Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh

By Ian Duncan

Scott's Shadow is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life.


Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century. Duncan goes on to examine in detail how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations--James Hogg and John Galt in particular--produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history.



Scott's Shadow illuminates a major but neglected episode of British Romanticism as well as a pivotal moment in the history and development of the novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Aug 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781400884308

Book preview

Cover: Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh by Ian Duncan.

Scott’s Shadow

Literature in History

______________Series Editors______________

David Bromwich, James Chandler, and Lionel Gossman

The books in this series study literary works

in the context of the intellectual conditions,

social movements, and patterns of action

in which they took shape.

Other Books in the Series

Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton

Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels: With New Essays on Scott

Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination

Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader

Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria

Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850

Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire

Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family

Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature

William Keach, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, and Politics

Scott’s Shadow

The Novel in

Romantic Edinburgh

Ian Duncan

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duncan, Ian.

Scott’s shadow : the novel in Romantic Edinburgh / Ian Duncan.

p. cm. — (Literature in history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-04383-8 (acid-free paper)

1. English fiction—Scottish authors—History and criticism. 2. English

fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Scott, Walter, Sir,

1771–1832—Influence. 4. Romanticism—Scotland. 5. Nationalism

in literature. 6. National characteristics, Scottish, in literature.

7. Scotland—In literature. 8. Modernism (Literature)—Scotland.

9. Edinburgh (Scotland)—Intellectual life—19th century. I. Title.

PR8601.D86 2007

823.0099411—dc22 2007061023

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Part I

Chapter 1

Edinburgh, Capital of the Nineteenth Century

A King and No King

The Modern Athens

A Post-Enlightenment

Scotch Novel Writing

Chapter 2

The Invention of National Culture

A Scottish Romanticism

From Political Economy to National Culture

A fast middle-point, and grappling-place

Patriarch of the National Poetry of Scotland

Chapter 3

Economies of National Character

Dirt

Purity

Beauty

Enjoyment

Traffic

Chapter 4

Modernity’s Other Worlds

Scott’s Highlands

Topologies of Modernization

Inside and Outside the Wealth of Nations

Modernity’s Other Worlds

Chapter 5

The Rise of Fiction

Seeing Nothing

The Sphere of Common Life

The Rise of the Novel and the Rise of Fiction

Fiction and Belief

Historical Fiction

After History

Part II

Chapter 6

Hogg’s Body

Ettrick Shepherd

Hogg’s Scrapes

Men of Letters

Border Minstrels

The Suicide’s Grave

Organic Form

Chapter 7

The Upright Corpse

The Mountain and Fairy School

Leagues and Covenants

Magical Realism

The Upright Corpse

Resurrection Men

Chapter 8

Theoretical Histories of Society

Local Theoretical History

Exemplarity: Annals of the Parish

Ideology: The Provost

Plot: The Entail

Chapter 9

Authenticity Effects

Post-Enlightenment Postmodernism

Revolutionary History

Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium

Technologies of Self and Other

Authenticity Effects

Chapter 10

A New Spirit of the Age

A Paper Economy

The Spirit of the Time

Recessional

Notes

Bibliography

Early Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

Sources Published before 1900

Sources Published after 1900

Index

Illustrations

Frontispiece   The Victorian cult of the author. Frontispiece to J.G. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart .

1.1  The post-Enlightenment era of The Modern Athens, from T. H. Shepherd, Modern Athens: Displayed in a Series of Views, or, Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century (1829), title page.

1.2  The Regency triumphalism of Waterloo Place—with the National Monument in the background.

1.3  Calton Hill, its romantic prospects newly illustrated by Turner, from Walter Scott, Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland (1820).

1.4  The site of ambitious plans for a monumental acropolis. An imaginary view of Calton Hill.

9.1  It bears the stamp of authenticity in every line, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), facsimile and title page.

9.2  A figure as closely veiled and wimpled as the hermaphrodite Nature of Spenser’s Mutability Cantoes, Robert Chambers, Illustrations of the Author of Waverley (1825), frontispiece and title page.

9.3  Astute readers would have recognized the bust behind the veil. Henry Raeburn’s portrait of Scott (1808), commissioned by Constable and engraved by J. Horsburgh.

Frontispiece: The Victorian cult of the author (see p. 281). Frontispiece to J. G. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (London: A. & C. Black, 1896); reproduced from the Abbotsford Edition of the Waverley Novels. Author’s collection.

Preface

Scott’s Shadow explores the distinctive literary field that flourished in Edinburgh between 1802, the year of the founding of the Edinburgh Review, and 1832, the year of the Reform Bill and the death of Sir Walter Scott. In those decades Scottish publications and genres dominated a globalizing English-language market and made Edinburgh a literary metropolis to rival London. The forms, discourses, and institutions produced there shaped an imperial British culture that lasted throughout the century, long after Edinburgh’s relapse to provincial status. They included definitive versions of the prose genres, fictional and periodical, that informed the nineteenth-century reading public; figureheads of an industrial mode of literary production, the professional author and entrepreneurial publisher; antithetical discourses of political economy and national culture that together would structure a Victorian liberal-conservative ideology; and that ideology’s self-reflexive formal principle of fictional realism.

Current disciplinary history holds that the modern category of literature in English emerged conceptually in the Romantic period, as the fictional genres of prose, verse, and drama disaggregated from the general field of written discourse that Enlightenment intellectuals called the Republic of Letters.¹ The Republic of Letters was, at least nominally, a cosmopolitan domain—if restricted to gentlemen—and the disaggregation of literature brought a compensatory investment with nationalist associations and ideologies as well as with a deep appeal to the people. Edinburgh provides an exceptionally clear view of this general transformation, in part because of the infrastructural shift that took place from the university curriculum, matrix of the projects of Enlightenment, to an industrializing literary marketplace, in the publishing boom of the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

This book focuses on Scott, the dominant figure in literary Edinburgh, and on the novel, the genre that made modernization and national life its themes, in the decade or so from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the publishing crash of 1825–26. Scott’s novels saturated the British fiction market, outselling all other novels combined; their claim on the cultural authority of the Enlightenment human sciences, as well as their artistic prowess, helped win them an overwhelming critical prestige; and their author stood at the center of the regional network of Tory patronage in unreformed Scotland.² This unprecedented ascendancy makes the reassessment of Scott’s achievement critical for any understanding of the larger scene and period, and it provides the organizing topic of Scott’s Shadow.

