A Companion To Scottish Literature - Gerard Carruthers (Editor) - 1, 2023 - Blackwell Pub - 9781119651444 - Anna's Archive

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A Companion to Scottish Literature
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109 A Companion to Scottish Literature Edited by Gerard Carruthers
SCOTTISH LITERATURE
A COMPANION TO
GERARD CARRUTHERS
Scotland, Glasgow G12 8QQ

University of Glasgow
EDITED BY
UK
This edition first published 2024
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carruthers, Gerard, editor.
Title: A companion to Scottish literature / edited by Gerard
Carruthers.
Description: First edition. | Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, [2024] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023028704 (print) | LCCN 2023028705 (ebook) | ISBN
9781119651444 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119651529 (adobe pdf) | ISBN
9781119651536 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Scottish literature–History and criticism. | LCGFT:
Literary criticism. | Essays.
Classification: LCC PR8511.W45 2024 (print) | LCC PR8511 (ebook) | DDC
820.9/9411–dc23/eng/20230824
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023028704
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023028705
Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image: © Cowdenimage/Wikimedia Commons
Set in 10.5/12.5, ITCGaramond LT Std by Straive, Pondicherry, India.

This Companion is dedicated in fond remembrance to Professor Douglas Gifford (1940–2020),
who would both have agreed and disagreed with many of its critical arguments.
Dedication
Contents
Notes on Contributors xi
Preface xxii
Acknowledgements xxiv
1 Introduction: What is Scottish Literature? 1
Gerard Carruthers
Part I: Periods 15
2 The First Millennium 17
Dauvit Broun and Gerard Carruthers
3 The Medieval Period 27
Pamela King
4 The Reformation 39
David J. Parkinson
5 The Seventeenth Century 52
Alasdair A. MacDonald
6 The Enlightenment 64
Ronnie Young
7 Literature in Gaelic I 77
Duncan Sneddon and M. Pía Coira
8 Romanticism 91
Dafydd Moore
9 The Scotch Novel 104
Peter Garside
viii Contents
10 The Victorian Period 116

Kirstie Blair and Michael Shaw
11 Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Literary Revival 127
Scott Lyall
12 Contemporary and Post-Modern Scotland 140
Timothy C. Baker
13 Literature in Gaelic II 152
Peter Mackay
Part II: Genres and Contexts 165

14 The Early Book in Scotland 167
Jeremy J. Smith
15 Publishing in Scotland to 1800 180
Rhona Brown
16 Publishing in Scotland from 1800 192
David Finkelstein
17 Sentimental Literature 205
Andrew Nash
18 Jacobitism 218
Daniel Cook
19 Religion 233
Linden Bicket
20 Folkways 246
Corey Gibson
21 Mapping Murder – Places in Scottish Crime Writing 259
Carol Baraniuk
22 Children’s Literature 271
Sarah M. Dunnigan
23 Scottish Drama and Theatre 286
Ian Brown
24 Gender and Sexuality 299
Carole Jones
25 Race and Ethnicity in Scottish Literature 311
Joe Jackson
Contents ix
26 Magazines, Devolution and Makars – the Institutions of Scottish Literature 324

Eleanor Bell
27 Diaspora 336
Paul Malgrati
28 Teaching Scottish Literature in the English Classroom 349
Gillian Sargent
29 Scottish Literature in the 21st Century and the New Media 363
Craig Lamont
Part III: Writers 377

30 Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas 379
Nicola Royan
31 Poets in the Age of James VI 393
Kelsey Jackson Williams
32 Women’s Writing to 1700 406
Sarah M. Dunnigan
33 Robert Burns and the 18th Century Vernacular Revival 419
Steve Newman
34 Women’s Writing, 1700–1900 432
Ainsley McIntosh
35 James Thomson 445
Sandro Jung
36 Alexander MacDonald and Duncan Ban Macintyre 458
Ronald Black
37 Walter Scott 473
Ian Duncan
38 Thomas Carlyle and His Ideas 486
Joanna Malecka
39 Robert Louis Stevenson 498
Robert P. Irvine
40 Sorley MacLean 509
Máire Ní Annracháin
41 W.S. Graham 523
Andrew McNeillie
ftoc.indd 9 03/09/2024 07:25:34

Chapter No.: 42 Title Name: <TITLENAME> ftoc.indd
x Contents
42 Kelman, Gray, Welsh and the New Urban Writing 538

Anthony Jarrells
43 Muriel Spark and the Invention of Identity 550
David Goldie
44 Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig and Iain Crichton Smith 561
Matt McGuire
45 Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay 574
Carla Rodríguez González
46 Contemporary Poetry – Carol-Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson 586
Danny O’Connor
47 Women’s Writing, 1900–2020 598
Fiona McCulloch
48 Scottish Literature in Film 611
John Caughie
49 Timeline and Further Resources 624
Moira Hansen
Index 644
Notes on Contributors
Timothy C. Baker is Personal Chair in Scottish and Contemporary Literature at the University
of Aberdeen. He is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community (Edinburgh
University Press 2009), Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity and Tradition (Palgrave
2014), Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty- First-
Century Fiction
(Palgrave 2019), New Forms of Environmental Writing: Gleaning and Fragmentation (Bloomsbury
2022), and Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories (Goldsmiths 2022). He
is co-editor, with Elizabeth Elliott and Sarah Sharp, of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to
Scottish Literature.
Carol Baraniuk completed her PhD in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow in 2009.
Her monograph, James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical (Pickering and Chatto 2014), based on her thesis,
discusses an eighteenth-century Ulster bard who wrote in the tradition of the Scots vernacular
revival poets. She has taught courses at Ulster University and Queen’s University Belfast on
Scottish literary traditions in Ulster, Literary Modernism, and on Scottish and Ulster crime fic-
tion. She is currently a Research Associate in Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow
where she is involved in two major AHRC-funded projects: ‘The Collected Works of Allan
Ramsay’, and ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Poetry and Correspondence’. Her
research additionally investigates literary, linguistic, historical and contemporary connections
between Scotland and Ulster. She has published widely on Burns and his Ulster contemporaries,
on eighteenth-century radicalism in Ulster and Scotland, and on Ulster detective fiction. She has
an essay in preparation for the forthcoming Cambridge History of Irish Poetry.
Eleanor Bell is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. She is the
author of Questioning Scotland: Literature, Nationalism, Postmodernism (Palgrave Macmillan 2004)
and co-editor of Scotland in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature (Rodopi 2004), as well as
two co- edited books on the Scottish sixties (The International Writers’ Conference Revisited:
Edinburgh, 1962 (Freight Books 2012) and The Scottish Sixties: Reading, Rebellion, Revolution?
(Rodopi 2013)). She was founding co-editor (with Scott Hames) of the International Journal of
Scottish Literature from 2006 to 2010 and is currently Chair of the Universities Committee for
Scottish Literature. Bell is writing a monograph on Scottish literary magazines from the 1960s
xii Notes on Contributors
through to 1990 and a co-editor (with Scott Hames and Malcolm Petrie) of the forthcoming
Scottish Magazines and Political Culture, 1968–1999: From Scottish International to the Scottish
Parliament.
Linden Bicket is Lecturer in Literature and Religion in the School of Divinity at the University
of Edinburgh, Scotland. She teaches on a wide range of courses about the connections between
doubt, faith, and scepticism, and her research focuses particularly on the Catholic imagination in
modern literature and poetry. Her first monograph, George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic
Imagination, was published in 2017 by Edinburgh University Press. She is also co-editor (with
the late Professor Douglas Gifford) of The Fiction of Robin Jenkins: Some Kind of Grace (Brill 2017)
and co-editor (with Professor Kirsteen McCue) of a 2021 centenary edition of George Mackay
Brown’s An Orkney Tapestry (published originally in 1969). Her current research focuses on
Catholic women’s writing. She is also editing a new edition of Scottish Religious Poetry: An
Anthology, which is due to be published with Hymns Ancient and Modern in 2024.
Ronald Black is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh, having taught in the
Department of Celtic there from 1979 to 2001. He is author of Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair: The
Ardnamurchan Years (Society of West Highland & Island Historical Research 1985), The Campbells
of the Ark (John Donald 2017), and editor of various books, including anthologies of eighteenth-
and twentieth-century Gaelic verse and an edition of Johnson’s and Boswell’s accounts of their
tour (To the Hebrides 2007). His newspaper articles on Gaelic traditions are on the web as www.
querndust.co.uk. For many years he was editor of the Gaelic page of The Scotsman, and he now
edits West Highland Notes and Queries for the Society of Highland and Island Historical research
(www.highlandhistoricalresearch.com). He is director of the Dewar Project, the aim of which is
to publish the ‘people’s history of the West Highlands, in their own language’ as collected in
manuscript by John Dewar (1802–1872) during the 1860s (www.dewarproject.com).
Kirstie Blair is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Stirling University, having
moved from University of Strathclyde in August 2022. Her research interests lie in Victorian
and Scottish Studies, and she has published extensively on various aspects of literature, newspa-
pers and periodicals, and working-class history, literature and culture. Her third monograph,
Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community (Oxford University Press 2019), won
the Saltire Society Scottish Research Book of the Year and Book of the Year awards.
Dauvit Broun has taught at the University of Glasgow since 1990, since 2009 as the Professor
of Scottish History. He has published on medieval Scottish historical texts and identity from the
seventh to the fifteenth centuries, including Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain from the
Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh University Press 2007).
Rhona Brown is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature and the Periodical
Press at the University of Glasgow. She is author of Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press
(Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment
(Routledge 2015), and has published widely on eighteenth-century Scots language poetry and
the periodical press. She is co-investigator on two major AHRC-funded textual editing projects:
‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Poems and Correspondence’, on which she is co-
editor of Burns’s correspondence, and ‘The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay’, on which she is
Notes on Contributors xiii
editor of Ramsay’s poems and co-editor of his prose. Brown is also co-editor of the journal,
Scottish Literary Review.
Ian Brown FRSE FRHistS FASL is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Scottish Literature at
Glasgow University and Professor Emeritus in Drama at Kingston University, London. He is
also a playwright whose plays have been performed throughout Britain and abroad, and a poet
whose poems have been broadcast, presented at readings on three continents, and published in
several collections and the press. He is widely published on theatre, literature, and cultural
policy, having edited a wide range of volumes. He was General Editor of the landmark three-
volume The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (Edinburgh University Press 2007) and edited
The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (Edinburgh University Press 2011). His most recent
monograph is Performing Scottishness: Enactment and National Identities (Palgrave Macmillan 2020)
and his most recent edited volume is Writing Scottishness: Literature and the Shaping of Scottish
National Identities (Scottish Literature International 2023), co-edited with Clarisse Godard
Desmarest. He is a Trustee of the Robert Burns Ellisland Trust, National Vice-Convener of the
Saltire Society and Publications Convener of the Association for Scottish Literature.
Gerard Carruthers is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of

Glasgow and General Editor of the Oxford University Press Edition of the Complete Works of
Robert Burns. He is Editor of Scottish Stories (Everyman 2023), Co-editor of 1820: Scottish Rebellion
(John Donald 2022), Literature & Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts (Oxford University Press
2018), The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (Cambridge University Press 2012) and
author of Scottish Literature (Edinburgh University Press 2009) in the ‘Critical Guides’ series.
John Caughie is Emeritus Professor of Film & Television Studies at Glasgow University. He was
Principal Investigator on a three-year project, ‘Early Cinema in Scotland, 1896–1927’, funded by
an AHRC Research Grant, and his personal research focused on the development of cinema from
1896 to 1927 in small towns in Scotland. His books include Theories of Authorship (editor;
Routledge 1982), Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford University
Press 2000), a short monograph on Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (2007), and Early
Cinema in Scotland (co-editor; Edinburgh University Press 2018). He has published extensively on
both film and television, and was a member of the editorial group of Screen from 1979 until 2014.
M. Pía Coira is a Lecturer in Gaelic Studies at the University of Aberdeen, where she teaches
Gaelic literature and the modern and early modern Gaelic languages. Her research focuses on late
medieval and early modern classical and vernacular Gaelic literature, including the interface
between them, literary representations of identity and nationhood, exploitation of the connec-
tion between literary conventions and Gaelic law, and the Classical Greek and Latin reception in
Gaelic literature. She is the author of By Poetic Authority: The Rhetoric of Panegyric in Gaelic Poetry
of Scotland to c.1700 (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press 2012) and of articles published in,
among others, Scottish Gaelic Studies, Éigse, and Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig.
Daniel Cook is Associate Dean and Reader in English Literature at the University of Dundee.
He is the author of Walter Scott and Short Fiction (Edinburgh University Press 2021), Reading
Swift’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press 2020), and Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius,
1760–1830 (Palgrave Macmillan 2013). His most recent books include Scottish Poetry,
xiv Notes on Contributors
1730–1830 (Oxford University Press 2023), Gulliver’s Travels (The Norton Library 2023), The
Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels (with Nick Seager; Cambridge University Press 2023),
and Austen After 200: New Reading Spaces (with Annika Bautz and Kerry Sinanan; Palgrave
Macmillan 2022).
Ian Duncan is Florence Green Bixby Chair in English at the University of California,
Berkeley. He is the author of Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Princeton 2019),
Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton 2007), and Modern Romance and
Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge 1992). He has co-edited
essay collections on Scottish Romantic-period writing, and edited works of fiction by Walter
Scott, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle. A general editor of
the Collected Works of James Hogg (Edinburgh 2012) and Edinburgh Critical Studies in
Romanticism (Edinburgh), he is currently editing The Cambridge History of Scottish Literature
and The Cambridge Companion to Walter Scott for Cambridge University Press. Duncan is a
Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an Honorary Fellow of the
Association for Scottish Literature.
Sarah M. Dunnigan is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Her publications in the field of early modern Scottish literature include Eros and Poetry at the
Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI (Palgrave Macmillan 2002) and, with C. Marie Harker
and Evelyn S. Newlyn, co-editor of Women and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish
Writing (Palgrave Macmillan 2002). She is editor of the Scots sections of the forthcoming Women’s
Poetry in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, with Sarah Prescott, Cathryn Charnell-White, Marie-Louise
Coolahan, and Wes Hamrick (Cambridge University Press). She also writes about traditional
Scottish ballads; fairy tales; and the history of Scottish children’s writing, and has most recently
co-edited, with Shu-Fang Lai, The Land of Story-Books. Scottish Children’s Literature in the Long
Nineteenth Century (Association for Scottish Literary Studies 2019).
David Finkelstein is a cultural historian who has published in areas related to print, labour and
press history. Recent publications include Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian
World (Oxford University Press 2018), and the edited Edinburgh History of the British and Irish
Press, volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800–1900 (Edinburgh University Press 2020), winner
of the 2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize for its contribution to the promotion
of Victorian press studies.
Peter Garside taught English Literature for more than thirty years at Cardiff University, where
he became Director of the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research. Subsequently, he was
appointed Professor of Bibliography and Textual Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He
served on the Boards of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels and the Stirling/South
Carolina Collected Edition of the Works of James Hogg, and has produced three volumes apiece
for each of these scholarly editions. He was one of the general editors of the bibliographical survey
The English Novel 1770–1829, 2 vols (Oxford University Press 2000), and directed the AHRB-
funded online database, British Fiction 1800–1829 (2004). He has also co-edited English and
British Fiction 1750–1820 (Oxford University Press 2015), as volume 2 of the Oxford History of
the Novel in English. More recent contributions include editions (with Gillian Hughes) of The
Shorter Poems (Edinburgh University Press 2020) for the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s
Notes on Contributors xv
Poetry, and of Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (Edinburgh University Press 2023) as part of the
Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart.
Corey Gibson is Lecturer in twentieth-century Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow.

He is the author of The Voice of the People: Hamish Henderson and Scottish Cultural Politics (Edinburgh
University Press 2015) – which was shortlisted for the Saltire Research Book of the Year – and
editor of The Collected Poems of Hamish Henderson (Polygon 2019). He is the principal investigator
on a Carnegie Trust-funded project: ‘Dreaming the Daily Darg: Working Lives in Scottish
Fiction since 1918’. Corey is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters on balladry
and critical theory; extremism and poiesis; war poetry; anonyms and the folk process; class and
nationalism; flyting; and folk revivalism.
David Goldie is a former Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde and is cur-
rently President of the Association for Scottish Literature. He has written extensively about Scottish
literature and culture in the twentieth century. He is co-editor (with Gerard Carruthers and Alastair
Renfrew) of Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (Rodopi 2004) and
Scotland and the Nineteenth-Century World (Rodopi 2012). And with Roderick Watson he has edited
From the Line: Scottish War Poetry 1914–1945 (Association for Scottish Literary Studies 2014) and
co-authored The Scottish Poetry of the First and Second World Wars (Scotnotes ASLS 2017).
Moira Hansen is an Associate Lecturer and Honorary Associate with The Open University
where she teaches English literature. She continues to explore her research interests in Robert
Burns’s mental and physical health, his friendship with Frances Dunlop, and the wider topic of
medical and literary cultural intersections in late-eighteenth century Scotland. Her forthcoming
publications include a study of Robert Burns’s entry in Charles Fleeming’s daybook (JRCPE), a
re-examination of the health of Paisley poet Robert Tannahill (SSL), and a chapter on Burns and
women for the Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns (ed. G. Carruthers; Oxford University Press 2024).
She is Reviews Editor for the Burns Chronicle, Executive Secretary of the Eighteenth-Century
Scottish Studies Society, and Secretary of the Association for Scottish Literature.
Robert P. Irvine is Reader in Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in

eighteenth-and early-nineteenth century literature in English and Scots. As well as journal arti-
cles on Burns, Scott, Galt and Stevenson he has edited Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice for
Broadview Press (second edition 2020); Robert Burns, Selected Poems and Songs for Oxford World’s
Classics (2013); Robert Louis Stevenson, Prince Otto (2014) and John Galt, Annals of the Parish (2020),
both for Edinburgh University Press. He is currently editing another volume in the Edinburgh
University Press edition of Galt, the paired novels The Member and The Radical, and The Lord of
the Isles for the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry.
Joe Jackson is Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary English Literature at

the University of Nottingham. He specialises in late-twentieth century fiction, particularly Scottish
novels, writing Blackness, and Caribbean fiction. His monograph, Writing Black Scotland: Race,
Nation and the Devolution of Black Britain, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020.
Anthony Jarrells is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His first
book, Britain’s Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature, was published in
xvi Notes on Contributors
2005 by Palgrave Macmillan. In 2006 he edited a volume of Selected Prose for the Pickering and
Chatto series, Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–1825. His recent work has focused on regionalism in
Scotland, political economy in the novel, and Romantic-era literary engagements with what we
now call ‘values’. He is editor of a forthcoming volume of John Galt’s Scottish stories. And his
current book project is titled The Time of the Tale: Regional Fiction and the Reordering of Tradition,
1760–1830.
Carole Jones is Senior Lecturer in English and Scottish literature at the University of Edinburgh
where she teaches courses in contemporary Scottish fiction, queer fiction, and the representation
of gender and sexuality. Her monograph, Disappearing Men: Gender Disorientation in Scottish Fiction
1979–1999 was published by Rodopi in 2009 and examines the complexities of gender identi-
ties and relations in the work of several writers of ‘devolutionary’ Scottish fiction. More recently
she has focused on the postfeminist context of recent work by Scottish women writers in her
essay ‘Femininity in Crisis: The troubled trajectory of feminism in Laura Hird’s Born Free and
Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon’ (Contemporary Women’s Writing 9.3 (2015)); queer communities in
‘From subtext to gaytext? Scottish fiction’s queer communities’ (Community in Modern Scottish
Literature, ed. by Scott Lyall; Brill 2016); and was co-editor of the Contemporary Women’s Writing
special issue on Scottish Women’s Poetry (14.2–14.3 (2020)). She has also contributed chapters to
the Edinburgh Companions to James Kelman, Irvine Welsh and Contemporary Scottish Literature. Her
latest publications expand her focus with the chapter ‘Muriel Spark’s Waywardness’ in The
Crooked Dividend: Essays on Muriel Spark (Association for Scottish Literary Studies 2022), and the
essay ‘“Lead us not into imagination, but deliver us from understanding.” Nan Shepherd’s
Wayward Poetics’ (Studies in Scottish Literature 49.1 (2023)). Her essay ‘Dis-comforting urban
myths: Challenging Brexit nostalgia in recent Edinburgh Fiction’ (Complutense 29 (2021)) was a
result of ongoing engagement with Scottish literature scholars at the University of Oviedo.
Sandro Jung is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fudan

University where he also serves as Director of the Centre for the Study of Textual Cultures. He is
also Jack Ma Distinguished Professor at Hangzhou Normal University. A Past President of the
East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, a former Senior Fellow of the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the recipient of two European Union Marie Curie
long- term fellowships, Jung has been the Editor- in-
Chief of the quarterly journal, ANQ
(Routledge/Taylor & Francis) for the past 11 years. He, furthermore, serves as General Editor of
the Lehigh University Press book series, Studies in Text and Print Culture. He is the author,
among other monographs, of David Mallet, Anglo-Scot: Poetry, Politics, and Patronage in the Age of
Union (University of Delaware Press 2008), The Fragmentary Poetic: Eighteenth-Century Uses of an
Experimental Mode (Lehigh University Press 2009), James Thomson’s The Seasons, Print Culture, and
Visual Interpretation, 1730–1842 (Lehigh University Press 2015), The Publishing and Marketing of
Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760–1825 (Lehigh University Press 2017), Kleine artige Kupfer:
Buchillustration im 18. Jahrhundert (Harrassowitz Verlag 2018) and Eighteenth-Century Illustration,
and Literary Material Culture (Cambridge University Press 2023).
Pamela King is Professor Emerita of Medieval Studies, and Senior Research Fellow in the
University of Glasgow. She has published extensively on medieval performing arts, tomb sculp-
ture, manuscripts, drama and poetry, chiefly in the English and Scottish traditions, and also on
European civic confraternal festivals. She is an editor for ARC Humanities Press and its series on
Notes on Contributors xvii
Early Social Performance, and is also a member of the Council of the Scottish Text Society and
the Traditional Music Forum.
Craig Lamont is Lecturer in Scottish Studies at the University of Glasgow. His PhD on Georgian
Glasgow won the 2016 Roy Medal and the resulting book – The Cultural Memory of Georgian
Glasgow – was published in 2021 by Edinburgh University Press. Craig has worked on two
major AHRC-funded textual editing projects: ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’ (PI:
Gerard Carruthers) and The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay (PI: Murray Pittock). Besides
Burns and Ramsay, Craig has published on John Galt, Irvine Welsh, and Dorothy K. Haynes. He
also co-edited 1820: Scottish Rebellion (Birlinn 2022) – and continues to work on Scottish history,
literature, and memory studies.
Scott Lyall is Associate Professor of Modern and Scottish Literature at Edinburgh Napier
University. His main research interests are in the areas of twentieth-century literature and
Modernism, especially in Scotland, and much of his work concerns the interwar revival in
Scottish literature known as the Scottish literary renaissance, on which he has published widely
and been interviewed on TV and radio. He is the author of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics
of Place (Edinburgh University Press 2006), co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh
MacDiarmid (Edinburgh University Press 2011), and editor of The International Companion to
Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Community in Modern Scottish Literature (Association for Scottish Literary
Studies 2015). Dr. Lyall was project leader of the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded ‘The
Scottish Revival Network (2021–2023)’, and is currently co-editor of Scottish Literary Review.
Alasdair A. MacDonald is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature of the Middle
Ages, University of Groningen; he is also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the University
of Glasgow. He has published widely on medieval and early modern Scottish and English litera-
ture. He edited (2015) the Gude and Godlie Ballatis for the Scottish Text Society, and (2022)
Jacobean Parnassus: Scottish Poetry from the Reign of James I for the Association for Scottish Literature.
He is author-editor of George Lauder (1603–1670): Life and Writings (Cambridge 2018). With
J. Craig McDonald he edited the Contemplacioun of Synnaris of William Touris (Leiden and Boston
2022). Currently he is co-editing the Commentatio quaedam theologica of the Lyon-based Scottish
humanist Florentius Volusenus.
Peter Mackay is Senior Lecturer in Literature in the School of English at the University of
St Andrews. He is the author of two monographs, Sorley MacLean (RIISS 2011) and This Strange
Loneliness: Heaney’s Wordsworth (McGill-Queen’s 2021). He has also been a co-editor of the essay
collections Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (Cambridge 2011) and Sùil air an t-Saoghal (Clo Ostaig
2013) and the poetry anthologies An Leabhar Liath (Luath 2015), 100 Dàn as Fheàrr Leinn (Luath
2020) and The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse (Canongate 2021). As a poet, he has two collections
of his own work – Nàdur De/Some Kind of (Acair 2020) and Gu Leòr/Galore (Acair 2015) – and a
pamphlet, From Another Island, with Clutag Press (2010); he writes in Gàidhlig and English, and
his work has been translated into Czech, French, German, Irish, Occitan, Macedonian, Serbian
and Slovakian. He is an AHRC/BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.
Joanna Malecka is an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at the Open University and a
Lecturer in Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Glasgow where she teaches a
xviii Notes on Contributors
wide range of courses in English, Scottish and European literatures, as well as modern languages.
Her doctorate was on Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. She has subsequently published
articles in History of European Ideas, Global Intellectual History and Studies in Scottish Literature on
Scottish-European literary and cultural exchanges. She has recently published on ‘Thomas
Carlyle and the Scottish Enlightenment Concept of Sympathy’ in Beyond the Enlightenment Scottish
Intellectual Life, 1790–1914 (Edinburgh University Press 2023) as well as on ‘Mapping Cultural
Alienation in Modernist Literatures of Europe and South America’ in Philosophy of Culture: twen-
tieth century (Libron 2023). Recent interests include questions of Scottish-European exchanges,
intellectual history, and religion.
Paul Malgrati is an award-winning scholar and poet from France, currently lecturing Northern
Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands. He is the author of two books: Robert
Burns and Scottish Cultural Politics. The Bard of Contention. 1914–2014. (Edinburgh University
Press 2023) and Poèmes Écossais (Blue Diode Press 2022).
Fiona McCulloch is currently an independent scholar and was Lynn Wood Neag Distinguished
Visiting Professor of British Literature at University of Connecticut in 2015. As well as publish-
ing several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, including, ‘“Connected to time”: Ali
Smith’s Anachronistic Scottish Cosmopolitanism’ (in Marie- Odile Pittin- Hedon, Camille
Manfredi and Scott Hames [eds.], Scottish Writing After Devolution: Edges of the New; Edinburgh
University Press 2022), her books include Contemporary British Children’s Fiction and Cosmopolitanism
(Routledge 2017), Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction: Imagined Identities (Palgrave
Macmillan 2012), Children’s Literature in Context (Bloomsbury 2011), and The Fictional Role of
Childhood in Victorian and Early Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature (Edwin Mellen 2004).
Matt McGuire is Professor of Literary Studies and Dean of the School of Humanities and
Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, Australia. He has previously taught at the
University of Glasgow where he was a Lecturer at the Department of Scottish Literature. He is
the author of Contemporary Scottish Literature (Palgrave 2008), editor of The Everyman Book of Irish
Poems (Random House 2011), and co-editor of Post-Conflict Literature: Human Rights, Justice Peace
(Routledge 2016) and The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh
University Press 2009). He has written on a range of contemporary Irish and Scottish literature
and is the author of two crime novels – Dark Dawn (Constable Robinson 2011) and When Sorrow’s
Come (Constable Robinson 2014).
Ainsley McIntosh is a Daphne Jackson/AHRC Research Fellow and Lecturer in Romanticism

at the University of Edinburgh. Her most recent project concentrates on Robert Louis Stevenson’s
poetry. Her other specialist research interests include Scottish Romanticism, Walter Scott stud-
ies, nineteenth-century Scottish women’s writing, and textual editing. She is volume editor of
Marmion (Edinburgh University Press 2018) and Rokeby (forthcoming) for the Edinburgh Edition
of Walter Scott’s Poetry. She is also currently completing a scholarly edition of Susan Ferrier’s
Destiny (Routledge forthcoming).
Andrew McNeillie is an Emeritus Professor of English at Exeter University. Before that he was
Literature Editor at Oxford University Press, signing up, among much else, the new Oxford
Edition of Robert Burns under the general editorship of Gerard Carruthers. His Striking a Match
Notes on Contributors xix
in a Storm: New & Collected Poems appeared from Carcanet in 2022. Lilliput Press of Dublin
published his memoir An Aran Keening in 2001. That book proved a telling seamark, signalling
a lifelong passion for the archipelagic, in and around what he came to call, ‘the unnameable
archipelago of Britain and Ireland’. That fraught terrain is celebrated in his annual periodical
Archipelago, anthologised by Lilliput in 2019 as Archipelago: A Reader, edited by Nicholas Allen
and Fiona Stafford. McNeillie founded the Clutag Press in 2000 (named after North Clutag, a
Wigtownshire farm, where his father the writer John McNeillie/Ian Niall spent his formative
years). The Press has published, via Archipelago and otherwise, many eminent and emerging
authors, including: Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Michael Longley, Douglas Dunn, Tim
Robinson, Robert Macfarlane, James Macdonald-Lockhart, David Gange, Alex Boyd, Alan
Riach, Marina Warner, and the artist Norman Ackroyd.
Dafydd Moore is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Plymouth. He

is widely published on James Macpherson, including Enlightenment and Romance in the Poems of
Ossian (Routledge 2003), Ossian and Ossianism (4 volumes; Routledge 2004) and the International
Companion to James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Scottish Literature International 2017). He
has also worked extensively on the literary culture of South West England in the late eighteenth
century, most notably in the book Richard Polwhele and Romantic Culture: The Politics of Reaction
and the Poetics of Place (Routledge 2020). He is currently working on varieties of sermon culture
in the late eighteenth century and controversies relating to mythical and lost cities in the
Romantic period.
Andrew Nash is a Reader in Book History and Deputy Director of the Institute of English Studies,
University of London, where he directs the London Rare Books School. He is the author of Kailyard
and Scottish Literature (Rodopi 2007) and William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel:
Gender, Genre, and the Marketplace (Routledge 2014), and has edited or co-edited several volumes
including The Culture of Collected Editions (Palgrave Macmillan 2003), Literary Cultures and the
Material Book (British Library 2007), New Directions in the History of the Novel (Palgrave Macmillan
2014) and The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 7: the Twentieth Century and Beyond
(Cambridge University Press 2019). His work on Scottish literature includes numerous articles and
chapters on J.M. Barrie, including a collection of essays, Gateway to the Modern: Resituating J.M.
Barrie (Scottish Literature International 2014), co-edited with Valentina Bold, as well as essays on
Burns, Hogg, Stevenson, Spark and Janice Galloway, among others. He is currently working on a
four-volume documentary history of the British publishing industry in the nineteenth century.
Steve Newman is Associate Professor of English at Temple University, where he specialises in

British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century and Scottish Literature. He is the author of
Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon (University of Pennsylvania Press 2007), articles on Robert
Burns, Allan Ramsay, songs in Shakespeare, personal statements for medical school, and other
topics. He is the textual editor of The Gentle Shepherd (Edinburgh University Press 2022), the first
volume of The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay by Edinburgh University Press, and is the
director of a DH project on The Beggar’s Opera (www.beggarsopera.net). He is currently work-
ing on Time for the Humanities: Learning from the Competing Narratives of Value in the Scottish
Enlightenment and Scottish Romanticism. From 2017 to 2021, he served as the President of The
Temple Association of University Professionals (AFT #4531), the labour union representing full-
time and part-time faculty, librarians, and academic professionals at Temple.
xx Notes on Contributors
Máire Ní Annracháin is Emerita Full Professor of Modern Irish literature in University College
Dublin. She has published widely and often comparatively on various aspects of Irish and Scottish
Gaelic literature. Her doctoral thesis was on the poetry of Sorley Mclean. Many recent articles
have focused on the traditional roots of contemporary Gaelic writers.
Danny O’Connor is the Colm Tóbín Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool.
His critical monograph, Burning the Foxes: Ted Hughes and Trauma (Palgrave 2016), considers a
range of theoretical approaches to Hughes’s writing. His debut novel, Nothing, was published by
W&N in 2020; he is currently working on a follow-up.
David J. Parkinson is a Professor emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan. His research has
to do with literature in late-medieval and early modern Scotland. He has edited the poems of
Alexander Montgomerie for the Scottish Text Society (2000), as well as Robert Henryson, Collected
Works and Gavin Douglas, The Palyce of Honour for TEAMS (Medieval Institute 2010 and 2018).
As a British Academy Visiting Fellow (2023) he is completing an edition of Henry Adamson, The
Muses Threnodie and leading a team of researchers studying connections in literature, environ-
ment and recreation in Perth and its environs, between the seventeenth and twenty-first
centuries.
Carla Rodriguez Gonzalez is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Oviedo, Spain.
Her research focuses on contemporary Scottish writing, as well as on postcolonial, gender and
cultural studies. Her publications include the books Escritoras escocesas en la nueva literatura
nacional (U. Illes Balears 2013), María Estuardo (Ediciones Clásicas 2006) and Jackie Kay: bio-
grafías de una Escocia transcultural (KRK 2005). She has translated into Spanish stories by Jackie
Kay (Las últimas fimadoras/Grace y Rose) and Suhayl Saadi (Las reinas de Govan/Oscuridad),
published in two independent volumes (KRK 2008 and 2022). She has co-edited the books
Performing Cultures of Equality (Routledge 2021), Debating the Afropolitan (Routledge 2019),
Nación, diversidad y género (Anthropos 2011) and The Plots of History in Performance (Cambridge
Scholars 2008). She has guest-edited special issues in the journals Papers on Language and Literature
(‘Strangers and Trespassers in Contemporary Women’s Crime Fiction’ 2022) and Complutense
Journal of English Studies (‘Contemporary Scottish Urban Writing’ 2021).
Nicola Royan is Professor of Older Scottish Literature in the School of English, University of
Nottingham and President of the Scottish Text Society. She has published widely on medieval
and early modern Scottish literatures, including articles on John Barbour, Gavin Douglas and
Thomas Hudson, and she is the editor of The International Companion to Scottish Literature 1400–
1650 (Glasgow 2020).
Gillian Sargent is a Principal Teacher of English, independent researcher and consultant. Her
recent work focuses on contemporary Scottish women writers. To date, she has written two
Scotnotes volumes – on the writing of Janice Galloway and Rona Munro – as well as teaching
guides on the plays Tally’s Blood and The Lament for Sheku Bayoh. She has contributed extensively
to BBC Bitesize’s learning provision on Scottish Set Texts.
Michael Shaw is Lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Stirling. His research
focuses on the literature and culture of Scotland from 1880 to 1945, with particular emphases on
Notes on Contributors xxi
decadence, national identity and queer history. His monograph, The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival:
Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity (Edinburgh University Press), and his edition of the corre-
spondence between Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barrie, A Friendship in Letters (Sandstone),
were published in 2020. He recently contributed (as Co-Investigator) to two RSE-funded pro-
jects: ‘Scottish Cosmopolitanism at the Fin de Siècle’ (2020–2021) and ‘The Scottish Revival
Network’ (2021–2023). His current research focuses on Scottish literature and homosexuality.
Jeremy J. Smith is Senior Research Fellow and Professor Emeritus in English Language and
Linguistics, University of Glasgow, from which he retired in 2021, and an Honorary Professor in
the School of English, University of St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
and of the English Association, and an Honorary Fellow of the Association of Scottish Literary
Studies. He is a former President of International Society for the Linguistics of English, a former
Convener of the Board of Trustees of Scottish Language Dictionaries, and currently serves on the
Council of the Scottish Text Society. He specialises in English historical linguistics, the history
of Scots, and book history. Recent publications include Transforming Early English (Cambridge
University Press 2020), funded by the Leverhulme Trust: a study of the transmission, reception
and of medieval English and Scottish texts, drawing upon new developments in historical prag-
matics. A forthcoming monograph, with David Jasper, is The Victorian Reinvention of Medieval
Liturgy (Boydell and Brewer). Current projects include a corpus-based history of English reli-
gious vocabulary from the Middle Ages to the Romantic period.
Duncan Sneddon is Lecturer in Celtic at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a PhD in

Scottish History on Adomnán’s Vita Sancti Columbae from the University of Edinburgh. He has
taught at the University of Aberdeen and Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and was a research assistant on the
Harvard University project, The Fionn Folklore Database.
Kelsey Jackson Williams is Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of
Stirling and General Editor of the Scottish History Society. He studies the intellectual, literary,
and book history of early modern Scotland, with a particular emphasis on the role of the material
book in shaping culture. In his capacity as director of the Pathfoot Press, he also runs the
University of Stirling’s centre for letterpress studies and teaches practical printing alongside
analytical bibliography. His most recent books are The First Scottish Enlightenment: Rebels, Priests,
and History (Oxford University Press 2020) and (with William Zachs) A History and Catalogue of
the Lindsay Library, 1570–1792 (Brill 2022).
Ronnie Young is a Senior Lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, where
he teaches a range of classes related to Enlightenment-period literature. He is the associate
director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at Glasgow, and is currently co-editing the cor-
respondence of Burns for a new scholarly edition of Burns’s work with Oxford University Press
as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’. He has pub-
lished a range of material on eighteenth-century literature, including the co-edited collection
The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture (Bucknell University Press 2016). He is also the
co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Burns Chronicle with Edinburgh University Press and a
series editor for the Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature (SCROLL) series with
Brill/Rodopi.
Preface
Scottish literary study is something not easily captured in one volume. Scottish literature and its
criticism are areas of much diversity in type and approach, and this Companion is as comprehen-
sive a compendium as has ever been produced. Historically, the critical study herein runs from
the earliest known appearances of literature in Scotland until very recently and linguistically it
deals with writing in English, Gaelic and Scots, with some consideration also of Latin, Norse and
other languages (a newly emerging critical area today is Scottish writing in French during the
seventeenth century which complicates things even further). Fictional writing in all the major
forms, including drama, novels, poetry and the short story, is treated in the Companion. Many
genres are dealt with, including Scottish crime fiction, an area to the forefront of attention in
the early twenty-first century in a manner that would have come as a surprise to critics as
recently as 30 years ago. It discusses all of the ‘major’ writers and dozens of ‘minor’ ones. As well
as historical contexts, sociological, psychological and many other cultural contexts are set. Not
as voluminous as American or English literature, nonetheless Scottish literature similarly sees
the full range of the modern literary critical toolkit applied to it. In this Companion, historicist,
revisionist, feminist, gendered and many other theoretical approaches demonstrate the wide
conversation within and around the subject. Little more than 50 years ago, scholars of the subject
would not have foreseen gender and sexuality, for example, as such vital concerns.
As the introduction and other chapters make clear the ‘national’ aspect of Scottish literature
is necessarily a consideration, but a less straightforward one than some may think. If there are
multiple types of community in contemporary as well as historical Scotland, different kinds of
social and other identities, at least three major languages and many kinds of outlook: personal,
local, regional and at the other end of this spectrum, an international perspective in Scottish
literature, then how does one define the subject? The answer, like all objects of study, is never
completely nor definitively: human activity constantly moves, shifts, disintegrates, recuperates,
reforms and reiterates. So too with Scottish literature: simply because there is not one static,
catch-all definition does not mean that there is not a field of study, endlessly contestable though
that may be. A moving target, Scottish literature, is something that requires all the more critical
skill to discuss it.
Preface xxiii
When we know something of the history of Scotland in its complicated existence as a nation,
state or sets of people, it should be no surprise to us that the conditions of its literature: ‘Celtic’,
‘Scottish’, ‘British’, ‘Western’, among many other things, should reflect similarly multifarious
conditions of expression. Beyond national conditions, what might we do, for instance, with the
religious outlook of Scotland for most of its history, as opposed to a more seemingly secular iden-
tity today? Is there not a major difference of type between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ Scotland? Or,
perhaps, even these categories make for too simplistic a binary, and there are always overlaps and
continuities alongside change and disruption that we might identify? This Companion traverses
all of the complicated issues of Scottish literary identity, in highly cogent fashion again overall,
via the contributions of 50 scholars whose work rests on the shoulders of many hundreds of oth-
ers. This Companion provides the most finely adjusted critical compass possible today to the
history and forms of Scottish literature; its literary critical contours will reliably inform the
reader but will also raise many other questions, and will provide much food for thought, which
is the job of all literary criticism, indeed the endeavour always of study in the humanities.
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to all the contributors of A Companion to Scottish Literature for lending their
expertise, and expressing it in such concise and fascinating form. Catriona King at Wiley
Blackwell had the initial vision for the book and kindly drove me forward in its d evelopment.
For the publisher, Nicole Allen, Charlie Hamlyn and Radhika Raheja Sharma, especially, have
been kindly supportive as well as replete with practical, professional wisdom as the Companion
was completed. The various vicissitudes that inevitably accompany a project such as this, not
least the Covid pandemic, did not slow things too much which is a tribute to great team resolve.
A special word of thanks is owed to Dr Moira Hansen who has acted so excellently as my editorial
assistant at all stages in putting the volume together. I am grateful too for support of various
kinds from the University of Glasgow, especially from the subject-area of Scottish Literature (the
only dedicated one of its kind in the world), to the School of Critical Studies and to the College
of Arts.
1
Introduction: What is Scottish Literature?
Gerard Carruthers
School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland
Does Scottish literature exist as a subject-area and a site of scholarly enquiry? Yes. Can we
completely define what Scottish literature is in one easy, wrap-around definition? No.
As this volume suggests, something that we might categorise under the label of ‘Scottish
Literature’ has been with us for nearly one and a half millennia and no doubt there were forms of
creative writing in Scotland even before that. There are hundreds of authors and thousands of
texts since at least the sixth century that today, in the early twenty-first century, we might –
however problematically – classify within the ‘subject’ of Scottish literature. As an area of study
with a body of texts taught in schools and universities, Scottish literature has particularly formed
a somewhat distinctive identity within ‘Literatures in English’ since the 1960s at least.
Distinctive but also related, however, as in a fairly large number of universities across the world,
courses in Scottish literature are usually taught from within departments of English Studies. The
post-1960s trend saw bold subject statements with the formation of the Association for Scottish
Literature in 1970 and the first and so far only discrete Department of Scottish Literature at the
University of Glasgow in 1971.1 From the second part of the twentieth century critical masses
of scholars in the subject-area were to be found in other Scottish universities, and indeed –
increasingly from the 1980s – in lesser number in universities in Europe, North America and the
Antipodes. Less densely again but noticeably, in the twenty-first century, Scottish literature
scholars formally researching and teaching were to be found in South America and Asia, with a
large amount of activity in China from around 2010 onwards. The scholarship of Scottish literature,
then, has a firm global footprint with the International Association for the Study of Scottish
Literatures (IASSL) formed in 2014.2
If in one sense the establishment of Scottish literature as a far-flung, communal scholarly effort is
obviously apparent, there remains, nonetheless, an existential (or is it really a politically perceived?)
A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
2 A Companion to Scottish Literature
difficulty for the subject-area. English literature, from which Scottish literature in the modern sense
largely developed with a claim to be a markedly different body of work to some extent, continues
either to shed some illuminating light or to cast a shadow. Depending on one’s point of view, we have
either the catholic, promiscuous, generous discipline of ‘Eng Lit’ which, as already mentioned, quite
often features distinctive Scottish literature courses within its curriculum, or, instead, the imperious,
colonising ‘Eng Lit’ subsuming Scottish literature. Courses under the widely-stretching umbrella of
English literature often tend to be courses in British Literature (where for instance and for good
reason, Walter Scott might be taught on a course in Romanticism), or even Literatures in English
(where an American, Saul Bellow say, might be taught on a course on the twentieth-century novel,
or an Australian, Les Murray, for example, might be taught in a course on poetry of the 1990s). ‘It is
about the English language rather than national identity’, we might be told by those who might
wish to uphold the logic of the rubric, ‘English Literature’. Proponents of Scottish literature, like
other cognate literatures – such as Australian or American Literature – have sought to assert distinc-
tiveness from English literature to a greater or lesser degree. Their desire has been to assert a measure
of some, or all, of national, cultural, or political difference that makes sense of operating on an axis
different from that of English literature. Along with such volition, we might objectively identify the
difficulty basically of absorbing Scottish within a definition of English literature, when we observe
rich, enduring seams of the literature produced in Scotland in the languages of Gaelic and Scots, such
as feature frequently for critical consideration in the present volume. Such linguistic diversity, of
course, makes the literature of Scotland not only difficult to be encompassed by English literature,
but represents also a ‘Scottishness’ that is far from straightforward. Indeed, as shown in the literature
of Scotland in the first millennium and beyond, we have writing as well as in English, Gaelic and
Scots, in Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, and Welsh too. Migratory patterns of people, languages, cul-
ture and political entities obviously enough account for a lack of stability through time in ‘Scotland’
(not really any kind of larger kingdom or state until about a thousand years after the Romans had
occupied much of the land). Something broadly similar about historically-shifting cultural expres-
sion and identity might be said for many parts of the British and Irish isles. Cultural or national
stability is often a rather over-determined notion, generated out of both good and bad human
motives. Not only the more distant but the fairly recent national past also heaves into unstable,
discontinuous view: is the instability and discontinuity, if that is what it is entirely, that is repre-
sented by ‘British Scotland’ more radically problematic than the Scotland prior to it?
In many small dynastic shifts and movements as well two overarching ones to do with historic
Scottish independence (or unity as a separate kingdom) and the later political union of Scotland
within the British Isles we see the idea of Scotland and its properly calibrated, or ideally healthy
state of culture much contested (see Carruthers 2023). Just as there are ways of reading Scottish
literature as often bound up with being different from the literature of England, there are reading
strategies which might view literature in Scotland sometimes productively issuing out of British
union, rather than antagonistically so. Indeed, even when Scottish literature might be seen as
arising modally out of awkward difference with England and English literature, what might
pertain, arguably, is the idea that interesting, fruitful, highly creative literature emerges from
cultural tension (see Carruthers and Kidd 2018).
One of the guiding pursuits of much twentieth-century Scottish literary criticism was the
analysis of a ‘national’ literature, assumed to be limited or even damaged by not being under-
pinned by a fully independent nation. However, the idea of Scotland as a nation – like Wales or
Ireland (albeit in some ways more problematic in the second of these cases) – is, obviously
enough, a successfully enduring narrative. We might look at the world of sport, in football or
Introduction: What is Scottish Literature? 3
rugby, say, to see the ‘truth’ of the existence of the Scottish nation, in spite of often-cited historical
points of British union where there is seeming evacuation of Scottish national distinctiveness.
Those moments of union comprise, most obviously, the Union of Crowns of 1603 (when James
VI of Scotland went south to become James I of Great Britain) or the Union of Parliaments of
1707 when Scotland gave up its wholly sovereign parliament. Many things contributed to a
somewhat confederated model of British culture, Scotland within this following 1707, including
the continuing distinctiveness of Scottish church, law and education. That flexibility or ‘hybrid-
ity’ of national identity – Scottish and British – is also supplemented since 1999 with the
devolved Scottish parliament at Holyrood, operating within the overall reserved authority of the
British parliament at Westminster. The tension between independence and union (involving a
degree of ‘dependence’) remains a contentious fault-line in Scottish culture, a referendum in
2014 on whether the people of Scotland wanted complete sovereign separation from the rest of
Britain being narrowly split between 44.7% ‘yes’ and 55.3% ‘no’. Even here though the consti-
tutional picture is not entirely straightforward as the major independence party, the Scottish
National Party, has as a declared policy the retention of the British Royal Family in a future
independent Scotland. Since 2014, Scottish culture is home to what seems like an increase in
bad-tempered political debate over the future of the nation, contested in popularly withering
parlance between ‘Nats’ and ‘Yoons’.
Within the terrain of popular discourse, including especially on social media in the 2020s,
there is a contention that Scotland was colonised by England, or as part of the British project
(including those men of Scottish nobility who enthusiastically voted to concentrate the parlia-
mentary legislature at Westminster from 1707). The idea has been powerfully present since at
least the 1970s, when nationalism became much more of a credible political force in Scotland.
It finds literary voice in one of the best-selling Scottish novels of the past 30 years, Irvine Welsh’s
Trainspotting (1993). Its central character at one points tells his friends:
Ah do not hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We cannot even
pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What
does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low … Ah hate the Scots.
(Welsh 1993, p. 78)
Interesting here first of all, perhaps, is the deep penetration of the idea of Scotland colonised by
England: its internalisation by a raddled individual on the working-class Edinburgh drug scene.
In the context of the novel’s themes and its response to Scottish culture overall, however, the
notion is not to be taken at face value. It sits here beside a stereotyping of the English as less
masculine than the Scots (a traditional small-nation jibe against a more powerful, overbearing
neighbour; something similar goes on in the long historical English characterisation of the
French). Along with the myths of colonisation by – and effeminacy in – this English ‘other’ is
another attendant mass-psychological cultural trope in the passage just quoted: the articulation
of Scottish self-hatred. The alert reader of Trainspotting will realise that all of these things repre-
sent common, lazy thinking rather than any authoritative truth with which we ought simply to
agree. Co-existing, in fact, with the notion of English colonisation of Scotland is the often iter-
ated idea that the Scots were enthusiastically to the fore in the project of British Empire and so
themselves among the world’s biggest colonisers. Recently, Scotland, in line with other progres-
sive democracies, has done much more to ‘own’ its largescale, but previously often overlooked,
complicity in the slavery that did so much to hyper-charge the economies of Europe in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (for the Scottish literary context here, see Morris 2015). As
well as enslavers, Scottish civil servants, or their equivalents in imperial overseas British institu-
tions (such as the East India Company), engineers, soldiers, clergymen, and many other profes-
sions leave a distinct Caledonian groove within the biggest imperial enterprise ever witnessed by
the world. Can Scotland, then, be both colonised and coloniser simultaneously over the course of
the past two to three hundred years?
In recent years, postcolonial studies have begun to make an impact on Scottish literature, in
its critical reading strategies at least – as distinct from analysis of the wider history of Scotland
(see Mack 2006; Gardiner et al. 2011). Most ripe for larger historical treatment here, however,
are the Gaelic and Scots languages, in literary and other usage, where it might be argued that
these have been supplanted and disempowered over time by the English language. Is this delib-
erate colonisation or the natural way that culture shifts, as alluded to already? In the Scottish
context, postcolonialism, class, race, and nation become somewhat entangled (what cultural
theorists might refer to as ‘intersectionality’). We see this fairly clearly in the case of one of the
country’s most celebrated modern writers, James Kelman. Accepting the Booker Prize for his
novel, How late it was, how late in 1994, he said:
A couple of weeks ago a feature writer for a Quality Newspaper suggested that the term “culture”
was inappropriate to my work, that the characters peopling my pages were “pre-culture” —or was
it “primeval”? I cannot quite recall. This was explicit, generally it is not. But —as Tom Leonard
pointed out more than 20 years ago —the gist of the argument amounts to the following, that
vernaculars, patois, slangs, dialects, gutter-languages etc. might well have a place in the realms of
comedy (and the frequent references to Billy Connolly or Rab C. Nesbitt substantiate this) but
they are inferior linguistic forms and have no place in literature. And a priori any writer who
engages in the use of such so-called language is not really engaged in literature at all. It’s common
to find well-meaning critics suffering from the same burden, while they strive to be kind they still
cannot bring themselves to operate within a literary perspective; not only do they approach the
work as though it were an oral text, they somehow assume it to be a literal transcription of recorded
speech. This sort of prejudice, in one guise or another, has been around for a very long time and for
the sake of clarity we are better employing the contemporary label, which is racism. A fine line can
exist between elitism and racism and on matters concerning language the distinction can some-
times cease to exist altogether
(Kelman 1994, p. 2).
The supposedly ‘inferior’ status of writing in Scots, as suggested here by Kelman to emanate
from an English or British cultural elite, and his further accusation of ‘racism’ are key elements
in the postcolonial identification of coloniser and colonised. However, Kelman’s subject matter,
most often west of Scotland working-class life and his voicing of its language, are frowned on as
a matter of class, precisely, as much as or maybe more so than nation (roughly here equivalent to
‘race’) per se. The same attitudes Kelman posits do not manifest themselves in relation to the
reception of an equally fine contemporary Scottish writer such as the middle-class, standard-
English-writing Allan Massie, say. Kelman’s writing, in other words, does not stand for the
whole of Scottish literature, even if in recent decades there has been an emphasis on the suppos-
edly more demotic core of Scottish national culture. The idea of ‘the people’ in Scotland during
the twentieth century came to be seen increasingly as synonymous with a sovereign-invested hoi
polloi much more so than the more marginal iteration of this idea in English culture. The sup-
posedly more authentic, core working-class nature of Scotland, down-trodden by its ‘posher’
southern neighbour, is a common piece of attitudinising in relation to England employed often

enough from the perspectives of both Socialist and Nationalist politics in Scotland. Race or
‘ethnicity’, nationality and class, then, form a potent compound in Scottish culture, but does the
existence of this narrative evidence an imperial English presence or – more ‘simply’ – is it really
a critique of the indigenous, widely-stretching British class system?
Is the ready appropriation of Scottish texts and the neglect of so many others within ‘Eng Lit’
programmes a form of colonisation? The architects of the new Department of Scottish Literature
at Glasgow in 1971 did not so much posit a colonised Scottish culture, as object to its limited
provincialised space, which they wished to inflate to proper national proportions. The provin-
cialism of Scottish literature shared with other Anglophone literatures, not least in Ireland and
America (see, for example, Clive and Bailyn 1954) speaks certainly of a metropolitan cultural
effect where ‘lesser’, or more ‘provincial’ cultures to England are rather disregarded and excluded.
Culture often operates with an assumed model of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. An important inter-
vention here came from Robert Crawford in 1992 with his Devolving English Literature, which
sought to unravel the metropolitan construct of English literature, demonstrating that this was
historically built by many ‘provincial’ parts far- flung across the English- speaking globe.
Interestingly, one of the things Crawford’s work demonstrated was the especially large Scottish
input into the canonical construction of English literature, or in other words perhaps, Scotland’s
self-provincialisation (see also Crawford 1998). This centripetal cultural effect is a consequence
ultimately of market-power, including the location of publishing industries, although histori-
cally in large part as much in Edinburgh as in London. For much of the nineteenth century and
beyond, Edinburgh was home to a powerful review and literary magazine culture including the
Edinburgh Review (from 1802) and Blackwood’s Magazine (from 1817), influential around the
world. The latter, especially, was a key publishing site for the Romantic poets, including Shelley
and Coleridge; later again it published George Eliot and Joseph Conrad. The literary culture of
Scotland, then, encompasses historically, an international engine of Rolls Royce standard. This
publishing power might also be read as symptomatic of an assumed superior national British
mindset as a massive capitalist empire, with a first language of English, grows. The already men-
tioned Les Murray here is a telling case: an Australian of Scottish settler descent he becomes –
rightly through his huge technical panache – a prominent part of the late twentieth-century
English poetry canon. Ought Murray be seen as product of the British Empire with all of its
assumptions about white, Protestant, English-speaking culture, or as a provincial poet writing,
to begin with, from the marginalised colonies (and someone who in his religious conversion to
Catholicism exercises one kind of dissent from his descent)? Fascinating readings of Murray’s
work can be made attending to all of these co-ordinates of place and identity, but ultimately a
very purist sort of literary critic might ask, is it not simply about Murray’s literary ability?
Literary criticism, of course, has never been only about the technical or natural ability of
writers. Always the lived and historical human context are part of necessary critical considera-
tion. Biography, literary history, cultural history in general, inevitably contextualise the critical
act and this is why all of the essays in the present Companion necessarily explore historical context
to some degree: whether that is a writer’s more personal, life circumstances or the ‘larger’ ones of
regional, national and, indeed, international import and location. One of the primary drivers of
Scottish literary criticism in historicist perspective is the shifting reality of Scotland, linguisti-
cally, ethnically, politically and culturally through time. The separate medieval kingdom of
Scotland down to 1603 under the Stuarts, especially, or the post-union Scotland following 1707
certainly make a difference to the kinds of things Scottish writers and texts say. But ought we to
agree with those commentators who have argued that these events represent essentially cultural
‘traumas’? Does the absence of a fully independent nation really make a difference fundamentally
to the quality of a nation’s literature, particularly the writers writing therein? In other words, is
there an organic relationship between a nation’s creative output and its constitutional institu-
tions? Central to the project of the ‘Scottish Literary Renaissance’ of the 1920s and 1930s was
the idea, as expressed by Scott Lyall in the present volume, that the writers associated with
this movement – Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) et al. – had inherited a
Scottish history, including 1603 and 1707, that had been ‘a series of catastrophes’. Such an
unpropitious history (most pessimistically the end of Scotland, essentially, rather than – from the
Unionist point of view – the fully flexed formation of a new, more progressive Britain), was taken
axiomatically by the literary-activists of the 1920s and 1930s to be bad for literary production.
At the same time, however, MacDiarmid, like other Scottish writers of his generation had the
experimental confidence of the Modernist movement to believe that one could begin anew, in
MacDiarmid’s case writing mature poetry in the Scots language, some of the most ambitious of
its kind, arguably, since Burns in the eighteenth century. This was so even as the recent history
of literary Scots was often one, he believed, of disuse and misuse, in the context of the infantilised
usage in the literature of the ‘Kailyard’ or cabbage-patch, parochial perspective (originally coined
as a dismissive term for fiction of the 1890s; see Nash 2007). Bad (or for that matter good) liter-
ary ‘tradition’, then, perhaps does not absolutely matter if literature can be resuscitated, if,
indeed, ‘resuscitation’ is here even a valid metaphor or accurate idea. Such is the problematic
terrain we enter when dealing with such determined positing of ‘tradition’ or ‘nation’ as contexts
for literature.
Brilliant Scots poetry production by MacDiarmid coexisted with his perennial complaint of
impoverished Scottish cultural conditions. Equally, a line of Scottish literary criticism from the
1920s to the 1980s (far from fully run out of steam today) described a very large corpus of
Scottish literature that was always lesser (at some point following the Reformation, and impaired
further by 1603 and 1707) than the amplitude which might have pertained had Scotland been a
‘truer’ (more independent) nation. This awkward situation, lots of writers and texts but lack of a
fully desirable Scottish nation, is summed up in a number of critical works, including a minor
classic of Scottish literary history: David Daiches, The Paradox of Scottish Culture: the eighteenth-
century experience (1964) which suggested that however brilliant the Enlightenment period might
have been intellectually in Scotland (and this had been and remains an epoch eliciting huge
Scottish pride), it forms part of a context for all writers in its milieu, including Robert Burns,
which is ultimately debilitating. Daiches’s paradox-in-chief is that Scottish culture and litera-
ture may appear brilliant during the eighteenth century, but it is always ultimately hamstrung
by a ‘crisis of identity’, where thinkers and writers are torn between two competing cultures:
Scottish and British (with a heavy weighting in the latter case towards English cultural mores).
The ‘crisis of identity’ that Daiches identified was part of long-standing mass-psychology
practised on Scottish cultural history by literary critics. Daiches had been crucially influenced by
David Craig in his Scottish Literature and the Scottish People, 1680–1830 (1961) where this author
wondered why Scottish literature had such a faulty mindset as to be preoccupied so often with
historic religious disputes (in its fiction and poetry) rather than – what seemed to Craig, the
Marxist – more pressing secular, contemporary social and economic issues, including industriali-
sation. Craig also paved the way for Daiches in his identification of fatal flaws in eighteenth-
century Scottish culture, seeing the ‘neo-classical’ Scottish Enlightenment as ‘an alienation from
things native’ (Craig 1961, p. 63) which meant the production of much synthetic literary
product (including James Macpherson’s faux-Celtic ‘Ossian’ poetry, to be discussed a little

further below and elsewhere in this volume) and the under-appreciation of native creative writing
such as was to be found in the Scots poetry of Robert Burns. Even in the case of the latter, how-
ever, in supposedly authentic Scottish literary production: Burns and writers in Scots were not
only lacking in vital support but were in receipt of a damaged culture overall; they might be
good, therefore, only within a limited ambit, for instance the satirical ‘reductive idiom’
(Craig 1961, p. 82), a strong sneering, satirical voice derived, supposedly, from the populist
outlook of Scottish Calvinism. For Scotland, lacking a fuller, more complete culture as purport-
edly possessed by England, there pertained a situation where even its most authentically native
literature was lacking in the wholeness of mind which ultimately consigned it to failure. Such
overarching generalisations by Craig, Daiches and many others though are difficult to justify and
exemplify with particular evidence. How might Robert Burns have produced better, more fully
extended poetry, what are his particular deficiencies a propos a healthier literary system that was
lacking, and can these really be attributed to an inadequate national situation?
In fact, what I have elsewhere called ‘generalist’ Scottish literary criticism (Carruthers 2009,
p. 10), as practised by Craig and Daiches, is a sincere, superficially persuasive but ultimately not
well supported narrative of Scottish historical, cultural and literary failure. In two ways in gen-
eral it proceeds from Anglocentricity. First of all, as already alluded to, these critics observe
English literature and enviously wish Scottish literature could have all the former’s features,
which supposedly emanate from a more secure, less troubled cultural history. For instance,
Scotland has something of a paucity in its tradition of drama as compared to its southern
neighbour, in part, arguably, due to Scotland’s puritanical attitude to the theatre as a result of the
somewhat puritanical Calvinist Reformation. We might ask, however, why should Scotland
necessarily have or even need all that English literature features? Some of our most influential
Scottish critics of the twentieth century, as shown in the case of Craig’s identification of strong
religious thematics, do not, in fact, actually like Scottish distinctiveness (or difference from
England). What we have, in effect is the belief of Craig and Daiches in the normative experience
of the English cultural tradition. This belief is inherent through much of the history of twentieth-
century Scottish criticism where its proponents, in lament for Scotland and its broken culture,
simultaneously over-idealise English literary culture.
The idea of a (largely) unbroken, or at least readily to be discerned, English literary tradition is
the result of twentieth-century literary criticism in England as influentially moulded by T.S. Eliot
and continued by the likes of F.R. Leavis and others. Very much a follower of Eliot was the
Scottish critic, Edwin Muir, upon whose foundational critical work, David Craig and David
Daiches build, to a very large degree. In his influential, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the
Scottish Writer (1982 [1936]), Muir suggested that true or proper or authentic Scottish literature
had essentially been impossible for a very long time, most certainly since the Reformation in
Scotland (1560) since when the nation had set a sure course towards integration with England,
including linguistic as well as political integration. Consequently lacking a ‘homogenous lan-
guage’ (Muir 1982 [1936], p. 72), or one used for all the functions that might be encompassed:
speaking, writing, thinking, and feeling, Scotland was linguistically compromised (including in
its impossibility of producing good literature). For Muir, Scottish people fatally came to think in
one (authoritative) language, English, and feel in another, Scots, neither of these then being fully,
authentically available to Scottish folk. Such sociolinguistics sound superficially persuasive, but
are ultimately far from soundly couched. We know that people code-shift, or use different regis-
ters and might even be bilingual. Where, then, is the necessity of a single, overarching language
for the psychological health of the nation or its individuals, writers or otherwise? Observing the
recession of the power of Scots and its declining use in literature from the sixteenth century, Muir
glumly sees broken tradition as settled, inescapable reality, something utterly to be deplored
according to the strictures of T.S. Eliot. This is why, for instance, Muir (and after him Craig and
Daiches) see the Scots poetry ‘revival’ of the eighteenth century as necessarily inadequate because it
is something remade where the national tradition has already fatally failed. Observing one of the
great poems in Scots, Robert Burns’s ‘Tam o’Shanter’ (1790), Muir has to adduce deep inauthentic-
ity in the text. It is not, according to him in Scott and Scotland (Muir 1982 [1936], pp. 42, 62, 71),
proper – as might be found in an English context – but rather drunken fantasy, the former kind
no doubt requiring sobriety. This is a quite brilliant piece of critical sleight of hand: Burns’s main
protagonist in his text might well be drunk as he has his supernatural adventure, but neither
author Burns nor his narrator necessarily are. Such elision in Muir’s reading practice is a necessity:
since Scottish tradition is, as a system, a priori impaired, and particularly impaired texts must
inevitably be the result. Muir, then, will adduce the evidence for this impairment any way he can.
We might return here to a basic question: does healthy literature always need a healthy cultural
context surrounding it? Do not protest literature or satire, for instance, often produce powerful
literary product from unamenable, unpleasant circumstances?
Muir, Craig, and Daiches, in their large generalism, practice a form of national, cultural and
literary essentialism. The idea of a Scottish literary tradition, both idealised and effectively absent,
lasted too long and unchallenged in Scottish criticism contributing also to a canonicity which
was needlessly exclusive of those elements felt particularly to be ‘un-Scottish’. Writers who wrote
in English, or even worse were doing so from an English locus, have tended to be less celebrated
in twentieth-century accounts of Scottish literature and indeed have been less frequently taught
in university courses. James Thomson, for instance, émigré from his native country to the south-
east of England and author of what perhaps has been the most globally influential Scottish
poetry-text, The Seasons (1726–1730), has tended only to have a very marginal place in considera-
tion of Scottish literature. Yet the seminal influence of The Seasons on the literature, architecture,
art, and music of western culture has been immense. We might also cite again James Macpherson’s
Ossian poetry of the 1760s, which was massively read from its own time and beyond, garnering
such readers as Tennyson and Napoleon Bonaparte, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings arguably
being not able to exist in the same way without it. Scottish criticism long tended to see
Macpherson’s texts as not simply forgeries, but additionally as too synthetic or programmatically
constructed (the Scottish Enlightenment ‘needing’ an ancient, primitive text featuring ‘noble
savages’ with Macpherson producing this to order). In this post-post-modern age, however, we
might well be much more comfortable with Ossian, regarding its complex fictiveness, let alone
its huge popularity and influence, as worthy of serious study – of admiration even – rather than
bringing to it straightforward disavowal for its lack of complete ‘authenticity’.
The Ossian poems also represented a moment of ‘Celtic revival’ in Scottish, British and,
indeed world culture. Ossian helped embed a new Celticism in Scotland which flourished into
the nineteenth century through the likes of the Jacobite song phenomenon. Romantic antiquari-
anism, practised by Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and many others aids and abets this cultural
movement, so that by the end of the nineteenth century, the Celtic/Highland identity is the most
overarching signifier of the Scottish ‘brand’, despite the recession of much of the actuality of that
culture in its heartlands following the final defeat of the Jacobites in 1745 and the disaster of the
nineteenth-century Clearances, when landlords cleared people from the land to make way for
more profitable sheep. The ruined, empty highlands could be consumed somewhat romantically,
thereafter, even as it represented a by-product of aggressive ‘progress’. ‘Highlandism’ or ‘Tartanry’

then joined ‘Kailyard’ in the twentieth-century critical lexicon as part of a repeatedly diseased
Scottish cultural polity where irresponsible romance and fantasy avoided the real growing pains
of modernity, not least as Scotland threw in its lot with British progress including empire. One
commentator, Tom Nairn (again building on Edwin Muir’s ideas of Scotland as a cultural waste-
land), brings together much of this political-critical lexis and sees Scotland, unlike other coun-
tries, failing to have a mature Romantic movement because of its determined British trajectory
pursuing thereby rampant capitalism and imperialism (Nairn 1981, pp. 94–111). However, in
recent decades Scottish literary scholarship has been particularly and powerfully productive in its
work on the sophisticated literature of ‘Scottish Romanticism’ (see, for instance, Trumpener 1997;
Wickman 2007; Duncan 2007; Pittock 2008). And are we really to believe that a host of writers,
including Burns and Scott as well as others dealt with in the following chapters of this volume
are not interestingly involved in and do not make largescale contributions to the Romantic
movement of the western world?
‘Ethnic’ Scottish-ness, and Celtic-ness have been viewed as aesthetically positive things, or
alternatively as part of a rhetoric of empty romance. We ought to glance at how Scottish and
Celtic become somewhat conflated terms in literary criticism. The most successful late nineteenth-
century promulgator of the Celtic idea in literary criticism is the poet, Matthew Arnold, who as
Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in the 1860s writes about ‘Celtic’, ‘Saxon’ and
other characteristics in ‘English poetry’. Arnold was a key player in the rise of English Studies as
a replacement for the more inaccessible literature of the Classical Humanities (Greek and Latin).
In an age of radical new political movements and when Christian Scripture was seemingly under
assault from the scientific discoveries of Charles Darwin and others, Arnold feared the loss of tra-
ditional moral and religious authority and saw secular literature as a substitute-repository of such
value (see Carruthers 2009; Baldick 1983). Related to this impulse, part of Arnold’s motivation
in identifying long ‘Celtic’ and ‘Saxon’ roots in English literature/British culture was to provide
an ancient pedigree for the new-fangled, rather too modern subject of literature in English. Also,
in an age increasingly interested in race and nationalism, often both in tandem, and recognising
the heterogeneous nature of British ‘ethnicity’, the bringing together of ‘Celtic’ and ‘Saxon’ cul-
tural characteristics by Arnold becomes an act of unifying diversity. As a byproduct of Arnoldian
racial-literary thinking, from the late nineteenth century onwards numerous accounts of Scottish
literature begin to posit the Celtic as distinct from Saxon character of its subject. If not necessarily
speaking of a ‘nationalist’ impulse such work certainly spoke to a growing uncertainty about
‘Great Britain’ (bound up with some of the seeming cultural fragmentation to which Arnold was
responding). The most obvious example here was the growing desire for Home Rule in Ireland. A
‘Home Rule Association’ was established in Scotland too amid this late Victorian crisis in British
national confidence, and here we find the seeds of the modern devolutionary movement, with
parliaments/assemblies in Northern Ireland and Wales as well as Scotland. Full-blown independ-
ence for the Republic of Ireland, of course, followed the rebellion of 1916.
Crisis in religion and British Empire became more pronounced with the Great War
(1914–1918) and at its end the Treaty of Versailles (1919) encouraged the right of smaller
nations, as the defeated Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were broken apart. Even as a
winning power in the war, the United Kingdom, or British Empire, was not immune from such
pressure. Ireland obtained independence and in a variety of places (including India) agitation for
separation and the slow decline of empire ensued. In the same year as Versailles (and representing
in part the new impetus to pay regard to smaller national cultures), G. Gregory Smith published
his influential Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (1919). In many ways a lightly-toned,
jovial tome (discussing even Scotland’s astrology), it concluded largely that Scottish literature
was a thing of the past, its onward trend, increasingly from the medieval period marked by the
infractions of Britishness, where Scottishness as anything meaningfully largescale gradually left
the building. Smith also transposed the terms ‘Celtic’ and ‘Saxon’ into ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Realism’ as
the defining ‘polar twins’ of ‘Scottish’ literature, where at its best both of these features operated
in concert (implicitly, though, Gregory Smith was actually pointing to what he – like so many
others – took to be the uncertainty of Scottish cultural history). This identification was also
based on a dubious stereotype – that of the quarrelsome, contrarian Scot, seen in Scottish mili-
tary pugnacity, for instance, or in the Scot’s supposed propensity for constant argument most
especially over religion. With some wit, Smith labelled the two moods of Scottish literature, the
‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ (Smith 1919, pp. 4–27), a term that derived a great deal of usage in
subsequent discussions of Scottish literature and culture, where it became a kind of elastic bipo-
larity applied as determining context to the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Mutatis mutandis, ‘Celtic’
and ‘Saxon’ became ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Realism’ and then, in Edwin Muir’s hands, ‘Feeling’ and
‘Thought’ (or the fatal linguistic division he identifies in Scottish life). This, then, is the rhetori-
cally loose lineage of the fault line through which twentieth-century Scottish critics despair over
broken, fragmented, dualistic (Scottish and English/British) Scottish literary tradition. A genu-
ine paradox is that, to a large degree, it is this parlance of division, or the supposed difficulty and
failure of Scottish literature and culture that does so much to drive the discussion and upon
which is built the subject of Scottish literature.
Characteristically, Edwin Muir’s arch-enemy, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, gleefully adopted
‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ as a liberating modernist term from the 1920s on, arguing a virtue to
‘aye [always] be whaur extremes meet’ (MacDiarmid 2008 [1926], pp. ll.141, ll.142).
MacDiarmid was also responding with some nice rhetorical anarchy in this period of Modernism,
where older, traditional authorities might seem somewhat bankrupted after World War I.
Following this cataclysm, all kinds of peripheralised identity including those relating to class,
gender, sexuality and also smaller, newly-formed or reformed nations found voice; included here
was the rise of modern Scottish nationalism. The idea of remaking nations, cultures, and tradi-
tions was part, then, of a new optimistic energy at this time which coexisted with the somewhat
hopeless tenor of Scottish literary criticism as it discussed the nation’s hopeless cultural history.
From the 1920s until the 1990s, the nationalist cause was steady, without real electoral gains
that only came at the end of the latter decade and which became very much more substantial in
the twenty-first century. Through the twentieth and into the present century, Scottish literary
studies became ever more-popular, partly but far from entirely due to the politics of nation.
Partly too, the trend was the result of Scottish Studies being seen as an area of disadvantage and
absent critical perspective, now to be made good. Also, the movement from Modernism into
Post-Modernism meant that literary criticism was, as was the case elsewhere in the disciplines of
the Humanities, much more comfortable with the peripheral, with variegated, multiple tradi-
tions/instances of cultural expression co-existing, changing, contradicting even, over time. Thus,
Scotland’s linguistic situation, the ‘three leids’ (as one Scots slogan suitably expresses it) of
English, Scots and Gaelic represented a case where differences might comfortably have some con-
nections and also disconnections, where these could signify a culture that was polyphonic.3
Alongside this comfortableness, of course, has been the continuation of the aforementioned idea
that Scotland has been colonised by England/Britain and pursued with great energy across social
media in a debate about ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ in relation to the expression of Scots. At one end
of the spectrum here is dislike by some language activists of the term ‘dialect’ which they take
as implying the subservience of Scots to English, with the attendant idea that Scots is a language
that has been rudely displaced by English. Both Scots and English, it can be claimed, are cousin-
dialects stemming from the same Early Middle English root (itself winding back further in West
Germanic linguistic origin) and Scotland, in fact – like England (or anywhere) has multiple
‘dialects’ according to different regions of the country.4 Might it even be that regional contexts
for literature (and language) represent more productive sites of critical analysis than national
ones (where the nation is always a thing rather too large to imagine)?
As reflected in this volume, there are long traditions, to use that word in the loosest or per-
haps most prosaic sense, of the literature of Scotland in all of English, Gaelic and Scots, each of
which remain vibrant today.5 What about diasporic Scottish language and literature, we might
ask? What about Ulster-Scots or Scottish Gaelic in North America, both the result of émigré
communities? Are these also not part of the story of Scottish history and literature? To which the
answer presumably is yes, and also that these are part of other national identities too.6 Diasporic
and international complexities in the ‘Scottish’ story of literature have increasingly been taken
account of in the growing, often multi-volume histories of ‘Scottish literature’ which have
appeared since the 1980s (Craig 1987–1989; Brown 2006; Carruthers and McIlvanney 2012).
Within and alongside these projects, effective historical revisionism a propos the Reformation/
Calvinist contribution to Scottish l iterature has been undertaken (see, for instance, Gribben and
Mullen 2009), countering the assumptions of Edwin Muir and others that this was simply, bane-
fully puritanical in its influence. Cairns Craig has produced important work on the dynamics of
the Calvinist imagination in the Scottish novel, exemplifying the positively creative results
therein (see Craig 1999). The Scottish Enlightenment, dismissed by David Craig and others, has
also seen a huge inflation in its serious cultural treatment, including in the literary context with
two fine volumes by John MacQueen (1982, 1989). Scottish literary studies of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries in recent decades have seen major new textual editions of James Boswell,
Thomas Carlyle, Allan Ramsay, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, James Hogg, John Galt, and Robert
Louis Stevenson. The work of reappraisal, of course, is never done in literary studies or in any
field. Adding to the huge vibrancy of Scottish literary study is the focussed concern, seen in
multiple chapters in this volume, with the riches of women’s writing (as pioneered by a path-
breaking modern critical compendium: Gifford and McMillan 1997).
The present publication is the biggest ever single-volume view of Scottish literature, featur-
ing in one way or another all of the issues and writers already mentioned in this introductory
chapter. Canonical authors and periods feature, as do institutional, including publishing,
contexts to the production of Scottish literature, and the issue of the relationship of Scottish
literature to state/national politics remains a live one in this volume (see also, Pittin-Hedon
et al. 2022). Tartan Noir, currently the best-selling of all Scottish writing genres, is given special
consideration, in a way which would not have been foreseen 30 years ago. Inter-relationship with
other art forms might comprise a volume all of its own, but here for some synergy o f themes,
especially, the medium of film is foregrounded. This Companion includes also more recent
intersections of identity in Scottish literature such as gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity
(in the ‘non-traditionally Scottish’ sense). There is much too about ‘regional’ as well as ‘national’
writing, a concern that has come to the fore evermore in a world that is sometimes claimed to be
‘post-’ or ‘multi-’ national. The Scottish diaspora is considered, which would include, for
instance, Douglas Stuart – author of the 2020 Booker Prize winner Shuggie Bain – and many
international cultural currents also appear obviously enough throughout the essays. What about
‘new Scots’, who might include Bernard MacLaverty, novelist and short-story writer, born in
Belfast but resident in Scotland for over 50 years, the Indian born poet, Bashabi Fraser (also resi-
dent in Scotland for decades)7 or J.K. Rowling? How do these fit into a narrative of Scottish
literature? The answer might be no less and no more problematically than any other Scottish
writer through time. Scottish literature, like all literatures, is constantly – to the critical eye – in
formation and also de-formation. The moving target we seek to hit makes it all the more and not
less interesting. There is always more to do, and if this volume not only informs but also raises
more questions than the answers it provides for readers and scholars, and leads them to ask what
about this or that writer, inadequately covered or not at all, it will have done its job in producing
more food for thought.8
Notes
1 https://asls.org.uk 6 To say nothing of the large influx of Irish people to

