The International Companion to Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature, edited by Sheila M. Kidd, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, and Kenneth McNeil

Abstract

This companion volume is the third in a series by Scottish Literature International designed to introduce readers to Scottish literature from 1400 to the twentieth century; like earlier volumes, it includes essays that cover a range of authors and genres, written by experts in the field. This particular volume is organized into three parts: Experiments, Consolidations, and Expansions. Each section examines key issues that influenced the development of Scottish literature, with attention paid to social, cultural, religious, and political contexts such as the Reform Act of 1832 and the Great Disruption of 1843, as well as more general developments in print culture and industrialization. The editors’ aim, as stated in their introduction, “The Strangeness of Centuries,” is to explore the nineteenth century as “the great undiscovered country for Scottish literary studies” in order to “remap the century to showcase the complexity of a period and place” (1). The volume achieves this objective, offering detailed and thoughtful analyses of familiar figures such as Walter Scott, John Galt, George MacDonald, and Margaret Oliphant, along with the writings of lesser-known Gaelic authors and urban poets like Evan MacColl, John MacLachlan, Alexander Smith, and James Macfarlan. Trends in genres are also ably assessed, particularly regarding the importance of periodical and newspaper publications in Scotland, along with the development of writing by women and working-class authors throughout the century.The first section, Experiments, highlights the period from 1800 to 1832 as “an age of innovation and expansion in Scottish publishing,” perhaps even a “golden age of print when Scottish cities, particularly Edinburgh, came to rival and sometimes surpass London as the centre of the British book trade” (5). Accordingly, much attention is paid to authors like Walter Scott who “became a phenomenon as the world’s first great literary star” (7) and periodicals such as Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. In the chapter “The Novel: Romance and History,” Pam Perkins discusses Scott’s contributions to the novel genre in Scotland and beyond, finding that his use of romance “becomes a means of establishing the appeal of a lost or distant world” (29). This strategy can also be found in works by other Scottish novelists like Jane Porter, James Hogg, and John Galt, but used for much different purposes. In particular, Galt diverges from Scott by employing “elements of romance to reinforce his unromantic approach to historical narrative” (31). Perkins concludes that in novels of this period, “the nostalgic escapism of romance is associated not so much with a specific past culture as with the form of the novel itself” (32). In the chapter “Private Thoughts and Public Display: Gender, Genre, and Lives,” Susan Oliver also examines Scott’s influence as a celebrity, particularly how he became increasingly “distressed by the incursion of public responsibilities on his personal life” (44). Along with Scott, the notoriety of Lord Byron’s life is discussed, particularly how his own “life writing more than blurred the boundaries between public and private experience, challenging distinctions between conventional autobiographical genres and poetic fiction” (44). In contrast to these famed male authors, Oliver looks at the public reception of Scottish women writers like Susan Ferrier, Mary Brunton, and Elizabeth Grant, with the aim of “advancing understanding of the literary thresholds where private thoughts and public display converge to generate meaning” (49). Other notable chapters in this section include Valentina Bold’s “Inspiring Songs: The Rise of Ballad Culture,” Michael Morris’s “Slavery, Kinship, and Capital,” Barbara Bell’s “Drama and Adaptation,” and Thomas C. Richardson’s “The Short Story to 1832.”The second section, Consolidations, deals with works from 1833 to 1869, described as “a period of literary expression that was both public in direction and popular in reception . . . as markets opened and diversified with an increasingly literate public” (3). Authors featured in this section include the geologist Charles Lyell, essayist and editor Robert Chambers, editor Christian Isobel Johnstone (described as “the first editor of any magazine to be proto-feminist, female, and paid” [74]), and novelists John Galt, James Grant, David Pae, and Margaret Oliphant. In the chapter “Diaries and Letters,” Paul Barnaby assesses the “new model of literary biography” introduced by John Gibson Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, noted for celebrating “a new kind of secular hero who embodied national values and humanized a collective