden fdl through the horrid chasm (Journey,p. 29).

Johnson was not overawed by the Highland's mountain sublimity. His response to the Highland sublime of heath and mountain is at fkt mostly negative:

An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless steriliQ. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only with one sullen power of useless vegetation (Journey, p. 34-35).

- - - -

36 CIark, Samuel Johnson, p. 222. 100 He at first sees no use for this landscape, but he slightly qualifies this, writing

that wild uncultivated mountainous regions "make a great part of the earth

and he that has never seen them, must live unacquainted with much of the

face of nature, and with one of the great scenes of human existence" (Journey,

35). Johnson did not find the natural landscape diverting in itself, but that the

contemplation of mountains opened up the interior landscape of the mind, and

the world of ideas, "by hindering the eye eom ranging" (Journey,p. 35).

Johnson writes that it was within a verdant pastoral vdey, where "al1 was

rudeness, silence, and solitude" (Journey, p. 35), and among the rnountains,

that he first conceived of bis Journey.

Johnson and Boswell, although not typicd tourists, participated in the

process of romanticization of the Highlands. Johnson's response is full of

ambivalences and is far £kom being purely an example of English Scotophobia

or simply a form of romanticizing the Highlands. Although his essential focus was on the 'real' Highlands, he invoked the mythical Highlands as well.

Boswell's Scottishness is contained within his sense of Britishness. His voice in the Tour,almost becomes lost in Johnson's persona. However, he negotiates through Johnson's Scottish prejudice, and tries to counteract his negative comments in the Journey by publisbing ail their informative and splendid conversations, as well as illuminating their fascination with Highland traditions. In later travel accounts, and especially in the work of Scott, the tie between the romantic Highlands and the real Highlands becomes even more 101 nebulous. By the nineteenth century the romantic image of the Wighlands was equated with al1 of Scotland and forrned the foundation of Scottish cultural nationalism of this period, as expressed by Scottish literary figures. CKAPTER TV: SCOTT AND THE HEART OF MIDLOTBIAAC SCOTTISH HISTORY AND THE ROMANCE OF THE HIGHLANDS Sir Walter Scott is the name most associated with the romanticization of Scottish culture and the transformation of Scotland into the land of romance, "Caledonia", the "Land of the mountain and the flood.' Later nineteenth-century Victorian tourists travelled to Scotland and especially to the Highlands, pilgrimaging to the romantic landscapes Scott immortalized in his epic narrative poetry, most notably Loch Katrine and the Trossachs (The

Lady of the Lake) and Loch Coruisk and the Black Cuillin mountains (Lord of the Isles). As Christopher Smout has phrased it, tourists came to ScotIand and the Highlands "to commune with the spirit of Scott communing with nature and with romantic historyV.* In many ways Scott completed the process of romanticization begun with James Macpherson. Scott's epic poetry is considered "quintessentially r~mantic".~Scott's involvement in orchestrating

George IV's visit to Scotland in 1822 precipitated the trend of .

l Walter Scott, Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI, English Romantic Wrïters, ed., David Perkins (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1967), p. 378. Christopher Smout, "Tours in the Scottish Highlands from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries" Northern Scotland vol. 5 (1983), p. 117; L. Ritchie in 1835 wrote of Scotland, that it was "where the spirits of history, siimmoned up by bis (Scott's) enchantments haunt visibly its mouldering temples and ruined castles". Cited in Imagining Scotland. Traditional Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism Since 1750. (Scolar Press, 19951, p. 65. Leah Leneman, "A New Role for a Lost Cause. Lowland Romanticism of the Jacobite Highlanders" in Perspectives in Scottish Social History, ed. Leah Leneman (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), p. 116. 103 However, his construction of Scottish culture was much more than simply a process of romanticization. It is in Scott's Waverley Novels that one finds the greatest expression of his historical vision, a vision which reveds the conflicting tensions in himself and his characters between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, realism and romance, the present and the past, Lowland and Highland, Britishness and Scottishness, the head and the heart. The

Heart of Midlothian (1818) provides one imaginative working out of these dualities. Essentially, this novel is concerned with definhg Scottishness during the penod 1737-1751, revolving around the historical events surrounding the . Jeanie Deans' journey to London is emblematic of mythic regeneration, which restores the balance between

Scotland and England. The social protest and anti-Union feelings of the

Edinburgh crowd are resolved in the "Highland Arcadia" at Roseneath in the final chapters of the novel.

Scott wrote during a transitional period in history, spanning both the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scott's writings reflect both the Scottish Enlightenment tradition, in which he was educated, and the romantic feeling and sense of cultural and national uniqueness of the nineteenth century. His vision of history stressed the necessity and inevitability of social change and enlightened progress. Yet, this ideal of progress was tempered with a Romantic longing or regret for the past.

Coleridge wrote of this dualily, which he considered fundamental to al1 of Scott's works, that it,

can never be obsolete, for it is the contest between the two great moving p~ciplesof social humanity; religious adherence to the past and the ancient, the desire and admiration of permanence, on the one hand; and the passion for increase of hwledge, for truth as the offering of reason-in short, the mighty instincts of progression and free agency on the other. In dl subjects of deep and lasting interest, you will detect a stmggle between the opposite, two polar forces, both of which are alike necessary to the existence of the ~ther.~

Fiction was a better-suited vehicle for Scott for expressing his historical vision, enabling him to dramatize the processes of history. All of his Wauerley

Novels focus on signiiicant social and political crises or turning points which affect everyone at al1 levels in society "in intensely personal ways"? His novels are as much narratives of individuals, as a record of the historical forces which affect, swirl around and get caught up in the characters' lives. Scott, through the use of imaginative approximation and historical scholarship, reconstructs the mentality of a historical era to produce a representation of life in the past. He is most successful at achieving this in his Scottish novels of the recent past, such as Waverley and The Heart of Midothian. The further away in time and place, such as in Iuanhoe, the less successful he was at recreating an accurate reconstruction. Scott's characters are depicted as

-- . ' Coleridge cited in Johnson, "Scott and the Corners of Time", in Alan Bell, ed., Scott Bicentenary Essays (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987), p. 36.