Accounts of Scott’s famous invention, the historical novel, have typically specified historicism as its key component, as though Scott chose to write history in the guise of fiction. Scott’s Shadow takes seriously the invention’s other term, fiction: the quality that differentiates the novel from other narrative genres, such as history, and renders its formal autonomy in the period.³ Scott’s historicization of fiction elicits not fiction’s absorption into history but its full categorical emergence, which made possible the Victorian primacy of the novel as a representation of national life. Elsewhere I have shown how the eighteenth-century revival of vernacular, premodern, and indigenous cultural forms supplied a repertoire for that representation, under the sign of romance.⁴ In these pages I shall argue that philosophical authority for the claim on fiction as the medium for reality, instead of its antithesis, was developed in Scottish Enlightenment empiricism. Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature provided a theoretical basis for that fundamental practice of modern ideology—acquiescence without belief, crediting without credulousness,⁵ that would find its technical realization in the Waverley novels.

Scott’s centrality in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh constitutes him as the figure I call Scott’s shadow. The term refers not only to Scott’s influence, and the turbulent formation of Scottish Romanticism as a force field of that influence, in which other writers were compelled to accept, refuse, or work through their configuration as shades of Scott. It designates Scott’s own presence in the field, which was not reducible to any of his various public, private, and secret personae—not even to that of the Author of Waverley and his avatars, refracted through the formal anonymity of the Great Unknown. A shadow—and an impersonal author is nothing better—can cast no shade, equivocates the Eidolon, or Representation, of the Author of Waverley, in one of his manifestations in a series of novel prefaces published at the height of the Scottish fiction boom in the early 1820s.⁶ Bearded in the recesses of Constable’s shop, publishing powerhouse of the Waverley novels and the Edinburgh Review, the Eidolon considers the question: What is an author? Refuting Adam Smith, this shadow affirms that a successful author is a productive labourer whose bales of books should not be esteemed a less profitable part of the public stock than the goods of any other manufacture. At the same time, authors should aspire to a professional ideal: the lawyer who pleads, the soldier who fights, the physician who prescribes, the clergyman . . . who preaches, without any zeal for their profession, without any sense of its dignity, and merely on account of their fee, pay, or stipend, degrade themselves to the rank of sordid mechanics . . . it is the same thing with literary emolument (14). Constable’s shop opens onto one of those subterranean interiors of the Edinburgh Old Town, a "labyrinth of small dark rooms, or crypts (4), at the center of which (a vaulted room, dedicated to secrecy and silence) the Eidolon makes his unashamedly worldly apology, assuming the double guise of garrulous humdrum gentleman and sublime archetypal phantasm—a magna parens, as closely veiled and wimpled" as Spenser’s hermaphrodite demiurge Nature (5). Scott’s frank location of his authorial function at the core of a capitalist mode of literary production discovers it as an underworld of occult procreative powers.⁷

This complex, self-baffling recognition, at once demystifying and remystifying, differentiates Scott’s Edinburgh from the later nineteenth-century literary field analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu. In Flaubert’s Paris, according to Bourdieu, the imaginary autonomy of the work of art relies on an antithetical inversion of the political economy of industrial capitalism.⁸ Fiction in the Age of Scott, however, asserts its peculiar character in terms of a ghostly relation to the market, to reality: one of doubling or repetition—haunting—rather than transcendence. What Bourdieu calls the charismatic rupture between art and money has not yet opened in Edinburgh in the early 1820s; on the contrary, a newly totalizing convergence of art and money generates charisma.⁹ Or rather, charisma is generated by the immanence of the rupture in the convergence, as art and money uncannily double one another. The Edinburgh post-Enlightenment bloomed around a complex of anxieties about the institutional relation of literature to politics and commerce (Bourdieu’s field of power) in the wake of the French Revolution, which moved a succession of attempts to define a separate public sphere, prefiguring, although still far from enunciating, a domain of aesthetic autonomy. The Edinburgh Review sought to revive the Republic of Letters within the marketplace and at the same time to raise it above industrial conditions by claiming professional distinction, and thus scientific and judicial disinterestedness, for literary work—as Scott’s Eidolon insists. The Tory writers at Blackwood’s Magazine accused the Edinburgh Review of debauching literature with politics under the cloak of that claim, and countered it with the appeal to a profound conception of national tradition, which accommodated, in turn, their own, more aggressive politicization, the bad faith of which was not so much disavowed as acted out in a relentlessly ironic and satirical infestation of periodical writing with fictional devices. The Blackwoodians conscripted Scott’s historical fiction as the solemn template for their imperial ideal of national culture, recasting the nineteenth-century public as a reading nation that consumed romance as history.

Massively influential, the Blackwoodian takeover of Scott for a Romantic cultural nationalism retains currency today, in disparaging characterizations of the Waverley novels as tools of a factitious invention of Scotland, a delusional substitution of romance for real history.¹⁰ Such accounts mystify Scott’s fictional practice by severing it from its Humean roots, as I show in chapter 2. It was their professedly inauthentic status as works of fiction that allowed Scott’s novels to float above local partisan alignments (however embroiled their author) and invoke a national public, as some of Scott’s liberal opponents, including William Hazlitt and Harriet Martineau, would acknowledge. Fictional status, reflexively insistent in Scott’s writing, provided for the doubled consciousness—of a skeptical disillusionment from reality and a sentimental attachment to reality as illusion—rehearsed in the self-representation of the Eidolon of the Author of Waverley. Scott’s Shadow restores to view this Humean legacy, characterized as Romantic irony or a proleptic postmodernism in some of the most acute recent Scott criticism.¹¹

