This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Digging up the Kirkyard: Death, Readership and Nation in the Writings of the Blackwood’s Group 1817-1839. Sarah Sharp PhD in English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2015 2 I certify that this thesis has been composed by me, that the work is entirely my own, and that the work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification except as specified. Sarah Sharp 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Penny Fielding for her continued support and encouragement throughout this project. I am also grateful for the advice of my secondary supervisor Bob Irvine. I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Wolfson Foundation for this project. Special thanks are due to my parents, Andrew and Kirsty Sharp, and to my primary sanity–checkers Mohamad Jahanfar and Phoebe Linton. Finally, I would like to thank my PhD cohort, academic department and friends without whom there would have been many more dismal days on the road to completion. The section on James Hogg’s ‘A Peasant’s Funeral’ beginning on P104 is based on an argument I made in my 2012 MSc thesis, and although the argument has progressed there is a minor overlap between the two accounts. 4 Abstract This dissertation examines the use of images of graveyards and death in the writings of the ‘Blackwood’s group’, a coterie of authors and poets who published their writing either within the influential Tory periodical Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine or with the publisher William Blackwood and Sons in the early decades of the nineteenth century. I argue that Blackwoodian texts like Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822) by John Wilson imagined the rural Scottish graveyard as a repository for the traditional values and social structures which appeared to be under threat in the rapidly modernising British nation. In these texts the kirkyard functions as a key symbolic space, creating an imagined national ‘home’ for British readers in the idealised Scottish village graveyard. This nostalgic pastoral image of the eternal kirkyard is however in opposition to Blackwood’s Magazine’s reputation for violent, urbane wit and sensational gothic stories. The Noctes Ambrosianae and Tales of Terror articulate a modern, masculine and elite image of the magazine which seem at odds with the domestic, pastoral Scottishness offered in the ‘Scotch novels’ and regional tales. William Blackwood’s publishing house and magazine are at once synonymous with two apparently opposing world views and target readerships, and this tension is most strongly articulated in the tidy Scots graves and unburied corpses of the magazine’s fiction. I examine works published by John Wilson, J.G. Lockhart, James Hogg, D.M. Moir, Henry Thomson, Robert McNish, John Galt, Samuel Warren, James Montgomery and Thomas de Quincey, between the magazine’s foundation in 1817 and the increasing defection of these original Blackwoodians to other periodicals and the retirement of the Noctes Ambrosianae series in the late 1830s. I identify a series of conventions associated with an idealised Blackwoodian rural death before examining the ways in which tales where the conventions of this 'good death' and burial are disrupted by crime, bodysnatching, epidemic disease and suicide challenge or reinforce the world view the rural texts articulated. Chapter one focuses on eighteenth-century ideas about death and sociability. Looking at a group of texts which span from Robert Blair’s The Grave (1746) to Edmund Burke’s revolutionary period writings of the 1790s, it traces what Ester Schor has termed a ‘transition from the “natural” sympathies of the Enlightenment to the “political” 5 sympathies of a revolutionary age’ (75). I argue that in particular Edmund Burke’s creation of a conservative image of nation based on tradition and ancestry acted as a foundation for the type of politicised engagement with the dead which characterised the work of the Blackwood’s group. Chapter two builds upon recent identifications of a Blackwoodian regional tale tradition by highlighting the crucial role of death and the kirkyard in this provincial fiction. Placing John Wilson’s highly popular story series Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life in relation to contemporary debates about Evangelical religion, readership and nation, reveals a series of ideas and conventions which can be identified in other rural writing by John Galt, J.G. Lockhart and James Hogg. Having established an image of what a ‘good death’ might look like and stand for within the Blackwoodian imagination, I turn my