John Barker, The Superhistorians. Makers of Our Past (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982), p. 131. products of time and place, as being moulded by hi~tory.~He imagined and fictionalized the thoughts and feelings of individuals which were not recorded in the historical accounts. Efis historical research achieved factual verisimilitude, while his fictional dialogue overcame the limits of history in describing character, to recapture the essence of the period.' He concretizes the abstract forces of history, visualizing history through the eyes of ordinary men and women. Scott perceived the past as organically connected and relevant to understanding the present. Underlying all history, for Scott, is change over tirne, the dynamic movement of history, confiict and progress which leads to the present. History was not a refuge from the present, escapist, but "the mat- in which the present had been formed".' By establishing empathy for the past, he was able to forge connections both with and within hi~tory.~Scott believed that history provided lessons which one could learn fkom, and offered a qualified belief in progress:

Our ancestors lodged in caves and wigwams where we construct palaces for the rich and cornfortable dwellings for the poor. And why is this but because ou.eye is enabled to look back upon the past to improve on our ancestors improvements and to avoid their errors. This can only be done by studying history and comparing

James Reed, Sir Walter Scott: Landscape and Locality (London: The Athlone Press), p. 114. ' David Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 19791, p. 181.

Johnson, "Scott and the Corners of Time", p. 27.

Barker, The Superhistorians, p. 138. 106 it with passing events."

Scott found that there were three alternatives of action in life: chgto the past, reject it, or compromise." The way of acceptance and moderation, as embodied in the heroes of the Waverley Novels, Scott found to be the best course for a stability which would make way for change.

Scott played a formative role in creating a Scottish identity and national consciousness, as presented in his poetry and his Waverley Novels. His

Waverley Novels especially educated his English reading public in Scottish history and in Scotland's cultural uniqueness and distinctiveness. Scott was very much concerned with preserving the past and a rapidly vanishing culture.

In the Introduction to the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802)Scott states that "1 may contribute somewhat to the history of my native country; the pecuLiar features of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those of her sister and alIy."'2 In the "Postscript which should have been a Preface" in Waverley, Scott writes that it was his purpose to preserve "some idea of the ancient manners of which 1 have witnessed the alrnost total extinction, 1 have embodied in imaginary scenes, and ascribed to fictitious characters, a part of the incidents which 1 then received fiom those

'O David Daiches, "Scott and Scotland", in Bell, Scott Bicentenary Essays, p. 40.

" Barker, The Superhistorians, p. 143. '' Cited in Barker, The Superhistorians, p. 125. who were actors in them".13

Scott's vision of Scotland and of the historical forces of progress which were irrevocably changing Scottish sociew are often shiRing and ambivalent.

His Scottish nationalism and romanticization of the Highlands were qualified by his beliefin the principles of progress of the Scottish Enlightenment and in his support of the Act of Union of 1707. In a letter to Maria Edgeworth in

1825, Scott writes that the Union was "an event which had 1 lived in that day

1 would have resigned my Meto have prevented, but which being done before my day, 1 am sensible was a wise t~m".'~In his Description of the Regalia of Scotland (1819), his stance is clearly pro-Union:

We who now read the slow, but weU-ripened fruits of the painfid sacrifice made at the Union, can compare, with calmer judgement, the certain blessings of equality of laws and rights, extended commerce, improved agriculture, individual safety and domestic peace, with the vain, though generous boast of a precarious national independence, subject to all the evils of domestic faction and delegated oppression. With such feelings we look upon the regalia of Scotland, venerating at once the gallantry of our forefathers who with unequal means, but with unsubdued courage, maintained the liberties and independence of Scotland through ten centuries of almost ceaseless war; and blessing the wise decrees of Providence, which fier a thousand years of bloodshed, have at length indissolubly united the two nations, W~O,speaking the same language, professing the same religion, and united in the same interests, seemed formed by GOD and

l3 Scott, Waverley, p. 466. l4 James F. Robertson, "The Construction and Expression of Scottish Patriotism in the Works of Walter Scott", unpublished Doctoral dissertation, (University of Edinburgh, 19881, p. 127. 108 Nature to compose one people.15

Scott believed that the benefits of peace within Britain outweighed the loss of

Scottish sovereignty and incessant warfare. He acknowledged and accepted the necessity for progress, the inevitability of history and change over time,l6 and compromise, but he also felt a sense of loss. This paradoxical stance on progress is summed up in a letter to Joanna Baillie on the new railroad, where he writes that he is "[hlalf proud, half angry, half sad and half pleased".17 In

1806 during a debate of the Faculty of Advocates on a reform of Scottish legal procedure, Scott was described by Lockhart as being overcome with emotion:

"Little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy, and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland ScotIand shall remain"." He strove to retain some of Scotland's uniqueness and individuality by recording her oral and cultural history. He supported Union, but still "venerated" Scottish culture.

Although Scott's outlook on Scottish culture and history is essentidy pragrnatic, conservative, and rationalistic, this is tempered with a vivid

l5 Richard Humphrey, Walter Scott. Wauerley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 68-69. l6 Scott's historicism, however was very conservative and reactionary, when it came to the French Revolution and Napoleon.

l7 Young, "Scott and the Historians", in Sir Walter Scott Lectures, 1940-48, Intro. Professor W. L. Renwick (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 19501, p. 105.

l8 Daiches, "Scott and Scotland, p. 4. 109 perception and a sense of compassion and empathy for Scottish past institutions and older codes of heroic behavior. Lockhart in 1819 wrote that

Scott "re-awaken[ed] the sympathies of his more energetic characters and passions of their forefathers" and "neutraliz[ed] that barren spirit of lethargy into which the progress of civilization is in all countries so apt to lu11 the feelings and imaginations of mankind.19 Scott brought about a change in imagination, not a change of government.

Scott's cultural nationalism for the most part is apolitical. However, in

The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther, based on the attempted suppression of

Scottish banknotes, Scott vehemently criticizes the anglicization and assimilation of Scottish Society: "there has been in England a gradua1 and progressive system of assuming the management of afkirs entirely and exclusively proper to Scotland as if we were totally unworthy of having the management of our own concerns. All must centre in London".*' He labels

England the "foreign enemy" who treated the Scots as "the Spaniards treated the Mans" and reminds them that "claymores have edgesrt - 21 In a Journal entry in 1826, he wrote that "They are gradually destroying what remains of nationality, and making the country tabula rasa for doctrines of bold

19 Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance. Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 19891, p. 146.

Scott, Letters of Malachi Malagrowther, chapter II in Humphrey, Wauerley, p. 42.

2' Cited in Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories. Scott, Gothie, and the Authorities of Fiction, p. 28. 110 innovation".22

The historical tuning point in The Heart of Midlothian is the Porteous

Riots, which occwred in Edinburgh in 1736. Scott spends six chapters in setting up and describing these events. Scott expertly weaves historical fact into his fictional narrative. He uses fictional didogue to enter the thoughts of the Edinburgh citizens in order for him to examine the motivations and passions that led to urban riot and popular justice. T. C. Smout states in A

History of the Scottish People 1560-1830, that Scott "gives the best account" of these events and that "[tlhere has probably never been so brilliant a piece of historical research so brilliantly disguised as fiction".23 For the most part, the events of the Porteous Riots are solicitously recorded, following closely the historical accounts available, including an account by the Solicitor General on the enquiry into the perpetrators and the composition of the Porteous Mob.