past” (77). Barnaby also reviews the life writings of Henry Cockburn, Thomas Carlyle, and Queen Victoria, claiming of the latter’s Highland Journals that “Victoria is self-consciously fashioning a model of sovereignty that welcomes the hitherto marginalised Highlands into the imperial project” (84). In the chapter “Travel Writing about the Highlands in the Nineteenth Century,” Nigel Leask notes that tours of the Highlands during this period offered “Britain’s newly affluent middle classes the powerful associational frisson of literary and imaginative geographies than it had done in the previous century” (149). Among the key tourist sites at this time were Fingal’s Cave on Staffa, Robert Burns’s birthplace cottage in Alloway, and the Trossachs, made famous by Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake.” Leask examines the Highlands travel writings of Queen Victoria (as seen above), Ann Grant of Laggan, David Stewart of Garth, John Macculloch, and Alexander Smith, concluding that this body of writing demonstrates much “richness, variety, and depth of social concern” (155). Noteworthy chapters from this section also include Alison Jack’s “Religion and Popular Literature in Scotland: The Literary Imagination as Inspiration,” Regina Hewitt’s “Social Comment,” Sheila M. Kidd’s “Gaelic Literature of the Diaspora,” and Joanne Wilkes’s “Industrial-Strength Fiction: Margaret Oliphant and James Grant.”The third section, Expansions, envisions the period from 1870 to 1900 as “an era of continued advancement in communication, distribution, and technology . . . looking both inward and outward in the search for new and profitable arrangements and additional markets” (156). Key figures from this section are editor William Robertson Nicoll, scientist James Clerk Maxwell (of “Maxwell’s Demon” fame), anthropologist James George Frazer, and authors Patrick Geddes, William Sharp (writing as “Fiona MacLeod”), Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, and George MacDonald. Kirstie Blair’s chapter “City Songs” explores the writing of urban poets unafraid to confront “the ‘nasty realities’ of the industrial city,” particularly Glasgow (161). Owing to Glasgow’s Citizen newspaper (which Blair states “played an important role in fostering the careers of several working-class writers” [163]), urban poets like Alexander Smith and James Macfarlan were able to convey the ambiguous appeal of the industrial city, representing it in their works as “a monstrous site of noise and fire, yet also possess[ing] its own strikingly modern beauty” (165). In the chapter “The International Author: Stevenson,” Lesley Graham evaluates the “global spread of Stevenson’s footprint through the publication, distribution, adaptation, and translation of his work outside Britain,” noting nineteenth-century translations of his works into French, Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish (188). Graham discusses the challenges Stevenson faced with pirated editions of his work, observing for example that “foreign authors received no copyright protection in the United States . . . [and] the accepted practice for American publishers was simply to reprint their works without paying the author” (190). However, after the passing of the International Copyright Law in 1891, Stevenson became “the first bankable Scottish writer to capitalise on the burgeoning international market” (191). Other chapters of interest in this section are Priscilla Scott’s “Gaelic Political Poetry 1870–1900,” Andrew Nash’s “The Kailyard Novelists,” Michael Shaw’s “Celticists and Anthropologists,” and Julia Reid’s “Science and Speculation.”As a whole, the volume provides useful and well-developed introductions to Scottish literature of the nineteenth century. There are some areas where one wishes for further discussion and analysis; for instance, consideration of the Scottish Gothic is largely confined to Walter Scott’s works, with very little acknowledgment of the Gothic contributions of James Hogg, Margaret Oliphant, and Robert Louis Stevenson. In addition, although there is ample treatment of Gaelic verse throughout the century, there is very little analysis of Scots writings by major poets and songwriters such as Hogg, Robert Tannahill, and Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne. Discussion of Robert Burns’s continuing influence on Scottish poets like Hogg, Thomas Campbell, and Allan Cunningham would have also been welcome, as well as analysis of Burns’s role in the emergence of the “Kailyard” school at the end of the century. Some other major authors from this period might have been examined in greater depth; for instance, Thomas Carlyle, Lord Byron, and Joanna Baillie merited more attention. That said, the volume succeeds in representing the period in all its complexity and remapping the “great undiscovered country” of nineteenth-century Scottish literature.