2 https://www.iassl.org Scotland who have left a large, if often unnoticed mark
3 This is why, for a while, Mikhail Bakhtin was so fash- on ‘Scottish literature’; in this connection see the
ionable in Scottish literary studies (see Alastair anthology, Jim McGonigal, Donny O’Rourke and
Renfrew, ‘Brief Encounters, Long Farewells: Bakhtin Hamish Whyte (eds.), Across the Water: Irishness in
and Scottish Literature’ in International Journal of Modern Scottish Writing (Glendaruel: Argyll
Scottish Literature Issue 1, 2006: https://www.ijsl.stir. Publishing, 2000).
ac.uk/issue1/renfrew.htm). 7 See especially, Bashabi Fraser, Patient Dignity
4 A superlative volume with many implications for how (Edinburgh: Scotland Street Press, 2021).
literature in Scots historically and in the present might 8 A Companion to Scottish Literature treats hundreds of
be viewed is Robert McColl Millar, A Sociolinguistic writers and texts, but always some slip beyond any
History of Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University projected and completed structure; for instance, the
Press, 2022). editor is fascinated by the work of the Glasgow-
5 Gaelic literature in English translation has been rather Jewish poet, A.C. Jacobs, whom he suspects is a
sparsely available; see, however, the helpfully monumen- more major talent than Scottish literary criticism
tal anthology, which runs from 600 ce to the present, has realised. See Jacobs’ collection Nameless Country
Wilson McLeod and Michael Newton (eds.), The Highest (Manchester: Carcanet, 2018) eds. Merle Bachman
Apple, An Ubhal as Àirde (London: Francis Boutle, 2019). and Anthony Rudolf.
References
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Brown, I. (ed.) (2006). The Edinburgh History of Scottish Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge
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Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives. Edinburgh: Oxford University Press.
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October), p. 2. https://blog.pmpress.org/2022/08/18/ University of Pennsylvania Press.
Periods
PART I
2
The First Millennium
Dauvit Broun and Gerard Carruthers
University of Glasgow
School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
‘Scottish Literature’ has long tended to have its history charted from the fourteenth century
when it exists in the medium of the Scots language. John Barbour produced his long narrative
poem, The Bruce (1375/6) with its romance and epic paraphernalia celebrating the exploits of
King Robert the Bruce in overcoming the English during the Wars of Independence. In the
Bruce’s reign the Scots defeated the English at the Battle of the Bannockburn (1314) and the
Declaration of Arbroath (6 April 1320) was written as a letter in Latin from the Scottish barons
to Pope John XXII, insisting on Scotland’s right to exist as a nation owing allegiance to no
outside sovereign overlord. Here Scottishness is defined not by language but by allegiance to
the king; the Scots are, first and foremost, a people united under a line of kings whose origins
are traced to Biblical times:
We know, most holy father and lord, and have gathered from the deeds and books of the Ancients,
that among other famous nations our nation, that is of the Scots, has been marked out for its many
celebrated deeds. Journeying from Greater Scythia by the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules,
and staying in Spain among the fiercest peoples for many periods of time, it could not be subdued
anywhere by anyone, however barbaric.
Coming from there one thousand and two hundred years after the Children of Israel’s crossing, it
won for itself through many victories for itself and very many hardships the settlements in the west
which it now occupies after first driving out the Britons and totally destroying the Picts; and
although often attacked by the Norwegians, Danes and English, it held these settlements always free
of all servitude, as the histories of the ancients testify.
In whose kingdom one hundred and thirteen kings from their royal lineage have reigned with
no-one foreign coming in-between.
(Adapted from Broun et al. 2020)

The Gaelic and Scots speaking part of the land-area we know today as Scotland were united in
their identification with the king of Scots, regardless of the differences and mutual enmity com-
mented on in Fordun’s history:
The people who speak Scots occupy the coastal and lowland regions, while those who speak Gaelic
live in the mountainous regions and outer isles. The coastal people are docile and civilised,
trustworthy, long-suffering and courteous, decent in their dress, polite and peaceable, devout in
their worship, but always ready to resist injuries threatened by their enemies. The island or highland
people however are fierce and untameable, uncouth and unpleasant, much given to theft, fond of
doing nothing, but their minds are quick to learn, and cunning. They are strikingly handsome in
appearance, but their clothing is unsightly. They are always hostile and savage not only towards the
people and language of England, but also towards their fellow Scots because of the difference in
language. They are however loyal and obedient to the king and kingdom, and they are easily made
to submit to the laws, if rule is exerted over them
(MacQueen and MacQueen 1993, p. 185).
Loyalty and obedience to the king and kingdom and its laws was also emphasised in the Treaty
of Perth in 1266 which marked the formal incorporation of the kingdom of the Isles into the
Scottish realm and renunciation of Norwegian suzerainty. In the text it was stated that ‘all the
people of the said islands … both greater and lesser, shall be subject to the laws and customs of
the kingdom of Scotland and be dealt with and judged according to them from now into the
future’ (translated from Duncan 1988, pp. 308, 309).
Notwithstanding the deepening sense of a cultural division between Lowlands and Highlands,
a national literary culture in Scots can be proposed in the late middle ages including the likes of
John Barbour in the late fourteenth century. He was followed in the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries by Robert Henryson and Gavin Douglas, drawing on classical (Greek and
Roman) models, and William Dunbar, brilliantly dynamic across a range of genres and styles, and
whose career is closely bound up with the court of James IV. Barbour’s Bruce (1375/1376 [1997])
was complemented a century later by another long poetic epic, The Wallace by ‘Blind Hary’ (2003)
celebrating Scotland’s other iconic freedom fighter from the period of King Robert, William
Wallace. Often, since the nineteenth century, these writers across the reigns of James III–V are
often referred to in Scots as ‘Makars’ (based on the Greek term for poetry as an act ‘to make’), and
that claim for Scottish distinctiveness is reiterated in the present by ‘Makars’ Court’ in Edinburgh
(constructed from 1997), which celebrates a wide range of Scottish writers or ‘Makars’. We might
notice, then, a closing of the circle down to the present in Scottish literature which sees the most
important roots of national literary consciousness lying in the medieval period.
It is only quite recently that literature in Scotland has been emphasised within a longer per-
spective, and one anthology especially has pursued this task, somewhat influentially and with
great gusto, The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Earliest Poetry AD 550–1350 (1998) edited by Thomas
Owen Clancy and several others. Where we see in documents such as The Declaration of Arbroath
and the Makars’ Court a cogent sense of Scottishness, The Triumph Tree celebrates instead ethnic
and linguistic heterogeneity. In a key gesture, the anthology includes only one fragment of verse
in Scots, the earliest known to survive, ‘Scotland after Alexander’ (c. 1300), which appears
297 pages into the collection, emphasising, accurately enough, the belated appearance in Scotland
of literature in Scots. The anthology features verse in Latin from the mid-sixth century on
(associated especially with the evangelising efforts of St Columba), Welsh from the seventh cen-
tury on, Gaelic likewise from that same period on, Old English from the eighth century on and
Norse from the tenth century onwards. Accurately, The Triumph Tree points to the multifarious,
The First Millennium 19
shifting, often co-existing, ethnic, and linguistic patterns in literature in Scotland in its iterations
before and also after literature in Scots. Clearly, this Scottish literary ‘prehistory’ (a useful word
for our purposes here, although open also to sharp critique) represents a set of traditions more
difficult but not impossible in many respects to set in any kind of narrative continuum with
Scottish literature as conceived from the medieval period. The material in The Triumph Tree
points to contested political as well as cultural identities and is none of it so formidably about
the large-scale nation-building (or building of a national literary culture) that we might identify
in literature in Scots from the fourteenth century onwards. It ought to be said, however, that the
contents of The Triumph Tree are often about asserting local and more widespread valorous territo-
rial, political and dynastic rights.
Appearing at the end of the second millennium and as Scotland was about to achieve its own
devolved legislature in the Scottish parliament at Holyrood in Edinburgh, The Triumph Tree was a
contradictory reminder that Scotland’s nationhood and culture were more trammelled than some
might have us believe. In one of a number of quietly defiant revisionist gestures, the anthology’s
general editor and his team set out in its introduction its self-declared ‘ambitious aim’:
We wish to restore eight centuries of Scotland’s literary heritage, lost or neglected by modern schol-
ars and anthologists, and virtually unknown to the general public. Most anthologies of Scottish
poetry, and indeed most discussions of Scottish literature, begin with the 14th century. They do this
largely because the approach to our literary history has for long been Anglocentric, concentrating on
the English-language tradition of Scotland, and that of its northern cousin, lowland Scots.
(Clancy 1998, p. 5)
The Triumph Tree emphasises a strongly factual element of sixth-century Irish cultural inflection
within the territory of Scotland which sees itself as far more than merely political. Around the
Irish saint, Columba (521–597) there are verses and hymns in both Latin and Gaelic celebrating
his life, its prodigious deeds and miracles in particular, and also Christianity in general. Here,
obviously enough, we can trace the formation of the Christian religious element in the formation
of ‘modern’ Scotland. In the middle ages, poetry was written ventriloquising Columba as in this
translation from Gaelic, associated with the monastic island of Iona, celebrating the ruggedly
beautiful landscape, and expressing devotion to God. One example provided by Clancy is trans-
lated from twelfth-century Gaelic:
Delight I’d find in an island’s breast,

on a rock’s peak,
that there I might often gaze
at the sea’s calm.
That I might see its heavy waves
over the brilliant sea
as it sings music to the Father on its constant way.
(Clancy 1998, p. 188)
The same text has Columba gazing towards Ireland, making us aware of a common cultural
identity across the Irish channel and in cousin-versions of Gaelic – an interconnectedness that
flowed along the seaways of the west, with sailing the quickest means of movement in an age
when mountain ranges and wetlands formed significant barriers to the movement of people.
Adomnán of Iona (c. 624–705), born probably in County Donegal, was a successor Abbot to
Columba at Iona and wrote his predecessor’s life. This is a highly important text from early
medieval Scotland, and so with Adomnán more certainly than Columba we have a literary author
of note. An extensive corpus of ecclesiastical and devotional hymns, poetry and prose in Latin and
in Gaelic emanates from or around Iona (written by its monks indeterminately in what we would
today call Ireland or Scotland) from the sixth century. One of the things The Triumph Tree devel-
ops is the slightly earlier work by Clancy and Gilbert Márkus in their path-breaking Iona: The
Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery (1995), a text of value to both Celtic Studies and anyone who
wishes to understand medieval Celtic monasticism in Ireland, Scotland and beyond.
The pre-fourteenth century Scottish Latin tradition also includes literary work that sheds
light on the functioning of the great ecclesiastical centres of the country such as Glasgow.
William, Clerk of Glasgow (fl. 1164) has his Latin ‘Song on the Death of Somerled’ translated
into English and anthologised in The Triumph Tree. Here we find a very local as well as national
patriotism as the Battle of Renfrew (1164) is celebrated when those loyal to the king of Scots
defeated the king of Argyll and the Isles, Somhairle (Somerled), whose downfall is attributed in
the text to prayers to St Kentigern, or St Mungo, patron saint of Glasgow, and the kingdom’s
saints. The song, or poem, is not squeamish about violence and ends:
So the enemy host being driven off, deluded

all the kingdom rang with Kentigern’s loud praise.
A cleric hacked off the head of the wretched leader Somerled,
and placed it in bishop Herbert’s outstretched hands.
He said, ‘The Scottish saints are surely to be praised!’
yet wept as his custom was, to see the head of his enemy.
And to blessed Kentigern he attributed the victory,
so keep you his memory always, and that fittingly.
(Clancy 1998, p. 214)
Clearly, there is much in martial depiction, as well as landscape painting, that might be drawn
upon from literature in Scotland from before the fourteenth century that might have connections
made with what comes afterwards. What we also glimpse in the text above also is an earlier
flicker of an idea that was not to gain momentum until the thirteenth century – the idea that the
Scottish kingdom was a single country, ‘Scotland’, whose inhabitants from the Mull of Galloway
to Wick (to paraphrase Barbour) were all ‘Scots’.
There are perhaps two very nicely provocative interventions in The Triumph Tree, in particular,
the first of which is to include a cornerstone of Old and Middle Welsh studies, The Gododdin, a
long poem which might well be treated in any department of Celtic within the British Isles or
anywhere else for that matter. Despite many unknowns around and within the text, as the note
in The Triumph Tree attests: ‘The kingdom at the heart of this literary work, speckled with vibrant
heroic imagery, is that of the Gododdin, who occupied the territory of the Lothians, and had as
their main fortress, Din Eidyn (Edinburgh)’ (Clancy 1998, p. 46). Elsewhere, Clancy argues, the
texts within its poetic sequence ‘if … excluded from being directly Scottish literature … are
nonetheless part of its literary history and should be incorporated in it’ (Clancy 2012, p. 16).
Here what he is suggesting is the reasonable proposition that literature not certainly written
within the bounds of Scotland as we know it today, but about people, places and events within
these, ought to be considered within a wider discussion of the significance of Scotland and litera-
ture to one another. What might also present itself here is an opportunity for texts such as The
Gododdin to be dealt with also in the context of diasporic writing about Scotland (something that
tends to be thought of usually as a much more modern phenomenon). The tales of martial
derring-do within The Gododdin are not dissimilar in recitative tone and timbre to the early Irish
(circa sixth century) Fenian Cycle, common lore to some extent for both Irish and Scottish Gaels.
The most notorious delving back into this material occurred with the incorporation of some of
its resonances within the poetry of Ossian, a purported ancient Scottish bard James Macpherson
published, claiming during the 1760s that he was both retrieving this material and translating
it into English. Later Scottish literature’s treatment of the first millennium is another topic that
has lacked comprehensive treatment, where this later delving back might fruitfully be mounted
to comparative effect to some extent with the kinds material being so visibly disinterred by
Clancy et al. Anglophone British literature has had a number of moments of fascination with
‘Celticism’ prior to the second millennium and the later medieval period, not least amid the
Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see, for example, several of the essays
in Carruthers and Rawes 2003), and there is much here that remains to be examined.
A second particularly noticeable intervention is the inclusion in The Triumph Tree of ‘The
Dream of the Rood’ (c. 700), a text which occupies a prominent place within the canon of Old
English/medieval English Literature, whose corporate identity then, almost as much as that of
Scottish literature’s, is interrogated. The logic for inclusion is the text’s first runic appearance
carved on to the Ruthwell Cross found in the village of Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire, ‘when
Northumbrian power had stretched into Dumfriesshire and Galloway, and when the cult of the
Holy Cross had come to the British Isles from the Mediterranean’ (Clancy 1998, p. 121). The
long devotional poem which, in another bold editorial act also provides the title for the anthol-
ogy of The Triumph Tree overall, reminds Scottish and British culture and literature generally of
its strongly formative Christianity. Whether polemically intended or not, food for thought was
thus proffered as Scotland was about to embark on a new political phase as a generally very secu-
lar state with the establishment of the Holyrood parliament in 1999.
Literature in the Norse languages was produced within or concerned the territories we would
today see as lying within Scotland, including the settings of Caithness, and the Orkney, Shetland
and Western Islands. As in other cases with pre-second-millennial Scottish culture, modern his-
torical novels have dealt with Scottish Norse culture, most famously George Mackay Brown
(1921–1996) whose novel, Magnus (1973) is a particularly celebrated example. Yet again, then,
we see that retrieval and re-memorying first millennial Scottish heritage is a significant ‘modern’
cultural concern which makes the historical and philological scholarship of The Triumph Tree all
the more vital. However, even as Mackay Brown’s work is obviously and rightly enough crea-
tively licentious, it should be noted that he frequently utilises the Orkneyinga Saga (late twelfth
century) as a historical resource. In itself though, this narrative history, foundational from the
nineteenth century onwards in the conception of Viking or Norse Scotland, might be considered
itself as a type of fiction (see Pálsson and Edwards 1981).
As well as Norse subject matter of more obviously direct concern to the central dynamics of
dynastic politics in Scotland, such as ‘Song on the Death of Somerled’, The Triumph Tree includes
work that is of more ‘limited’ concern to the Western Isles and Orkney, in their interactions with
Norway and Iceland. There is the likes of work by Orm Barreyjarkskald, ‘Poet of Barra’, frag-
ments of poetry composed on a sea-journey from the Hebrides, or ‘The Death-Song for Eirik
Bloodaxe’, all in Norse. As with the Irish Sea as a channel of cultural commonality in first mil-
lennium Scotland, so too with literary exchange for the Scottish islands and the Scandinavian
world as a rather (although never completely) separate entity to either Gaelic-or Scots-speaking
Scotland on a simultaneous timeline. Here, especially, we might realise not so much the scholarly
job of making linkage in harmony or hostility between these two spheres, Gaelic-Scots and
Scandinavian, but grasping precisely a large reality of separateness as well.
The Triumph Tree succeeded as an intervention, so much so that the multivolume The Edinburgh
History of Scottish Literature in the first decade of the twenty-first century has for its sub-title to
volume one, ‘From Columba to the Union (until 1707)’ (Clancy and Pittock 2006) as well as
several chapters that deal with Scottish literature in non-Anglophone languages from before the
fourteenth century, and a chapter by Clancy in The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature
(2012), ‘Scottish Literature before Scottish Literature’ likewise succeeds in placing pre-fourteenth
century writing in Scotland on the agenda. A propos the terminology used already in this essay,
Clancy makes the point that ‘[t]he period before Barbour is not pre-history, nor need Scottish
literature’s earliest centuries, before its traditional beginnings be shrouded in obscurity.’
(Clancy 2012, p. 23). Truly, scholarship, not least including Clancy’s own, has brought wider
attention for and access to Scotland’s earliest known literary production. However, as he also
acknowledges, ‘challenges to scholarship’ (p. 23), not least the requirement to read non-
Anglophone languages and to understand very different modes of writing and culture mean that
any realisation of a more integrated consumption of the whole corpus of literature produced in
Scotland through its entire history is extremely difficult. ‘Scottish literature’ as taught in schools
and universities and treated in critical compendia such as the present one tend to concentrate on
literature in Scots and English and where joined by Gaelic, the latter is mediated via English
translation. English literary study (in which context Scottish literature is more usually taught)
remains an area separate from Celtic/Gaelic Studies (for Gaelic and also Welsh texts), or indeed
Classical Humanities (where Latin texts might be treated) or Norse Studies. Not only that, but
much of this terrain is already also catered for in the context of Historical Studies in Medieval
History courses and published scholarship in and beyond Scotland. Generally in the early twenty-
first century, we are much more aware of the multi-cultural outlines of the literary production of
Scotland in the first millennium, as we ought to be aware of this in relation to post-medieval

Scottish literature. The earliest literature of Scotland represents a corpus of texts that usefully
qualify and problematise any idea of a cogent Scottish literature encompassing the whole of the
Common Era, or the last millennium and a half.
Seeking Scotland’s earliest literature leads us not only to the rich and varied collection of
poetry curated and translated by Thomas Clancy and his collaborators in The Triumph Tree from
Irish/Gaelic, Welsh/Brittonic, Old English, Old Norse, and Latin, but also to Latin prose of the
first millennium and beyond – in particular, the highly structured and stylised ‘lives’ of saints in
Latin. Such hagiographic writing, with its miracles and strongly emphatic narratives of God’s
providence at work in the life of the saint and the wider community, might seem very far removed
from our literary matter in the twenty-first century. However, the celebration of Columba,
Ninian, Andrew, Margaret, and many others has a long and enduring legacy in place and church
names in Scotland. Not only this, but as with so many earlier periods of culture such memory
becomes revitalised as we see in the re-establishment of the St Ninian’s Way pilgrimage route,
something which has proved highly popular with the public during the present century.1
Running from Carlisle to South Queensferry (near the spectacular, modern Forth rail and road
bridges) St Ninian’s Way adds to our awareness of cross-border, often cross-channel, cultural
transactions necessary for an understanding of an earlier ‘Scotland’.
The literature that remains from the first millennium for us to read today must only be a tiny
fraction of what was written and performed at the time in Latin and the many vernaculars once
spoken in what is now Scotland. The earliest extant poetry and prose of Scotland has in common
the fact that it appealed to scribes (and their patrons or masters) who produced the manuscripts
in which this literature survives. This manuscript production was often many centuries after the
texts were first written. Adomnán’s Life of Columba is an exceptionally rare example of a text that
we can read today in a volume produced within a couple of decades of its actual composition
(Anderson and Anderson 1991; Adomnán of Iona 1995). The song on the death of Somhairle
(Somerled), mentioned already, survives in a copy created no more than two years after it was first
performed. In both cases the manuscript survives beyond Scotland. Most of this rich corpus,
however, is found not only in copies written long after the works themselves were composed, and
kept in other countries, but also in manuscripts produced beyond the bounds of modern Scotland
itself. They survive because they were part of wider vernacular cultures, or – in the case of Latin –
because they belonged to an extensive ecclesiastical literary tradition. The manuscripts also sur-
vive only because they became part of a library or collection which has been preserved. Very few
of these works are in extant medieval libraries; the great majority had the good fortune to catch
the eye of a collector in early modern times whose manuscripts were eventually acquired by a
major institution where they can be consulted today. Such has been the fragile survival and trans-
mission of so much of Scottish literature from the first millennium and beyond.
Can any manuscripts produced in Scotland before the fourteenth century and containing
mainly literature be identified today? A case can be made for British Library Cotton Vitellius C
viii, a late twelfth-century manuscript which contains Jocelin of Furness’s Life of Kentigern,
commissioned by Jocelin, bishop of Glasgow (1175–1199) (see Tucker 2020, p. 215 n.97). Until
the fourteenth century, however, a Latin manuscript produced in Scotland in the twelfth or thir-
teenth century would look very much like any other manuscript produced in Britain or Ireland;
there is also no way to discern if a Gaelic manuscript is Scottish rather than Irish. This serves to
reinforce how deeply literati in Scotland participated in wider cultural practices. Unfortunately
it also means that literary manuscripts cannot readily be identified as ‘Scottish’. The same is not
true for those containing non-literary texts, such as year-by-year chronicles and cartularies (works
recording charters and similar documents), whose content is either wholly or distinctly local in
nature. It would be absurd, however, to question if there ever were literary manuscripts, not only
in Latin but in the vernacular, too. The fact that copies of a mid-ninth-century Pictish king-list
with Pictish orthography survives shows that the Pictish language was written regularly – and,
if this is the case, it is hard to imagine that this would not have included vernacular literature.
The oldest copy of this king-list is in a northern English manuscript from around 1360 now kept
in Paris (Anderson 1980, pp. 245–249). This also contains a copy of the genealogy of William I
(king of Scots 1165–1214) which uses Gaelic spelling conventions from David I (1124–1153)
onwards (Broun 1999 pp. 176–180). This, alongside the Gaelic property records added into the
Book of Deer between around 1130 and 1150, show that writing in Gaelic was well established
(Ó Maolalaigh 2008). Again, it is difficult to see how this skill would not also have been used to
create manuscripts containing literature in Gaelic. We might detect the titles of them in Irish
lists of tales, such as Braflang Scóine, the ‘Treachery of Scone’ (Mac Cana 1980, p. 47). As far as
literary manuscripts in the vernacular are concerned, it is easy to understand why none would
survive once the languages were no longer understood. We must also allow for literature that was
never committed to parchment, but was sung or recited by professional learned practitioners in
the courts of the high born, as well as by people generally at the hearths of their neighbours. A
versified king-list in Gaelic (referred to today as Duan Albanach, ‘Scottish Poem’) datable to the
reign of Mael Coluim III (1058–1093) only survives in Irish manuscripts from the seventeenth
century and later (Jackson 1955): it was in a form that would have readily been committed to
memory, so it was not necessarily written down until long after it was composed.
There is no escaping the dreadful reality that a huge proportion of Scotland’s earliest literature
is now forever in the silence of oblivion. It is still possible, however, to detect faint echoes when
we search beyond the written word. Place names can reveal familiarity with a wider literature,
such as ‘Castle of Maidens’ for Edinburgh Castle – evoking Geoffrey of Monmouth’s legends of
early British kings – or Ben Gulabin (Beann Ghulbainn) in Glenshee, calling to mind the death
of Diarmaid at Benbulben (Binn Ghulbain) County Sligo (Meek 1998, pp. 153–158). Although
it is impossible to say when Ben Gulabin acquired its name, the story of love, passion and vio-
lence leading to Diarmaid’s death is strikingly similar to the Old Irish tale of Deirdre and the
sons of Uisliu. Thomas Clancy and Matthew Hammond have pointed out that ‘Derder’/‘Derd’,
countess of Dunbar in the mid-twelfth century, must be Deirdre; as the only known example of
this name in Scotland in this period, they argue that she was named from the literary Deirdre.
This is not the only striking personal name in twelfth-and thirteenth-century Scotland which
Clancy and Hammond have shown to have a likely literary origin. They have shown, as a result,
that ‘Chanson de Roland’, ‘Roman d’Alexandre’ and other French tales must have been well
known, as well as Gaelic ones, among the aristocracy of eastern and southern Scotland in this
period (see Clancy and Hammond 2019).
If we wish to find traces of the lost vernacular literature that originated in Scotland we can
look beyond names themselves to a text that lists the names of kings, recording how each died.
The earliest version would have run from Cinaed mac Ailpín (d. 858) to Alexander I ( 1107–1124);
although it is in Latin, its use of some Gaelic name-forms reveals that its author was a Gael
(Broun 1999, pp. 156–160). In many cases there is no reason to suspect that when it is said that
a king was killed by his successor, or killed in battle at a certain place, there was necessarily any
reference to a tale in these bald statements. Occasionally, however, the embers of what might
once have been a vivid story seem to flicker before us. Cinaed mac Maíl Choluim (971–995), we
are told, was killed by his own men in Fettercairn by Finguala, daughter of Connchobar earl of
Angus, because Cinaed had killed her only son. In John of Fordun’s history of the Scottish king-
dom (in a section probably derived from an earlier, partially lost, history of the kingdom datable
to 1326 or soon thereafter (Broun forthcoming)), this is transformed into a detailed narrative of
Finguala’s artifice and Cinaed’s gullibility (MacQueen and MacQueen 1989, pp. 377, 379 and
notes at pp. 490, 491); could this fuller account be a version of the original tale?
There is slightly less doubt that the king-list alludes to a lost tale in its statement of how
Cinaed’s brother, Dub mac Maíl Choluim (962–966) met his end. He was killed at Forres, we are
told, and his body hidden under the bridge at Kinloss – but the sun did not appear for as long
as his body remained there. On the edge of Forres stands the tallest and most gruesome carved
slab among hundreds of finely carved stones that stand upright today from the Firth of Forth to
the Northern Isles, datable to between the eighth and tenth centuries. Although the stone at
Forres is badly worn, it is possible to make out – or imagine – a body concealed beneath what
might be a bridge (Duncan 2002, p. 21 and Plate 1). Be this as it may, the carving can be read
as literature in its own right with its sequence of friezes telling of the heat of battle and the cold
slaughter of the defeated, their headless bodies in a row. Another carved slab with a story is in
Aberlemno, datable to the eighth century. It begins with a bold warrior and ends with a crow
pecking at his carcass. The battle of Nechtansmere/Dun Nechtáin/Llyn Garan was once supposed
by scholars to have occurred nearby, which led many to assume that this was a representation of
that fateful day, 20 May 685, when the Northumbrian hegemony of northern Britain was broken
by the Pictish king of Fortriu (Cruickshank 1999, Fraser 2002). Now that the battle site is
regarded as near Insh in Strathspey (Woolf 2006), the carved stone at Aberlemno can be seen as
a tale on a smaller scale about a lone warrior’s demise. Although it is tempting to regard it as the
record of an actual event nearby, it could be first and foremost inspired by literature – closer,
therefore, to the frightening figures depicted on the sculptured stones in Meigle not far away
than to the non-literary records of royal deaths and battles.
The corpus of medieval Scottish literature before the fourteenth century that we can read today
is not only the work of writers working in one of a number of languages that thrived in parts of
what was Scotland at the time, but is also an artefact of scribes and collectors of later centuries,
reflecting patterns of survival that are unlikely ever to be fully understood. Today we can, perhaps,
strain to hear tiny echoes of what is lost by searching beyond poems and prose to peer at place
names and sculptured stones, or strain our ears to hear lost sources behind extant texts. At the end
of the day, however, we can only guess at how an already diverse range of literature would have
been much more varied still if only we could listen into the entertainments of households noble
and humble and the ceremonies and celebrations of churches, courts, and ceilidhs.
Note
1 https://britishpilgrimage.org/portfolio/st-ninians-way/
References
Adomnan of Iona (1995). Life of St Columba (trans. Anderson, M.O. (1980). Kings and Kingship in Early
R. Sharpe). London: Penguin. Scotland, 2e. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.
Anderson, A.O. and Anderson, M.O. (1991). Adomnán’s Duncan, A.A.M. (ed.) (1988). Regesta Regum Scottorum,
Life of Columba, 2e. Oxford: Clarendon Press. vol. v, The Acts of Robert I King of Scots 1306–1329.
Barbour, J. (1997). The Bruce. (trans ed. A.A.M. Duncan). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Edinburgh: Canongate Press. Duncan, A.A.M. (ed.) (2002). The Kingship of the Scots:
Broun, D. (1999). The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Succession and Independence, 842–1292. Edinburgh:
Scots in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Woodbridge: Edinburgh University Press.
The Boydell Press. Fraser, J.E. (2002). The Battle of Dunnichen, 685. Stroud:
Broun, D (forthcoming). ‘Scotland’s first ‘national Tempus.
history’? Fordun’s principal source revisited’. Harry, B. (2003). The Wallace (ed. A. McKim). Edinburgh:
Broun, D., Taylor, A, Noël, G. et al. (eds) (2020). The Canongate Press.
Dynamic Edition of the Declaration of Arbroath, online at Jackson, K.H. (1955). The poem A eolcha Alban uile.
The Community of the Realm in Scotland, 1249–1424: Celtica 3: 149–167.
history, law and charters in a recreated kingdom: https:// Mac Cana, P. (1980). The Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland.
cotr.ac.uk/guidelines/dynamic-declaration-arbroath/ Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
introduction/dynamic-edition-declaration-arbroath/. MacQueen, J. and MacQueen, W. (ed.) (1989).
Brown, G.M. (1973). Magnus. London: Hogarth Press. Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, (gen.
Carruthers, G. and Rawes, A. (ed.) (2003). English ed. D.E.R. Watt), vol. ii. Aberdeen: Aberdeen
Romanticism and the Celtic World. Cambridge: University Press.
Cambridge University Press. MacQueen, J. and MacQueen, W. (ed.) (1993).
Clancy, T.O. (ed.) (1998). The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, (gen.
Earliest Poetry AD 550–1350. Edinburgh: Canongate ed. D.E.R. Watt), vol. i. Edinburgh: The Mercat Press.
Classics. Meek, D.E. (1998). Place-names and literature: evidence
Clancy, T.O. (2012). Scottish literature before Scottish from the Gaelic bards. In: The Uses of Place-Names (ed.
literature. In: The Cambridge Companion to Scottish S. Taylor), 147–168. Edinburgh: Scottish Cultural
Literature (ed. G. Carruthers and L. McIlvanney), Press.
13–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ó Maolalaigh, R. (2008). The Scotticisation of Gaelic: a
Clancy, T.O. and Hammond, M. (2019). The Romance reassessment of the language and orthography of the
of names: literary personal names in twelfth and Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer. In: Studies on the Book
thirteenth Century Scotland. In: Personal Names and of Deer (ed. K. Forsyth), 179–274. Dublin: Four Courts
Naming Practices in Medieval Scotland (ed. M. Press.
Hammond), 166–186. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Pálsson, H. and Edwards, P. (trans.)(1981). Orkneyinga
Clancy, T.O. and Márkus, G. (ed.) (1995). The Earliest Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney. London:
Poetry of a Celtic Monastery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Penguin.
University Press. Tucker, J. (2020). Reading and Shaping Medieval
Clancy, T.O. and Pittock, M. (ed.) (2006). The Edinburgh Cartularies. Multi-Scribe Manuscripts and their Patterns of
History of Scottish Literature: From Columba to the Union Growth. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press.
(until 1707). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Woolf, A. (2006). Dún Nechtain, Fortriu and the geogra-
Cruickshank, G.D.R. (1999). The Battle of Dunnichen. phy of the Picts. Scottish Historical Review 85:
Brechin: Pinkfoot Press. 182–201.
Further Reading
Hudson, B.T. (1991). Historical literature of early A Festschrift in honour of Colm Ó Baoill. (ed. S. Arbuthnot
Scotland. Studies in Scottish Literature 26: 141–155. and K. Hollo), 63–72. Ceann Drochaid: Clann Tuirc.
Hudson, B.T. (2007). Tracing medieval Scotland’s lost
history. In: Fil súil nglais – a Grey Eye Looks Back.
3
The Medieval Period
Pamela King
School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, UK
The Older Scots literary tradition is distinct from Middle English by linguistic history, by external
influences, and by genre, emanating from a discrete cultural and social milieu. Older Scots
derives directly from Old Northumbrian with heavy Danish influence; there is no ‘Middle’
(Kopaczyk 2013). Yet the debate about the enduring distinctiveness of early Scots writing from
all English dialect writing eddies not only in modern reception, but amongst those who gener-
ated it: William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas were near-contemporaries, both originating in the
eastern counties between Edinburgh and the Border, yet Dunbar considers he is writing in
‘Inglis’, and lionises Chaucer, while Douglas describes his written language as ‘Scottis’, sneering
at the ‘Sudron’ Caxton (McClure 2010). The issue is as much cultural as it is linguistic, as we
shall see.
The Older Scots literary canon is rich. Best known authors include Robert Henryson, William
Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. Persistently but misleadingly known as the ‘Scots Chaucerians’, a
term arising from the knee-jerk tendency to understand all things Scots by reference to English,
this triumvirate is the subject of another essay in this volume. Here we set them aside in order
to consider the whole literary milieu of which they are part, the rich and varied 200 year period
of medieval writing in Scots.
Witnesses to the Older Scots literary canon are few. The earliest manuscript miscellany is
Edinburgh, Adv. MS 16500, compiled by John Asloan in the first quarter of the sixteenth cen-
tury. The single most important source, however, is the later Bannatyne Manuscript, Edinburgh,
Adv.MS.1.1.6, assembled by George Bannatyne (1545–1607/1608), an Edinburgh merchant, in
1568 when he was under lockdown in his house because of plague. The manuscript contains
religious and secular texts, copied from printed as well as manuscript sources, and reflecting
eclectic taste.

Scotland’s first press, established in Edinburgh by Walter Chepman, another Edinburgh merchant,
and Androw Myllar, a bookseller who learned about printing in France, produced important
prints of early Scots works in the first decade of the sixteenth century (Mapstone 2008). Their
nine printed books were small ‘chapbooks’, all around 15 cm high, except for Hary’s ‘Wallace’, a
folio volume of which only fragments survive. They printed Henryson and Dunbar’s work, as
well as romances and lyrics.
Later important sources are the Maitland folio and quarto manuscripts, c. 1570 and 1586,
respectively, Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys Library, MSS 2553 and 1408 (Martin 2015).
They were compiled by and for Richard Maitland of Lethington, Keeper of the Great Seal to
Mary Queen of Scots in the 1560s, and included a number of his own works.
The works printed by Robert Leprivick, printer to James VI, also include some important
witnesses including one of the two massive pillars of Early Scots literature, John Barbour’s
The Brus, which he printed in 1571. The two manuscript versions, Cambridge, St John’s
College MS. G.23 and Edinburgh Adv. MS. 19.2.2 (1), are also much later than the composi-
tion of the poem, but there is evidence that it circulated throughout the intervening century
(Barbour 1980, p. ix).
Barbour’s poem, and ‘Blind’ Hary’s The Wallace (2003) immediately distinguish the Scots
from the English tradition. The Middle English projects of comparable scale, for example Cursor
Mundi or The Prick of Conscience are devotional; England was not threatened by a foreign power
after 1066. Barbour and Hary’s works, by contrast, were inspired by a sense of identity celebrating
the heroic oppressed. Both share a common, nationalistic – specifically anti-English – partisan
narrative purpose, inspired by the Wars of Independence, but though frequently grouped
together, they are emphatically not the same.
John Barbour (c. 1320–1395) was paid £10 Scots in 1377 for the composition of the
13 000 lines that make up The Brus, the earliest major work in Older Scots. Barbour served as
Precentor of Dunkeld Cathedral, then Archdeacon of Aberdeen. His life spanned the troubled
reign of the boy-king David II, son of Robert the Bruce, although he lived to enjoy the patronage
of Robert II, the first Stewart. He places the poem precisely in this context (XIII, 698–722),
tracing the dynastic developments which resulted from victory at Bannockburn. Barbour appears
to have been in France during David II’s exile, and the best approach to his poem, which is with-
out native antecedents, is to attribute its form to French influences, and the inspiration of its
subject to the troubled history of the Bruce dynasty and hope for stability under the Stewarts
(Jack and Rozendaal 1997, p. 1)
The poem opens with a commendation of the double pleasure afforded by the well-told story
that is also true.1 Barbour is faithful to this ambition, attending to a number of formal aspects of
good telling in his adept interlace of events, as well as his rhetorical flourishes and formal digres-
sions. There are apostrophes and formal speeches, as well as conventional topoi, such as the 13-line
peroration on the passage of the seasons that opens the fifth book (V, 1–13) and reflections on the
operation of Fortune’s wheel (XIII, 635–670). His ‘suthfastnes’ (I, 7), is not really historical
accuracy, but lies in the realism of his accounts locally that convincingly ‘shawys the thing richt
as it wes’ (I, 8). For example he addresses the question of how two forces, one in pursuit of the
other, manage not to engage when it does not suit them, even when they have to stop to feed
their horses in close proximity. (XIII, 590–602). Then there is the later vivid depiction of how
people behave when suddenly besieged, in the account of the surprise attack on Berwick. (XVII,
110–128). The whole of the description of the Battle of Bannockburn is full of similar touches
going beyond the conventional romance account of conflict.
The Medieval Period 29
The poem exists to glorify Robert the Bruce as Scotland’s liberator. It is early established that
the English are sly and deceitful, the Scots open and naive (I, 37–134). Bruce is exemplary in
showing no personal ambition, but refusing vassalage. There follows a declaration of the driving
theme behind the poem, and its most famous lines:
A, fredome is a noble thing,

Fredome mays man to haiff liking,
Fredome all solace to man giffis,
He levys at es yat frely levys. (I, 255–258)
This yearning for freedom echoes the sentiment already enshrined in the Declaration of Arbroath
(1320)2:
As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions submit to the rule of
the English. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, that we are fighting, but for freedom –
for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.
Bruce is given liberal amounts of direct speech in which he addresses his troops before the battle,
always on the same theme.
From the first book, as Bruce is established as the ideal monarch, James Douglas, compared
in a lengthy panegyric to Hector of Troy (I, 275–406), enters the narrative. Douglas as freedom-
fighter with a grievance will act as a foil to Bruce’s more measured behaviour as a figurehead. It
is Douglas who will be criticised for flouting the code of chivalry, particularly in the account of
the so-called ‘Douglas lardner’ (V, 335–462) in which Douglasdale, occupied by the English, is
sacked in the midst of a whole-scale massacre on Palm Sunday.
Barbour promises, after preliminaries, that the ‘romans’ will begin (I, 445–446). This does
not make what follows narrowly a ‘romance’, although the chansons de geste clearly influence how
Barbour will shape his matter. He also here makes a pitch for the Matter of Scotland to be
included alongside the other classic ‘matters’ of romance (I, 521–568). Barbour’s chief followers,
however, were the verse chronicler Andrew Wyntoun, and Blind Hary who wrote The Wallace;
romance writing in Scotland took a different turn.
The construction of the character of Robert the Bruce himself occupies most of the first half
of the poem. First his personal strength is established, then his qualities as leader. The third book
in particular deals reflectively with the formation of the band of brothers who will be the core of
Bruce’s fighting force. Here Bruce becomes a figure of exile, hiding in the mountains (III, 370–
373) until Douglas comes to his aid. Bruce in a surprising turn of events, here reads his men
‘Ferambrace’, a Charlemagne romance.3 The romance seems to have appeared in English around
the time Barbour was writing, but he could equally have known the original French. Throughout
the poem, psychological reflection, cross-references to romance, an embellished cult of heroism,
lavish digression and direct speech, all set Barbour’s poem above the chronicle or simple action-
driven tale. Here from the outset, early Scottish literature defies customary genre classification.
William Wallace does not feature in Barbour’s account. Wallace’s celebrated ‘victory’ against
the English was the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, at which his co‑leader Andrew Moray died
of wounds. The victory was short-lived, overturned at the Battle of Falkirk in the following year,
after which William Wallace resigned as Guardian of Scotland in favour of Bruce, and spent time
abroad in exile. He returned in 1304, was captured, hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305.
The verifiable details of the lives of William Wallace the freedom fighter, and Robert the Bruce,
king in waiting, are readily available; their construction as the abiding rival heroes of a distinc-
tively Scottish literary tradition was inevitable.4
Whereas John Barbour is a near-contemporary of Bruce, and living in the court milieu which
was a direct heritor of the events he describes, his literary disciple, ‘Blind’ Hary, drew on events
from over a century before he lived. A shadowy figure, Hary is mentioned by philosopher histo-
rian, John Major, in his Gestis Scotorum (Paris 1521). The poem is generally dated to the 1470s.
James III was working on a policy of reconciliation with England, and the resistance of partisan
Scottish magnates to such policies may be echoed in Hary’s poem (McKim 2003, pp. xii–xiii).
The poem is a tribute to Barbour’s in structure, in blending chronicle with romance, and with
digressions taken from classical and philosophical sources. But Hary is writing for his own times.
Whereas The Bruce is written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, the commonest narrative form in
the French poetry of its day, The Wallace is written in rhyming decasyllabic couplets, the ‘heroic’
couplet found in French verse, but also favoured by Chaucer who would have been unknown to
Barbour. Hary shows himself familiar with Chaucer’s works, with the metrically complicated
nine-line decasyllabic stanza of Anelida and Arcite, later used by Henryson, Dunbar, and Douglas,
and the decasyllabic eight-line stanza of The Monk’s Tale. Hary’s poem thus belongs to the aes-
thetically self-conscious late fifteenth century (Riddy 2012).
In its sole manuscript witness, Edinburgh, Adv. MS 19.2.2 (2), The Wallace rubs shoulder
with one of the early copies of The Bruce. It is the also-ran in modern criticism because of its
derivative nature, and because Hary was unsure in his handling of form (Riddy 2012). Yet atten-
tion to the afterlife of Hary’s poem demonstrates that it was far the more often published in the
intervening centuries. It was first printed by Chepman and Myllar, and by Robert Leprevik, and
continued to be printed at least 15 times in the seventeenth century, a record which held up
through the eighteenth century. Its republishings and their instigators have been matched with
historical moments desirous of emotional support for the threatened underdog and justification
for anti-English feeling (Smith 2013). The modernisation of 1722 by William Hamilton of
Gilbertfield was read by Robert Burns and used as the basis for the Hollywood phenomenon,
Braveheart.
In 1460, Sir Gilbert Haye used the same five-stressed couplet form as Hary to write his
19 370 line Life of Alexander the Conqueror, the Scots’ contribution to the pan-European collection
of Alexander romances, translated from the French (Calin 2014, p. 177). There is some evidence
for a Scots appetite for French romance. The fragmentary Florimund of Albany, about Alexander
the Great’s fictional grandfather, is based on the late twelfth-century French Florimunt by Aimon
de Varennes. This enticing fragment was discovered in the 1970s in a manuscript in the then
Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh NRS MS GD112/22/2 (Purdy 2013, pp. 1–14; 87–103). The
manuscript also contains Sir Colling and King Orphius. The first of these purports to be the story
of Sir Colin Campbell of Argyll, who features in both Barbour’s Bruce and Hary’s Wallace
(Purdy 2013, pp. 14–23). In a mere 246 lines, Colling falls in love with an heiress, goes to kill
an elvish knight, returns with a jewelled hand and magic sword, and dispatches a giant with
three heads who has come with 24 ships to steal his beloved. The lady marries Colling and bears
him 16 children after he has fended off an attack by a lion in unarmed combat (Purdy 2013,
pp. 104–112). The whole is a blatant piece of Argyll propaganda, unabashedly far-fetched. King
Orphius and Rosewall and Lilian again demonstrate a more conventional taste for the matters of
French/Breton romance, the former taking up a topic also strikingly adapted by Robert Henryson
(Purdy 2013). More substantial than any of the above is The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane,
printed by Chapman and Myllar in 1508, and deriving from the Comte del GraalI of Chrétien de
Troyes, a very fine and thoughtful Scots contribution to the European stock of Arthurian
romances (Hanna 2008).
The poem known as The Kingis Quair owes much to romance conventions as well, but is also
one of the earliest autobiographies in the British Isles (James I of Scotland 2005). The narrator
is the protagonist’s older self as in all autobiography, but more unusually here, the prisoner-
protagonist’s deferral of real lived experience fashions the autobiography of a young king who
lived vicariously through reading and writing. Thus the matter of books, chiefly the English
Chaucerian tradition, supplies the substance of the narrated life. The Kingis Quair is also the most
English of medieval Scottish texts.
The 12-year-old then Prince James of Scotland, was captured on his way to France in 1406.
There followed a 17-year sojourn as guest-prisoner of the English Lancastrian crown. James went
to France in Henry V’s service, and, in 1421 was dubbed a knight and invested with the Order
of the Garter. He returned to England with Henry V’s dead body in 1422. In 1423, a treaty for
his release was concluded, but Scotland was presented with a huge bill for his keep. A sixth of
this ransom was remitted as dowry for Joan Beaufort, Henry V’s cousin, the lady of the poem.
With her James went on to have eight children and to progress towards imposing strong royal
government in Scotland, before he was murdered in February 1437.
The sole witness to the poem is an anthology, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B.
24, commissioned around 1489 by Henry Sinclair, grandson of James’ sister, and married to the
grand-daughter of one of those who treated for the king’s release. A note in a sixteenth-century
hand corroborates the main scribe’s attribution of the work to James. Within the manuscript, the
Quair concludes a sequence of English poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Clanvowe, and
including three anonymous works in Scots, The Lay of Sorrow, The Lufaris Complaynt, and
The Quare of Jelusy. It has been argued lately that line 177, where the first scribe breaks off, is the
point at which the poem initially stopped. This implies that the surviving poem may be a later,
but still authorial, version which betrays the existence of an earlier one, but is later than the
failed attempt which is the poem’s subject (Quinn 2011).
Prominent among the plethora of reworked literary conventions in the poem’s complex struc-
ture is James’s subversion of the Chaucerian version of dream vision. The book which he is read-
ing, the early Christian Boethius’s prison narrative, the Consolation of Philosophy, does not put him
to sleep but keeps him awake all night thinking about his own situation. In his dream, James has
an encounter with Venus, but unlike Chaucer’s, James’s goddess unusually aligns love with rea-
son and the dream experience with the maturation process. The poet’s hindsight is recast as
Venus’s future prediction for his younger dreaming self, as she sends him on to Minerva suggest-
ing metaphorically that the experience of sexual love can lead to worldly wisdom. Minerva’s
rhetoric reflects the best aspects of James’s rule of Scotland when he returned as monarch, defend-
ing order in the midst of political turbulence. Minerva, however, passes him on to Fortune,
which gives the narrator the opportunity to reprise what he drew from Boethius. Thus too the
Kingis Quair is circular, its last line the same as its first, as James is released from imprisonment,
but realises he will never be released from time, circumstance, human affection, and kingly
responsibility. Paradoxically it is the idea of wakefulness that unites the early stanzas in the book,
as the protagonist concludes that he should write ‘sum newe thing’, drawn from his own
imagination.
Prison narrative is an allied convention, although James suffered few privations except free-
dom itself in his captivity. When Henry died suddenly, James was at Windsor with Catherine
and the infant Henry VI, and it is possible that it was there that he first saw Joan Beaufort walk-
ing in the gardens, though the scene in the poem owes more to Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale than to
real life. Marriage to Joan was a condition of James’s subsequent release. James’s account of his
prison experience in the poem stands in metaphorical relationship to his psychological sense that
he, uniquely amongst his companions, was a monarch experiencing the imposed isolation from
his rightful place in life.
A number of other Chaucerian conventions are subverted in this complex and subtle poem:
metaphorical references to ships and the sea of life, a locus amoenus garden setting, a conventional
itemisation of the attributes of a beautiful woman, references to the structure of the Ptolomaic
universe, and to the wheel of Fortune. All these are put to original use, however, as a piece of
life-writing or autobiography, and in a circular structure as a piece of metafiction, that is a book
about the difficulty of writing a book.
The deployment of European poetic convention to veil contemporary politics characterises
The Buke of the Howlat by Richard Holland. Holland first appears on record in 1441 in Caithness
diocese as clerical servant to Alexander MacDonald, Earl of Ross and Lord of the Isles, and inter-
nal evidence in his poems suggests that he originally came from Orkney. After a number of legal
spats over clerical preferment, he spent his later career serving the ‘black’ Douglases, earls of
Moray. In 1455 the Douglases failed in their revolt against James II. Archibald Douglas was
killed, and Holland seems to have gone into exile in England. The poem on internal evidence has
been dated to 1448.
The witnesses to the Buke of the Howlat are a fragment from a Chepman-Myllar print, and the
Asloan and Bannatyne manuscripts. In both the manuscript miscellanies, Howlat keeps company
with some of Henryson’s Moral Fables, ‘Colkelbie Sow’and, in Asloan, the lost ‘Buke of the otar and
the ele’, suggesting that compilers and patrons placed the poem amongst animal tales. But there
are no ‘simple’ animal tales in early Scots, and this poem is no exception (Holland 2014, pp. 1–9).
The story, like Henryson’s Moral Fables, is part of the ‘Aesopian’ tradition, deriving from a
complex network of sources drawn together around 1200 and attributed to Gualtierus Anglicanus
(Walter the Englishman). There were many other spin-off versions in the high Middle Ages,
from texts for schoolboys, to the courtly literary game of Marie de France’s Fables, to the sermon
exemplum.5 The framing narrative is an account of how the owl, so ugly it dare not go out in
daylight, appeals to a council of birds. Nature intervenes and all the birds donate feathers to the
owl. The owl, however, becomes so arrogant that all the birds attack him and snatch their feath-
ers back, so, denuded, he is left alone with the narrator who claims he wrote the poem with its
moral for the dove of Dunbar. Her name is parsed as ‘dow’ and ‘glass’ as Gavin Douglas will also
do at the end of the Eneydos.
At the heart of the poem’s conciliar debate, redolent with heraldic imagery, is a panegyric to
the Douglases, and a digression in the form of a chanson d’aventure telling of the Douglas’s return
of Bruce’s heart from the Saracens to Scotland. Holland’s reputation as a poet seems to have out-
lasted the disgrace of the Douglases. Hary uses the story as a cautionary tale delivered to the
young Wallace, Holland is paired with Barbour in Dunbar’s Lament for the Makars,6 and also
features in Lyndsay’s ‘Testament and complaint of oure soverane lordis papyngo’.7
There are two ways of regarding the picture emerging from the texts studied thus far: they
frustrate genre-categorisation though drawing on English and French prototypes, but they also
refract the position of Scotland as culturally distinct and constantly fending off the threat of
political, and cultural, vassalage to England. Hence all offer reflections on the difference of
Scottishness and the need for its diplomatic assertion.
The Taill of Rauf Coilyear (c. 1470), printed by Leprivick in 1572, is a superficially burlesque
narrative which demonstrates that its author had detailed familiarity with the structural com-
monplaces, values, and motifs of chivalric romance, and of the tenets of Christian charity, if not
of European geography. It also pits the ethical principles of the ordinary Scot against those of a
socially superior honour group. That group is represented by Charlemagne, the ‘chiftane’, who
gets lost in a storm on his way back to ‘Paris’ for Christmas. Relentless rain, waterlogged ground,
‘rude’ moorland, and a hostile landscape is all suspiciously evocative of the Scottish uplands. The
scene is set, as the practised romance reader would recognise, for his rescue by a passing stranger
from outside the honour group, from whom he conceals his identity. The rescuer is a stout rustic,
called Rauf, with a nag on which are two panniers of charcoal. In the dialogue that follows, Rauf
is aware that his interlocutor is a man of rank, but that rank is of little account. He offers the
king shelter in his own home, brusquely brushing aside gushing thanks and keeping the king
entertainingly on the back foot. The speech is in low register, but the emphasis on taking in a
traveller and providing food and drink, cover three of the six Corporal Works of Mercy, the
byword for Christian charity set out in Matthew 25.
Discrepancies in manners, however, lead to Rauf clouting the king round the ear then giving
him a lecture. Over a hearty meal, Rauf confesses that the table is supplied by his poaching
activities, while the king claims to be a groom of the queen’s chamber called ‘Wymond of the
Wardrobe’. In the morning, which is Christmas Eve, Rauf refuses payment so the king suggests
he come the following day to the court to sell charcoal.
On the way home, Charlemagne meets up with a search party from across the social spectrum.
They return to Paris for a service in St Denis, feasting and minstrelsy ‘as the buik sayis’, which
seems to be a formulaic reference to authority, but also suggests, tongue in cheek, that the author
is well-versed in courtly romance narratives. Rauf sets out to keep his part of the bargain on
Christmas morning. The Christmas bargain, the lone self-reliant traveller, and the strange court
are all reminiscent of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the meantime Charlemagne instructs a
reluctant Sir Roland to waylay any travellers heading their way. He encounters the collier. In
what ensues there is a familiar pattern of mistaken identity, resolution, and reward. The poem
thus uses romance convention not mechanically to reinforce chivalric values, but to interrogate
alternative honour systems.
Rauf Collyer, though patronising its hero, is at a remove from classic fabliau in which the
mores of the aspirant classes outside the honour group are held up for ridicule. For classic fabliau
in Scots we go to the Freires of Berwik: fast-paced, its characters emerge from action and direct
speech, and its humour involves bawdy double-entendre.
The tale opens with a panegyric to Berwick, focusing on its impregnable defences. The two friars,
one old and suffering from a bladder disorder, the other young and lusty, find themselves locked out
of the town. They are stranded in a hostelry where the host is, inevitably, away from home, and has,
inevitably, left his wife who is ‘sumthing dynk and dengerous’ (fastidious and haughty) in charge
(Jack and Rozendaal 1997, pp. 152–165, l. 55). He agrees they can sleep in the loft.
The poet is adept at managing two theatres of action: the friars are locked in the loft, while
the ‘gudwyf’ prepares for a pre-arranged visit from her lover, the local Dominican abbot, in ways
that involve both cookery and masturbation. The young friar in the loft watches through a spy-
hole. The host returns unexpectedly and the hostess hides her lover in a large cupboard and goes
to bed.
The host insists on being fed, and the older friar coughs to draw attention to himself. The host
invites both the friars to join him. The young friar then, in an elaborate mock-ritual, forces the
hostess on pain of betrayal to produce the abbot’s superior food and drink previously secreted.
Revelry lasts all night. In the increasingly intricate plot, the host attempts to cudgel the escap-
ing abbot, but overbalances and hits his head on a grinding stone, while the abbot falls into the
midden. The poet reminds us how everyone has their just deserts and the tale ends.
The beautifully crafted fabliau may call to mind Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale, but
the topoi and plots of fabliaux, and of anti-fraternal satire, were so enduringly ubiquitous in late
medieval Europe that it is perhaps judicious simply to admire this anonymous author’s adept
contribution.
Further burlesque tales include Christ’s Kirk on the Grene which survives in both the Bannatyne
Manuscript, and the Maitland Folio collection (Kinghorn 1970, pp. 58–65). The 230 line poem
tells of a country dance, which descends into a brawl. The behaviour of both sexes is less than
courtly, but the quality of the dancing is reminiscent of Dunbar’s account of the dance in Queen
Margaret’s chamber), particularly in the failed emulation of French dancing, and the physical
inelegance of Stevin, and as in the more famous poem, unfortunate outbreaks of farting. The
subject matter, like French fabliau, mocks the lower aspirant orders of society for a courtly audi-
ence. There is an archery competition so inept that little harm is done. James I, to whom the
poem was attributed in the Bannatyne manuscript version, legislated more than once for archery
practice, proscribing the rival attractions of football and golf.8 Archery is abandoned in favour of
hand-to hand combat with agricultural implements, various injuries are sustained, and there is
a great deal of running away. The only person to escape uninjured is the minstrel, possible sur-
rogate for the narrator. Christ’s Kirk on the Green displays technical artistry far exceeding the
subject matter. The stanza form rhymes, alliterates, and finishes with a bob-and-wheel which is
the refrain.
Peblis at the Play also tells of young men and women going to a festival. A dispute arises about
the bill at a tavern, leading to 37 injuries, and 7 people in the stocks. The accompanying bag-
piper resigns in disgust. A third burlesque poem is Cockelbie Sow, a three-part tale about a pig,
thought to derive from an old folk tale. Comparable festive burlesque verse is found all over
Europe in the period, particularly in the Germanic and Danish traditions.
Matter drawn from the mainland European tradition of farce, which bypassed medieval
England, is incorporated into what is, notoriously, the ‘only’ early Scots play. Ane Satyre of the
Thre Estaits was written by Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, a prolific poet and reformer,
author of the satirical Papyngo. The swingeing nature of the Calvinist Reformation in Scotland
accounts for this paucity of surviving texts, as presbytry records proscribing a range of festive
activity eloquently attest. Prohibitions, however, demonstrate that Older Scots has a wide
vocabulary associated with playing, so we can assume that Pre-Reformation Scotland was,
like the rest of Europe, rich in dramatic activity, and play-making was not a cultural activity
apart, but deeply embedded in the social world and its festive year. Lindsay’s play is not an
oddity but something that sat amidst a hubbub of now lost performed texts before and after
the Reformation.9
The full text of Ane Satyre of the Thre Estaits is an ambitious play, incorporating a number of
contemporary dramatic sub-genres, such as the morality play, and its development as allegorical
political satire, as well as farce and burlesques imitative of the French sottis. The text is the
Charteris print of 1602. There is, however, an earlier excerpted version from the Bannatyne
manuscript of 1568, and an even earlier so-called ‘interlude’ performed in Linlithgow palace in
1540. The precise relationship between the full, and late, play script, the extracts, and the third-
party account of the interlude, remains fertile ground for research.
The 1540 interlude survives only by the report of Englishman William Eure to Thomas
Cromwell. The descriptor Eure uses, ‘interlude’, in English refers to an elite household entertain-
ment, coterie drama performed indoors. The occasion was Epiphany, and the audience included
James V and Mary of Guise, their court circle and a number of senior clergy. The great hall set-
ting implies conventional spatial arrangements, playing as it were on a thrust stage facing the
high table. It offers, therefore, the opportunity to juxtapose a player king, who says nothing,
with the real king. Greg Walker, who co-produced a speculative attempt to recreate the inter-
lude in 2013, offers the caveat that Eure probably winnowed out what he wanted Cromwell to
know, so the differences between the lost interlude and the later play may not be as great as the
account suggests.10
The play’s substance and argument as it was reworked seem to be responses to contemporary
events. The interlude was topically focused on James V’s Erasmian aspirations, concerned with
clerical abuses, the burdens on the poor. The Charteris print (1602) of the whole later play sharp-
ens its political and reformist allusions, but the opportunity to juxtapose real and player king
was gone. On 14 August 1554, when the play was performed in Edinburgh, at the Greenside
playfield, Mary of Guise was Regent, the infant queen Mary being safely raised in France. The
1602 print of 4630 lines is the play known today, revived for the first time by Tyrone Guthrie in
1948 at the inaugural Edinburgh Festival.
Bannatyne’s record of extracts from a performance in Cupar, Fife, in 1552 is a witness of a
different order. The 3377 lines are grouped with Bannatyne’s ‘balletis mirry and Vther solatius
consaittis set furth be Diuers ancient poyettis’. He acknowledges that he has written ‘bot schor-
tly. . ./levand the grave mater thairof/becaws the samyne abvse Is weill reformit in scotland’ (fol.
168r). Thus he indicates that he has made a judicious selection of entertaining material that will
not offend. His extracts include the so-called ‘Cupar banns’, a farcical trailer for the play.
Bannatyne wrote during the regency of James Stewart, Earl of Moray, and intends an unpolemi-
cal, even anodyne, text recorded for readers.
The play is in two parts. The first focuses on the court of the young King Humanitie, who
falls into corruption and is restored, with a focus on the selection of counsellors. The king’s
reform is, however, only the prelude to an examination of the dependence of the whole ‘com-
monweal’ on the moral surety and strength of its monarch ruling through the three ‘estates’, not
the conventional abstract social model, but the actual structure of the Scottish parliamentary
system: the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal, and the Commons. Part two opens with the
Three Estates being led in backwards by their vices, then John the Commonweal bursts on to the
scene. Unlike Pauper, the play’s victim figure, John does not represent any individual condition.
He is, as Greg Walker has put it, both vox populi and vox dei, the voice of prophetic outrage who
chastises a slumbering nation (Walker 2015).
The chief reforms enacted in the second part are directed at the Church, corruption in the
spiritual estate being a common thread through all Lindsay’s writing and life. The play ends,
however, with a sermon by Foly, not a recantation but a restatement of the situation in the real
world outside the play in which sin, self-interest, and stupidity continue to prevent reform.
The Bannatyne extracts from Ane Satyre illustrate the performative nature of much Older
Scots writing. Bannatyne’s personal connoisseurship was for the comic, parodic, and satiric,
‘mirry’ items in time of plague. He records songs, dances, instruments, minstrels, frequently
supporting a theme or presenting a character, or setting a scene. Another item in the ‘ballettis
mirry’ is a text headed, ‘Ane littill Interlud of the droichis [dwarf’s] pairt of the play’ (fols
118v–120r), also witnessed in the Asloan manuscript, with the title: ‘[T]he maner of the crying
of ane playe’ (fols 240r–242v). Asloan’s ‘crying’ advertises a Robin Hood May game, tied specifi-
cally to Edinburgh and its particular mercantile and civic interests. Scotland’s Robin Hood
becomes interchangeable with a King of the May, sometimes called the Abbot of Unreason, the
Abbot of Narent (no rent), the Lord of Inobedience, or, in Aberdeen, the Abbot of Bon Accord.
These carnival characters lead festivities given up to excessive eating, drinking, other bodily
pleasures, and misrule.
Masculine authorship, point of view, and preoccupation has dominated everything discussed
above. The history of early women’s writing in Scotland, with the notable exception of clan-
based exemplars in fifteenth-century Gaelic, yields nothing until the seventeenth century.
Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (c. 1578–c. 1640), author of Ane Godlie Dreame, remains the
earliest known Scottish woman to have her work published. Melville’s work survives in a context
in which women are found writing letters and documents, imaginative verse and prose and, in
the case of Esther Inglis (1571–1624), working as a professional calligrapher and miniaturist.
Most of these women like many of their counterparts south in England, wrote from extreme
Protestant points of view, bearing witness to higher powers than social norms dictated.
For our period, John Barbour’s Bruce and Blind Hary’s Wallace are frankly phallocentric in
interest, and the three best known poets, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas
were all in holy orders and display incipient gynophobic tendencies, but there are strong ‘real’
women in the chronicles of the Wars of Independence, notably ‘Black’ Agnes, Countess of
Dunbar. Though absent from Barbour and Hary’s accounts, Agnes and her retinue held out
under siege in Dunbar Castle for 13 weeks in 1338 and not only rallied the troops but, in the
voice given to her in ballad tradition, famously addressed her adversaries in verse11:
Of Scotland’s King I haud my house, I pay him meat and fee,

And I will keep my gude auld house, while my house will keep me.
In different mode, The Kingis Quair, is at one level a celebration of Joan Beaufort who was to
become queen, thanks to the good offices of Venus, Minerva, Fortune and Divine Providence.
This elision of a sage advisor and a subject of real affection, with the usual courtly object, dis-
couragingly inimitable and unobtainable, is promising for the recuperation of women in medi-
eval Scots literature.
Fictional strong women otherwise quickly descend into the carnivalesque, and Dunbar’s two
married women and their accompanying widow in the eponymous poem do not give autono-
mous women a helpful press. Critical approaches can be deployed, however on the understanding
that women are as likely to have composed in Scots as they did in Gaelic.
Recent work has focused productively on anonymous poetry in the Maitland Quarto. ‘Marie’,
daughter of the compiler, Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, is inscribed twice on the first
folio, with the date 1586, and two poems in the manuscript are addressed to her. Her sister
Helen’s name appears in the folio manuscript, and the whole family had literary interests. A
number of anonymous verses in the Quarto are written in the female voice, on ‘female’ themes,,
such as religion, family, and friendship. The latest editor acknowledges the Maitland women in
the ‘composition, compilation, and copying’ (Martin 2014, p. 28) of the texts within the Quarto,
while reminding the reader of male conventions of ventriloquising women’s voices.
Evelyn Newlyn for one, however, argues for adopting a ‘transgressive’ reading, resisting the
reflex that, unless a piece of writing is proven to be written by a woman, male authorship should
be assumed (Newlyn 2004, pp. 100–101). The argument for Marie Maitland being the manu-
script’s scribe is strong, and the analysis of the manuscript’s structure, suggests that poem 49,
with its expressions of quietude and mutuality which plausibly anticipate, for example, the work
of Katherine Phillips, may be written by a woman. Other poems in the collection, notably 75,
77, 79, 81, 85, and 86, on grounds of image, tone and point of view, appear convincingly to be
in female voice also. There is the ghost of an alternating conversation between a (real) female and
a supportive male voice, plausible in the Maitland family context, and something that invites
further speculative investigation.
A synoptic reading of the milieu of literature in Older Scots cannot be comprehensive, and a
number of works that have their champions have been given short shrift in the preceding.
Additionally it has been difficult to draw a divide between the medieval and the Early Modern,
or between the ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’, such that some texts will fall down the non-existent
fissures between these relatively specious categories. I have endeavoured to indicate what is dis-
tinctively Scottish in the comparatively modest body of early literature in Scots, to indicate how
and perhaps why it does and does not intersect with neighbouring traditions in genre, form, and
preoccupation, and to sample just enough of a number of works deserving of wider readership.
Notes
1 All references to the poem, by book and line number, 8 See Dickenson, W.C., Donaldson, G., and Milne, I.A.
are to the edition of McDiarmid and Stevenson. Books (1953). (eds). A Sourcebook of Scottish History, Volume II,
I–X in volume II, Xi–XX in volume III. from 1424 to 1567. Edinburgh: Nelson. pp. 74–75.
2 See National Records of Scotland at www.nrscotland. 9 See McGavin, J. J. (2007). Theatricality and Narrative
gov.uk/Declaration. in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland. London:
3 See Sir Ferumbras, Early English Text Society, Extra Ashgate.
Series 34 (1966). 10 See Walker, G. (2015). The Linlithgow interlude of
4 See, for example, Brown, M. (2004). The Wars of 1540 and Lyndsay’s Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaits.
Scotland, 1214–1371. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Medieval English Theatre, 37. pp. 41–56. For reports
University Press. on the project of reconstruction see Betteridge T. and
5 See Mann, J. (2009). From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature Walker, G. (2013). Staging and Representing the Scottish
in Medieval Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, for an Renaissance Court http://stagingthescottishcourt.
exhaustive study of the medieval beast fable. brunel.ac.uk.
6 See below, p. 310. 11 Lines in the ballad ‘Auld Maitland’ in Walter Scott’s
7 See https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/testament- Border Minstrelsy, origin unverified.
and-complaynt-our-soverane-lordis-papyngo
References
[‘Blind’] Hary (2003). The Wallace (ed. A. McKim). Betteridge T. and Walker, G. (2013). Staging and
Edinburgh: Canongate. Representing the Scottish Renaissance Court http://
Barbour, J. 1985, (1980, 1981). Barbour’s Bruce I, II, III stagingthescottishcourt.brunel.ac.uk (accessed 9
(ed. M.P. McDiarmid and J.A.C. Stevenson)). August 2022).
Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society. Brown, M. (2004). The Wars of Scotland, 1214–1371.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Calin, W. (2014). The Lily and the Thistle: The French Martin, J.M. (ed.) (2014). The Maitland Quarto: A New
Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland. Toronto: Edition of Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys: Library
University of Toronto Press. MS 1408. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society.
Dickenson, W.C., Donaldson, G., and Milne, I.A. (ed.) McClure, D.J. (2010). The distinctiveness of Scots:
(1953). A Sourcebook of Scottish History, Volume II, from perceptions and reality. In: Varieties of English in