The historical background to the Porteous Riots is as follows: Mer the

Act of Union, Scotland had to pay increased taxes on imported tea, tobacco, brandy and wines, which led to smuggling. The Fife Smugglers, Andrew

Wilson, George Robertson, and WiUiam Hall, bad had a large amount of their goods confiscated, and had decided to regain what had, they felt, been

22 Christopher Harvie, "Scott and the Image of Scotland", in Sir Walter Scott: The Long Forgotten Melody, Alan Bold, ed. (London: Vision Ltd., and Barnes and Noble Books, 19831, p. 40. 23 T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish Peopb 1560-1830 (London: Fontana Press, 1969), p. 498, note 9. 111 rightfuUy theirs, by robbing the Kirkcaldy exciseman. They were caught.

Robertson escaped, but Wilson was hanged on April 14, 1736. Wilson held public sympathy for helping Robertson escape, and at his hanging stones were thrown at Captain Jack Porteous, the commander of the City Guard. Porteous ordered his men to fie on the crowd, causing several fatalities. Porteous was then tried and sentenced to be hanged September 8th. However, Porteous was granted a six-week reprieve by Queen Caroline, who was acting as regent in

George II's absence. On September 7th, the night before Porteous's original execution date, the mob, led by Robertson, broke into the Tolbooth, seized

Porteous, and lynched hi~n.*~The Queen was not amused. She seemed to take the riot as a personal attack on her authority. An enquiry was launched, but the rioters were never discovered. In 1737 a vindictive bill was proposed in parliament suggesting several harsh reprisais against the city of Edinburgh: abolishing the Town Guard, revoking its charter, banning the from holding office, and demolishing the Nether Bow Port (making it easier for troops to enter the city). This bill, which was passed in the House of Lords, was strongly opposed by John Campbell, the second Duke of Argyle, and was mitigated in the House of Commons to a fine of £2,000 to be paid to Porteous's widow. However, an act of parliament was passed which legislated the death

24 In The Heart of Midothian, Scott changes the day of the riot to the night of September 8th. This heightens the drarnatic effect of having the milling crowd informed of Porteous's reprieve while waiting for his expected 112 penalty for those who harbored any of the rioters, and a reward was offered for information. This clause was read at church before the sermon on the first

Sunday of every month, outraging the Scottish Church, whkh was very sensitive about its relationship with the statemZ5

Scott's reconstruction of the Porteous Riots in The Heart of Midlothian dwells on the mord nature of the Porteous mob and their unusual deliberation, order, and pmdence. The whole atmosphere of the riot is given a sense of dignity, solemnity, and popular justice. The crowd waiting for Porteous's hanging were "silent and decent, though stem and relent les^".^^ After the announcement of Porteous's reprieve, they gave "a roar of indignation", after which, however, they "seemed to be ashamed of having expressed their disappointment in a vain clamour", and instead of a riot ensuing, the matter ended in resentful mutterings. It took an outsider RobertsonlStaunton, an

Englishman, to instigate the riot itself and precipitate the muder of Porteous.

Members of the upper classes were courteously escorted away from the action:

"This was uniformly done with a deference and attention to the feelings of the terrified females, which hardly could have been expected from the videttes of

25 Robert McNeil, The Porteous Riot (Edinburgh: Scotland's Cultural Heritage, [1988?]);Scott, Tales of a Grandfather, Being the History of Scotland From the Earliest Times (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1869), p. 381- 386.

26 Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (London:Everyman's Library, J. W. M. Dent & Sons, 1991), p. 44. Subsequent references to The Heart of Midlothian will be f?om this edition and WUbe included in the text. 113 a mob so desperate" (p. 68). An officer who had seized one of the rioters' muskets was disarmed, but let go unharmed, "which afforded another remarkable instance of the mode in which these men united a sort of moderation towards al1 the others, with the most inflexible inveteracy against the object of their resentment" (p. 90). When a coi1 of rope was taken fkom a nearby shop, a guinea was left, "so anxious were the perpetrators of this daring action to show that they mediated not the slightest wrong or infkaction of law, excepting so far as Porteous was concerned" (p. 77). Robertson proclaimed before Porteous's execution, that "[w]e are not his judges; he has been already judged and condemned by la- authority. We are those whom Heaven, and our righteous anger, have stirred up to execute judgement, when a corrupt government would have protected a murderer" (p. 78). Once their purpose had been accomplished, the mob threw down their weapons and dispersed." In a veiled reference to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, Scott distinguishes the Porteous mob from the Parisian mob:

In generd, whatever may be the impelling motive by wihich a mob is at first raised, the attainment of their object has usually been only found to lead the way to further excesses. But not so in the present case. They seemed completely satiated with the vengeance they had prosecuted with such staunch sagacious activity (p. 79).

27 In actuality, the mob did not depart all at once, and some did hger about. Also the 'real' mob was a bit more cruel. Porteous was strung up three times, had his right arm and shoulder broken by Lochaber axes, suffered blows to the face and back, as well as having one foot burned by a torch. H. T. Dickinson and Ke~ethLogue, "The Porteous Riot, 1736. Events in a Scottish protest against the Act of Union with England" History Today, (Vol. XXII, April 1972), p. 278. 114 Scott even at times seems to display a tinge of Scottish pride at their actions.

He writes of the Edinburgh mob, that they "when thoroughly excited, had been at all times one of the fiercest which could be found in Europe; and of late years they had risen repeatedly against the government, and sometimes not without temporary success" (p. 45). He states that the Porteous Riot "bas always been quoted as a close, daring, and cdculated act of violence, of a nature peculiarly characteristic of the Scottish people" (p. 86). Popular protest is certainly not unique to ScotIand, but Scott suggests that the uniqueness of the Porteous Mob lay in its moral nature. However, Scott's response to the riot, as to all things, was divided. He is sympathetic to the reasons for their anger, praises their conduct, but he is too much of a lawyer to condone their lawlessness. Reuban Butler, an educated moderate member of the clergy, represents the voice of reason and law: 'Tou are neither judges nor jury . . .

You caruiot have, by the laws of God or man, power to take away the life of a human creature, however desedghe may be of death (p. 75). Butler reacts with horror at the sight of Porteous's body.