Scholars have sought to analyze the reenchantments of literature as it shifts into industrial production in the Romantic age. Deidre Lynch evokes the Romantic library as haunted enclosure of a strange time of posthumousness, vibrant with telepathic yearnings between readers and ghostly—dead or absent—authors.¹² Contemporary authors in Scott’s shadow testified to a more troublesome haunting of the scene of writing. The mighty spirit of the Magician has already so filled the labyrinth of Romance, that it is not easy to venture within its precincts, without feeling his influence, murmured one of Scott’s fainter disciples.¹³ More ambitiously, James Hogg wrote the Magician into his own romances in a bold series of attempts to command or exorcize that influence. Scott’s preternatural dominion over so condensed and layered a terrain as Romantic Edinburgh intensified the strife of authorial position takings that internally structure a literary field.¹⁴ The second part of Scott’s Shadow looks in detail at the rival projects of Scottish fiction by Hogg, John Galt, Christian John-stone, and others, as well as Scott’s responses to them, that proliferated in the 1820s, composing a major episode in the history of British fiction as well as a major scene of British Romanticism. While some of those other projects and careers have returned to view, most spectacularly Hogg’s, Scott’s Shadow undertakes the first comprehensive critical study of them.¹⁵

Romantic-period Edinburgh has been all but invisible in modern literary studies. Recent scholarship has begun to address the interrelation of national, regional, and imperial sites of production in the cultural history of the long eighteenth century, and to reevaluate the Scottish contribution to the projects of British Romanticism.¹⁶ Scott’s Shadow, aligning itself with and owing much to these studies, differs from them in sustaining an intensive focus on the Edinburgh post-Enlightenment. Its focus is more local and period-specific than that of Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism, the authoritative recent treatment of British fiction in the period, which ranges across a century of Irish, Welsh, English, and North American as well as Scottish writing and an array of nationalist genres besides the novel. Scott’s Shadow departs from Bardic Nationalism in making Scott’s centrality its topic, rather than displacing it—a move which, while recovering hitherto overshadowed alternative projects, tends to reconstitute the Great Unknown as a kind of dark matter in the Romantic universe. Ina Ferris’s The Achievement of Literary Authority, the other influential study of Scott’s novels and their local contexts, examines the impact of Waverley in relation to the Edinburgh Review and early Irish national tales as well as the rival fictions by Hogg and Galt that issued through the Old Mortality controversy. Scott’s Shadow revisits that terrain, but weights its inquiry towards the postwar periodical matrix of Blackwood’s and a more comprehensive examination of Scottish novels and careers.¹⁷ Much of the revisionary work that has followed Ferris and Trumpener seeks to dismantle the trope of Scott’s originality by celebrating dissident and precursor projects of national and historical fiction, eclipsed by the global media triumph of the Waverley novels and their Victorian monumentalization.¹⁸ Valuable, indeed necessary as that work has been, it has not always avoided a reductive or zero-sum accounting of the oppositions on which it mounts its case. Understanding originality and influence as dialectically productive conditions and effects of literary work, Scott’s Shadow attends to the generative rather than restrictive force of Scott’s impact on prose fiction in the Romantic period.

Chapter 1 of Scott’s Shadow sketches an archaeology of the Edinburgh literary field and Scottish fiction that provides a formal introduction to the book. Besides the rise of the Scottish novel, the postwar decade (1815–25) saw the rise of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: the archetype of Romantic miscellanies, wellspring of nonnovelistic fictional experiments and regional base camp for alternative projects to the Waverley novels. Blackwood’s accommodates the belated theorization of a Scottish Romanticism in the form of an aesthetic ideology of cultural nationalism, which provides the topic of the second chapter. Chapter 3 contextualizes Scott’s achievement with a discussion of the Scottish school of domestic national fiction that took its cue from Maria Edgeworth. Chapter 4 turns to Scott, and to the critical consensus that has cast Scott’s novels as the ideological engines of an Anglo-British internal colonialism. The chapter reorientates the discussion of Scott by examining Scott’s own reorientation of Waverley, and of the progressive plot of Enlightenment stadial history (i.e., a history articulated by stages of economic and social development), in the later Highland romance Rob Roy. Chapter 5 discovers the philosophical source for Scott’s work of fiction in Humean empiricism.

The second half of the book looks at the field of influence constituted by Scott’s shadow in rival projects of Scottish fiction in the early 1820s, focusing on the entangled projects of Hogg, Galt, and Scott himself. Chapter 6 revisits, through Hogg’s career, the sociology of the Edinburgh literary scene and its mixed culture of patronage, commerce, and professionalism analyzed in the first chapter. The chapter reads Hogg’s inset allegories of his relationship with Scott as he turned from ballad-based poetry to novel-length prose fiction, as well as the outrageous fictionalization of an all-too-organic Hogg in Blackwood’s. Chapter 7 reads Hogg’s novelistic (or counternovelistic) experiments with the forms and figures of popular tradition. These express, through tropes of cannibalism and the upright corpse, an increasingly resolute resistance to the ideology of Enlightenment progress and the cultural historiography of loss and salvage that Hogg associated with Scott. Hogg’s resistance to the scheme is so violent that it demands a different critical vocabulary, and I have drawn on psychoanalytic theories of incorporation and the uncanny as offering the best entry into his work. John Galt, the subject of chapter 8, offers the converse case: where Hogg claimed a rival position by repudiating Scott’s dialectic of improvement, Galt seeks a more rigorous fictionalization of Enlightenment conjectural history, undisfigured by residual artifices of romance. Yet, after all, Galt found himself struggling with allegorical and romance plotting, and with the large-scale novelistic forms associated with Scott, in his most ambitious works. Chapter 9 offers a summation of the themes of Scott’s Shadow in the triangulation of masterpieces by Galt, Hogg, and Scott from 1823–24. If Redgauntlet offers a virtuoso reaffirmation of Scott’s aesthetic of Romantic skepticism, set against Galt’s formal and ideological revision of historical romance in Ringan Gilhaize, Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—the astounding terminus to which several preceding chapters have been tending—obliterates both positions. Chapter 10, a coda, tracks the dissolution of the literary field of Scottish Romanticism through three stages: Christian Johnstone’s 1827 novel Elizabeth de Bruce, which registers the saturation and exhaustion of the genre; the outbreak of liberal magazines in Edinburgh around the 1832 Reform legislation and Scott’s death, which, among their proclamations of signs of the times, attempt to redeem the Waverley novels from Tory bondage for a progressive spirit of the age; and lastly, Carlyle’s programmatic disintegration of the literary and ideological forms of the Edinburgh post-Enlightenment (the novel, conjectural history, national culture, common life) in that climactic specimen of Blackwood’s-style serial, fusing fiction with cultural critique, Sartor Resartus.