1424 to 1567, 74–75. Edinburgh: Nelson. Writing: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, 1e (ed.
Hanna, R. (ed.) (2008). The Knightly Tale of Golagros and R. Hickey). Amsterdam: Benjamins https://doi.
Gawane. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society. org/10.1075/veaw.g41.06mcc.
Holland, R. (2014). The Book of the Howlat (ed. R. Hanna). McGavin, J.J. (2007). Theatricality and Narrative in
Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society. Medieval and Early Modern Scotland. London: Ashgate.
Jack, R.D.S. and Rozendaal, P.A.T. (ed.) (1997). The Newlyn, E.S. (2004). A methodology for reading
Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature, 1375–1707. against the culture: anonymous, women poets and
Edinburgh: Mercat Press. the Maitland quarto manuscript (c.1586). In: Woman
James I of Scotland (2005). The Kingis Quair. In: The and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish
Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems (ed. L. Mooney and Writing, 1e (ed. S.M. Dunnigan, C.M. Harker and
M.-J. Arn). Kalamazoo MI: Medieval Institute E.S. Newlyn), 89–103. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Publications. Macmillan.
Kinghorn, A.M. (ed.) (1970). The Middle Scots Poets. Purdy, R. (ed.) (2013). Shorter Scottish Medieval Romances.
London: Edward Arnold. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society.
Kopaczyk, J. (2013). Rethinking the traditional periodi- Quinn, W.A. (2011). Red lining and blue pencilling The
sation of the Scots Language. In: After the Storm: Papers Kingis Quair. Studies in Philology 108: 189–214.
from the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland Riddy, F. (2012). Unmapping the territory: blind Hary’s
and Ulster, 232–260. Forum for Research on the Wallace. In: The Wallace Book, 1e (ed. E. Cowan), 107–116.
Languages of Scotland and Ireland. www.abdn.ac.uk/ United Kingdom: Birlinn.
pfrlsu/documents/Kopaczyk,%20Rethinking%20 Smith, J.J. (2013). Textual afterlives: Barbour’s Bruce and
the%20traditional%20periodisation.pdf (accessed 9 Hary’s Wallace. In: Scots: Studies in its Literature and
August 2022). Language, 1e (ed. J. Kirk and I. Macleod), 37–69.
Mann, J. (2009). From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Medieval Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, G. (2015). The Linlithgow interlude of 1540 and
Mapstone, S. (ed.) (2008). The Chepman and Myllar Prints: Lyndsay’s. Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaits. Medieval
Scotland’s First Printed Texts. Boydell & Brewer. English Theatre 37: 41–56.
Further Reading
Bawcutt, P.J. and Riddy, F. (ed.) (1987). Longer Scottish Poems: Lindsay, S.D. (1989). Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (ed.
1375–1650. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. R. Lyall). Edinburgh: Canongate.
Bawcutt, P. and Williams, J.H. (ed.) (1996). Companion to
Older Scots Poetry. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
4
The Reformation
David J. Parkinson
Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
Scottish Literature and the Reformation
The Reformation in Scotland marks a departure from an established system of religious belief
and practice into a far-reaching new one. It is conventionally dated 17 August 1560, when a
reformed church government and confession of faith were established by an act of Parliament,
which thereby abolished papal authority (RPS 2007–2022, A1560/8/3). Two months previously,
the regent, Marie de Guise, died in Edinburgh Castle; with French military support, she had
long resisted the protestant Lords of the Congregation and their English allies. No monarch
presided at the Reformation Parliament – Mary Stuart would not arrive in Scotland from France
until 1561 – and the ecclesiastical establishment was largely silent. The reforming acts did not
receive royal assent until after Mary’s forced abdication in 1567.
As a cultural phase in Scotland, the Reformation extends from early in the reign of James
V into the minority of James VI (1567–1578). In this sense, it involves competition over the church’s
role in civil society, the form of worship, and common access to key religious texts (the Bible,
catechisms, prayers). This long Reformation emerges and expands during two previous minori-
ties, James V’s (1513–1528) and Mary’s (1542–1561). The phase is beset by war, especially the
devastating English incursions of the 1540s that became known as ‘the Rough Wooing’. However,
the Reformation also arises out of the international evolution of learning and literature along well-
established avenues, not least through the sustainment and intensification of ties with universities
and scholars on the Continent, from Paris and Louvain to Luther’s Wittenberg and Calvin’s
Geneva. These are the years in which George Buchanan earns European fame as a Latin poet.
Even if one refuses to let historical events (reigns, minorities, parliamentary acts, assassina-
tions, wars) demarcate stages of literary development, one can observe some developments in
Scottish literature during the Reformation. Prose becomes more dominant and dynamic than is

often assumed. In prose and verse, courtly eloquence gives way to a lower style. These developments
can be related to a shift of focus, away from courts and the households of prelates and the higher
nobility, and towards a more common, urban audience – a public whose values and aspirations
are becoming Scottish writers’ main concern. This is a time of sharpened awareness of both the
benefit and the damage that books can produce; the stakes for literature are raised thereby.
The custodianship of vernacular literature devolved into lairdly, professional, and mercantile
households, with a resulting diversification of aims and interests across an increasingly sharply
articulated range of allegiances and factions. Literary production was based in the larger burghs
in Scotland’s east-central belt (Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, Stirling, and Edinburgh, with Glasgow
in the west). From original composition to the compilation of anthologies, a powerfully recu-
perative, retentive capacity dominates, with a persistent interest in collecting and reshaping
materials from past generations – the partbooks of Thomas Wode’s St Andrews Psalter, the man-
uscript anthologies by George Bannatyne and for Richard Maitland, the reprinted Gude and
Godlie Ballatis, and Sir David Lindsay’s Warkis. With the changing focus for patronage and
reception, interest increases in lyrics in lighter stanza forms and plainer diction.
Urgency informs the literary production of these decades. From the mid-1520s, catechisms and
scriptural translations (notably William Tyndale’s New Testament in English) were being printed
abroad and secretly imported via seaports such as Leith and Dundee. After 1560, tractates sup-
porting the newly disestablished church were the ones circulating clandestinely. Risk was not just
a factor of religious conflict; awareness was growing about the fragility and precariousness of
sources and traditions. George Bannatyne’s exemplars were ‘awld, mankit and mutillait’, but he
organised them thematically and indexed them alphabetically by first line (Tod Ritchie
1928–1934, vol. 2, p. 1; vol. 4, pp. 316–329); Thomas Wode gathered pieces of Scottish choral
polyphony after the reduction of part-singing in reformed worship and the closure of the nation’s
song schools. Based in Edinburgh or seeking refuge in St Andrews, printing houses were able to
function continuously, but their proprietors were subject to fines or imprisonment for publishing
unacceptable texts. Controversy marked literary production in the decades of the Reformation,
but no less significant is the prominence given to versions of the common voice, from Sir David
Lindsay’s ‘Johne the Commonweill’ to Robert Sempill’s ‘Maddie of the caill mercat’. Even while
playing at high confrontation, literary writing functions to distance and frame controversy within
rhetorical and narrative structures. Indeed, such structures have a way of metamorphosing when
used thus. The controversies at the fore in the literature of the sixteenth century in Scotland have
a combativeness, but also a familiarity that might best be appreciated by remembering the close-
ness of the networks in which their main proponents lived, worked, and disputed.
The Springtime of Scottish Prose
The inception of the Reformation in Scotland coincides with developments of Scottish prose, and
the coincidence affects the later development of literary writing in this form. For all their diver-
gence in method and argument, two of the most influential thinkers of Renaissance Scotland,
Hector Boece and John Mair, were rooted – like Erasmus, Calvin, and Loyola – in the same seed
bed of humanism and the Reformation, the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, under the devout
ascetic Jan Standonck. Two landmarks of early sixteenth-century Scottish historiography are
Boece’s Historia gentis Scotorum (History of the Scottish People; Paris, 1527; Sutton, ed. 2010) and
Mair’s Historia majoris Britanniae (History of Greater Britain; Paris, 1521). Where the humanist
The Reformation 41
Boece would rhetorically amplify the myth of unbroken royal descent from ancient origins in
order to uphold the distinctiveness of the Scottish nation, the scholastic Mair combined the his-
tories of Scotland and England to advance an argument for the union of their crowns.
Through John Bellenden’s translation, Boece’s version had the greater influence on sixteenth-
century Scottish readers. By it, and by his translation of the first five books of Livy’s history of
Rome, Bellenden established a model for Scottish prose. The qualities of Bellenden’s style can be
observed in his prefatory dedication to James V:
Amang all princelie behavings and werkis of nobill men, I find no thing moir fructuous or moir
respondent to knichtly besynes then reding of historyis, for nobill men sall nocht find onlie in thame
marciall dedis bot als mony documentis concerning thair faime, thair honour and perpetuall mem-
ory, seand every stait apprisit eftir thair merittis and demerittis. Attoure, the froute of history bene
sa necessair that, but it, the vailyeand dedis of forsy campionis suddandly evanis. Be contrar, the
effect thairof causis thai thingis quhilkis ar mony yeris goine appere als recent in oure memory as
thai war instantlie done. Thairfor sayid Marcus Cicero, ‘He that is ignorant of sik things as bene
done afoir his time, for lak of experience is bot ane barn.’
(Chambers et al. 1938–1941, vol. 1, pp. 15–16)
The impression of fullness and roundness (copia) is borne out by the use of synonyms, antonyms
and other semantic balances. The reader is invited to seek and savour logical congruency and
opposition. Key terms reappear in different grammatical guises (fructuous, froute). Phrase patterns
expansively approach metrical regularity (‘thair faime, thair honour and perpetuall memory’).
Complex sentence structure often works toward a key word in final position (evanis, done, barn).
The great stylistic exemplar, Cicero (Brutus: Orator, paragraph 120), is duly cited.
Scottish literary prose in the sixteenth century does not remain within the amply flowing
Ciceronian channel laid out for it by Bellenden. In the Complaynt of Scotland (1549–1550), the
vivid appeals to the sense of hearing (running water, sailor’s cries, birdcalls, popular songs,
among others) provide recreation in the midst of the anatomy of Scotland’s woes. Typifying this
aspect of the Complaynt, Luuk Houwen cites Northrop Frye’s comment on ‘prose melos’, with its
‘tendency to long sentences made up of short phrases and coordinate clauses, to emphatic repeti-
tion combined with a driving linear rhythm’ (Frye 1957, p. 266, qtd Houwen 2013, p. 19). In
fact, these qualities also characterise The Complaynt at its most earnest:
as sune as ther is ane person slane, brynt or bannest for the halding of perverst opinions, incontinent
ther rysis up thre in his place. Therfor sic punitione maye be comparit til ane serpent callit hydra,
quhilk hed sevyn heidis. The poietis rehersis that quhen this said serpent was assailyeit be men to
sla hir and quhen thir men straik ane or twa of hir heidis fra hir, than sche fleid til her caverne, and
on the morne uthir twa heidis wald be growen on hir as of befor, and of this sort sche did grit dom-
age baith to man and beist, quhil onto the time that nobil Hercules venqueist hir, than he straik al
hir sevin heidis fra hir. Fra that time furth, sche livit nevir agane. This exempil tendis that the
scisma that ringis in this warld sal nevir be extinct for na punitione that can be exsecutit bot gif al
the heidis of the universal Cristianite be strikkin fra them or ellis bot gif the ministers reforme and
correct ther awen abusione.
(Stewart 1979, p. 127)
The Complayner uses the image of the Hydra to refer subtly to the way repression stimulates
opposition. In its variation of longer and shorter clauses, as well as the greater prominence of
coordination, the style of this passage can be contrasted with Bellenden’s.
It is conventional to distinguish Bellenden’s and the Complayner’s kinds of eloquence from

the plainness considered typical of religious prose in the sixteenth century. In fact, religious writ-
ing exhibits a greater complexity than this opposition suggests: one encounters frequent use of
subordination in complex syntax, sometimes interrupting the main idea being presented; as
well, sentences often begin with scene-setting phrases (indicating when, where, or how; Macafee
and Aitken 2002, section 9.5.2.1). Even though no Scots translation of the Bible gained preva-
lence (the reformers used English versions, the so-called Matthew Bible and increasingly the
Geneva Bible), translation plays a significant role in the development of religious prose, and it
does so across the emerging sectarian spectrum. To his translation of a Danish Lutheran cate-
chism, The Richt Way to the Kingdom of Hevine, John Gau added an ‘epistil to the nobil lordis and
barons of Scotland’ with a rebuke to ‘the blynd giders and pastors quhilk sekis bot the mylk and
the wow [wool] of the scheip, quhilk alswa thinkis nay scheyme to cal thayme self vicars of Christ
and successours of the apostlis. O say lik? Say lik?’ (Mitchell 1888, p. 104); the idiomatic inten-
sifier likesay [really] can still be heard on some streets in Edinburgh. Evidently a ‘familiar and
engaging’ approach was called for in religious discourse with common people, along with rhe-
torical questions and ‘pictures in the imagination’ (Todd 2002, p. 54; see also Smith 2012,
pp. 198–199).
These techniques are not restricted to the reformers’ style, any more than was neglect of pas-
toral duties in the established church. Writing in 1563, Ninian Winzet observes how this neglect
has driven people
to be refreschit in the cumpanie of thir new techearis, as it war in an apothecaris buyth ful of al kynd
of droigis bayth of delicat spycerie and of rady poysoun quare thai without ony consyderatioun or
respect of the guid or the evil hes tane sa gredy a fil, bot sum mair and sum les, of the poysoun that
certane ar fallin as it war in an apoplesie, nothir heiring, seing nor feling thare infirmitie, utheris as
in a phrenesie, rinnand and ruscheand without knawlege quhat thai othir do or say.
(Hewison 1888–1890, vol. 2, pp. 12–13)
A sequential progression of phrases unfolds the consequences for ordinary people of unadvisedly
taking in the ‘delicat spycerie’ and ‘rady poysoun’ of the reformers’ teachings. Even where a
delaying phrase intervenes between subject and verb (‘without ony consyderatioun or respect of
the guid or the evil’), it does so to whet the listeners’ eagerness to learn the outcome. This pas-
sage occurs near the end of a dedicatory epistle to Mary Stuart, but Winzet has not confined his
style to a courtly audience; in the ensuing preface ‘To the Reidar’, he declares his intention to
‘speik propir langage conforme to our auld brade Scottis’ (Hewison 1888–1890, vol. 2, p. 15).
This is a dig at the reformers’ preference for English over Scots grammar, vocabulary and spell-
ings, as in the foundational Book of Common Order.
In relation to the reformer John Knox, Winzet’s accusation of abandoning ‘our auld brade
Scottis’ is not entirely accurate. Knox’s description of a riot against the ritual procession of the
relics of St Giles in Edinburgh exhibits the very Scottish strengths of his Historie of the Reformation
(1559–1567):
[B]egane one to cry ‘Doun with the idole, doun with it’, and so without delay it was pulled doun.
Some brag maid the preastis patrons at the first, but when thei saw the febilness of thare god – for
one took him by the heillis, and dadding his head to the calsay, left Dagon without head or handis
and said, ‘Fye upon thee, thow young Sanct Geile, thy father wold haif taryed four such’ – this con-
siddered, we say, the preastis and freiris fled faster then thei did at Pynckey Clewcht. Thare mycht
The Reformation 43
have bein sein so suddane a fray as seildome hes bein sein amonges that sorte of men within this
realme, for doun goes the croses, of goes the surpleise, round cappes cornar with the crounes. The
Gray Freiris gapped, the Blak Frearis blew, the preastis panted and fled, and happy was he that first
gate the house, for such ane suddan fray came never amonges the generatioun of Antichrist within
this realme befoir.
(Laing 1846–1864, vol. 1, p. 260)
This scene has the immediacy of spoken narrative. In it, circumstantial allusion (the English
defeat of the Scots at Pinkie Cleugh, 1547), the performance of different voices, an invitation to
the audience to imagine the action as it unfolds, as well as omission of functional words, abrupt
shifts into present tense, and a sequence of ridiculous reactions (gapped, blew, panted), all contrib-
ute to a triumphant re-enactment, to be savoured especially when the passage is read aloud.
Satire and Ventriloquism
In order to understand what is special about the mimicry of speaking voices during the
Reformation, it is useful to look at a Latin poem that its author later referred to as a translation
from an ‘old epigram written in Scots’ (Ford 1982, p. 49). George Buchanan based his Somnium
(‘Dream’) on William Dunbar’s ‘How Dumbar wes desyrd to be ane freir’. A gifted assumer of
the voices of others, Dunbar describes a dream in which it seemed St Francis invited him to
become a friar. When the dreamer admits that he has previously adopted the guise of a friar to
engage in all manner of flattery and falsehood, the apparent saint is revealed to be a devil. In
contrast, Buchanan’s Saint Francis makes a dignified invitation to the dreamer, who refuses rhe-
torically: he would rather be free than a slave, he prefers ‘simplicity and a life unadorned’ (l.24)
to flattery and deceit; the friars’ filth, ‘nauseous chanting’ (rancida cantio, l.25) and beggary can
be tolerated only if they guarantee entry to heaven, but apparently friars seldom get there
(Ford 1982, p. 52; Jack and Rozendaal 2000, pp. 484–486). Where Dunbar created a dialogue
in which the saint turns out to be a demon and the dreamer shows himself to be a trickster,
Buchanan uses the encounter as the gambit for more serious criticism; a request for a bishop’s
honours is the only residual whiff of self-interest. A self-consciously eloquent remaking, the
Somnium presents a miniature debate between older monastic ideals and a revisionary commit-
ment to liberty and simplicity.
Other examples of literary role-playing in Reformation Scotland make less of a show of even-
handedness. In his Historie, for example, Knox displays an ‘Epistle direct fra the holy armite of
Allarit’, by the reforming leader Alexander Cunningham, Earl of Glencairn. This ‘epistle’ takes
the guise of a letter that the hermit at the shrine of Loretto (near Musselburgh) is supposed to
have written to his Franciscan colleagues, complaining about the ‘Lutherians rissen of new’
(Hadley Williams 2016, p. 101, l.5). In fact, Cunningham uses the hermit as a mouthpiece for
the very criticisms the reformers are levelling at the friars, ‘Lurkand in holes lyke traytour tod-
des,/Mantenaris of idoles and false goddes’ (Hadley Williams 2016, p. 102, ll.35–ll.6). The
strings of abusive terms recall earlier pieces verging between farce and satire such as ‘The cursing
of Schir Johine Rowlis upoun the steilaris of his fowlis’, William Dunbar’s ‘Schir ye have mony
servitouris’ or The Complaynt of Schir David Lindesay. Metrically, however, Cunningham is
rougher: his four-stress couplets ‘help to establish the urgent, self-righteously outraged and
alarmed tone that ridicules the speaker’ (Hadley Williams 2016, p. 37).
Mimicry of one’s opponent proved an effective way to gain political advantage – later in the
sixteenth century, the Casket Letters show how capturing an opponent’s voice can affect the
course of events. Already in the 1540s, first-person narration was being used with hostile intent.
Within months of the assassination of Cardinal David Beaton, Sir David Lindsay wrote The
Tragedie of the Cardinall (1547), in the de casibus model of Giovanni Boccacio, probably via its
main English exemplar, John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes. But where Lydgate had preferred
third-person narration, Lindsay depicts Beaton as a ghostly apparition of a ‘woundit man,
aboundantlie bledyng’ (Hadley Williams 2000, pp. 112, l.17) who tells his tale of brilliant rise
and miserable fall. No time is wasted on self-justification; Beaton frankly admits that ‘I was the
rute of all that gret myscheif’ when ‘new mortall weris’ broke out and ‘favoraris of the Auld and
New Testament’ were persecuted (Hadley Williams 2000, pp. 118–119, ll.187, 183, and 217).
Neglecting the details of his murder, Beaton lavishes attention instead on the ineffectual strength
and wealth of his castle, and particularly on his murdered body, preserved in salt and dumped on
a midden. His ghost gives two concluding orations, first to the high church dignitaries to give
up ‘your auld corruptit conswetude’ (Hadley Williams 2000, p. 124, l.340) and second to the
secular magnates to nominate only qualified candidates to positions of authority in the church.
This Tragedie manages to be both denunciatory and restrained. The restraint has something to
do with the poem’s stately rhyme royal (Lydgate’s main stanza form in The Fall of Princes) but
owes more to the cautious assumption that reform will arrive merely through providing better-
trained bishops, abbots and priests. When Lindsay has Beaton list off the unqualified ‘Rome
rakaris’, ‘rude ruffianis’, ‘fantastyke, fenyeit flaterraris’, ‘cowhubeis’ and ‘clatteraris’ who are
crowding their way into ecclesiastical preferment (Hadley Williams 2000, p. 125, ll.377–ll.381),
he is entertaining but perhaps also reassuring his audience; engage better clergy, and the whole
fuss over reformation might be resolved.
As voices are synthesised, so audiences undergo changes. In the decades before the establish-
ment of national reformation in 1560, fears of radical religious change had prompted parliament
to forbid importing ‘bukis or werkis of … Lutheris’, sharing ‘the dampnable opiniouns of the
grete heretik Luthere’, disputing ‘the papis autorite’ and printing unlicensed ‘bukis, ballattis,
sangis, blasphematiounis, rymes or tragedeis’ (RPS 1525/7/32, 1535/10, 1540/12/57,
1552/2/26). After 1560, the presentiment of threat affected secular authority; in the tumultuous
final months of Mary Stuart’s personal reign, parliament addressed ‘ane licentious abuse enterit
laitlie and cum in practize within this realme’ by which ‘placardes and billis and ticquettis of
defamatioun’ were being ‘sett up under silence of nycht in diverse publict places … to the sclan-
der, reproche and infamy of the quenis majestie and diverse of the nobilitie’ (RPS 1567/4/12).
The authorities were concerned about the circulation of dangerous opinions among the com-
mons, the focus of address as the engine of further change. Prohibiting ‘ticquettis of defama-
tioun’ suggests official awareness of the increasing sway of this wider audience, especially in the
burghs.
Political factions sought to control the focus and direction of this sway. The posting of broad-
side poems on public walls was a way to reach this audience, and with the reading aloud of such
poems to gathered throngs, the reach extended beyond the literate minority and became in itself
an opportunity for street theatre. Foremost in this trend were the printer Robert Lekprevik and
the shadowy poet Robert Sempill, both engaged in advancing the reforming agenda spearheaded
by the regent James Stewart, Earl of Moray and the so-called King’s Party (named for the child
prince James VI) in a civil war against the partisans of Mary Stuart. As well as polarising the
urban commons in Scotland, copies of the broadsides were transmitted to the English Secretary
The Reformation 45
of State, William Cecil, as topical information about the progress of the civil war. In such poems,
Tricia McElroy notes, traditional forms such as the ‘overheard dialogue’ exert ‘more than literary
influence by enacting the spread of political ideas’ (McElroy 2007, p. 329).
To the same end, Sempill often uses the persona of an urban working woman named Maddie.
Freedom of movement and access in public spaces makes Maddie a credible witness (Verweij 2016,
p. 120). As Maddie, Sempill is purveying the rumours supposedly being conveyed along the
street by a dependable network of ordinary women. In this guise, Sempill reports on Queen
Mary’s festivities at Seton Palace after the murder of her husband Henry Stuart (Ane ballat declar-
ing the nobill and gude inclinatioun of our king, ll.73–4; Cranstoun 1891–1893, pp. 31–38).
Bewailing the death of Regent Moray in 1570, Sempill uses Maddie’s voice to warn Moray’s
assassins to leave town or, ‘Maddie sayis, byde ye aucht dayis/Ye be not thair quhill Yule’ (The
regentis tragedie, ll.176–ll.177); get out of town or expect to be sent on a one-way journey. Not
merely retailing gossip, Maddie channels revenge. This righteous female presence resists the
cause of the deposed queen, whose partisans hold Edinburgh castle. Go home to your wives
before your money runs out, Maddie advises them; after all, ‘it is ane wyfis quarrell / Ye wald sa
faine set furth’ (The exhortatioun to all plesand thingis, ll.133–ll.134). Sempill locates his voices in
an urban crowd enlivened by its female protagonists.
Power and Plainness: Lindsay
The reformer James Melville remembered how his interest in poetry was awakened by ‘ballates,
namlie of Robert Semple’s making, wherin I tuik pleasour and lernit sum thing bathe of the
esteat of the countrey and of the missours and cullors of Scottes ryme’ (Pitcairn 1842, pp. 22–23).
If Sempill’s satires would teach Melville how to write Scots poetry, ‘David Lindsayes book’ had a
more visceral effect. When James Melville was only 12 years old, his elder sister, Isbel, ‘wald reid
and sing’ from Lindsay’s Buke of the Monarche, ‘namlie concerning the letter [last] judgment, the
peanes of hell and the joyes of heavin, wherby scho wald caus me bathe greit and be glad.’
Lindsay’s depiction of human destiny could overwhelm an impressionable listener; on one occa-
sion, Isbel ‘cryes out the verses of Davie Lindsay’:
Alas, I trimble for to tell

The terrible torments of the hell,
That peanful pit who can deplore
Quhilk sall endure for evermore.
With hir speitches and teares sche maid me to quak and chout bitterlie, quhilk left the deipest
stampe of Gods fear in my hart of anie thing that ever I haid hard befor.
(Pitcairn 1842, pp. 18–19)
The passage Isbel voiced from Lindsay’s Monarche (ll.6018–ll.6021) stuck in Melville’s memory.
It comes from a book that coloured thoughts about heaven and hell for generations of Scottish
readers and listeners.
Lindsay wrote during the controversial initial inroads of religious reform in Scotland, from
the 1520s to the early 1550s. His first extant poem, The Dreme, follows late-medieval convention
in using dream vision as the frame for a cosmography to advise a prince; the poet had been master
usher to the young James V. In its penultimate section, The Dreme goes beyond the bounds of
advisory literature to introduce the figure of Johne the Comoun Weill, his clothes ‘raggit, revin
and rent’ (Hadley Williams 2000, pp. 33–34, ll.921, ll.945). This representative of the common
people denounces the corrupt legal and ecclesiastical establishment of the realm but hopes for
the restoration of order under a ‘gude auld prudent kyng’ (l.1005). In The Testament of the Papyngo,
Lindsay intensifies his attack against clerical incompetence and greed: with her dying breath a
courtly parrot composes advisory epistles to James V and her ‘Brether of court’ (Hadley
Williams 2000, p. 70, l.346) but then denounces the avid churchmen flocking around her in the
form of scavenging birds.
Much of Lindsay’s later writing develops this critical position, with increasing attention to a
common audience. The position is most fully expressed in The Monarche (1553; alternate title,
Ane Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour). Demonstrating eloquence in the moment of
rejecting it, the poet seeks inspiration on ‘mont Calvare’ rather than ‘Pernaso’ (Hamer 1931–1936,
p. 206, ll.274, ll.272). He directs his ‘ryme’ to ‘colyearis, cairtaris and to cukis,/To Jok and
Thome’ (Hamer 1931–1936, p. 231, ll.549–ll.550). What ensues is in effect a dialogue with
Experience in which a courtier learns to reject his secular values. For its common audience, how-
ever, the Monarche is an encyclopaedic history with a powerfully apocalyptic drive. Citing the
millenarian chronicle of the Lutheran Johann Carion, Lindsay constructs a history that high-
lights key stages in the advance of human wickedness and the inevitability of divine retribution:
the expulsion from Paradise of Adam and Eve, ‘cause radicall/That we bene fragyll synnaris all’
(Hamer 1931–1936, p. 211, ll.446–ll.447); Nimrod’s Tower of Babel and the consequent break-
ing of languages; Ninus, Semiramis and the invention of war and idolatry; the destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah because their ‘foule, unnaturall lychorie/A vengeance to the hevin did
crye’ (Hamer 1931–1936, p. 301, ll.3430–ll.3431); the no less dreadful destruction of Jerusalem
because its citizens ‘myskend/Jesu the sonne of God’ (Hamer 1931–1936, p. 314, ll.3869–
ll.3870). The excoriated ‘fyft spirituall and papall monarchie’ serves as prelude to ‘that dreidfull
day … Quhilk ye call jugement generall’ (Hamer 1931–1936, p. 355, ll.5257–ll.5258).
The dialogue form of the Monarche teaches the reader to weigh each speaker’s views critically;
it also protects the poet from being associated too closely with any one of those views. This pro-
cess proliferates in Lindsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1552), with its wealth of voiced perspec-
tives and positions; it is difficult to determine where irony ends. The Satyre has its origins in an
interlude performed in 1540 before James V and Marie de Guise. Lindsay developed its scenario
on a much grander scale toward a two-part structure. In the first part, a young king, ‘Humanitie’
(Lyall 1989, p. 1, l.18), misled by his foolish, deceitful servitors, falls prey to Sensualitie, who
has assumed control over the estates of the realm. ‘Divine Correctioun’ intervenes (Lyall 1989,
p. 57, l.1598), and a Parliament is summoned. In the second part, a stage direction indicates that
the actors playing the Three Estates enter ‘gangand backwart, led be thair vyces’ (Lyall 1989,
p. 84, l.2322 [stage direction]). What follows is an investigation of the causes and effects of this
reversal, with much scope given to complaining voices lower down the social hierarchy, led by
‘Johne the Common-weil’ (Lyall 1989, p. 88, l.2431), to denounce the oppressions committed
by their superiors, especially in the ecclesiastical estate. The play draws to a close with Folly’s
sermon (a form derived from medieval French drama; Lyall 1989, pp. xxiii and xxxi), identifying
merchants, married folk, clergy, nobility and kings as fools. Foolery bubbles up at every oppor-
tunity; the play is rich in the ‘mirry Interludes’ that George Bannatyne deconstructed from
its script and added in 1568 to the ‘ballettis mirry’ section of his manuscript anthology
(Tod Ritchie 1928–1934, vol. 2, pp. 87–238). There is no conclusive royal proclamation.
The Reformation 47
As Greg Walker observes, ‘the reformation which the play offers is … fragmentary, imperfect,
and finally indefinitely postponed’ (Walker 1998, p. 141).
Middle Ground and Counter-Readings
Common voices ring out obstreperously in the Satyre; but a balanced alternative is intermittently
audible. Correctioun commands a competent cleric to ‘preiche/In Inglisch toung, land folk to
edifie’ (Lyall 1989, p. 123, ll.3467–ll.3468). Heckled vigorously by the other clerics, the good
doctor of theology asserts that salvation depends purely on the commandments to love God and
one’s neighbour: ‘Luife bene the ledder quhilk hes bot steppis twa,/Be quhilk we may clim up to
lyfe againe’ (Lyall 1989, p. 125, ll.3521–ll.3522). This assertion chimes with the orthodox
Catechism promulgated in 1552, where the devout are assured that their faith ‘is alwayis jonit
with hoip and cheritie, and werkis throw lufe’ (Law 1884, p. 128; qtd Edington 1994, p. 190).
Alasdair A. MacDonald observes that ‘Lindsay’s poetry was instrumentalized by the Catholic
party in the 1550s, just as it again would be by the Reformation party in the late 1560s, albeit
for very different ends’ (MacDonald 2021, p. 42). In 1568, Henry Charteris wrote in his preface
to Lindsay’s Warkis that the poet was a prophet of radical reformation, protected as one of
God’s elect from the ‘cruell, bludie and insatiabil hartis of the memberis of Antichrist’
(Hamer 1931–1936, vol. 1, p. 401).
Poets’ public reputations, Lindsay’s pre-eminently, were subject to radical revision over the
decades of the Reformation. Through these decades, a counterbalancing trend can be identified
in the poems themselves. In his topical and moral lyrics, Sir Richard Maitland ‘avoids specific
references to doctrine or devotional practice and distils faith to its essentials’ (Martin 2015,
p. 10). In his 1562 ‘New Yeir Gift to the Quene Mary’, Alexander Scott allows ‘those with dif-
ferent confessional backgrounds a role in the wider political dialogue that the poem itself devel-
ops’ (van Heijnsbergen 2008, p. 111). A role for literature in sixteenth-century Scotland may
well be to provide spaces in which to identify and celebrate shared values; traces of just such a
role are evident in printed texts but also more private collections. To commence his manuscript
anthology, George Bannatyne provided a sequence that ‘concernis godis gloir and ouir salva-
tioun’ (Tod Ritchie 1928–1934, vol. 2, p. 1). Bannatyne’s inclusion here of Robert Pont’s version
of Psalm 83, Jamie Reid Baxter has argued, ‘could be read in two entirely opposite ways’, either
attending to the ‘deafeningly loud gude and godlie associations’ or perceiving ‘a prayer for the
restoration of the old spiritual order and its certainties’ (Reid Baxter 2006/2007, p. 52).
The private settings for the composition and sharing of literature in Scotland 1540–1570 have
more to reveal about complex kinds of reading and interpretation. David Lindsay likely com-
posed his Squyer Meldrum poems for the household and friends of John, Lord Lindsay of the Byres
or his successor Patrick. In Meldrum, ‘tone and register sometimes shifts abruptly, with regular
(if ambiguous) hints of irony’ (Purdie 2018, p. 159). Lindsay celebrates the courage and ardour
that make the contemporary Fife gentleman William Meldrum into a conventional romance
hero, but the poet then demonstrates their inevitable collapse. Another instance of significant
opposition can be found in The Court of Venus by John Rolland, whose patron was the prominent
reformer James Douglas, Earl of Morton (Reid 2004). Though much taken up with a visionary
journey, this poem hinges on a debate between loyalty to and rejection of sexual love. Speaking
against is Desperance, who carries the Douglas emblem, ‘an bludie hart’ (Gregor 1884, p. 20, l.174).
This debate is eventually taken up with Venus by Desperance’s advocate Vesta; both pagan dei-
ties base their argument on Biblical evidence, with much discussion of whether those Old
Testament women Thamar, Bathsheba, Rahab and Ruth are ‘licht ladeis’ or stand for ‘prayer and
gude deidis’ (Gregor 1884, pp. 107 and 106, ll.828, ll.804). Each side scores points, with Venus
rising to the Yeatsian declaration that
In the vyle schell is found the perle of price.

Of the rude rute springis the flour delice.
In the gray clay is found the gold sa cleir.
Richt swa did Christ our flour and fortalice fortress
Spring of the rute quhilk part was givin to vice.
(Gregor 1884, p. 107, ll.820–ll.824)
It is intriguing to imagine this debate being recited at Morton’s castle of Tantallon, sometime in
the years just before the Reformation Parliament; in such moments, the old pastime of the
demande d’amour has acquired an entirely new metaphysical daring.
Recreation and Reinvention
As stated in its 1565 prologue, the collection known as The Gude and Godlie Ballatis (GGB) was
compiled for ‘singing of the psalmes and spirituall sangis, and that speciallie amangis young per-
sonis’ and others ‘nocht excersit in the scripturs’ to ‘cause us tyll put away all bauldry sangis and
unclene’ (MacDonald 2015, p. 87, section i, no. 1). Many of its texts having been translated from
German, it includes catechisms in prose and verse as well as lyrics. Some of the latter are religious
revisions, contrafacta, of Scottish and English secular songs. ‘Hay now the day dallis’ is one of these:
Hay now the day dallis,

Now Christe on us callis,
Now welth on our wallis
Apperis anone.
Now the worde of God ringis
Quhilk is kyng of all kyngis,
Now Christis floke syngis,
The nycht is neir gone.
(MacDonald 2015,
p. 228, section iv,
no. 56, ll.1–ll.8)
The English carol ‘This day day dawes’ is not a particularly close parallel (Greene 1977, p. 263,
number 432). With its burden ‘we must home gone’, it is an aubade; in GGB, the song is a
reveille – we are waking up. The secular form of this song is mentioned in Scottish sources. Gavin
Douglas likens the birds’ dawn chorus to minstrels’ performance of ‘The joly day now dawys’;
William Dunbar is sick of hearing Edinburgh’s minstrels perform this ditty (Bawcutt and
Cunningham 2020–2022, vol. 3, p. 250, l.182; Bawcutt 1998, p. 175, ll.29–ll.30). The contrafac-
tum in GGB conceptually expands on the nycht of superstition and the ensuing day to evoke feelings
of a new age dawning, with new duties and responsibilities ahead for the singer in the street.
Given this combination of religious and secular, it is fitting to end this survey with Alexander
Scott. Scott was a cleric and musician connected with the Chapel Royal in Stirling; his poems are
almost exclusively recorded in the Bannatyne Manuscript, in which they stand out among the
The Reformation 49
most recent items. Scott is the great exponent of lyrical plainness during the Scottish Reformation.
Here are the opening stanzas of his version of Psalm 1:
Happy is he
Hes hald him fre
Frome folkis of defame
Alwayis to fle
Iniquite
And sait of syn and schame,
Bot hes his willmacdonald
Conforme untill
The Lordis command and law,
Thame to fulfill
With purpois still
Boith day and nicht to knaw.
(Tod Ritchie 1928–1934,
vol. 4, p. 12)
By breaking up the odd lines of common measure and writing in Scots, Scott is in effect resisting
the increasingly dominant English versions of the Psalms.
In a stanza that cannot be fitted to the same tune but is comparably light and plain, Scott
makes a parallel assertion in secular terms:
Quha is perfyte
To put in wryt
The inwart murnyng and mischance
Or to indyte
The grit delyte
Of lustie lufis observance,
Bot he that may certane
Patiently suffir pane
To wyn his soverane
In recompance
(Tod Ritchie 1928–1934,
vol. 3, p. 316)
Long ago, George Saintsbury called this a ‘very pretty stave’ which conveys a ‘carillon effect
which is so charming, but which also gives an effect of curiosity, of something out of its own time
and place’ (Saintsbury 1906, vol. 1, pp. 281–282). There may be Romantic excess in Saintsbury’s
notion of untimeliness; but Scott’s lyrics bear comparison with Burns’s. To return to the stanzas
just quoted, both the psalmist and the lover are practicing restraint and sufferance to reach
happiness – it is a devotional equation artfully out of tune with Calvin and Knox.
Note
1 To enhance reading comprehension of quotations yogh, y, z; thorn, y, th) are redistributed, and punctua-
from primary sources, some overlapping forms (u, v, w; tion is editorially adjusted.
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5
The Seventeenth Century
Alasdair A. MacDonald
Department of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, GB
In the history of Lowland Scottish literature, the seventeenth is perhaps the least well known of
centuries. The resonant name of William Drummond of Hawthornden may spring to mind, but
his poetry has not been much read in modern times. Although in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
(1861) Drummond was well represented, tastes change: the arrival of modernism contributed to
the decline in Drummond’s appeal, and Scottish nationalist sentiment has been uncomfortable
with his cultivation of the English language.
In the meantime, many works of the temporally more remote medieval literature of Scotland
are now relatively familiar, having received keen attention from philologists and literary critics;
and for its part, the poetry of the eighteenth century has an even more secure presence in general
awareness. Nevertheless, the intervening period remains – except in relation to poetry in Gaelic –
underestimated and understudied. The imbalance is curious, especially since the religious, polit-
ical, military, constitutional and intellectual history of the seventeenth century – which saw such
significant events as the Union of the Crowns, the Kirk’s resistance to Episcopacy, the Wars of
the Three Kingdoms, the execution of Charles I, the Cromwellian occupation, the Restoration,
the regime of Lauderdale, the persecution of the Covenanters, the dismissal of James VII, the
Glorious Revolution and the triumph of Presbyterianism – has by no means been neglected. It
is as if the fascination with political culture has had the effect of crowding out interest in the
literature as such. In the coverage which they accord to the seventeenth century, most histories
and anthologies of Lowland Scottish literature seldom find room for more than ballads, composi-
tions which, though uncertainly medieval, are presumed to predate the Enlightenment. Yet,
though the anonymous ballads have been the subject of enthusiastic study, there has been no
equivalent interest in the very much larger literary corpus produced by Scottish writers of known

The Seventeenth Century 53
identity and education. Much of the latter corpus has long remained inaccessible, but online
publication is at last enabling the rediscovery of a wealth of interesting but forgotten texts.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century it must have seemed that many preconditions of the
production of literature were suddenly under serious challenge. Where no sovereign was present
in the country, with all the associated patterns of royal patronage, was a courtly culture still pos-
sible? Were unpopular kings deserving of honour and obedience? If the centre of power was no
longer at Edinburgh but in London, what would be the effect for literature? Had Lowland
Scotland become degraded to the merely provincial? Would aristocrats, or could they, fulfil the
role of patrons of culture, from the local vantage-points of their country houses? Since, as has
been written, fame is the spur raised by the clear spirit, where and how was literary fame hence-
forth to be earned? How would literature inspired by Christianity respond to factionalism and
persecution? What would patriotism mean in the age of the Scoto-Briton? What would remain
Scottish in a literature that was busily self-assimilating to the norm of standard English, a pro-
cess wherein nota bene the Kirk played the role of Pied Piper? These are only a few of the existen-
tial considerations to be confronted in any appraisal of the century.
Some of these issues presented themselves even before the Union of the Crowns. The formerly
only sporadic and decorative resort to English language forms by the ‘Scottish Chaucerians’ gave
way, from the 1560s onwards, to the regular policy of the Reformed Kirk. Cultural convergence
was also promoted by other factors. Some printers relocated from London to Edinburgh and
published poetry by James VI and his Scottish contemporaries, as well as such English works as
Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, and St Peter’s Complaint by the Jesuit Robert Southwell; on the other
hand, works by a few Scottish authors (e.g. Henryson, Lindsay) were printed at London. Both
Scottish and English youths studied the same Ancient languages and the same Classical authors,
and the ability to compose neo-Latin verse was a prestige educational accomplishment both
north and south of the Border. The famous George Buchanan was not the only Scottish master of
this skill, and, when King James revisited his homeland, he was everywhere greeted with poetry
in Latin (or even Greek) – duly anthologised in the memorial volume, The Muses’ Welcome (1618).
Even more impressive are the more than one thousand pages (in tiny letters) of Latin verse in the
Delitiae poetarum scotorum [Delights of the Scottish poets] (Amsterdam, 1637). David Echlin, the
Scottish physician to two queens, published two whole volumes of poetry in French, and Walter
Quin, a Dublin-born poet at James’s court, wrote copiously in English, Latin, French and Italian.
The essential choice for poets, therefore, was not so much between Scots and English, but
between Latin and the modern vernaculars. The preferred forms of literature also changed, and
poets embraced new genres, whether from the Classics (e.g. ode, epistle, elegy, epigram, epitaph,
satire) or from the Renaissance (e.g. sonnet, canzone, sestina, madrigal).
During at least the first third of the seventeenth century, the term ‘Scottish literature’ is most
appropriately understood as that which was written in Scots, English, and a further four lan-
guages (five including Gaelic). This remarkable proficiency, with its attendant internationalism
of outlook, is reflected in the polyglot holdings in the libraries of William Drummond and
George Lauder. Scottish poets also began to comment on what they observed in their travels
abroad. Allusions to places in England begin to crop up (e.g. Alexander Craig on Stonehenge,
Patrick Hannay on charcoal-burning at Croydon, Robert Allen on the sights of London), as do
memoirs of the Continent (e.g. Simion Grahame’s nostalgic thoughts of home when crossing the
Alps, and William Lithgow’s record of his peregrinations round the Mediterranean and in the
Near East). George Lauder, who left Scotland as a young man to go soldiering on the Continent,
and who spent his last four decades in the Netherlands, counts as a genuinely Scottish poet,
since, in addition to eulogising Dutch poets, pastors and members of the House of Orange, he
wrote memorably about such developments at home as the Bishops’ Wars, the execution of
Charles I, the death of William Drummond, the Restoration. The earliest author to make a truly
Europe-wide impact while self-identifying as Scottish, was the Catholic John Barclay, born in
France to a French mother, who wrote poetry, satires and political romans à clef in neo-Latin, lived
for a time close to the Jacobean court in London but never in Scotland, and died in Rome.
Significantly, the first-ever history of Scottish literature was compiled in Bologna by an erudite
scholar from Aberdeenshire, Thomas Dempster. For no previous period is such a Europe-wide
perspective required.
Until recently, few critics have engaged with such developments, and the general idea has
been that the literature of the seventeenth century was merely an etiolated falling-away from
that of earlier and more interesting times. Moreover, to the extent that most of the new lit-
erature was anglophone, it was open to being thought unpatriotic, and slighted as ‘English
imitation stuff’. Such notions are wide of the mark. Some measure of continuity with the past
there indeed was, but the degree of change and innovation consequent upon the Union of the
Crowns is much more significant. The most obvious point of difference was the absence of the
ruler, and henceforth Scotland would only see the head of state at rare moments, and briefly
at that: James VI in 1617, Charles I in 1633 and 1641, Charles II for a few months in 1650–
1651, James VII (as king) and William II not at all. Inevitably, the older pattern of direct and
easy contact between poet and sovereign was no longer possible. Instead, there was a prolif-
eration of verse ostensibly addressed to the king but more probably intended for the numer-
ous readers of the books in which that verse was printed; it is likely that the king never set
eye on most of it. The changed relationship is also to some extent connected with the general
trend away from manuscript publication for an intimate or coterie audience, towards the
more public form of printed publication, in which the identity and number of the readers
would necessarily be unpredictable. For most of the printed poetry of the seventeenth century
no manuscript source-texts exist.
With the court gone, Edinburgh ceased to play such a monopolistic and centripetal role in
Scottish literature, and the regions begin to gain significance. The Muses’ Welcome demonstrates the
high competence in neo-Latin on the part of grammar-masters throughout the Lowlands. In ver-
nacular verse, there emerge local clusters of poets, for example in the north-east (Alexander Craig,
Alexander Garden, Patrick Gordon), the south-west (Sir William Mure, William Lithgow, Robert
Allen, Patrick Hannay), the Forth Valley (Alexander Hume, Elizabeth Melville, Sir William
Alexander), and in Lothian (Simion Grahame, James Cockburne, William Drummond, George
Lauder). One manifestation of the cultural fissiparousness is the poets’ pride in their native locali-
ties. For example, in Forth Feasting Drummond lauds the river and its entire course from mountain
to sea, and William Lithgow, a native of Lanarkshire, lists the landmarks of the Clyde from
Dumbarton Rock via Glasgow to Corhouse Linn. Praise of landscape had always been a conspicu-
ous feature of Gaelic poetry, but now it emerges in the literature of the Lowlands: in this respect,
the political union of Great Britain seems to have promoted a sense of Scottish specificity.
This attitude extends to an increase of interest in the earlier history and literature of
Scotland. Several prose histories of famous families (e.g. Humes, Bruces, Drummonds,
Douglases, Sutherlands) were composed. At the beginning of the century, John Johnston
celebrated in Latin verse the sequence of Scottish kings from Fergus I to James VI (Inscriptiones
historicae regum Scotorum: [Historical notes of Scottish kings]) as well as a list of non-regal
figures (Heroes ex omni historia Scotica: [Heroes from the entire history of Scotland]). William
Drummond wrote a history of the first five kings James. In The Jewel, Sir Thomas Urquhart
of Cromarty celebrated a host of Scottish men of arms or arts, most memorable among them
the Renaissance prodigy James Crichton. Older Scottish classics, such as Barbour’s Brus,
Hary’s Wallace and Sir David Lindsay’s poems, were reprinted many times in the course of the
century – as well as Patrick Panter’s incomplete neo-Latin epic poem based on Hary: Valliados
(1633). Drummond possessed his own manuscript copy of the poems of Sir Richard Maitland
of Lethington (d. 1586). The great sixteenth-century manuscript collections of medieval and
early modern Scottish poetry continued to be consulted, as scribblings in the margins testify.
George Lauder’s mother, Annabel Bellenden, was from a family which had provided items in
the Bannatyne MS, and the first wife of his father, Sir Alexander of Haltoun, had been Marie
Maitland, a daughter of Sir Richard and copyist of his poems: it is therefore altogether likely
that the young Lauder had access to such codices, and learned something from them. The
Maitland Folio and Quarto MSS were later to leave Scotland, and were purchased in 1692 by
Samuel Pepys at the sale of the library of John, Duke of Lauderdale; the Bannatyne MS, how-
ever, remained in the vicinity of Edinburgh, where it would eventually be quarried by Allan
Ramsay. An excellent illustration of the persistence of the patriotic strain in culture is Patrick
Gordon’s The famous historie of … Bruce. This long poem, printed (1615) at Dort (Dordrecht)
in the Netherlands, is a recasting of the story told by Barbour. In style it is indebted to
Italian poets of the Renaissance, and it competes with Spenser’s Faerie Queene by introducing
not Merlin but Thomas the Rhymer, to celebrate an alternative and northern royal dynasty
and ‘prophesy’ its culmination in James VI.
Though there was normally little or no physical presence of royalty in seventeenth-century
Scotland, royalist adherence remained strong – albeit that, in the later decades and for certain
sections of society, the sentiment may have been increasingly subject to qualification. Some
Scottish poets (e.g. Robert Ayton, William Alexander, Alexander Craig) followed the king to
London. Some stayed permanently (Ayton even became formally a denizen of England and was
buried in Westminster Abbey); some returned after a comparatively short time (e.g. Alexander
Craig, David Murray); some (e.g. Simion Grahame) failed to gain patronage and transferred their
hopes from the king to new patrons; for his part, Robert Allen was unimpressed with both capi-
tal and court; John Barclay and George Lauder spent only a short time in London before leaving
for the Continent. Other poets, however, preferred to remain at home (e.g. Elizabeth Melville,
William Drummond). Nonetheless, interest in royal events was maintained through a plethora
of book-dedications, liminary verses, and poems on such events as James’s departure to England
(e.g. Craig’s ‘Scotland’s Teares’), the Westminster Coronation, the Gunpowder Plot, the death of
Prince Henry (most notably, Drummond’s ‘Teares on the Death of Mœliades’), the funeral of
Queen Anne, the death of James himself: mutatis mutandis, this kind of public and occasional
writing remains a feature of the subsequent reigns. This large literary production can be regarded
as comprising a virtual court culture, with its locus of existence not at the court itself, but in the
composition, publishing and communal reading of verse on topics of court interest – whatever
might be the geographical location of the poets and their public.
Of course, when the king did come home again, the virtual and the actual could happily
coincide, and the conjunction resulted in two outstanding works: Drummond’s ‘Forth Feasting’
(1617) and his ‘Entertainment of King Charles’ (1633). In the first of these, Drummond com-
bined Classical mythology with patriotic pride in the history and natural features of his own
country to create a verse ‘panegyricke’ to the king, putatively delivered by a personified River
Forth; in the second, similar resources were deployed in a lavish, spectacular, historical and alle-
gorical pageant which, mounting Parnassus in the main thoroughfare of the capital, overtopped
any previous entrée joyeuse in Edinburgh and used street theatre as theatre of state. Whereas it is
easy to credit that the execution of Charles I should have precipitated the decline and death of
the Episcopalian and perfervid royalist Drummond, even a staunch Presbyterian like George
Lauder was impelled to pen a vehement satire ‘On the most Horrid and Terrible Treason, the
unparalleled Parracide committed upon the Sacred Person, of the High and Mighty Prince
Charles’ [etc.]. Royalism survived the fatal stroke of the axe, and the new king – the last to be
crowned at Scone – was promptly hailed in Scoticlassicum (1650) by a poet identifying him/herself
only as ‘I. S.’. Amid a flurry of verse elicited by the Restoration, there appeared Eubulus, one of
Lauder’s most substantial compositions, full of mature advice for Charles II, in 1660 despatched
to him from across the North Sea. In subsequent years, however, the bright flame of royalism
dimmed to the flicker of ephemeral praise, protest and petition – such as the anonymous ‘Humble
Address’ (1689) of the ‘Regimented Cameronian Presbyterians lying at Montrose’, which, while
recycling for William of Orange some of the old tropes of triumph dating from the days of the
Union of the Crowns, concludes with a hard-headed appeal for ‘pay in hand’.
Religion was the other great and characteristic theme of seventeenth-century Scottish litera-
ture. In a period of doctrinal controversies, there is no shortage of pasquils and other sparkily
polemical and satirical material, but there are also more substantial works which stand out in
their articulation of general Christian beliefs and attitudes. In overall impact, of course, no
poetry could compete with the Psalms, whether in public worship or in the informal and
domestic sphere, and in the 100 years following the Reformation of 1560, nearly all Scottish
poets produced versifications of selected specimens. Versions of the entire collection were also
made: one, advertised as the work of King James but more indebted to Sir William Alexander,
was published in 1631; another was that of the Glasgow professor and minister Zachary Boyd
(1644); that of Sir William Mure is two-thirds complete. In the face of a multitude of compet-
ing versions, and in order to achieve uniformity, the General Assembly gave its blessing in May
1650 to a new rendering, and for three centuries thereafter this Metrical Psalter had canonical
status in Protestant Scotland. The whole topic of vernacular psalmody is a huge one, and
seventeenth-century Scotland displays a fascinating range of translation strategies. There is a
fundamental tension between the commitment to render the biblical message as accurately as
possible and the ambition to produce an elegant (and/or singable) work of literature; David
Murray, Sir Robert Kerr and Sir William Mure are some of the poets who opted for the latter,
more literary, approach. Needless to say, the spirituality, diction and imagery of the psalms
exerted a profound influence on other types of literature, most notably the religious lyric. This
influence is most patent in the work of those (e.g. James Melville, Elizabeth Melville, Sir
William Mure) of a strongly Calvinist persuasion, but it impinges on all poets of the age, whatever
their particular religious adherence.
Several poets produced works on the large scale. William Alexander’s Doomes-Day is a detailed
account of the end of the world, based on the Book of Revelation. It was first published in four
‘hours’ (1614), and in 1637 was expanded to 12, reaching more than 11 000 lines. Although
Alexander’s magnum opus has not found favour with the few modern readers with patience to
tackle it, recognition is its due as a triumph of the baroque imagination, where the poet intro-
duces realistic touches to assist his audience in the visualisation of the apocalyptic content – as
when fire from heaven causes the instantaneous roasting of birds on the wing. Sir William Mure’s
The Trve Crvcifixe for True Catholickes (1629), however, is a work of a quite different stripe, and
does not attempt any kind of narrative. Instead, in over 3000 lines of rhymed couplets Mure
expatiates on his philosophy of what is fitting by way of devotion to Christ; this, he argues,
should be absolutely Bible-based, of an abstract nature, eschewing any outward, physical,
mechanical or artistic dimension. Mure’s rigour extends to literary style, and in the introduction
he repudiates ‘the whorish ornaments of affected eloquence’, which he deems ‘an vnsutable orna-
ment to garnish pure Truth’. The uncompromising aesthetic underlying this work offers a strong
challenge to most modern literary tastes. Yet the manifest sincerity of Mure’s standpoint as an
artist calls for respect, even though it may seem antipathetic to what is often most valued in
religious literature and art.
Whereas these two works have suffered neglect, others are today even more obscure, though
they exhibit attractive features and deserve to be brought in from the cold. William Wishart’s
Immanuel: or the Mistery of God, Revealed in the Flesh (1642), dedicated to Charles I, is a brief epic
in pentameter couplets, dealing with the Nativity, the preaching career, and the Passion,
Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. Its three ‘weeks’, each of seven cantos, are dedicated
respectively to the ladies Urania, Astræa and Melpomene. On the title-page, the author declares
himself to be a ‘Scoto-Britan’ and a preacher in both kingdoms. Originally from North East
Scotland, the royalist Wishart had been the minister in Restalrig (i.e. South Leith), but he was
deposed in 1639 for ‘erroneous doctrine’, went into exile and died in Cornwall. In the opening
‘Rogation’, he expresses contempt for those who write on worldly themes (‘Poetasters of brain-
sick passions’), and he rejects the pagan matter of Homer and Virgil, in favour of a Christian
subject. Nonetheless, in Immanuel Wishart pours the wine of Christianity and Jewish history into
Classical bottles, and to some extent the rather grandiloquent result seems to anticipate Milton;
by the same token, in his artistic attitude and practice Wishart is the complete antithesis of
Mure. Another forgotten masterpiece is George Lauder’s final composition, Hecatombe Christiana
(1661). This poem, likewise a life of Christ, is formed of precisely 100 stanzas each of 10 lines,
and there is an obvious numerological significance in the fact that the Cross appears at the exact
mid-point. In certain aspects Lauder too is indebted to the Virgilian precedent, both in his por-
trayal of Christ as hero, and in those stanzas which, with their references to the phenomena of
landscape and the natural world, function as epic similes. This poem, which survives in a single
and slightly mutilated print, is one of the most accomplished works of Scottish religious poetry
tout court.
Whereas the explicit intention of these authors is, in various ways, to justify the ways of
God to man, others preferred a stance that was less completely and directly linked to Scripture.
One such is William Drummond, who, in his Flowres of Sion (1630), a collection of sonnets,
madrigals and hymns on a variety of religious and moral subjects, achieved a blending of
Christianity with a neo-stoic concern with tranquillity of mind. This synthesis also informs
his prose meditation on death, A Cypresse Grove, which, in a manner reminiscent of Sir Thomas
Browne, is sonorously eloquent on its theme (e.g. ‘The Violets haue their time, though they
empurple not the Winter, & the Roses keepe their season, though they discouer not their
beautie in the Spring’). A comparably meditative, though more anguished, note animates The
turtle-dove (1664) by John Fullartoun of Carleton (Ayrshire), a self-declared ‘Lover of the
Celestiall Muses’. This specimen of personal and local piety, was offered to Lady Jean Campbell,
widow of Sir John Gordon of Lochinvar, first Viscount Kenmure (Kirkcudbrightshire). The
work had its origin in a religious crisis which befell Fullartoun at the mid-point of his life (in
1628, therefore), and his admonitions to the ‘wrestling believer’ emanate, as with Bunyan,
from the author’s own experience of spiritual struggle. He makes much of the contrast between
the old man (Vice) and the new (Virtue), and, when the introspection of his conscience becomes
most acute, Fullartoun breaks out into passages of (highly competent) verse. After this intro-
duction, the main part of The turtle-dove (cf. Ps 74:19) consists of a series of debates in verse
between allegorical personages, whereof everything flows from the intention to fortify the
mind and soul of the ‘Child of God after Regeneration’.
Some smaller works likewise testify to local piety, and some even at the level of the house-
hold. An early example is Alexander Hume’s A Day Estivall, which, though seen by Victorian
and later critics as a quasi-Romantic response to the beauties of nature around his parish of
Logie (Stirlingshire), is more accurately a psalm-like celebration of the providence of God,
manifested through landscape and climate. It was printed in a volume (1599) in which Hume
goes out of his way to praise the poetry of his friend Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross. The
latter has among other distinctions that of being the first female Scottish author to see her
poetry in print, namely in her Ane Godlie Dreame, an allegorical journey of the soul to God.
This work was first published in Scots (1603), and thereafter in English. An important dis-
covery of recent years has been of a manuscript collection of religious lyrics very probably
from her pen, which thus confirms Hume’s words in reference to her many verses. Characteristic
of Melville’s poetry, which shows an unerring verse technique, is her preoccupation with the
issues of personal sin and election.
Also writing religious verse for the edification of an aristocratic lady was James
Cockburne, who in 1605 published both Gabriel’s salutation to Marie, a rendering of the
subject of the Annunciation, and Judas’ kisse to the sonne of Marie, telling of Christ in
Gethsemane and at Golgotha. These two excellent poems were dedicated to his sister-in-
law, Jean Hamilton, Lady Skirling (Peeblesshire), and their publication coincided with the
birth of her son. The cases of the ladies Culross, Skirling and Kenmure are a reminder that
women might form a significant part of the audience of a recently-developed regional and
country-house literary culture.
In any survey of the seventeenth century it is impossible to ignore the cornucopia of material
inspired by denominational politics, even if shrillness in contemporary reference may sometimes
diminish the value of such works as belles lettres. Not infrequently, however, well-established
literary conventions and techniques reappear, whereof the dream vision is one of the most vener-
able. This was put to good use by James Melville in a poetic dream vision of the years 1606–
1607, in which the poet, ensconced in a close somewhere between the Pleasance and the
Canongate, sees fire and brimstone descend on the new Sodom (i.e. Edinburgh), where the king
is busy imposing bishops on the Kirk. A second such poem (sadly surviving in an abbreviated
text) is his ‘The Black Bastel’ (1611), in which a lady representing the Kirk of Scotland utters
her lamentation at the intrusion of bishops and extrusion of pastors such as Andrew Melville (the
poet’s uncle). However, two decades later the tables were turned, and the triumph of the
Presbyterian party is recorded with exultation in The Beavtie of the Remarkable Yeare of Grace,
1638, by a poet modestly identified only as ‘T. H.’. Here the year of the National Covenant is
hailed as an annus mirabilis and epitomised as ‘A dyademe to all Eternitie’: all nature is rejuve-
nated, with the Scottish climate as it were transported to ‘sweet Arabie’. Despite this outburst of
euphoria, Fortune’s wheel kept turning, and 20 years later there occurred the burning of the
Solemn League and Covenant by royalist supporters at Linlithgow (May 1662), commemorated
in a jubilant Dismal Account in prose and verse. However, in January 1689 the boot was back on
the other foot, when students of Marischal College, with the approval of the magistrates, staged
The Popes Procession at Aberdene – a ludicrous and purposely humiliating piece of agit-prop, cli-
maxing in the trial and burning of an effigy of Innocent XI. A great deal more could be said
about the profusion of literary and sub-literary works spawned by religious factionalism, the
rhetoric of polemic being a subject of lasting interest.
In a century riven by religious dispute and racked by armed conflict, a few Scottish sol-
diers wrote memoirs of their activities on the Continent – e.g. Sir Andrew Melville (grand-
son of the poet and diarist James Melville), and Robert Monro, whose His Expedition (1637)
details his service in the Swedish army during the 30 Years War. However, there is surpris-
ingly little literature on the subject of fighting at home. A number of poems take particular
engagements as their starting-points – such as the Scottish victory over ‘the English Papists,
Prelats and Arminians’ in Zachary Boyd’s The Battel of Newburne (1640), dedicated to
General Alexander Leslie, a hero said to conjoin the valour of Hector and Gideon. In such
works, needless to say, God tends to support the cause of the particular author. Boyd does
provide some vivid lines (e.g. ‘Bones, bloud, and brains went in a hurly burly’), but he can
all too easily slip into crudity (e.g. ‘Who fights for prelats is a beastly foole’). With fewer
and less obvious literary ambitions were the broadsheets arising from skirmishes – such as
the anonymous ballad Bodwell-Bridge (1679), ‘to be sung with a pleasant New Tune’, which
celebrates the ‘Kings Cavileers Trivmph’ over the Whigs. More interesting, especially since
quite different from these essentially occasional poems, are two works by George Lauder:
The Souldiers Wishe (1628) and The Scottish Souldier (1629). Unlike the war-loving clergyman
Zachary Boyd, Lauder writes about the military life from personal experience, and in both
poems he addresses his fellow soldiers. He does not conceal his hope for glory, but makes
clear that the physical hardship of army life (e.g. having to take meals not at table but on
the grass) brings a moral benefit which distinguishes him from the effete troop of parasites
around the throne; these he contemns as ‘painted puppies’ and ‘court monkies’. Lauder’s
neo-stoical attitude and his relativising view of social conditions and public morality make
his one of the more interesting voices of the age.
The turbulent history and politics of the century stimulated many poets, in Scotland as in
England, to reflect upon the course of events and the lives of the figures therein. A genre very
suited to such considerations is that of the elegy, and such works proliferated as never before. For
example, the fate – fortunate or unfortunate – of members of the royal family provided the theme
of a large number of poems. These could range in form and style from the most laconic of epi-
grams (e.g. a couplet [1625] by Robert Allen on King James) to the baroque and ‘Metaphysical’
exuberance of Patrick Hannay’s two elegies (1619) on Queen Anne. More satisfactory than either
of these extremes is Drummond’s splendid poem, ‘Teares on the Death of Mœliades’, on Prince
Henry Stuart (d. 1612), the man whom, in the words of the solemn refrain, ‘courtly nymphes
deplore,/From Thuly to Hydaspes’ pearlie shore’. George Lauder was also addicted to the genre,
not only in respect of successful military commanders – e.g. the Dutch Stadholder, Frederick
Henry of Orange-Nassau (d. 1648) – but also of his friend and mentor, William Drummond. On
receiving in the Netherlands the news of Drummond’s death, Lauder was moved to write his
plangent tribute, ‘Damon’ (1650); this poem, while making full use of the conventions and arti-
fice of pastoral elegy, adds personal emotion to the threnody, and the result is one of the great
Scottish poems.
Hitherto, in the literary works considered, the relation to the larger background of the historical
situation, with all its variety and vicissitudes, has been the determining factor; however, there
are also works which are not triggered by events. One is the verse translation by Anna Hume
(daughter of the historian and neo-Latin poet David Hume of Godscroft) of three of Petrarch’s
Trionfi (Love, Chastitie, Death), which she dedicated to the philosopher-princess Elisabeth,
daughter of Frederick V of the Palatinate (the son-in-law of James VI/I), deposed as king of
Bohemia in 1620. This volume (1644) is a notable example of intellectual contact between
learned women. Other texts have their origin purely in the mind and imagination of the poets.
Typically, many are on the theme of love, and some may even express the genuine sentiments of
the authors. The sonnet is the form of choice for such compositions, and a multitude, some com-
prising sonnet sequences, had already been written by the so-called ‘Castalians’ of the late six-
teenth century. Jacobean poets continued with the writing of sonnets, and by far the best are the
work of William Drummond. In the past, much of the critical attention given to Drummond has
been obsessed with the identification of his sources and models from Italy, France and England.
However, while such indebtedness is undeniable, Drummond’s best work is more than a mosaic
of quotations, and transcends the level of cliché and convention to reveal a characteristic intro-
spection and self-interrogation. Poets also adapted the sonnet to topics other than love, for exam-
ple: expressions of religious feeling; praise of the king, patrons, and personal friends; liminary
commendations of the works of admired fellow poets; comments on contemporary events.
While the fashion of sonnet-writing, which had its inception in Scotland in the 1560s, lasted
for a mere seven decades, the composition of stanzaic lyrics (often called ‘sonets’) was an activity
much more ancient and perdurable, albeit that styles changed along the way. Among the most
highly prized features in seventeenth-century verse are concision, elegance and balance, as in the
lyrics of Ben Jonson and the English Caroline poets. Sir Robert Ayton is the Scottish poet with
the greatest affinity to this manner. Often such works were entitled ‘song’, whether or not they
were written to match some pre-existing melody, or required a newly-composed lute accompani-
ment. Many lyrics depend upon the art of the neatly-turned commonplace, perhaps in applica-
tion to shepherds and shepherdesses in a pastoral never-never land, while others may introduce a
cynical tone, or display insouciance in the game of love and chance. English lyrics were warmly
welcomed in Scotland and readily copied into the manuscript collections treasured in the
country-houses. Such poems might undergo significant adaptation: for example, Marlowe’s
famous ‘Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ became the starting-point for a longer lyric by Alexander
Craig, ‘Alexis to Lesbia’, which successfully transports the locale from Ancient Greece to the
shore of the Moray Firth; in an alternative manner of revision, the same original work was con-
verted into a religious lyric by Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross, who, now speaking in the
female voice, addresses not Lesbia but Christ. The poems of James Graham, first Marquis of
Montrose, which are some of the best known love-lyrics of the century, belong within the context
of the Caroline period, and were remembered long after.
The century produced several interesting specimens of fictional narrative, though these have
also been generally ignored. Scottish taste in this area had a preference for verse over prose, and
can be viewed in the light of Continental masters of the neo-medieval romance. The relevant texts
are the following: Patrick Gordon’s History of Penardo and Laissa (1615); Patrick Hannay’s Sheretine
and Mariana (1622); John Kennedy’s Historie of Calanthrop and Lucilla (1626). Common features
in such works include: exotic settings (Greece, Italy, Hungary, Transylvania); indeterminate his-
torical period (vaguely suggestive of the Ancient world); wicked magicians; threats from barbar-
ian armies; royal ancestry (perhaps unsuspected) on the part of hero or heroine; stern fathers;
frustrated love-affairs; assorted monsters; ships blown off course; beautiful heroines glimpsed
while bathing; dynastic marriages; etc., etc. The influence of Spenser and the Faerie Queene is
manifest herein, but the Scottish poets eschew the latter’s antiquated language and polyvalent
allegory. Such romances consist essentially of pure fantasy, and are eminently readable page-
turners, of which a high moral purpose need not be expected. Greater seriousness can be detected
in David Murray’s Tragicall Death of Sophonisba (1611) and William Mure’s recasting of Virgil in
his Dido and Æneas (1614): these works, which are both set in Carthage, turn on the conflict
between love and duty. Patrick Hannay’s Philomela, The Nightingale (1622) is based on a grisly tale
told by Ovid, and is remarkable for its successful use of the intricate stanza-form used by
Montgomerie in the Cherrie and the Slae. Fiction in prose is represented by John Barclay’s Euphormio’s
Satyricon (1605–1610) and Argenis (1621), both written in Latin, and, in English, by Sir George
Mackenzie’s Aretina; or, The serious romance (1660). The latter is strongly reminiscent of the
Arcadian world of Sir Philip Sidney, and the story moves between Greece, Egypt and Ethiopia; the
central part of this post-Restoration work, however, follows the model of Barclay, in using fiction
to treat the religious and political issues of the mid-century in the manner of romance.
In certain respects, the literature of the post-Restoration years seems to hark back to the old
normality of the time before the Civil Wars. Mackenzie’s poem, ‘Cælia’s Countrey House and
Closet’ (written 1667/1668?) belongs to the genre best represented in England by Ben Jonson’s
‘To Penshurst’ (1616) and Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1651), in which descrip-
tions of venerable dwellings serve to adumbrate a poetic vision of civilised society. In Mackenzie’s
poem, the account of the house is supplemented with an itemisation of the contents of the closet,
whereby the details mentioned indicate the moral values and artistic taste of the owner. The fact
that Cælia has collected heads of not only Seneca and Cato, but also of Charles I and Montrose,
is also a signal of the royalist sympathies of the author. From the same political camp came the
comedy Tarrugo’s Wiles (translated from Spanish) by the journalist Thomas Sydserf/St Serfe
(1667). Sydserf’s father, who had once been a minister at St Giles’ in Edinburgh, had welcomed
the introduction of episcopacy in Scotland, and he was excommunicated by the General Assembly
in 1638; like William Wishart, he left for England, but returned in 1661 to the Restoration
establishment, as bishop of Orkney. Such works give no sign of the ongoing bitter political and
cultural struggle between royalists and Covenanters during the rule of the ‘Merry Monarch’, but
just that provides the inspiration of The Whiggs supplication (1681) of Samuel Colvil. This witty
and Hudibrastic work is a so-called ‘mock-poem’, a genre that arose in England in the
mid-century and specialised in parodying prestigious works of former times. Colvil does not
take aim at Homer or Virgil, but at Zachary Boyd, minor Scottish poets, and unreconciled
Presbyterians in general. However, the poet’s glib rejoicing at the crushing of the Covenanters
and his total lack of sympathy for the defeated party must today qualify any appreciation of his
undeniable verbal brilliance.
In this age of cultural polarisation, theatre was anathema to Presbyterians, with the result that
after the Glorious Revolution there was scant likelihood of a public performance of any play, and
especially not of the mordant satire The Phanaticks (aka The Assembly), by the polymath doctor,
Episcopalian and Jacobite supporter, Archibald Pitcairne (1691) – himself a relation of the
Sydserf family. During the reign of William of Orange a new theme enters Scottish poetry,
namely, that of colonisation and its promise of commercial advantage. Sir William Alexander
had raised the issue in his (prose) Encouragement to Colonies (1624), but the Darien scheme seems
to have fired the literary imagination. One of the first such specimens is A Poem upon the
Undertaking of the Royal Company of Scotland. Trading to Africa and the Indies (1697), which among
other things contrasts the wealth of the Scottish and English nations. Needless to say, the per-
spective is that of the white exploiter (e.g. ‘Black Slaves like bussie Bees will plant them Canes’).
Several contemporary poems and ballads are of the same tenor – one of the stated ambitions
being to erect a New Glasgow in ‘Caledonia of the Rysing-Sun’. For its part, The Golden Island
(1699), has the distinction of being by a ‘Lady of Honour’; sadly, this work displays a naïve com-
bination of jubilation and pietistic complacence (e.g. ‘Heathens receiv’d us with a Grace,/as if we
had been Gods’). Although today literature in this strain is likely to be found embarrassing, it
does afford an interesting Scottish point of entry to the larger theme of empire.
A not unimportant dimension of the Scottish literature of the later seventeenth century is that
which concerns the topics of rusticity, inebriation, and the personification of animals. All three
elicit an ironic or deliberately bathetic style and the use of a lexis that is markedly Scots as
opposed to English. Many such poems employ a particular stanza which, though ancient, has
become known as ‘standard Habbie’ from its use in ‘The Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan’
[i.e. Habbie Simson], written c.1640 by Robert Sempill of Beltrees. Quâ genre, the latter poem
is an elegy, but the person commemorated is not one of the great but a greatly beloved village
musician, and the poem is full of references to local customs. It was not long before imitations
appeared, such as the ‘Epitaph on Sanny Briggs’, but, whereas the poet of ‘Habbie’ displays affec-
tion, ‘Sanny’ veers off into parody, with a subject who is a ridiculous drunkard. Comedy in ‘The
Mare of Collingtoun’ (1673 and 1695), written in rime couée by an unidentified ‘P. D’., arises from
the presence of a speaking horse, a rustic protagonist, an earthy vocabulary, a crowd of characters
with folksy names, a string of named hamlets hard by Edinburgh, a parody-testament by the
horse, and a significant element of social-class awareness. This kind of writing, whereby low or
rustic life, with its distinctive linguistic register, is presented for the indulgent entertainment of
socially superior readers, would long prove popular in Scottish literature.
This brief survey has been able to do little more than draw attention to some representative liter-
ary productions, but it will at least be clear that there is a mass of submerged material below the
visible tip of the iceberg. A great deal awaits scholarly investigation and wider popularisation,
since the public can only be expected to appreciate what it knows. The seventeenth century as a
whole may be compared to a play in five acts – the Jacobean, the Caroline, that of the Civil Wars,
the Restoration, and the Williamite – each with its own character and priorities. In the approach
to any or all of them, however, it is important that uninformed critical assumptions from the past
be jettisoned: that done, this multi-faceted period of Scottish literature will emerge as full of
interest in its own right.
Further Reading
Many of the works mentioned in this chapter can only be accessed either in the original
manuscripts and/or prints or via such an online resource as Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Reprints of a number of such texts are in two volumes edited by David Laing: Various Pieces
of Fugitive Scottish Poetry; principally of the seventeenth century, first series (Edinburgh, 1825);
second series (Edinburgh, 1853). A selection of texts from the earlier part of the century is in
Jacobean Parnassus: Scottish poetry from the reign of James I, ed. Alasdair A. MacDonald (Glasgow,
2022); for the middle and end of the century see Laing’s volumes, and James Watson’s Choice
Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, ed. Harriet Harvey Wood, STS, 2 volumes
(Edinburgh, 1977, 1991).
MacDonald, A.A. (2018). George Lauder (1603–1670): Spiller, M. (1988). Poetry after the union 1603–1660. In:
Life and Writings. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. The History of Scottish Literature. Volume I: Origins to
Ouston, H. (1987). Cultural life from the restoration to 1660 (ed. R.D.S. Jack), 141–162. Aberdeen: AUP.
the union. In: The History of Scottish Literature. Volume Verweij, S. (2016). The Literary Culture of Early Modern
II: 1660-1800 (ed. A. Hook), 11–31. Aberdeen: AUP. Scotland. Oxford: OUP.
Parkinson, D.J. (ed.) (2013). James VI and I, Literature and
Scotland: Tides of Change, 1567–1625. Leuven: Peeters.
6
The Enlightenment
Ronnie Young
Senior Lecturer (Scottish Literature), School of Critical Studies,
University of Glasgow, UK
In 1757, the philosopher David Hume wrote to Gilbert Elliot of Minto, remarking that
it is admirable how many Men of Genius this Country produces at present. Is it not strange, that at
a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent Government, even the
Presence of our chief Nobility, are unhappy, in our Accent & Pronunciation, speak a very corrupt
Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of; is it not strange, I say, that, in these Circumstances, we
shou’d really be the People most distinguish’d for Literature in Europe?
(Greig 1932, p. 255)
To Hume, as to other eighteenth-century commentators, Scotland was gaining recognition for

what later periods would come to know as the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, an intellectual phenom-
enon that covered most of the long eighteenth-century and which was reaching its zenith around
the time Hume was writing. Hume’s appraisal of this period is a story of national greatness
through literary endeavour, by which he means ‘literature’ in the broad sense as a world of letters
which encompassed philosophy, history and other areas of polite learning. Scots thinkers and
writers excelled in these fields even in spite of national decline, or what Hume identifies as the
loss of status brought about by major constitutional and political changes. Richard B. Sher has
read Hume’s quote as highlighting the ‘central paradox of the Scottish Enlightenment’: how ‘a
poor, tiny country on the geographical fringes of Europe’ which had with Union in 1707 lost its
sovereignty and was haemorrhaging nobles south within the new British state, nevertheless
managed to become a world intellectual leader (Sher 2007, pp. 43–44). Despite Scotland’s rela-
tively small size and status, its public intellectuals, or literati as they are often termed, made