Scott sees the Act of Union as the fundamental cause behind this social protest. He stresses the precarious situation of Scotland at this period:

She was indeed united to England, but the cernent, had not had time to acquire consistence. The irritation of ancient wrongs still subsisted, and betwixt the htfidjealousy of the Scottish, and the supercilious disdain of the English, in the course of which the national league, so important to the safety of both was in the utmost danger of being dissolved (p. 37 1).

In 1736 the doubts and misgivings of the Union were still strong. He singles 115 out some voices of discontent in the mob waiting Porteous's death: Mr.

PIumdamas states that "1 am judging that this reprieve wadna stand gude in the auld Scots law, when the kingdom was a kingdom" and Miss Grizel

Damahoy laments that "they hae taen awa our parliament and they hae oppressed our trade" and she speaks of "the gude auld tirne before the Union"

(p. 52).

The proposed reprisals against Edinburgh and the action taken to induce informers to identify the culprits, produced nationalistic feeling. The reading of the clause on informants in church was especially unpopular. Scott notes that this demand "united in a cornmon cause those who might privately rejoice in Porteous's death, though they dared not vindicate the matter of it, with the most scrupulous presbyterians" who bristled at any interference of the state in the matters of the kirk (p. 206). The anger at the aftermath of the whole affair he feels was ultimately an expression of Scottish nationalism. Scott states that "[tlhe anxiety of the government to obtain conviction of some of the offenders, had but served to increase the public feeling which connected the action, though violent and irregular, with the idea of ancient national independence" (p. 367). Jeanie Deans "felt conscious, that whoever should lodge information concerning that event . . . it would be considered as an act of treason against the independence of Scotland. With the fanaticism of the

Scotch Presbyterians, there was dways mingled a glow of national feeling" (p.

368). Others thought they saw, in so violent an act of parliament, a more vindictive spirit than became the legisiature of a great country, and something Like an attempt to trample upon the rights and independence of Scotland . - . . who thought a pretext was too hastily taken for degrading the ancient metropolis of Scotland. In short, there was much heart-burning, discontent, and disaffection, occasîoned by these ill-considered measures (p. 206-207).

The Duke of Argyle came to Edinburgh's defence and strongly opposed

the bill's measures. In an authorial note, Scott states that the Duke believed

that the Bi11 was "a cruel, unjust, and fanatical proceeding, and an

encroachment upon the privileges of the royal burghs of Scotland, secured to

them by the treaty of Union" (p. 547, note XIII). Scott provides a version of

the Duke's speech in the parliamentary debates:

1have given my reasons for opposing this bill, and have made it appear that it is repugnant to the international treaty of union, to the libertg of Scotland, and reflectively, to that of England, to common justice, to common sense, and to the public interest. Shall the metropolis of Scotland, the capital of an independent nation, the residence of a long line of monarchs . . . for the fault of an obscure and unknow-n body of rioters, be deprived of its honours and its privileges--its gates and its guards?--and shall a native Scotsman tamely behold the havoc? 1 glory, my Lords, in opposing such iinjust rigour, and reckon it my dearest pride and honour to stand up in defence of my native country while thus laid open to undeserved shame, and unjust spoliation (p. 372).

Although this speech is not an exact account of the Duke's real speech,

(compared to an extract in a 1744 biography by Robert Campbell), it does

follow the Duke's general meaning.28 The tone in The Heurt of Midlothian is,

however, more fervently patriotic. This corresponds with Scott's portrayal of

28 Robert Campbell, The Life of the Most Rlustrious Prince John, Duke of Argyle and Greenwich (London: C. Corbett, 17451, p. 304-320. the Duke of Argyle as being passionately Scottish as well as British.

Scott shows another kind of Scottish nationalism in the character of

Jeanie Deans.* Jeanie's heroic journey to London to plead to the Queen for her sister's life has strong mythic connotations. Jeanie's virtuous, non-violent determination and sincerity accomplish what the violent uprising did not, the restoration of the proper balance between the two countries, a mythic regeneration of the Union. Jeanie was unable to pe jure herseif, to pretend that her sister had revealed her pregnancy to her, which would have saved her sister fiom a death sentence for the crime of infanticide. She undertakes an alternate means to Save her sister, a plea for mercy at the British court, a reprieve which had been earlier granted to Captain Porteous. However,

Saddletree surmises that "do ye think our auld enemies of England, as

Glendook aye ca's them in his printed Statute book, care a boddle whether we didna kill ane anither". He believes that it is unlikely that Jeanie would be able to obtain Effie's pardon and "that dei1 a kindly Scot will they pardon again, either by reprieve or remission, if the haill town oYEdinburghshould be a' hanged on ae tow" (p. 206).

Jeanie's journey reverses the usual direction of Scottish tours (England

29 Scott expertly weaves the personal fictional story of the Deans' into his historical fkarnework. Effie Deans, Jeanie's sister bas an illegitimate child by RobertsonIStaunt on- The child is stolen and she is imprisoned for infanticide. Under a harsh Scots Law (Act of 1690) the failure to show proof of her innocence (the child), dong with concealing her pregnancy, is enough for a sentence of death. This act was reduced to banishment in 1803. 118 to Scotland) as seen in Humphry Clinker, Boswell and Johnson's journey, and also in Scotfs Wauerley. Instead, The Head of Midothian examines

Scottishness as seen amongst outsiders in London. As Jeanie travels to

London barefoot she encounters English prejudice against her dress, her bare feet, and her Scottish accent. To avoid ridicule, she exchanges a straw bonnet for her tartan screen, wears shoes and stockings the whole day, and speaks as little as possible. On the return journey, while passing the border at Carlisle,

Jeanie witnesses further Scotophobia and superstitious anti-Scots prejudice at the hanging of Meg Murdockson: "shame the country should be harried wi'

Scotch witches and Scotch bitches this gate-but 1say hang and drown" (p. 419, chapter XI). Madge is killed by "a parce1 of savage-looking fellows, butchers and glaciers chiefly, among whose cattle there had been of late a very general and fatal distemper, which their wisdom imputed to witchcraf2" (p. 421).

Archibald is threatened when they discover his nationality: "He's a Scot by his tongue . . . I'se gie him his tartan plaid fid o'broken banes" (p. 421). Scott

(following the tradition of Smollett) criticizes this behavior as being anachronistic, superstitious, and uncivilized.