It has taken me far longer than it should have done to write this book, and I have accumulated many debts along the way. First thanks must go to my resourceful and meticulous research assistants, Nick Nace and Slavica Naumovska, who have prevented many inaccuracies, great and small. Princeton University Press has blessed me with a succession of astonishingly tolerant editors: Bob Brown, Mary Murrell, and latterly Hanne Winarsky, who has seen the project to completion with apparently imperturbable patience and good humor. I thank Kathy Cioffi, the most scrupulous and discreet of copyeditors, and an exemplary production team at Princeton under Ellen Foos. The editors of the Literature and History series—David Bromwich, James Chandler, and Lionel Gossman—encouraged this project from the very start. I could not have wished for better press readers, as supportive as they were exigent, than Ina Ferris, Susan Manning, and the anonymous third reviewer. I owe a particular debt to Jim Chandler and to Douglas Mack, who also read the entire MS, and have been models of unstinting generosity as well as inspiration over the years. My greatest thanks go to my best critic, Ayşe Agiş, for her intellectual companionship and love.

Research on Scott’s Shadow has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Smart Family Foundation, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University; from the Barbara and Carlisle Moore endowment and the Oregon Humanities Center at the University of Oregon; and from the Committee on Research of the Academic Senate and the Division of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities supported a visiting fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where I began my research; I was also able to pursue my work as a short-term guest of the Programme in Modern Scottish Thought at the University of Edinburgh, the Noted Scholars Program at the University of British Columbia, and the Department of Literature at the University of Konstanz. I thank my hosts, friends and colleagues-for-a-season, Peter Jones, Penny Fielding, Cairns Craig, Miranda Burgess, and Silvia Mergenthal. I am also grateful to the staff of the university libraries at Yale, Oregon, and Berkeley, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Edinburgh City Libraries, and the Edinburgh University Library.

It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge friends, colleagues, students, and teachers at the English departments where I have been lucky enough to have taught and studied while at work on this book. In New Haven, besides names already mentioned, Dick Brodhead, Jill Campbell, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Kevin Dunne, Lynn Enterline, Elizabeth Fowler, Paul Fry, Suzanne Fusso, Sara Suleri Goodyear, Lanny Hammer, Geoffrey Hartman, John Hollander, Suzanne Keen, Jacques Lezra, Victor Luftig, David Marshall, Linda Peterson, Martin and Mary Price, Lawrence Rainey, Claude Rawson, Patricia Spacks, Howard Stern, Gordon Turn-bull, Lynn Wardley, Sandy Welsh, Laura Wexler, Sarah Winter, Suzanne Wofford, and Mark Wollaeger all had an impact on this work in ways of which they may never have been aware. The Yale diaspora has kept other friendships warm: David Hensley, David Kaufmann, Maggie Kilgour, Scott Klein, Steven Meyer, Sophia Padnos, Leah Price, Jahan Ramazani, and Jennifer Wagner-Lawler. I salute the generosity and enthusiasm of friends, former colleagues, and dissertation students in Eugene: Liz Bohls, Ken Calhoon, George Cusack, Dianne Dugaw, Rachel Foster, John Gage, Sarah Goss, Roland Greene, Clare Lees, Randy McGowen, Paul Peppis, Amanda Powell, Tres Pyle, Eric Reimer, Bill Rossi, David Sandner, Steve Shankman, Dick Stein, Richard Stevenson, Tom Tracy, Bianca Tredennick, Julian Weiss, Molly Westling, George Wickes, Harry Wonham, and the late Carlisle Moore. Here in Berkeley I thank Janet Adelman, Mark Allison, Ann Banfield, Kelvin Black, Mitch Breitwieser, Janet Broughton, Anne-Lise François, Cathy Gallagher, Steve Goldsmith, Kevis Goodman, Jared Greene, Rae Greiner, Dori Hale, Nick Howe, Priya Joshi, Lewis Klausner, Celeste Langan, Jennifer Miller, Kent Puckett, Padma Rangarajan, Sue Schweik, Monica Soare, George Starr, James Turner, Leslie Walton, and Alex Zwerdling.

Extramurally, I thank the friends and collaborators on various projects that have fed into this book: Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen, Gill Hughes, Ann Rowland and Charles Snodgrass, and Murray Pittock. My work has been nourished over the years by the communities of scholars of Scott and Hogg, Scottish studies, studies in the novel, Romanticism, and the nineteenth century. Some of them have read or heard parts of this, and some of them said helpful things they will no doubt have forgotten: besides those I have mentioned above, they are Ian Alexander, Sharon Alker, Steven Arata, Nancy Armstrong, Alyson Bardsley, John Barrell, Guinn Batten, Ian Baucom, John Bender, David Brewer, Marshall Brown, Margaret Bruzelius, Jim Buzard, Joe Carroll, Siobhan Carroll, Claire Connolly, Robert Crawford, Janette Currie, Jenny Davidson, David Duff, Hans de Groot, Simon Edwards, Mary Favret, Peter Garside, Luke Gibbons, Denise Gigante, Suzanne Gilbert, Nancy Goslee, Evan Gottlieb, Tony Hasler, David Hewitt, Bob Irvine, Catherine Jones, Jon Klancher, Andrew Lincoln, Alison Lumsden, Deidre Lynch, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Jerry McGann, Maureen McLane, Ken McNeil, Richard Maxwell, Franco Moretti, Nicholas Phillipson, John Plotz, Fiona Robertson, the late Jill Rubenstein, Meg Russett, Mark Schoenfield, Jonah Segal, Clare Simmons, David Simpson, Katie Trumpener, Graham Tulloch, Enrica Villari, Tara Wallace, and Matt Wickman.