The Enlightenment 65
hugely influential contributions to the development of wide-ranging areas of enquiry from moral
philosophy and political economy through to natural philosophy and the sciences. The Scottish
Enlightenment had a lasting influence which still shapes modern ideas about progress and civil
society through to the nature of government. It also had a considerable cultural influence, as seen
in the work of poets and novelists from the period.
The Scottish Enlightenment was cosmopolitan and expansive in nature. Scottish thinkers looked
outward across an expanding globe to reveal the uniform laws of human nature that underly cultural
diversity, while also engaging with wider Enlightenment ideas, including the work of influential
figures from Europe’s Enlightenment such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baron de Montesquieu and
Voltaire. Yet although Scots thinkers looked beyond Scotland’s borders, the nation’s contribution
to the Enlightenment was in many respects peculiarly Scottish in character, shaped by Scottish
intellectual traditions and by the nature of key institutions, particularly Church, University and
Law, which preserved a degree of distinctiveness after the Union of 1707.
Although the Enlightenment can be seen as a secular or anti-clerical movement, Enlightenment
in Scotland did not happen in spite of the Church; rather, it has been linked to significant
changes in religious life. T.M. Devine points out that to move from the ‘Scotland of the 1690s to
that of the middle decades of the eighteenth century is to enter a different world’: where the
earlier period was characterised by the kind of puritanism that could condemn and hang a young
Edinburgh University student Thomas Aitkenhead for heresy, the Scotland of a mere half cen-
tury later was building repute for its culture of progressive intellectual inquiry (Devine 1999,
pp. 64–65). In a standard study of the period, Sher outlined the crucial role of the churchmen in
driving Enlightenment in Scotland, namely the activities of the ‘moderate literati’ -a grouping
of ministers which included William Robertson, Hugh Blair, Adam Ferguson and other indi-
viduals (Sher 1985, p. 13) who shared a similarly moderate theological and culturally progressive
outlook and who spread Enlightenment by ascending to key church and university positions.
Robertson, a leading historian, became moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of
Scotland as well as Principal of the University of Edinburgh. In addition to being a practising
minister, Blair was a prominent man of letters who held the role of professor in Rhetoric and
Belle Lettres at Edinburgh University. Adam Ferguson, author of Essay on the History of Civil
Society and a pioneer of modern sociology, had been a regimental chaplain before taking on suc-
cessive professorships at Edinburgh. The close-knit social ties of these individuals also show the
‘clubbable’ aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment, in which the literary and philosophical socie-
ties of University towns provided occasion for discussion and the cross-fertilisation of ideas.
Robertson, Blair and Ferguson were early members of the Edinburgh ‘Select Society’ alongside
Hume, Adam Smith, and the polymathic Lords Kames and Monboddo (List of members of the Select
Society 1754), law lords who wrote voluminous, intellectually ambitious works on ‘the natural
history of man’.
The rise of the moderate literati nevertheless showed Scotland still locked in religious dis-
pute, torn between Auld Licht and New Licht theology and fundamentally divided over the issue
of Church ‘Patronage’, or the contentious right of wealthy patrons to present ministers to con-
gregations. The moderates emerged as a group in support of patronage, while on the other side
appeared the evangelical ‘Popular Party’, who upheld the rights of congregations to appoint their
own minister as fundamental to the Presbyterian values on which the Church of Scotland was
founded. Such divisions are reflected throughout the culture of the period. The moderate-
inclined Robert Burns, for example, railed against the Auld Licht in his early Kirk Satires ‘The
Holy Tulzie’, ‘The Holy Fair’, ‘The Ordination’, and his celebrated dramatic monologue, ‘Holy
Willie’s Prayer’, a satire against a type of hypocritical Kirk elder and self-identified member of
the Calvinist ‘elect’ chosen to be saved yet who confesses numerous sins throughout the poem.
Although the moderates may have come to be associated with Enlightenment in Scotland, yet
their ascendancy did not give them a free hand. ‘Father of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Francis
Hutcheson was seen as a controversial professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow and students had
to defend him against the charge that his teachings regarding an inbuilt ‘moral sense’ were con-
trary to religion (Moore 2004). Moderate support for the tragedy of Douglas, first performed to
considerable success in Edinburgh’s Canongate playhouse in 1756, led to a flood of evangelical
pamphlets against its author the Reverend John Home and theatre more generally as a source of
immorality. Alexander Carlyle, another member of Edinburgh’s literati who had also been one of
the moderates to take part in dress rehearsals for Douglas, wrote a Swiftian defence of the play in
response to the public fallout over its performance. His activities led to censure by his local
Presbytery in Dalkeith (McLean 2010, p. xiv). That said, the conventional link between the rise
of religious moderatism and Enlightenment in Scotland does not mean that those with more
evangelical ‘popular’ views were wholly unenlightened. One of the moderates’ main antagonists
in print around the time of the Douglas controversy, for example, was John Witherspoon, the
Paisley minister who was later to become a proponent of Enlightenment in America as President
of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) and co-signatory of the Declaration of Independence.
As a wide-ranging project, the Scottish Enlightenment intersects with the life and work of a
number of major literary figures, some of whom are more well-known today than others. James
Macpherson gained international fame following the publication of the Ossian cycle of poems,
Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760), Fingal (1761), and Temora
(1763), which ‘translated’ the tales of ancient heroes such as Fingal from Gaelic for a polite
English-speaking audience and played a key part in the development of European Romanticism.
Yet these works, which once had an international reach, are little remembered in popular culture
today. Other figures are comparatively visible but often viewed through the distorted lens of later
generations. David Hume is renowned as one of Britain’s major philosophers, largely due to
revived study in university philosophy classes of such ‘classic’ works as his Treatise of Human Nature
(Robertson 2004). Yet Hume considered the Treatise of Human Nature a flop which ‘fell dead-born
from the press’ (Hume 2000, p. 3). After that period, he deliberately cultivated a career as a pro-
fessional author through his connection with Scots publishers in London, and turned to other
modes of writing, from shorter essays through to a multi-volume History of England which gained
him considerable reputation in his own day as a historian (see Sher 2007, pp. 44–45).
Adam Smith is another well-known Scottish Enlightenment thinker, yet one who is often
remembered selectively as a free-market economist and figurehead of right-wing thinktanks.
Much of his reputation is built around his masterwork of political economy, The Wealth of Nations
(1776), and famous concept of the ‘invisible hand’, a metaphor for a hands-off approach to the
economy which nevertheless stresses the unintended social benefits of self-interested behaviour,
that people left free to pursue their interests will inadvertently promote the ‘public good’ even
without intending to (Smith 1776, II. p. 38). When outlining the ‘division of labour’ – a key
concept highlighting the gain in productivity from dividing work into distinct specialist tasks –
Smith also realised that labour divided into ‘a few simple operations’ could, when taken to
extremes, act against the wellbeing of the worker, leading to a corruption of body and mind that
ultimately acts to the detriment of humanity and civil society. As a possible solution to the men-
tal ‘torpor’ caused by mindlessly repetitive work, Smith advocates public spending to ensure that
‘common people’ gain instruction in ‘the most essential parts of education’ (Broadie 1997,
pp. 455–458). It could be said that as a moralist, Smith had societal wellbeing at heart. In his
own day, Smith had been Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow (economics did not yet exist
as a discipline) whose teaching at Glasgow University included different subjects that fed into
the later Wealth of Nations, from lectures on jurisprudence through to political economy. While
at Glasgow, Smith also published his Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 (Smith 1976), a different
kind of work in which he focussed not on self-interested relationships of exchange but on com-
paratively selfless sentiments such as ‘sympathy’ as the foundation of morality:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which
interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives
nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.
(Broadie 1997, p. 157)
Such ‘moral sentimentalism’ had its own impact on Enlightenment culture, as we’ll see in what
follows.
Smith and Hume were influential in their own time, yet the movement which they have come
to define, the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, is in some ways a twentieth-century invention. The
phrase first appeared at the start of the century in historian William Robert Scott’s biography of
Francis Hutcheson (Scott 1900, p. 265). By the 1960s, historian Hugh Trevor-Roper identified
the Scottish Enlightenment as a movement restricted largely to a handful of male pioneers in
social science, viz. Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Robertson, and John Millar, while
soundly rejecting the wider culture of artists and writers of eighteenth-century Scotland as ‘irrel-
evant’ (Trevor-Roper 1967, pp. 1639–1640). By the closing decades of the twentieth century,
scholarly interest was moving towards Scottish endeavours in the sciences during the period,
while historians also began to take more of an interest in the culture of Enlightenment that had
been rejected by Roper. Richard Sher’s seminal study Church and University in the Scottish
Enlightenment (1985) brought an approach to Enlightenment which Alexander Broadie has
described as ‘inclusive’ for its focus on those moderate churchmen and men of letters who drove
Enlightenment in Scotland and their shared cultural values such as politeness, cosmopolitanism,
and ‘improvement’ (Broadie 2019, p. 5).
However, focus on church and university as the central organs of the Scottish Enlightenment
raises its own questions about inclusion because women were barred professional entry to such
institutions (McLean et al. 2016, pp. 4–5). Viewing the Scottish Enlightenment in terms of men
of letters involved in those institutions preserved after Union runs the risk of ignoring women’s
contribution to the Enlightenment, as does a persistent critical focus on the ‘great men’ of the
period. Attempts to redress the relative scholarly neglect of women’s contribution to the Scottish
Enlightenment have accelerated in our own century. As Rosalind Carr has argued, ‘Women were
never invisible in the Enlightenment, but their participation was constrained by gender’
(Carr 2014, p. 73). For example, Carr discusses how in contrast to Paris or London, which had
their salons and bluestocking circle respectively, Scottish women were ‘totally excluded from the
intellectual societies of the literati’ (Carr 2014, p. 8). As a counter to such examples of exclusion,
Jane Rendall has recently revealed a considerable amount of associational activity by middle-and
upper-class Scottish women in the late Enlightenment period, from female friendly societies
through to associations for reform or against slavery (Rendall 2020, pp. 206–227). Taking a
truly inclusive approach to culture shows that women were not, as Carr puts it, ‘entirely absent’
from the Scottish Enlightenment, even if there were societal impediments to their participation
(Carr 2014, p. 73). As Pam Perkins suggests, the issue of Scottish women’s contribution to
Enlightenment letters may be one of visibility rather than absence (Perkins 2010, p. 22).
The term ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, then, is what Robert Crawford calls something of a
‘moveable feast’ (Crawford 2007, pp. 270–271), changing as academic perspectives shift and we
revisit the period in relation to current concerns. The celebrated achievements of Scottish engi-
neer James Watt in steam, for example, may have brought about a reliable source of power that
later fuelled industrial revolution, yet it also ushered in a reliance on fossil fuels that is being
urgently re-addressed in relation to contemporary climate change. Watt also benefitted from the
Atlantic slave trade, as did many Scots of the period, even in spite of Enlightened intellectual
arguments and associational activities in favour of abolition (Mullen 2020; Hamilton 2012).
Such links highlight the current need to reassess the period in relation to the legacies of Empire
and slavery.
A shift in how scholars have studied Enlightenment in recent decades is perhaps signalled in
the work of Sher, from his early focus on the moderate literati of Edinburgh to his later work The
Enlightenment and the Book, which focusses on the print culture of the period as an enabling factor
in the development of Scotland’s Enlightenment. Scottish thought reached well beyond Scotland,
through networks such as the Scots publishers in London (Sher 2007, pp. 266–274), and through
places as far afield as America, either through importation of books – as in Thomas Jefferson’s
advice to a friend to procure works by Hume, Robertson, Smith, Kames, Home, Smollett and
other Scots through a London bookseller when setting up a gentleman’s library – or via reprint
in places such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia (Sher 2007, pp. 504–510). Scottish books
also formed a significant portion of the early curriculum of America’s Universities (Hook 1975,
pp. 73–78). Closer to home, print culture was evolving in significant ways. Next to London,
Edinburgh was a key player in publishing Scottish Enlightenment works and often published in
collaboration with London-based booksellers (see Sher 2007, pp. 265–326). The published
transactions of learned societies also played their part in disseminating Enlightenment. Following
a paper given to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, pioneering geologist James Hutton, for exam-
ple, published his radically new theory of the Earth in the first volume of transactions of the
Society in 1788 (Jones 2004). There he outlined a dynamic vision of the Earth as a planet with
‘no vestiges of a beginning,-no prospect of an end’ (Hutton 1788, p. 304), subjected to the cycli-
cal forces of erosion and renewal over vast periods of time. Scotland’s Enlightenment was also
enhanced by the rise of the periodical press. The world’s longest running periodical The Scots
Magazine was first published in 1739 as part of a wider patriotic attempt by Scots to assert them-
selves in cultural and literary terms post-Union (Benchimol 2013). This new type of literary
miscellany published poetry by Allan Ramsay, James Macpherson, and the young James Boswell,
among others. The comparatively short-lived Edinburgh Review of 1755–1756 included such con-
tributors as Smith and Robertson, and lead the way for the development of the critical review in
Scotland (Brown 2012, pp. 359–360). ‘Man of feeling’ Henry Mackenzie edited both the Mirror
magazine and the later Lounger, in which he proclaimed the ‘original genius’ of ‘heaven-taught
ploughman’ Robert Burns (Mackenzie 1786).
Crucially, print culture is also one area of the Scottish Enlightenment in which women could
make a significant contribution despite societal pressures. Pam Perkins has, for example, out-
lined a number of women writing in Enlightenment Scotland and points specifically to the
activity of Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Grant, and Christian Isobel Johnstone, who operated pro-
fessionally as literary figures in late Enlightenment Edinburgh and engaged in intellectual
debate across a variety of genres (Perkins 2010, pp. 14, 19–24). Women writers also made
insightful inquiries into ‘human nature’, showing that this focal point of Scottish Enlightenment
enquiry was not the sole preserve of male moral philosophers. Susan Ferrier began her second
novel The Inheritance (1824) with the observation that ‘It is a truth, universally acknowledged,
that there is no passion so deeply rooted in human nature as that of pride’ (Ferrier 2009, p. 1).
Despite the echoes of Pride and Prejudice that have hampered Ferrier’s reputation as the Scottish
Jane Austen (see McMillan 2020, pp. xx–xxi), it shows Scottish women writers involved in their
own investigations into human passions and sentiments to rival what David Hume outlined as
the central project to establish a ‘science of Man’ (Broadie 1997, p. 38). In her series of published
Plays on the Passions begun in 1798, Joanna Baillie —a poet and dramatist linked directly to the
Scottish Enlightenment through family connections with the anatomists William and John
Hunter —saw theatre as a means of probing human psychology, depicting for the purposes of
her species of ‘moral drama’ human emotional responses in extremis when faced with challeng-
ing circumstances (Young 2016, pp. 129–132).
These literary endeavours to outline ‘character’ and investigate what makes people tick can in
part be seen as the by-product of sentimentalism in Scotland during the eighteenth-century. Deidre
Dawson, for instance, highlights the influence of the philosophy developed by Francis Hutcheson,
David Hume, and Adam Smith upon a range of Scottish authors including John Hume, James
Macpherson, Tobias Smollett, Henry Mackenzie, and Joanna Baillie (Dawson 2019, pp. 289–312).
In his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726), Hutcheson had argued that
humans have an inbuilt ‘moral sense’ which gives feelings of pleasure when approving the actions
of others and pain when disapproving. This ‘moral sentimentalism’ was later refined by Hume and
Smith into a theory of morality founded in ‘sympathy’ and our ability to feel as others do, and in
turn influenced the construction of novels, plays and poetry around the sentimental responses of
characters. In Tobias Smollett’s final novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), we see multi-
ple perspectives of members of the same family via the letters they write while touring Great
Britain, perspectives that are tinctured by their different psychological make-up: for example, the
overly-Romantic niece Lydia, the parsimonious Aunt Tabitha, or Matthew Bramble, the curmudg-
eonly squire whose sentimental side is revealed through acts of benevolence witnessed by his
nephew Jery. In Henry Mackenzie’s archetypal sentimental novel The Man of Feeling of the same
year, the main character Harley —a ‘man of sensibility’, or delicate feeling —moves through
episodes contrived by Mackenzie as a literary experiment to test his sympathetic response to the
misfortune of others (see Young 2016, p. 128). The piling on of misfortune intended to evoke a
sentimental tear in the main character – and by extension the reader – is sometimes taken to
extremes, as when Harley meets a family turned out of the farm they have rented for generations:
Had you seen us, Mr. Harley, when we were turned out of South-hill, I am sure you would have wept
at the sight. You remember old Trusty, my shag house-dog; I shall never forget it while I live; the
poor creature was blind with age, and could scarce crawl after us to the door; he went however as far
as the gooseberry-bush that you may remember stood on the left side of the yard; he was wont to
bask in the sun there; when he had reached that spot, he stopped; we went on: I called to him; he
wagged his tail, but did not stir: I called again; he lay down: I whistled, and cried ‘Trusty’; he gave
a short howl, and died! I could have lain down and died too.
(Mackenzie 2009, pp. 66–67)
Such sentimental devices may look crudely manipulative today, but they sit on top of sophisti-
cated ideas about social psychological responses and the exercise of sympathy as the foundation
of moral benevolence.
Poet Robert Burns was a great reader of sentimental authors who rated Mackenzie’s Man
of Feeling ‘a book I prize next to the Bible’ (Burns 1985, p. 17). Burns was likewise influenced
by Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments had formed part of the poet’s formative reading
(see Dawson 2019, p. 306). Smith’s ideas about ‘sympathy’, or the ability to feel as others do,
from that work can be found throughout Burns’s early poetry published in his debut collec-
tion Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in Kilmarnock 1786. In ‘To a Mouse’, for example,
the speaker shows sympathy for the poor afflicted mouse whose nest he has just overturned
with the plough:
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,

Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
(Kinsley 1968, p. 127)
To Smith, moral sympathy was essentially an act of imagination whereby we place ourselves in
the position of others and imagine how we would feel if placed in like situation. For Burns, it is
a similar process of imaginative transference that enables his speaker to understand how the
mouse might feel to be turned out of house and home by the plough with ‘December’s winds
ensuin’ (line 23). As a tenant farmer working the difficult land of Mossgiel at a particularly chal-
lenging time (when tenant farmers generally lacked rent security), Burns himself could no doubt
understand what it would be like for the family to lose their home at short notice. Thus, the
sympathy Burns exhibits in his poetry is derived from Smithean ideas about the imaginative acts
performed by spectators when exercising sympathy for others. Another idea central to Smith’s
moral philosophy was that when it comes to correcting our own behaviour, we should strive to
become the ‘impartial spectator’ of our actions, effectively to view ourselves as others would.
Burns incorporates this cornerstone of Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy in another early
poem, ‘To a Louse’, where he concludes with a moral point which alludes directly to Smith:
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
And ev’n devotion! (lines 43–48)
(Kinsley 1968, p194).
If Jenny – the young lady who has drawn the attention of the speaker during Church service – could
see herself from the perspective of others, she might realise that people are not staring at her fash-
ionable ‘Lunardi’ bonnet, but at the louse crawling across her head. She might then stop putting on
‘airs’. Like Smith, Burns shows that individual actions take place within a social framework, and it
takes the mirror of society to reflect upon ourselves and self-regulate our behaviour.
Smith and fellow Enlightenment thinkers had a further impact on literary treatments of
human history and society. Philosopher and biographer Dugald Stewart outlined Smith’s
method as ‘theoretical or conjectural history’ which filled in the blanks in the historical record
by starting with the known principles of human nature and imagining how people would have
conducted themselves in the past (Broadie 1997, pp. 670–671). In a similar vein, John Galt
presented his Annals of the Parish (1821) not as a novel but as a ‘theoretical history’ (cited in
Costain 1976, pp. 343–344), in which he outlines the changes that occur in the fictional vil-
lage of Dalmailing during the tenure of the local minister, the Reverend Balwhidder, between
the years 1760–1810. Although Galt’s narrator is a comically unreliable one, Galt neverthe-
less imagines a plausible account of civil progress and the coming of modernity to towns across
Scotland within a wider world of commerce, trade, and industry: as he himself described it, a
‘treatise on the history of society in the West of Scotland during the reign of George III’ (cited
in Costain 1976, p. 344). As a minister, Balwhidder would be well placed to chart such
changes: his account of his Parish recalls another major work of the Scottish Enlightenment,
the first Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–1799), the brainchild of Sir John Sinclair (1754–
1835), which similarly contained entries written by the local minister covering the civil his-
tory of different Scottish towns at a time of rapid improvement (Withers, [n.d.]; see also
McKeever 2020, p. 158).
Scottish Enlightenment historiography attempts to understand and measure human ‘progress’
as following general principles which have an end point in civil society. In his lectures on jurispru-
dence, Smith noted how, in general, human society tends to progress through set stages, from
hunter-gatherers, through to nomadic herding societies, on to agricultural societies, and finally
evolving into commercial society, with each stage bringing increasing complexity in such areas as
property rights and law (Broadie 1997, pp. 478–487). To Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, then,
historical progress towards civil society becomes a gradual process to be understood in relation to
complex causes which operate independent of the will of ‘great’ individuals. In Walter Scott’s pio-
neering historical novel Waverley (1814), characters are caught up in the forces of history and the
protagonist Edward Waverley swept away by the current of the 1745 Jacobite rising, while the
‘great men’ of history such as Bonnie Prince Charlie are reduced to bit-part players. The ending of
Waverley symbolically banishes the divisive forces of the past through the hanging of Jacobite clan
leader Fergus MacIvor and the banishing of his radical sister Flora to a convent, while uniting
England and Scotland as they move together as part of a modern civilised British state, as symbol-
ised through the marriage of the English officer Edward Waverley to lowlander Rose Bradwardine.
A similarly fictional representation of progress towards civil society appears in Scott’s short
story ‘The Two Drovers’. The drovers of the title, Gael Robin Oig and Englishman Harry
Wakefield, unite through the gruelling commercial activity of moving cattle down South for sale
and find mutual benefit in each other’s company despite gaping cultural differences. However, a
misunderstanding over grazing rights leads to a fallout and a pub brawl in which Harry gets the
upper hand; later the vengeful Robin, acting according to a different code of honour from pugi-
list Harry, returns to the inn and stabs the Englishman. At the end of the story, the English judge
presiding over Robin’s murder trial asserts the rule of law over the Highlander in the interests of
promoting British civil society (see McKeever 2020, p. 94). In his summation, the judge
concludes that Highlander Robin’s code of honour is the product of an earlier ‘savage’ stage of
society comparable to native American tribes:
The country which he inhabits was, in the days of many now alive, inaccessible to the laws, not only
of England, which have not even yet penetrated thither, but to those to which our neighbours of
Scotland are subjected, and which must be supposed to be, and no doubt actually are, founded upon
the general principles of justice and equity which pervade every civilized country. Amongst their
mountains, as among the North American Indians, the various tribes were wont to make war upon
each other, so that each man was obliged to go armed for his own protection. […] Those laws of the
ring, as my brother terms them, were unknown to the race of warlike mountaineers; that decision of
quarrels by no other weapons than those which nature has given every man, must to them have
seemed as vulgar and as preposterous as to the Noblesse of France. Revenge, on the other hand, must
have been as familiar to their habits of society as to those of the Cherokees or Mohawks.
(Scott 2008, pp. 49–50)
The comparison between Gael and Native American may seem fanciful but it is enabled by the
‘stadialism’ of Scottish Enlightenment historiography, which dictates that, even though geo-
graphically, historically, and culturally distinct, Highlanders and American Indian can be com-
pared because they inhabit a similarly early ‘stage’ of social development in which martial codes
of honour persist. The approach is in effect similar to the ‘comparative history’ practiced by
historian William Robertson, who was principal at Edinburgh University while Scott studied
there. In his History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769), Robertson sets up a comparison
between ancient Germanic tribes and the ‘various tribes and nations of savages in North America’
on the grounds that both are supposedly in the ‘same political situation’, thereby allowing him
to compare their ‘character and manners’ and ultimately to test the reliability of classical accounts
of ancient Germany against observations of undeveloped societies in the present (Broadie 1997,
p. 679). In his sermons, Robertson also suggested that Highlanders were examples of primitive
society (Crawford 2000, p. 17).
As Robertson’s evaluation of Native Americans as ‘savages’ might suggest, Scottish
Enlightenment ‘stadial’ history sets humanity on a sliding scale of progress with commercial
European nations such as lowland Britain as the measure of civilisation against which some cul-
tures can be deemed less civilised. In ‘The Two Drovers’, the Highlander Robin becomes a type
of ‘noble savage’ much like stereotypes of Native Americans at the time, and a figure to be sym-
pathised with by a notably sentimental judge and jury, yet nonetheless a member of a ‘barbarous’
people to be sacrificed on the altar of progress. When it came to non-white and non-European
cultures, Scottish Enlightenment thought could even descend into overt racism, as in a notorious
footnote to the essay ‘Of National Characters’ in which Hume flirted with dangerous ideas about
polygenesis:
I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civi-
lized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No
ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and
barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TARTARS, have still something
eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform
and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an
original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are NEGROE
slaves dispersed all over EUROPE, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; though
low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profes-
sion. In JAMAICA, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he
is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.
(Hume, [1777])
Hume’s views were published at a time when Scotland was still very much involved in the
slave trade (see Liinpää 2018: pp.16-20) and although Hume himself was opposed to slavery
in principle, his views about racial ‘inferiority’ were used by others such as planter Edward
Long (1713-1814) in defence of the institution (Garrett and Sebastiani 2017). Moreover, he
himself invested in a Grenada plantation linked with the labour of enslaved individuals
(McLaughlin 2020).
When studying the Scottish Enlightenment, therefore, one should be aware of the negative
aspects as well as the positive. The Enlightenment may have brought positive changes to
Scotland, but ‘improvement’ was accompanied by cultural challenges. Among these was a real
pressure among Scots to conform to Southern English standards of civility, taste and expression
(Pittock 2019, p. 250). In our opening quote, we saw Hume describe fellow Scots as ‘unhappy,
in our Accent & Pronunciation’, and speaking ‘a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we
make use of’. Indeed, a list of ‘Scotticisms’ to be studiously avoided in speech and writing was
appended to Hume’s Political Discourses published Edinburgh 1752 and reprinted in The Scots
Magazine in 1760 (see National Library of Scotland (n.d.)). Hume’s views reflected a wider anxi-
ety about the Scots tongue among the learned which was expressed through advocacy for south-
ern English as the language of polite communication. Such forces of ‘Anglicisation’ were evident
in the lectures on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres delivered in Scotland’s Universities by professors
such as Adam Smith and Hugh Blair: a direct forerunner to the later discipline of English
Literature, these courses exposed students to models of ‘pure’ English style in the writings of
Swift or Addison’s Spectator (Crawford 2000, pp. 16–44). In 1761, the Irish elocutionist Thomas
Sheridan gave a successful series of public lectures to the Edinburgh elite in which he taught
proper accent and pronunciation to those who ‘speak a corrupt dialect of English’ (Sheridan 1761,
p. 390). As Marina Dossena suggests, Sheridan’s lectures perhaps epitomised Scots’ anxiety to
overcome the linguistic markers of their provinciality in order to ‘get on’ in a new British state
centralised in London (Dossena 2011, pp. 545–550). ‘I think the Scots would do well, for their
own sakes’, opines Matt Bramble in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, ‘to adopt the English idioms
and pronunciation; those of them especially, who are resolved to push their fortunes in South-
Britain’ (Smollett 1998, p. 231).
Such moves among Enlightened Scots to conform to English cultural standards within post-
Union Britain may seem counter to Scotland’s interests but this does not mean that they were
opposed to indigenous culture. As noted above, the literati were early supporters of theatre in
Scotland through their involvement with and defence of John Home’s Douglas, a patriotic play
seen as heralding the coming of the stage in Scotland to rival South Briton. Hume even gave
hyperbolic praise to kinsman John Home for possessing ‘the true theatric genius of Shakespear
and Otway, refined from the unhappy barbarism of the one, and licentiousness of the other’
(McLean 2010, pp. 167–168), while one audience member at the first performance reportedly
shouted out ‘Whaur’s yer Wully Shakespeare noo?’ (p. xi). Gaelic culture also gained support
from the literati, notably through sponsorship of James Macpherson. Adam Ferguson and John
Home encouraged Macpherson’s collection and translation of ancient Gaelic verse, while Hugh
Blair was instrumental in bringing the resulting Fragment of Ancient Poetry to publication in
1760 and, in his new role of Professor of Rhetoric and Belle Lettres at Edinburgh, wrote a Critical
Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763) in support of the antiquity and authenticity of
Macpherson’s material (Saunders 1895, pp. 64–78). Blair was also one of the major Scottish
Enlightenment figures to give early encouragement to the leading figure of Scots ‘vernacular
revival’ in poetry, Robert Burns. Burns also moved in the same Enlightenment circles as Ferguson,
who facilitated the only meeting between Burns and the young Walter Scott at a literary salon
in his Edinburgh home.
Besides support for young talent such as Home, Macpherson and Burns, the literati of the
Scottish Enlightenment also nurtured the critical arts through their contributions to the fields
of aesthetics and rhetoric (Flynn 1979). Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762) and Hugh
Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres (1783), for example, included important reflections on
poetry and drama among their expansive enquiries into such topics as eloquence, sublimity and
‘taste’. Hume’s Essay ‘Of the standard of taste’ (1759) defined the qualifications a critic must
possess to make discerning and unbiased pronouncements about what constitutes a proper object
of taste. Alexander Gerard wrote an award-winning Essay on Taste (1759) followed up by an Essay
on Genius (1774), while his colleague at Aberdeen University, philosopher and poet James
Beattie, gave literary shape to emerging ideas about ‘genius’ in his long poem The Minstrel: or the
Progress of Genius (1771–1774). Through his poetic depiction of the developing powers of the
young minstrel Edwin in relation to a sublime natural landscape, Beattie foreshadowed the com-
ing of literary Romanticism and his poem went on to become an important influence on major
Romantic poets from Burns to Wordsworth.
Although it is impossible here to give a full account of the different areas upon which the
Scottish Enlightenment had a notable influence, this chapter has sought to outline some of the
breadth of the project as an ‘outward-facing’ enterprise that yet had significant impact on such
areas as culture, literature and language in Scotland. In this, we can begin to see how the imagi-
native literature of the period not only reflects Enlightenment concerns, but how poets, novelists
and dramatists also contributed to the wider project of Enlightenment. Without considering the
Scottish Enlightenment, it is difficult to fully appreciate the shaping context for the emergence
of Scottish writers as varied as Allan Ramsay, James Macpherson, Tobias Smollett, Robert Burns,
Walter Scott, and Joanna Baillie. Without such writers, the Scottish Enlightenment can appear
a far less varied, dynamic, and intellectually contested period.
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7
Literature in Gaelic I
Duncan Sneddon1 and M. Pía Coira2
1
Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
2
Gaelic Studies, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland
This chapter is divided in two parts: before and after 1200. Naturally, all periodisations in
literary history are fairly arbitrary, but 1200 is a meaningful inflexion point here for linguistic
reasons (as the conventional beginning of Early Modern Gaelic) as well as changes in the social
structures and patronage of Gaelic intellectual life.
To 1200
The explorer of medieval Scotland’s Gaelic literature is rather like an adventurer in one of the
immrama, (‘voyage tales’). They journey into wondrous places, but many things are not what they
seem, few are where we might expect them to be and no complete and accurate map of the waters
is ever likely to exist.
Before sailing into these dangerous waters, the intrepid reader must bear two important
things in mind for orientation, both pertaining to the wider contexts in which this literature is
embedded. The first is the wider context of the Gaelic world of Scotland and Ireland. This chap-
ter discusses texts pertaining to (what is now) Scotland, but which we cannot be sure were com-
posed in, or by people from, Scotland. The high degree of homogeneity in the literary language
used by medieval Gaelic intellectuals means that it often cannot be determined whether a text
was composed in Ireland or Scotland – or indeed continental Europe – or where the author was
from. The wider Gaelic context also means that texts pertaining to and possibly originating in
Scotland are often preserved only in Irish manuscripts (Gillies 2007, p. 58). The shared literary

language, the mobility of the learned elite and of their texts mean that it is impossible to draw
firm lines between ‘Scottish’ and ‘Irish’ Gaelic early medieval literature. For earlier texts predat-
ing the emergence of the Kingdom of Alba, such a demarcation is obviously anachronistic, and
for centuries thereafter people, texts and ideas continued to move back and forth across Sruth na
Maoile. Clear modern national categories cannot be sustained here.
The second wider context is that of the western church and Latinity. Latin literacy was essen-
tial for the everyday functions of the church, and also gave access to Biblical, Patristic, scholarly
and Classical literature. Gaelic speakers participated in that vast network of Latin letters, as both
writers and readers. Latin texts composed by Gaelic speakers are beyond our scope, but it should
be remembered that libraries and scriptoria held and produced texts in both languages, and that
writers, scribes, glossators, and readers switched comfortably between them.
The embedding of Gaelic writing within Latinity can be literally true in that Gaelic is writ-
ten alongside Latin in manuscripts, as with the oldest manuscript known to have been written
in what is now Scotland, Schaffhausen Stadtbibliothek Gen. 1, the first manuscript of Adomnán’s
Vita Columbae (c. 700 x 713). This manuscript is almost entirely in Latin, but also features some
usage of Greek, including the Lord’s Prayer in Greek (Sneddon 2018a, pp. 139–140; 34–40).
Gaelic is also present, mostly in place and personal names (some given Latin glosses), but on two
occasions Adomnán uses Old Gaelic words or phrases without explaining them (Sneddon 2018a,
pp. 144–150).
Those are isolated fragments, though. Extended Gaelic texts might also appear alongside
Latin ones in the same manuscript, as in the Book of Deer, or Latin texts might be translated into
Gaelic, as with Lebor Bretnach. There are also mutual stylistic influences between Latin and
Gaelic poetry (unsurprising in a bilingual literary milieu): the syllabic metres, fundamental to
medieval Gaelic poetry, were modelled on those of Latin hymns (Murphy 1961, pp. 11–25),
while Gaelic patterns of rhyme and alliteration were woven into Latin poetry as well (Márkus 2007,
pp. 92–93).
Most early Gaelic literature composed in or connected to what is now Scotland is poetry. It
comprises a range of genres, covering devotion to saints, monastic life, political propaganda,
genealogical treatises, and episodes from Gaelic legendary tradition. Naturally, these are not
hermetically sealed categories – genealogy often has a propagandistic rather than merely anti-
quarian function, for instance. They are also preserved in various contexts: some presented as
songs sung by saga characters, others uttered by saints in hagiographies. Some, notably Amrae
Coluimb Chille, acquired tranches of scholarly commentary in the medieval period, others stand
as decontextualised verses in metrical tracts. This points to a varied and sophisticated poetic
culture, though it has survived only in a frustratingly fragmentary form.
Much of the corpus is religious poetry, and here the Columban familia and devotion to
Columba bulk large. While it is plausible that Columba was the author of two Latin poems
ascribed to him (Clancy and Márkus 1995: 39–68; 69–80, though see Márkus 2010 for a reat-
tribution of Adiutor Laborantium to Adomnán), the Gaelic poems attributed to him postdate
him significantly. These include an invocation of Mary and a poem on the weary work of a scribe
(Murphy 1956, pp. 46–51; 70–71), as well as poems presented as reflections on his ‘exile’ and
his delight in the peaceful life of Iona, where nature joins him in praising God (McLeod and
Bateman 2007: pp. 12–13; 14–17; Márkus 2007: p. 98).
There was an extensive body of verse addressed to or about Columba, including Amrae Coluimb
Chille, presented as an elegy on the saint’s death and attributed to Dallán Forgaill. This is an
infamously complex text, whose most recent editor argues was composed in the early ninth
Literature in Gaelic I 79
century (Bisagni 2019, pp. 250–257; Clancy and Márkus 1995, pp. 97–128). This poem presents
a slightly different Columba than that given in Adomnán’s Vita Sancti Columbae, showing him as
a teacher, an ascetic, a scholar of patristic writers and Greek grammar. Amrae Coluimb Chille
acquired a body of scholarly commentary throughout the medieval period, and became a central
text in practices of Columban devotion. The commentary allowed a range of traditions to cluster
around the poem and the person of the saint, some of which are also attested in later Gaelic folk-
lore (Sneddon 2018b, pp. 208–213).
Beccán mac Luigdech, possibly the Beccán of Rum mentioned in the Martyology of Tallaght
and the Annals of Ulster and/or the hermit Beccanus solitarius known from the 630s, also composed
poems in Columba’s honour (Clancy and Márkus 1995, pp. 129–163). Beccán also mentions
Columba’s love of learning, but focuses more on his asceticism and protection of those who call
upon him, and makes use of fiery images (the sun, candles, flames) to express Columba’s holy
power as a blazing, burning brightness.
Adomnán (d.704), best known as Columba’s hagiographer, was an accomplished and deeply
erudite Latinist and a number of Gaelic poems are attributed, plausibly, to him. There are also,
as with Columba, many later poems presented as his, but he may genuinely be the author of some
verses on the death of the Pictish king Bruide son of Beli, and of this beautiful quatrain on the
prospect of dying at Iona:
Má ro-m-thoiccthi écc i ndhÍ

ba gabál di thócari.
Nícon fettar fo im glas
fótan bad ferr fri tiugbás.
[If I be destined to die in Iona,

it were a merciful leavetaking.
I know not under the blue sky
a better little spot for death.]
(Clancy and Márkus 1995,
pp. 166–168)
As Clancy and Márkus note, ‘Colum Cille co Día domm eráil’, an invocation of Columba’s aid
after death, lacks the elaborate poetic skill seen in the Amrae, but its complex syntax recalls
Adomnán’s fondness for hyperbaton in his Latin prose – an indication, though hardly a conclusive
one, that its ascription to Adomnán may be correct (Clancy and Márkus 1995, pp. 164–176).
Other poetic genres include learned genealogical and historical verse, so central to medieval
Gaelic intellectual culture, in which political agendas and antiquarian research combined to
provide authoritative (pseudo-)histories. One such is the Duan Albanach (‘Scottish Poem’), an
account of the kings of Scots in 27 quatrains. Following medieval Scottish pseudo-historical
tradition, it presents a sequence in which the land was ruled by a succession of peoples culmi-
nating with the Gaels, and its penultimate verse says that Máel Coluim III ‘is king now’. Since
he died in 1093 the poem seems to predate that, possibly with some minor reworking, but no
new kings added, in the following century (Jackson 1957, pp. 127–128). Máel Coluim III’s
reign also saw the second recension of The Prophecy of Berchán, another historical poem compiled
from texts of various periods, the extant versions being derived from an eleventh-century text
(Hudson 1996, pp. 14–16). This long poem, comprising 206 stanzas, is a history of Irish and
Scottish kings from the ninth century to the eleventh, cast – as was not uncommon in medieval
Gaelic verse – as a prophecy of the reigns purportedly still to come. This poem illustrates once
more the problematic nature of assigning modern national categories to this literature: it covers
Scotland and Ireland, parts are clearly drawn from Scottish materials, but its third author, who
had access to Scottish information about Domhnall II and Donnchad I and updated its Scottish
to reign of Domhnall III (deposed 1097), seems to have been Irish and based in Ireland
(Hudson 1996, p. 19).
A similar complexity regarding the nationality of early Gaelic literature is present in legendary
verse. This can be seen in that great omnigatherum of Fionn Cycle lore, Acallam na Senórach (the
earliest recension dating to c. 1200) in which the aged Caílte travels through Ireland with St
Patrick, telling of the heroic days of his youth. In one episode Patrick asks about the best hunt the
Fianna had, and he replies that it was in Arran (Itir Alpain 7 Cruithentuaith, ‘between Scotland and
Pictland’), and declaims a lay praising the island (Dillon 1970, pp. 5–6; McLeod and Bateman 2007,
pp. 304–307). This poem is in many respects typical of the still-popular genre of Gaelic songs in
praise of a particular place. The poem itself, outwith the context of the Acallam’s frame tale, has
no essentially Fianna-related content at all. It was probably an originally independent poem with
no connection to the Fianna worked into the Acallam by its compilor, and there seems no reason
to doubt that it was composed by a poet from Arran itself, or who had at least spent some time
there McLeod and Bateman make the important point that ‘[p]art of the “delightfulness” of Arran
is its suitability for human heroic activity and sustenance. Apart from the early stage of eremetic
poetry and the late stage of Clearance poetry, Gaelic poetry includes people as part of nature.
Nature, with a few exceptions, is not constructed as “an absence of people”.’ Later poems of prob-
able Scottish provenance, such as those attributed to Deirdre during her Scottish exile, also par-
ticipate in the shared narrative traditions of the wider Gaelic world (McLeod and Bateman 2007,
pp. 306–313), as do the Ossianic ballads (Ross 1939, passim).
Fragments of what may have been longer poems are sometimes preserved in metrical tracts –
poets’ manuals in which verses were used to demonstrate metres, or to exemplify faults and
suggest remedies. For instance, an Irish tract preserves an anonymous, otherwise unknown verse
about David son of Máel Coluim III, later David I:
Olc a n[d]earna mac Mael Colaim

ar n-aimleas re hAlaxandair
da-ní le gach mac righ romhainn
foghail ar farasAlbain.
(Bergin 1955, p. 269)
[It's bad, what Mael Coluim's son has done,

dividing us from Alexander;
he causes, like each king's son before,
the plunder of stable Alba.]
(Clancy 1998, p. 184).
The tract’s compiler comments, ‘Lochtach sin, uair ní tig Colaim 7 ar n-aimleas ar enfidh’, (That
is faulty, for Colaim and ar n-aimleas do not agree on the same vowel) and that the second line
should start with ar cosaid. This verse, likely culled from a longer poem, seems to be a response
to David’s claiming of Lothian in 1113 (Clancy 1998, p. 184). It is of interest despite its brevity,
as it shows that Gaelic poetry participating in political discourse in southern Scotland as late as
the twelfth century – whether our poet was based there or simply had some connections to and
interest in Lothian politics. It also demonstrates the precarity of textual survival, hinting at what
must have been a more extensive poetic culture. Had our poet paid more attention to vowel qual-
ity and used ar cosaid instead of ar n-aimleas as the tract’s compiler thought he should have done,
even this scrap would be lost. One metrical fault is all that lies between a tantalising glimpse of
Gaelic literary culture in southern Scotland (and the Scottish court?) in the early twefth century
and a void.
We get another glimpse of lost vernacular material in Adomnán’s Vita Sancti Columbae. He
writes of violent wicked men who, trapped in a burning house by their enemies, called upon
Columba, singing Gaelic hymns in his praise. Those who sang were saved from the flames and
their foes, while those who refused to sing naturally persished (Anderson and Anderson 1991,
pp. 16–17). Adomnán gives no further details on these carmina, much less quote from them, but
he does say that similar things happened several times in Ireland and Britain, pointing to a cor-
pus of vernacular hymns to Columba current on both sides of the Irish Sea by the seventh century.
Whether these carmina were ever written down is unknown, as is the extent of this corpus, and
how many other saints’ cults had similar material. For all its frustrating limitations, the episode
reminds us that Scotland’s early medieval Gaelic literature included an oral dimension, now
largely lost, as well as a written one.
Surviving Scottish-related Gaelic prose from this period is sparse, though again the embed-
ding of Gaelic literarcy within Latinity is apparent. For instance, the genealogical tract Míniugud
Senchasa Fher nAlban (? tenth century) is described by Dumville as ‘an apparently randomly
bilingual text’ (Dumville 2002, p. 199), being mostly Gaelic but switching between Gaelic and
Latin both between and within sentences. Dumville also notes a progressive Gaelicisation of the
text in the manuscript tradition, largely complete by the latest version (mid-seventeenth
century).
Vernacular prose also included translations from Latin, for instance Lebor Bretnach, the Gaelic
version of the so-called Nennian recension of Historia Brittonum (van Hamel 1932). This was
translated into Middle Gaelic in the second half of the eleventh century, probably in Scotland, as
Clancy has argued persuasively, during an intense period of intellectual and especially historio-
graphical activity in Scotland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Clancy 2000, p. 88). This
can be seen not only in the composition of other Gaelic texts discussed in this chapter, such as
the Prophecy of Berchán, the Duan Albanach (both eleventh century) and the foundation legend in
the Book of Deer (twelfth century), but also in Latin texts such as the B recension of Adomnán’s
Vita Sancti Columbae, probably in the early twelfth century (Anderson and Anderson 1991,
pp. lix–lx), as well as the redaction and compilation, probably during the reign of William of the
Lion, of seven Scottish-related texts preserved in the fourteenth-century Poppleton Manuscript,
Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS Latin 4126 (Hudson 1998, pp. 130–138; Woolf 2007,
pp. 88–93).
Gaelic texts could also appear alongside Latin ones in the same manuscript, as in the Book of
Deer (Cambridge University Library MS Ii.6.32). This is a Gospel book, containing the Gospel
of John, portions of the Synoptic Gospels and the Apostles’ Creed (all in Latin) and a colophon
in Old Gaelic. It could have been produced anywhere in the Gaelic world between the second
half of the ninth century and the early eleventh. It may have been produced at Deer itself, and
was certainly there by the twelfth century, when the monastic community started to write other
texts on blank pages and in margins. One of these is a Latin charter from David I. There are also
six in Gaelic: five records of land given to the monastery by local laypeople and the monastery’s
foundation legend. This tells of how Columba and his disciple Drostán came from Iona to
Aberdour, where Bede the Pict, mormaer of Buchan, granted them land for a monastery. They
later asked for land at Deer, and after Bede refused, his son fell ill and the clerics healed him in
exchange for the land. Columba installed Drostán as the monastery’s abbot, naming it after
Drostán’s tears (déra) at their parting. This short story of monastic foundation, place-name ori-
gins (a major branch of medieval Gaelic scholarly writing), ecclesiastical strongarming and a
legendary link for the later community with Iona is the earliest extant Gaelic narrative prose we
know to have been written in what is now Scotland (Jackson 1972; Ó Maolalaigh 2008, passim;
Forsyth et al. 2008, passim).
As with the poetic corpus, the Gaelic prose of the early period also demonstrates the difficulty
of clear national distinctions between Scottish and Irish texts. For instance Apgitir Chrábaid (The
Alphabet of Devotion), a tract on the aspirations of the pious monastic, is ascribed to Colmán mac
Béognae, founder of the monastery at Lann Elo, Co. Offaly (d.611) (Hull 1968 pp. 44–89; Clancy
and Márkus 1995, pp. 195–207). Colmán, mentioned in Vita Sancti Columbae (I: 5; II: 15), was a
contemporary of Columba’s who studied at Iona, and the place names Kilcalmonell (Knapdale)
and Colmonell (Ayrshire) may indicate further travel in what is now Scotland (Clancy and
Márkus 1995, p. 195). This work, among the earliest surviving Gaelic religious writings, exem-
plifies a number of traits noted throughout this survey: the Iona connection, being situated
within the wider Gaelic world, and the embrace of Christian Latinity (not only in subject man-
ner but in the use of Latin loanwords) while also deploying native stylistic features such as elabo-
rate alliterative runs and groupings of triads and tetrads. The same is true of the immram or
voyage-tale – a popular and deeply Christian literary form – of Sniaghus and MacNiaghus, prob-
ably composed at the Columban foundation of Kells in the early tenth century, and of which a
new recension was likely made at Iona at some point between the thirteenth and the fifteenth
(Clancy 2007, p. 130). Similarly, the vernacular hagiography Betha Adomnáin (Herbert and
Ó Riain 1988), composed in mid-tenth century Kells, seems to have incorporated materials from
a lost Latin Vita Adomnani from Iona (Herbert 1996, pp. 170–173; Clancy 2010, p. 114), once
more demonstrating the interweaving of Latin and Gaelic, Ireland and Scotland and the great
Columban ecclesiastical network.
This interweaving of Ireland and Gaelic Scotland can also be seen in texts of apparently Irish
provenance which concern Scotland, such as Gein Branduib maic Echach ocus Aedáin maic Gabráin,
an example of historical fiction from a tradition of early Irish tales often called The Cycle of the
Kings (Meyer 1899, pp. 134–137). This tale, which also exists in a poetic version (O’Brien 1952),
tells of the birth of Áedán mac Gabráin, a historical king of Dál Riata. It says that Eochaid of Uí
Cheinselaich in Leinster and his wife Feidlimid were in exile in Dál Riata, when Feidlmid and
the wife of Gabrán, their host, went into labour at the same time. Feidlimid bore two sons, the
other woman two daughters, and they exchanged a son and a daughter between them. Áedán was
raised as Gabrán’s son and became king of Dál Riata, his true identity being revealed years later –
by his real mother – when he invaded Leinster. As Hudson argues, this reflects the situation in
the early eleventh century, as Máel Coluim II was the son of a Leinsterwoman, and connections
between Scotland and Leinster might be expected to be cultivated, if not outright invented
(Hudson 1994, pp. 110–111). Similarly, the King Cycle saga, Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin, parts of
which are in verse or rather obscure rosc rather than prose, and which is dated by Binchy to not
later than the second half of the ninth century, is a historical fiction telling of Cano’s exile to
Ireland, his time there, and his triumphant return to Scotland (Binchy 1963). This may have
been composed on either side of Sruth na Maoile, but was certainly composed by someone with
an interest in Scottish affairs and access to Scottish (pseudo-)historical traditions.
It should be noted that the corpus of Scottish-related Gaelic prose in this early period was
more extensive than what has survived. Glimpses of what has been lost can be discerned in the
Irish tale lists, which include the otherwise unknown Tochomlod ó hErind co Albain and Tochomlod
Dáil Riatai i nAlbain (Mac Cana, 1980, pp. 49; 60). Tochomlada are migration tales, so these
were about the settlement of Gaels in Britain, but their particular forms and agendas cannot
now be known. Byrne suggested that ‘Tochomlod Dáil Riatai i nAlbain alone of the series [of
tochomlada tales in the lists] may have had some firm historical basis’, but did not expand on this
(Byrne 1971, p. 142).
1200–1600
In late medieval Gaelic Scotland two distinct literary streams remained in place, one oral and the
other written. In the first we find folksong, as well as many tales and ballads that passed into
the oral tradition; a good amount of this material survived, orally transmitted, right down to the
current older generation of native Gaelic speakers.1 While the oral dimension of Gaelic literature
has often been noted and emphasised, to the educated professionals of Gaelic society, commonly
termed learned orders or learned classes, the written record was of paramount importance. That
this was so is manifest from internal evidence – especially that in poetry – and from the copying
and recopying of a variety of texts, literary but also genealogical, historical, religious, philosophi-
cal, scientific, and legal. Of the 138 Gaelic manuscripts held in the National Library of Scotland,
a healthy 61 date, at least in origin, from the 1200–1600 period (Black 1989, p. 160). Gaelic
Scotland and Ireland continued to share much in cultural terms (with the latter as the literary
fountainhead and lead), members of the learned orders – the guardians of learning – travelling
between the two countries to meet with their counterparts for scholarly exchange and growth.
In respect of prose literature, between the thirteenth and the early seventeenth centuries
native heroic tales remain popular. As in Ireland generally, the Fionn stories are favourites, a taste
also reflected in the subject-matter of a great number of the ballads.2 The early sixteenth-century
compilation known as the Book of the Dean of Lismore’ (henceforth BDL) contains a good selection
of these. Yet the interest in the Greek and Latin classics endures, and late medieval scribes
remain busy copying the early medieval translations of the classics into Gaelic; some favourites
were Togail Troí (The Destruction of Troy), Togail Tebe (Statius’ Thebaid), and An Cath Cathardha
(Lucan’s Civil War) (NLS Adv. 72.1.8, Adv. 72.1.15, Adv. 72.1.46).3 Our period is also one of
new and intense translation activity in Ireland, and the heyday of the eachtra (‘romantic tale’)
throughout the Gaelic world. Tales of the courts of Arthur (Gillies 1982, passim) and Charlemagne
(NLS Adv. MS 72.1.6) are recorded in Gaelic translation which, like the early medieval transla-
tions, were rather adaptations guided by home culture and mores; in modern jargon, originals
were subjected to a process of localisation. Home-grown romance – some of it a branch of the
broader tales category – remained in vogue alongside matter of continental provenance, some-
times quite literally: Caithréim Chellacháin Chaisil (The Victorious Career of Cellachán of Cashel) was
placed in between the tales of the destructions of Thebes and Troy. Other matter of foreign origin
was similarly of interest, such as the wonder tale Letter of Prester John (NLS Adv. 72.1.41) and The
Seven Sages of Rome. The latter, originally translated in Ireland, survives only in NLS Adv. 72.1.39,
a seventeenth-century manuscript produced in Scotland (Byrne 2015, p. 192).
Religious prose (and verse) texts come in a variety of genres: sermons, instructional tracts,
hagiographical pieces, and of course prayers and charms. Manuscripts of this period include texts
which, in line with the contemporary wider European trend, aimed to promote affective d evotion;
the poetry, too, shows the influence of this particular development (Innes and Reid 2018, p. 62;
Ryan 2004, passim). There are religious texts in Latin and in Scots as well as in Gaelic, evidencing
a multilingual setting (Innes and Reid 2018, p. 63; Bannerman 1983, passim). While the bulk
of extant religious literature belongs to the pre-Reformation period, the later sixteenth century
saw the production of a major work in support of the Protestant faith: the translation of the Book
of Common Order into Gaelic by Eòin Carsuel (John Carswell, c.1522–1572), Bishop of Argyll,
under patronage of the 5th Earl of Argyll. Its title was Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh (The Form of the
Prayers) and, as in other instances of translation, it was rather an adaptation of the original. But
despite that and despite some threads of continuity with the old religion, it did deliver the
Protestant message, the intended readership encompassing, as Carsuel states in the preliminary
matter, the Gaels of both Scotland and Ireland. This work was the first book ever printed in
Gaelic (Edinburgh, 1567). The second, a translation of the Anglican catechism that went through
the press in Dublin four years later, contains a number of prayers, four of which are based on
those in Carsuel’s work (Innes and Reid 2018, p. 68 and n. 47).
Turning now to poetry, momentous undertakings were afoot in Ireland in the later twelfth
century that would drastically and permanently affect the literary scene throughout the whole
Gàidhealtachd, the Gaelic-speaking world. Through a process that is not yet fully understood
but may well have resulted from combined late twelfth-century factors such as ecclesiastical
reform, Anglo-Norman settlement, and even the Ó Dálaigh poets of Ireland, the poets ceased
(though not entirely) their affiliation to the monasteries and began to operate in an entirely new
way. They organised themselves in hereditary poetic families under the patronage of secular lords
and began to run their own schools of poetry (open, like other schools of secular learning, to
males only). This was not the only change. In what has been called ‘an exercise in language plan-
ning’ (Ó Cuív 1980), poets decided on the form of language to be used in their work; this literary
‘dialect’ was preserved for some five centuries, petrified in its initial conception, never allowed
to change or evolve. This high-register, artificial language is known as Early Modern Irish, or
Classical Gaelic, and its period of existence (c. 1250–c. 1650) as the Classical Gaelic period. A
variant of it was used for formal communication, and in the writing of history, law, or science,
political treaties, and letter-writing as well. Further changes taking place at the time concerned
the number of (syllabic) metres to be used (reduced), poetic ornamentation (vastly increased),
and the rhetoric of panegyric, that is the set of codified expressions and imagery appropriate for
poetic composition. The professional court poet – sometimes called bardic poet – had been born
(Ó Cuív 1980 passim; Simms 2007, pp. 83–84).4
Such were the changed circumstances and arrangements for the poetic class, and while it is
agreed that the new status quo originated in Ireland, it applied to and spread throughout the
whole Gaelic world. An early example is the anonymous eulogy for Domhnall mac Raghnaill
(Donald son of Ranald), the eponymous founder of Clan Donald, who flourished in the earlier
thirteenth century (McLeod and Bateman 2007, pp. 76–81). To the same period date two poems
composed by Muireadhach Albanach for members of the family of the earls of Lennox. This poet,
of the Irish Ó Dálaigh family, settled in Scotland after running into difficulties in his home
country, and became the founder of the Mac Muireadhaigh (MacMhuirich) hereditary poets to
Clan Donald. Most, if not all, the families of hereditary court poets of Scotland seem to have been
of Irish origin. The principal ones were, as well as the Mac Muireadhaighs, the Ó Muirgheasáins
and the Mac Eóghains.5 While the court poet’s main contractual obligation was the composition
of panegyric for his noble patron – and his family – he was also a member of the latter’s council
and the signatory of legal documents. He might also undertake diplomatic duties, as a late
sixteenth-century anonymous Irish poet states on the occasion of a visit to Mac Cailéin (the
Gaelic title of the Earl of Argyll) to request military help for the Irish in their struggle against
the English: ‘Dual ollamh do thriall le toisg … | [I]arta d’fhiachaibh ar ollamh’ (It is fitting for
a chief poet to travel on an embassy … | It is demanded of a chief poet as an obligation) (NLS
Adv. 72.2.2, fo. 8v).
The poets worked within a pan-Gaelic field of literary reference which incorporated geneal-
ogy, history, pseudo-history, mythology, and ancient tales of Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of
Man (Gillies 2013, p. 190). This might suggest an exclusively inward, if not plain backward,
outlook. Yet the early medieval scholarly contact and exchange of the Gaels with the continent
continued in our period; unsurprisingly, we find Gaelic poetry influenced by the school doc-
trines on the art of rhetoric, regarding both poem structure and figurative language
(Breatnach 2001; Ó Riordain 2007). Neither was the ‘panegyric code’ – the set of codified
expressions and imagery deployed by our poets – unique to Gaelic poetry: a praise code is like-
wise found in the medieval European Latin tradition, and indeed there are remarkable similari-
ties between the two (Coira 2020, p. 102). The Gaelic code, drawing also on native law, ascribed
to the subject the attributes of the ideal ruler (as well as the signs both preceding his rule and
present throughout it), and thus effectively legitimised his leadership. Panegyric was for public
performance, to the accompaniment of the harp, and its legitimation of the ruler had an impor-
tant, even essential, social and political function.6 Many court poets composed panegyric for
various other subjects and also religious verse. In all of it (praise of God, the Virgin Mary, or a
saint, and in the secular ambit in poems for women, for males who were not chiefs, or for a
person’s home or other possessions) very much the same poetic code was applied, in adapted
form. Both official panegyric and religious poetry were in dán díreach (strict metre), while
poems for other occasions might use more relaxed metres (ógláchas).
The requirement to present the subject as the ideal ruler meant that certain concepts, and
often the terminology, are predictably repeated from poem to poem. Yet the value or interest of
this poetry cannot be dismissed on account of such predictability and repetition. Firstly, it often
contains historical information – persons, places, events, dates, social custom – not recorded
elsewhere (Simms 1987). Secondly, one might expect the prescribed code, especially in combina-
tion with the highly complex metres, to preclude creativity, and this is true to a point. But the
connoisseur will readily distinguish between a poem merely portraying the ideal ruler and one
that, from the literary perspective, has far more to offer. The author displayed his creativity
through his employment of rhetorical and stylistic devices. It is notable that, in our period and
far beyond, metonymy far outshines that queen of the figures of speech, metaphor, of other
European literatures (Ní Annracháin 2007). Alliteration was prescribed by metre; when com-
bined with wordplay, for which poets often showed a penchant, it would have been powerful and
persuasive, especially for an audience of listeners rather than readers. There are also many
instances of metalepsis, that sophisticated figure of speech that skims, like a stone on water but
invisibly, from one metonymy to another, or to a simile or metaphor, with striking results
(Coira 2023). Above all, the rhetorical device called fras adhmholta (shower of praise) provided a
place and a space for the poet to show off his literary resources and skills (Breatnach 1997, p. 92).
There was in Scotland (but apparently not in Ireland) another, ‘lower’ class of poet, the bárd
(pl. báird), who had some level of training in syllabic poetry, might compose in the vernacular
language, and had a broader thematic range. He might have an official or semi-official position
in his patron’s court, but never the same duties and privileges as the school poet, the file
(pl. filidh). When or how this poetic class originated remains uncertain. In the early sixteenth-
century BDL we find An Bárd Mac an tSaoir (the Bárd MacIntyre) and An Bárd Ruadh (the
Red-Haired Bárd), both contemporaries, or near contemporaries, of the BDL compilers. Finally,
we have compositions by members of the nobility who were not poets by profession; they are
sometimes referred to as ‘aristocratic amateurs’. They had learned the Classical language and
enough about syllabic poetry to allow them to versify, like the báird, in the less strict ógláchas
style. Women were no exception: several poems of female authorship are preserved in BDL, that
unique collection that brings together verse by authors of all these different types. The work of
these ‘amateurs’ offers an insight into aspects and levels of the education of the nobility in our
period; standards would decline in the seventeenth century (Bannerman 1983, p. 224). In con-
trast to those in our period, later báird and aficionados could only achieve ‘semi-classical’ poetry:
very loose forms of syllabic metres in the vernacular, rather than the Classical, language.
Love poetry is in the amour courtois style, though with a ‘home’ touch: description of the object
of affection is unequivocally through the panegyric-code conventions. Branching off from the
courtly-love typecast are poems that ridicule love, and closely linked with these we have criti-
cism of clerical licentiousness and verse in the querelle des femmes medieval tradition (Gillies 2016;
Ó Mainnín 2018). The last two sub-categories are often sexually explicit if not downright
obscene, and a type of literature that, as far as surviving evidence suggests, the filidh did not
engage in. A different poetic genre is the incitement to battle, as in the ‘Harlaw brosnachadh’, or
as in the anti-English poem composed on the eve of the battle of Flodden.7 As for religious verse,
many topics are common to pre-and post-Reformation poems, with renunciation of the world as
the leading theme; sin and penitence, the inevitability of death to all, Judgment Day, the Devil,
the pains of Hell, but also the role of the Virgin Mary in man’s salvation – especially her powers
of intercession for the sinner – and the joys of Heaven. Some pre-Reformation poems touch on
themes such as the Trinity, Transubstantiation, The Lord’s Prayer, the Creed; and affective devo-
tion features in poetry just as it does in religious prose, an example being Niall Mór Mac
Muireadhaigh’s (c.1550–post 1613) reflection on the Five Wounds (RIA 744 [A/v/2], fol. 61a).
Satire by professional court poets is not represented in our period, but then it is rare in
Classical Gaelic poetry generally. A file’s satire essentially reversed the praise code, so that, given
the file’s role as legitimator of leadership, it was best avoided. The court poet, however, normally
chose to give his subject an opportunity to make things right, and this he did by issuing him
with a warning of satire, which combined cajolery and threat (McLeod and Bateman 2007, Poems
14, 20, 25). No such niceties, however, if a poet had been wronged by a fellow poet; he would
directly attack the offender via a poem, one favourite form of insult being either questioning his
enemy’s poetic skills, or addressing him as an insignificant nobody, as did a jealous Scot on dis-
covering that another file had visited his beloved’s house (McLeod and Bateman 2007, Poem 45).
But, if the author is a bárd or a noble amateur, then again satire (and a good few of these are
extant) becomes coarse, going either down the sexually explicit lane, or the scatological one, or
both (Gillies 2014; McLeod and Bateman 2007, Poems 40, 41, 44).8 Finally, there are poems on
miscellaneous topics, all the work of either báird or members of the nobility; for example,
Carsuel’s exhortation to his Gaelic Book of Common Order to make its way to its readership;
Giolla Críost Táilliúr’s poem beginning as a prayer for protection against, but ending wishing
the destruction of, certain ‘wolves’; or the one by a bedridden Mac Combaigh nobleman who lists
the various valuable things he would give up in exchange for improvement, closing with a
statement that a visit from Alasdair Mac an Tóisigh (Alexander MacIntosh), presumably a good
friend, would undoubtedly restore him his health (Thomson 1970, p. 13; McLeod and
Bateman 2007, Poems 35 and 62).
In closing, a word about folksong, which is always in the vernacular language. The earliest
extant songs date to the sixteenth century, some perhaps to the fifteenth. As we have them from
oral tradition, many are work-songs (for instance waulking songs). However, few are in fact
about work, and a number of features in them point to a very different origin, in a very different
environment and social class. In content as in ambience they relate unequivocally to the medieval
aristocratic-warrior society, sometimes containing details that could hardly have been within the
reach of the lower social ranks. Additionally, some still preserve traces of originally syllabic com-
position, again beyond the capabilities of the illiterate. Thematically they range from medieval-
style eulogy and elegy, through battles and their outcomes and personal impact, to more private
affairs such as love and loss, and other. It is perhaps fitting to close with mention of an early
sixteenth-century tàladh (lullaby), B’ fheàrr leam gun sgrìobhte dhuit fearann (literally I wish that
land was written to you, that is ‘I wish you were assigned a charter’) (McLeod and Bateman 2007,
Poem 85), which brings us full circle to the written word and its recognised importance in the
medieval Gaelic world.
Notes
1 Gaelic folksong is ‘verse that was composed for sing- 6 For the Gaelic panegyric code see Coira 2012. For the
ing and used styles popular with the non-learned’ musical side of the performance see Gillies 2010;
(Thomson 1994, p.77). Blankenhorn 2010.
2 For this tradition see the Fionn Foklore Database (http:// 7 The Harlaw incitement seems not to date, at least in
fionnfolklore.org). its entirety, to 1411; see Gillies 2018.
3 All manuscripts cited can be consulted at Meamram 8 But outwith the official-poetry context, a file might
Páipéar Ríomhaire: Irish Script on Screen (http://www. compose less refined verse, in vernacular language and
isos.dias.ie). For BDL see, for instance, MacGregor accentual metre (or a deliberately poor syllabic one) to
(2006), pp. 209–218. further insult the person satirised. Niall Mór Mac
4 For the difficulties with the terms bardic poet/bardic Muireadhaigh’s satire on the bagpipes (McLeod and
poetry, see Ó Baoill and Bateman 1994, pp. 22–23. Bateman 2007, Poem 46) is a good example.
5 For these poetic families see McLeod 2004, pp. 70–78.
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Further Reading
Clancy, T.O. (2006a). A fragmentary literature: narrative Clancy, T.O. (2008). Before the ballad: Gaelic narrative
and lyric from the early middle ages. In: The Edinburgh verse before 1200. Scottish Gaelic Studies 24: 115–136.
History of Scottish Literature: Volume 1 from Columba to the Dooley, A. and Roe, H. (1999). Tales of the Elders of Ireland
Union (until 1707) (ed. T.O. Clancy, S. Manning, and (Acallam na Senórach). Oxford: Oxford University
M. Pittock), 123–131. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press.
University Press. Fraser, J.E. (2009). From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to
Clancy, T.O. (2006b). The poetry of court praise. In: The 795. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature: Volume 1 from O’Rahilly, T.F. (1960). Measgra Dánta. I. Dublin: Browne
Columba to the Union (until 1707) (ed. T.O. Clancy, and Nolan.
S. Manning, and M. Pittock), 63–71. Edinburgh: O’Rahilly, T.F. (1977). Measgra Dánta. II. Cork: Cló
Edinburgh University Press. Ollscoile Chorcaí.
8
Romanticism
Dafydd Moore
University of Plymouth, Plymouth, United Kingdom
Not so long ago a chapter with this title would have been devoted to the way Scotland – its
landscape, history and writers – provided inspiration for the literary imagination of an e stablished
canon of Romantic, by which was meant English (or at a push German and French) authors. In
such a telling, Robert Burns was of more interest because of the imaginative capital made of his
life and writing by William Wordsworth, than on account of any sense of his intrinsic impor-
tance as a Romantic poet. And until surprisingly recently such imaginative reconstructions in
large measure stood within Anglo-British literary history for the reality of the likes of Burns.1
The change in status of Scotland, distinguished by Duncan et al. as being from ‘Romantic com-
modity’ to being ‘a site of Romantic production’, from Romantic Scotland to Scottish
Romanticism, is the topic of this chapter (Duncan et al. 2004, p. 4).
The bulk of the chapter is a case study of a less familiar Scottish Romantic writer. Hugh Blair
(1718–1800), Minister of the High Church of St Giles in Edinburgh and first Regius Professor
of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh, might seem an odd choice. Yet
that incongruity, and the nature of the assumptions upon which this perception relies, is the
point. Assessing Blair’s career and achievements in relation to more familiar categories of
‘Romanticism’ demonstrates how appreciating a broad sweep of Scottish writers expands the
possibilities of Romantic thought and periodisation. Addressing ‘Romantic Blair’ necessitates
addressing critical dilemmas in current scholarly debate beyond Romantic and literary studies,
including the relationship between literary and religious discourse in the late eighteenth century
and the question of the critical purchase to be gained on texts such as sermons. By way of intro-
duction the chapter will outline the wider terrain of Romantic writing in Scotland and the criti-
cal and methodological issues that have characterised the recovery of this body of work.