Jeanie, however, is also befiiended by fellow Scots she meets on her journey who give her advice, letters of introduction, recommendations for acco~modations,or provide her with an escort, or a short wagon ride. Scott defends this sense of community, stating "although it is often objected to us as a prejudice and narrowness of sentiment, seems, on the contrary, to arise from 119 a most justifiable and honourable feeiing of patriotism" (p. 298). The Queen is convinced that the Duke of Argyle's defence of Jeanie's cause must be rooted in clan ties or that she must be fiom Inveraray or Argyllshire. Scott comments on the strong national feelings that exist among Scots and %ow ardently, under all distinctions of rank and situation, they feel with each other as natives of the same country . . . the high and the low are more interested in each other's welfare" (p. 403).

Jeanie's and Scotland's greatest champion is the Duke of Argyle. He warms to Jeanie's simple sincerity and earthy Scottishness: "1 know the full value of the snood; and MacCalliimmoreYsheart will be as cold as death cm make it, when it does not warm to the tartan" (p. 379). The Duke was considered by Miss Damahoy, Mrs. Howden and Plumdamas "a real Scotsman- a true friend to the country" (p. 262). Scott writes very glowingly (almost eulogistically) of the Duke of Argyle. He states that "Mew names deserve more honourable mention in the history of Scotland, during this period" (p. 370). He was frequently out of favor with the court, but "[tlhis rendered him the dearer to Scotland, because it was usually in her cause that he incurred the

&spIeasure of his sovereign" (p. 371). The Duke of Argyle comments to the

Queen that "My sword, madam . . . has been always at the command of my lawful king, and of my native country--1 trust it is impossible to separate their real rights and interests" (p. 391).

However, although the Duke of Argyle is Scotland's champion, he is the 120 defhitive British statesman and represents the integrated merging of Scottish and British national identities (which Scott, Smollett, and Boswell all displayed). Jeanie obtains Effie's pardon with an appeal to mercy to the

British crown, with the help of a British statesman, although she is unaware of the political manoeuvrings going on under the surface. The Duke's political influence in the British government and Jeanie Deans' sincerity appease the

Queen's anger at Scotland. The Duke sees Effie Deans' case as "highly useful in conciliating the unfortunate irritation which at present subsists among his

Majesty's good subjects in Scotland" (p. 391), and as a means to rect* the imbalance between the two countries. The Queen's anger both over the

Porteous affiand with Scotland in general is described as being rather pem.

The narrator supposes that "she was displeased that he [the Duke of Argylel should talk of the discontents in Scotland as irritations to be conciliated, rather than suppressed" (p. 391). She makes several snide derisive quips against

Scotland: "That his Majesty has good subjects in England, my Lord Duke, he is bound to thank God and the laws-that he has subjects in Scotland, 1 think he may thank God and his sword (p, 391); "1, at least, have had enough of

Scotch pardons" (p. 392). The Queen took the Porteous Riots as a personal affront to her authority as Queen and regent. She believes that "the whole nation is in league to screen the savage and abominable murderers of that unhappy man" (p. 397). She supposes that the people of Edinburgh would hang Effie, even if she was pardoned, "out of spite" (p. 396). In this audience 121 with the Queen Scott portrays her in a very human fashion and shows how extreme and uajust was her anger at Edinburgh.

The problems, both personal and national, raised in the novel are both resolved in the "Highland Arcadia" (p. 461) at Roseneath/Knocktarlitie. The

Highlands in The Heart of Midlothian are to a large extent mythologized and romanticized. Scott's vision of the Highlands is emblematic of a fictitious solution to the problems of Scottish national identity and moral regeneration.30 Roseneath/Knocktarlitie is the site of abundance and

Highland feasts. This agricultural utopia represents the forces of improvement and rnoderni~ation.~'The Duke of Argyle, with Davie Deans as his manager, establishes an "experimental farm" (p. 437) in Dumbartonshire. The Butlers live in domestic bliss, have three healthy children, and become landowners,

It is Jeanie and Reuban, the forces of moderate progress, improvement, moral

This corresponds to Smollett's theme of the rejuvenating regenerative effects of the Highlands in Humphry CZinker. Scott's The Heart of Midlothian contains several close allusions to Humphry Clinker-Jedidiah Cleisbothan as the editor of the tales, the opening stage coach upset, the boat incident on the way to Roseneath, the character of Dolly Dutton, a cross between Tabitha Bramble and Win Jenkins, and the "Highland Arcadia" of Dumbartonshire. The Forty-five is only bnefly alluded to in a reference to the roving bands of thieves who took advantage of the social disruption, such as men like Donacha dhu na Dunaigh, a former tinker, who became "whole robber" from "haifthief' (p. 493). Reference to the Jacobite rebellion and its violent rather brutal suppression by the English Crown would detract from his theme of moral and mythic regeneration of the Union.

31 Johnson's legacy on the issue of the shortage of trees in Scotland, was still felt. Scott notes that weeping willows and birches "flourish in these favoured recesses in a degree iinknown in our eastern districts" (p. 434). 122 virtue, rationalism and Union who survive and prosper at the end of the novel.

StauntodRobertson and Davie Deans are killed off (although the former violently by his bastard son and the latter peacefidly at the age of ninety-odd years). The world of Staunton is self-destructive, violent, and based on lawlessness and deceit. Davie Deans' extremist fanatical Cameronianism was still concerned with persecuting old women as witches, prying into scandais, and condemning the Scottish church for their backslidings fkom the ideals of the Covenanters. His fanaticism passes away in favor of Reuban Butler's moderate Presbyterianism. Effie and her savage son are exiled, Effie to a convent, and Whistler to a tribe of wild Indians in North America.

The HigHands in The Heart of Midlothian were depicted as being less foreign, alien, and remote than the Highlands of Humphry Clinker, which was written more than twenty years later than the date in which the novel is set.

Duncan Knockdunder is the dominant Highland representative. He symbolizes the gradua1 lessening of division between the Highlands and the Lowlands.

As the bailie and representative for the Duke of Argyle, he supe~sesa district which was partly Lowland and partly Highland. Order and peace were maintained by the Duke and Duncan so that "the Gael and the Saxons lived upon the best possible terms of good neighborhood (p. 461). When we fint meet Duncan,he is dressed in the plaid and philabeg, with a black tie-wig and a cocked hat with gold lace, "unit[ing] in his own person the dress of the

Highlands and the Lowlands" (p. 456). However this amalgamation of dress 123 has a "whirnsical and ludicrous effect, as it made his head and body look as if belonging to different individuals . . . an Englishman's head on a Highlander's body" (p. 456)- He is more of a caricature, though, than a My-developed person. He is the stereotype of the Highland fool and rogue, whose excessive drinking and swearing affronts Davie Deans. Davie Deans charactenzes

Duncan as the typical Highlander, having "a hasw and choleric temper, and a neglect of the higher things that belong to salvation, and also a gripping unto the things of this world, without muckle distinction of property" (p. 439).