Parts of the work in progress were delivered as lectures and papers at various institutions, conferences, and symposiums over the last dozen or so years. I thank my hosts and colleagues, in addition to those already named, especially Jonathan Allison, Kevin Gilmartin, Greg Kucich, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Loretta Innocenti, Catherine Kerrigan, Michael Moses, Thomas Pfau, and Charlotte Sussman. In recent years I revised the manuscript in balmy circumstances on the southwest coast of Turkey, and I have to thank visiting family and friends for their forbearance while I shut myself away for the large part of the day: Hamish and Maureen Duncan; Rory, Victoria, Fern, and Aeneas Duncan; Godfrey Bird; Saime Ünlüsoy; and Fethiye Çetin.

Shorter versions of the A King and No King and The Modern Athens sections of chapter 1 and part of the Scottish Romanticism section of chapter 2 have appeared in Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, edited by James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 45–64; part of chapter 2 also appeared as "Blackwood’s and Romantic Nationalism" in Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930, edited by David Finkelstein (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 70–89; a version of chapter 4 appeared as "Primitive Inventions: Rob Roy, Nation and World System" in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2002): 81–102, and an excerpt from chapter 5 appeared in a special issue (edited by Lene Østermark-Johansen) of Angles on the English Speaking World 3 (2003): 63–76; the Suicide’s Grave and Organic Form sections of chapter 6 and the Magical Realism, Upright Corpse, and Resurrection Men sections of chapter 7 appeared in a series of articles in Studies in Hogg and His World (1993–98); and a few pages of the Post-Enlightenment Post-modernism section and all of the Authenticity Effects section in chapter 9 appeared as Authenticity Effects: The Work of Fiction in Romantic Scotland in SAQ 102, no. 1 (2003): 93–116. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to reprint the revised versions in this book. I thank the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland for permission to publish excerpts from manuscript and printed materials in their holdings, and the Edinburgh Central Library and the National Galleries of Scotland for permission to reproduce the images.

Part One

Chapter 1

Edinburgh, Capital of the Nineteenth Century

How high the situation of poor Scotland . . . in arts, in arms, and in literature—her universities every year more crowded—her philosophers advancing with so proud a career in the field of science—her little junta of accomplished men in the first literary journal that ever appeared in any country, giving law to the republic of letters—her moralists improving—her poets delighting the world.

—Christian Isobel Johnstone, The Saxon and the Gaël; or, The Northern Metropolis (1814)

The poets, the orators, and the lawyers, of the flat Boetian region of the dull and muddy Thames, being under the influence of the envious spirit of conscious inferiority, make a point of rarely noticing the pre-eminent endowments of the northern Athenians. . . . The whole English people, the Irish, and all Europe, are chagrined at the superiority of the wise and learned of Edinburgh; yea, every other town that participates in the intellectualising keenness of the Scottish air, turns the sharpness of its wits against the pretensions of the provincial capital.

—John Galt, Glenfell; or, Macdonalds and Campbells. An Edinburgh Tale of the Nineteenth Century (1820)

The tartan robe (which has got into vogue in France and Flanders) adorns the London fair ones; the border and other minstrelsy delight the lovers of literature; the Scottish novels turn the heads of the readers of light matter, and even those of the second class are found to amuse their perusers; the stage teems with imitations and representations from the former.

—Felix MacDonogh, The Hermit in Edinburgh: or, Sketches of Manners and Real Characters and Scenes in the Drama of Life (1824)

A King and No King

In the early afternoon of 14 August 1822, the yacht The Royal George with its naval and civilian escort cast anchor off the Edinburgh port of Leith. Heavy rain postponed the King’s landing until the following day. At about half past two on 15 August, a naval barge drew alongside the royal yacht, bearing, among other dignitaries, the home secretary, Robert Peel, and Sir Walter Scott, whose baronetcy had been gazetted on George IV’s accession to the throne two years earlier. Sir Walter Scott! exclaimed the King; The man in Scotland I most wish to see! Let him come up.¹

No reigning monarch had visited Scotland since its incorporation into the British state at the Treaty of Union in 1707. Under Scott’s careful management, the King’s Jaunt unfolded as a fortnight-long pageant of antique ceremonies—most of which were made up for the occasion.² Here, in one of the centers of the European Enlightenment, Scott staged the sovereign’s relation to the ancient kingdom of Scotland as the primitive, patriarchal relation of a Highland chieftain to his clan. The return of the king conjured up a vanished social formation. At the height of a new wave of forced clearances of tenantry to make way for sheep, Scott wrote to Highland landlords exhorting them to bring their traditional tail of kilted and armed retainers, and published a pamphlet instructing gentlemen attending the Grand Ball at the George Street Assembly Rooms to wear the ancient Highland costume. The King himself appeared at his Holyrood Levee in an extravagant outfit (it cost £1,354. 18s. 0d.) of scarlet philabeg, jewelled weapons, and pink satin drawers. George was wearing the Royal Stuart plaid of his own grandfather’s dynastic rival. With lavish insistence, the pageantry of the royal visit kept alluding to the last occasion on which Edinburgh had been visited by a claimant to the throne of Scotland—an outlaw one. Seventy-seven years earlier, for a few momentous days in September 1745, Prince Charles Edward Stuart had occupied the city with an army composed largely of Highlanders, whom many of the inhabitants regarded as savage banditti.