In 2011 Ian Duncan observed that ‘Edinburgh became visible as a world capital of
Romanticism in the first third of the nineteenth century’ and, what is more (because this does
not necessarily follow), that it was in Edinburgh during this time that ‘the genres that would
dominate the nineteenth- century literary marketplace acquired their definitive forms’
(Duncan 2011, p. 72). The volume in which that claim is made bears its own testament to the
variety, energy and interest to be found in Scottish writing of the period. Key to this has been
renewed insistence upon Burns and Walter Scott as giants of their literary age, and a revaluing
of their achievements more securely within their own terms: whether that be Scott as in large
measure responsible for making Edinburgh such a literary powerhouse across multiple forms of
publication; or Burns as, amongst other things, providing a defining example of a highly
sophisticated Romantic literary sensibility ranging across registers, languages and traditions,
simultaneously articulating and interrogating the wellsprings of its own creative power.2 Their
pre-eminence is reflected in the chapters devoted to them in the current collection, however
they have been far from the only figures in receipt of attention. Burns and Scott sit within the
complex network of writers, forms, and thematic preoccupations that go to make up Scottish
Romantic writing: poets such as Robert Fergusson, James Macpherson, James Beattie, Janet
Little, Anne Bannerman, Joanna Ballie (who was also an accomplished playwright), Mairearad
Ghriogarach (Margaret MacGregor), Dughall Bochanan (Dugald Buchanan) and Donnachadh
Bàn Mac an t-Saoir (Duncan Macintyre); song collectors such as James Johnstone, James
Johnson, George Thomson and Lady Nairne; novelists such as James Hogg, John Galt, Susan
Ferrier, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton, Catherine Sinclair and Christian Isobel Johnstone.
This list covers only the more familiar names and does not even begin to account for the distinc-
tive contribution of Scottish periodical culture, historical writing, moral philosophy, literary
criticism and sermon writing to European Romantic culture.
Recovering the variety of Scottish Romantic writing and writers is, at its best, more than a
matter of rediscovering forgotten or neglected names (or reasserting the forgotten or neglected
Scottishness of the more familiar, such as Byron). Four Nations (or Archipelagic) literary history
is part of a larger effort to ‘to strip away modern Anglo-Centric and Victorian imperial para-
digms to recover the long, braided histories played out across the British-Irish archipelago
between three kingdoms, four countries, divided regions, variable ethnicities and religiously
determined allegiances’ (Kerrigan 2008, p. 2). In contributing to this recovery, Murray Pittock
has proposed a conceptualisation of what constitutes a national literary culture based on five
criteria: ‘the persistence or development of a separate public sphere’; the ‘inflection of genre
towards a distinctive agenda of selfhood’; ‘the use of a hybrid language and variable register’; a
‘taxonomy of glory, the symbolic organisation of images and tropes […] into a reading of a glori-
ous past’; and the ‘performance of self in diaspora’ (Pittock 2011, pp. 3–5).3 In such approaches
the devolutionary turn is about more than adding a Scottish-flavour to a still-monolithic concep-
tion of Romanticism, or emphasising the importance of ‘the margins’. Rather it insists upon
different Romanticism and an understanding of literary culture across the nations of Britain and
Ireland not as more or less satisfactory performances of a single phenomenon ‘Romanticism’ but
as ‘negotiated dialogues where complicated questions of aesthetics, cultural politics and nation
are asked, and answered in equally complex fashion’ (Carruthers and Rawes 2003, p. 19).4
Understanding diverse Romantic literary cultures’ variety rather than inferiority when judged
against an Anglo-centric standard brings new issues for enquiry into focus and provides fresh
angles on old debates. Ian Duncan has noted that a greater awareness of the precise nature of
Romanticism in Scotland, which ‘describes rhythms of continuity, change and disjunction quite
Romanticism 93
different from the English model to which it has been subordinated’, may ‘provoke a salutary
defamiliarisation of some of the fundamental categories that structure literary history, including
the temporal borders of periodisation and the topological borders of nationality’ (Duncan
et al. 2004, pp. 3, 10). This has highlighted the relationship between Romanticism
and Enlightenment in Scotland, and the institutional or establishment status the latter
bequeathed the former. What might previously been seen as stultifying has more recently been
interpreted as generative: Pittock considers ‘paradoxical relationship’ between the two as ‘the
latter drew on some of the former’s values to critique others’ while Duncan has suggested that
the ‘precocious development of a bourgeois Enlightenment’ was necessary for the ‘rich and var-
iegated flowering’ of Scottish Romanticism, not least to the extent that it could be a more thor-
oughly urban phenomenon than other Romanticisms (Pittock 2011, p. 9; Duncan 2011, p. 79).
In turning to Hugh Blair, a figure who on the face of it is not only temporally but institutionally
estranged from the normal categories associated with ‘the Romantic’, we see these and other
insights from this wider understanding of Scottish Romanticism, play out.
Charles Martin Hardie’s 1887 painting Burns in Edinburgh, 1787 recreates, on the centenary of the
event, a reading given by the poet at the house of Jane, Duchess of Gordon. In the shadows, imme-
diately to Burns’s right as we view the picture, sits a rather austere, perhaps disapproving, clerical
figure. This is Hugh Blair, both central to the painting (positioned so close to Burns that, due to
Hardie’s tenuous mastery of perspective, he looks in imminent danger of being poked in the
bewigged ear by Burns’s gesticulating left hand) and yet also in its background.5 This indetermi-
nacy is apt for Blair given the place he has occupied in accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment:
important, but never to the fore; while the possible implication of lurking disapproval is also
appropriate. After all Blair, as promoter of Anglo-British metropolitan standards of poetic taste,
has traditionally been seen as misguided influence, threatening to derail Burns as he had James
Macpherson a generation earlier.6 More recent accounts have questioned the assumption that Blair
represents a blind alley or that his influence on Burns was negative, and have come to acknowl-
edge how Blair, by dint of both his writing and his institutional standing, ‘at the epicentre of the
Scottish Enlightenment’ (Duff 2009, p. 54).7 This chapter outlines the extent to which Blair
should be seen as a significant figure within Romantic Scotland. It does so from a belief in the
intrinsic value of such an attempt and as a worked example of the critical issues, methodological
questions and cultural insights the recovery of Scottish Romanticism involves. Understanding
‘Romantic Blair’ takes us to the heart of key challenges and methodological questions and dem-
onstrates the rich benefits of the critical endeavour at large.
Born in Edinburgh in 1718, Blair was educated at the University of Edinburgh and entered
the Presbyterian ministry in 1741. He was to become a leading figure in the Moderate party,
with a church career that culminated in his appointment to the charge of the High Church of
St Giles in Edinburgh in 1758. In 1753 he anonymously edited an edition of Shakespeare and in
1759, following the lead of his friend Adam Smith, he began offering lectures at the University
of Edinburgh. In 1762 this arrangement was formalised when he was appointed the first Regius
Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University, a position often characterised as the
first professorship of literature in the United Kingdom. He contributed to the first series of the
Edinburgh Review and was a founder member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, acting as its
literary President from 1789 to 1796. He played a crucial role in the emergence of James
Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian and was a patron of Burns. His most enduring direct contributions
to literature are his Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763/1765) and his Lectures on
Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), a two volume collection that, in the words of David Duff,
‘remained a standard academic work in Britain and America for more than sixty years and
spawned numerous imitations’ (Duff 2009, p. 56).8 Yet his most important published works
were his five volumes of Sermons, published to extraordinary acclaim between 1777 and 1801. If
his position at St Giles made him the senior churchman in Scotland, his Sermons ensured that the
Moderate party’s brand of Latitudinarian religious thought was exported across the English-
speaking world. This chapter will make the case for the importance of the Sermons as Romantic
texts, but first will consider the more directly ‘literary’ contributions.
The importance of Blair’s contribution to the emergence of The Poems of Ossian has long been
recognised. He wrote the anonymous preface to The Fragments of Ancient Poetry in 1760 and his
Critical Dissertation was, from its first appearance in 1763, an almost ever-present companion of
Ossian, working to ‘bridge the gap between the striking novelty of these supposedly ancient
poems and accepted standards of literary excellence in the mid-eighteenth century’ (Rizza 1991,
p. 132). David Hume told Blair that Critical Dissertation was ‘incomparably the best piece of
criticism in the English language’; while Blair’s first biographer claimed that it heralded ‘a new
aera’ in literature because, via a method that demonstrated that ‘one principle was found uni-
formly to operate’ in ‘decisions of taste’, Blair had proved that ‘polite literature was found
entitled to take its place amongst the sciences’ (Hume 1932, vol. 1, p. 497; Hill 1807, pp. 39–40).
Yet it did not age well, particularly as the inauthenticity of Ossian became a more accepted mat-
ter of fact. To those for whom Ossian was synonymous with a fraudulent imposition, Blair is the
epitome of the naïve establishment dupe. While many would today resist dismissing Ossian as a
simplistic fraud, the uncomfortable fact that Ossian was not as Macpherson, and therefore Blair,
maintained it to be does undermine the credibility of the theory of ‘primitive’ poetics Blair built
upon it.
Appreciating that Blair was more than an early audience for (or victim of) Ossian has done
little to improve his literary standing, providing as it does would-be Macpherson apologists with
a reason to emphasise the inadequacy of Blair’s critical acumen (Raynor 1991, p. 161). Thomas
Grey was earliest, suggesting even before Ossian saw the light of day that Macpherson would be
‘an admirable judge’ of the poetry he found in the Highlands, ‘if his learned [sic] friends do not
pervert, or over-rule his taste’ (Gray 1971, p. 704). Thomas Bailey Saunders, Macpherson’s first
substantial biographer, uses Blair as a fall guy to explain Macpherson’s misguided energies
if Blair, instead of waxing enthusiastic over the fancied discovery of a national epic, had applied to
an examination of the poems, not any formal rules of criticism, but a little poetic genius, with an
admixture of common sense, he could never have given Macpherson any ground for supposing that
the collection of lyrical pieces which he produced was characterised by an real unity, or possessed any
other mark of a true epic.
(Saunders 1895, p. 188)
J.S. Smart, while less inclined to let Macpherson off the hook, nevertheless suggested that ‘as a
poet Macpherson went, little as he knew it, with the full current of the modern stream; as a critic
he was pedantically attached to classical rules and strove to adapt his writings to their require-
ments’, a paradox he explained by the fact that Blair’s ‘very voice and accent may be detected in
Macpherson’s commentaries’, before concluding that ‘it was not easy to pour the bright wine of
Romanticism 95
Celtic fantasy into the bottles of Blair’ (Smart 1905, pp. 86, 102). The formula is clear: Blair’s
commitment to outmoded ways of thinking warped the Macpherson’s intentions and led to the
travestying of authentic expression and ultimately, perhaps, deceit. This mismatch argument is
echoed by modern commentators such as Peter Womack, who see Ossian as the product of the
application of ‘wholly inapplicable set of Augustan assumptions about what literature could be’
in the mediation of Gaelic to an English audience (Womack 1989, p. 108). In this version of the
literary Scottish Enlightenment, Blair succeeds with Macpherson in a way he would fail some
20 years later as the ‘representative of a Scottish critical establishment that was inherently incapa-
ble of appreciating Burns’s true achievement, and that continually threatened to vitiate his work
by encouraging a conformity to polite anglo-centric norms’ (McIlvanney 2005, p. 26).
Yet just as, as McIlvanney argues, this might be an incomplete view of Blair’s relationship with
Burns, so the idea that Ossian represents the travestying of Gaelic tradition in the interests of
Anglo-British neo-classicism is now more fruitfully tensioned against both an awareness of the
fugitive traces of that tradition within the poems and the ‘new sense of literary, spiritual and cul-
tural aspiration’ Ossian represented for Gaeldom (Meek 2004, p. 66).9 Indeed, the contradiction
between the native poet and the academic editor previously seen as emblematic of the dead hand
of neoclassicism is now understood as an example of the code shifting found in Scottish writing in
the eighteenth century from at least the time of Allan Ramsay and central to the way in which ‘in
its blend of primitivism and sophistication the evolving Ossianic text creates the modern poet’
(Crawford 2001, p. 44).10 And if, in David Raynor’s words, ‘we have reason to be pessimistic about
the possibility of ever untwisting the aesthetic principles of Hume and Blair from Macpherson’s
fancy’, then this should lead to a re-interpretation of Blair as well as Macpherson (Raynor 1991,
p. 161). McIlvanney concludes his analysis of the ‘deep ambivalence’ that pervades Blair’s promo-
tion of a polite metropolitan style with the observation that ‘it would be unfortunate if a one-sided
perception of Blair as simply an Anglicising “improver” were to obscure the profound, if some-
times paradoxical, affinity between his aesthetic theory and the poetic practice of Robert Burns’
(McIlvanney 2005, p. 44). In the same way Blair’s uncontested influence on Macpherson (and
responsibility for Ossian) should not be seen as entirely suffocating.
No-less venerable an authority than Samuel Monk noted the crucial turn in eighteenth-
century aesthetics represented by Blair: it was in the hands of Blair, via Ossian, that ‘the Sublime,
which had been a convenient safety-valve for the neo-classical system, became a weapon which
could be turned against the theories of art that has been dominant when it has appeared in 1674’
(Monk 1960, p. 236). Others have expressed their sense of the progressive nature of Blair’s
thought. Jonathan Wordsworth suggests that Blair’s Lectures were the ‘dominant influence on
poetry and criticism in the 1790s’ and has claimed of the Critical Dissertation that ‘forty years
ahead of its time the preface to the Lyrical Ballads is there, waiting to be written’, while Womack
has suggested that Blair’s codification of the ‘mythology of human nature’ articulated by Ossian
‘predat[es] Arnold in seating literature on dogma’s throne’ (Wordsworth 1996; Womack 1989,
p. 99). Duff, considering Blair’s ‘ambitious synthesis of ancient and modern theories of literature’
in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, sees him as ‘representative of progressive critical opin-
ion in the late eighteenth century’ characteristic in the way that ‘neoclassical assumptions and
categories supply much of its framework, but these are supplemented and modified by new
categories and theories derived from Enlightenment aesthetics’ (Duff 2009, pp. 31, 55).
If some Ossian scholarship has found it convenient to over-emphasise the staid nature of Blair’s
thought in order to provide a lightning rod for criticism of Macpherson himself, on a more gen-
eral scale Duff suggests that such over-emphasis is one of the ways ‘Romantic constructions of
neoclassicism distort a more complicated picture, concealing important continuities between

neo-classical and Romantic thought’ (Duff 2009, p. 40). From a Four Nations perspective, recov-
ering an appropriate perspective on the more progressive nature of Blair’s critical theory leads to
the re-assertion of the importance of a neglected Scottish writer to the development of Romantic
aesthetics and, in Robert Crawford’s words, the ‘Scottish Invention of English Literature’. Except,
of course, that an influential school of thought within that Four Nations perspective is suspicious
of such acts of recuperation on the grounds that the contributionalist basis of the case under-
mines rather than advances the notion of a Scottish literary tradition defined in its ‘own’ terms.
McIlvanney notes that ‘while critics have readily acknowledged Blair’s influence on the English
Romantic poets, any possible influence on Burns has been occluded by narrow perceptions of
Blair as the champion of Anglocentric propriety’ (McIlvanney 2005, p. 39).
McIlvanney suggests that Blair, no less than Ramsay or Burns sought to ‘negiotiat[e] native
and metropolitan cultures’, and it is hard to read Blair’s account of the development of language
and expression from primitive sublimity to modern correctness and not hear a note of, if not
regret, then wistfulness
As the world advances, the understanding gains ground upon the imagination […] fewer objects
occur that are new or surprizing. Men apply themselves to trace the causes of things; they correct
and refine one another; they subdue or disguise their passions; they form their exterior manners
upon one uniform standard of politeness and civility. Human nature is pruned according to method
and rule.
(Blair 1995, p. 346)
And the ambivalence captured above in words such as ‘disguise’ and ‘pruned’ is resolved into a
truism that suggests a common preference for the very qualities the Enlightenment critic would
seek to improve away
Hence poetry, which is the child of imagination, is frequently most glowing and animated in the
first ages of society. As the ideas of our youth are remembered with a peculiar pleasure on account of
their liveliness and vivacity; so the most ancient poems have often proved the greatest favourites of
nations.
(Blair 1995, p. 346)
This is not an unalloyed preference any more than it is unqualified dismissal. Ossian’s real value
for Blair lies in the extent the poems’ resolve the dilemma at the heart of Scottish Enlightenment
primitivism
We find the fire and enthusiasm of the most early times, combined with an amazing degree of regu-
larity and art. We find tenderness, and even delicacy of sentiment, greatly predominant over fierce-
ness and barbarity.
(Blair 1995, p. 349)
As many have pointed out, Ossian’s appeal lies in combining the apparently incompatible aes-
thetic and wider societal value systems of primitive virtue and civilised modernity. Furthermore,
accounting for this ‘curious point’ provides Blair with an opportunity to propound an ideology
of bardic aesthetic, social and political improvement. Poets, he says, ‘flourish[ed]; not as a set of
strolling songsters, like the Greek […] Rhapsodists, in Homer’s time, but as an order of men
Romanticism 97
highly respected in the state, and supported by the public establishment’ (Blair 1995, p. 350).
In other words, as the acknowledged legislators of the world.
However for those who would see the Scottish Enlightenment programme of improvement as
an instrument of Anglo-British political and cultural hegemony, Ossian’s bardic society is but a
naturalised version of that hegemony, divorcing the bard (and Gaelic culture more widely) from
history and recreating Scotland’s past as some sort of foundational text for Anglo-Britain’s future.
The different positions it is possible to take on this issue have been a major point of debate
within Macpherson studies, beyond the strict remit of this chapter. Yet wherever one places the
emphasis in this discussion between assimilation and influence, one central charge remains.
What is the significance of asserting Blair’s significance in relation to the staples of an Anglo-
centric critical tradition –Wordsworth, Arnold or Shelley have all been alluded to above – he
might otherwise be thought of as revising? Even if commentary emphasises the difference of
perspective an awareness of Blair brings, the argument remains relational and orientated in terms
of a pre-accepted standard. As such are we subverting easy assumptions about the Englishness (or
originality or universality) of ‘Eng. Lit.’; or are we reinforcing a broader prejudice that assumes
that the likes of Blair can only be bartered into the mainstream of critical thought to the extent
that he prefigures (or influences or qualifies our understanding of) previously established greats
of the canon?
Returning to Duff’s notion of the distorting effect of ‘Romantic constructions of neoclassi-
cism’, another way of characterising the above debate (although, to the extent that it de-
emphasises the question of nationhood, it is not a neutral manoeuvre) is to say that understanding
Blair as a literary critic involves a more accurately calibrated understanding of the relationship
between Enlightenment and Romantic critical thought. And as previously noted, awareness of
the differences inherent in the Scottish experience of that relationship when compared to that
of England has been one of the key insights resulting from closer attention to Scottish
Romanticism as a distinctive category. Turning to Blair’s career as a sermon writer, it is possible
to see a similar debate played out, one braced against the context of a further area of critical
interest: the status – hermeneutic and otherwise – of the sermon as literary form in the eight-
eenth century.
Literary history’s collective amnesia about the ubiquity and influence of Blair as a critic pales in
comparison with the way the importance of his published Sermons within the culture of the
Anglophone world has been forgotten. Blair’s fate is symptomatic of the ‘metanarrative of secu-
larisation’ within eighteenth-century studies that leaves little space for the appreciation of the
‘demand, consumption and culture’ (Gibson 2014, p. 26) of sermons as a publishing phenome-
non, despite the fact that eight pages of sermon text were published for every page of fiction
during the eighteenth century (Gibson 2014, p. 6). Recovering Blair as the most significant and
influential Sermon writer of the Romantic age not only advances the broader re-evaluation cur-
rently underway but highlights the critical and methodological dilemmas such re-consideration
involves. This chapter offers an outline of a critical approach to Blair’s Sermons through a consid-
eration of them as a version of the ‘Romantic’.
Blair published 89 sermons across five volumes between 1777 and 1801. The first went
through four imprints in six months and it is estimated that 35 500 copies of the first two were
in circulation by 1785. By 1790 these 2 volumes had gone through 15 editions, been translated
across Europe, and brought their author considerable financial success (including an annual pen-
sion of £200 from King George III). It is usual to account for the popularity of Blair’s sermons
in terms of their ability to articulate ‘a reasonable Christianity with emotive appeals to senti-
ment and a heart-felt religion’ within a comfortably establishment setting (Brown 2016, p. 423).
Blair’s preaching was above all else accessible: doctrinally convenient for middle class ears, his
ability to ‘synthesise the ideas of Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and other thinkers, and to relate
those views to a practical Christian morality in clear and vivid prose’ provided a counter to the
appeal of Methodism and Evangelical Enthusiasm that the otherwise dry, out-of-touch nature of
late century Latitudinarianism found difficult to match (Brown 2016, p. 422). Ironically, if Blair
offered a safe way of channelling the appetite for a more emotionally-grounded religious experi-
ence, in doing so he was making respectable the taste which would eventually condemn him to
obscurity as representative of a tepid, half-hearted Latitudinarianism from which a more decisive
break was needed.
It is usual to interpret Blair’s sermons in terms of the prevalent concerns of Scottish intellec-
tual culture (Dwyer 1987, p. 19). In his first published sermons (composed in May 1746 and
January 1750), he interprets the relative success of what, after the fashion, he considers to be the
primitive and wild Highlanders during the Jacobite rising of 1745–1746, as divine warning
against the potential corruptions of modern ‘luxury’; and the need for a moderate and civilising
religion as guard both against primitive savagery and modern degeneracy. Thus Richard Sher has
seen Blair’s sermons as confronting the two central ‘moral and political problems’ concerning the
Moderates: ‘the place of patriotism and public virtue in a modern commercial society’ and ‘the
defence of the prevailing institutional order in the context of a changing and challenging ideo-
logical climate’ (Sher 1985, p. 175). In terms of the latter, Sher identifies Blair’s emphasis on ‘a
benevolent state of mind and the humane, socially constructive conduct that normally follows
from it’ as the key bulwark against the disruptions of the age; while in terms of the former,
Blair’s sermons advocate, in Dwyer’s words, ‘a new role for the landed and upper classes, not as
heroic warriors or conspicuous consumers, but as practitioners of benevolence’ (Sher 1985,
p. 178; Dwyer 1987, p. 64).
The importance of moral sympathy is central to Blair’s preaching. What, in ‘On the Benefits
to the derived from the House of Mourning’, Blair terms ‘that humane sensibility which is one
of the highest ornaments of the nature of man’ was both innately human and vitally in need of
cultivation (Blair 1796b, p. 382). John Dwyer, commenting on this Sermon, describes it as an
‘extremely delicate and sophisticated responsiveness […] a tender and gentle process of identifi-
cation with others rather than any crude outpouring of undifferentiated fellow feeling’
(Dwyer 1987, p. 59). The human ability to cultivate this feeling is not only for Blair a sign of
Divine benevolence but as important evidence that mankind was created in His image. As he
puts it ‘On the Influence of Religion upon Adversity’, ‘there is no character which God more
frequently assumes to himself in the sacred writings, than that of the patron of the distressed’
(Blair 1796c, p. 43). God is the ultimate Man of Feeling and described by Blair in terms familiar
to the readers of Henry Mackenzie: ‘the sigh, heaved from the afflicted bosom, which is heard by
no human ear, is listened to by Him; and that tear is remarked, which falls unnoticed or despised
by the world’ (Blair 1796c, p. 45).
Blair’s interest in the dynamics of Sensibility, their importance both for individual virtue and
for social good, characterises numerous sermons. In doing so it forges a link between an
Enlightenment interest in moral sympathy and a Romantic interest in moral subjectivity. In ‘On
Sensibility’ he notes that
Romanticism 99
from true sensibility flow a thousand good offices, apparently small in themselves, but of high
importance to the felicity of others; offices which altogether escape the observation of the cold and
unfeeling.
(Blair 1794, p. 31)
And if that reminds the reader fleetingly of ‘that best portion of a good man’s life, | His little,
nameless, unremembered, acts |Of kindness and of love’ then Blair’s description of the subjectiv-
ity that empowers such sensibility similarly foreshadows a confidence in the ability to ‘see into
the life of things’
he possesses a new sense, which the enables him to behold objects which the selfish cannot see. At
the same time his enjoyments are not of that kind which remain merely on the surface of the mind.
They penetrate the heart. They enlarge and elevate, they refine and ennoble it.
(Blair 1794, p. 35)
Or again, on the bounties of a properly calibrated moral and religious life in ‘On the Influence of
Religion upon Adversity’
When tired with the vexations of life, devotion opens to him its quiet retreat, where the tumults of
the world are hushed, and its cares are lost in happy oblivion; there the wicked cease from troubling, and
the weary are at rest. There his mind regains its serenity; the agitation of passion is calmed; and a
softening balm is infused into the sounds of the spirit […] and as he hears a voice which speaks to
none but the pure in heart, so he beholds a hand that sinners cannot see. He beholds the hand of
Providence, conducting all the hidden springs and movements of the universe; and with a secret, but
unerring operation, directing every event towards the happiness of the righteous.
(Blair 1796c, pp. 45–47)
There are other occasions when Blair’s speculations on the nature of the moral life led him to
positions we might today term ‘Wordsworthian’. For example, in the same sermon when he
considers how the wise and good person uses times of prosperity, not merely to bask in the pleas-
ures of the moment but to spend their time reflecting and acting in ways that provide succour
for the future
the time of prosperity was to him not merely a season of barren joy, but productive of much useful
improvement […] these resources remain entire, when the days of trouble come. They remain with
him in sickness as in health; in poverty as in the midst of riches; in his dark and solitary hours, no
less than when surrounded with friends and gay society.
(Blair 1796c, p. 33)
Crucially, for the purposes of an argument about Romantic subjectivity, this is a question of
perspective, of experience and reflection, of a sense of perception in which past and present (and
projected future) are inter-twinned, and of a confidence in how a transcendent subjectivity can
offer an element of permanence in a transitory world
The improvement which he made of those advantages while they lasted, the temperate spirit with
which he enjoyed them, the beneficent actions which he performed, and the good example which he
set to others, remain behind. By the memory of those, he enjoys his prosperity a second time in
reflection; and perhaps this second and reflected enjoyment is not inferior to the first. It arrives at a
more critical and needful time. It affords him the high satisfaction of having extracted lasting pleas-
ure from that which is short; and of having fixed that which by its nature was changing.
(Blair 1796c, p. 37)
Such apparent congruencies of thought between Blair’s sermons and Wordsworth’s sense of
memory ‘as a dwelling place for all sweet sounds and harmonies’ in the face of ‘the dreary inter-
course of daily life’ suggest Blair’s place in the creation of the discourse of Romantic subjectiv-
ity and an influence that remains long after his brand of sociable religion fell from favour. The
contribution of Blair’s sermons, embedded as they are in the religious, philosophical and his-
torical context of the Scottish Enlightenment, to Romantic habits of thinking and feeling
represents another, and perhaps unexpected, contribution to the Scottish invention of English
literature.
Yet as we saw above in relation to the Critical Dissertation, articulating this brings its own
dilemmas. Blair should not be valued in proportion to his importance to pre-determined canons
of taste and feeling. Blair was the senior Churchman in Scotland, whether or not his preaching
influenced or can be accommodated within the literary discourse of English Romanticism. And
paying specific attention to Blair’s achievement is as much about our sense of religious writing
as it is national identity. Indeed, the greatest challenge but also the greatest insight to be gained
from restoring a sense of Blair’s importance in Romantic culture is the calibration it commends
between the religious and secular.
In recent years scholarship has come to recognise that because ‘the centrality of religion to the
nation’s political, cultural and social life fits uneasily into the prevailing grand narratives of the
period’ there has been a tendency to underemphasise or otherwise downplay ‘expressions of reli-
gious belief as such’ (Gibson and Ingram 2005, p. 1; Anderson 2012, p. 15). Understanding
Blair’s sermons in terms of the sociological concerns of the Scottish Enlightenment or the crea-
tion of a modern literary subjectivity runs the risk of under-emphasising their essentially reli-
gious nature. In some ways Blair makes this easy for us. As Brown notes
[w]hile the sermons were broadly orthodox in their Reformed theology, they neglected doctrinal
issues or close analysis of biblical texts. There was no attention to hell, Christ’s atonement, or the
need for personal conversion by accepting Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
(Brown 2016, p. 417)
Commentary on Blair has been clear that wearing their theology lightly was key to the Sermons’
fashionable success. Yet for all that they are sermons. In the passage quoted above, the phrase
‘there the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest’ is, for all its overtones of Wordsworthian
epiphany, a quotation from Job (3:17). Blair’s sermon ‘On the Death of Christ’ reads the
Passion, ‘the hour in which Christ was glorified by his sufferings’ (1796d, p. 117), as a drama of
Sensibility, of virtue in distress: as he puts it, using the stage metaphor so beloved of Classical
Stoic thought, ‘the court of Herod, the judgement-hall of Pilate, the hill of Calvary, were so
many theatres prepared for his displaying all the virtues of a constant and patient mind’ (1796d,
p. 118). But Blair is also at pains over 10 pages to read the Passion in other, more familiarly theo-
logical terms as well, typological and otherwise.
There are other examples of the need to calibrate the relationship between secular sensibility
and orthodox Christian teaching in the Sermons. This is Blair ‘On the Duties and Consolations
of the Aged’ suggesting the best attitude with which to face death, redolent with a language
derived from Classical Stoicism, filtered through Macpherson’s Ossian
Romanticism 101
Is it desirable, to continue lingering on the borders of the grave after every tie which connects you
with life is broken; and to be left a solitary individual, in the midst of a new generation, whose faces
you hardly know? The shades of your departed friends rise up before you, and warn you, that it is
time to depart. Nature and Providence summon you to be gathered to your fathers. Reason admonishes
you, that as your predecessors made way for you, it is just that you should yield your place to those,
who have arisen to succeed you on this busy stage; who, for a whole, shall fill it with their actions
and their sufferings, their virtues and their crimes, and then shall, in their turn, withdraw, and be
joined to the forgotten multitudes of former ages. (1796e, p. 372)
Compare with the departed Fingal’s call to the dying Ossian
Why art though sad, son of Fingal? Why grows the cloud of thy soul? The chiefs of other years are
departed; they have gone without their fame. The sons of future years shall pass away; and another
rise arise. The people are like the waves of the ocean, like the leaves of woody Morven, they pass away
in the rustling blast, and other leaves lift their green heads.
(Macpherson 1995, p. 198)
But ‘gathered to your fathers’ is from Genesis 15:15; and the clinching point of the argument is
an affirmation of the Christian promise of the hereafter. The sermon ends not on this moving
statement of Stoic resignation but with two pieces of Scripture. Similarly in ‘On Death’ stoicism
is a comfort while-ever death is to be contemplated as a Sublime object at a distance; at more
pressing moments it will be ‘the discoveries of revelation’ that ‘fortif[y] the heart’ (1796a,
p. 224). Crawford Gribben has noted that ‘the established scholarly paradigm, which links
European Romanticism with religious scepticism, needs to be significantly qualified’, while
Philip Connell has observed that the ‘development of an autonomous literary aesthetic was as
much a product of Protestant apologetic as a vehicle for incipient secularisation’ (Gribben 2011,
p. 115; Connell 2018, p. 322). Hugh Blair’s polite Sermons are central to understanding how
this might have come to pass if only we can rise to the challenge of holding their religious and
their more secular frames of reference and priorities in creative tension.
This chapter has suggested the kind of Romantic figure Hugh Blair might represent, or, per-
haps more usefully, the kind of Romanticism accommodates a figure such as Blair. To ask these
questions is to insist on the different critical frameworks an engagement with Scottish
Romanticism necessitates, whether they be chronological, institutional or theological. Engaging
with Blair’s work across a number of albeit related forms draws attention to the relationship
between Enlightenment and Romantic thought, and between secular and religious writing, that
is specifically Scottish and also of relevance to anyone interested in the historical phenomenon of
European Romanticism.
Notes
1 Addressing these re-mediations and misrepresenta- Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 1–15.
tions, starting with Henry Mackenzie’s influential Oxford: Oxford University Press.
description of Burns as ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ 2 See for example, Duncan, I. (2007). Scott’s Shadow:
in The Lounger for 9 December 1786, has been a The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton:
major preoccupation of Scottish Romantic studies, Princeton University Press; Pittock, M. (2008).
but see for example and in overview, Leask, N. Scottish and Irish Romanticism, 147–164. Oxford:
(2010). Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Oxford University Press.
3 These criteria are elaborated at greater length in, 7 On Burns see McIlvanney, L. (2005). Hugh Blair,
and provide the structuring framework to, his Robert Burns, and the invention of Scottish litera-
Scottish and Irish Romanticism, see Note 2. ture, Eighteenth-Century Life, 2.2 Spring, 25–46.
4 See also Duff, D. and Jones, C. (2007). (eds), 8 See also Stafford, F. (1998). Hugh Blair’s Ossian,
Scotland, Ireland and the Romantic Aesthetic. Lewisburg: romanticism and the teaching of literature in The
Bucknell University Press. Scottish Invention of English Literature, (ed. R.
5 A similar point can be made about the rehearsal of Crawford), 68–88. Cambridge: Cambridge
John Home’s Douglas in Edinburgh some 30 years University Press.
earlier. Blair was ‘in the room’ along with Robertson, 9 The classic account of the Gaelic provenance of
Smith, Hume and Ferguson, but he took the role of Ossian remains D.S. Thomson’s The Gaelic Sources of
Anna the maid. See Sher, R. (1985). Church and Macpherson’s Ossian (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University
University in the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 77. Press, 1952) but see also Meek’s “The Gaelic Ballads
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. of Scotland: Creativity and Adaptation” in Gaskill
6 See for example, Daiches, D. (1964). The Paradox of (ed.) Ossian Revisited, 19–48.
Scottish Culture, London: Oxford University Press, 10 For Ramsay’s ‘code switching’, see Pittock, Scottish
75–79 and Crawford, R. (1992). Devolving English and Irish Romanticism, 32–58 (Note 2).
Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press 16–44.
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22–43. London/Edinburgh: A Strahan & T. Cadell/W Connell, P. (2018). Afterword: writing religion and the
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Strahan and Cadell. cism. In: The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism
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Strahan and Cadell. University Press.
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9
The Scotch Novel
Peter Garside
Professorial Fellow, English Department, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland
One of the earliest occurrences of the term Scotch novel appears in J. G. Lockhart’s seminal
account of contemporary Scottish culture, Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819), where Walter
Scott, notwithstanding anonymity, looms large as ‘The author of the Scotch novels’, a body of
work lauded by Lockhart as having created a new form of national literature: ‘the best are those,
the interest of which is most directly and historically national – Waverley and Old Mortality.
The whole will go down together, so long as any national character survives in Scotland’
(Lockhart 1819: I, 193; II, 352). Noticeably in choosing his exemplars Lockhart links two titles
originally managed by different publishing concerns – the Edinburgh houses of Archibald
Constable and William Blackwood respectively – as well as ostensibly originating from different
authorial sources: ‘the author of Waverley’ and Jedediah Cleishbotham, the latter representing the
pseudonym used to front Tales of My Landlord, the first series of which includes Old Mortality.
The cognomen of ‘author of Scotch novels’ moreover continued to feature widely in the contem-
porary reviews as a means of binding together Scott’s continuingly divergent path as a novelist
into the 1820s, in the process incorporating a succession of novels, commencing with the
English-medieval Ivanhoe (1820), whose contents range far from the initial focus on Scottish
subject-matter.
By the mid-1820s, however, the term ‘Scotch novel’ has taken on a wider meaning, encom-
passing a yet larger field of novel production, one equally capable of being viewed as representing
an outstanding feature of the age. Writing to Archibald Constable in 1824 in response to receipt
of ‘a perfect copy of Reginald Dalton’ – Lockhart’s 1823 novel of that name – the Irish novelist
Maria Edgeworth somewhat archly responds: ‘The copy which I first possessed, I shall keep as a
curiosity, on which future commentators in future ages may write ingeniously on the inexhaust-
ible subject of the Scotch novels’ (Constable 1873: II, 408). Another indication is found in the

The Scotch Novel 105
London-based Monthly Review’s May 1822 notice on Lockhart’s preceding novel Adam Blair (full
title Some Passages in the Life of Mr Adam Blair Minister of the Gospel at Cross-Meikle [1822]): ‘From
the title of this volume, we were led to expect an edifying account of the pastoral labours of some
precious member of the Scotish [sic] presbytery [. . .] We were, however, surprised by discovering
these “Passages” to be a very interesting fictitious narrative, proceeding from that vast forge of
novels which has within the few last years been established in the Scotish capital’ (second series,
vol. 98, p. 110). The idea of Edinburgh as a manufactory of novels is also pervasive in Sarah
Green’s satirical fiction Scotch Novel Reading; Or, Modern Quackery, published in three volumes by
A. K. Newman in 1824 at the Minerva Press, which points to an undiscriminating willingness
by southern readers to accept all kinds of incomprehensible matter from the northern presses. In
particular its impressionable heroine, Alice Fennel, is viewed consuming from a Bond Street
circulating library all the Waverley novels, from which she imagines ideal Scottish heroes and
heroines, followed by James Hogg’s Three Perils of Man (1822), which she barely comprehends,
though she herself affects Scottish speech, before seeking out (as ‘imitations’ of Scott) John Galt’s
The Entail (1823) and Sir Andrew Wylie, of that Ilk (1822), which she doesn’t understand at all.
At which point the narrator chips in: ‘It is wonderful – at least, it appears so to me, who am a
poor matter-of-fact cockney – how any bookseller would publish a work that bore so heterogene-
ous a title, or that any mere London novel-reader could think of looking into its pages’
(Green 1824: II, 111). Considering that the publisher of Sir Andrew Wylie and The Entail was
William Blackwood, whose output of new fiction was ascending commensurately with the
decline of that of A. K. Newman, one might sense an element of sour grapes in all this. Also
perceptible is the shift in ‘Scotch’ itself to a more pejorative term, compared with Lockhart’s
somewhat adulatory usage in 1819.
Recent advances in charting the output of new novel titles in the British Isles during the
period from 1770 to 1836 make it possible to provide a clearer context for this awareness among
contemporary observers of an unprecedented upsurge in the production of Scottish fiction. Key
sources here are the two-volume bibliographical survey The English Novel 1770–1829 (Garside
et al. 2000), including statistical information concerning output, publishers and authorship;
supplemented by the online database British Fiction 1800–1829 (www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk),
which incorporates a number of discoveries since the printed bibliography as well as adding
several secondary fields, such as contemporary library holdings and data from publishing records.
A continuation of the bibliographical record of new fiction titles is also found in The English
Novel, 1830–1836 (www.romtext.org.uk/resources/english-novel-1830-36), available through
the online journal Romantic Textualities, which itself also contains regular updates of the biblio-
graphical record from 1800 to 1836. Statistical information in quantitative terms will be pro-
vided throughout this chapter from a combination of these sources. One notable feature worth
noting at the onset, however, is a rapid acceleration in the production of fiction in Scotland dur-
ing the early decades of the nineteenth century, with just four primary Scottish imprints for new
novels in the 1800s, followed by 30 in the 1810s, and 100 in the 1820s, the large bulk of these
coming from managing Edinburgh publishers, with a high peak in 1821–1825, representing
15% of total British output. This tally is all the more impressive in view of many of these being
upmarket products, valued proportionately at almost twice the amount charged for the Minerva’s
Scotch Novel Reading.
What is all the more surprising is that this level of production was achieved against such an
apparently low base. Robert Crawford (2007, p. 313) acknowledges a dearth of indigenous fic-
tion at a time when the genre was making considerable strides in England, with ‘[o]nly about
forty book-length works of prose fiction’ being ‘published in Scotland before 1800’. In terms of
novels generated within the country and bearing Scottish title-pages even this is likely to over-
estimate the number. According to volume 1 of The English Novel 1770–1829 only seven new
novels published in the last three decades of the eighteenth century show Edinburgh as their
primary place of publication. As for other Scottish locations there are just two titles from Perth,
both translations, issued by the firm of Robert Morison; and a miscellaneous collection from
Glasgow. In particular the two main sub-genres of the later eighteenth century, the Sentimental
and the Gothic novel, tended to bypass Scotland, notwithstanding the input of Henry Mackenzie
into the formal development of the first mode with The Man of Feeling (1771) and the brief and
imperfect intersection of the Gothic and Scotland in Ann Radcliffe’s Ossianic first fiction, The
Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne: A Highland Story (1789). Admittedly one should not overlook the
Scottish reprint industry, buoyed up by the 1774 decision confirming limited copyright and
especially active during the closing decades of the century, but production here was mainly con-
centrated on single and collected works by ‘classical’ writers such as Henry Fielding, with odd
trespasses into more modern works such as those by the English novelist Frances Burney. Nor
does this point necessarily to an absence of Scottish authors in the broader field. Richard Sher
(2006) lists as part of an Appendix of 360 works emanating from the Scottish Enlightenment
more than 20 items categorised as fiction, from Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random in 1748 to
John Moore’s Mordaunt (1800), all of which however typically carry London imprints, with
Scottish booksellers only occasionally appearing on a secondary basis. Various ‘internal’ reasons
might be given for the paucity of Scottish indigenous titles, including the sway of Presbyterianism
and patriarchal resistance to the novel as an increasingly female form, but on the whole these are
far outweighed by two salient factors: the dominance of London as a publishing centre for fash-
ionable literature and a concentration of polite novel readers in southern England.
The kinds of predicament faced by Scottish novelists under these conditions can be illustrated
by three individual cases. Having first moved south in 1739, Smollett continued to show an
interest in his native country, as illustrated by the Edinburgh scenes in The Expedition of Humphry
Clinker (1771), which subsequently fed into a number of Scottish fictions of the later period,
notably Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815), as well as into the design of Lockhart’s quasi-fictional
Peter’s Letters (1819). All his own novels, however, were handled by London booksellers without
notable Scottish connections, and Smollett stood as a virtual bystander with regard to their dis-
tribution in Scotland. Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, begun when its author was furthering
his legal studies in London, likewise on its first appearance had all the air of a London publica-
tion, though the association of its publisher Thomas Cadell with the Scots-born William Strahan
certainly eased communications after Mackenzie’s return to play a central role in Edinburgh
cultural life. In the case of the last of Mackenzie’s three anonymous fictions, Julia de Roubigné
(1777), William Creech of Edinburgh makes a rare appearance on the title-page of the first edi-
tion as secondary publisher. In other respects, apart from the Monthly’s complaints about provin-
cialisms and Scots idioms in the Man of Feeling, there is little to suggest a Scottish provenance in
contemporary reviews, notwithstanding the tendency of modern critics to trace peculiarly
Scottish components of Enlightenment thinking in these narratives. Finally, the case of the still
partly shadowy figure of Jean Marishall offers an early and rare glimpse of a Scottish woman
engaging in English domestic fiction. Her two epistolary novels, The History of Miss Clarinda
Cathcart (1766) and The History of Alicia Montague (1767), published in London for the circulating-
library market, both contain interesting Scottish components, a letter in the first describing a
trip to Edinburgh and Holyroodhouse, the characters of the latter flitting between the two
countries in terms which seem to mirror a larger movement towards national union. Having
subsequently settled in Edinburgh, however, Marishall in A Series of Letters, as published from
there, offered a somewhat despairing account of not only her shoddy treatment as an aspiring
novelist in London but also the near impossibility of explaining her activities to her mother, a
go-between finally being enlisted to assure her ‘that there was nothing more common in England
than ladies writing novels’ (Marishall 1789: II, 173).
As already indicated, there are few signs of any significant uptake in the early 1800s. The first
suggestion of a shift occurs with two 1808 imprints: Joseph Strutt’s Queenhoo-Hall, printed in
Edinburgh by James Ballantyne, through Walter Scott’s influence, though otherwise a publica-
tion of John Murray in London; and Elizabeth Hamilton’s The Cottagers of Glenburnie, again printed
by Ballantyne, but this time for the Edinburgh firm of Manners & Miller, in association with two
London booksellers. In bringing together three components – a Scottish setting, Scottish printer,
and managing Scottish publisher – Glenburnie, which enjoyed three editions in the year of
publication, might be said to foreshadow what was to become an almost commonplace combina-
tion. Hamilton had settled in Edinburgh in 1804, embedding herself at the heart of the New
Town, from where according to Pam Perkins (2010, p. 77) she found a congenial atmosphere in
late Enlightenment thinking. The Cottagers contains a variety of narrative strands, but the scenes
which contemporaries found most engaging are those in which Mrs. Mason, formerly a governess,
attempts to ameliorate the living conditions and mental outlook of the ramshackle MacClarty
family in Glenburnie. Both the Scots Magazine and the Edinburgh Review drew attention to the
work’s ‘pure’ representation of Scots dialogue (see Grogan 2016: pp. 130–131), in the process
anticipating the counterpoising with Standard English which was to become a defining feature of
later such fictions. In other respects, however, the novel in its didacticism looks back to the anti-
Jacobin novels of Hamilton’s English period, while the judgmental focusing on the inadequacies
of rustic life has strong affinities with the tract literature of Hannah More and others.
Another interesting imprint year is 1810, when two then fashionable modes, the scandal
novel and the ‘national tale’, can be seen finding out Scotland as a suitable location. This is evi-
dent in titles such as: Caledonia; or, the Stranger in Scotland: A National Tale, by ‘Kate Montalbion’
(Catherine Bayley); two novels by ‘Honoria Scott’, A Winter in Edinburgh and The Vale of the Clyde;
and, most famously, Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs. All four of these works, however, were pub-
lished from London, with no visible input from the Scottish trade. Honoria Scott herself can now
be identified as Susan Fraser, wife of a wounded officer from the 42nd Highland Regiment; and
as such one of a succession of native Scots women writers scratching a living in the London mar-
ket, among whom might be added the prolific Gothic novelist, Isabella Kelly, and the recently
disclosed Agnes Crombie Hall, author of a succession of novels under the pseudonym Rosalia St.
Clair for the Minerva Press (Frey 2014: passim). Within Scotland, however, the situation must
have still seemed bleak, even as Edinburgh gained new ascendancy as a mart of fashionable litera-
ture with the arrival of Scott’s outstandingly popular third long poem, The Lady of the Lake
(1810). The solitary Edinburgh fiction imprint for year 1810 is Peter Middleton Darling’s now
rare The Romance of the Highlands, printed by George Ramsay & Co. for the author, and distrib-
uted by two Edinburgh booksellers, with Longman & Co. as London sellers. Evidently released
slightly before Scott’s poem, this offers a melodramatic view of a medieval Highlands, featuring
wraiths and witches, as well as large portions of verse. It also includes a list containing 137 sub-
scribers, mostly from Edinburgh, consisting of legal professionals, aristocrats and in-town coun-
try lairds, tradesmen, and eight circulating library proprietors: offering arguably just a glimmer
of a clientele potentially capable of supporting an indigenous fiction industry.
A far more telling illustration of underlying forces at work is provided by the unprecedented
success of Mary Brunton’s polite evangelical novel, Self-Control (1811), published by Manners &
Miller, in association with the house of Longmans in London. The Longman publishing records
contain a succession of requests sent to Edinburgh for new editions to be printed (again by
Ramsay & Co), and for spare copies to be sent down in the meantime, with as a whole four edi-
tions being published within the first year, amounting to over 4000 copies.1 While the larger
part of these went to satisfy the appetite for moral evangelical fiction in England, there are also
signs of an unprecedented sale in Scotland too. In a letter of 20 February 1811 to Eliza Izett the
Orkney-born Brunton refers to an ‘unexampled’ sale at first release in Edinburgh, with 240 cop-
ies passing out of the hands of the publishers in five days, the rest of the first impression of 750
being despatched to London. Anne Grant also remarked several days later how ‘In this literary
city it occasions as much conversation as a new island in the Clyde could do at Greenock’ (see
Mandal 2014, pp. xxxii–xxxiii). It is also hard not to sense an element of national pride in the
Scots Magazine for March 1811 (vol. 73, p. 203), not least with regard to which metropolitan
centre was in question: ‘We do not recollect, even among the most popular productions of the
present day, any one, the appearance of which excited a more immediate and general interest
throughout this metropolis’.
According to conventional accounts, it was the publication of Walter Scott’s Waverley in
1814 which marked the arrival of the Scottish novel proper. From an early point, too, Scott set
about constructing his own literary genealogy, apparently placing the composition of his early
chapters in 1805, then later describing how discovery of the unfinished manuscript in 1813 while
in pursuit of fishing tackle had led to its conclusion. By such manoeuvres he was able to position
the inception of his Scottish historical novel before the national Irish tales of Sydney Owenson
[Lady Morgan], notably her Wild Irish Girl (1806), whereas in reality all the surviving evidence
indicates a starting-point in 1808, a resumption in 1810/1811, in the wake of The Lady of the
Lake, when the title was advertised, prior to a rapid completion in the months leading up to
publication in July by Archibald Constable & Co. (see Garside 1991). While one should be care-
ful not to underestimate the force of Scott’s influence through his great ‘Scottish’ sequence of
novels running to 1819, the emergence of a national fiction in Scotland was plainly an event
waiting to happen. An indication of this can be found in the number of claims made post-
Waverley by fellow Scottish novelists to have been close to becoming instigators themselves:
among them James Hogg (who proposed a collection of ‘Rural Traditionary Tales of Scotland’ to
Archibald Constable in May 1813); J. G. Lockhart (whose manuscript novel, titled ‘The Romance
of the Thistle’, was mostly drafted 1813–1814, and proposed unsuccessfully to the same pub-
lisher in December 1814); and John Galt, who in 1822 asserted that ‘before “Waverley” appeared
I wrote to Constable proposing to execute a Scottish story’ (Oliphant 1897: I, 452)). A more
immediate feeling-out of the way might be sensed in two titles actually published in 1813/1814:
The Widow’s Lodgings, generally attributed to John Ballantyne (its co-publisher with Longmans),
though there is a suspicion of the hand there of his wife, Hermione, later a novelist in her own
right with the Kelso-published Seymour (1835); and R. P. Gillies’s The Confessions of Henry
Longueville, printed by James Ballantyne for Longman & Co., whose self-destructive hero observes
the world from the vantage point of 1810, in a narrative framework which both looks back to the
sentimentalism of Mackenzie and forwards to more complex fictions in the 1820s.
It is also interesting to observe how Scott’s intervention as a novelist – which was instantly
recognised by Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Grant, and others – seems to have sent shock waves on
a scene of writing, which, left interrupted, might have led to the dominance of a different kind
of Scottish national fiction (it is worth bearing in mind that Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1819) was
evidently under discussion with a friend as early as 1810). A sense of disruption is certainly to be
found in two novels both containing Highland scenes that came out only months after Waverley:
Mary Brunton’s Discipline (1814) and Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale
(1815: co-published in Edinburgh and London with variant title-pages). Both writers in their
prefatory matter show signs of feeling pre-empted, and are insistent that their materials had been
decided on before Waverley’s appearance: Johnstone in her ‘Advertisement’ stating that ‘the first
half of this Tale was not only written, but printed, long before the animated historian of the race
Ivor had allured the romantic adventurer into a track, rich, original, and unexplored, and ren-
dered a second journey all but hopeless’; and Brunton’s ‘Preface’ likewise conceding that ‘the
Author of Waverley, alone, has incorporated with a fictitious story the characteristic manners of
the Gael’. For Johnstone, who subsequently dedicated the second edition of her National Tale to
‘Walter Scott, Esq.’, the ultimate humiliation (though she was probably unaware of it) might be
said to have come with the ascription of the 1821 German translation of Clan-Albin to no less
than Scott himself. Yet there is also of a strand of more durable defiance in her novel’s
‘Advertisement’, the intimation of a Fingalian contest there suggesting the reverse of capitula-
tion. And as Andrew Monnickendam (2013, pp. 48–49) observes, Mary Brunton’s lively first
response to Waverley, in writing to Eliza Izett, hardly squares with the seismic aftershock to her
confidence suggested by her husband’s posthumous ‘Memoir’ (1819).
There can be no question that Scott served as a forceful spearhead in the development of a
fully-fledged Scottish fiction industry. All his novels without fail carried the word Edinburgh at
the head of the title-page imprint, followed in earlier instances by the wording ‘Printed by James
Ballantyne and Co.’, this latter reflecting the author’s lifelong insistence that his imaginative
works should be printed by Ballantyne’s firm, and pride in their Scottish manufacture. The pri-
oritising of Edinburgh as the place of publication occurs even in those cases where Longmans
were technically the managing publishers, though from The Antiquary (1816), when Constable
took over the management, its positioning normally reflected the joint reality of an Edinburgh
printer and publisher. Following Ivanhoe, whose imprint displayed Constable’s new London part-
ners, the unequivocally secondary Hurst, Robinson, and Co., this ascendancy became more set-
tled. Impression numbers rapidly accelerated from an initial 1000 copies for Waverley to the
production of 10 000 for Rob Roy (1818), released in two tranches, with an optimum of 12 000
for first editions being reached in the early 1820s. Their upmarket reputation also enabled the
achievement of the premium price of 31s 6d for three volumes with Kenilworth (1821). In two
imprint years (1820 and 1822) no less than three novels by ‘the author of Waverley’ were pub-
lished. Scott’s influence was also instrumental in bringing in other high-profile authors, notably
C. R. Maturin and William Godwin. However, rather than acting as a spur to new Scottish fic-
tion, Constable as a general publisher in some respects served more as a brake on output. In the
years 1814 to his bankruptcy in 1826 he was the publisher of less than 30 new titles, the
majority by Scott, and the Constable Letter Books reveal quite a few cases of novels being turned
down, common reasons given being that the firm was not normally interested in fiction and an
all-consuming involvement with the author of Waverley.2 Especially vulnerable to rejection were
women writers, Amelia Opie and Sydney Owenson – both attracted by the cachet of the imprint –
being prominent victims, alongside less prominent supplicants such as an unknown
‘Mrs Mackenzie’ from Edinburgh.
One publisher whose commitment to the development of a broader Scottish fiction cannot be
doubted is William Blackwood, not least during the 1820s, when he was primary publisher of
35 new titles, twice as many as Constable’s output, even allowing for the Waverley Novels.
While occupying his original quarters at 64 South Bridge, near the University, Blackwood pub-
lished just one work of fiction, Hector MacNeill’s The Scottish Adventurers; or, the Way to Rise
(1812), in which the two main protagonists come from Edinburgh, though most of their exploits
take place elsewhere. Blackwood’s first full taste of handling fiction occurred when he became
Edinburgh publisher of Scott’s Tales of My Landlord (1816), shortly after having moved to new
premises at 17 Princes Street (and thereby closer to an expanding polite readership in the New
Town). Scott’s main purpose in changing from Constable and Longmans on this one occasion was
to secure John Murray as the London publisher, and throughout their dealings Murray evidently
regarded Blackwood primarily as his Edinburgh agent and only nominally having the book’s
management. Blackwood nevertheless took a full half share of the first and early subsequent edi-
tions, and records indicate Edinburgh sales for the most part matched those generated from
London. In 1818 Blackwood ventured further into fiction with Susan Ferrier’s Marriage and
James Hogg’s The Brownie of Bodsbeck, with Murray offering to take a two-thirds share of each
impression of 1500, only to withdraw from promoting the second title when taking alarm at
Hogg’s alleged improprieties.
The height of Blackwood’s productivity as a publisher of fiction is found in the years 1821–
1825, when his firm managed some 25 novels, representing nearly 50% of all new fiction pub-
lished from Edinburgh. In the 1820s as a whole Blackwood was the fifth largest publisher of new
fiction titles in Britain, most of these with Thomas Cadell, junior, in London as the secondary
publisher. As already suggested Blackwood’s titles were generally ‘high profile’ items, first issued
in relatively large impressions of 1500–2000, and for which Blackwood paid good money, often
up front (culminating in a £1000 advance for Ferrier’s Inheritance [1824]). An integral part of the
operation was Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (its re-branding as such, instead of the Edinburgh
Monthly Magazine, as when first issued in April 1817, made the connection all the more appar-
ent). Not only did this serve as a source of material (a number of works from John Galt’s Ayrshire
Legatees in 1821 onward were first serialised in the Magazine) and means of sustaining key liter-
ary personnel, but it is also helped shape a core audience, not least in the demographically
expanding Central Scottish and Northern English regions. (The claim to be the metropolis of
this larger expanse is implicit arguably in the editorship of the Maga by ‘Christopher North’.)
Between 1820 and 1825, more than half Blackwood’s fiction titles were generated by just three
authors, Galt, Lockhart, and John Wilson, all closely connected with the Magazine. As a whole,
the authorship (albeit at the time at least nominally anonymous) was predominantly masculine
and from the professional class. Of 35 titles published by Blackwood in the 1820s, more than
two-thirds are now identifiable as by male writers; though there are exceptions, these including,
in addition to Ferrier: Lady Charlotte Bury, née Campbell (Conduct is Fate (1822)); Anne Walker
of Dalry, author of two moral domestic fictions in mid-decade; and, nearer the end of the decade,
Amelia Gillespie Smyth and Caroline Bowles.
A large proportion of this output, too, was recognisably Scottish, in authorship and/or subject-
matter (usually both). Of Blackwood’s full output of 40 titles from 1812 to 1829, well over half
are set in Scotland, and of some 20 authors involved a large majority lived in Scotland, including
the most productive. Even where these Scottish criteria do not apply, authors and their works
were still, often most willingly, drawn into Blackwood’s circle. Theodore Hook, while promot-
ing his brother James’s Pen Owen (1822) to Blackwood as by the ‘English Unknown’, was insist-
ent on the standard Edinburgh Blackwood imprint (a letter of his refers to ‘the impression of
superiority which an Edinburgh publication has given’3). Blackwood at this time also published
an American novel in John Neal’s Brother Jonathan (1825), and two key translations by R. P.
Gillies of German fiction, including E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Devil’s Elixir (1824), at a time when
Scotland stood at the vanguard of promoting this field of literature in Britain.
Undoubtedly the Blackwood phenomenon contributed significantly to the heightened aware-
ness of the ‘Scotch Novel’ by the mid-1820s – recognisable now as much by provenance (source
of manufacture) as by authorship or content. One marker of this can be found in Francis Jeffrey’s
composite review of 12 Blackwood titles, in the Edinburgh Review of October 1823; though the
running headline ‘Secondary Scottish Novels’ reflects the general tenor of Jeffrey’s argument that
this fresh output stands in the shadow of Scott as the Great Unknown (‘we regard them as imita-
tions of the inimitable novels’ [vol. 39, p. 160]). This, however, ran counter to the line then
being pushed in Blackwood’s Magazine, which argued that the same works enjoyed an autono-
mous status, with a separate genealogy, stretching back through Galt’s Annals of the Parish (1821)
to Henry Mackenzie (over whom the young Blackwoodians were eventually to claim
supremacy).
Although traditional literary history has tended to support the Jeffrey line in ranking this
output, and while some of the self-promotion found in Blackwood’s borders on the nauseous, in
several respects the Blackwoodian novel was genuinely innovative as well as distinctive in its
own time. The focus on provincial communities by Galt and others in contrast to the grand
linear narratives of Scott is one notable feature, as too the choice of characters from the middling
and lower orders as main protagonists. One might also note the shift of materials for subject-
matter to the west of Scotland, an area left relatively untouched by Scott, and where Galt evi-
dently believed lay an untapped market for fiction. The Blackwoodian novel can also be seen as
making a number of innovations with regard to narrative modes in fiction, veering in particular
between monologic first-person accounts and experimentations with editorially-governed ‘third-
person’ narrations: the two spectacularly colliding at the end of Lockhart’s last novel, The History
of Matthew Wald (1824). Physically, too, the novels produced by Blackwood at this time were
smart-looking-products, with innovative features such as arresting title-pages, and the early use
of cloth binding for three-decker novels such as Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Elizabeth de Bruce
(1827). In particular, the firm was at the forefront in producing a species of up-market single-
volume fictions: the common pattern by 1823 being a novel between 350 and 450 pages, in a
new kind of tighter clearer print, and at a premium price of 10s 6d. This pattern fits almost
exactly Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published not by Blackwood (who had helped exile
Hogg as a novelist) but Longmans in London, with Hogg in the process offering a devastating
critique of Blackwoodian forms in its tripartite narrative, which leaves its Wilson-like ‘Editor’
along with Lockhart bereft in a pastoral community whose customs and language they palpably
fail to comprehend.
Encouraged by the vogue, a number of other Edinburgh booksellers moved into the field,
most notably Oliver & Boyd, who published some 15 titles from Edinburgh between 1819 and
1829 beginning with Alexander Balfour’s Campbell; or, the Scottish Probationer, and also includ-
ing Hogg’s Winter Evening Tales (1820) and several Galt titles, these all normally in association
with the firm of Whittaker & Co in London. The substantial Oliver & Boyd Archive also reveals
that R. P. Gillies was translator of Fouqué’s The Magic Ring (1825), and that Gabriel Alexander –
one of a by now fairly long chain of underemployed advocates turning their hand to fiction –
was author of My Grandfather’s Farm (1829), the last work of fiction to be managed by the firm
during the period under consideration.4 The same records also indicate that normally a good
half of impressions were retained for distribution directly from Edinburgh (contrasting with
the 700 out of 1000 that Constable sent to Longmans of the first edition of Waverley), and that
the firm commissioned advertisements in provincial newspapers on a scale comparable to that
as arranged from London by Whittakers. Other Edinburgh booksellers account for more than
40 titles, among these Robert Cadell (Constable’s successor, who published titles by Sir Thomas
Lauder Dick and Marion and Margaret Corbett, in addition to later Waverley novels), William
Oliphant (proselytising evangelical titles in the 1820s, mainly by Grace Kennedy), and John
Anderson, junior, on North Bridge Street (four shorter fictions, including two novels by James
Wilson, identifiable as yet another Scottish advocate, then training as a barrister in London, and
not the younger brother of the Blackwoodian John Wilson, to whom the first of these, The Fire-
Eater (1823), is nevertheless dedicated). In a few cases an Edinburgh bookseller is found pub-
lishing a single title: an instance is William Hunter, in Hanover Street, who took on Tales of a
Pilgrim (1827) by Alexander Sutherland, whose four previous fictions had been issued from the
Minerva Press: an unusual, but perhaps significant, instance of a writer returning back to the
Scottish fold. (An obverse case might be found in Alexander Balfour, whose three novels follow-
ing on from his Campbell were issued by Newman in London, interpretable at the time as a
climb down in status.) In some individual cases it is possible that the Scottish market provided
the main support for the enterprise.
Certainly there is evidence of a significantly expanded indigenous readership in Edinburgh by
the mid-1820s: the subscription list in Henri Dubois’ Adolphe and Selanie (1824), published from
Edinburgh by John Carfrae & Son, includes 348 names, predominantly male and professional in
character, and with a high density of residency in the New Town squares. In an adjacent area, an
1825 catalogue of Robert Kinnear’s circulating library in Frederick Street shows that fiction
made up 70% of holdings, with the library including approximately 55% of all titles published
between 1800 and 1825, this comparing with the approximately 25% fiction found in the
earlier Old Town libraries, such as James Sibbald’s in Parliament Square, where the young
apprenticed Walter Scott might have found the fiction of Mackenzie and Burney among a welter
of more diffuse romance materials. Underlying the phenomenon too was the range of printing
activity apparent in Edinburgh by the 1820s. Examination of printers’ marks in novels reveals at
least 12 concerns other than James Ballantyne’s active in manufacturing fiction. On some occa-
sions the colophons of Edinburgh printers can be found in novels bearing London imprints,
among these Hogg’s three novels published with Longman: a concession no doubt granted by the
publisher to facilitate delivery of copy and proofing, though one that presumably would not have
been entertained had the job been considered too costly. In Hogg’s case for the last of these nov-
els, his Confessions, he was able to manoeuvre a position where the relatively obscure firm of James
Clarke was employed, this evidently allowing a much sought-after greater control of his text. In
more general terms the Edinburgh operation involved a host of ancillary operatives, including
the publishers’ house readers, and those unsung heroes the compositors, adept at turning rough
script into orderly text, and well-practised in the rendition of Scots speech into print.
Only a handful of titles in this period are found with other Scottish imprints, the result no
doubt of the centrality of Edinburgh as a publishing centre, matching in some respects the domi-
nance of London in the South. An instance of this pull might be seen in Robert Crawford’s Tales
of My Grandmother, a collection of short stories which was first published in 1824 ‘for the author’
in Ayr, and sold by a local bookseller (John Dick, Sandgate); but then bought up by Archibald
Constable, who reissued an expanded and repackaged version under his own imprint in the
following year. Just two works with Glasgow imprints are to be found in the 1820s, one of these
being Andrew Picken’s Tales and Sketches of the West of Scotland (1824), which was also issued in
the same year with an alternative Edinburgh imprint, showing Oliver & Boyd as primary pub-
lishers as opposed to Robertson & Atkinson, Glasgow. At the same time there is evidence cor-
roborating Galt’s sense of an emergent readership for fiction in the West of Scotland. As early as
Scott’s Rob Roy the demand from Glasgow and the West proved so large that delivery by waggon
had been deemed necessary, even then proving insufficient for a region that features prominently
in the novel (see Garside 1983, p. 109). Robert Trotter’s Lowran Castle (1822), printed in
Dumfries, indicates a surprising support level of support from the author’s own locality, listing
273 subscribers, the main concentration being in south-west Scotland, but with a significant
input also from north-west England. On a broader scale, the major Scottish publishing houses
can be seen moving forcefully into the industrial heartlands of the North, directly supplying
booksellers in places such as Leeds and Manchester, as well as exporting books through Liverpool
to Ireland. In this light, the considerable influence of Scotland on the young Brontë family in
Haworth might seem all the less unusual.
Seen in terms of its production, rather than through filters such as authorship by those born in
Scotland or quintessential notions of ‘Scottishness’, the Scotch novel of the 1820s takes us closer
to something resembling a material and fully-fledged form of national literature. In addition to
Edinburgh, the novels in view cover a wide range of Scottish locations, from Galloway in the
south-west to Aberdeen, from the Borders to a much-revisited Highlands, and from an agrarian
Ettrick Forest to the new industrial world of Paisley and Glasgow. Authors also interrogated a
shared history from different ideological standpoints, the ‘killing times’ of religious persecution
in the seventeenth century featuring especially a site of contestation. And while a turn to mascu-
linisation is apparent both in Scott’s influence and the Blackwoodian inner circle, the larger
cultural scene was by no means averse to significant contributions by women novelists. The
widespread use of anonymity too allowed a special kind of fluidity, with authors building up
identities through the linkage of works as ‘by the author’, then suddenly disappearing from view
or adopting different guises, and with the question of gender sometimes providing a main issue.
The centrality of Edinburgh, and the relatively small group of prolific novelists involved, also led
to a high degree of awareness of parallel writing. James Hogg for instance, as well as eagerly
following Scott’s progress, was regularly supplied with the latest titles issued by William
Blackwood. One result is an exceptional level of interaction in novels of the period. In this con-
text, as Ian Duncan (2007) has argued, the influence of Scott is best figured as dialectically
productive rather than more simply as a source of opposition or imitation. More recently, in
examining Scottish fictions from 1824, Angela Esterhammer (2020, p. 209). has observed a
literary-cultural field reminiscent of key aspects of postmodernity: ‘the market-conscious atti-
tude of writers and publishers, the prominence of consumerism and celebrity, the emergence of
genres in which fact and fiction blend into one another’.
Even by the later 1820s however there are signs of decline, with new titles published in
Edinburgh between 1827 and 1829 representing only 8% of national British output, a propor-
tion just over half that of the optimum years in mid-decade. Only 17 Edinburgh-managed nov-
els are traceable in the immediate pre-Victorian years of 1830–1836, moreover, with a further
four titles originating from Glasgow, total Scottish output forming under 4% of the main pool
of 610 titles found in the extension of the Novels Bibliography mentioned at the beginning. A
number of reasons might be adduced for this. The failures in the book trade of 1825–1826,
noticeably that of Constable who was publicly recognised as being over-committed to Scott,
undoubtedly dissuaded fellow booksellers from taking on uncertain literary commitments.
Blackwood notably by the end of the 1820s was concentrating on scientific and other
informative material, his few fiction titles stemming primarily from the Magazine, prior to the
firm effectively relocating to London in mid-century. Robert Cadell for his part turned mostly to
promoting Scott’s collected magnum opus edition (1829–1833), and its various offshoots, which
continued as a mainstay of the Scottish print industry until the Edwardian period, though
increasingly as part of a British then Imperial project. Oliver & Boyd, whose last novel in the
period as noted belongs to 1829, found safer and more familiar ground in text books and whole-
sale distribution. The removal of key figures such as Lockhart and Jeffrey to the central political
stage in London has been well recorded; less so that of a number of more ‘artisan’ Scottish writers,
such as the Paisley-born Andrew Picken, and Hogg’s fellow countryman Allan Cunningham,
attracted partly by the burgeoning trade in annuals and gift-books there. All five works of fiction
by Picken in the 1830s, some with strongly Scottish materials, were issued by London publishers
alone. An associated factor here no doubt was the increasing professionalism of the London trade
itself, not least in the field of fiction, where firms such as Colburn & Bentley and Smith, Elder &
Co. gained a strong hold on the market and on distribution. Noticeably, all of Galt’s nine titles
between 1830 and 1833 were published by leading London houses. In the case of the five man-
aged by the Colburn/Bentley concern, the long-established Edinburgh house of Bell & Bradfute
would have been the Scottish agents, but there is scant sign of this connection on any of the
imprints involved. James Thin, describing his first year as an apprentice in Edinburgh in 1836,
recalls having seen Colburn novels displayed in the windows of the firm’s premises in Bank
Street, at the top of the Mound (Thin 1905, pp. 36–37), where law books had once held sway. It
is hard to think of a stronger image of the decline of the Scotch novel from its perhaps still not
fully acknowledged ascendancy earlier in the nineteenth century.
Notes
1 Longman Archives (University of Reading), Impression 3 NLS, MS 4008, fol. 278.