The Highlands are not entirely idealized and are portrayed as still being a country of lawle~sness.~~One of the Duke's representatives tells Davie

Deans, before he leaves for Roseneath, that the Highlands were "beyond the bounds of ordinary law and civilization" (p. 439). Duncan is both Laird of

Knocktarlitie holding all the patriarchal authorïty over, and loyalty of, his men

(as a Highland chief would), and a bailie and representative of the Duke, upholder of law and order. His position as baiiie is contrasted with his somewhat lawless behaviour. Duncan has "a high hand ower the country with

"a' the keys O' the kintray hings at his belt" (p. 467). He accepts bribes fi-om

Donacha, and participates in smuggling, which is considered permissible since the duke %as gien nae orders concerning the putting it down" (p. 459).

32 However, lawlessness is certainly not a characteristic only associated with the Highlands, as demoastrated in the criminal underclass of Edinburgh, and of Meg Murdockson and Ratcliffe and their criminal activities in the English countryside. 124 Despite the abolition of Heritable Jurisdictions, which has been passed by the end of the novel, Duncan still exercises judicial authority. He and his men still

Wear the Highland dress, despite the Disarming Act. The rather feudal and violent ethos of clan blood-feuds that Duncan represents is depicted as being clearly out of place in the more civilized world of the Butlers. Duncan tells young Davie Butler to cut off Donacha's head and plans to hang three of the bandits in fiont of Lady Staunton's window, which he thinks will be a "creat cornfort" to her (p. 536): "1hope she will do me the credit to believe that 1can afenge a shentleman's plood fery speedily and well" (p. 533).

The use of dialect in all of Scott's Waverley Novels, is reflective of the

Romantic ideal of organicism. Burns had done much for the renewed popularity of Scots dialect in Scottish verse. By Scott's tirne, Scots and

Scotticisms were less condemned. Francis Jeeey wrote that Scots was not "a provincial dialect and vehicle only of rustic vulgarity and rude local humour.

It is the language of the whole community, long an independent kingdom, and still separate in laws, in character and in rnanner~".~~Scots and Scottish folklore and customs were given a more vigorous signincance as the language of the Scottish people and the expression of Scottishness. In the appendix of

The Pronunciation of the English Language (1799),James Adams vindicates

33 Francis JefEey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (1844), cited in N. T. Phillipson "Nationalism and Ideology" in Government and Nationalism in Scotland, ed. J. N. Wolfe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969)' p.178. and promotes the national distinctiveness of Scots: "Great, then, is the birth of this national dialect; it is not the spurious offspring of passive corruption and barbarous ignorance. It took its rise &om the antient heroes, and was supported by independency and national pride . . . Retain it with

John Jarnieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish hnguage (1808) was more forcefül:

1 do not hesitate to cal1 that the Scottish language, which has generally been considered in no other light as merely on a level with the cWerent provincial dialects of the English . . . 1 am bold to afarm that it has as just a claim to designation of peculiar language as mmt of the other languages of Europe.35

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment's condemnation of Scots and the eradication of Scotticisms which produced such works as James Beattie's

Scotticisms Arranged in Alphabetical Order, designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing (17871,was waning.

In the Wuverley Novels, Scott uses a considerable amount of Scots dialect, especially in his lower-class characters. However, his Scots dialogue is somewhat anglicized. A mixture of Scots and English spellings provide

Scottish color and imply a Scots speaker, yet are also comprehensible to an

34 James Adams cited in James G. Basker, "Scotticisms and the Problem of Cultural Identity in Eighteenth Century Britain" in Sociability and Society in Eighteenth Century Scotland, eds. John Dwyer and Richard B. Sher (Edinburgh: The Mercat Press, 1993), p. 89.

35 John Jamieson cited in Janet Adam Smith, "Some Eighteenth-Century Ideas of Scotland" in Scotland in the Age of Improvement, eds. N. T. Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), p. 123, note 16. English speaker.36 Some critics, however, stïü complained that there was too much Scots in Scott's works, which made them in~ornprehensible.~~The

Quarterley wrote that his novels could be "improved by being translated into

English" His characters are divided into English speakers (narrator,

Queen), English speakers who occasionally speak Scots in moments of strong emotion, or who speak the occasional Scots phrase (Duke of Argyle, Reuban

Butler), and Scots speakers.39 English was used to express thoughts which were more serious and formal, while Scots was more colloquial and was used to express humor and emotion. It is spoken by the lower classes, by the relatively uneducated, and by the older generati~n.~'

Scott is very sympathetic to his Scots speakers. Jeanie Deans is the main Scots speaker in The Heurt of Midlothian. Jeanie is Fom the peasant class, a coopfeeder's daughter. Her Scots, however, is anglified somewhat during her interview with the Queen, to give her speech dignity and pathos, and to place her above ridicule. The Queen responds to Jeanie's hedelt

36 Graham Tuïloch, The Language of Walter Scott. A Study of his Scottish and Period Language (London: Andre Deutsch, 1980), p. 301.

37 Robert Crawford, Deuoluing English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19921, p. 133.

38 Elizabeth Bray, The Discovery of the Hebrides. Voyagers to the Western Ides 1745-1803 (London: Collins, 1986), p. 202-203.

39 Tulloch, The Language of Walter Scott, p. 301. 40 Graham Tdloch, "The Use of Scots in Scott and Other Nineteenth Century Scottish Novelists" in Scott and His Influence, eds. J. G. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literacy Studies), p. 341. request to save her sister (which only has a few Scots words to represent her

Scottish, peasant origins) with the remark "[tlhat is eloquence" (p. 398). The

Duke of Argyle speaks a few Scots and Gaelic phrases: "ilka man buckles his belt his ain gate" (p. 379) and "doch an'dorroch" (p. 416). He cdsJeanie "my bomy lass", the narrator notes, "usingthe encouraging epithet which at once acknowledged the connection betwixt them as country-folk (p. 374). There is no Gaelic dialogue in The Heart of Midlothian, although the narrator does note when a character speaks Gaelic:' Duncan of Knockdunder speaks Highland

Scots, derived corn literary conventions, which are rather stylized and remote from reali~.~~Duncan's Scots is indicated by the mispronunciation of certain letters: "shentlemans", "cot tam", and "Mi. Putler". This inflexion makes him sound very ignorant, foolish, and uneducated-

Laced throughout Scott's realism in the Waverley Novels is a thread of

Romanticism. The Heart of Midlothian contrasts the romantic love of rebellion, individual fieedom, and the world of the imagination with the rational love of order and social stabilit~.~~He comments on the darker side of Romanticism and the republican levelling of the Porteous Mob, which he

41 Scott acknowledges that he did not know any Gaelic in a letter to Lady Abercorn in 1806 where he states, "being born and bred not only a lowlander but a border 1 do not in the least undertstand the Gaelic language". Cited in Susan Manning, "Ossian, Scott, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literary Nationalism" , Studies in Scottish Literature (Volume 17), p. 50.