Commentators then and since have deplored the King’s Jaunt as a garish travesty—the iconographic investiture of the British monarchy, as well as Scotland’s postnational identity, with a bogus, retro-Jacobite, Highland pageantry. Much of that commentary has satisfied itself with denouncing the phoniness of Scott’s invention of Scotland as a nation of Highlanders and Jacobites doing homage to a Hanoverian king.³ But in identifying the gouty ageing dandy, legitimate George, with the defeated but glamorous Chevalier, in dressing metropolitan Scotland in the robes of its desolated Gaelic hinterland, in redeeming a lost national cause for a modern imperial triumphalism, Scott was far from being the dupe of an antiquarian nostalgia. This was no deluded abolition of modernity for a regression to misty origins. Scott was assembling a gaudily up-to-date national spectacle that relied on the availability of sovereignty—its mystic link with the past decisively broken—as a sign among other signs that gathered its meaning in public circulation and consumption.

The political purpose of the Jaunt was clear at the time. The King’s Scottish excursion followed a visit to Ireland the previous year: no doubt the tour of the Celtic provinces would endow the monarch with a measure of public dignity in the wake of the Queen Caroline scandal. In Scotland, the mass spectacle of sovereignty and reciprocal loyalty symbolically repaired the rifts of post-Union history: not just the dynastic conflict of the preceding century, but more recent civil tensions. Postwar recession and unemployment had driven the struggle over constitutional reform, muted for two decades by anti-Jacobin repression and war with France, to crisis pitch. Government spies, dragoons, and magistrates had put down working-class unrest in the western Lowlands only two years earlier, with exemplary ferocity. A journalistic warfare waged between Edinburgh and Glasgow Whigs and Tories set gentlemen as well as hacks (the difference was not always evident) at one another’s throats in libels, lawsuits, brawls, and duels—James Stuart of Dunearn had shot dead Sir Alexander Boswell, son of the biographer, as recently as March 1822. The Scots Tory administrative junta, vexed by the clamor for reform, was attempting to shore up its legitimacy by laying claim to a transcendental national interest. In staging the royal visit as a mass loyalist pageant, Scott and his collaborators sought to replicate the outbursts of public festivity that had greeted the news of Napoleon’s defeat in the spring of 1814 and again the following year after Waterloo.⁴ Some of the devices of these victory celebrations—parades, fireworks, illuminations, allegorical transparencies, the lighting of a beacon on top of Arthur’s Seat—were repeated in 1822 (not always successfully: rain made the beacon a damp squib). The most suggestive of these recyclings was a double one: the adoption of Jacobite tokens such as the white cockade and tartan. In 1814–15 these had expressed solidarity with the House of Bourbon, restored to the French throne after a cataclysmic interlude. In 1822 they identified the once-revolutionary House of Hanover with the anciens régimes restored across Europe at the Congress of Vienna. The King’s Visit staged the spectacle of legitimacy itself as a neoabsolutist politics: in William Hazlitt’s sardonic phrase, ingrafting the principles of the House of Stuart on the illustrious stock of the House of Brunswick.⁵

The most elaborate of the loyalist accounts of the Visit took the form of a commemorative Royal Number of the vanguard Tory organ Black-wood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Christopher North’s closing sonnet To the King (printed in red capital letters) follows a three-act episode of the satirical dialogue series Noctes Ambrosianae, which shamelessly identifies the interests of the sovereign with Blackwood’s Magazine. Mr. Black-wood and his literati descend upon a local farmhouse. This is maist as gude’s a visit frae the King himself, cheers the Gudeman. His wife praises the magazine: Siccan a buik I never read afore. It gars ane laugh, they canna tell how; and a’ the time ye ken what ye’re reading is serious, too—Naething ill in’t, but a’ gude—supporting the kintra, and the King, and the kirk.⁶ An item by the premier Blackwood’s author of the day illustrates, however, the complexity of responses to the King’s Jaunt even within the Tory camp.

The title of John Galt’s comic sketch, The Gathering of the West, mocks the strategy of Scott’s pageant. Instead of the Gathering of the Clans, that topos of Jacobite revival, Galt narrates an invasion of Edinburgh by the citizens of its great industrial rival, the economic power-house of Scottish modernity as well as of the radical distemper which lately raged in the west⁷—Glasgow and its outlying ports and burghs. Galt recounts how the whole west began to move: all the roads from Glasgow to Edinburgh were like so many webs of printed calico, stamped with the figures of coaches and carriages, horses and noddies, men, women, and children, and weavers from Paisley, who had abjured reform (317). The Radicals butchered after the Battle of Bonnymuir had been weavers from Strathaven and Greenock (where Galt spent part of his childhood), not far from Paisley. In Galt’s simile, the energies of popular resistance now feed the loyal mass movement without, however, being completely digested by it. The modern labor of weaving that constitutes the fabric of national patriotism, like so many webs of printed calico, remains visible, and does not quite yield to the image it suggests, the dominant image of the Jaunt: tartan plaid. In Edinburgh, in the following chapter, the visitors behold writers [solicitors] and writers’ clerks . . . trembling in the breeze, dressed in the Celtic garb, that their peeled, white, ladylike legs might acquire the healthy complexion of Highland boughs (317). Galt’s satire ends up confining itself to a harmless, indeed, healthy regional animosity and submitting to the general tone of celebration, but only after it has made its own distinctive—western—claim on the occasion. Rather than an ancient nation centered in Edinburgh, the King represents a modern commercial empire in which Glasgow’s interests are crucial: free trade and loyalty beget ease and affluence (327).