Books, 4 and 5; Divide Ledger ID; Letter Books, I, 97. 4 See especially NLS, Acc. 5000/1-2, 51-52, 140, and
2 National Library of Scotland [NLS], MSS 789-92. 188-95.
References
Constable, T. (1873). Archibald Constable and His Literary Relations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (ed.
Correspondents, vol. 3. Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas. R. Myers and M. Harris), 88–118. Oxford: Oxford
Crawford, R. (2007). Scotland’s Books. London: Penguin. Polytechnic Press.
Duncan, I. (2007). Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Garside, P. (1991). Popular fiction and National Tale:
Edinburgh. Princeton and London: Princeton University hidden origins of Scott’s Waverley. Nineteenth-Century
Press. Literature 46: 30–53.
Esterhammer, A. (2020). Print and Performance in the Garside, P., Raven, J., and Schöwerling, R. (2000). The
1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity. Cambridge: English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of
Cambridge University Press. Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. Oxford:
Frey, A. (2014). The National Tale and the pseudony- Oxford University Press.
mous author: Mobile identity in the “Rosalia St. Clair” Green, S. (1824). Scotch Novel Reading; or, Modern Quackery.
novels. European Romantic Review 25 (2): 181–199. London: A. K. Newman at the Minerva Press.
Garside, P. (1983). Rob’s last raid: Scott and the publica- Grogan, C. (2016). Politics and Genre in the Works of
tion of the Waverley novels. In: Author/Publisher Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756–1816. London: Routledge.
Lockhart, J.G. (1819). Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, 2e, Oliphant, M. (1897). William Blackwood and His Sons:
3 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Their Magazine and Friends, 2 vols. Edinburgh:
Mandal, A. (ed.) (2014). Introduction. In: Self-Control (ed. Blackwood.
M. Brunton), xiii–xliii. London: Pickering & Chatto. Perkins, P. (2010). Women Writers and the Edinburgh
Marishall, J. (1789). A Series of Letters, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Enlightenment. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Printed for the author and sold by C. Elliot. Sher, R.B. (2006). The Enlightenment & the Book. Chicago:
Monnickendam, A. (2013). The Novels of Walter Scott and University Press of Chicago.
His Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Thin, J. (1905). Reminiscences of Booksellers and Bookselling
Christian Johnstone. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. in the Time of William IV. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.
Further Reading
British Fiction 1820–1829: A Database of Production, Ferris, I. (1991). The Achievement of Literary History:
Circulation & Reception http://www.british-fiction.cf. Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels. Ithaca and
ac.uk (accessed 9 August 2022). London: Cornell University Press.
The English Novel, 1830–1836 www.romtext.org.uk/resources/ Monnickendam, A. (2013). The Novels of Walter Scott and
english-novel-1830-36 (accessed 9 August 2022). His Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and
Duncan, I. (2007). Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Christian Johnstone. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Edinburgh. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Perkins, P. (2010). Women Writers and the Edinburgh
Press. Enlightenment. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Esterhammer, A. (2020). Print and Performance in the
1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
10
The Victorian Period
Kirstie Blair 1 and Michael Shaw 2
1
Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling UK
2
Lecturer in Scottish Literature, University of Stirling UK
In 1829 a poem titled ‘Ode to the Ness’ appeared in the anonymous Poems, Written in the Leisure
Hours of a Journeyman Mason. It opened:
Child of the lake whose silv'ry gleam,

Cheers the rough desert dark and lone,
A brown, deep, sullen, restless stream,
With ceaseless speed thou hurriest on.
(Miller 1829, p. 63)
Local landscape is perhaps the most predictable topic in all of nineteenth-century Scottish poetry,
and thousands of poems look like this one. The rhymes of ‘stream/gleam’, ‘lone/on’ are predict-
able, the metres are familiar, and the content is supremely unsurprising in its language and its
emphasis on the wildness and loneliness of the Highland landscape. But this poem serves to
typify Scottish literary production over the next 80 years not simply because of its content and
form, but because of its strategic aims. The ‘journeyman mason’ was self-taught writer Hugh
Miller. His famous 1854 autobiography, My Schools and Schoolmasters, told readers that he pro-
duced this poem when he was trying to find work in Inverness:
My verses, thought I, are at least tolerably correct: could I not get one or two copies introduced into
the poet's corner of the Inverness Courier or Journal, and thus show that I have literature enough to be
trusted with the cutting of an epigraph on a gravestone?
(Miller 1854, p. 398)

The Victorian Period 117
He therefore dashed off ‘Ode to the Ness’. Though, looking back, he notes that it had ‘more of the
advertisement in it than is quite seemly’, he was at the time upset that editors rejected it, since he
had mentioned it to home friends who would now ‘regard me as an incompetent blockhead who
could not write rhymes good enough for a newspaper’ (Miller 1854, p. 412). As Miller well knew,
his poem had no great literary merit, yet it wasn’t notably worse than others which appeared in
the poetry columns. And indeed, when he submitted it with a larger collection of poems to the
Inverness Courier, the editor was impressed, befriended him, and published the collection.
In ‘Ode to the Ness’, the literary production of works romanticising the beauty of the
Highlands intersects with advertising culture, with the rise of the local newspaper press, and
with a very Victorian autobiographical narrative of self-help via literary education. The poem is
a ‘journeyman’ production: Miller quite explicitly describes it as what we might now call a
write-by-numbers attempt. But it did ultimately achieve its end, which was to connect this
aspiring young working man with newspaper and periodical culture. As a geologist, naturalist,
religious writer, poet and journalist who published all his major works first in the periodical or
newspaper press, Miller is representative of the kind of polymath literary career made possible by
the rise of a thriving press in Victorian Scotland. And he was also, during and after his lifetime,
represented as the Scottish Victorian man of the period: a model of the best of Scottish character
and intelligence, for others to follow. (The fact of his mental breakdown and suicide, likely
related both to religious controversies and overwork, tended to be glossed over.) A letter asking
for donations for the Miller centenary institute in 1902, for instance, was widely circulated in
newspapers in the Anglophone colonies, on the basis that ‘The Scottish people have always been
proud of Hugh Miller’s achievements in science and literature, and the whole story of his life has
been felt to be an inspiration to his countrymen’ (J. Bain, ‘Centenary of Hugh Miller’, Otago
Daily Times, 6 March 1902, p. 5). This included expatriate countrymen: in New Zealand, cente-
nary commentators noted that the Otago Witness was named after Miller’s Free Presbyterian
Church periodical, and that his Witness circulated widely amongst early settlers.
Miller is a good example of the kind of writer mid-late Victorian commentators had in mind when
they extolled Scotland’s unique literary culture. The literature of Victorian Scotland, sandwiched as it
is between the excitements of the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, and the Scottish Renaissance,
has often seemed less distinctive and less influential than late eighteenth century and early twentieth-
century developments, or influential only in a negative sense. It is accurate to say that most Victorian
Scottish writers rarely escaped – or tried to escape – the lasting impact of Robert Burns and Walter
Scott, and that they invested in forms of Scottishness which Burns and Scott had made possible. It is
also true that many major writers born in Scotland in this period – Thomas Carlyle, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle – produced some of their most significant works outside Scotland, as
part of cosmopolitan literary circles in London and further afield. And while Hugh MacDiarmid’s
various judgements of Victorian Scottish writers as ‘entirely destitute of intellectual equipment ade-
quate to work of international calibre, or even of national calibre comparatively considered’, and
invested in ‘the mindless v ulgarities of parochial poetasters and the cold-haggis-and-gingerbeer atroc-
ities of prose Kailyardism’ (MacDiarmid 1995, pp. 101, 42) are deliberate exaggerations, his judge-
ment of literary quality, by his own terms and those of his period, was not wholly unfounded. Most
literary work published in the Scottish press, or that made it to small-scale volume publication (for
instance the more than 2000 volumes of Victorian verse in the Mitchell Library’s Scottish Poetry
Collection) is much closer to ‘Ode to the Ness’ than to ‘work of international calibre’.
What is dismissed in these judgements, however, is the crucial importance of Victorian
Scottish literature as popular literature, by and for ‘the people’, exemplified by writers like
Miller. As William Donaldson first outlined in his seminal 1986 study, and as more recent
studies have confirmed, a ‘grassroots’ view of literary activity in Victorian Scotland reveals a
remarkable array of writing which reflected on industry and labour, religion and science,
Empire and emigration, domestic and political life and local and global affairs (see Blair 2019).
These themes have also been explored recently in Victorian Scottish Literature more broadly by
such critics as Julia Reid 2006; Sarah Dunnigan and Shu-Fang Lai 2019; Tanya Cheadle 2020;
Michael Shaw 2020; and Juliet Shields 2021. During this period Scotland became a major
industrial power, heavily invested in the affairs of the British Empire while also developing its
own nascent nationalism, and Scottish popular culture in the form of songs, poems, theatre,
music-hall and popular fiction, spread across the globe. What we might now call the ‘soft
power’ of Scottish literature and culture was remarkably effective, and this intersection between
local and global is vital in considering what can seem like parochialism in Scottish Victorian
literature in English and Scots.
In this chapter we survey some of the individuals, works, and movements which are indicative
of the wider body of Victorian Scottish literature. The first half of the chapter, by Blair, selects
two further representative working-class writers, active in the early-mid Victorian period, as
examples of the ways in which local newspaper authors used their works to reflect upon and
intervene in the industrial and political landscapes of Victorian Scotland. The second part of the
chapter, by Shaw, considers the rise of the ‘kailyard’ and the shifting perspectives on Scottish
literary culture near the end of the century, as movements like the Celtic Revival and New
Woman writing gained importance, with Scottish writers making influential contributions to
such international developments. Though we concentrate on named authors and works here, it
is also important to recognise that publications such as anonymous and pseudonymous broad-
sides, the oral traditions of songs and spoken word performances, and the world of popular thea-
tre and music-hall, were as significant in Scottish literary culture as any individual author of the
early-mid Victorian period (see, for instance, Maloney 2003). This is also true of fiction, where
thousands more readers encountered unsigned newspaper serials like David Pae’s The Factory
Girl; or the Dark Places of Glasgow (serialised 1860) than published novels by Scottish authors.
Comic Scots prose, again often published anonymously or pseudonymously, was another
influential genre which the Scottish press became known for, with characters like Tammas
Bodkin, authored by William Latto, achieving international recognition. And amid the focus on
fiction and poetry here, it is vital to note that the best-known Victorian Scottish writers were
often not primarily novelists or poets (though they may have written in these genres) but prose
writers in different genres. They include Robert Chambers, and his enormously controversial
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), as well as his works on Scottish history and cul-
ture; Samuel Smiles, author of the seminal text of mid-Victorian ‘improving’ culture, Self-Help
(1859); and David Livingstone, whose reputation and representation by other authors was as
important as his own publications, such as Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857).
That Chambers, Smiles, Livingstone and Thomas Carlyle all lacked privileged backgrounds
added further to the mythology of Scotland as adept at producing self-made men. And while
there were no women authors, at least in the earlier part of this period, who achieved the level of
household recognition of these male prose writers, there are a number of Scottish women writers
whose work is now recognised as making a substantive contribution to Scottish literary, journal-
istic and political culture, including Helen Macfarlane, first translator of the Communist Manifesto
for the Red Republican, and the writers and journalists examined in the second half of this chapter,
such as Mona Caird and Lady Florence Dixie.
One of the lasting legacies of Victorian Scottish literature, at least as perceived from the perspec-
tive of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was the entry of a host of self-taught
working-class writers into the literary sphere. As in the opening example from Miller, these
writers are important because their efforts depended on, and in turn supported, the Scottish press
and periodical culture. There are many such writers to choose from. I focus here on two Glasgow
and Lanarkshire names, James Nicholson (1822–1897) and Janet Hamilton (1795–1873),
because both are good examples of the intersections of class, religion and politics in Scots verse.
They are also representative of a hugely important and neglected influence on early-mid Victorian
Scottish literature: the temperance movement. As a leading working- class woman poet,
Hamilton’s writings have been anthologized and attracted some scholarly attention (see
Boos 2001, 2012; Kossick 2017), whereas Nicholson is less known, though he would have been
a familiar name to Scottish readers in the period.
Nicholson produced a significant autobiography, which was submitted for and won a prize in
a Glasgow Commonwealth competition for working men’s autobiographies in 1853, and then
subsequently reprinted in some of his collections. It outlines his childhood labour, including as
a herd-boy, and his miscellaneous education through reading whatever he could access, and even-
tually learning to write as a tailor’s apprentice. His writing career followed a typical trajectory
for aspiring working-class writers. First, he got his poems accepted by religious magazines, then
he managed to place poems and prose pieces in Cassell’s Working Man’s Friend and do well in their
competitions, expand his reach into the wider periodical press including the People’s Friend, and
gain enough name recognition that he could publish his first volumes by subscription. Moving
to Glasgow as the tailor overseer in the Govan Poorhouse, he eventually became well-known as
a Scots poet, a temperance stage performer and advocate, and an amateur naturalist and astrono-
mer. His book publications included Father Fernie, the Botanist (1868), a semi-autobiographical
story designed to educate young readers about the natural world; Nightly Wanderings in the Garden
of the Sky (1881), a collection of pieces on astronomy from the People’s Friend; The Phenomena of the
Unseen (1866), on spiritualism; and several volumes of poetry, including one co-authored with
his daughter Ellen Nicolson, also a People’s Friend poet.
Nicholson’s poetry moves between Scots and English, and includes substantial amounts of
sentimental ‘village life’ verse, pastoral, comic and nursery verse (for and about cute children).
But he was also one of the many Glasgow working-class poets who wrote poems about working
people and the dignity of labour (e.g. ‘Who Are the Heroes?’ Nicholson 1863, p. 156), and
poems on international political movements dear to Scottish writers (‘Lament for Garibaldi’,
Nicholson 1863, p. 150). Two particularly notable poems in his longest collection, Kilwuddie and
Other Poems, are both concerned with the Loch Katrine water project. One of Victorian Britain’s
greatest engineering feats, this brought water from a new dam at Loch Katrine in the Trossachs
through tunnels, aqueducts, and bridges, down to the rapidly expanding industrial city of
Glasgow. Work began in 1855 and was completed in 1859, with further works in the 1880s.
The Loch Katrine project was not uncontroversial, partly because of its scale and expense, and at
least in part because it involved interfering with a natural location famed via its presence in
Walter Scott’s poems. Scotland’s poets wrote extensively about Loch Katrine, because this project
supplied a means to connect the established ode to Scottish scenery with patriotic verse about
Britain’s world‑leading engineering, while also enabling reflection on the state of Glasgow. Any
water-related project also enabled writers to build in commentary on the horrors of alcohol.
Nicholson’s ‘A Welcome to the Waters of Loch Katrine’ is a celebratory poem in standard

English, representing these pure mountain streams as bringing light and hope to the slums of
Glasgow:
Throughout her mighty system of tunnel and tube and main,

Thy healthful current is pulsing, pulsing through every vein;
In the fever den, in the attic, in cellars under the street,
The poor have long been waiting to quaff thy waters sweet.
(Nicholson 1863, p. 164)
Engineering works are imagined as a network connecting city to country. Once the water flows
from these veins through the veins of city dwellers, it will revive and purify them, both physi-
cally and, Nicholson hopes, spiritually:
O would thy gushing waters might quench for ever and aye
Those fountains of fiery ruin that lead men’s souls astray;
That drunkeries all were abolished, and, planted in their stead,
The reading-room and the school-room, and shops for the sale of bread!
These fountains, like the ‘veins’ above, are literal as well as metaphorical, since Nicholson is
commenting on the easy access people had to cheap alcohol in the city. His second ode is a Scots
song, ‘Oor New Caller Water’, to the tune of ‘Bonnie Dundee’. Also a temperance song, it has a
comic focus on the cleanliness of Loch Katrine water as opposed to the creatures that live in
Glasgow city water, and on the misdoings of the Glasgow council and big business in the city:
In bonnie loch Katrine there’s nae siccan things,

For the red deer hae legs an’ the muircocks hae wings,
Unless some big spate bring us doon in our need
A dish o’ braw trouts or a Hielan’ sheep-head.
Wi’ their braw whisky palaces, puddocks, an’ mud,
Our provost and bailies’ll drive us clean wud,
An’ the loons o’ St Rollox wad poison us a’,
But the water’ll wash ilka nuisance awa.
St Rollox Chemical Works was, at this time, the largest of its kind in the world. The allusion to
it typifies the ambiguous attitude of the Glaswegian speaker in this poem, simultaneously proud
of the city’s achievements, and anxious about pollution, drink and poverty, and about the failure
of the city authorities to deal with these environmental and social hazards.
Though Victorian Scottish authors have sometimes been accused of retreating into nostalgia
and ignoring the realities of a newly industrialised nation, this is not borne out by the concerns
of the many local writers who relied, like Miller and Nicholson, on periodical publication. Nor
were Scottish writers purely concerned with Scottish affairs. The 1880s memorial volume which
constitutes the largest selection of working-class writer Janet Hamilton’s poems and prose writ-
ings contains, for instance, three separate poems on Poland, and a number on her support for the
Italian Risorgimento, for which she was recognised by a visit from Garibaldi’s son. Though
Hamilton was represented as a determinedly local writer in an introductory essay by Alexander

Wallace – ‘she has never seen a mountain, nor the sea, nor any river but the Clyde…she has never
been the distance of twenty miles from her humble dwelling’ (Hamilton 1885, p. 19) – this did
not prevent her from expressing strong political opinions on national and international affairs,
on topics ranging from American slavery to the running of trains on Sundays. Hamilton married
young and had a large family while engaging in textile work from home, she did not start to
publish until old age, when she was blind, and she never formally learned to write: her works
were generally recorded by her son. She became well-known in the area as a newspaper author for
the Hamilton Advertiser and other papers, and as an advocate for temperance, especially female
temperance (though her politics elsewhere could verge on the radical, she was deeply conserva-
tive on women’s place in society). As a North Lanarkshire author, Hamilton also lived through
the rapid industrialisation of her immediate area, and her poems reflect on this. Verses on
‘Gartsherrie’ remember a visit to an old house and its inhabitants, on the site of Gartsherrie
Works:
Noo the bodies are gane an’ their dwallin’s awa’

An’ the place whaur they stood I scarce ken noo ava,
For there’s roarin’ o’ steam an’ there’s reengin’ o’ wheels,
Men workin,’ an’ sweatin’, an’ swearin’ like deils.
An’ the flame-tappit furnaces staun’ in a raw,
A’ bleezin’ an’ blawin’ an’ smeekin’ awa,’
Their eerie licht brichtenin’ the laigh hingin’ cluds,
Gleamin’ far ower the loch an’ the mirk lanely wuds.
(Hamilton 1885, p. 168)
Hamilton wrote in both Scots and English, and perhaps one of the most notable aspects of her
use of Scots is how she used it as a language of industry, with repeated verbs, as here, often serv-
ing to convey the incessant noise and motion of industrial labour. This poem, though in part a
lament for the lost villages and customs of her childhood, is not a rejection of industrialism: she
approves of Gartsherrie’s modernity and importance, and of the paternalistic attitude of its well-
known owners, the Bairds.
Nicholson and Hamilton were significant contributors to the dissemination of lively Scots
verse in the popular press. Like the vast majority of authors in Victorian Scotland, they could not
have made a living from their writing, though it may have supplemented their income. Both
represented key themes of early-mid Scottish Victorian culture, including an interest in religious
change (especially post the 1843 Disruption and the establishment of the Free Church); a heavy
investment in the moral and educational improvement of the working classes; a generally liberal
political outlook and a support for causes such as European nationalism, American abolitionism,
and electoral Reform in Britain; an investment in industrial change and growth and the chal-
lenges it brought; and a patriotism evident in multiple poems on Wallace, Bruce, Burns, and
‘auld mither Scotland’. Their writings do engage in a sentimental valorisation of Scottish land-
scape, traditions and culture. But they also discuss key issues facing modern Scotland, such as
emigration and Irish immigration, the Highland clearances, poverty and homelessness, and, as
in the poems cited here, the changing environment and the development of industry. Poems on
Loch Katrine and Gartsherrie speak to local issues which were immediately visible, especially
since these poems first appeared in the local newspaper columns. Yet they are also commentaries
on modernity and on a changing Scotland, where the beautiful lochs famed in song and story
were exploited and channelled to serve the needs of a growing city population, and reflected the
blaze of industry in their waters.
The previous section demonstrates how enmeshed Scottish popular poetry was in modernity dur-
ing the Victorian period. This section will forward these points by illustrating that late-Victorian
Scottish literature, especially prose fiction, (which has similarly been demeaned on the basis of
its parochialism, escapism and nostalgia) was also engaged in the key questions facing modern
Scotland, from the position of women and the rise of socialism to the Land Wars, Home Rule,
empire and migration. A concept that has become near-synonymous with late-Victorian Scottish
literature, and its supposed sentimental parochialism, is ‘the Kailyard school’. J.H. Millar
was the first critic to group together those works of J.M. Barrie, S.R. Crockett and Ian Maclaren
that focussed on small Scottish towns and local ministers and label them ‘kailyard’ (meaning
cabbage patch). While there was much early critical appreciation for these ‘kailyard’ texts, a
resistance to them grew quickly based on their supposed sentimentality and nostalgia. Millar
himself mockingly noted Maclaren’s ‘diseased craving for the pathetic’ (Millar 1895, p. 385),
while the novelist George Douglas Brown explicitly expressed his desire to resist the supposed
‘sentimental slop’ of Barrie, Crockett and Maclaren through his novel, The House with the Green
Shutters (cited in Nash 2007, p. 40). Indeed, from its first paragraphs, we are invited to read The
House with the Green Shutters (1901) against ‘kailyard’ texts through the subtle allusions to Barrie’s
(similarly titled) A Window in Thrums (1889): in both openings, the local brae and yellowing are
mentioned, and while Barrie depicts ‘flung’ ropes in his opening paragraph, Brown includes
‘flung’ water. Building on such critiques of sentimentality and nostalgia, the term kailyard
gradually morphed into a critical foil over the twentieth century, a term used ‘to sum up what
critics take to be wrong ways of writing about Scotland’ (Nash 2007, p. 14).
But when we turn to late-Victorian ‘kailyard’ texts, the tropes of sentimentality, nostalgia and
‘a tendency to evade social or industrial issues’ can prove distracting and reductive (Nash 2007,
p. 14). The first text that Millar discusses in his essay on the Kailyard is Barrie’s The Little
Minister (1891), which was initially serialised in Good Words, a periodical with a Christian focus.
But while the novel’s protagonist is a minister, it can hardly be called a portrait of humble and
religious life; the central plotline concerns Gavin Dishart, the new Auld Licht Minister’s adora-
tion for the enigmatic ‘gypsy’, Babbue (who he us married to in a ‘gypsy wedding’). Rather than
evading social and industrial issues, the novel is set against the backdrop of a Chartist uprising
in Thrums (a fictionalised Kirriemuir), and it subtly suggests the violence, discontents and
rebellions of the people of Thrums. Barrie renders the neglect of husbands to their wives through
Adam Dishart’s treatment of Margaret, as well as Margaret’s bigamous marriage to Gavin Ogilvy.
Sentimental Tommy (1896) subverts the idealised rural life further in depicting Grizel’s mother,
the Painted Lady, as a prostitute. When writing the novel, Barrie told Robert Louis Stevenson
that he was ‘at a queer situation just now, a little girl going to several respectable gentlemen, and
asking them not to come to her mother’s house alone at night any more. You understand?’
(Shaw 2020, p. 146). In these texts, Barrie doesn’t simply reproduce piety but reveals the social,
inter-personal and psychological tensions (and scandals) that lie beneath its appearance in
small-town Scotland. Within these contexts, it’s easier to understand why Stevenson told Henry
James that Barrie was a writer with ‘guts’ (cited in Shaw 2020, p. 17).
Famously, works by these ‘kailyard’ authors were spectacularly popular in international mar-
kets. For instance, The Bookman’s bestseller lists for America reveal that Ian Maclaren’s Beside the
Bonnie Briar Bush was the bestselling novel in America in 1895 (and his The Days of Auld Lang
Syne was the sixth), while Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy and Margaret Ogilvy both featured in the
top 10 for 1897. Barrie was widely translated and ‘kailyard’ writings were also ‘devoured’ in
England (Millar, p. 384), which puzzled Andrew Lang who couldn’t understand how English
people could get their heads around the Scots vernacular in Barrie’s writing, noting that he ‘was
baffled’ by it (Lang 1899, p. 384). But it’s easier to grasp the international success of these works
when we think of the Kailyard as part of an international trend, rather than a peculiarly Scottish
phenomenon or condition. In the late nineteenth century, there was an international craze for
local or regional fiction. Indeed, when J. H. Millar first discussed ‘kailyard’ fiction, he wrote that
Barrie, Crockett and Maclaren were aligned to a wider literary and political project: ‘the revolt
of the provinces against the centre – against London’ (Millar 1895, p. 384). Growing cross-
cultural worries about centralisation and the power of the metropolis fed a widespread desire for
local and (even alienating) vernacular writing.
A further stereotype of late-Victorian Scottish life is that it was defined by sexual propriety
and concerted observance of the separate gendered spheres, a stereotype invoked in Willa Muir’s
1936 book-length essay, ‘Mrs Grundy in Scotland’, which presents a commentary on attitudes
towards women and sex in Victorian Scotland. Muir’s opening chapter notes that Mrs. Grundy
(a ubiquitous personification of propriety and prudishness in the Victorian period) had to find a
new home in the late nineteenth century, as she was under threat from the new woman and the
‘the young men of the Naughty Nineties’ in England. As a consequence, Muir notes that
Mrs. Grundy decided to put her roots in ‘the Northern Kingdom’, for Mrs. Grundy ‘can always
find a home in Scotland’ (Muir 1996, p. 9). Combining with her Scottish equivalent,
‘Mrs MacGrundy’, who was dedicated to Sabbatarianism, fiddle breaking and sanctimonious-
ness, they worked together to stress that ‘no woman could possibly become the head of anything’
(Muir 1996, p. 57). But Victorian Scotland was not as hospitable to Grundy as Muir suggests:
new woman writers, a culture of fin-de-siècle dissidence, and literary interrogations of sexual
conservatism (all threatening Grundy’s ideals) took root in Scotland too.
Indeed, some of the most radical new woman novelists of the late-Victorian period were
Scottish, including Lady Florence Dixie, Jane Hume Clapperton and Mona Caird, whose essay
‘Marriage’ (1888) in The Westminster Review defined the failures of the institution of marriage and
prompted a furious public (and satirical) backlash. Dixie was a war correspondent, suffragist and
travel writer, and her feminist utopian novel Gloriana; or, the Revolution of 1900 (1890) explicitly
invokes and challenges Mrs. Grundy and her laws of propriety (Dixie 1890, p. 29). Gloriana
details the dream of Maremna, a child who appears to be situated in Scotland, at one with the
‘mountain crag’, ‘straths’, ‘corries’, ‘rugged glens’ and ‘red deer’ (Dixie 1890, p. 3). Maremna’s
dream focuses on Gloria, a young girl whose mother, Speranza, has been in an abusive marriage.
Gloria decides that she will pose as a man (Hector D’Estrange) to get into Eton and then gain the
power to win women’s rights. The novel charts her various challenges and successes: for instance,
Gloria enters the House of Commons as D’Estrange, who serves as a member for the Douglasdale
division of Dumfriesshire, and carries ‘his’ Woman’s Suffrage Bill by a large majority. The
D’Estrangeites are supported in the Commons by the Scottish, Irish and Welsh Home Rulers,
with D’Estrange indicating his personal support for Home Rule (reflecting Dixie’s own support)
and his belief that the centralised parliament is holding back progress, including women’s eman-
cipation. By the time of her death (and burial at Glenuig Bay), Gloria has lived to witness
women’s emancipation and the establishment of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh parliaments.
Clapperton’s Margaret Dunmore: or, A Socialist Home (1888) similarly puts forward a feminist uto-
pian vision, but instead focuses on a radical reconceptualisation of domestic life and roles.
Other Victorian writers were more ambiguous in their feminism: Ann Heilmann notes that
some of Margaret Oliphant’s views on women and marriage might appear to align her with Mrs.
Grundy, but her later protagonists – including the titular character of Kirsteen (1890) – exhibit
new-woman traits, including self-will and independence as they enter the workforce. As Heilmann
writes, Oliphant oscillated between ‘cautious support for, and mistrust of, nineteenth-century
feminism’ (Heilmann 1999, p. 215). Such examples or radical and tentative feminism reveal
that Victorian Scotland was no more removed from the culture of first-wave feminism than
other nations. Some male writers in Scotland were also quick to scold Mrs. Grundy: the words
‘Sic Transit Gloria Grundi’, heralding the passing of Mrs. Grundy, appeared on the front cover of
The Pagan Review (1892), a magazine edited by a Scottish friend of Mona Caird’s, William
Sharp, who put forward proto-feminist and sexual liberationist ideas in his introduction to the
magazine.
Like Scotland’s supposed ‘Kailyard’ fiction, its Celtic Revival has often been associated with a
retreat from socio-political realities, into the romance and glamour of twilight (contrasting with
the common understanding of the Irish Revival, which fed directly into Irish politics). Certainly,
some writers, notably Sharp – writing through his heteronym, Fiona Macleod, who was acknowl-
edged as Scotland’s leading figure of the Celtic Revival – traded in associating the Highlands
with mystique, legend and death. But even in writings where Macleod acknowledges that she is
‘of the passing race’, a typical expression of Celtic defeatism, she also expresses defiance against
the socio-political forces that are undermining the life and culture of the Isles and the Highlands,
including deer stalking and sheep farming. In The Washer of the Ford (1896), she hopefully relates
a prophecy that the forests will move south ‘and there will be lack, then, not of deer and of sheep,
but of hunters and shepherds’ (Macleod 1896, p. 230). One of Scotland’s main Celtic Revival
magazines, The Evergreen, published by the Edinburgh-based sociologist and town planner,
Patrick Geddes, spoke directly to contemporary debates around Scottish nationalism; for the first
issue, Geddes (a tentative Home Ruler) contributed his essay, ‘The Scots Renascence’, bearing
seeds of the (more committedly nationalist) Scottish Renaissance of the twentieth century. While
there is a Scottish and Celtic focus to The Evergreen, it is remarkable for its determined cosmopoli-
tanism and inclusion of European, symbolist texts, as well as illustrations that owe debts to
Aubrey Beardsley and decadence. Indeed, the gender bending of Sharp and Dixie’s Gloria are just
two examples of Scottish literary queerness in this period, which would benefit from more situ-
ation within the contexts of nineteenth-century sexology, decadence, and the media panic over
homosexuality.
While the Celtic Revivalism associated with Sharp and Geddes was far more focussed on reviv-
ing myth, culture and race than it was on language, a Gaelic Revival took hold in Scotland and
sometimes intersected with Geddes and Sharp’s efforts (language activists contributed to The
Evergreen and William Sharp issued animated praise for Alexander Carmichael’s collection of
Gaelic folklore and literature, Carmina Gadelica, in 1900). Gaelic revivalism was supported by the
formation of such institutions as An Comunn Gàidhealach (founded in 1891) and through promi-
nent and vocal writers like Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr. Victorian Gaelic literature could be deeply
politically engaged, especially over land reform and clearance, which is clearly reflected in the
poetry of Mary Macpherson, or Màiri Mhòr nan Òran (Big Mary of the Songs). Macpherson had risen
to prominence through her political poetry on the Inverness burgh elections in 1874 and used her
work to advance the cause of the crofters and land reform. In ‘Incitement of the Gaels’, prompted
by the 1885 parliamentary election campaigns when the Crofters’ Party took several seats, she
evokes the dispossession experienced by those living in the Highlands and Islands:
Ma thog neach eisir ann an cliabh,

No maorach ann am meadhon mara,
Théid an cur fo ghlais’s fo dhìon,
Le laghan diongmhalt’ dìon an fhearainn.
If someone lifts a creel with an oyster,
or in the open sea they find a clam,
they’ll be apprehended and locked away
under the law protecting the land.
(Macpherson 1991, pp. 92–93)
The land and its profitability are protected, not the locals; for them, to simply subsist is a crime.
Macpherson doesn’t pull her punches in the poem, taking direct aim at William Ivory, Sheriff of
Inverness, and those who try to bribe or deceive people into boarding boats for Canada.
Macpherson wasn’t alone: the radical Glaswegian poet Marion Bernstein, for instance, attacked
those orchestrating clearance in her poem ‘The Highland Laird’s Song’. Although Macpherson’s
work was not collected until 1891, in Dain agus Orain Ghaidhlig, it is striking that neither she
nor Bernstein, nor any women, featured in George Douglas’s anthology, Contemporary Scottish
Verse (1893). Other anthologies, such as Women’s Voices (1887) and Lyra Celtica (1896), both
edited by Elizabeth Sharp, made efforts to showcase contemporary Scottish women poets.
A recurring complaint of twentieth-century criticism on Victorian Scottish literature is that
it seemed ‘incapable of contributing to the great realist tradition of the nineteenth-century
novel’ (Noble 1985, p. 64). This is a problematic claim in itself (not least because many Scottish
texts in this period are concerned with the relationship between realism and romance) but it also
distracts from the fact that Victorian Scottish literature was making important contributions to
a huge range of other key Victorian genres. George Macdonald is often credited as being a pio-
neer of modern fantasy fiction; his 1858 novel Phantastes had a profound influence on C. S. Lewis.
Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) not only became a key example of the
urban gothic, which Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Arthur Machen’s The
Great God Pan (1894) owe debts to, but it also anticipates H. G. Wells’s science fiction novels.
Detective fiction was by no means invented by Arthur Conan Doyle, but his Sherlock Holmes
stories (beginning in 1887) have become synonymous with it. Victorian adventure fiction was
advanced by Stevenson’s Jacobite era romances and nautical fiction, such as Kidnapped (1886) and
The Ebb-Tide, written with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne (1894), and such adventure fiction
became a key site to scrutinise High Imperialism, speaking to an increased scepticism towards
empire at the end of the nineteenth century. The socialist MP Robert Bontine Cunninghame
Graham used his short stories to question imperialist ideology, while Stevenson’s The Beach of
Falesá (1892) offers a deeply ironic presentation of (corrupting) imperialist attitudes; it also
marks a turn towards realism through his unpicking of the imperial gothic. Alongside Stevenson,
several Scottish writers contributed to an emerging neo-Jacobitism in this period, including the
poet, Douglas Ainslie and Andrew Lang. Lang’s Fairy Books – a multi-volume collection of fairy
stories – also reflect Scotland’s important contributions to children’s literature at this time, not
least through Treasure Island (1881–1882) and the emergence of Peter Pan. Considering this
(limited) list, it is clear that Victorian Scottish literature, rather than being characterised by a
‘lack’, was one of the most vibrant and influential periods in Scottish literature.
References
Blair, K. (2019). Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: MacDiarmid, H. (1995 [1925–1927]). Contemporary
Poetry, Press, Community. Oxford: Oxford University Scottish Studies (ed. A. Riach). Manchester: Carcanet.
Press. Macleod, F. (1896). The Washer of the Ford and Legendary
Boos, F. (2001). The “Homely Muse” in her diurnal set- Moralities. Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes and
ting: the periodical poems of “Marie,” Janet Hamilton, Colleagues.
and Fanny Forrester. Victorian Poetry 39 (2): 255–286. Macpherson, M. (1991 [1891]). Incitement of the Gaels.
Boos, F. (2012). Janet Hamilton: working-class memoir- In: An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets. (trans.
ist and commentator. In: The Edinburgh Companion to M. Bateman (ed. C. Kerrigan), 90–94. Edinburgh:
Scottish Women’s Writing (ed. G. Norquay), 63–74. Edinburgh University Press.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Maloney, P. (2003). Scotland and the Music Hall, 1850–1914.
Cheadle, T. (2020). Sexual Progressives: Rethinking Intimacy Manchester: Manchester University Press.
in Late Victorian Scotland. Manchester: Manchester Millar, J.H. (1895). The literature of the Kailyard. New
University Press. Review 12: 384–394.
Dixie, F. (1890). Gloriana; or, the Revolution of 1900. Miller, H. (1829). Poems, Written in the Leisure Hours of a
London: Henry and Company. Journeyman Mason. Inverness: R. Carruthers.
Donaldson, W. (1986). Popular Literature in Victorian Miller, H. (1854). My Schools and Schoolmasters, or The
Scotland: Language, Fiction and the Press. Aberdeen: Story of My Education. Edinburgh: Johnstone and
Aberdeen University Press. Hunter.
Dunnigan, S. and Lai, S.F. (ed.) (2019). The Land of Muir, W. (1996 [1936]). Mrs Grundy in Scotland. In:
Storybooks: Scottish Children’s Literature in the Long Imagined Selves (ed. K. Allen). Edinburgh: Canongate.
Nineteenth Century. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Nash, A. (2007). Kailyard and Scottish Literature.
Literary Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Hamilton, J. (1885). Poems, Sketches and Essays. Glasgow: Nicholson, J. (1863). Kilwuddie and Other Poems. Glasgow:
James Maclehose. Scottish Temperance League.
Heilmann, A. (1999). Mrs Grundy’s rebellion: Margaret Noble, A. (1985). Urbane silence: Scottish writing and
Oliphant between orthodoxy and the new woman. the nineteenth-century city. In: Perspectives of the Scottish
Women’s Writing 6: 215–237. City (ed. G. Gordon), 64–90. Aberdeen: Aberdeen
Kossick, K. (2017). “And aft They Dear Doric aside I Hae University Press.
Flung, to Busk oot My Sang wi’ the Prood Southron Reid, J. (2006). Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin
Tongue”: the antiphonal muse in Janet Hamilton’s de Siecle. London: Palgrave.
poetics. In: A History of British Working-Class Literature Shaw, M. (ed.) (2020). A Friendship in Letters: Robert Louis
(ed. J. Goodridge and B. Keegan), 208–225. Stevenson and J. M. Barrie. Inverness: Sandstone.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shields, J. (2021). Scottish Women’s Writing in the Long
Lang, A. (1899). At the sign of the ship. Longman’s Nineteenth Century: The Romance of Everyday Life.
Magazine 33: 376–384. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further Reading
Shaw, M. (2020). The Fin- de-

Siècle Scottish Revival:
Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
11
Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish
Literary Revival
Scott Lyall
Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland
The Scottish literary renaissance is a paradox. Imagining Scottish history as a series of catastrophes –
Reformation, Union, Enlightenment, industrialisation – the renaissance sought rebirth in the
nation’s cultural past (Gifford 2004: passim). Critics usually locate such inconsistencies in Hugh
MacDiarmid’s positions; David Goldie (2004, p. 54), for one, argues that the poet’s work pre-
sents an ‘uneasy combination of revolutionary and reactionary impulses’. However, as Tom Nairn
(1981a, p. 141) points out, ‘the dilemma of nationalist movements is that they have to gaze
backwards […] in order to leap forward’. This chapter surveys the work of MacDiarmid and
other key contributors to the literature of the period and finds that the renaissance’s paradoxes
developed from its liminal nature as a movement for cultural renewal caught between rural roots
and urban modernity, belief and secularity, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, writing in Scots
or English. Consideration of key themes – origins and aims, language, rurality, religion, and
politics – reveals that the renaissance’s contradictions reflect what Nairn (1981b: passim)
described as the Janus-faced nature of nationalism, which looks to the past in order to create a
national future while at the same time repudiating parts of that history.
Pasts and Futures
The renaissance is generally understood as an inter-war movement prompted by a culturally

nationalist response to the First World War (McCulloch 2009, pp. 4–6). As novelist George
Blake (1932, p. 158) put it: ‘A “consciousness of Scottishness” came to us all after the War’.
Although the Scottish Home Rule Bill of 1913 was stalled by the outbreak of war

(Cameron 2011, p. 98), in the war’s aftermath began the fragmentation of the British Empire
with the strengthening of the independent identity of the Dominions as well as the creation of
new nations protected by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and the League of Nations (1920)
(Krol 2020, pp. 1–3). The Scottish renaissance was among a number of global post-war cultural
revivals to emerge from the loosening of older imperial formations.
Violet Jacob (2014, p. 23) wrote several poems of loss relating to the war, including ‘To
A.H.J.’ for her son who was killed at the Somme; Jacob remembers in this English-language
poem the importance of the landscape and dialect of Angus to the dead soldier: ‘Her Grampians,
faint and blue,/Her ways, the speech you knew so well,/Were half the world to you’. The topog-
raphy of regional Scotland is important to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932) and Neil M.
Gunn’s Highland River (1937). Each novel describes the war as representing the end of a local way
of life while also suggesting, in the form of Modernist pastoral (Hubble 2018: passim), that some
sanctuary and healing are found from the lunacy of war in the landscapes of home. It was during
wartime that MacDiarmid, then C.M. Grieve (1988, p. 13) of the Royal Army Medical Corps,
resolved upon his mission of reviving Scottish literary culture, promising to return home to
‘enter heart and body and soul into a new Scots Nationalist propaganda’. War generated new
cultural and political particularities and priorities.
Framing the renaissance as a post-war movement suggests its links to Modernism but under-
plays its connections to the fin-de-siècle Celtic Revival led by Patrick Geddes, who proposed a ‘Scots
Renascence’ in the first edition of The Evergreen. Geddes (1895, pp. 136–137) highlighted a ‘widely
reviving Literature of Locality’ in the 1890s, providing a basis for the localism of the later renais-
sance. Despite claiming in the first editorial (August, 1922) of The Scottish Chapbook that the Celtic
Revival was ‘a promise that could not be kept’ (MacDiarmid 1992a, p. 6), MacDiarmid (1966,
pp. 80–81) would later praise Geddes as a pioneer in the Scottish generalist tradition in The
Company I’ve Kept. Writing to MacDiarmid in 1925, Geddes (2011, p. 17) proposed the unification
of ‘all our scattered movements of synthetic & constructive & progressive character’ into a ‘synthetic
movement’, so relating the Geddesian revival to the Scottish renaissance and MacDiarmid’s
Synthetic Scots poetry. What Murdo Macdonald (2020, p. 92) calls Geddes’s ‘encyclopaedia of
methods’ is reflected in MacDiarmid’s approach to writing, from the dictionary-scoured Scots
poetry to his English-language poetry of ‘difficult knowledge’ (MacDiarmid 1994, p. 1013).
MacDiarmid learnt from Geddes’s Evergreen the importance of journals to cultural revival. He
first identified ‘the possibility of a great Scottish Literary Renaissance’ (MacDiarmid 1992c,
p. 19) in The Scottish Chapbook, connecting this to language revival. Denis Saurat emphasised the
importance to the revival of MacDiarmid’s ‘little magazines’ in ‘Le Group de “la Renaissance
Écossaise”’ (1924). Saurat’s article provided the renaissance with welcome European endorse-
ment, but despite MacDiarmid’s desire that the renaissance be a ‘co-operative’ (MacDiarmid 1996,
p. 185) movement, the poet remained its propagandist-in-chief. Albyn: or Scotland and the Future
(1927) is his most concerted prose definition of the renaissance’s aims. MacDiarmid cites the war
as a determining cause of the renaissance, but also recognises the movement for Home Rule,
continuing Irish immigration to Scotland (which he supported), and industrial unrest as impor-
tant contributory factors. These, he admits, appear to be ‘incompatible’ influences, but that is
because the renaissance ‘is at once radical and conservative, revolutionary and reactionary’
(MacDiarmid 1996, p. 1), contradictions also characterising the National Party of Scotland
(NPS) at its conception in 1928.1 MacDiarmid sees the renaissance’s paradoxes as a strength in
his efforts to resurrect the aspects of Scottish cultural and political life that he regards as having
been suppressed by industrialisation, British Union, and the Reformation. These stifled elements
Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Literary Revival 129
include the ‘entirely different psychology’ of the Scots, Catholicism, Scots dialect, and the work
of pre-Union poets such as William Dunbar (MacDiarmid 1996, p. 19). In turn, the cultural and
spiritual mainstream – Robert Burns, Kailyard, Presbyterianism – must be supplanted.
MacDiarmid’s (1996, p. 14) solution to what he regarded as cultural decline is captured in his
slogan ‘Not Burns – Dunbar!’, but the paradox remains of finding a future in the past. These
tensions were central to debates over language.
A Living Language? Debates in Scots

John Buchan’s ‘Preface’ to Violet Jacob’s Songs of Angus suggests that volume as a modest begin-
ning in the revival of Scots. Buchan (1915, pp. vii; viii) acknowledges that ‘There are few poets
to-day who write in the Scots vernacular’, but Jacob’s poetry in the Angus dialect derives from ‘a
living speech’ and ‘is good Scots, quite free from misspelt English’. MacDiarmid (1995, p. 28)
was ambivalent about Jacob’s poetry, believing it to be ‘conservative rather than creative’, the
work of an ‘etherealised Kailyairder’ constituting an end to a period of sentimental Scots poetry
rather than a fresh beginning. Jacob’s prose work, often narrated in English with some Scots
dialect speech, he frowned upon as being ‘Anglo-Scottish’; for MacDiarmid, ‘The proper business
of any Scottish imaginative writer is to found or further a Scottish – not an English – tradition’
(MacDiarmid 1995, p. 33).
Disliking what he saw as the Kailyard Scots promoted by the London Burns Club, MacDiarmid
started as a writer in English and much of his oeuvre is in English. His switch to Scots in the early
1920s, after reading Sir James Wilson’s Lowland Scotch as Spoken in the Lower Strathearn District of
Perthshire (1915) and John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808),
revealed to MacDiarmid the repressed potential of Scots, from which he sought connections to
the Modernist experimentation of the likes of James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. Tradition and
modernity combine in many poems in Sangschaw (1925) and Penny Wheep (1926). ‘Empty Vessel’,
for instance, melds lines from the traditional folk air ‘Jenny Nettles’ – ‘I met ayont the cairney
[hillock]’ and ‘Singin’ till a bairnie’ – with Einstein’s general theory of relativity (1915), which
proposed that light is bent by gravity: ‘The licht that bends owre a’ thing’ (MacDiarmid 1993,
p. 66). The indifference of that light to the young woman’s grief at the loss of her child suggests
a Godless universe unconcerned with humanity. The Scots words of ‘The Eemis Stane’ are apt
tools to reveal the mysteries of life’s meaning precisely because they too have been buried by ‘the
fug o’ fame/An’ history’s hazelraw [lichen]’ (MacDiarmid 1993, p. 27), while in ‘Gairmscoile’
MacDiarmid suggests that Scots, like the Landsmål of Norwegian nationalist Henrik Wergeland,
is the literary expression of an anti-evolutionary cultural programme:
Cast-offs? – But wha mak’s life a means to ony end?

This sterves and that stuff’s fu’, scraps this and succours that?
The best survive there’s nane but fules contend.
(MacDiarmid 1993, p. 73)
The philosophy behind MacDiarmid’s Scots is not reductively anti-English, but an opposition to
assimilation by a universalising and stadialist metropolitanism. However, MacDiarmid’s search
for a language fit for modernity was where his Scots ultimately foundered. As he acknowledged,
‘A modern consciousness cannot fully express itself in the Doric as it exists. Take a simple case.
What is the Doric for motor-car? It is futile to say “mottor caur”’ (MacDiarmid 1992b, p. 10).
His answer is to imagine what the Doric for motor car might have been had the vernacular
remained a living literary language in modern conditions. His inability to do so would subse-
quently see him all but abandon Scots for a terminological English.
This same debate takes place in Gibbon’s Sunset Song, where Long Rob argues that a Scots
usage such as ‘gloaming’ is more beautifully expressive than the equivalent English word ‘sunset’
(Gibbon 1990, p. 156). Mr. Gordon replies that ‘If folk are to get on in the world nowadays, away
from the ploughshafts and out of the pleiter, they must use the English, orra though it be’. Their dispute
captures the liminality of the renaissance, caught between past and future, with mercantilism
and urbanisation the drivers of anglicisation. Ironically, Gordon, advocate of English, makes his
point by using Scots such as pleiter (mess) and orra (odd), while the etymology of Rob’s gloaming
is from Old English. Gibbon’s novel is both a lament for a dying culture and a late rekindling of
that culture’s speech and songs, but he was acutely aware of the technical pitfalls of Scots revival-
ism in his own practice as a prose writer. His opening ‘Note’ to Sunset Song justifies his hybrid
Scots-English methodology, which reflects the ‘rhythms and cadence’ of the crofters’ speech but
rejects ‘to seek effect by a spray of apostrophes’ through merely dropping letters from English
words to make them sound Scots: livin’ for living (Gibbon 1990, p.xiii). Lorna Moon, author of
the Kailyard-inflected stories Doorways in Drumorty (1926) – a title echoing J.M. Barrie’s A
Window in Thrums (1888) – and the novel Dark Star (1929), makes much the same point in a
letter to her publisher:
I am a stickler for using the idiom of a people, and the form in which they make a sentence. But to
write ‘y’, ‘yi’, ‘yar’, ‘ye’, ‘yous’ for ‘you’ according to location; and ‘o’ for ‘of’, and ‘bin’ for ‘been’, and
‘canna’ for ‘cannot’, is just a lot of tripe.
(Moon 2002, p. 264)
In ‘Literary Lights’ Gibbon dismisses most of those he cites as the main protagonists of the
renaissance – Norman Douglas, Compton Mackenzie, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, James
Bridie, Edwin Muir, Naomi Mitchison, Neil Gunn, Willa Muir, John Buchan, Catherine
Carswell, A.J. Cronin, Eric Linklater, Muriel Stuart, and the anthropologist J.G. Frazer – as
Anglo-Scottish writers in English, the exceptions being MacDiarmid and the poet Lewis Spence.
As far as Gibbon is concerned, the renaissance has manifestly failed if its purpose is the revival
of the Scottish tradition in literature, an either/or critical attitude gainsaying his more flexible
creative approach in Sunset Song, where he employs an idiomatic Scotified English in which peas-
ant folk voice and narrator are one. MacDiarmid (1993, p. 236) expressed his own frustrations as
to the personal and poetic costs of cultural dualism in To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930) – ‘Curse
on my dooble life and dooble tongue,/– Guid Scots wi’ English a’ hamstrung –’, while scarcely
rising above an apostrophised Scots in the poem itself. However, the real breach occurs with
Edwin Muir’s Scott and Scotland (1936), published in Routledge’s ‘Voice of Scotland’ series. Only
tangentially concerned with Walter Scott, the actual subject of Muir’s book is what he sees as the
deteriorating standard of Scottish literature due to the historical decline in the use of Scots. Muir
(1982, p. 44) is in line with MacDiarmid’s analysis in proposing that the direction of Scottish
history since the Reformation has been responsible for the loss of an organic Scottish culture:
‘The Scotland of James IV [who reigned from 1488 to 1513] shows us a coherent civilization,
and in the individual writer thought and feeling harmoniously working together. Calvinism
drove a wedge between these two things, and destroyed the language in which they had been
fused’. The result, Muir believes, has been a catastrophic decline on all fronts in Scottish literature
with no possible historical retrieval of Scots. To continue writing in Scots will only further nar-
row an already provincial culture. The Scottish writer should write in English, as W.B. Yeats
proposed in Ireland, or Gaelic. Muir was far from alone in this view. Eric Linklater (1935,
pp. 114, 113) described the ‘destruction of Scotland’s language’ as ‘a tragedy’, but claimed that
Burns’s Scots is ‘an artefact, a literary convention’, a dialect and not a language. He thought
Braid Scots was no solution to the problem, believing it to be essentially a ‘rural dialect’
(Linklater 1935, p. 115).
Linklater, like many other renaissance writers, wrote successfully in English, satirising
MacDiarmid’s renaissance in Magnus Merriman (1934). Catherine Carswell’s novels of middle-
class life, Open the Door! (1920) and The Camomile (1922), show the striving for artistic fulfilment
of semi-autobiographical female characters, and she took aim at the Burns myth in her 1930 Life
of the poet. Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners (1931) and Mrs Ritchie (1933) are narrated in English
with some dialect speech, especially from the working-class characters in the latter novel.
Similarly, Nan Shepherd’s three novels, The Quarry Wood (1928), The Weatherhouse (1930), and A
Pass in the Grampians (1933), contain lively speech in the Doric from the older characters, con-
trolled through English narration. Shepherd wrote poetry in Scots and English, and her non-
fiction book on the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain (1977), is written in crystalline English
prose. Gunn’s novels of Highland life are in English, as are those of Fionn Mac Colla; although
Mac Colla’s first novel, The Albannach (1932), contains only a sprinkling of Gaelic, MacDiarmid
(1997, p. 322) described it as the first novel to contain an ‘authentic hard Gaelic note in modern
Scottish literature’. MacDiarmid promoted Gaelic as central to the renaissance, but the language
appears rarely in his poetry and a Gaelic revival would await the talents of native speakers such
as Sorley MacLean.
In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), a long poem in English fashioned from a ‘compilation’
(Whyte 2004, p. 92) of sources, illustrates MacDiarmid’s (1994, p. 735) eagerness to unify
knowledge from diverse fields in a ‘world language’, while still celebrating the cultural remnants
as did his Scots work. However, what remains true in each phase of MacDiarmid’s oeuvre is its lack
of popularity beyond the cognoscenti. MacDiarmid (1993, p. 323) was aware of this, asking
himself in ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’ (1932): ‘Are my poems spoken in the factories and fields,/In
the streets o’ the toon?’. The poem’s dedicatee, Naomi Mitchison, who visited the Soviet Union
in 1932, wondered archly, ‘but what Ayrshire Socialists have read his First Hymn to Lenin?’
(Mitchison 1932, p. 171). MacDiarmid’s reinvention in the 1930s as a Marxist poet is less con-
vincing than his best work in Scots from the previous decade, with its typically rural origins
(McClure 2009, p. 38). The renaissance was largely a rural movement that never gained purchase
with those at the sharp end of urban modernity.
Rural Modernism
Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey’s suggestion ‘that the urban/rural divide maps more or
less directly on to the elite/popular divide’ in modern literature is doubtful in the case of the
Scottish renaissance, which, while largely rural in provenance, exhibited many of the elite char-
acteristics of Modernism (Bluemel and McCluskey 2018, p. 7). The city has traditionally been
understood as site of Modernist creative energies (Bradbury 1991, pp. 96–104). However, many
renaissance writers, described by Sylvia Bryce-Wunder (2014, p. 87) as ‘a de facto literary elite’,
were hostile to urban environments, perceiving Scottish cities as philistine centres of industrial
degradation. This is clear in Scottish Scene (1934), co-authored by MacDiarmid and Gibbon,
where Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Dundee are represented as settings where the catas-
trophes of Scottish history and the effects of capitalism are brutally evident. For instance,
Glasgow, for Gibbon (1934a, p. 115), is ‘a corpse, but the maggot-swarm upon it is fiercely
alive’, while MacDiarmid (1934, p. 159) thinks ‘Dundee is the most appalling example in
Scotland of the results of the Manchester School of Economics, the policy of laissez faire’. Scotland’s
cities are hellish capitulations to capitalism.
In Scottish Journey (1935), Edwin Muir set out to discover the essence of Scotland. In Glasgow,
though, he finds only a ‘depraved and shameful knowledge’ on the inhabitants’ faces caused by
‘Industrialism’ (Muir 1999, pp. 112, 156), the negative impact of which is Muir’s main theme.
While rejecting a nationalist solution, Muir wavered between socialism and C.H. Douglas’s
Social Credit as economic replacement for capitalism. Muir (1993, p. 289) claimed he ‘was born
before the Industrial Revolution’ and that on leaving Orkney for Glasgow, he arrived in the
industrial present-day. His poetry often expresses alienation at humanity’s expulsion from the
Garden of Eden, which he associates with his childhood in pastoral Orkney. In ‘Horses’, from
First Poems (1925), these creatures possess the ‘magic power’ of mythic beasts as seen in a vision
(Muir 1979, p. 19). In ‘The Horses’, from his final collection, One Foot in Eden (1956), the horses,
which ‘come from their own Eden’, signify a hopeful ‘beginning’ for humanity after an apocalyp-
tic war has destroyed civilisation (Muir 1979, p. 247). Muir’s horses, symbolical of a place out-
side time, are both pre-and post-industrial. What Muir (1993, p. 289) regarded as the
‘time-accidents’ of his own experiences on travelling from countryside to city were central to the
renaissance comprehension of the nature of time, which developed from the temporal disjunction
between the renaissance’s rural origins and the changes shaped by modernity.
The countryside is the locale for many of MacDiarmid’s Scots poems. There are farm animals
in ‘Overinzievar’, ducks, flying beetles, corncrakes, and jackdaws in ‘Country Life’, and ‘broon
hens’ and a ‘muckle white pig’ in ‘Farmer’s Death’ (MacDiarmid 1993, p. 34), dedicated to
Edwin Muir. This is a decidedly rural Modernism in which the colloquial earthiness of rustic life
is juxtaposed with the cosmological uncanniness of lyric poems such as ‘The Bonnie Broukit
Bairn’ and ‘The Watergaw’. In Gibbon’s Sunset Song, Chris Guthrie’s development is charted
against the rhythms of the farming seasons and her commitment to the land is integral to her
identity. While A Scots Quair’s implied progress through various world-historical ages corre-
sponds with humankind’s increasing disconnection from the land, Chris communes with her
Pict ancestors at the Standing Stones in Sunset Song and appears to merge with the land at the
close of Grey Granite (1934), despite that novel’s setting in the fictional city of Duncairn.
While male authors depict rural Scotland as a site of revival, for female writers it could be a
place of frustration from which to break free. Rural life is a constricting force for younger female
characters in the novels of Nan Shepherd. Unlike Gibbon’s Chris Guthrie, Martha Ironside of
The Quarry Wood opts to go to Aberdeen University, but struggles to reconcile her experiences
there with the more vigorous but challenging circumstances of her home in the farming com-
munity of Wester Cairns. The natural world is a ‘holy’ (Shepherd 2001, p. 182) wonder for Ellen
of The Weatherhouse, but the allure of escape to the modern city from the limited opportunities of
rurality is especially strong for young women in Shepherd’s work, such as Jenny Kilgour, who is
fascinated by Bella Cassie, a successful metropolitan singer who returns to rural Boggiewalls in
A Pass in the Grampians. Moon’s Dark Star depicts the pressures for women in semi-rural Pitouie,
exemplified by male brutalisation of women – Nancy’s objectification and sexual assault and
Bella Pringle, drug addicted and ravaged, are grim examples. Nancy seeks escape through
romance and idealisation but drowns herself at the novel’s end. Calderwick, the location for
Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners and Mrs Ritchie, is a small town from which younger female char-
acters flee the pinched confines of provincial life.
Novels by Carswell, Dot Allan, and Christine Orr are set in cities but, overall, the renaissance
was anti-urban and failed to live up to MacDiarmid’s (1927, p. 7) hope that the movement
would overturn ideas of Scotland ‘that take a rural background for granted’. Mitchison (1932,
p. 170), whose greatest novel is the agrarian epic The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931),
lamented the mainly London and Edinburgh audience for Rachel Annand Taylor, Agnes Mure
Mackenzie, and Gunn, suggesting a rural movement appreciated principally by an educated
urban elite. The renaissance was never a Berlin-Paris-Vienna variety of European Modernism,
but neither did it wholly resemble the Irish revival’s resacralisation of the land. Rather, Scottish
renaissance writers attacked their nation’s principal spiritual tradition.
‘Fu o’ a Stickit God’: Religion
While there was little consensus as to the future of Scots as a mode of national literary expression,
many renaissance writers agreed that the Reformation, often seen as originally responsible for the
decline of Scots, had been disastrous for the national imagination. In his biography of John
Knox, dedicated to MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir considered the literature and culture produced in
Scotland immediately after Knox to be greatly inferior to that of England in the same period. For
Muir (1930, p. 308), Calvinism ‘outraged the imagination’; a ‘strange belief’ that brought a ‘sav-
age provincialism’ to Scotland, it robbed the country ‘of all the benefits of the Renaissance’
(Muir 1930, p. 309). MacDiarmid (1996, p. 12) thought the Reformation was ‘repressive and
anti-Scottish’, increased the pace of anglicisation, cut links to the Catholic past, and rendered
Scotland ‘singularly destitute of aesthetic consciousness’; as described in A Drunk Man Looks at
the Thistle (1926): ‘The Presbyterian thistle flourishes,/And its ain roses crucifies. . ..’ (MacDiarmid 1993,
p. 152). Just as Muir found parallels between Bolshevism and Calvinism, Fionn Mac Colla
regarded the Reformation as on a par with the totalitarianism of Communism or Nazism. Mac
Colla’s slim oeuvre of novels and non-fiction addresses what he regarded as the victory of ‘the Nay-
saying impulse’ in Scotland with the Reformation, which created psychological divisions in the
Scot and marginalised Gaels (Mac Colla 1967, p. 185). Mac Colla’s thesis – that the stimulus
given by Protestant rationalism to Whig progressivism encouraged modern secularism with its
denial of mythmaking, rendering the Scottish imagination incapable of the creative regeneration
required to escape the repressions of the Reformation – sums up the typical renaissance attitude
to the reformers. As the educationalist A.S. Neill (1936, pp. 42, 43) put it, ‘Scotland is a death
country’ and Calvinism, ‘the negation of joy’, is the cause of death.
Gibbon (1934c, p. 258), from the perspective of his belief in the freedoms of precivilisation,
thought humans to be ‘naturally irreligious’ and religion a civilisational ‘cancer’. While he sup-
posed industrialism to have freed Scots from the more oppressive aspects of Church control,
Gibbon worried that sex repression remained an undesirable factor in Scottish life, especially for
women. Novels such as Stained Radiance (1930) and The Thirteenth Disciple (1931), written under
his birthname J. Leslie Mitchell, challenge taboos around female sexual liberty and birth control
in British society in the early twentieth century. Focused on metropolitan milieus, these novels
represent religion as a persistent hangover from a primitive age. In Sunset Song, however, the
Scottish village of Kinraddie remains in thrall to Calvinist values, leading Chris’s mother, Jean,
to kill herself rather than face another pregnancy dictated by her husband’s beliefs. The all-male
Church Session of Fetter-Rothnie in Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse sit in judgement over what
Garry Forbes regards as the falsehood of Louie Morgan’s claim to have been engaged to the dead
soldier David Grey. What Garry and others come to learn is that religious moralism allows little
insight into peoples’ souls, and so ‘One could not be taken into other lives except by learning
what they were in themselves’ (Shepherd 2001, p. 182). God exists, if at all, for Shepherd, in the
particularity of people and nature, rather than in the moral systems of men.
Contemporary criticism sees the renaissance’s reading of the negative historical influence of
the Reformation on Scottish life and letters as overstated (Gribben 2009: passim). But
Matthew Wickman (2019, p. 32) worries that critical focus on renaissance writers’ responses
to the Reformation has undermined attention to ‘an entire mode of experience – religious experi-
ence, particularly lived religion’ – in their works. MacDiarmid (2001, p. 247) defined himself
as ‘neither a Protestant nor a Catholic, but a freedom-loving Scot’. A Drunk Man Looks at the
Thistle proposes metaphysical and philosophical perspectives from a range of sources, includ-
ing Yeats’s A Vision, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Blok, and Scottish idealism (Craig 2020:
passim), making the spiritual experience of the Drunk Man undefinable in traditional reli-
gious terms. He describes himself as being ‘fu’ o’ a stickit God’ – a botched deity – while search-
ing for the soul of Scotland, a country he compares to the spiritual wasteland of T.S. Eliot’s
famous poem (MacDiarmid 1993, p. 134). Reference to a Dionysian ‘divine inebriety’ and the
Nietzschean slant of the poem do not indicate a Christian framework, but there are sympa-
thetic allusions to Christ (MacDiarmid 1993, p. 145). The poem’s credo – ‘He canna Scotland
see wha yet/Canna see the Infinite,/And Scotland in true scale to it’ (p. 162) – emerges from
what Nairn (1981a, p. 169) calls MacDiarmid’s ‘Cosmic Universalism’. A spiritually-inflected
questioning of reality is likewise central to MacDiarmid’s ‘On a Raised Beach’ (1934).
Originating in geological deep time, the poem’s stones relate to what Mircea Eliade (1985,
p. 83) calls the ‘hierophanization of matter’, which is ‘the discovery of the sacred manifested
through the substance itself’:
These stones go through Man, straight to God, if there is one.

What have they not gone through already?
Empires, civilisations, aeons. Only in them
If in anything, can His creation confront Him.
The scientific terminology bookending the poem suggests a materialist perspective, but, in the
tones of a biblical prophet, MacDiarmid calls upon and challenges the very God of whom he is
disbelieving.
Edwin Muir was initially a religious sceptic. We Moderns, first published in 1918 under
the pseudonym Edward Moore, reflects Muir’s admiration at that time for Nietzsche.
Unabashedly elitist – ‘we must affirm aristocracy’ –, Muir advances a Nietzschean ‘Creative
Love’ of personal becoming in place of Christian love (Muir 1920, pp. 170, 185–186). Muir
was later embarrassed by the arrogant anti-humanism of We Moderns, but it captures a devel-
oping Modernist sensibility, especially in its advocacy of myth against realism. Myth
remained important in Muir’s poetry, which explores how humans are caught between the
time-bound nature of our conscious lives, which he called ‘the story’, and a domain beyond
time of which we are usually unconscious but that lives still in the collective mythic memory,
named ‘the fable’. In ‘The Labyrinth’ (1949), Muir (1979, p. 165) describes lived reality as
‘the lie,/The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood’ through which we cannot find our
way. The ‘dialogue’ of the gods in ‘The Labyrinth’ strikes ‘a chord deep’ in our temporal lives,
if only we can hear it (Muir 1979, p. 165). It is poetry’s job to reveal the fabular world and
so lead us from time’s labyrinth to a transcendent realm, which is the true reality. While the
gods of ‘The Labyrinth’ relate to Greek mythology, Muir’s poetry suggests a Christian quest
to find the eternal in the mundane.
What had Eden ever to say

Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
(Muir 1979, p. 227)
Humanity may be Fallen, but exile from Eden engenders Christian virtues.
Muir (1926, p. 9) understood Modernism to be an ‘age of transition’, central to which were
shifting attitudes towards religion. The Scottish renaissance fits this pattern, being neither
expressive of a distinct sacrality nor entirely secular. Broadly, the renaissance objection to
Reformation is political: it was a gateway for absorption in Union. William Power’s (1935,
p. 153) contention that ‘the cardinal blunder of the whole Reformation and Covenanting period’
was ‘the lack of any consistent and comprehensive idea of the Scots nation’ confirms this stand-
point. However, renaissance writers sought to loosen the grip of what they perceived as a deter-
ministic religious ethos with oppressive moral and psychological implications that continued
into the early twentieth century. Contemporary critiques of the renaissance’s attitude to
Reformation that remain blind to this point, while themselves focusing on nationhood and his-
tory, illustrate the persistence of political teleology as a critical framework for understanding the
revival.
Politics and Paradox
MacDiarmid’s politics have long been seen as paradoxical. He was a founding member in
1928 of the NPS, but when his membership was not renewed, he joined the Communist
Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1934; he was subsequently expelled from the CPGB for
nationalist deviation (Manson 2000: passim). He made a consistent attempt to connect the
national question to political internationalism, particularly through a Scottish Republicanism
influenced by the thinking of the revolutionary socialist John Maclean. However, MacDiarmid’s
political internationalism was often extremist – not unusual in a period undergoing a crisis
of liberal democracy. In this sense, MacDiarmid was not a Modernist outlier but a fairly typi-
cal Modernist, although his positions still demand scrutiny, perhaps especially his re-
joining the Communist Party in 1957 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. MacDiarmid
(1998, p. 363) described the murder of millions of Russians under Stalinism as ‘a mere
bagatelle’ in comparison to what he regarded as the greater crimes of capitalism. As Neal
Ascherson (1980, p. 235) comments, MacDiarmid ‘was not, in common parlance, a dem-
ocrat […]. He believed that in the world he saw around him, the vast mass of ordinary
people lived and died with the insignificance of flies’. MacDiarmid (1993, p. 298) may
have believed that communism would imbue peoples’ lives with significance, but his
description in ‘First Hymn to Lenin’ (1931) of the ‘necessary’ and ‘insignificant’ murders
committed by the Cheka undermines professedly revolutionary ends through endorsement
of brutal means.
Mitchison (2019, p. 239) was sympathetic to communism and like MacDiarmid expressed
support for violence, writing in her World War Two diary: ‘all I wanted was revolution and
the chance of killing people myself’. She also supported independence upon moving back to
Scotland just before the war. Mitchison (2000, p. 169) recounts feeling ‘a queer kind of pride
and anger’ on a visit to Edinburgh in 1941 and ‘the most passionate and disconcerting longing
to be a Member of the first Scots Parliament under the New Order, or maybe the Supreme
Soviet of Scotland’. The Bull Calves (1947) examines the division of Scotland between Highland
and Lowland – ‘the two nations of Scotland’ (Mitchison 1985, p. 55) – and the manner in
which Scotland was ‘thought of as a kind of county of England’ (Mitchison 1985, p. 72). The
Corn King and the Spring Queen, set in fictional Marob by the Black Sea around 200 BCE, is a
meditation on ‘civilised’ and ‘barbarian’ cultures and has been read as an implicit attack on the
centralisation of politics and culture in Britain (Gifford 1990: passim). This same theme can
be understood as relating to social class in Mitchison’s own time, as well as the ways in which
political power is grounded in myth. Mitchison’s novel, based loosely on Plutarch and influ-
enced by Frazer’s The Golden Bough, is finally about how civilisations come to be, also a central
concern of Gibbon.
Chris’s son Ewan grows to be a communist in Gibbon’s Grey Granite, dedicated to MacDiarmid.
Set during the Depression, lithic imagery pervades the novel, inferring the materiality of being
but also alluding to the stoniness of the ‘hard man’ communist leader. Yet, seen through the eyes
of female characters, such as Ewan’s reformist girlfriend, Ellen, and Chris, Ewan’s views look
immature and pitiless and the novel does not straightforwardly offer communism as a solution
to civilisation’s ills. Gibbon’s ‘Glasgow’ (1934) scorns renaissance culturalism as of no help to
those living in the city’s slums, cutting through revivalist claims to establish a new future based
on past national culture, and casts Scottish nationalism as a helpmate of fascism. While Gibbon
proposed a radically cosmopolitan response to urban immiseration, Sunset Song would inspire
Scottish nationalist leaders such as Nicola Sturgeon (b.1970) and Billy Wolfe (1924–2010)
(Jackson 2020, p. 92).
Nairn’s ‘Old and New Scottish Nationalism’ (Nairn 1981a, p. 162), with its hostility to the
‘tartan monster’ of Scottish kitsch, is indebted to MacDiarmid and contributed to his position as
simultaneously critically canonical and the epitome of ‘negative nationalism’ (Craig 2009,
p. 133) now condemned by critics. Nationalism’s Janus face meets its own reflection in the
renaissance’s central paradox: the pursuit of national rebirth through reclamation and erasure of
facets of the nation’s past. Nairn’s thesis that nationalism is adopted by less developed countries
so as to escape their own backwardness in the global economy does not fit the culturally rich and
politically secure Scotland of the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, the Scottish literary
renaissance was culturally nationalist, whether or not all its protagonists were political national-
ists and whatever the debates over MacDiarmid’s antisyzygies. Its paradoxes emerge from
Scotland’s position in the period, caught between a fading imperial past and the emergence of a
post-British future. Though not a successful nation-building movement as was the Irish revival,
the renaissance anticipated the cultural and political hopes and ambiguities of the Scottish devo-
lutionary era to come.
Note
1 Jackson (2020, p. 17) points out that ‘The ideology (Macdonald 2009, pp. 168–169), as well as those
of the early national movement was a fissiparous who wanted to retain Scotland’s role in Empire. For
one, with diverse, and at times contending, strands the evolution of the Scottish National Party,
of nationalist thought coexisting in an uneasy part- founded in 1934, from the NPS and various other
nership with one another’. Part of this entailed nationalist parties and organisations, see Lynch
objections to immigration from some quarters (2013, pp. 29–47).
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White Publishing. Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 2e,
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(1975). In: The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-
Nationalism, 2e, 126–195. London: Verso.
Further Reading
Lyall, S. (2006). Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of McCulloch, M.P. (ed.) (2004). Modernism and Nationalism:
Place. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939. Source
Lyall, S. and McCulloch, M.P. (ed.) (2011). The Edinburgh Documents for the Scottish Renaissance. Glasgow:
Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
University Press. McCulloch, M.P. (2009). Scottish Modernism and its Contexts
Lyall, S. (2014). ‘That ancient self’: Scottish Modernism’s 1918–1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural
counter renaissance. Scottish Renaissances. European Exchange. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Journal of English Studies 18 (1): 73–85.
Lyall, S. (ed.) (2015). The International Companion to Lewis
Grassic Gibbon. Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary
Studies.
12
Contemporary and Post-Modern Scotland
Timothy C. Baker
Personal Chair in Scottish and Contemporary Literature, School of Language, Literature,
Music and Visual Culture, University of Aberdeen, UK
The brief introduction to Maurice Lindsay and Fred Urquhart’s postwar anthology No Scottish
Twilight begins with a note of protest. While Welsh and Irish texts may be especially prominent
in the eye of the reading public, the editors are confident that the following stories will convince
the reader ‘that the Scottish short story is by no means enshrouded in any romantic twilight’
(Lindsay and Urquhart 1947, p. 3). The collection contains new material from both emerging
writers such as Dorothy K. Haynes and Margaret Hamilton and more established voices such as
J.F. Hendry and Naomi Mitchison. While most of the contributions are in a traditional realist
mode, their focus on working-class lives and regional dialect suggests a diversity of perspectives
and styles, ranging from the Scots narration of Robert MacLellan’s contribution to the historical
romance of Mitchison’s. The editors’ combative positioning, however, presages a now familiar
story of twentieth-century Scottish literature in terms of ebbs and flows, where the postwar
period is relatively fallow, save for a handful of familiar names, not least Muriel Spark, and the
literary scene is revitalised after the 1979 devolution referendum with the publication of Alasdair
Gray’s Lanark (1981). If constitutional or political crisis did not directly cause a national literary
rebirth, in this account, it ‘trigger[ed] long-building tendencies’ (Gardiner 2009, p. 181), lead-
ing to a second literary renaissance that emphasised cultural and aesthetic diversity.
Contemporary Scottish literature, in this narrative, is tied to a national, and often nationalist,
political imagination. While emphasising the way a national imagination ‘is an unending series
of interactions between different strands of tradition’, for instance, Cairns Craig (1999, pp. 31, 33)
also stipulates that the Scottish novel, in particular, is ‘an index of the continuity of the nation
and the national imagining to which it contributes’. This national imagination is, in many
accounts, a bleak one: Isobel Murray and Bob Tait (Murray and Tait 1984, pp. 9, 8) note the
striking diversity of twentieth-century Scottish fiction, but conclude that the novels they