42 Tulloch, The hnguage of Walter Scott, p. 225.

43 A. D. Walker, "The Tentative Romantic: An Aspect of the Head of MidLothainl', English Studies 69 (19881, p. 146. 128 dtimately criticizes and negates as dangerous to the integrity of the family, nation, and social order. Madge Wildfire communicates in folksongs and ballads, reflecting Scottish oral culture. Scott describes her narrative on her deathbed as "the wildnotes of her former state of exalted imagination" (p. 423).

StauntodRobertson essentidy typifies the Byronic hero-self-destructive, unprincipled, self-indulgent, subver~ive~~.Staunton is an aristocratie rebel who both interacts with the criminal underclass and the world of the degenerate aristocracy. Effie and Staunton's relationship celebrates the

"primacy of individual fuKlment" and passion over "filial affection and communal harrn~ny".~~Effie is described as the "untaught child of nature, whose good and evil seemed to flow rather fkum impdse than Fom reflection"

(p. 113). Her childish wilfulaess is a result of more "unrestrained fkeedom" (p.

112) and less moral restraint than Jeanie received. Her child Whistler is the wild child of nature. He never knew his parents, was never given a sense of right and wrong, lis values (or Iack thereof) were formed first by a wandering gypsy and then by a tinker turned bandit. He was neither baptized nor given a Christian name. Jeanie made an attempt to civilize him and release him from his captivity; however he refused to be civilized and escaped to his wdd fate. The romantic imagination and the romance of roguery had a strong

Robertson, Legitimate Histories, p. 206.

'5 James Kerr, Fiction Against History. Scott as Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 78. fascination for Scott, but he recognized that these energies must be contained for an ordered stable society.

Another romantic element in The Heart of Midlothian is the use of landscape and the picturesque and the sublime. Scott's works al1 have a very vivid sense of place. Nature and landscape had an almost Wordsworthian association. At Kelso at around the age of twelve, Scott experiences

the awakening of that delightfirl feeling for the beauties of natural objects which has never since deserted me . . . the romantic feelings which 1 have described as predominately in my mind naturdy rested upon and associated themselves with these grand features of the landscape around me; and the historical incidents or traditional legend connected with many of these, gave to my admiration a sort of intense impression of reverence, which at times made my heart feel too big for its bo~orn.~~

He wrote of Loch Coruisk (Corriskin) on his voyage to the Hebrides that "[ilt is as exquisite a savage scene as Loch Katrine is a scene of romantic bea~ty".~~He, like other tourists to the Highlands, described the Highland landscape as "barren and naked and refers to the "grisly mountains", however, he was also uplifted by its sublimity:

Upon the whole, though 1 have never seen many scenes of more extensive desolation, 1 have never witnessed any in which it pressed more deeply upon the eye and the heart than Loch Corriskin; at the same time that its grandeur elevated and redeemed it from the wild and dreary character of utter barrennes~.~~

46 Marine11 Ash, The Strange Death of Scottish History, (Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 1980), p. 16.

47 Bray, The Discovery of the Hebrides, p. 193. 130

In The Heart of Midothian, Scott includes several romantic descriptive passages of laadscape. Jeanie has little interest in nature: "But to Jeanie whose taste for the picturesque, if she had any by nature, had never been awakened or cultivated" (p. 463). Effie/Lady Staunton, on the other hand, was a picturesque tourist: "Gifted in every particular with a higher degree of imagination than. that of her sister, she was an admirer of the beauties of nature" (p. 508). Lmplied here, is that the appreciation of landscape was an elitist activity which had to be "cultivated and could only be enjoyed by those of the leisured upper classes. Lady Staunton, although languid and Listless indoors, was invigorated walking through glens, mountains, and lakes of the

Highlands. The sublimity of a waterfd is described with romantic imaginative force: "A single shoot carried a considerable stream over the face of a black rock, which contrasted strongly in colour with the white foam of the cascade . . . The water, wheeiing out far beneath, swept round the crag, which thus bounded their view, and tumbled down the rocky glen in a torrent of foam" (p. 509). However, Lady Staunton became a little too adventurous and crossed the barrier separating the sublime from the fearful. She, while

"clinging like sea-birds to the face of the rock, climbed right in front of the waterfall which

had a most tremendous aspect, boiling, roaring, and thundering with unceasing din, into a black cauldron, a hundred feet at least below them which resembled the crater of a volcano. The noise, the dashing of the waters, which gave an unsteady appearance to al! around them, the trembling even of the huge crag on which they stood, the precariousness of their footing . . . had so powerfkl an effect on the senses and imagination of Lady Staunton, that she called out to David she was falling, and would in fact have dropped &om the crag had he not caught hold of ber (p- 509-5101.

Scott's works are ohn accused of sounding the pibroch for Scottish

histûry, and of being more of a lament for a vanishing culture, than a

celebration of a Living tradition.49 Scott did contribute to the romanticization

of Scottish history, especially Highland history, and in this he followed the

tradition established by Macpherson, However, his Romanticism is heavily

qualified by his realism and bis historicism. His nationalism, as found in his

Scottish novels, is cultural and located firmly in the past. However, although

The Heurt of Midlothian is set in the past, that does not mean that it was

irrelevant to Scott's present. Scott, Janus-like, looked to the past to infonn the

present. He utiiized the events of the Porteous Riots and referred to a mostIy

mythical Highlands to comment on Scottish nationalism. He sanctioned both

the Union and the Britishness of his present, as well as preserving Scottish

history, especially Highland culture, as a source for providing a sense of

Scottishness.