The Scottish Whigs and Tories vied with one another to define the meaning of the Jaunt, contending whether its spectacles of mass enthusiasm showed that sovereignty descended from the King or rested with the consent of the people. Outright derision, much of it scurrilous, poured from the Radical press in London.⁸ Nor was a disillusioned view confined to the opposition. An impeccably ironical account of the royal visit turns up where it might perhaps be least expected, fifteen years later, in the monumental biography of Scott by John Gibson Lockhart—former Blackwood’s fire-eater, now respectable editor of the Quarterly Review. Before this time, Lockhart reminds his readers, no Prince of the house of Hanover was known to have touched the soil of Scotland, except one, whose name had ever been held there in universal detestation—the cruel conqueror of Culloden, —‘the butcher Cumberland.’ ⁹ Lockhart understood very clearly what his father-in-law had been up to. The national humiliation marked by 1745 and its aftermath was to be healed through a ceremonial and comic reenactment. Lockhart saw, however, that what he called Sir Walter’s Celtified pageantry alluded only secondarily to the historical event of Jacobite occupation. Before that, it referred to the literary medium that had given the ’45 its mythic shape in the modern imagination. Scott’s first novel Waverley (1814) had represented Charles Edward’s Edinburgh sojourn as the moment when the Jacobite dream of a recaptured Scottish royalty achieved its greatest brilliance, above all as an evanescent series of civilian and military spectacles. Accordingly, referring to Daniel Terry’s theatrical adaptations of the Waverley novels as well as his assistance in planning the royal visit, Lockhart calls Scott’s management "a sort of grand terryfication of the Holyrood chapters in Waverley; —George IV, anno ætatis 60, being well contented to enact ‘Prince Charlie,’ with the Great Unknown himself for his Baron Bradwardine (7:50). Scott staged the Royal Visit as the reenactment of a fictional representation of a historical event, the Jacobite project of restoration he had already exposed as theatrical, romantic," and historically inauthentic, in Waverley.¹⁰ Charles Edward was, after all, a Pretender: his own performance the hapless, ghostly repetition of a Scottish sovereignty that had exited the stage of history with the removal to London of his ancestor James VI one hundred and forty years earlier. Jacobitism could only reiterate, with the blindly literal insistence of a tragic protagonist, the loss of a sovereign presence that the Stuart kings themselves had belatedly defended with the principle of Divine Right. Instead of the king’s body (or its constitutional supplement, a parliamentary assembly), national order resided now in Edinburgh with the problematically textual institution of the law—as several Scottish novels, notably Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818) and Galt’s The Entail (1822), would propound.

Lockhart narrates George IV’s ceremonial reenactment of Charles Edward’s attempt to replicate a lost ancestral sovereignty as a succession of tragedy by farce. Scott, treasuring the glass in which the King has toasted him, forgets he has it stowed away in a pocket until he sits down on it; the poet Crabbe, Scott’s houseguest, finds himself surrounded by Gaelic-speaking Highlanders and stammers away at them in French (what he considered . . . the universal language, 7:55); best of all the King, in full Highland fig at Holyrood, confronts a figure even more portly than his own, equipped, from a sudden impulse of loyal ardour, in an equally complete set of the self-same conspicuous Stuart tartans. This is the London alderman Sir William Curtis, whose portentous apparition cast an air of ridicule and caricature over the whole of Sir Walter’s Celtified pageantry (7:64–65). Lockhart follows contemporary caricatures in making Sir William the King’s "heroic doppel-ganger," the mirror image of an inauthentic Scotch Majesty.¹¹ The absurd alderman exposes the King’s own status as a facsimile, bound to the inorganic, metaphysically empty spatial and temporal axes of duplication and repetition. Duplication and repetition: sovereignty’s modern origin is no divine Logos, nor any natural bond, but literary production in the mode of mechanical reproduction: industrial print technology. A genealogy showing George as legitimate heir of the Stuarts was duly got up for the occasion and circulated in the loyalist press. Scott’s pageant reiterates the more spectacular topoi of the Romantic literature that flourished in Scotland in the decades since 1746: not just the meteoric transit of a Pretender (Waverley) but the dubious revival of extinct ancestral origins (James Macpherson’s Fingal) and the metaphysically disastrous proliferation of the Double (James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner).

Lockhart wavers between describing the King’s Jaunt as a blatant confection, its artifice plain to see ("the extent to which the Waverley and Rob Roy animus was allowed to pervade the whole of this affair, 7:58), and as a hallucination that had completely . . . taken possession of spectators and participants (7:67). He describes, in short, the ambiguous subjectivity effect of a work of fiction, which takes possession of the imagination while the reader goes on knowing that it is just a fiction. Lockhart recognizes, even as he mocks, Scott’s sophisticated staging of a disenchanted, thoroughly textualized figure of sovereignty in a modern commercial culture. Lockhart’s treatment, along with the range and complexity of contemporary responses to the event, must complicate the gesture of ideological exposé with which the royal visit is typically dismissed: as though it is enough to denounce the inauthenticity" of an occasion of which inauthenticity was the point. Observing the King’s coronation at Westminster the previous year, Scott had been impressed by the ideological power of such public spectacles of invented tradition.¹² The inauthenticity—the alienation, portability, and recursiveness—of the signifiers of sovereignty, ancestry, territoriality, and legitimacy was a chief end of the pageant, not its inadvertent by-product.¹³

The Modern Athens

The royal visit reflected the civic confidence of an Edinburgh that showed itself off as a national metropolis more than a century after Scotland had lost the last of its institutions of sovereignty. The city was not only tartan decked for the occasion, dressed in the trophies of a North British internal colonialism, but more durably adorned with the edifices and monuments of an imperial classicism. The adoption of James Craig’s plans for a New Town in 1767 had initiated a sixty-year boom of construction and civic improvement, fuelled by the Edinburgh Town Council’s combination of visionary enthusiasm and deficit spending. By the early nineteenth century Edinburgh’s professional and gentry elite had deserted the medieval city, huddled precipitously around the Royal Mile, for the townhouse-lined piazzas of the South Side and the boulevards spreading beyond the North Loch. This was the post-Enlightenment era of The Modern Athens, unfolding lavishly in the completion of Robert Adam’s palatial frontage on Charlotte Square (commissioned in 1791 but interrupted by the French wars), the extension of the New Town in the Rae-burn and Moray estates to the northwest of Princes Street (1813–22), and a series of splendid public works, from the Regency triumphalism of Waterloo Place (1815–19) to civic temples such as William Playfair’s Royal Institution (now the Royal Scottish Academy) on Princes Street itself (1822–26). The Leith docks, too, had been improved and beautified (1806–17), at a cost that would hasten the city’s bankruptcy in 1833.¹⁴ This spectacular, monumental, and imperial urban landscape, dominated by the work of William Playfair and Thomas Hamilton, exploiting the unevenness and sheer verticality of the city’s topography, marked a shift from the rational, horizontal, rectilinear conception of Craig’s residential New Town. The city magistrates encouraged the change, commissioning William Stark (1814) and, on Stark’s death, his student Playfair (1819) to develop Calton Hill and the adjacent lands. Calton Hill, its romantic prospects newly illustrated by J.M.W. Turner, was the site of ambitious plans for a monumental acropolis crowned with an observatory (1818), model temples to Robert Burns (1830) and Dugald Stewart (1831), a Nelson memorial (1807–16), Hamilton’s Royal High School (1825–29), and a National Monument (1822–29), the foundation stone of which was laid during the royal visit.¹⁵ The staging of the visit revealed all this to be something more grandiose than regional civic pride. Edinburgh was promoting and redefining itself as a new kind of national capital—not a political or commercial metropolis, but a cultural and aesthetic one.