Contemporary and Post-Modern Scotland 141
study are most easily characterised by ‘their sense of human resilience’ in the face of ‘conditions
of unhappiness, inequality, injustice and failed personal relationships in families, streets, and
communities’. Each of these critics, over a sixty-year period, stresses that contemporary Scottish
literature is more innovative, varied, and interesting than most readers have acknowledged, but
the case must still be made that modern Scottish literature deserves sustained investigation.
Rather than focusing on the relation between contemporary literature and national politics,
however, or presenting a story of seismic change, this chapter traces the gradual development of
modern Scottish literature since 1945 by focusing on three key themes: regionality, embodi-
ment, and experimental poetics. The work produced in this period challenges received notions
of the relation between people and place and between source text and revision; it offers nuanced
approaches to questions of gender, class, ethnicity, and history. The continued vitality and com-
plexity of Scottish literature is further demonstrated by focusing on the development of the short
story, the use of intertextual techniques to re-examine the relationship between personal and
collective histories, and the intersection between regional, racial, and sexual identities.
Critical accounts of Scottish regionality are often tied to particular forms. The contemporary
Glasgow novel, for instance, is exemplified by Archie Hind’s The Dear Green Place (1966), whose
protagonist, like Alasdair Gray’s Duncan Thaw in Lanark, laments the difficulty of being an art-
ist in a city he sees as hostile to art. Glasgow, in the words of a schoolteacher in George Friel’s
The Boy Who Wanted Peace (1964) is characterised by ‘wild-life reservations, a pocket of vandal-
ism, a pool of iniquity’ (Friel 1999, p. 68). The only escape, in texts like Gordon Williams’s From
Scenes Like These (1968) and Alan Spence’s story collection Its Colours They Are Fine (1977), is to
embrace football and sectarianism: Williams’s novel ends with the shouts ‘Kill the Fenian bas-
tards’ and ‘We are the people’, where collective enunciation is a voice of separation and violence
(Williams 1996, p. 282). This sense of Glasgow as a place of disaffection, in James Kelman’s
term, often framed not only in terms of working-class experience but masculinity, continues
through the latter half of the century, in works by Robin Jenkins, Andrew O’Hagan, Jeff
Torrington, William and Liam McIlvanney, Alexander Trocchi, Anne Donovan, Chris McQueer,
Douglas Stuart, and others. While Kelman’s work in recent years has ventured far beyond
Glaswegian settings, he remains best-known for a series of stories and novels that pay close atten-
tion to working-class Glasgow lives and the legacy of Thatcherism. Kelman’s free indirect style,
which breaks down barriers between dialogue and narration, emphasises the importance of
demotic language; the relation between language and working-class experience is similarly
emphasised in McQueer and Donovan’s works. The relation between class, gender, and urban
environments is given further exploration in the rise of crime fiction in the past decades. While
Denise Mina’s work expands the horizons of the Glasgow novel in a variety of nuanced ways,
particularly in her inventive historical novel The Long Drop (2017), similar concerns can be found
in Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh-based crime fiction and Stuart MacBride’s Aberdeen novels.
The Glasgow novel, and by extension other urban writing, is also a place of unexpected
encounter and increasing diversity. Agnes Owens’s first published story, Arabella (1978) begins
with a still-surprising juxtaposition: ‘Arabella pushed the pram up the steep path to her cottage.
It was hard going since the four dogs inside were a considerable weight’ (Owens 2008, p. 1).
While the story that follows is more fanciful than much of Owens’s other work, she instils the
Glasgow setting with a sense of wonder that is echoed in the early work of the filmmakers Bill
Forsyth and Lynne Ramsay. In Gothic and fantasy novels by Louise Welsh and Ellen Galford,
Glasgow, and the surrounding region, is a place that hovers at the threshold between the familiar
and the unexplained. A. L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad (1995) presents modern Glasgow as a setting
where the figure of Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac might suddenly appear and trouble the
distinction between fact and fiction, past and present, and body and spirit. Even in Jenkins’s
more realist novels, the urban location provides a way to rethink questions of inclusion and
exclusion, a trope further explored in novels such as Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag (2004). While the
Edinburgh novel does not have the cohesion of the Glasgow novel, it remains an important set-
ting for a range of perspectives, from the marginalised lives depicted in Irvine Welsh’s bestsell-
ing fiction to the political hijinks of many of Christopher Brookmyre’s crime novels to the blend
of realism and supernatural elements that characterise the city’s history in James Robertson’s The
Fanatic (2000) and Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth (2021). More playful or knowing versions of
Edinburgh can be found in the humorous 44 Scotland Street series by Alexander McCall Smith
and Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series of crime novels. Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
(1961) and Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) inarguably remain the most popular representations of
Edinburgh life, thanks in part to their successful stage and screen adaptations, but the city and
surrounding region has been the setting for a wide variety of texts.
If the urban environment is often associated with fiction, the islands are more often associated
with poetry. Iain Crichton Smith’s ‘The Departing Island’, first published in Three Regional Voices
(1968), frames Lewis as a dream from which the speaker is awaking: ‘Like an unbearable thought
it sinks beyond/assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands’ (Crichton Smith 2011, p. 65).
Crichton Smith’s work, like Derick Thomson’s, emphasises the tension between a desire to
belong to a given community and the impossibility of return. For the Orcadian poet, playwright
and novelist George Mackay Brown, on the contrary, islands are a place of timeless renewal:
‘Time here, in the island, is a single day, repeated over and over’ (Brown 1984, p.72). The Raasay-
born poet Sorley MacLean (1999, p. 143) likewise positions the Hebrides as located ‘between the
world and eternity’, while the Shetland poet Christine De Luca implicitly argues for the central-
ity of island life to any view of the world, or literature. Whether writing in Gaelic, Shetland,
English, or Orcadian, the relation between remoteness and centrality is a common feature in
contemporary island poetry by J.O. Morgan, Jen Hadfield, Harry Josephine Giles, Meg Bateman,
Robert Alan Jamieson, and others. While island poetry is often associated with and draws from
the Gaelic tradition, each of these authors, and many others, often explore the relation between
different languages, and the relation between geographical remoteness and a global or cosmo-
politan imagination. This dynamic can increasingly be seen in island-set novels, such as Malachy
Tallack’s The Valley at the Centre of the World (2018) and Ian Stephen’s A Book of Death and Fish
(2014), where Shetland and Lewis, respectively, are framed in terms of both continuity and loss.
Both the urban novel and island poetry exemplify the repeated themes of community that crit-
ics from Kurt Wittig and Francis Russell Hart to more contemporary researchers have seen as
central to a discussion of Scottish literature. Communities are seen as simultaneously sustaining
and stifling: they can give rise to a hostile homogeneity or allow for spiritual rebirth. A focus on,
and critique of, community is one of the defining features of Scottish fiction, particularly, from the
late nineteenth century to the present. The ethics of community are given particular attention in
Neil M. Gunn’s philosophical crime novel Blood Hunt (1952), which opposes compassion and
legal or religious duties. In Gunn’s late fiction, like Brown’s novels, remote communities are not
seen as microcosms of the nation, but instead are whole in themselves. The tension between kind-
ness and hostility, or between inclusion and exclusion, endemic to community life can especially
be seen in texts that focus on less-heralded regions of Scotland. Jessie Kesson’s Glitter of Mica
(1963), for instance, is set in an Aberdeenshire parish that ‘has moved neither poet to song nor
tourist to praise’ (Kesson 1998, p. 1). Kesson’s work, largely autobiographical, focuses on the
opportunities available to rural, working-class protagonists, especially women, in the Northeast,

and their often-frustrated search for identity and fulfilment. More recent texts continue this
approach, such as Eleanor Thom’s The Tin-Kin (2009), focusing on Traveller experience. The sto-
ries in Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home (2018), like her novels, are set not only in Aberdeen but
Khartoum, London, Edinburgh, and Cairo: each place offers a possibility for belonging, and also
creates feelings of exclusion. Eric Linklater’s earlier The Dark of Summer (1956) portrays an unro-
manticised Northern archipelago that draws on the adventure stories of a previous generation to
portray the relation between political and environmental threat.
Focus on a particular regional identity can also bring new voices to light: Bill Duncan’s story
collection The Smiling School for Calvinists (2001), like W.N. Herbert’s poetry, uses a Dundonian
dialect that has not previously been given prominence in literary conversations, while Alan
Bissett’s Boyracers (2001) explores the teenage culture of Falkirk. Jamieson’s poetry collection
Nort Atlantik Drift (2007), like Roseanne Watt’s Modor Dy (2019), presents innovative approaches
to Shetland, or Shaetlan, orthography alongside English translations or commentary, and in
Jamieson’s case photographs, to create a new vision of Shetland that is not dominated by main-
land poetic traditions. In sharp distinction to narratives of national unity, many authors follow
Tom Leonard’s aphorism ‘the local is the international/the national is the parochial’ (Leonard 2009,
p. 172). While focus on particular regional communities has long been a mainstay of Scottish
literature, contemporary writers often use that focus to challenge ideas of unity and inclusion.
This challenge is especially apparent in the cosmopolitan war poetry of Hamish Henderson and
George Campbell Hay, which employ a wide range of settings and tones to capture an increas-
ingly fractured world.
Many writers of this period take a sceptical approach to ideas of community. The Orkney of
Luke Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy (2004) is seen by incomers as potentially utopian, but is deeply
hostile to Black and queer experience. More comically, Inspector Grant in Josephine Tey’s The
Singing Sands (1952) believes he has found a true paradise on the fictional Hebridean island of
Cladda, but is instead treated to a meal ‘of bright orange kippers inadequately cured and liber-
ally dyed in Aberdeen, bread made in Glasgow, oatcakes baked by a factory in Edinburgh and
never toasted since, jam manufactured in Dundee, and butter made in Canada’ (Tey 2011, p. 90).
If remote or rural communities are often imagined as paradises, not least in comic fiction such as
Compton Mackenzie’s Hunting the Fairies (1949), more recent fiction has demonstrated the ten-
sion between lived experience and received notions of authenticity. As Crichton Smith writes in
an essay, the very sense that a community to which one belongs ‘is a sustaining force’ that pro-
vides ‘the feeling that one has a place’ is linked to the community’s conservatism and hostility to
change (Crichton Smith 1986, p. 26). Even Brown’s Greenvoe (1972) and Beside the Ocean of Time
(1994), which herald the continuity of Orcadian communities across the century, also envision
apocalypse and raise the idea that community is unsustainable. In Alan Warner’s often phantas-
magoric stories of Oban and the surrounding area, particularly These Demented Lands (1997), both
place and character names are unstable: community in these novels is simultaneously claustro-
phobic and constantly evolving. Jenkins’s The Missionaries (1957) and Iain Banks’s Whit (1995)
focus on the closed-mindedness of religious communities; in both novels intentional communi-
ties are prone to dysfunction at the same time they remain appealing.
Questions of community are equally prominent in drama of this period. The post-war period
saw a sharp increase in the number of professional productions; the rise of the Edinburgh
International Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as well as the belated foundation of the
National Theatre of Scotland in 2006, indicate the increased prominence of drama from the
1960s onwards. The keystone play of the period is inarguably John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the
Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1974), for the theatre company 7:84, which influentially employed
a ceilidh structure and was adapted each night to include members of the community in each of
the town halls where it played. McGrath’s mixture of song and storytelling, Brechtian drama-
turgy, and local resonances in order to tell the parallel stories of the Clearances, the romanticisa-
tion of the Highlands as a tourist idyll, and the advent of North Sea oil brought new energy to
Scottish theatre while maintaining a focus on small communities. For many dramatists of the
period, however, such communities are seen as overly homogenous and hostile to new ways of
thinking. Isolated communities are explored in Zinnie Harris’s Further than the Furthest Thing
(2000), David Greig’s Outlying Islands (2000) and David Harrower’s Dark Earth (2003). John
Byrne’s The Slab Boys Trilogy (1978–1982) provides new approaches to working-class culture in
Paisley, while Chris Hannan’s Glasgow-set Elizabeth Gordon Quinn (1985) and Sue Glover’s
Borders-set Bondagers (1991) focus on gendered power relations. Glover’s inventive polyvocal
approach brings a poetic light to the story of itinerant farmworkers, and illuminates an under-
studied element of social history. Rona Munro’s The Maiden Stone (1995) contrasts the outsider’s
view of the North-east as a ‘blasted heath’ fit only for turnips, with a rich sense of folkloric tradi-
tion (Munro 1995, p. 3). Whether following the Brechtian tradition of McGrath’s later plays
such as Joe’s Drum (1979) or more realist approaches, each of these plays invokes the possibility
for seeing the stage as a space for exploring ideas of community formation and change.
A focus on regional and community identity has also led to significant poetic innovation. Ian
Hamilton Finlay’s early work, such as Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd, Haw, an Inseks, an, aw, a Fush
(1963) combines experimental poetics with Glaswegian demotic, inspiring work by Tom Leonard
and Edwin Morgan, among others. Finlay’s greatest poetic achievement, however, is his garden
Little Sparta, begun in 1968, where poems appear as sculptures within a physical environment.
Leonard likewise presents poems not only in the pages of books but also on the walls of cafes:
democratising poetry meant not only opening up the language used, but making use of pictorial
and environmental elements. Leonard’s often playful use of phonetic orthography repeatedly
raises the question of whose life, and whose language, is a fit subject for poetry. Morgan’s From
Glasgow to Saturn (1973) combines everything from the voices of Martians and the Loch Ness
Monster to traditional sonnet forms to help readers see Glasgow, and the rest of Scotland, in a
new light. Morgan’s expansive, inclusive ethos can be contrasted with the far more minimalist
work of Thomas A. Clark, whose The Hundred Thousand Places (2009) completely displaces
human involvement in its short, aphoristic poems that depict a variety of often-unnamed places.
A number of poets also took more intermedial approaches, combining poetry with art, whether
in terms of the mixture of poetry and filmmaking in the work of Margaret Tait or the new tech-
nologies employed by Alec Finlay. Yet Scottish poetry of this period frequently raises the ques-
tion of language itself, as in W.S. Graham’s rhetorical question at the beginning of Implements in
Their Places (1977): ‘What is the language using us for’ (Graham 2004, p. 199), or Crichton
Smith’s Wittgensteinian lament ‘He who loses his language loses his world. The Highlander
who loses his language loses his world’ (Crichton Smith 2011, p. 114). Veronica Forrest-
Thomson’s Language-Games (1971) likewise invokes Wittgenstein to explore the indeterminacy
of language and its relation to both body and world. The question of how language relates to
place has been taken up by more recent poets including Carol Ann Duffy, Robert Crawford, Alan
Riach, and John Glenday. Duffy’s work encompasses everything from feminist reinterpretations
of myth to plaintive love poems, but also depicts the failure of both language and community:
‘We scratch in dust with sticks,/dying of homesickness’ (Duffy 2004, p. 33). All of these poets
combine postmodern or experimental techniques with a focus on the relation between interior
and exterior life to trouble the borders of language.
The publication of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (1977), long after its original writ-
ing, has inspired a wealth of nature writing, most prominently in the works of Kathleen Jamie,
Amy Liptrot, and Esther Woolfson. Like Neil M. Gunn’s experimental autobiography The Atom
of Delight (1956), Shepherd combines a close attention to the natural world with elements of
spiritual insight using multiple philosophical and religious influences. Shepherd’s work has
become far more influential with the passing years: her invocation of her walks in the Cairngorms
as ‘a journey into Being’ that allows her to live ‘a life of the senses so pure, so untouched by any
mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think’ (Shepherd 2001,
pp. 84, 82) has resonated with a wide variety of readers, and achieved far more prominence than
in Shepherd’s own lifetime. Nature writing and memoir in the previous decades is less promi-
nent; important works include Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water (1960), long-running col-
umns in the Scots Magazine by Kesson and Gunn, and in the New Yorker by Alasdair Reid, and
the work of the Shetland-based ornithologist Ursula Venables. Alasdair Maclean’s Night Falls on
Ardnamurchan (1984) combines Maclean’s father’s journal of mid-century crofting with Maclean’s
explanation of, and lament for, an already-vanished past. Nature writing has become a much
more dominant trend in the past years, largely in response to the success of Jamie’s essays, which
demonstrate an attention to the more-than-human world that reflects but is not limited by social
and political change. Like the poet Jim Carruth, especially in his verse novella Killochries (2015),
Jamie focuses on the land not as a place for aesthetic contemplation, but as the meeting of human
and nonhuman lives.
Jamie’s work also illustrates an increasing turn to questions of embodiment, especially in the
works of women writers. In an influential essay, she juxtaposes the bird paintings of the
nineteenth-century Aberdonian ornithologist William MacGillivray with the preserved remains
of conjoined twins at the Royal College of Surgeons: ‘By these pictures, we know the birds. By
the specimens, we know our bodies, our conditions’ (Jamie 2005, p. 142). The question of how
bodies are known is central to contemporary Scottish writing. Few stories are as iconic as Janice
Galloway’s ‘Blood’ (1991), where a routine dental visit opens up to encompass questions of puberty,
misogyny, and sexual violence. The mix of the grotesque and the quotidian is echoed in many of
John Burnside’s short stories, novels, and poems, particularly Glister (2008), which combines
natural and potentially supernatural depictions of murder and decay. Both Galloway and
Burnside focus on the fragility of the human body; Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing
(1989) uses an experimental, fragmented form to present the protagonist’s own physical and
mental illness and desire for a condition where the ‘fact of being alive has no substance’
(Galloway 1999, p. 138). This desire of a protagonist to find their identity in relation not only
to social oppression but their own body is given its fullest expression in Elspeth Barker’s O
Caledonia (1991), which opens and closes with its heroine’s murder. Like Liz Lochhead’s poems
in Dreaming Frankenstein (1984), Galloway, Burnside, and Barker all employ a combination of
intertextual allusion, physical violence, and experimental aesthetics to challenge ideas of the
body as readily knowable. These concerns are also brought to light in the developing field of
creative nonfiction, including work by Gavin Francis, Kapka Kassabova, and Chitra Ramaswamy,
whose work explores questions of national identity, pregnancy, travel and medicine.
Questions of embodiment are often tied to sensory experience in the work of Elspeth Davie,
not only Spark’s contemporary but her childhood neighbour. In Davie’s stories, escape from quo-
tidian life is often found not only through art but through particular individual rituals, from the
smelling of books to the eating of eggs. The domestic surrealism found in Spark and Davie,
along with a frequent focus on the macabre and grotesque, is developed in the work of Candia
McWilliam and Shena Mackay, as well as in selected stories by Dilys Rose, Jackie Kay, Laura
Hird, Toni Davidson, and Margaret Elphinstone. More recently, writers such as Helen McClory
and Kirsty Logan combine Gothic and fairy tale traditions with a focus on marginalised lives.
Like Owens’s work, these authors often focus on excluded voices, from a McWilliam story from
the perspective of a ‘woman [who] lives on the step of the bank and eats soap’ (McWilliam 1997,
p. 161) to the inventive, multi-voiced stories of Ali Smith and A.L. Kennedy. Kennedy’s fre-
quent use of second-person narration and direct address to the reader, also central to Ron Butlin’s
The Sound of My Voice (1987), frames the reading experience as an essentially democratic, com-
munal process. Kennedy’s stories often focus on marginalised or discounted lives: her depiction
of the relation between spiritual and sexual longing in Original Bliss (1997) or alcoholism in
Paradise (2004) raises questions of agency and belonging. A focus on children and adolescents in
terms of these themes has grown increasingly prominent, whether in Kerry Hudson’s fiction or
plays such as Sharman MacDonald’s When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout (1985) and
subsequent productions. Ali Smith’s novels combine postmodern techniques with a frequent
focus on lives marginalised by class, age, or sexuality: across her work she presents engaging and
often playful narrative voices combined with a sharp attention to social and political problems,
culminating in her Seasonal Quartet (2016–2020) which depicts British life in as close to real
time as possible. In both her stories and novels such as Hotel World (2001) Smith draws the
reader’s attention to the complicated relationship between time, body, and text, using a combi-
nation of direct address and self-referentiality. Smith’s work also represents the growing visibil-
ity of queer voices, including work by Christopher Whyte, Zoe Strachan, Toni Davidson, and
many others.
Embodiment can also be seen as a central theme for a wide variety of poets. Robin Robertson’s
work, particularly his translations from classical sources, are often violent and visceral. ‘At Roane
Head’, his rendition of the selkie myth, combines infanticide with an outpouring of empathy: ‘It
would put the heart across you, all that grief’ (Robertson 2010, p. 88). Like Robertson, Vahni
Capildeo and MacGillivray use multiple genres and modes to explore ideas of myth and belong-
ing while challenging easy formulations of identity. The work of South Asian and Black poets,
including Bhashabi Fraser, Nadine Aisha Jassat, Maud Sulter, Hannah Lavery, Kei Miller, and
Jackie Kay often revolves around questions of diaspora, immigration, and community inclusion.
Kay’s Fiere (2011), for instance, combines her own enquiry into her Nigerian heritage with allu-
sions to Morgan and MacDiarmid and prominent use of Scots. Each of these writers creates new
possibilities for Scottish literature. Poetry continues to be a place where the personal speaks for
the political: the line ‘Look to the living, love them, and hold on’ from Douglas Dunn’s
‘Disenchantments’ was projected onto Edinburgh Castle in 2010, somewhat eliding the poem’s
complicated journey through Edwin Muir and MacDiarmid (Dunn 2003, p. 247). Likewise, the
work of Don Paterson, Angus Peter Campbell, Elizabeth Burns, and Norman MacCaig, to vary-
ing degrees, represents the relation between individual and collective imagining, whether in
Paterson’s marked use of traditional forms, Campbell’s experimentalism, Burns’s interest in eve-
ryday lives, or MacCaig’s focus on immanent experience of the natural world. Each of these poets
situates themselves within both a Scottish and a world literary tradition while also writing from
personal experience.
Each of these authors, like many novelists and playwrights, constantly resituates themselves
in relation to national, regional, sexual, and racial imaginaries. It is not possible, if it ever was,
to write from the position of a unified or communal identity: instead, these writers use intertextual
allusions and postmodern techniques to highlight the instability of explanatory metanarratives.
This approach is particularly prominent in the work of canonical writers such as Spark, Kelman,
and Gray, as well as fiction by Frank Kuppner and John Herdman. Gray’s blend of realism and
science fiction in Lanark reappears in Banks’s The Bridge (1986) and Andrew Crumey’s Sputnik
Caledonia (2008): all three novels use a blend of genres, and similar structuring principles, to
imagine different pasts and futures for Scotland. Postmodern reworkings of earlier texts are
increasingly common, in particular novels by Robert Louis Stevenson and James Hogg, whose
work has been revisited by Emma Tennant, James Robertson, William Boyd, Graeme Macrae
Burnet, Kevin MacNeil, and Spark, as well as in crime fiction by Mina and Rankin. Hogg and
Stevenson are used both as thematic and structural templates in these novels, raising questions
of textual authenticity, dual personalities, and narrative unreliability. Mary Shelley is also a
prominent intertext in works by Banks, Gray, and Lochhead; Gray’s Poor Things (1992), for
instance, not only alludes to nineteenth-century authors, but also takes Lochhead’s Blood and Ice
(1982) as one of its central inspirations. These texts foreground a dialogue between Scottish writ-
ers of different periods; while they can be seen as reifying a handful of texts and central themes,
they also create a community of references and intellectual exchange. Just as writers of this
period use a focus on geographic or human communities to both partake in and critique notions
of collective identity, a focus on literary communities allows writers to situate themselves within
what might be seen as a national literary tradition at the same time they call attention to its
precarity.
The continued prominence of Hogg and Stevenson indicates the centrality of Gothic writing
to Scottish fiction, especially from the 1980s to the present. The continued viability of Gothic
themes has been framed in terms of both ‘a frequently disastrous Scottish past’ (Bold 1983,
p. 164) and a ‘whole, vibrant, mythic’ history (Bissett 2001, p. 6). In Alice Thompson’s Pharos
(2002) Gothic is a way to investigate Scottish involvement with the slave trade, while Ever
Dundas’s Goblin (2017) casts a wider net to look at the mistreatment of both humans and nonhu-
man animals in the Second World War. A wide-ranging approach to folktale and ballad tradi-
tions can be seen in plays such as Greig’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (2011), Haynes’s
short stories and novels, Andrew Greig’s When They Lay Bare (1999), Linda Cracknell’s Call of the
Undertow (2013) and Tennant’s Wild Nights (1979). Each of these writers, as well as Sian Hayton,
Alison Fell and others, presents texts that operate on the threshold between the natural and the
supernatural. Gothic and fantastic writing is for many of these writers both a way to attach their
work to a past tradition and explore new visions of reality. Tennant’s work, across a range of gen-
res, is particularly notable: whether writing narratives of apocalypse or the country house mur-
der, her work uses received forms and traditions as an opening for insights into class and gender
identities.
The historical novel, in a variety of forms, continues to be a vibrant and often experimental
form. While Mitchison’s work – in this period ranging from The Bull Calves (1947) to Early in
Orcadia (1987) – remains particularly prominent, the wide-ranging and popular work of Dorothy
Dunnett, Ronald Frame, and Allan Massie deserves continued attention. Robertson’s And the
Land Lay Still (2011), Kirstin Innes’s Scabby Queen (2020) and Gregory Burke’s hugely successful
play Black Watch (2006) all turn their attention to recent political history, while Robertson’s
Joseph Knight (2003) and Kay’s play The Lamplighter (2008) provide new perspectives on the slave
trade. And the Land Lay Still is a contemporary epic, largely focused on Scottish struggles for
independence, that highlights the individual frailty and the centrality of narrative refashionings;
as one character concludes, ‘Whatever else we put faith in will, in the end, betray us or we will
betray it. But the story never betrays’ (Robertson 2011, p. 646). Returning to historical moments,
whether in Crichton Smith’s and Fionn MacColla’s Clearance novels Consider the Lilies (1968) and
And the Cock Crew (1945), does not bring comfort or clarity, but suggests the importance of the
individual narrative in times of violence. This focus on the individual can also be seen in texts
looking at the very recent past, such as James Kennaway’s Tunes of Glory (1956). Each of these
texts contrasts individual experience with collective struggle not, as in Scott’s fiction, at least as
formulated by György Lukács, to provide insight into that historical moment, but to highlight
how little can be known. This tension is often frequently found in theatre of this period. Gaelic
theatre, which like English-language theatre was largely amateur until the mid-century, but has
become increasingly professionalised, often focuses on historic themes, including plays such as
Donald S. Murray’s Sequamur (2015). Linguistic experimentation is a central feature of many his-
tory plays, from the Scots of Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987)
and Donald Campbell’s The Jesuit (1976) to the Gaelic of Greig’s Dunsinane (2010). Both
Lochhead and Greig incorporate ballad and song traditions to retell and reshape stories of Scottish
monarchs, a theme also revisited in Munro’s trilogy The James Plays (2014). Neo-Victorian and
historical crime has grown increasingly popular, especially in the work of S.G. (Shona) Maclean,
E.S. Thomson, Elizabeth Macneal, Kaite Welsh, and others. The more traditional, Scott-inspired
historical novel, however, continues to be important, particularly in the island-focused work of
Margaret Elphinstone, who recharts the history of the north.
Like the historical novel, Scottish science fiction has been a prominent genre for rethinking
the nature of community. By far the most significant science fiction novels of the period are
Banks’s Culture series, beginning with Consider Phlebas (1987). While his work is split into sup-
posedly realist fiction under the name of Iain Banks and science fiction under Iain M. Banks,
many of his novels challenge generic classification, but are united in their focus on the difficulty,
and necessity, of imagining a utopian society. While novels such as The Crow Road (1992) deploy
a recognisably Scottish setting, Banks’s work as a science fiction writer has led to his being
described as ‘a profoundly Scottish novelist writing Scottish novels that depict a civilization
marked in no way by discernible Scottish characteristics’ (Garrison 2012, p. 62). These distinc-
tions are not restricted to science fiction, of course, but are particularly prominent, as in the work
of Ken MacLeod, who often employs Scottish settings in his science fiction, and the graphic
novelist Grant Morrison, who rarely does. Science fiction has been used to explore gender iden-
tity, most notably in Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), Elphinstone’s The Incomer
(1987) and Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), while Crumey, Martin MacInnes and Pippa
Goldschmidt have focused on the intellectual foundations of science more generally. Science fic-
tion has also been a vehicle for linguistic experimentation, whether in the poetry of Morgan and
Russell Jones or Matthew Fitt’s Scots-language novel But n Ben A-Go-Go (2005).
Fitt’s work in Scots has been particularly important in creating new visibility and audiences
for Scots narration. Along with Robertson and Donovan he has translated a number of children’s
books into Scots, including work by Roald Dahl. While Donovan’s Glasgow-set work remains
more famous, her historical novel Gone are the Leaves (2014) represents new possibilities for Scots
prose. Earlier examples of innovations in Scots fiction can be seen in the work of David Toulmin,
while more recent work in Scots has been produced by Ross Sayers. While Hugh MacDiarmid’s
later poetry was often in English, Sydney Goodsir Smith’s late long poems such as ‘Gowdspink
in Reekie’ combine Joycean neologisms with Scots in proposing ‘the Scoatish/Sadsatiety for the
Spukin o’Verse’ (Smith 1975, p. 224). The interplay between Gaelic and English in Campbell’s
Aibisidh/ABC (2011) likewise combines experimental highlights multilingual wordplay to

expand the horizons of the language. Lochhead’s Scots translations of Moliere, among others,
have similarly demonstrated the flexibility, and continued vitality, of the language, while Sheena
Blackhall’s poetry, prose, and translations have repeatedly emphasised the continued importance
of the Doric tradition. Rather than establishing Scots and English as binaries, as was often the
case in the Renaissance arguments of MacDiarmid and Muir, these authors each illustrate the
interplay between multiple linguistic traditions. Jamie’s ‘Lucky Bag’ depicts modern Scotland as
a place of linguistic, cultural, and material juxtapositions, from ‘a field o whaups’ to ‘a shalwar-
kemeez’ that coalesce into ‘an orderly rabble’ (Jamie 1999, p. 42). Language, like culture, is
always evolving.
While discussions of children’s literature are often less prominent in literary criticism, it is as
rich and nuanced a corpus as the work for adults discussed above. Mitchison’s The Big House
(1950) explores questions of class consciousness, while Mollie Hunter’s The Kelpie’s Pearls (1964)
uses familiar folktale elements to comment on Highland tourism. Julie Bertagna’s more recent
Exodus (2002) offers a story of climate change, which, in its depiction of survivors huddled in
Glasgow’s Necropolis, also echoes Lanark. Mairi Hedderwick’s Katie Morag stories, like
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, have achieved great popular success and also been an increas-
ing draw for the tourist industry. Writers best-known for their adult work, such as Brown, Kay,
and Kennedy, have produced important work for children, while Kathleen Fidler, Lavinia
Derwent, and Allan Campbell McLean have focused on children’s literature in a variety of genres.
Likewise, while popular and often sentimental fiction is often ignored in critical discussions, the
legacy of Jane Duncan’s long-running series beginning with My Friends the Miss Boyds (1959) can
be seen in a wide range of writers from Laura Marney to Jenny Colgan.
As the above examples indicate, the question of inclusion into a Scottish literary canon has
remained central, and sometimes contentious. The formulation used in the annual publication of
New Writing Scotland, from the Association of Scottish Literary Studies, however, remains the
most open: Scottish writers are those ‘resident in Scotland or Scots by birth, upbringing, or incli-
nation’. Over the past decades, numerous anthologies have appeared that highlight marginalised
voices. Ryan Vance and Michael Lee Richardson’s We Were Always Here (2019), and Zoe Strachan’s
Out There (2014) have drawn attention to queer writers, while Tessa Ransford’s Fresh Oceans
(1989) and the Polygon anthology Meantime (1991), introduced by Galloway, highlighted wom-
en’s voices. While the majority of literary journals in this period have been relatively short-lived,
important work has appeared in Cencrastus, Edinburgh Review, Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, Gutter, Neu
Reekie, Gairfish, Harpies and Quines, Northwords and many others. Likewise, while Canongate has
gone from strength to strength and Polygon, Luath, and Birlinn remain prominent, the Scottish
publishing scene has not always championed the work of Scottish writers, and in recent years
many of the most adventurous publishers, such as Freight and Two Ravens, have been unsustain-
able. Small publishers such as Stewed Rhubarb Press and 404 Ink continue to be a home for more
experimental writing. The visibility of contemporary Scottish literature, however, continues to
be hampered by the relatively restricted publishing scene, and frequent hostility to work in Scots
from London-based publishers, while even works by well-known name fall out of print with
surprising rapidity, and works from earlier decades are often unavailable.
Yet this diversity also permits an expanded sense of what a Scottish writer might be. Writers
born in Scotland but who left in childhood range from Duffy and Graham to Sarah Moss and
Aminatta Forna, while Atkinson and Faber’s residence in Scotland, like that of Maggie O’Farrell,
has led to their inclusion in the canon. Scottish writing is certainly not limited to Scottish
themes or settings, nor to a particular view of nationhood, although the geographically

far-ranging work of writers such as Philip Kerr, Gilbert Adair, and James Meek is not always
included in discussions of national literature. Val McDermid’s crime novels alternate between
Scottish and English settings while important novels by Scottish authors, such as Walker
Hamilton’s overlooked All the Little Animals (1968) makes no reference to Scotland at all. In
recent years this cosmopolitanism has been best-reflected in the work of Ali Smith, whose stories
often emphases the universality of art and love, such that every story is ‘told by way of other
stories’ (Smith 1999, p. 176). This diversity is especially seen in the flexibility contemporary
writers have with form: Burnside, Jamie, Kay, and others are as fluid and innovative in prose as
in poetry. The importance of the short story as a form that emphasises marginalised lives is
prominent during this period in work ranging from Kelman to Davie, and continues to be a
place of innovation. Longer work also increasingly illustrates a play between genres and forms.
Fagan’s The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016), for instance, combines a vision of a very contemporary
apocalypse with one of the first accounts in Scottish fiction of a trans adolescent’s coming of age,
while Smith’s Artful (2012) combines literary criticism with a ghost story. Yet, as in Jamie’s
poetry, work of this period balances multiple voices with ideas of unity and community. Wind
Resistance (2017), a solo theatre piece by the folksinger Karine Polwart, combines ballads, histori-
cal narratives, and autobiography with a focus on the natural and nonhuman world to suggest
new futures: ‘We are each other’s wind resistance, a human skein./And we’re not going to make
it on our own’ (Polwart 2017, p. 117). This desire for community, framed with caution and aris-
ing from multiple literary forms, is a hallmark of postmodern and contemporary Scottish litera-
ture. If the period resists easy summary, it is safe to say that there is still no Scottish twilight.
References
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Bold, A. (1983). Modern Scottish Literature. Essex: Longman. Scotland Where it Did?’ In the culture of Iain M. banks.
Brown, G.M. (1984). Three Plays: The Loom of Light, the In: Scotland as Science Fiction (ed. C. McCracken-Flesher),
Well, and the Voyage of Saint Brandon. London: Chatto 55–66. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
& Windus. Graham, W.S. (2004). New Collected Poems. London: Faber.
Craig, C. (1999). The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the Jamie, K. (1999). Jizzen. London: Picador.
National Imagination. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Jamie, K. (2005). Findings. London: Sort Of Books.
Press. Kesson, J. (1998). Glitter of Mica. Edinburgh: B&W
Duffy, C.A. (2004). New Selected Poems: 1984–2004. Publishing.
London: Picador. Leonard, T. (2009). Outside the Narrative: Poems 1965–
Dunn, D. (2003). New Selected Poems: 1964–2000. London: 2009. Edinburgh: Word Power Books and Exbourne:
Faber. Etruscan Books.
Friel, G. (1999). A Glasgow Trilogy. Edinburgh: Canongate Lindsay, M. and Urquhart, F. (1947). Introduction. In:
Classics. No Scottish Twilight: New Scottish Short Stories
Galloway, J. (1999). The Trick Is to Keep Breathing. London: (ed. M. Lindsay and F. Urquhart), 3. Glasgow:
Vintage. William MacLellan.
Gardiner, M. (2009). Arcades – the 1980s and 1990s. In: MacLean, S. (1999). From Wood to Ridge. Manchester:
The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Carcanet.
McWilliam, C. (1997). Wait till I Tell you. London: Shepherd, N. (2001). The living mountain. In: The
Bloomsbury. Grampian Quartet (ed. R. Watson), 1–84. Edinburgh:
Munro, R. (1995). The Maiden Stone. London: Nick Hern Canongate Classics.
Books. Smith, S.G. (1975). Collected Poems. London: John Calder.
Murray, I. and Tait, B. (1984). Introduction. In: Ten Smith, I.C. (1986). Towards the Human: Selected Essays.
Modern Scottish Novels (ed. I. Murray and B. Tait), 1–9. Edinburgh: MacDonald.
Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Smith, A. (1999). Other Stories and Other Stories. London:
Owens, A. (2008). The Complete Short Stories. Edinburgh: Granta.
Polygon. Smith, I.C. (2011). New Collected Poems (ed. M. McGuire).
Polwart, K. (2017). Wind Resistance. London: Faber. Manchester: Carcanet.
Robertson, R. (2010). The Wrecking Light. London: Picador. Tey, J. (2011). The Singing Sands. London: Arrow.
Robertson, J. (2011). And the Land Lay Still. London: Williams, G. (1996). From Scenes like these. Edinburgh:
Hamish Hamilton. B&W Publishing.
13
Literature in Gaelic II
Peter Mackay
School of English, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland
In late August 1609, after having been held captive through the previous winter, Highland clan
chiefs signed what came to be known as the Statutes of Iona. Negotiated by Andrew Knox,
Bishop of the Isles (who helped curb anti-Gaelic tendencies King James VI had expressed in the
Basilicon Doron), these were designed to assimilate Highland chieftains into the noble society of
Lowland Scotland and Britain as a whole; and to weaken, and ultimately do away with, the clan
system and the cultural differences it embodied. Chiefs were to appear in Edinburgh regularly to
justify the conduct of themselves and their clansfolk; their eldest sons were to be educated in the
Lowlands; and the hereditary role – and power – of the bards was to be ended (Hunter 1999,
p. 76). The statutes were not necessarily inimical to the desires of many of the Highlands elite:
for many, assimilation and the maintenance of some level of power was preferable to state
aggression and being supplanted by Fife Adventurers or their like (MacGregor 2006, pp. 15–16).
Following years of disruption, however, the Scottish Privy Council in 1616 made the restrictions
even harsher, striking a stronger anti-Gaelic tone to argue (the spelling is modernised) ‘that the
vulgar English tongue be universally planted, and the Irish [sic] language, which is one of the
chief and principal causes of the continuance of the barbarity and incivility amongst the inhabit-
ants of the Isles and Highlands, may be abolished and removed…’ (Newton 2009, p. 31; quoting
Withers 1988, p. 13). After the attack on Gaelic literature (and the bardic culture that preserved
it) comes an affirmation of the desire to extirpate the language itself.
To start a discussion of Gaelic literature of the last 400 hundred years with the Statutes of Iona
is to assume, at a basic level, the necessary interrelation between the culture of the Highlands –
poetry, song, music, fashions – and the social and political structures that inform, enable or dis-
able these: Gaelic literature has to be read in terms of the society out of which it emerges, its
relationship to other communities and nations, its obsessions. And it is also to flirt with a cata-
strophic narrative, one that takes the Statutes as a stage in the inevitable decline of Gaelic

Literature in Gaelic II 153
culture, one crisis which will be followed by other crises: the collapse of the clan system; the
defeat of the Jacobite cause in the eighteenth century; the Highland Clearances and large scale
emigration from the Highlands; the Great Disruption; the urban drift of the Scottish popula-
tion; the participation in Imperial conflicts (and two World Wars); the rapid decrease in the
number of Gaelic speakers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; the shortages of jobs and
housing crisis in the contemporary Highlands and Islands (and so on). In this narrative, the
Statutes are just one – albeit important – stage in a process in which the Highlands come ever
more under the power of the Scottish throne and are subject – in the eighteenth-century words
of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair [Alexander MacDonald] – to ‘mì-rùn mòr nan Gall’ [the
great ill-will of the Lowlanders]. The importance of the Statutes themselves, however, might be
overstated: there has been recent debate about how much they were a cataclysmic turning point
rather than just one instance of the constant flux that has characterised much of the political and
socio- economic background to the Highlands before and since (see MacGregor 2006;
Cathcart 2009; Goodare 1998). Constant flux might, nevertheless, be as unsettling as cataclysm,
and moments of historical and political crisis – or flux – had material effects on how Gaelic
literature was composed, shared, enjoyed, understood and funded. Perhaps paradoxically, those
events – even if socially or politically disastrous – might also have spurred on positive literary
developments. Narratives of ‘decline’, ‘catastrophe’ or ‘flux’ are, however, also important pre-
cisely because they are narratives: they feed into the various stories, histories and historiographies
that Gaelic speakers have created for themselves (and had created for them) about their culture,
time and again.
In tracing Gaelic literature through the last 400 plus years, therefore, various questions arise
about that literature. Who was composing it? For what audiences? What genres, styles, modes
of writing and oral composition came into or passed out of custom? In what ways can the pres-
sures of interactions with other literatures (Irish, Lowland Scottish, English, continental
European) be felt? Are these pressures aligned to what one might expect from political and social
connections? How was the literature disseminated locally, nationally and internationally? What
support or infrastructure was there for the creators of Gaelic literature? What role – if any – do
ideas of ‘cultural confidence’ play in the balance between tradition and innovation? These ques-
tions can be answered in quite different ways (and from very different perspectives) throughout
the last four centuries, and the emphases chosen will give you quite different versions of how
Gaelic literature can be understood: whether the transition, for example, from the classical Gaelic
bardic world of the dàn dìreach to the clan-and-chief (or prince-and-poet poetry) of the seven-
teenth to eighteenth centuries is a form of creative adaptation to changing political circum-
stances or a debilitating, nostalgic echo of a late-medieval golden age (a ‘Linn an Àigh’ or ‘Age
of Plenty’). Cultural moments and movements can be often be read, again, in contradictory –
catastrophic or optimistic – ways.
To return to the 1600s: despite James VI’s prejudice against Gaels – and his attempts to sup-
plant or circumscribe the culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the
concomitant drawing of Gaelic chiefs into a pan-British cultural milieu – Gaelic literature in the
period maintained its traditional connections to Ireland, through the shared high-register
Classical language and bardic tradition which had been developed and sustained – amongst the
learned and aristocratic Gaelic classes – over centuries. The efflorescent work of the MacMhuirich
and Ó Muirgheasáin poetic dynasties in the early seventeenth century could be seen as ‘a con-
servative poetry of convention, bardic poetry, for and often by the nobility’ which ‘can be por-
trayed as lacking political awareness and as “anachronistic, particularist and elitist”’; but it can
also be approached as nuanced and vital, with the ability – in the work of Cathal or Niall
MacMhuirich, say – to combine allusions to ‘medieval Irish and Classical literatures’ and the
European poetry conventions of amour courtois (Innes and Petrina 2015, pp. 51–52; quoting
MacInnes 1995, p. 63).
Whichever way this bardic poetry is understood, the socio-political system which maintained
this tradition was to become badly frayed over the century, as the older Gaelic order collapsed
first in Ireland and then – more slowly – in Gaelic Scotland. The bardic verse that survives from
the 1600s – the largest body of such verse – is then revealing because it belongs in a tradition,
and looks towards a cultural continuity, that was weakening and breaking. It is telling that one
of the most common literary heroes of the period was Alasdair mac Colla Chiataich, the ‘ceann-
feadhna greadhnach gun ghiorraig’ [splendid, nerveless chieftain] as the Luing poet Diorbhail
nic a’ Bhruthain [Dorothy Brown] labelled him (Mackenzie 1841, p. 63; Stevenson and
Davidson 2001, p. 272). Mac Colla Chiataich was a military commander in both Ireland and
Scotland and so a symbolic representative of the old political bonds across Sruth na Maoile. In
following centuries, Ireland would not be the immediate context or wellspring of Scottish Gaelic
literature to the same extent. Lowland Scotland – barely present in the surviving late-medieval
Gaelic literature – would be more pressing, as would questions of Gaelic’s place in ‘Scotland’; as
Wilson McLeod notes, it is only in Robert Kirk’s 1690 edition of the New Testament that the
term ‘Gàidhealtachd’ first appears (Kirke 1690; McLeod 2004, pp. 23, 127, 142).
The seventeenth century was, in other words, one of cultural transformation. For Ruaraidh
MacThòmais it was the ‘crucible’ for Gaelic poetry; for Colm Ó Baoill it contained a ‘mixture of
poetic traditions, some very old and some in the process of being developed and/or borrowed’
(Thomson 1991; Ó Baoill 1994, p. 19). Professional vernacular poets – those not trained in the
shared Classical language of Gaelic Ireland and Scotland but adapting the earlier praise conven-
tions to the clan society of their time – came to prominence. The poetry they produced was a
codified literature that often had a clear social and political role, celebrating clan chiefs, lament-
ing and eulogising the dead. Originality was not the main consideration but rather the ability to
marshal and extemporise existing images, tropes and themes from within the Gaelic tradition,
to work within what John MacInnes famously labelled a ‘panegyric code’ (MacInnes 1976–
1978). The work of poets such as Eachann Bacach (d. after 1651), Iain Lom (c.1624–1710), Màiri
nighean Alasdair Ruaidh (c.1615–c.1705) and An Clàrsair Dall (c.1656–c.1714) often features
eulogies, especially at the archetypal moment of crisis within the Gàidhealtachd, when the clan
chief has died and there is subsequent uncertainty about succession. Such eulogies commonly
involved warnings to current leaders about the importance of upholding standards, maintaining
clan loyalties and – in the case of An Clàrsair Dall’s ‘Òran do MhacLeòid Dhùn Bheagain’ – not
spending all their money in Edinburgh on the latest French fashions (Matheson 1970, pp. 58–73;
Ó Baoill 1994, pp. 198–207).
Vernacular Gaelic literature through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was almost
entirely oral, with a valuing of forms and styles that allowed for memorisation and public per-
formance whether in dùn [castle], talla [hall] or cèilidh-house. This oral literature was supple-
mented – and complicated – by a body of published material from the mid-eighteenth century
onwards. Publishing was relatively slow to develop, however – Black provisionally calculates
that ‘184 or 185 Gaelic books were published between 1567 and 1800’ (Black 2007c, p. 180; see
also Newton 2009, pp. 82–85) – and from the first, it was somewhat contentious or anxious. The
first book published in Gaelic, Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh (1567), was a translation of John Knox’s
Book of Common Order by Bishop Seon Carsuel [John Carswell] which also contained an attempt
to redirect, limit or control elements of Gaelic culture: in his preface Carsuel railed ‘against poets
who would disseminate stories of Fenian heroes rather than use their skills to spread the Gospel’
in the name – in Thomas McLauchlan’s translation – of ‘passing worldly gain’ (Bateman and
McGonigal 2015, p. 184; Carswell 1873, p. 19; see also Carswell 1970). Despite Carsuel’s con-
cerns, there would be no secular Gaelic publishing until mac Mhaighstir Alasdair compiled a
dictionary for the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge in 1741 (as part
of the attempt to combat ‘heathenism’ and Catholicism in the Highlands). His own collection of
poems, Ais-eiridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich (1751) was the first book of secular verse published
in Gaelic: there had only been five individual original Gaelic poems published previously
(Black 2007a, pp. 600–601).
Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair was one of the last Scottish Gaelic poets – along with his son
Raghnall – to write in the centuries-old Gaelic corra-litir hand and continuity to earlier Gaelic
traditions can clearly be seen in his poetry, not least in its emphasis on praise (Black 1989,
p. 167). What he praises is quite different, however. Not for him the celebration of a clan chief;
instead, in Black and Carruthers’s words, he praised ‘anything but famous men – women,
bagpipes, the Gaelic language, a pet dove, the seasons, whisky, the Muses, the “Sugar Burn”, a
good penis’ (Black and Carruthers 2015, p. 58). Such effusive celebration comes, though, pre-
cisely when there was a need to argue for the value and place of Gaelic and its literature within
the European canon and the British state. The defeat of the Jacobite cause (and the subsequent
precariousness of his own position) can be traced through the defiant yet defensive bombast of
his foreword. He celebrates ‘this ancient and comprehensive language’ but also asserts (ironically
given the sedition and ‘immorality’ of his book) his own ‘inoffensiveness’; the book would nev-
ertheless, it appears, be burned by the common executioner in Edinburgh (Mac-Dhonull 1751,
pp. v, viii).
The Ais-Eiridh was followed by individual collections by Dùghall Bochanan [Dugald
Buchanan] (1767) and Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir [Duncan Bàn MacIntyre] (1768), and
then by a spate of anthologies of Gaelic verse, the first of which – the Eigg collection edited by
Raghnall, mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s son – saw Gaelic poetry by women (Sìleas na Ceapaich and
Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruadh) in print for the first time (Black 2007a, p. 602). Throughout this
period there is an enrichening of the vernacular poetic and song tradition that had come to the
fore in the seventeenth century, but which also sought to break from the limitations of the ‘pan-
egyric code’ by introducing new forms to Gaelic poetry, from other European traditions and from
music. Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s responses to James Thomson’s poems on the seasons spawned
many admiring Gaelic variations; his praise poems – especially with their use of the pìobaireachd
as a basis – inspired Mac an t-Saoir’s masterly ‘Moladh Beinn Dòrainn’. But Gaelic literature in
turn exerted an influence on European culture in this period, in ways which (notoriously) shaped
the production and consumption of Gaelic literature for decades and instigated numerous debates
about its antiquity and authenticity.
In 1760, when James MacPherson (Seumas Bàn MacMhuirich) published his Fragments of
Ancient Poetry – quickly followed by Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), purportedly authored by
the third-century poet Ossian – he was drawing on songs and tales central to the Gaelic oral
tradition (those Fenian tales that Carsuel railed against in 1567). There is no question, though,
that he rearranged and reshaped the material, adding his own elements, fitting the tales to a
contemporary taste for the sentimental and presenting them through an unsettling form of prose
translation (Thomson 1952; Stafford 1988; Kristmannsson 2017). From the first, MacPherson’s
claims about the poems’ origins were challenged or supported depending on whether one
believed such works of ‘genius’ could be preserved in an oral (and so ‘barbaric’) culture; neverthe-
less, the poems had a huge international reach, finding readers in Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon
and helping set the stage for the Sturm-und-drang and melancholy of Romanticism. They were
also – in perhaps the clearest example of the connection between political and military upheaval
and literary production – a complex response to the ravaging of the Highlands in the years
following Culloden. MacPherson was born in 1736 and brought up near Ruthven Barracks in
Badenoch; he would have been well aware of the violence of Cumberland’s army – rape, murder,
house-burnings – against the native population and the poems can then be seen as a form of
‘catharsis and revenge’, a way of claiming some glory out of military defeat, celebrating a poetic
tradition stretching back centuries at a moment of cultural implosion (Thomson 1998, p. 17;
Black and Carruthers 2015, p. 61).
MacPherson’s role in collecting and preserving Gaelic texts – most importantly the Book of the
Dean of Lismore – was certainly notable, and there is no doubt that his work sparked a wider inter-
est in Gaelic literature (McLeod 2004, p. 57). In his preface to the Eigg Collection Raghnall
MacDhòmhnaill describes his motivations behind his collection being that he was ‘moved’ by
the Ossianic phenomenon and so ‘desirous to preserve his mother tongue’. He was somewhat
mistaken, however, that the outcome of MacPherson’s labours would be that ‘the love of the
Gaelic has been revived; and a taste for Gaelic compositions has become general’; as Ronald
Black notes, a planned second volume of this anthology never appeared (MacDhomhnuill 1776,
p. viii; Black 2007a, pp. 602–603). The collection of tales, songs and folklore – with increas-
ingly professional methodologies – would become an important feature of Gaelic literature
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; in the decades following the Eigg Collection
there was also the publication of other anthologies – including the important 1786 Gilles
Collection – as well as individual collections by Coinneach MacCoinnich [Kenneth MacKenzie],
Duncan Lothian and others, along with later editions of Mac an t-Saoir’s work (See Black 2007a).
The subscriber lists from Mac an t-Saoir’s 1786 and 1790 volumes and of later publications
such as MacCoinnich’s 1792 Orain Ghaidhealach give a glimpse of who was patronising – and
likely reading – these publications: they suggest a burgeoning Gaelic middle class (teachers,
ministers, priests, taxmen and tacksmen as well as gentry and barber-surgeons), and an increas-
ing Gaelic literary presence in the Lowland cities (not to mention in overseas diasporic Gaelic-
speaking communities), and with a broadened base of Gaelic literacy (see Black 2007b, c; Ó
Ciosáin 2013; Gunderloch 2019). Such an increase in literacy was desperately needed: by 1800
a descendent of the MacMhuirich family of bards and oral tradition bearers, Lachlan, was illiter-
ate and (in a common trope) telling of how the last vellum manuscripts kept by the family (in
the classical Gaelic hand and language) had been cut up for tailors’ measures (MacKenzie 1805,
p. 275).
These anthologies can be seen, however, to supplement the oral tradition rather than to dis-
place it. They could provide a source for songs and tales shared in urban inns and public houses,
venues which offered ‘a ceilidh-house setting for urban Gaelic communities’ (Kidd and Byrne
2019, pp. 97–98). From 1803, these anthologies were irregularly joined by periodicals sharing
Gaelic tales, news and poems. The first was the short-lived An Rosroine [which Meek parses as An
Ròs Raoine, ‘The Field Rose’] published in Glasgow by Thomas Duncan in the Saltmarket; this
was followed by An Teachdaire Gaelach in 1829 and Cuairtear nan Gleann from 1840 to 1843 –
both edited by Rev. Norman MacLeod, ‘Caraid nan Gàidheal’ – and Mac-Talla, published by
Jonathan G. Mackinnon in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia from 1892 to 1904 (Meek 2007c, pp. 112–
113; Dunbar 2019, pp. 110–113). These periodicals – along with newspapers and landmark
publications such as Sàr-Obair nam Bàrd Gaelach, edited by John MacKenzie in 1841 – often had
a global reach, binding the rural Highlands and Islands to Scottish cities and the international
trans-imperial diaspora. Print culture was, as Donald Meek argues ‘of considerable importance as
an aide-mémoire’ and by the end of the nineteenth century ‘the “urban cèilidh-house” was
flourishing in city halls and single-ends, and being sustained by books of “readings”, specially
concocted for the occasion’, or by papers such as the Oban Times (Meek 2007c, p. 108; 2007a,
p. 169). Periodicals also spawned new genres: the ‘còmhradh’ [or conversation], an invented
dialogue used for didactical, informational or comedic purposes (which would be a precursor of
and model for later Gaelic prose); and a new type of praise/dispraise poem, directed at the peri-
odicals themselves (Kidd 2016; Dunbar 2019, p. 109).
The development of a global Gaelic diaspora with print media that could sustain cultural
links over thousands of miles was, of course, a consequence of the large-scale emigration from the
Highlands and Islands through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The collapse of the clan
system as hereditary chieftains became indebted landlords and cleared thousands of people from
off their traditional lands and the subsequent emigrations – whether driven by or in opposition
to the wishes of lairds dependent on the success of the wool, kelp and herring industries – shaped
much of the Gaelic literature of the nineteenth century. It is hard to overstate the sense of loss –
personal, social, cultural – which informs the poems, songs and prose of this period; this loss
might be even more marked when people found themselves, in effect, in a ‘diaspora communit[y]
in exile within their own dùthchas, sometimes within sight of the very land they had lost’
(Stiùbhart 2019, p. 15). However, the extent to which Gaelic literature in this century suffered
a diminution in quality as it lost contact with long-standing native poetic traditions, and instead
adopted wan versions of English-language models, has been a matter of some debate. Ruaraidh
MacThòmais was perhaps the harshest in his criticism, noting how Gaels were introduced ‘not
to the glories of English literature but to the simpler ephemera of the elementary schoolroom, to
the chapbook and to the models of semi-literate taste’; as a result nineteenth-century Gaelic verse
‘largely turns its back on its own relatively learned, aristocratic tradition, and grovels content-
edly in its novel surroundings’ (Thomson 1989, p. 223). For Somhairle MacGill-Eain, similarly,
there was a considerable amount of ‘imperialist dope’ in nineteenth-century literature, replaying
jingoistic celebrations of British (and especially Highland) military exploits overseas while
Highland glens were being emptied (MacGill-Eain 1985, p. 27). To some extent Thomson and
MacLean represent a generational shift within the twentieth century; they can be seen as creating
a space for their own work that cuts through not just the sense of nostalgia that pervades the
literature of the previous century, but also the suffocating ossification of this in the ‘Celtic
Twilight’ at the turn of the twentieth century.
More generously, the literature of the 1800s sees the ongoing attempt – from the publication
of the Highland Society’s 1805 report on the authenticity of the poems of Ossian onwards – to
gather, preserve and celebrate a distinct Gaelic literature and worldview (MacKenzie 1805). It
also – especially as argued by Donald Meek – represents a developing and coherent sense of a
literary tradition which can not only account for the changing nature of Highland society, testi-
fying to the ravages of clearance and unjust political mismanagement, but also hope to bring
about social and political change for the people of the Highlands (Meek 1995, 2003). The poetry
of Màiri Mhòr nan Òran [Mary MacPherson] and Uilleam MacDhùnLeibhe [William Livingstone]
can then be seen to intertwine with the journalism and activism of a figure such as John Murdoch,
helping to shape the intellectual, political and emotional milieu of the Highlands that would
lead to the Land League activism and the Napier Commission in the 1880s. This was paralleled
by other literary – and cultural – developments, not least the growing importance of religion as
a determining feature of the Highlands and Islands with the religious awakenings in Protestant
regions in the 1810s – there had been earlier awakenings in the previous century – and the insti-
tutionalising of evangelism in the Free Church of Scotland and its offshoots from the 1840s
(Hunter 1999, p. 304; Bateman and McGonigal 2015, p. 186). Religion heavily influenced the
language in this period, and the development of a ‘linguistic identity’ was largely encouraged
through ‘exposure to scriptural rhetoric’ following the translation of the Testaments into Gaelic
under the guidance of the SSPCK in 1767 and 1801 (Bateman and McGonigal 2015, p. 185). If
this helped literacy rates, there would also have been a boost to Gaelic publishing from the
increase in Gaelic-speaking teachers throughout the Highlands and Lowland cities during the
century: Norman MacLeod, for example, looked to school-teachers for support when he launched
Cuairtear nan Gleann in 1840 (Kidd and Byrne (2019), p. 97). The success of such informal and
patchy educational arrangements as found in the Gaelic schools system (nineteenth-century
Gaelic Medium Education of a sort) would, however, be dealt a huge blow by the Education
(Scotland) Act of 1872, which made no discrete provision for education through Gaelic, with the
concomitant weakening of cultural bonds and historical awareness. For Dòmhnall Uilleam
Stiùbhart the legacy of this outweighed any gains made by the land legislation: ‘In the end, it
may not have mattered whether Gaelic-speaking crofters had attained some of the objectives of
their agitation. Perhaps the state had already stolen their children’ (Stiùbhart 2019, pp. 15–16).
It is tempting to read this period in terms of a suspended or lost future (as well as a lost past): its
nostalgia often expresses anxiety about a desolate future. The end of Màiri Mhòr nan Òran’s
‘Nuair a bha mi Òg’, for example, ends on a bleak image of a ‘dùthaich gun surd, gun cheòl,/Far
nach fhaic mi cluaran no neòinean guanach/No fraoch no luachair air bruaich na lòin’ [country
with no tune or spark,/where I will see no thistle or joyful daisy/or heather or rushes on field or
bank”] (Meek 2003, pp. 22–23). Far from being enervating, though, this mix of desolation and
nostalgia was hugely popular, especially among those subject to what has elsewhere been diag-
nosed as ‘psychogeographical exile’ (Dymock and Lyall 2015, p. 74). Certainly, it was the domi-
nant mode of the ‘Celtic Twilight’, the repackaging of Gaelic songs, poems and tales for a
predominantly urban (and English-speaking) audience.
The explosion of interest in the ‘Celtic’ in late nineteenth-century Scotland was fed by the
foundation of Gaelic or Highland societies, the success of the Celtic Revival in Ireland, and the
growing body of folklore collected in the Highlands and Islands to use as material. Essential
folklore work had been carried out by a succession of influential collectors following in the foot-
steps of John Francis Campbell, who published his Popular Tales of the West Highlands in 1860:
figures such as Alexander Carmichael, John Gregorson Campbell, John Dewar, Donald
MacPherson, and Frances Tolmie. The publications of these collectors ‘reasserted the worth of
Gaelic tradition at a time when self-confidence was exceedingly low’ (Newton 2009, p. 96;
Shaw 2007); however, they also made the preservation – and so survival – of Gaelic culture a
pressing question. Rather than a ‘living stream’ of cultural continuity there might instead be an
ossified archive, or indeed the displacement of that culture onto an unrooted, misty and twilit
otherworld, a land of selkies, lullabies and lost children.
Somhairle MacGill-Eain, the most influential twentieth-century Gaelic poet would thus
reject the ‘the fozy and inauthentic splendours of the Celtic Twilight’, while also being appalled
by the likely extinction of the Gaelic language ‘within a generation or two’ in part because ‘exact
shades of meanings of most words [were] not to be found in any of its dictionaries and dialecti-
cally varying enormously’ (MacGill-Eain 1985, p. 11; 2002, p. 248). There was a risk, in other
words, that Gaelic might either dissipate into fuzziness or solidify into inexpressive simplicity.
MacGill-Eain is often seen as the foremost poetic figure of a ‘Gaelic Renaissance’, a resurgence of
energy and interest in Gaelic writing from the 1930s onwards, which itself drew on earlier
attempts to reinvent Gaelic literary culture (in part in response to ‘Celtic’ mystification). Such
innovation can be seen in the poetic experiments of Iain Rothach [John Munro] the first Gaelic
poet to use vers libre, who died in the trenches in 1917, the genre-busting work of Dòmhnall Mac
na Ceàrdaich [Donald Sinclair] in the 1910s and 1920s, and the poetry of MacGill-Eain’s friend
Deòrsa mac Iain Deòrsa [George Campbell Hay]. And for the first time, renewal can be seen in
the development in the early years of the century of a Gaelic drama, and a modern Gaelic fiction
(both of which Mac na Ceàrdaich also tried his hand at).
If the late 1800s saw the cèilidh house move ‘into print’, in Donald Meek’s words, the early
1900s saw the folk tale, the ‘reading’ and the anecdote transform – slowly and with teething-
pains – into the genres of the short story and the novel (Meek 2007b, pp. 253–266). Three
collections of stories by Iain MacCormaic [John MacCormick (1860–1947)] – Oiteagan O’N Iar
(1908), Seanchaidh na h-Airigh (1911) and Seanchaidh na Tràghad (1911) – perhaps most clearly
show this turn. Their titles, which can be translated as ‘Breezes from the West’, ‘Storyteller of
the Sheiling’ and ‘Storyteller of the Beach’, suggest liminal, in-between spaces, places on the
edge. They draw their authority from the tradition-bearing figure of the (island) storyteller but
redirect this tradition into an urban print culture, that was, in MacCormaic’s case, written
heavily in the shadow of Robert Louis Stevenson, and relied on overblown plots and thin char-
acterisation: similar issues would blight MacCormaic’s Dùn-àluinn (1912), generally acknowl-
edged as the first novel in Gaelic (Watson 2011, pp. 22–24). (Aonghas MacDonnchaidh’s An
t-Ogha Mór was published in serial form earlier, but not in book form until 1913 [Kidd 2006,
p. 202; Watson 2011, p. 38]). Other notable fictional experiments of the period – again of vari-
able quality – include Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar’s detective short stories (see Poncarová 2020);
it would not be until later in the century, though, and the culture that developed around the
magazine Gairm that Gaelic fiction would become fully established. Gaelic drama also arose out
of earlier phenomena and artforms, including preaching, prayer, rituals, the reading of printed
‘còmhraidhean’; as with prose, it was not until the early twentieth century that Gaelic drama
for the stage appeared (a notable earlier exception being the macaronic work of Archibald
MacLaren in the 1780s and 1790s) (Macleod 2021, pp. ix, xi). Iain MacCormaic was again an
early trailblazer, with ‘Am Fear a Chaill a Ghàidhlig’ (1911); so too was Iain N. MacLeòid with
‘Rèiteach Mòraig’ (Macleod 2021, pp. 21–51, 1–20). In both cases, the influence of Irish
Revival theatre can be traced, especially in terms of the staging of cultural loss and resurgence:
MacLeòid, a schoolteacher from Kintail, explicitly comments that he is following the example
of ‘ar caraidean an Èirinn’ [Our friends in Ireland] (Macleod 2021, pp. 2, 12; Macleod’s
translation).
The ties between the Gàidhealtachds of Scotland and Ireland would soon be weakened once
more, however, as one of the outcomes of the tumultuous period that saw the First World War,
the derailing of the Home Rule Acts, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and Civil War
in Ireland, and the formation of the Irish Free State. The result of these, Stiùbhart argues, was
debilitating: ‘Scottish Gaelic art, literature, even self-confidence, were deprived of that vital
motor and inspiration from the largest island in the Hebrides: the Isle of Ireland’ (Stiùbhart 2019,
pp. 15–16). The renaissance in Gaelic literature that began in the 1930s and which – if one is
being optimistic – continues to this day (in a third or fourth wave, diminishing or reinforcing
itself) can thus be understood in terms of the search for different sources of inspiration, and the
attempt to create internal motors and institutions to support the development and creation of
new literature (or indeed to re-connect with parallel efforts in Ireland). This is one way to read
the masterworks of Somhairle MacGill-Eain, the poem cycle Dàin do Eimhir and the long poem
‘An Cuilthionn’, which combine rootedness in shared Gaelic traditions with exploration of other
literatures and political and philosophical trends: Provençal courtly love tradition harmonises
with the dàn dìreach, Yeats jostles with Shelley and Marx. Deòrsa mac Iain Deòrsa, meanwhile,
would draw on the languages and cultures of Greece, Italy, North Africa, Scandinavia and Argyll
to inform his multilingual, humanist and pointedly nationalist poetry. Internationalist concerns
and foci were also present in the work of poets working in more traditional forms, such as the
highly popular song-writer and poet Dòmhnnall Ruadh Chorùna [Donald MacDonald] from
North Uist or the South Uist poet Dòmhnall Iain Dhonnchaidh [Donald J. MacDonald] (whose
posthumously-published account of his time in a German POW camp, Fo Sgàil a’ Swastika
[1974], is also one of the most popular Gaelic non-fiction books).
After the Second World War, the promotion of Gaelic literature would be driven on by a
handful of key figures, and the institutions they set up and energy they devoted to it. Perhaps
the most important of these was Ruaraidh MacThòmais, who co-founded the magazine Gairm in
1952 – he would edit this (largely alone) for the next 50 years – and who was also the force
behind the establishment of the Gaelic Books Council in 1968. Although there had been earlier
Gaelic literary magazines, none had the longevity, reach and catalystic impact of Gairm: it was
an early publisher of many of the significant Gaelic writers in the late twentieth century, includ-
ing Iain Crichton Mac a’ Ghobhainn, Fionnlagh MacLeòid, Cairistìona Dick, Aonghas
MacNeacail, Eilidh Watt, and Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul. Perhaps most importantly, it helped
create a readership with an appetite for and expectation of contemporary Gaelic literature; a
readership which was then ready for the appearance of sophisticated, complex novels and short
stories from the 1970s onwards, including Iain Moireach’s An Aghaidh Choimheach (1973), An
t-Aonaran (1976) by Iain Crichton Mac a’ Ghobhainn, and Tormod Caimbeul’s Deireadh an
Fhoghair (1979), which all engage with isolation and cultural loss and – in less overt ways – with
the spectre of nuclear (as well as linguistic) demise. More or less ready: the existentialist, Beckett-
inspired plays of Fionnlagh MacLeòid or T.C. Dòmhnallach’s ‘uncompromising’ 1993 novel An
Sgàineadh, with its fragmented structure and Knut Hamsun-esque focus on the yearning human
body, could still present difficulties (Watson 2011, p. 103).
It is possible to trace a continuous tradition of lyricism and songwriting, deeply informed
by the previous centuries, through the last 50 years in the works of writers such as Murchadh
MacPhàrlain [Murdo MacFarlane], or Calum and Rory MacDonald of Runrig, and carried on
today in the songs of Alasdair Whyte, Mary Anne Kennedy and Aonghas MacNeacail among
others. Indeed, song is still the pre-eminent Gaelic literary form (and certainly the most popu-
lar) in Scotland and abroad; there has also been a highly successful poetic culture in print,
developing on the work of the generation of MacGill-Eain and MacThòmais. It is tempting to
measure the development in the poetic scene through anthologies, from Dòmhnall
MacAmhlaigh’s Nua-Bhàrdachd Gàidhlig in 1974 – which collected MacAmhlaigh himself,
MacGill-Eain, mac Iain Deòrsa, MacThòmais and Iain Crichton Mac a’ Ghobhainn – to
Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin’s An Aghaidh na Sìorraidheachd (1991) which brought together
MacIlleBhàin [Christopher Whyte] himself with Meg Bateman, Maoilios Caimbeul, Anne
Frater, Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh, Aonghas MacNeacail, Catrìona NicGumaraid and Màiri
NicGumaraid. Such canon building helps coalesce the idea of a poetic culture but also might
bespeak a certain anxiety. Both anthologies exist in the face of either infinitude or
nothingness: as MacIlleBhàin’s foreword puts it, his title [‘In the face of eternity’] could sug-
gest Gaelic being projected into a ‘limitless’ future or, on the other hand, that ‘Gaelic poems,
like any poetic word, are thrust into a void which often seems limitless and unresponsive, but
where they hope to find an echo, or even a resonance which will persist in time’ (Whyte 1991,
pp. xx–xxi). That there has not been a follow-up anthology to MacIlleBhàin’s might be under-
stood either as a sign that there is now such a wealth of internationally-recognised poetry
being written in Gaelic that it could not be contained in a single, canon-building anthology,
or – more pessimistically – that the readership for Gaelic poetry might be (comparative to its
previous place in Gaelic culture) small, its ‘echo’ faint.
Gaelic drama has developed, from the late twentieth century, through the creation of
professional and semi-professional theatre companies (as well as the drama competitions
held at local and national Mòds): Fir Chlis operated from 1977 to 1981 and Tosg from 1996
to 2007, while Proìseact nan Ealan, the Gaelic Arts Agency, was a consistent supporter of
drama until it stopped in 2015. Currently the professional company Theatre Gu Leòr, under
the directorship of Muireann Kelly, continues to produce new and innovative work, by writ-
ers such as Màiri Morrison (Bana-Ghaisgich 2018), the writer- director Catriona Lexy
Campbell (Doras Dùinte 2014 and Shrapnel – a stage version of a novel by her father Tormod
Caimbeul – in 2016) and Kelly herself (Scotties 2018, co-written with Frances Poet, and
MAIM 2020). Sustaining audiences for Gaelic theatre has proved to be a challenge; Theatre
Gu Leòr have, however, through canny and innovative collaborations built up a very respect-
able body of work.
There have also been concerted efforts to support the development of Gaelic fiction in the
twenty-first century, especially after the cessation of Gairm. MacThòmais’s magazine was fol-
lowed by a series of other journals and periodicals: Gath (2003–2008), An Guth (with poetry
in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, 2003–2012) and Steall (2016 to present). The most ambitious
expansion of Gaelic literature in the new millennium has come, though, in the publication of
original and translated novels and collections of short stories, first under the Ùr-Sgeul imprint
from 2003 to 2013, and then the efforts of the publishers Acair, Clàr, Luath and the Nova-
Scotia based Bradan Press. The focus from these publishers on different levels and styles of
writing – for children, young adults, learners, native speakers, in western, romance, science-
fiction and detective genres (as well as more ‘literary’ fiction) – has created a more accessible
range of stories than previously existed, and also helped a large number of Gaelic writers to
hone their craft. Different dialects, voices and preoccupations mingle in Gaelic poetry and fic-
tion, and if there are still particular strongholds for Gaelic writing (the prominence of writers
from Ness on Lewis, say, or the clustering around Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on the Isle of Skye) it is
a particular strength that so much is now written by people who have learnt the language as
adults. This has led, for example, to the reimagining and deconstructing of Gaelic linguistic
utopias in Alison Lang’s An Aisling (2015) and the transportation of Utopian ideals to a post-
planetary future (and reimagined past) in Dàibhidh Eyre’s science-fiction-novel-cum-love-
letter-to-open-source-software Cailèideascop (2017), set primarily on a kaleidoscope-shaped
space-station 200 years in the future (while also retelling David Brewster’s invention of the
kaleidoscope in the nineteenth century). The fracturing, breaking and sundering that can be
traced through the last 400 years of Gaelic literature can also, that is, be re-imagined into a
kaleidoscopic model for a fairer, more equitable – even interstellar – version of a Gàidhealtachd
that can incorporate castle hall, cèilidh house and space-station: what has been broken might
yet glister in new, forever changing patterns.
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Genres and Contexts
PART II
14
The Early Book in Scotland
Jeremy J. Smith
Senior Research Fellow and Professor Emeritus, English Language and Linguistics,
School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow and Honorary Professor,
School of English, University of St Andrews
Early Scottish Textual Culture
What counts as ‘Scottish literature’ in a multi-lingual culture, such as existed in medieval and
early modern Scotland? Literature composed in Scotland? Literature copied in Scotland? Literature
read in Scotland? And what is meant by literature? And linguistic questions are basic: are Gaelic
(or Celtic), Old Norse, French, and Latin texts included? Or Old Northumbrian (i.e. northern
Old English), or indeed Middle English? All these languages were, at one time or another,
widely used in what is now Scotland.
One of the oldest ‘literary’ artefacts in present-day Scotland illustrates the complexities: the
inscription on the great stone cross at Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire. The cross dates, probably, from the
eighth century and on it appears, in runes, a version of The Dream of the Rood, closely related to a fuller
poetic text in an eleventh-century southern English manuscript now in Vercelli, Italy (see further
Sisam 1953, pp. 109–118). The inscription is in the Old English dialect known as Old Northumbrian.
The Ruthwell poem, because of its physical location, has been claimed as the earliest example
of ‘Scottish literature’ (see e.g. Clancy and Markus 1998). But closer examination of its contexts
demonstrates the complexities involved in its cultural mapping. The Cross itself, along with the
Old Northumbrian text carved upon it, manifests an ancient social ordering stretching across the
present-day Scottish-English border. Now housed within the local kirk, the Cross was once visible
to mariners in the Solway Firth, indicating their propinquity to the powerful kingdom of
Northumbria, whose founding figure, Oswald, had erected a cross before his victory in 633/634