49 Scott wrote an eloquent paean to the passing away of the clans: "But if the hour of need should corne distant--the pibroch may sound through the deserted region, but the summons wiU remain unanswered. The children who have leR her dlre-echo from a distant shore the sounds with which they took Ieave of their own--Ha til, ha til, ha til, mi tulidh!--"We return, we returm-we return-no more!" cited in G. M. Young, "Scott and the Historians", in Sir Walter Scott Lectures 1940-1948, p. 107. CONCLUSION 132 CONCLUSION

The cultural construction of Scottish national identity and the

romanticization of the Highlands in James Macpherson's The Poerns of Ossian,

Tobias Smollett's The Expedition ofHumphry Clinker, Walter Scott's The Heart

of MidZothian, and to some extent Samuel Johnson and James Boswell's tour

of the Highlands, were governed by the historical conditions of late

eighteenWearly nineteenth century Scotland. Andrew Hook raised the issue

that Scottish romanticism

produced those images which for better or worse, continue to provide Scotland with a meRning. and identity for the outside world. What has to be recognized is that these familiar images- whatever their subsequent fate in terms of nationdistic seIf- indulgence, commercial exploitation, or the development of the Scotiish tourist industry-were in their origins imaginative responses to the realities of Scottish life and culture at a particular historical moment, Romantic images of Scotland and the mythology they helped to create . . . that is, began life as necessary fictions: imaginative attempts to order and interpret historical realities. l

These works responded to historical issues of the period, the Union with

England, the loss of political independence, and the disintegration of the

Highland clans. They all used the Highlands to discuss what they perceived as Scottishness. Most often, it is the rnythical Highlands which is invoked.

The recurring themes which this thesis has examined have been the dual allegiances of ScottisblBritish nationalism, the response to anti-Scots

' Hook, "Scotland and Romanticism: the International Scene", The History of Scottish Literature, Volume 2, 1600-1800, ed. Andrew Hook (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), p. 307. 133 prejudice, and the creation of a mythical Highland Scottish national identity.

Smollett and Scott's novels advocated a ScottisM3ritish national identity, which allocated an important defor Scotland within a British Union. Scott in his 1829 General Preface to the Waverley Novels writes that Maria

Edgeworth "may be truly said to have done more toward completing the Union

[of Ireland] than perhaps ail the legislative enactments by which it has been followed ~p".~The same could be said of Scott's Waverley Nouels, which contributed to the ideological solidScation of the Union between Scotland and

England. Smollett was essentially concerned with defusing anti-Scots prejudice. Johnson, although he expressed many anti-Scots comments, exhibited a sincere sympathy for the Highlanders and Islanders. Although he had come too late to study the feudal customs of the Highland clans, he nevertheless tried to investigate the causes of the Highlands' social and econornic transformation, and the way in which this aEected the lives of the inhabitants. However, although his focus in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland was the study of the real Highlands, Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., reveds a certain degree of

"Highlandism" exhibited by both himself and Johnson, a fascination with the

Highland symbols and customs of the mythical Highlands. Macpherson,

He then wishes "something might be attempted for my own country of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland", James F. Robertson, "The Construction and Expression of Scottish Patriotism in the Works of Walter Scott", unpublished doctoral dissertation (Eduiburgh University, 1988),p. 82. Smollett, and Scott all created representations of mythical Scotland.

Macpherson's Ossianic society, presented as history, provided Scotland with a heroic pst. With national pride he asserted that ancient Scotland had produced a civiiized primitive culture and an epic poetical tradition before the other barbarian tribes of Europe. As well, he claimed that the Highlanders were the inheritors of this heroic culture, since their language was "pure and original" and their manners and customs "those of an antient and unmixed race of rnenY3 Smollett's and Scott's "Highland Arcadias" in Humphry Clinker and The Heart of Midlothian, spiritually rejuvenated their characters, Scottish national identity, and the British Union. However, it is Scott's romanticization of Scottish culture, especially located in the Highlands, which has had a more pervasive impact on Scottish nationdism. William Motherwell, quoted in

Lockhart's Introduction to Scott's Poetical Works, wrote of what he perceived to be the Scott Legacy:

Fortunate it was for the heroic and legendary Song of Scotland that the work was undertaken . . . Long will it live, a noble and interesting monument of his unwearied research, curious and minute leaming, genius, and taste. It is truly a patriot's legacy to poste*; and as much as it may now be esteemed, it is only in times yet gathering in the bosom of futurity, when the interesting traditions, the chivalrous and romantic legends, the wild superstitions, the tragic songs of Scotland, have whoIly failed from living memory, that this giR can be duly appreciated. It is then that these volumes will be conned with feelings akin to religious enthusiasm that their strange and mystic lore will be

James Macpherson, "A Dissertation", The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 206. treasured up in the heart as the precious record of days for ever passed away-that their grand stem legends will be Iistened to with reverential awe, as if the voice of a remote ancestor from the depths of the tomb had woke the thrilling strains of martial antiq~ity.~

This clearly associates Scottish history and culture with this mythical image of Scotland, which had been gaining strength since Ossian.

It is sigdïcant to realize that the late eighteenw early nineteenth century perceptions of the Highlands were created mostly by non-Highlanders.

It is also important to discern that much of modern day perceptions of Scottish culture and Scottish national identity is based on this mythical Highlands which Macpherson, Smollett, Johnson, Boswell and Scott al1 invoked. Withers writes that

[t]he Highlands do not figure in the Scottish consciousness in the way they do because of historical and current interest in the material transformation of the Highland society. The region has national associations precisely because it has been made in the minds of outsiders and because the historiographicd creation of how we have believed the Highlands to be has been buth more enduring and more fascinating (and enduring because it has been fascinating) than our knowledge of changes in Highland Meand economy."

This romanticized image of Scotland was perpetuated by later nineteenth and twentieth century writers. Most modern perceptions of Scottish culture revolve

4 Robertson, "The Construction and Expression of Scottish Patriotism", p. 73. Charles Withers, "The Historical Creation of the Scottish Highlands", The Manufacture of Scottish History , eds. Ian Donnachie and Christopher Whatley (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), p. 155. 136 around the mythic structures of tartanry and Kailyard, which seem to dominate Scottish culture." Tartanry refers to the construction of Scottish national and cultural identity around Highland symbols (the kilt and tartan, bagpipes, and Highland Garnes) which seems to have escalated aRer the tirne of Sir Walter Scott and after Queen Victoria purchased Balmoral Castle.

Kailyard refers to the popdar group of minor Scottish writers in the latter half of the nineteenth century who emphasized the picturesque, pastoral scenery, and the sentimental. This mythical national image lost its historical relevance as ScotIand became a modernized industrial nation. However, for Macpherson,

Smollett, Boswell, and Scott, the romantic Highlands had great symbolic force to solve the sociai problems of late eighteentldearly nineteenth century Scottish society and to counteract the profoundly negative anti-Scots prejudice of

English society. Although much of this imagery is based only loosely on historical reality, the romanticization of Highland culture and the

'highlandization' of Scottish national identity served a purpose for these writers. Their representations of Highland culture influenced Scottish national identiQ and ideology signincantly.

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