Henry Cockburn attributed the postwar civic improvements to a spirit of emulation fired by national victory and renewed access to the Continent:

It was the return of peace that first excited our attention, and tended to open our eyes. Europe was immediately covered with travellers, not one of whom . . . failed to contrast the littleness of almost all that the people of Edinburgh had yet done, with the general picturesque grandeur and unrivalled sites of their city. It was about this time that the foolish phrase, The Modern Athens, began to be applied to the capital of Scotland; a sarcasm, or a piece of affected flattery, when used in a moral sense; but just enough if meant only as a comparison of the physical features of the two places. . . . There were more schemes, and pamphlets, and discussion, and anxiety about the improvement of our edifices and prospects within ten years after the war ceased, than throughout the preceding one hundred and fifty years.¹⁶

Figure 1.1. The post-Enlightenment era of The Modern Athens, from T. H. Shepherd, Modern Athens: Displayed in a Series of Views, or, Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century (1829), title page. Courtesy of Edinburgh City Libraries.

Figure 1.2. The Regency triumphalism of Waterloo Place—with the National Monument in the background, from Shepherd, Modern Athens. Courtesy of Edinburgh City Libraries.

Figure 1.3. Calton Hill, its romantic prospects newly illustrated by Turner, from WalterScott, Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland(1820). Courtesy of Edinburgh City Libraries.

Figure 1.4. The site of ambitious plans for a monumental acropolis. An imaginary view of Calton Hill with the national Monument as it would appear if completed. Courtesy of Edinburgh City Libraries.

The antiquarian James Stuart seems to have been the first to compare the physical settings of Edinburgh and Athens in 1762, although, as Cock-burn suggests, the epithet Modern Athens did not become widely current until after Waterloo.¹⁷ Cockburn’s discomfort with the foolish phrase stems from its association with the Whig cultural ascendancy of the Edinburgh Review, with which Cockburn himself was linked. Peacock makes it the boast of the mulish modernist Mr. MacQuedy in Crotchet Castle (1831): Morals and metaphysics, politics and political economy, the way to make the most of all the modifications of smoke, steam, gas, and paper currency; you have all these to learn from us; in short, all the arts and sciences. We are the modern Athenians.¹⁸ In the year of the Royal Visit, the Tory wits of Blackwood’s Magazine poured scorn:

In the days of Smith, and Hume, and Robertson, we were satisfied with our national name, and so we were during a later dynasty of genius, of which old Mackenzie still survives; but now-a-days, when with the exception of Scott, yourself North, and myself, and a few others, there is not a single man of power or genius in Edinburgh, the prigs call themselves Athenians! Why, you may just as appropriately call the first Parallelogram, that shall be erected on Mr Owen’s plan, the Modern Athens, as the New Town of Edinburgh. . . . We are Scotsmen, not Greeks. We want no Parthenon—we are entitled to none. There are not ten persons in Edinburgh—not one Whig I am sure, who could read three lines of Homer "ad aperturam libri." There are pretty Athenians for you! Think of shoals of Scotch artisans, with long lank greasy hair, and corduroy breeches, walking in the Parthenon!¹⁹

Edinburgh’s title to Athenian glory was a topic of lively controversy. Descriptions and illustrations of picturesque Edinburgh formed an aesthetic hinge for the turn from a Classical to a Romantic city, secured by the accession of a sublime vocabulary. The political terms of this shift involved the displacement—bitterly contentious—of an oligarchic and republican ideal of citizenship based on civic virtue, developed in the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and sustained by the Edinburgh reviewers, to an aesthetically based cultural nationalism promoted by the Blackwood’s literati.

Partisanship and scandal inflame the many books, pamphlets, essays, and reviews published about Edinburgh in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819) founds a Tory cultural politics on the critique of Scottish public figures and institutions, while the anonymous Edinburgh: A Satirical Novel (1820) scarcely glances up from its trough of scurrilous gossip, and Felix MacDonogh’s The Hermit in Edinburgh (1824) offers Sketches of Manners and Real Characters and Scenes in Edina, the pride of the North.²⁰ The city’s metropolitan pretensions come under hostile scrutiny in Robert Mudie’s The Modern Athens: A Dissertation and Demonstration of Men and Things in the Scotch Capital (1825). Mudie (the son of a Tayside weaver) had attempted to exploit the postwar vogue for Scottish novels in Glenfergus (1820), which was respectfully reviewed but by no means a hit on the scale of Scott or even Hogg (with whose Winter Evening Tales the publishers coupled it in their advertisements).²¹ Since 1820 Mudie had been working in London for the radical Morning Chronicle, and he returned north to cover the royal visit for the paper. A first, obsequiously exhaustive spin-off, A Historical Account of His Majesty’s Visit to Scotland (which went through four editions in 1822), preceded the polemical Modern Athens.

In The Modern Athens, Mudie argues that Edinburgh’s civic prominence constitutes an illegitimate claim on national representation. He fastens his critique upon a semantic