attention to deaths which do not follow these conventions. Chapter three explores Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’s well- documented fascination with spectacular violence in three of the magazine’s signature Tales of Terror and Thomas De Quincey’s ‘On Murder’ essays (1827, 1839). Chapter four looks at three stories from the magazine which feature bodysnatching, focusing on the role which doctors and provincial communities play within these texts. Chapter five compares responses to the 1832 cholera epidemic by James Montgomery and James Hogg. Finally, Chapter six argues for a reading of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) which foregrounds the role of the suicide’s body within the narrative based on the representations of suicide in contemporary discussion and in Galt’s Annals of the Parish (1821). 6 Contents Statement of Own Work 2 Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 4 Introduction 7 Chapter One- Sympathy, Society and Death before Blackwood’s 34 Chapter Two- The Good Death: Lights and Shadows of Scottish 61 Life and Dying Well in Blackwoodian Regional Fiction. Chapter Three- A Club of ‘Murder-Fanciers’: Violence, Sensation 110 and Readership in ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ and the Tales of Terror Chapter Four- ‘Church Yard Pirates’: Anatomy, Community and 136 the Medical Professional in Blackwood’s Chapter Five- ‘Burking, Bill and Cholera’- Death, Mobility and the 165 1832 British Cholera Epidemic Chapter Six- The Suicide’s Grave: Suicide, Civilisation and the 187 Kirkyard Conclusion 217 Works Cited 224 7 Introduction Welcome to Gandercleugh: Scott’s Tales of my Landlord and the Scottish Regional Tale In the opening pages of Walter Scott’s 1816 novel Old Mortality, fictionalised editor Jedediah Cleishbotham, ‘schoolmaster and Parish-clerk of Gandercleugh’ asserts his imagined Parish’s position in the world: Gandercleugh is, as it were, the central part- the navel (si fas sit dicere) of this our native realm of Scotland; so that men, from every corner thereof, when travelling on their concernments of business, either towards our metropolis of law, by which I mean Edinburgh, or towards our metropolis and mart of gain, whereby I insinuate Glasgow, are frequently led to make Gandercleugh their abiding stage and place of rest for the night. And it must be acknowledged by the most sceptical, that I, who have sat in the leathern armchair, on the left- hand side of the fire, in the common-room of the Wallace Inn, winter and summer, for every evening in my life, during forty years bypast, (the Christian Sabbaths only excepted,) must have seen more of the manners and customs of various tribes and people, than if I had sought them out by my own painful travel and bodily labour (52). Gandercleugh, in Cleishbotham’s world-view, typifies the nature of Scotland in a way that neither ‘our metropolis of law’ nor ‘our metropolis and mart of gain’ can. To sit by the fire of the Wallace Inn is to understand Scotland in a way that the mobile and metropolitan Scots of Glasgow and Edinburgh cannot. As Richard Cronin puts it, Scotland ‘finds its true epitome in the entirely undistinguished village of Gandercleugh’ (83). Cleishbotham subsequently comically supports his own ability to comment on the nation at large by asserting that he has visited Edinburgh twice and Glasgow thrice. This defence of the provincial is a playful pen portrait of Scott’s ficitionalised editor, designed to amuse his increasingly urban and outward looking readership. Cleishbotham is a figure apparently marooned at an Inn fireside; his confidence in his own knowledge of the world evidence of his complete isolation from the rapid changes taking place around him. However, Cronin highlights the fact that by 1816 the publication of a Scott novel had an importance which extended far beyond Scotland. Gandercleugh, within the reading nation, did have the sort 8 of importance which Cleishbotham attributes to it: ‘Tales of my Landlord was a British rather than a Scottish publishing event: Gandercleugh established itself in the closing months of 1816, not at all ironically but as a fact amply borne out by the volume’s sales figures, as the “navel” of the whole United Kingdom’ (83). Cleishbotham’s panegyric on Gandercleugh introduces the second frame narrative of Scott’s novel: the teacher, Peter Pattieson’s, account of a meeting with the ancient Cameronian, Old Mortality, in Gandercleuch’s abandoned cemetery. Pattieson describes his evening stroll to the quiet graveyard which lies ‘up the narrow valley, and in a recess which seems scooped out of the side of the steep heathy bank’ (60).