over the pagans at ‘Heavenfield’, on the Roman wall near Hexham in present-day Northumberland.
Crosses were especially venerated by Northumbrian rulers, becoming their chosen hegemony
symbol, expressed inter alia through erecting stone crosses on their kingdom’s boundaries.
Marks of this Northumbrian culture stretch now across Scotland’s south and England’s north,
from St Cuthbert’s tomb (d. 687) in Durham Cathedral in the east to the place-name Kirkcudbright
‘Cuthbert’s church’ in the west. And that culture’s complex liminalities are expressed by the fact
that Cuthbert was born in Lauderdale, in what is now the district known as the Scottish Borders,
and then moved to Lindisfarne, now in Northumberland.
Such complexities challenge simplistic definitions of ‘Scottish literature’, and numerous other
examples, with similarly convoluted back-histories, are available. For instance, the tenth-century
Book of Deer (Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.6.32), later housed in the Cistercian abbey of
Deer, Aberdeenshire (Ker 1964, p. 57), has been claimed as Scotland’s oldest surviving book, and
twelfth-century additions in the manuscript are some of the earliest surviving Scottish Gaelic
texts. However the book was originally created as a Latin gospel-book, its decoration linked to the
insular cultural nexus that also produced the Book of Kells (c. 800 ce: Dublin, Trinity College,
MS 58), a manuscript that – though now an important landmark of Irish culture – may have been
made on Iona, and the Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 720 ce: London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero
D.iv), from Holy Island off the Northumberland coast (see further Forsyth 2008). Another exam-
ple is The Gododdin, which derives its title from the eponymous kingdom, centred on Edinburgh,
that existed between pre-Roman times and the seventh century. According to the text as it sur-
vives, this poem was composed in the variety of Celtic known as Brythonic by Aneirin, a sixth-
century poet from the area; however the earliest witness for the poem is Aberystwyth, National
Library of Wales, Cardiff MS 2.81 (the Book of Aneirin), which dates from the thirteenth century
and – whatever the language of its exemplar – was copied in Middle Welsh by a scribe somewhere
in North Wales (Rowland 2007). Again, the earliest witness for the Orkneyinga saga, describing
Norse settlements in Orkney and Shetland, is the fourteenth-century Old Icelandic Flateyjarbók
(Reykjavik, Arni Magnusson Institute, MS GkS 1005 fol.); although apparently composed in
Iceland, the saga draws on settlers’ accounts from the Northern Isles (Jesch 2007). And the Anglo-
Norman Roman de Fergus, which survives in two thirteenth-century manuscripts (Chantilly, Musée
Condé, MS Aumale 472, and Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français MS 1153), may be in
origin a Scottish composition (Owen 1991; see also Clancy 2007, p. 127). All such texts have
therefore a claim to be ‘Scottish literature’.
And, above all, medieval and early modern Scottish literate culture was profoundly Latinate,
and thus transnational: Latin was the language not only of record, but also of international cur-
rency; to be literatus was, at this time, to be literate in Latin, as shown by Neil Ker’s magisterial
survey of manuscripts located in medieval libraries of Scottish religious foundations (Ker 1964;
see also Andrew Watson’s supplement, 1987). Thus a fourteenth-century Historia Dunelm, now
London, British Library, MS Additional 24059, was at the Benedictine priory of Coldingham in
Berwickshire, the gift of the monk Thomas Dyppyng: unsurprisingly, since this Scottish founda-
tion was a cell of Durham, in northern England. A copy of the Liber Pluscardensis, a historical
account composed at Pluscarden near Elgin, was written at Dunfermline’s Benedictine abbey in
the fifteenth century for William Schevez, archbishop of St Andrews (Glasgow, University
Library, MS Gen 333, olim BE.7.b.8); Pluscarden was a cell of Dunfermline, which accounts for
the connexion (see further Lyall 1989, p. 241, for contemporary comments on Schevez as a
collector of books, and also 1989, pp. 246–247). At Perth the Franciscan convent owned a
fifteenth-century manuscript of the widely-circulated Moralia in Job by Gregory the Great
The Early Book in Scotland 169
(Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 18.2.6), and a thirteenth-century copy

of poetry by the late Latin writer Claudian (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, MS
Helmst. 499): both loans to the convent from, respectively, Dunkeld Cathedral and the abbey of
St Thomas at Arbroath. Several of the books that were once at St Andrews cathedral are now also
at Wolfenbüttel, including a hymnal (MS Helmst. 628), sermons (MS Helmst. 1029), and a copy
of the Scotichronicon by Walter Bower, abbot of the Augustinian monastery of Inchcolm (MS
Helmst. 538): ‘the most elaborate work of Latin literature to survive from medieval Scotland’
(ODNB). These books were taken to Germany by Marcus Wagner, agent to the Lutheran contro-
versialist Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–1575); Wagner ‘who visited Scotland in 1553, alleged
that he saw at Scone, Cambuskenneth, Edinburgh, St Andrews and elsewhere, books such as were
not to be found in Denmark, Germany and Italy’ (Durkan and Ross 1961, p. 5, and reference
there cited). Bower’s own working copy of the Scotichronicon survives: Cambridge, Corpus Christi
College MS 171; another copy, now Edinburgh, National Records of Scotland, MS GD 45/26/46,
was written by the ‘familiar clerk’ Magnus Makculloch for William Schevez in 1483–1484
(Lyall 1989, p. 245). The Premonstratensian abbey at Soulseat, Wigtownshire, owned a Latin
translation of the Muslim philosopher-scientist Avicenna’s writings (Edinburgh, University
Library, MS 165). Even though the skew of ownership described in Ker’s and Watson’s cata-
logues is necessarily towards what Malcolm Parkes called the ‘professionally literate’ (1991,
p. 275), this selective list captures the flavour of medieval Scottish literary culture, a culture
linked to Latinate discourse communities and social networks across western Europe.
Similar content-patterns appear in early Scottish libraries’ printed holdings, both religious
and secular, described authoritatively by John Durkan and Anthony Ross (1961), who cover the
period 1470–1560 (see also supplements in Cherry 1963, Durkan and Pringle 1978;
Durkan 1981; and Durkan and Russell 1982, 1985). It is perhaps unsurprising that St Leonard’s
College in the University of St Andrews owned works by St Augustine and Robert Holcot (both
published in Basle in 1506), a 1508 Venetian edition of Aquinas’s Opuscula (a simplified version
of the mighty Summa), and Alexander of Hales’s works (Lyons, 1515–1516): Holcot, Aquinas
and Hales were dominant scholastic figures, central for any late medieval university’s curricu-
lum. Nor is it surprising that Alexander Arbuckle, the Franciscan Provincial who debated with
John Knox, owned works by Aquinas and Hales, alongside Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea,
and works by Sts Bonaventure, Hilary of Poitiers and Jerome. Archbishop Schevez, commis-
sioner of the manuscript Liber Pluscardensis, also owned many incunabula, all in Latin (Durkan
and Ross 1961, pp. 47–49; Durkan 1981, p. 90); in 1493 he paid ‘500 crounis in gold’ to the
book-dealer James Watson, who traded between Scotland and Antwerp (Mann 2000, p. 71). And
a similarly substantial Latinate library was in the possession of the much less important figure of
John Greenlaw of Haddington (d.1566), vicar of the then remote East Lothian settlement of
Keith Humbie; Greenlaw owned works by Augustine, de Voragine and Hilary of Poitiers, and
editions of the Church Fathers Tertullian (Paris, 1545) and St Athanasius (Basle, 1556). Such
readers may be presumed to have decanted their literate culture, however indirectly, into the
Scottish school-system (see further Durkan and Reid-Baxter 2013: section I).
Greenlaw also owned a vernacular printed book: a eucharistic tract, in Scots, by the Roman
Catholic controversialist Quintin Kennedy (1520–1564). However, only one of the volumes
recorded from Scottish libraries by Ker and Watson, and very few in Durkan’s and Ross’s lists
(and in later supplements), are in Older Scots, Middle or Early Modern English, or indeed
French. Prose works appear occasionally, notably John Bellenden’s Hystory and Croniklis of
Scotland, printed by Thomas Davidson in Edinburgh around 1540: copies of Bellenden’s Hystory
were owned by Henry Sinclair (bishop of Ross), Alexander Dick (archdeacon of Glasgow), and
Giovanni Ferreri ‘of Piedmont’ (olim tutor to the Kinloss Cistercians). However, Durkan and
Ross record only one text of the great Older Scots ‘makars’, viz. William Dunbar’s The Golden
Targe, in the edition produced by Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar (1508). This book, now
in the National Library of Scotland, has the inscriptions Liber florentini mertine and Amen borthuyk;
the names ‘Florentine (Florimund) Martin’ and ‘Borthwick’ are recorded in The Sheriff Court
Book of Fife from the early fifteenth century, along with that of one ‘Pratt’, who is probably the
W. Prat forret (i.e. Forret in Fife) whose name appears in another Chepman and Myllar print
from 1508, the anonymous Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane (see Hanna 2008). Indeed, the
most successful product of Chepman and Myllar’s short-lived Edinburgh press seems to have
been Bishop William Elphinstone’s Breviarium Aberdonense (1510) rather than any vernacular
work.
Manuscripts (as opposed to printed books) containing Older Scots texts are similarly rarely
recorded within pre-Reformation libraries. English books made their way over the border, of
course, perhaps including London, British Library, MS Additional 22139, a copy of John Gower’s
Confessio Amantis, whose language indicates an origin in the English West Midlands but which
was later lightly annotated in a northern dialect, possibly Older Scots (as claimed in Lyall 1989,
p. 240; but see also Smith 1988, p. 109). The only vernacular book recorded by Ker is an Older
Scots theological work by John of Ireland (d.1495), The Meroure of Wysdome: now Edinburgh,
National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 18.2.8, this volume used to be owned by the col-
legiate church at Guthrie, Angus.
These foundational studies by Durkan and Ross, and Ker and Watson, can now be supple-
mented by later research (notably Lyall 1989; see also the ongoing updating of Ker/Watson
under way at the University of Oxford, accessible at http://mlgb3.bodleian.ox.ac.uk, last con-
sulted 15 June 2022), and the printed-book trade in post-Reformation sixteenth-century
Scotland included a substantial body of vernacular writings. It is also worth noting some obvi-
ous gaps in coverage: female readers, for instance, are rarely represented; as yet, there is no
Scottish equivalent to David Bell’s survey of the reading of English nuns (1995). In all the later
supplements to Durkan and Ross (1961) only one volume, a book of hours in French printed in
Paris in 1549, is ascribed to Jane Chisholm, the illegitimate daughter of Bishop William
Chisholm I of Dunblane (Durkan and Russell 1982, p. 33; for the education of girls, albeit from
noble or royal backgrounds, see Durkan and Reid-Baxter 2013, pp. 19–20). To this example
may be added another work that crossed the border from England: a manuscript of John
Lydgate’s Sege of Thebes, now Boston, Public Library MS f.med.94, which was owned by Marion
(Mariota) Lyle of Houston in Renfrewshire in the late fifteenth century (see Bawcutt 2001;
Lyall 1989, p. 240). This manuscript was copied by the prolific scribe Stephen Dodesham, a
monk based largely at the Charterhouses of Witham in Somerset and Sheen (now Richmond) in
Surrey (see Edwards 1991; Doyle 1997). Lydgate’s poem seems to have been popular with
female readers across Britain; another copy of the Sege, not the Boston manuscript, was loaned
in 1472 by Anne Paston of the well-known Norfolk family to Thomas Boyd, earl of Arran
(Bawcutt 2001, p. 80).
Nevertheless, the essential picture presented by Durkan and Ker remains valid, viz. the
strongly Latin-based textual culture of the period. Although the remainder of this chapter will
be focused on materials generally referred to in textbooks as early ‘Scottish literature’ – that is,
writings in Older Scots or Early Modern English composed in Scotland – it is important to be
aware of that literature’s wider cultural setting.
From Script to Print?
John Barbour (c.1330–1395), archdeacon of Aberdeen, seems to have written The Brus for Robert
II, King of Scots, completing the main section of the work in 1375; an additional section was
completed in the 1380s. The poem survives not in any copy contemporary to Barbour but in two
late fifteenth-century manuscripts, both generally believed to have been copied by John Ramsay,
prior of the Perth Charterhouse (MacDonald 2003, p. 159): Edinburgh, National Library of
Scotland MS Advocates’ 19.2.2 (transcribed in 1489), and Cambridge, St John’s College MS
G.23 (an imperfect copy starting in Book 4, transcribed in 1487) (see further Cunningham 1973,
p. 247). The Edinburgh manuscript also contains a copy of another major Older Scots poem with
a comparable theme, ‘Blind’ Hary’s Wallace.
That no copy of The Brus survives from earlier than 1487 may simply be the result of chance.
However, it is somewhat puzzling that – given the work’s evident contemporary cultural
impact – only these manuscripts survive. References by Andrew Wyntoun in his Chronykill (circa
1400), and by Walter Bower in the Scotichronicon (circa 1440), both predating Ramsay’s manu-
scripts, are evidence of earlier copies. Perth’s Charterhouse – Vallis Virtutis, Scotland’s only
Carthusian monastery – was established by James I in 1429 as an appropriate location for a royal
mausoleum: both James and his wife Joan were buried there. The royal connexion may account –
given the ‘advice to princes’ theme of The Brus – for the existence there of an exemplar for
Ramsay to copy, alongside other books with a contemporary Charterhouse provenance, e.g. man-
uscripts of the Scotichronicon (now Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’
35.6.7; see Watson 1987, p. 56), and of the Regiam Majestatem, a fifteenth-century digest of Scots
law (now Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 25.5.10).
The composition of Hary’s Wallace, by contrast with The Brus, seems to have been contempo-
rary with Ramsay’s manuscripts, possibly through a specific royal commission. Blind(e) Hary –
Hary may be a surname – is recorded as receiving the king’s bounty on five occasions between
1473–1474 and 1492, such events all taking place at Linlithgow Palace and presumably relating
to the presentation of his poem, although – as with The Brus – no royal copy survives. Hary’s
blindness, although suspiciously Homeric, seems to be well-attested; along with Barbour, he is
commemorated in William Dunbar’s Lament for the Makaris, dated from internal references to
after July 1505 (Bawcutt 1998, pp. 333, 337), where he is specifically referred to as ‘blind Hary’
(Bawcutt 1998, p. 96, line 69). The historian John Major in 1518 records Hary’s authorship of
integrum librum Guillelmi Wallacei, naming him Henricus a nativitate luminibus captus ‘Henry [who]
was blind from birth’.
A colophon to the Edinburgh manuscript records that Ramsay copied The Brus and The
Wallace for the use of Symon Lochmalony, vicar of Auchtermoonzie (now simply Moonzie) in
Fife. Moonzie is now a small parish, near the royal burgh of Cupar, and the present-day
Lochmalony Farm is a mile or so to the north-east of Moonzie. In its day, Lochmalony was a
substantial estate, and Fife itself, which contained the university city and bishopric of St Andrews
(a diocese that extended well beyond Fife) and powerful religious houses at Lindores and
Balmerino, was a prosperous county. The Edinburgh manuscript at least therefore seems to
derive from a distinctive Fife culture focused on the university of St Andrews and involving
lesser nobility and clergy (see Brown 2015).
Ramsay’s manuscripts can therefore be placed within a contemporary cultural setting: these
books were, as was generally the case in the manuscript-world, ‘bespoke’ productions, deriving
from particular commissions (see Doyle and Parkes 1978, and also Doyle 1983, for earlier examples
of late medieval English bespoke production). But new processes of book production were already
under way. Just over a decade before Ramsay made his copies, in 1476, the English printer William
Caxton (c.1422–c.1491) had set up his Westminster printing press (see further Pettegree 2010).
Printing for the Scottish market seems to have begun somewhat slowly, although Scots writ-
ers certainly engaged with the new technology. The Aberdonian philosopher James Liddell, who
from 1484 was teaching at the University of Paris, published there a little book containing two
treatises: the Tractatus conceptuum et signorum and the Ars obligatoria logicalis (see Broadie 1994; see
also Mapstone 1996, p. 4). In 1499, Wynkyn de Worde printed, at the expense of Richard Fox,
then bishop of Durham, an anglicised version of The Contemplacioun of Synnaris by the Scottish
Observant Franciscan William Touris (Mapstone 1996, p. 6), and in 1503 The kalendayr of the
shyppars, in Older Scots, was published in Paris by Antoine Vérard, well-known for printing cop-
ies of the Sarum Rite for the English market (for all these texts see MacDonald 2003, p. 152 and
references there cited).
Scottish printing was famously triggered in 1507 by a grant awarded by James IV to Walter
Chepman and Andro Myllar, it seems primarily to produce an edition of Elphinstone’s Breviarium
Aberdonense. The charge in the grant has often been cited
… to furnis and bring hame ane prent, with all stuff belangand tharto, and expert men to use the
samyne, for imprenting within our Realme of the bukis of our Lawis, actis of parliament, croniclis,
mess bukis, and portuus efter the use of our Realme, with addicions and legendis of Scottis sanctis,
now gaderit to be ekit tharto, and al utheris bukis that salbe sene necessar, and to sel the sammyn
for competent pricis
(cited Dickson and Edmond 1890, p. 8; see also Mann 2000).
Walter Chepman (d. 1528) was by background an entrepreneur like Caxton, although his con-
nexions with the Scottish royal court seem to have been closer than Caxton’s to the English
equivalent. Andro Myllar’s biography is more obscure; he seems to have begun his career as a
book-dealer, being paid in 1503 to supply James IV with Latin books on canon law and theology,
but by 1505 he was in Rouen, where he seems to have been associated with the printer Pierre
Violette in producing books for the English market. However, he was back in Scotland by 1507,
when with Chepman he set up their press in the Southgait (Cowgate) in Edinburgh, producing
along with the Breviarium several editions of verse, beginning in 1508 with John Lydgate’s
Complaint of the Black Knight (erroneously titled The Maying and Disport of Chaucer).
The Complaint of the Black Knight was widely circulated in Scotland, with at least two other
surviving copies: one in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Arch. Selden. B.24 (a manuscript discussed
later), and another in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 16500, copied by the notary
John Asloan with extra material added by a scribe possibly called Gilbert Myln. The ‘Asloan
Manuscript’ is also a useful early witness for works by Henryson and Dunbar, and the sole source
for other texts, such as the prose Spectakle of Luf (see further Cunningham 1994; see also
Smith 2012, pp. 195–197).
Pamphlet-type editions of poems by Dunbar and Henryson followed under the Chepman
imprint over the next couple of years, accompanied by other works; fragments survive of a folio-
sized edition of Hary’s Wallace, a much larger book, and it seems likely that many of the press’s
outputs have not survived. Myllar had dropped out of the partnership by 1510, when the
Breviarium appeared in two volumes, and Chepman seems then to have turned to other enter-
prises, notably property-dealings around Edinburgh.
Chepman seems to have made a good living from his properties, and his change of focus sug-
gests that printing had not been a completely successful enterprise; as in England, importing
luxury goods such as books, rather than producing them using home-based novel technology,
seems to have been less risky. And although books continued to be printed in Scotland, e.g. by
Thomas Davidson in the 1540s, who was granted a licence to print the acts of parliament, pub-
lications in Older Scots as opposed to Latin texts were commonly printed outside the country.
The London printer William Copland’s 1553 edition of Gavin Douglas’s translation of the
Aeneid, for instance, retained Older Scots usage (by contrast with William Thynne’s anglicised
Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, which appeared – without acknowledgement of the real author –
in his edition of Chaucer and Chauceriana in 1532; see Mapstone 1996, p. 8). Another remark-
able example is John Gau’s prose The Richt Vay to the Kingdom of Heuine, printed in the then-Danish
city of Malmö around 1533: a translation of Christian Pedersen’s Danish Den rette vey till hiem-
merigis rige (1531). It is amongst the first texts in Scots to engage with religion from a reformed
point of view, and Gau (d. c. 1553), possibly a graduate of St Andrews, seems to have gone into
exile after Patrick Hamilton’s burning there for heresyin 1528. Gau spent the rest of his life in
Scandinavia, ending his career as a Lutheran chaplain in Copenhagen (ODNB).
It seems that truly successful printing in Scotland emerged only in the 1560s and 1570s,
when Robert Lekprevik began work in Edinburgh, printing materials for the newly reformed
kirk such as the Forme of Prayers (1562) and its translation into Gaelic, Foirm na nurrnuidheadh
(1567), and also parliamentary publications; he experimented moreover with the proto-
newspapers known as broadsides (see Smith 2017), including satirical verses from a Protestant
perspective. During the same period John Scot and Thomas Bassandyne catered for a similar
market with The Gude and Godlie Ballatis (1565; see MacDonald 2015). However Older Scots
verse remained in demand; Lekprevik printed a Wallace in 1570 (with a modified contents
reflecting the printer’s Protestant Anglophile ideology), followed by a Brus (1571), while
Bassandyne’s edition of Henryson’s Morall Fabillis appeared in 1571. By the end of the sixteenth
century editions of major Older Scots poets were widely available from Edinburgh booksellers.
Henry Charteris’s inventory of 1606 records in his Buith (i.e. shop) numerous copies of works by
major poets, including David Lyndsay and Robert Henryson, and fyve scoir tua Wallaces (Dickson
and Edmond 1890, p. 353).
Such records of booksellers’ stock indicate that the demand for such material was there.
Research by Sebastiaan Verweij (e.g. 2016) and Theo van Heijnsbergen (e.g. 1994, 2010), has
hugely increased our knowledge of the evolving urban literary culture in Scotland in the second
half of the sixteenth century, as societal and demographic changes in court and city, especially
but not exclusively in Edinburgh, drove that demand, expressed not only in print’s increasing
social salience but also in ongoing copying of literary manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts are
high-status products for a ‘coterie’ audience, e.g. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS
Advocates’ 19.2.6 of John Stewart of Baldynneis’s verse, probably prepared for presentation to
James VI; Stewart (c.1545–1605) was a courtier as well as a poet. Similarly associated with court
culture is Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2553, the Maitland Folio Manuscript,
compiled around 1570 for Sir Richard Maitland (1496–1586), Keeper of the Great Seal of
Scotland in 1562, and the only witness for some of Dunbar’s court poetry.
The volume however that has attracted most attention is the Bannatyne Manuscript-
miscellany: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 1.1.6 (see for a facsimile
Fox and Ringler 1980; for its afterlife, see Smith 2020). This manuscript was copied by the
Edinburgh merchant George Bannatyne (1545–1607) ‘in tyme of pest’. The Bannatyne
Manuscript is an important source for inter alia Dunbar’s and Henryson’s poetry; it also contains
interludes extracted from Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Usually dated to 1568, the
manuscript may have been written a little earlier, perhaps relating to Mary Queen of Scots’s mar-
riage to Henry Lord Darnley (see MacDonald 1986).
Theo van Heijnsbergen’s exhaustive researches into the ‘collective biographies’ of Bannatyne
and his circle – Bannatyne had 22 siblings, and he recorded their names and those of their god-
parents, spouses, and of family patrons in an appended ‘memoriall buik’ – has opened up many
directions for research into a crucial time in Scottish socio-cultural history. Scottish society was
changing, and Bannatyne’s lists, linked to the volume’s ‘aspirational’ nature, reflect these
changes, and the powerful social networks that were emerging. Van Heijnsbergen has shown
how Bannatyne’s network of merchants and legal clerics interacted with other ‘townspeople’
… local administrators who became national figures, merchant lairds, professional legal men, royal
servants and secular clergy… . Considered collectively, these names provide a cross-section of the
public figures on whom the Stewart monarchs had come to depend for the increasingly complex
administration of the country. Many of them were university-trained men with roots in the educated
circles at previous courts, and had been the recipients as well as promoters of the twin concerns of
Scottish humanism, education and legal reform. By contrast, the aristocracy, frequently tied up with
dynastic interests furth of Edinburgh, formed a separate power in many respects, and were not likely
to act as civil servants
(Van Heijnsbergen 1994, p. 186).
The Bannatyne Manuscript therefore represents a bridge between medieval past and early mod-
ern future. Much of its contents drew on the late medieval world of Henryson and Dunbar and
associated court culture; but the circle for which it was created pointed forward to the audience
for which printers like Lekprevik catered.
The Sinclair Books
As a final demonstration of some of the complexities involved in early Scottish book-history, this
account will conclude by examining some manuscripts all copied by the same scribe at the end
of the fifteenth/beginning of the sixteenth century. All are associated with one family of promi-
nent magnates: the Sinclairs, who were major book collectors from the fifteenth through to the
seventeenth centuries, and who, at the Reformation, like their English counterparts, seized the
opportunity of the monasteries’ suppression to augment their libraries (see e.g. Mapstone 1996,
p. 3). The following discussion, however, focuses on earlier activities, during the fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B.24 is an anthology-manuscript generally dated
to the third quarter of the fifteenth century (see further Boffey et al. 1997; see also Lyall 1989,
pp. 250–253, Mapstone 1996, pp. 11–19). Beside works by the English poets Geoffrey Chaucer,
Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate and Sir John Clanvowe, the manuscript contains the sole
witness for an important medieval Scottish poem, The Kingis Quair. This last poem was com-
posed – it is generally argued – by King James I of Scotland (1394–1437), apparently inspired
by his imminent marriage to Joan Beaufort.
A household chaplain probably compiled the Selden manuscript for the Sinclair earls of
Orkney during the reign of James IV (1488–1513). John Norton-Smith argued that this scribe
was James Graye, a priest and notary public (1971, p. xxxiii), and more recently Julia Boffey has
commented that ‘similarities between the Selden scribe and [Graye] may hint at some connec-
tion between the compilation of MS Selden and the circle of William Schevez, Archbishop of
St Andrews’ (Boffey 2000, p. 130); this identification has been disputed (see e.g. Chesnutt 1985,
and references there cited; see also Lyall 1989, p. 245). Such possible links flag the close social
ties possible amongst elites and professionals when the entire population of Scotland was between
500 000 and 800 000 (roughly the population of present-day Glasgow; see Flinn 1977).
The Sinclair family-connexion seems clear. The inscription ‘liber Henrici domini Sinclair’
appears on folio 230v. This reference could refer to Henry Sinclair (1507/1508–1565), an avid
book-collector who was bishop of Ross but primarily a leading judge and privy counsellor
(ODNB). This volume could perhaps therefore be added, along with Thomas Davidson’s 1540
edition of Bellenden’s Hystory, to two more vernacular manuscripts in Older Scots that belonged
to the bishop: Wyntoun’s Chronykill (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’
19.2.4), and The Roit or Quheill of Tyme by the Franciscan Adam Abell (Edinburgh, National
Library of Scotland, MS 1746) (see Durkan and Russell 1985, p. 85; see also Hadley Williams
and Dunn 2012). However, these vernacular books are exceptional rather than the rule in the
bishop’s library, otherwise dominated by humanist works printed in France, and to a lesser extent
in Flanders, Italy and Germany (see Cherry 1963).
Perhaps more plausibly, however, given his attested interests (and indeed the wording of the
inscription), the Selden manuscript could have been in the possession of the bishop’s cousin, who
confusingly shared his first name: Henry, Lord Sinclair, known to have been interested in ver-
nacular literature, who died at the battle of Flodden in 1513. Lord Henry patronised, for instance,
Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, earning the poet’s praise
I mene Uirgillis volum maist excellent

Set this my werk full febill be of rent
At the request, of ane Lord of renowne
Of ancestry nobill, and Illustir baroun
Fader of bukis, protector to science and lare
My speciall gude Lord Henry, Lord Sinclare
Quhilk with grete instance, diuerse tymes sere
Prayit me translaite Uirgill, or Homere
(Douglas 1553: folio ii r)
(On Douglas and the Eneados, see now Bawcutt 2020.) An earlier manuscript-version of the
poem survives, but dated to around 1515 and thus after Lord Henry’s death: Cambridge, Trinity
College, MS O.3.12. This manuscript may however have been another Sinclair book, since on a
leaf before the main text, in a sixteenth-century hand, appears the name ‘Johannes Danyelston
Rector a Dysert’. Dysart on the Fife coast was in the sixteenth century an important port for the
salt trade; it was also part of the Sinclair estate focused on nearby Ravenscraig Castle, given to
William Sinclair by James III in exchange for the earldom of Orkney.
Yet another manuscript with Sinclair associations is by the same scribe as Selden: Edinburgh,
National Library of Scotland MS Acc. 9253, containing Sir Gilbert Hay’s (born c. 1397, d. after
1465) prose translations into Older Scots. Dunbar and Lindsay respectively refer to Hay the
Lament for the makaris and the Testament of the Papyngo; Hay also seems to have contributed materi-
als to The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, a poem surviving in London, British Library,
Additional MS 40732 and Edinburgh, National Archives of Scotland, MS GD 112/71/9, both

late fifteenth century (see further Mapstone 1994, p. 1; for later Scottish ownership of the manu-
scripts, see Bawcutt 2001, p. 84). Hay was also a retainer in the service of William Sinclair
(d. 1480), third earl of Orkney and first earl of Caithness and founder in 1447 of the well-known
Roslin (Rosslyn) collegiate chapel in Midlothian; Hay seems to have stayed for some time at
nearby Roslin Castle, and in 1456 was remembered in the will of William’s father-in-law,
Alexander Sutherland. The three works in question are The buke of the law of armys, The buke of the
ordre of knychthede and The buke of the gouernaunce of princis, renditions respectively of L’arbre des
batailles by the Provençal cleric Honoré Bonet, the Mallorcan scholar and mystic Ramon Llull’s
L’ordre de chevalerie, and the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum: all three texts widely circulated
in European courtly circles (see further Glenn 1993, 2005).
Hay represents interactions between Scottish and Mediterranean cultures, and this cross-
cultural theme continues with a third manuscript by the same scribe containing a Latin text with
a Scandinavian theme: the sole witness for the early thirteenth-century Historia Norvegiae, viz. the
Dalhousie Manuscript, now Edinburgh, National Archives of Scotland, GD 45/31/I–II. The
Sinclair family had acquired the Norwegian earldom of Orkney in the later thirteenth century,
and family-members were established widely in northern Scotland and the Northern Isles. The
Historia Norvegiae was therefore an appropriate volume for their collection. Although in Latin,
the work has distinctive connexions with Old Norse culture, containing a Latin translation of
the skaldic Ynglingatal, the late ninth-century Norwegian poet Þjóðólfr ór Hvíni’s regnal
list-poem.
If the Dalhousie Manuscript points east across the North Sea, the fourth manuscript makes a
south-facing link. Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.19 has been authoritatively described by
Susan Powell (2011, pp. 591–592; see also Smith 2013). Although the scribe has not been iden-
tified, the name ‘ser olifer sinclar of ro-, Oliuer Sinclar off Rosling knigt’, found in the manu-
script (fols 104v, 164r), clearly indicates provenance. This Oliver could be either a son (d. 1523)
or a grandson (d. c. 1576) of Sir William; the latter, Bishop Henry’s brother, was James V’s last
favourite owning lands in Orkney and Shetland like many Sinclairs, he was also at one time
Keeper of Tantallon Castle near North Berwick. Sinclair, possibly (his entry in the ODNB
records some uncertainty), commanded the Scottish forces at Solway Moss (1542), where he was
captured, not being released until early 1543, after James V’s death.
G.19’s main text is a copy of the Festial by John Mirk, an Augustinian canon from Shropshire,
a widely circulated work used for personal devotion. G.19’s text is actually a copy of the edition
produced in Rouen in 1499 by Martin Morin (fl. 1490–1518), a leading printer who catered for
the burgeoning English market. The back-story of G.19 therefore illustrates a sub-theme of this
chapter, viz. the parallel existence of print and manuscript cultures during the late medieval/
early modern periods.
Whereas the copy of Hay’s translations is in a fairly consistent Older Scots, the two remaining
vernacular works in the same scribe’s hand, The Kingis Quair and the Festial, appear predomi-
nantly in Middle English, with only sporadic spellings more commonly found in Older Scots,
mostly <quh-> as a reflex of present-day English <wh->. We might note in both texts charac-
teristically Middle English sche, schall, allone, and the third-person present singular inflexion in
-th in, e.g. falleth (compare prototypical Older Scots scho, sal, allane, fallis) alongside Scots spell-
ings such as quhat, quhen/quhan (cf. present-day English ‘what’, ‘when’), eftir ‘after’, occasional -it
for present-day English -ed, and buke ‘book’ (beside boke, the more prototypically Middle English
form). The form quhich ‘which’ also appears, a blend of Middle English which etc. and Older Scots
quhilk, while in the Quair the Scots form quharfor ‘wherefore’ rhymes with southern English more
(cf. Older Scots mare, mair). Rhyming practice may be taken to reflect the author’s usage – James
I, after all, spent his formative teenage years as a prisoner in England, which would have almost
certainly affected his pronunciation – but other usages indicate that the scribe had both English
and Scots forms in his repertoire, and therefore reproduced such forms when constrained by his
exemplar (see further Benskin and Laing 1981 and references there cited).
The Sinclair family’s books, therefore, reflect well the multilingual and multicultural themes
with which this chapter began, ranging linguistically from Older Scots and Middle English at
one end to Latin at the other, touching on cultures from Norway to Mallorca. Early modern
Scotland’s book-culture may have existed at the edge of the world most Europeans knew, but it
was still international.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Alasdair A. MacDonald for his characteristically kind and helpful comments on
an earlier draft of this chapter.
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15
Publishing in Scotland to 1800
Rhona Brown
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland
The bulk of scholarship on the evolution of the Scottish periodical press has focused on the
nineteenth century, in which the relaunched Edinburgh Review (1802) and its Tory rival,
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817), began and maintained their long reign over Scottish
readers (see Christie 2009; Finkelstein 2002; Morrison and Roberts 2013; Pottinger 1992, and
Stewart 2011). However, this nineteenth-century ‘golden age’ should be regarded as ‘a culmi-
nation point as much as one of departure’ (Benchimol et al. 2015, p. 1). A growing number of
studies now concentrate attention on the pioneering publishers and periodicals of the long
eighteenth century, and the ways in which this era sets the foundations and creates the necessary
conditions for what was to come (See Benchimol et al. 2015, and Brown and McDougall 2012).
The path of periodicals publishers in eighteenth-century Scotland was littered with obstacles:
they had to contend with strong competition from the London press, as well as heavy taxation,
including the introduction of stamp duty on paper, and, later, further taxes on newspapers and
advertisements (Craig 1931, pp. 1–3). While some publishers found shrewd ways to evade
these tariffs and maximise profits, many newspapers and magazines of this period were short-
lived, appearing for only two or three issues before vanishing altogether. Despite these difficul-
ties, a set of significant innovators, including Agnes Campbell (1637–1718), James Watson
(c.1664–1722), Walter Ruddiman (1719–1781), James Sibbald (1747–1803) and John
Mennons (1747–1818), founded flourishing and enduring newspapers and magazines which
not only established the industry but also helped to shape Scotland’s intellectual life and iden-
tity in the long eighteenth century.
There is some debate over which publication constitutes Scotland’s first newspaper. General
consensus bestows the title on the short-lived Mercurius Caledonius (1661), which was founded

Publishing in Scotland to 1800 181
and edited by Thomas Sydserf (1624–1669) and was suppressed ‘on religious grounds’ after only
a few issues (Couper 1908, vol. 1, p. 181). It is the case, however, that there were a number of
newssheets and papers in circulation in Scotland before Sydserf’s enterprise. The first English
newspaper, Diurnall Occurrences, had been founded in 1640–1641, and was reprinted in Edinburgh
from 1642 by Robert Bryson, who was based ‘At the Signe of Jonah’ between 1640 and 1645
(Couper 1908, vol. 1, p. 165). The Mercurius Scoticus first appeared in 1651, describing itself as
providing ‘a true character of Affairs in England, Scotland, Ireland and other Forraign Parts’, and
was the first to be entirely manufactured, printed and published in Scotland, having been issued
from Leith. The Faithfull Intelligencer from the Parliaments Army in Scotland, ‘printed by Christopher
Higgins in Hart’s Close, over against the Trone Church’, commenced in 1659 and is, according
to W.J. Couper, ‘the first paper known to have been produced, edited, and published in Edinburgh
at first hand’ (Couper 1908, vol. 1, p. 176). As their titles suggest, these periodicals focused
primarily on parliamentary debates and army intelligence, often lifting information from the
London papers and generating little in the way of local or even national news. However, their
foundational activities paved the way for ‘the first genuine Scottish newspaper’, the Edinburgh
Gazette (S.W. Brown 2012, p. 353). This paper had two false starts before it was fully established
in 1707: the first Edinburgh Gazette was printed from 1680 by Agnes Campbell (1637–1716),
the widow of Andrew Anderson, who continued her husband’s role as King’s Printer following
his death in 1679. Campbell was a resolute and prosperous businesswoman who was, according
to Adam Fox, ‘one of the most successful entrepreneurs of either sex and in any profession in early
modern Scotland’, as well as principal rival to fellow news pioneer, James Watson (Fox 2020,
p. 13). By 1699, Watson was printing the Edinburgh Gazette with editor James Donaldson. In
1707, the Gazette was being produced ‘by John Reid at his Printing House in Bell’s Wynd’; the
paper continued until 1708, when it became The Scots Postman or New Edinburgh Gazette.
As these ground-breaking publications of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
demonstrate, Edinburgh was, and remained for many decades to come, the nucleus of periodicals
publishing in Scotland. Thanks to the innovative efforts of Campbell, Watson, Donaldson and
others in the early eighteenth century, the city held the monopoly over Scottish readers of news-
papers and magazines until the late 1740s and 1750s when Aberdeen and Glasgow joined the
fray; later still, newspapers and magazines were established in Scottish cities and towns includ-
ing Perth and Dumfries. Although each fresh publication sought to add something new to the
growing number of options for the contemporary periodicals reader, most replicated these early
Edinburgh models with only slight variations in form and substance.
One such model is Watson’s Edinburgh Courant, published from 1705 with Adam Boig and,
following Boig’s death, with James Muirhead. Watson was a key figure in early eighteenth-century
publishing, being responsible for ‘at least nine different news and journal publications, making
him the most active agent in the frenetic newspaper market of early eighteenth- century
Edinburgh’ (Fox 2020, p. 104). Beyond periodicals, Watson ‘is known to have printed over 500
titles’, and was the editor of the influential and canon-defining Choice Collection of Comic and
Serious Scots Poems both Ancient and Modern (1706–1711), which anthologised Scots language
poetry in new ways and for a new reading public (Ovenden 2004). The Edinburgh Courant
reprinted much of its national and international news from the London press, but was distin-
guished by its coverage of shipping news, by which it hoped to provide ‘a great advantage to
merchants’ (Couper 1908, vol. 1, p. 215). Similarly path-breaking was its mode of dissemina-
tion: at its inception by Watson and Boig, the paper’s imprint advertises that, in addition to
being distributed by booksellers and street paper criers, it was ‘sold at the Exchange Coffee
House’ and, following Muirhead’s involvement, available from ‘Muirhead’s Coffee House, up the
stair, immediately below the entry to Writer’s Court’. The role of the coffee house would evolve
throughout the eighteenth century, from a place of dissemination and reading to being itself a
valuable source of news. By the time the Edinburgh Evening Courant – the first Scottish newspaper
to give over a large portion of its space to local news – was established by James McEuen,
William Brown and John Mosman in 1718, ‘Edinburgh’s coffee houses provided the town’s
intelligence through gossip and conversation’ (S.W. Brown 2012, p. 354).
The aforementioned Edinburgh Evening Courant was one of the longest running of the newspa-
pers established in the Scottish capital in the early eighteenth century. Its printer James McEuen
was a successful bookseller with shops in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, and was uniquely
able to import ‘Continental papers supplied by Dutch contacts through the Leith port, giving
him access to foreign news as quickly as his London colleagues’ (Scottish Book Trade Index n.d.;
S.W. Brown 2012, p. 354). This competitive edge meant that the paper was without serious rival
(excepting John Reid Junior’s Scots Courant of 1710–1720) at the time of its establishment, and
it remained in circulation until 1860. The Edinburgh Evening Courant’s potential supremacy was,
however, soon challenged by another long-running newspaper established and developed by key
actors in the eighteenth-century Scottish periodical press. The Caledonian Mercury was founded
in 1720 by William Rolland and printed by William Adams. By early 1724, prominent
Edinburgh publisher Thomas Ruddiman (1647–1757) had begun printing the title, and at
Rolland’s death in 1729, the Ruddiman family publishing business took full ownership, which
it retained until 1772 (S.W. Brown 2012, p. 355). In the Ruddimans’ hands the paper thrived,
thanks in part to its focus on Scottish politics and local news, and it became the key rival to the
Edinburgh Evening Courant. Thomas Ruddiman was a favourite of influential Scottish Jacobite
physician and author Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713), on whose encouragement he left north-
east Scotland for Edinburgh, where he worked first as a copyist and later librarian in the
Advocates’ Library. He entered the printing and bookselling trade in 1706, when he began work
alongside his brother Walter (1687–1770) for Jacobite and Episcopalian printer Robert
Freebairn; by 1712 the Ruddiman brothers had established their own printing business where,
as outlined below, Thomas’s nephew Walter Ruddiman Junior would go on to make a significant
contribution to Edinburgh’s literary magazine culture.1
The ideological differences between the Edinburgh Evening Courant and the Caledonian Mercury
mark the gestation of modern political journalism in Scotland, and their relationship constitutes
a significant moment in the development of the newspaper as a tool of public political debate.
The Courant and Mercury were the dominant papers throughout the period of the Jacobite upris-
ings in the early eighteenth century. While the Courant was, according to McEuen, ‘very well
liked by all except the violent Jacobites, who hate it for no other reason but it is a true and
impartial paper’, the Ruddimans’ political sympathies were revealed by their connections to such
prominent Jacobites as Pitcairne and Freebairn (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 22). This is not to say
that the Mercury was radically pro-Jacobite in its substance: as Couper states, the editors exer-
cised ‘a certain degree of prudence, and while fully chronicling the doings of the rebels’, they
succeeded in keeping the paper ‘free of legal entanglements with the Government’ (Couper 1908,
vol. 2, p. 45). Notwithstanding the journalistic and editorial ‘prudence’ required in the tumul-
tuous political context of the Jacobite uprisings, the Courant and Mercury are early, necessarily
circumspect examples of the politically motivated newspaper which would become familiar first
in the 1790s, and then established in the succeeding centuries. Furthermore, both titles insti-
gated what would become the crucial financial role of advertising for ensuing newspapers; as
Brown states, the Edinburgh Evening Courant was able to fill ‘nearly half its pages with advertise-
ments, something no previous Scottish newspaper – other than Watson’s short-lived Courant –
had come close to achieving’ (Brown 2015, p. 26). These two giants of eighteenth-century news
were without outside competition until Alexander Donaldson, an established publisher of cheap
imprints and popular literature, launched his Edinburgh Advertiser in 1764; Donaldson’s title ran
until early 1859.
As the Edinburgh Evening Courant and Caledonian Mercury dominated Scottish news reporting
in the first half of the eighteenth century, a new and influential breed of periodical was intro-
duced to the reading public. The Scots Magazine and General Intelligencer, founded in 1739 by
William Sands, Andrew Brymer, Andrew Murray and James Cochran, was intended and soon
flourished as a serious alternative for Scottish readers to the established London literary periodi-
cals including the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine by proceeding with a loudly
proclaimed ‘patriotic mandate’ (S.W. Brown 2012, p. 364; see also Benchimol 2013). In the
‘Preface’ to their opening issue, the editors state that their focus will be on ‘the interest of Scotland,
abstractedly consider’d’, and ‘that before every thing else, whatever concerns the interest of this
kingdom, shall always be preferred; for as our labours, so are our wishes employed on the
Prosperity of SCOTLAND’ (Scots Magazine, vol. I [January 1739], pp. ii, iv). Central to the
Scots Magazine’s strategy was an engagement with Scottish authors and the promotion of Scottish
literature: in the ‘Preface’, the editors state that their journal was established so that ‘the
Caledonian Muse might not be restrain’d by want of a publick Echo to her song’ (Scots Magazine,
vol. I [January 1739], p. ii). As Scotland’s first literary magazine, the Scots Magazine established
the model for subsequent journals: in its incorporation of miscellaneous essays and poetry along-
side lists of births, marriages and deaths, every ‘magazine which followed the Scots Magazine
adopted the idea in a more or less modified form’ (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 73).
Meanwhile, newspapers were now being printed and sold outside Scotland’s capital. Prior to
the launch of its first substantial periodical at mid-century, Aberdeen’s printers had had a few
short forays into the trade: only John Forbes’s Weekly Diurnall, published in 1657, sits alongside
the ‘News Schedules’, ‘published by James Chalmers in 1745 and 1746, relative to the Jacobite
rebellion and the battle of Culloden’ (Craig 1931, p. 11). The first substantial newspaper to enter
the Aberdeen marketplace was James Chalmers’s Aberdeen Journal, which was launched at the end
of 1747 and ‘ran for 1,077 issues in this form before changing its title and format in September
1768 under the editorship of James Chalmers junior’ (Fox 2020, p. 146). It was followed, in
1752, by Francis Douglas’s and William Murray’s Aberdeen Intelligencer, which although provid-
ing competition for the Aberdeen Journal for a time, was incorporated by its rival in 1757.2
According to M.E. Craig, the Aberdeen Journal was unusual in that its editorial stance did not
reflect the values of its readership; in Craig’s account, it ‘established itself as the one great news-
paper of the north. That it did so is the more remarkable in that it was unmistakably an anti-
Jacobite organ, whereas the community in which it was seeking to make a place for itself was
strongly Jacobite and Episcopalian in sympathy’ (Craig 1931, p. 51). While the Aberdeen Journal
made space for the customary parliamentary news and national affairs, its popularity might be
explained by the fact that it placed equal weight on local news. This unique emphasis on the
concerns and debates of northern Scotland gave the paper longevity: the Aberdeen Journal survived
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1922, the paper was retitled the
Aberdeen Press and Journal and it continues as the Press and Journal to this day.
In Glasgow, an early attempt at news publishing had been made in 1715 by Donald Govan,
whose Glasgow Courant (renamed the West-Country Intelligence after three issues) made it to
67 numbers (S.W. Brown 2012, p. 355). It was not until 1741 that Andrew Stalker’s Glasgow
Journal – a newspaper in the mode of the Edinburgh Evening Courant and Caledonian Mercury
which appeared as a weekly – provided a locally-made newspaper. The Glasgow Journal was
joined in 1745 by another weekly – Matthew Simson’s Glasgow Courant – which was produced
by renowned Glasgow printers Robert and Andrew Foulis (See Ferguson 1889; Lamont 2018).
Despite the efforts of the city’s periodicals pioneers and the prestige of the Foulis brothers,
Glasgow would wait until the 1780s for a serious rival to the Edinburgh press with the arrival
of John Mennons’s newspaper, the Glasgow Advertiser.
Back in Edinburgh, literary magazines were multiplying and thriving. The popularity of the
Scots Magazine revealed a market for periodicals with miscellaneous contents from philosophy
and medicine to politics and poetry, and it was joined by a number of enterprises including
Mathie’s The Patriot, established in 1740; Fleming and Alison’s Christian Monthly History,
launched in 1743; and Lumsden’s British Magazine or the London and Edinburgh Intelligencer, first
published in 1747. The original Edinburgh Review, established in 1755 by Gavin Hamilton and
John Balfour, was a short-lived journal, whose details have almost been eclipsed by the later
journal of the same name, but which made a number of influential innovations adopted by many
periodical successors. Like other established journals, the Edinburgh Review covered local and
national news ‘while vigorously engaging the emerging literary culture’ through its reviews: this
included Edinburgh’s first theatre reviews, which were provided by James Boswell, as well as
contributions by Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson and other prominent philoso-
phers and historians (S.W. Brown 2012, p. 360). The Edinburgh Review of 1755 was also central
to the development of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous periodical essay, which its editors presented ‘as
an exponent of pure literature’: its ‘cultivation was recognised as one of the means towards rais-
ing Scotland to a higher literary level among the nations’ (Couper 1908, vol. 1, p. 148; see also
McLean 2015).
The Edinburgh Review was followed by the Ruddimans’ first venture into the literary magazine
market: their Edinburgh Magazine was first issued by Walter Ruddiman Junior in 1757. It was
modelled on the Scots Magazine and lasted for only six years, but was a valuable rehearsal for its
more popular successor, Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement, launched in 1768.
The Weekly Magazine was clearly seen by its editors as ‘the resurrection of the old, for they headed
its opening verses “Resurgo”’ (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 99). More than this, however, the Weekly
Magazine provided a number of firsts in the history of the Scottish periodical press. As its title
indicates, it was Scotland’s first weekly magazine, and the first to give the Scots Magazine mean-
ingful competition. Given its more frequent appearance than the monthly magazine, it was also
cheaper than its competitors. Its editor, Walter Ruddiman Junior, introduced a number of inno-
vations which would enlarge the scope of the literary magazine, making the Weekly Magazine one
of the most successful periodicals of the later eighteenth century. The Magazine first appeared on
7 July 1768, professing itself on its title-page to be the ‘ESSENCE of all the Magazines,
Reviews, Newspapers, &c published in Great Britain: also Extracts from every New
Work of Merit, whether political, literary, serious or comical; being a Register of the Writings
and Transactions of the Times’ (The Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement, 7 July 1768, p. i).
Its miscellaneous nature, consisting of local, national and international news, periodical essays,
reviews, poetry, advertisements and literary extracts, made it a hybrid newspaper-meets-literary
magazine, and in this guise, it had unusual success. The Weekly Magazine enjoyed unparalleled
distribution; according to Bob Harris, it ‘claimed a circulation of 3,000 in the late 1770s’, while
the eighteenth- century historian of Edinburgh, Hugh Arnot, describes its success as
‘unprecedented’ (Harris 1996, p. 11; Arnot, quoted in Craig 1931, p. 34). The Magazine featured
prominently the work of Scots language poet Robert Fergusson (1750–1774), who became their
house poet between 1771 and 1773, and whose final contribution to the Magazine – the ‘Codicile
to Rob. Fergusson’s Last Will’, printed on 23 December 1773 – shows gratitude to Ruddiman
as his key patron, ‘whose pen/Still screen’d me from the Dunce’s Den’ (ll.29–30) (McDiarmid 1954–
1956, pp. 221–23).3 For Couper, ‘the appearance of Robert Fergusson’s poems in the pages of the
Magazine contributed much to its popularity’ (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 117). Like the Scots
Magazine, and as Ruddiman’s patronage of Fergusson demonstrates, the Weekly Magazine empha-
sised and prioritised Scottish content. However, while other mid-century periodicals such as the
Edinburgh Magazine and Review ‘stressed the intellectual side of nationalism, challenging their
countrymen to put aside Scotticisms and seek a global reputation for letters’, Ruddiman’s sup-
port of Fergusson demonstrates his investment in Scots language literature and his contribution
to the preservation of enduring Scottish literary forms and modes (S.W. Brown 2012, p. 367).
Ruddiman had further strategies which allowed him to become a key player in Scottish peri-
odicals publishing. As with many other literary magazines, the Weekly Magazine was issued with
blue covers which were printed with advertisements. Unlike other editors, however, Ruddiman
‘unusually packed all four – in double columns – and generated enviable annual profits’ (S.W.
Brown 2012, p. 367). Moreover, Ruddiman was able to evade the stamp tax even while printing
local, national and international news, because his magazine did not comfortably fit the Stamp
Act’s definition of a newspaper. Since its inception, the news section was a key aspect of the
Weekly Magazine: it gave a digest of events at home and abroad in all issues, and ‘everything was
done to make this part as fresh and full as possible’ (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 117). For nine years
Ruddiman continued in this vein, until his competitors grew increasingly dissatisfied at his abil-
ity to elude the taxes that they as newspaper editors were obliged to pay: in 1777, they made a
joint representation to the authorities and Ruddiman was called to the Court of Exchequer to
explain his actions. Ruddiman had three answers to the charges brought: he stated that, as the
publication day for the Weekly Magazine was a Thursday – a day on which no post came to
Edinburgh – the publication was not a newspaper but rather a pamphlet; the Stamp Act did not
apply to magazines; and the Weekly Magazine had been running since 1768 with no objections,
as had other magazines with considerable news coverage (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 119). Ruddiman
was found guilty of evading tax, but had one more attempt at printing the news while still
avoiding the payment of Stamp Duty. In 1777, he split the Weekly Magazine into two new pub-
lications: the news section was now printed as Ruddiman’s Weekly Mercury, while the literary
magazine was continued as the Weekly Magazine. Even with the Weekly Mercury, which was rec-
ognisable as a newspaper, Ruddiman was still attempting to move through the loopholes of the
Stamp Act. According to the Act, all weekly publications were considered to be newspapers if
they carried the news, but ‘the region beyond the seven days was doubtful’: Ruddiman’s Weekly
Mercury was, therefore, printed every eight days (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 120). His strategy
worked for some time: in 1779 the Weekly Mercury had a circulation of 1400 copies per week,
while the Weekly Magazine still sold 3000 per week (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 120). Profits did,
however, diminish. Ruddiman died in 1781, and the Weekly Magazine ceased trading a few years
later, issuing its final number on 24 June 1784.
Perhaps in response to the success of Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine, a number of literary peri-
odicals arose in Edinburgh in the 1770s, making it one of the most productive periods for the
literary magazine in eighteenth-century Scotland. The aforesaid Edinburgh Magazine and Review
first appeared in 1773, having been established by a ‘Society of Gentlemen’ which included
editor Gilbert Stuart (1743–1786), William Creech (1745–1815), Alexander Kincaid (1710–
1777), and William Smellie (1740–1795), all prominent players in the Scottish publishing
industry. Stuart was a historian, political writer and journalist whose ‘works are characterized by
their intensity of personal feeling and their oppositional rhetoric’ (Zachs 2004). Before establish-
ing the Edinburgh Magazine and Review, Stuart was a regular contributor to the London Magazine
and Monthly Review, being particularly prolific as a book reviewer. As a member of the Speculative
Society, Creech was connected to various high-profile Enlightenment figures including Hugh
Blair, and from 1764 was apprentice to Kincaid and John Bell, who were at that time King’s
Printers for Scotland. He would go on to publish two short-lived but influential periodicals
edited by Henry Mackenzie – the Mirror (1779–1780) and the Lounger (1785–1786) – as well as
the works of significant contemporaries including Hugh Blair, James Beattie and Robert Burns.
Kincaid had been trained by periodicals pioneer James McEuen and, after McEuen’s death, suc-
ceeded to the business and the printing of the Edinburgh Evening Courant from 1735; he was also
known as a publisher of English classics, including the works of John Milton (1755). Smellie
began his career in 1759 at the Scots Magazine, where his ‘contract called for him to compile and
edit the magazine, a responsibility that aroused his passion for journalism’, and later became
‘Scotland’s premier printer’ who was favoured by ‘the chief publishers of the day’ (Brown 2004).
As its title suggests, the Edinburgh Magazine and Review had a two-part structure: the first offered
essays on multifarious topics, while the second was made up of often brutally vicious reviews of
contemporary publications. Despite its closure in August 1776 thanks to ‘the numerous indis-
creet performances of its editor’, the Edinburgh Magazine and Review nevertheless established the
model that would be replicated in 1802 by Francis Jeffrey with his relaunched Edinburgh Review
which became, alongside Blackwood’s, one of the principal literary magazines of nineteenth-
century Scotland (Craig 1931, p. 31).
Before the 1770s came to a close, the portfolio of newspapers and magazines produced out-
with Scotland’s capital expanded further. The Perth Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, an early
publishing venture of Robert Morison, was first issued on 3 July 1772, consisting of literary
extracts, poetry, essays and reviews. Although it was on sale for only a year, it was well-regarded
and, like the Weekly Magazine, featured the work of Fergusson and provided ample support for
contemporary authors. In Dumfries, the intermittently-issued Drumfries [sic] Mercury had been
printed as early as 1721, but it was not until 1773 that Robert Jackson and William Boyd estab-
lished the Dumfries Weekly Magazine. Although existing for only four years, the Dumfries Weekly
Magazine also featured the work of Fergusson and, according to Craig, ‘furnished a surprising
number of contacts with the literary world. From continental literature alone, there were extracts
from the work of Voltaire, Fénelon, Montesquieu, Thomas, Corneille d’Espagnac, Diderot,
Beaumelle, Rousseau, Molière, Montaigne, and others’ (Craig 1931, p. 71). In 1777, the Dumfries
Weekly Magazine was replaced by Jackson’s Dumfries Weekly Journal, a newssheet which remained
in circulation until 1835. Although there is evidence that a literary magazine was produced at
Dundee in the late 1750s, the city did not produce its Weekly Magazine until August 1775, and
then for only three years (Fox 2020, p. 147; S.W. Brown 2012, p. 365). It was not until the close
of the century that, following numerous failed attempts at periodicals publishing, Thomas
Colvill’s Dundee Magazine, launched in January 1799, would give Dundee its own, locally-
produced literary magazine.
In Edinburgh, the 1770s saw the entrance of a new periodicals publisher in the shape of entre-
preneur Peter Williamson (1730–1799), who ‘combined the occupations of bookseller, printer,
publisher, inventor, and keeper of a tavern, Indian Peter’s Coffee Room, inside the parliament
house’ (Anderson 2004). Williamson launched two periodicals in this decade – The Scots Spy or
Critical Observer in 1776 and The New Scots Spy or Critical Observer in 1777 – both of which were
issued from his coffee house. ‘Indian Peter’s Coffee House’ is itself a significant location in
Fergusson’s poem on court schedules in Edinburgh, ‘The Rising of the Session’ (1773), in which,
at the lawyers’ retirement after the close of the Court of Session’s first term in March, Williamson’s
establishment is covered by a ‘heavy doom’ in their absence, ‘For a’ his china pigs are toom
[empty]’ (l.61; l.63) (McDiarmid 1954–1956, vol. 2, pp. 127–130). 1779 saw the launch of the
first of two periodicals by novelist and playwright Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831). The Mirror
was compiled by Mackenzie and his fellow members of the Mirror Club, which included various
prominent figures in contemporary Scottish law. Although lasting for only a year and being
heavily modelled on the Spectator, the Mirror enjoyed a positive reception. According to Couper,
Edinburgh ‘bought it and rejoiced over it. It was canvassed in clubs and coffee houses. It spread
into the country and even caused a stir in London’ (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 155). The Mirror was
followed in 1785 by its close relative, the Lounger. Similarly fleeting and similarly popular as its
predecessor, the issue of 9 December 1786 contains the most significant of all early reviews of the
Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (also 1786), in which Mackenzie
christens Burns as ‘the heaven-taught ploughman’.
In the same year, another prominent periodicals publisher arrived in the Edinburgh market-
place. James Sibbald (1747–1803) began as a bookseller, having bought the Circulating Library
of poet Allan Ramsay from Margaret Yair and a stock of books from London in the late 1770s
(McDougall 2004). He launched his Edinburgh Magazine or Literary Miscellany in 1785 in direct
competition to the Scots Magazine but, as Couper states, Sibbald’s periodical ‘was of a more ambi-
tious and attractive character’ (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 170). While providing extracts from
English and European magazines, Sibbald featured numerous original articles and, in the issue
for October 1786, printed the earliest known review of the first edition of Burns’s Poems, Chiefly
in the Scottish Dialect. The Edinburgh Magazine or Literary Miscellany remained in circulation until
mid-1776, but Sibbald would return to periodicals publishing in 1790 with his newspaper, the
Edinburgh Herald, in which he recorded another literary first by printing Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’
for the first time on 18 March 1791, in advance of the poem’s publication in Francis Grose’s
Antiquities of Scotland, which appeared in the following month (Couper 1908, vol. 2,
pp. 184–185).
By the 1780s, Glasgow had two new periodicals from the office of John Mennons: the Glasgow
Advertiser, a newspaper focused on the city’s industrial life, and the Glasgow Magazine and Review
or Universal Miscellany, both launched in 1783 (See Benchimol 2018a,b). The former had signifi-
cant longevity, continuing under its original name until 1802 when it became the Glasgow
Herald, which exists as the Herald to this day; the latter survived for only eight months. However,
the arrival of Mennons from Edinburgh allowed Glasgow to become, for the first time, ‘a com-
petitive newspaper environment’: Mennons’s close attention to Glasgow’s local affairs, which
were driven largely by the tobacco trade and shipping news, allowed him to establish a genuine,
Glasgow-based rival to the Edinburgh newspapers which catered for his local audience in a man-
ner which would have been impossible for the more distant Edinburgh Evening Courant and
Caledonian Mercury (S.W. Brown 2012, p. 356).
The 1790s ushered in a new context for periodicals publishing in the wake of the French
Revolution. As we have seen, political journalism was well-established in Scotland by 1789 and,
from the 1760s onwards, as Bob Harris states, ‘the political role of the newspapers was, in fact,
a rapidly strengthening one, especially from the 1780s’ (Harris 2005a, p. 40). However, the
double context of increasing alarm at the actions of the French Revolutionaries post-1792, with
the dethronement of Louis XVI and the September massacres, alongside the rise of domestic
radicalism and reform societies such as the Friends of the People, newspapers and magazines were
under increasing scrutiny by the authorities. As Gordon Pentland states, aside ‘from Paine, the
most successful and notorious contribution to the debate on the French Revolution in Scotland
came from James Thomson Callender’, whose letters were printed in an Edinburgh periodical
under the pseudonym ‘Timothy Thunderproof’ (Pentland 2015, p. 393). The periodical in ques-
tion was James Anderson’s the Bee, which was launched in December 1790. Anderson was him-
self known for a number of pamphlets and articles which paid special attention to the subject of
agricultural improvement, including some contributions to Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine, writ-
ten under ‘at least fourteen aliases’ (Mitchison 2004). The Bee was wide-ranging in its contents,
from philosophy, history, agricultural issues and poetry through to religion, Scottish literary
antiquarianism and female education, and Anderson himself authored many of its articles.
Additional contributors to the Bee included David Stewart Erskine, Earl of Buchan (1742–
1829),4 and Anderson attempted to recruit Burns as a regular contributor prior to the journal’s
launch. Burns declined: as he states in a letter to Anderson of 1 November 1790, ‘My fingers are
so wore to the bone in holding the noses of his Majesty’s liege subjects to the grindstone of Excise
that I am totally unfit for wielding a pen in any generous subject’, but asks to be included as a
‘Subscriber, bona fide’ (De Lancey Ferguson and Roy 1985, vol. 2, p. 60). Upon his pseudony-
mous publication of Callender’s pro-radical articles, which were later collected as The Political
Progress of Great Britain (1794), Anderson was brought before the sheriff and requested to name
the author, which he refused to do. Callender fled to America, and the Bee ‘limped on for another
year or so and attributed its decline to subscribers – perhaps Burns included – for failing to pay
up their arrears’ (Mee 2015, p. 73).
As Harris has stated, at the beginning of the 1790s, ‘the responses of the Scottish press to the
French Revolution and the related issue of domestic reform were generally balanced in tone and
emphasis and frequently favourable’ (Harris 2005a, p. 50). However, following the events of the
summer of 1792, most Scottish newspapers ‘furnished unwavering support to the anti-radical
cause’ (Harris 2005a, p. 51). There were two exceptions to this rule in Edinburgh – the Edinburgh
Gazetteer and Scots Chronicle – and one in Glasgow: the Glasgow Advertiser. The Edinburgh Gazetteer
was first issued ‘gratis’ in November 1792 by Captain William Johnston. It was unapologetic in
its radical stance, stating in its opening issue’s ‘Plan’ that it hoped to ‘arrest bad men in their
career’, and ‘acquire the power of searching out and expressing to the world, the detestable and
crooked schemes by which corruption undermines the bulwarks of freedom’ (Edinburgh Gazetteer,
16 November 1792, p. 1).5 As well as reporting on high-profile cases, including the trial and
execution of Louis XVI in France, the Gazetteer offers comprehensive accounts of the Scottish sedi-
tion trials of Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving and Maurice Margarot,
details of the meetings of the various Scottish societies of the Friends of the People, contributions
to the debate on the slave trade and its abolition, and poetic contributions by Burns. The Gazetteer’s
role as ‘the main Scottish radical newspaper’ meant that it was under constant scrutiny by the
authorities. Johnston and the paper’s printer, Simon Drummond, were prosecuted in March 1793
for printing a report of a political trial in Edinburgh, and the paper was ‘effectively closed by the
indictment for treason in February 1794 of its second proprietor, Alexander Scott’ (Harris 2005b,
p. 199; Harris 2005a, p. 52). Despite its short life, the Gazetteer remains a valuable lens via which
to view the uneasy political atmosphere in Scotland in the early 1790s, and makes a unique con-
tribution to debates on Scotland’s democracy at a crucial moment in its development.
The pro-reform readership gained another periodical in 1796, when the Scots Chronicle was
printed by J. Johnston under the patronage of London-based Scottish Whigs, including the Earl
of Lauderdale (Harris 2005a, p. 58). It too was taken to court for libel in late 1797, with charges
brought against Johnston as printer and John Morthland as editor, but managed to continue
printing until at least 1802, and perhaps as late as 1806 (Couper 1908, vol. 2, pp. 217–218). In
Glasgow, Mennons’s Glasgow Advertiser professed impartiality in political debate in the post-
Revolution period until, in early 1793, he was charged for printing a radical notice in his paper;
following this incident, Mennons was much more cautious in selecting material for the Advertiser.
Indeed, when the prospect of war with France loomed, ‘apart from the radical papers, only the
Edinburgh Advertiser and Glasgow Advertiser reflected the existence of divisions amongst Scots on
the justification for war and on its conduct’ (Harris 2005a, p. 58). The government’s monitoring
of journalism in the 1790s reduced the Edinburgh Gazetteer ‘to speechless impotence’ while, as
Couper states, ‘other newspapers of the city considered their duty done if they succeeded in
becoming mere colourless chroniclers’ (Couper 1908, vol. 2, p. 111). Having said this, the early
1790s ushered in a new, recognisably modern form of political journalism, and the newspaper
became a sharpened tool in public debate: during this time, ‘the press took on a new importance
in many communities in lowland Scotland as a vehicle for political information and opinion’
(Harris 2005a, p. 60). Furthermore, the radical newspapers of the 1790s paved the way for the
radical journals of the early nineteenth century, including Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf and
Richard Carlile’s Republican, both launched in 1817.
The evolution of the periodical press in eighteenth-century Scotland is one of growing confi-
dence and diversity. Beginning with the derivative newssheets and digests of the late seventeenth
century, the Scottish periodical press grew to encompass numerous newspapers of varying politi-
cal stripes, alongside several literary magazines produced across a number of cities and towns. By
1789, Scotland boasted 10 newspapers, while the literary magazine had become a crucial site of
support, through publication and review, for both new and established Scottish authors
(Harris 2005a, p. 39). Through its dissemination to subscribers, on the street by paper criers and
via coffee houses, the periodical press took on an increasingly important role in Scottish political
and intellectual debate as the century progressed. While the Edinburgh Magazine and Review
espoused an Enlightenment narrative of improvement which advised expunging ‘Scotticisms’
from writing in order to promote the nation’s global literary reputation, Ruddiman, Sibbald and
Anderson were supporting Scots language poetry and engaging in literary antiquarianism in
their periodicals’ pages: each played a crucial role in the establishment of a canon of Scottish
literature. Although monitored and suppressed since its earliest days, newspapers were subjected
to increased governmental scrutiny in the 1790s, and many periodicals succumbed to official and
non-official political and legal pressures. Having said this, by the close of the century, the peri-
odical was the Scottish reader’s main source of fresh political intelligence and a significant tool
in public debates regarding Scotland’s evolving democracy. The periodical press’s diversity puts
it at the centre of ‘the culture of controversy’ of eighteenth-century Scotland and, by extension,
at the heart of Scottish intellectual, political, literary and social life (Raffe 2012, pp. 5–12).
Notes
1 For further details on Ruddiman and his business, 2 For more on the relationship between the two peri-
see Duncan 1965. odicals, see McDonald 1969.
3 For a full account of Robert Fergusson’s relationship 5 An online edition of the Gazetteer is available at
with the Weekly Magazine, see R. Brown 2012. https://edinburghgazetteer.glasgow.ac.uk (accessed
4 For more on Erskine’s contributions to the Bee, see 9 August 2022).
Brown 2019.
References
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Beavan, I. (2012). The pamphlet. In: The Edinburgh Mathison, H. (1998). Tropes of promotion and wellbeing:
History of the Book in Scotland: Enlightenment and advertisement and the eighteenth- century Scottish
Expansion 1707-1800 (ed. S. Brown and W. periodical press. Prose Studies 21 (2): 206–225.
McDougall), 382–390. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Scally, J. (2015). Cheap print on Scottish streets. In: The
University Press. Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: Enlightenment
Ellis, M. (2004). The Coffee House: A Cultural History. and Expansion 1707–1800 (ed. S. Brown and W.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. McDougall), 372–382. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Feather, J. (1988). A History of British Publishing. London: University Press.
Routledge. Sher, R.B. (2006). The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish
Mann, A.J. (2000). The Scottish Book Trade 1500–1720: Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth- Century
Print Commerce and Print Control in Early Modern Britain, Ireland, & America. Chicago, IL: University of
Scotland. East Linton: Tuckwell. Chicago Press.
16
Publishing in Scotland from 1800
David Finkelstein
Cultural Historian, Edinburgh, Scotland
Introduction
In 1876 a Royal Commission on Copyright was convened to grapple with the thorny issue of
international copyright and American piracies. For years, British publishers and authors had
complained about the income lost through flagrant pirating of bestselling works in US markets,
while readers had complained about high British book prices, and a reliance on a patchwork of
private circulating libraries and a slowly emerging public library system to access new publica-
tions when budgets could not be stretched. The Commission, chaired by Lord John Manners,
with author Anthony Trollope as one of its examining panellists, heard testimony over several
days from leading figures in the printing and publishing world. Among them was John
Blackwood, head of the Edinburgh publishing firm William Blackwood and Sons. As a leading
figure in mid-century British publishing circles, he was asked whether the practice of circulating
books through lending libraries such as Mudie’s Select Library served to inflate book prices, and
therefore whether abolishing them and circulating direct to readers might offer more rewards for
publishers and authors, and lower book prices accordingly. His response was revealing. ‘The
business both of authors and of publishers is to consult and please the public,’ he stated, ‘and we
will adapt ourselves to any case which arises to the best of our ability; but as to the prices at
which to sell a book the circumstances guide us, and no legislation would work any change in
what is merely a business operation’ (Royal Commission 1878, p. 41).
Blackwood’s stance was typical of the major firms operating at the time, many of them
Scottish in background and founding. Though his answer conflated publisher and author inter-
ests (‘we will adapt ourselves’), truth be told he and likeminded colleagues acted on the basis that
the publisher, not the author, was best arbiter for assessing value, price and form of a book

Publishing in Scotland from 1800 193
prepared for the marketplace. Writing the work was the author’s territory: judging its value was
a business operation best overseen by entrepreneurial leaders such as Blackwood, and not to be
interfered with by external commissions.
In late century evaluations of Scottish publishing figures such as Archibald Constable,
William and John Blackwood, John Murray I, William Collins, Thomas Nelson, William and
Robert Chambers, such dispassionate appraisals of literary and commercial worth were
remarked upon as key to their rise to prominence. Scottish pioneers were offered up as daring
adventurers who had achieved great success through identifying, assessing and bringing to
market at relevant prices treasures from the minds of knowledge experts. Canny were the
Scottish publishing entrepreneurs who steered authors to the task of spinning golden threads
of literature, so creating value and worth where none had existed before. ‘It is a common
belief’, Margaret Oliphant wrote in her 1897 multi-volume narrative of the Edinburgh firm
William Blackwood and Sons,
in the literary world that publishers are the most grasping of middlemen, eager only to have the
lion’s share of the profits. But in those days there was a certain spirit of daring and romance in ‘the
Trade’. The Revival of Literature was like the opening of a new mine: it was more than that, a sort
of manufactory out of nothing, to which there seemed no limit. You had but to set a man of genius
spinning at that shining thread which came from nowhere, which required no purchase of materials
or ‘plant’ of machinery, and your fortune was made.
(Oliphant 1897, p. 25)
Early Days
The period 1800–1900 saw a shift in Scottish publishing from a reliance on individual
‘booksellers’ undertaking the full gamut of book production, to mid-century dominance by
family led ‘publishers’ specialising in key national and international markets, to end of century
challenges from nimbler upstarts and London based entrepreneurs.
Early pioneers such as John Murray I, Daniel Macmillan and his brother Alexander, crossed
Scottish borders to set themselves up in London and Cambridge. Others pursued careers from
Scottish bases in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. The turn of the century saw steady
appearance of Scottish publishing firms that would flourish as the century progressed: William
Collins, who built a business upon religious publications in Glasgow from a standing start in
1789; Thomas Nelson, Edinburgh based from 1798; the educational pioneers Oliver and Boyd,
set up in 1801 off the High Street of Edinburgh; William Blackwood, who established modest
holdings in Edinburgh’s High Street in 1804, then moved in 1829 to swankier New Town
premises to consolidate early successes; Adam and Charles Black, who joined forces in Edinburgh
in 1823 to form A&C Black, going on in 1827 to take up the copyright of Archibald Constable’s
publishing experiment in encyclopaedias to expand and extend the reach of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
Key to understanding motivations of these individuals in founding and directing publishing
firms was the expression of personal and cultural traits that they saw as particularly emanating
from Scottish roots. Though their business was mercantilistic, memorials and autobiographies of
Scottish born and bred publishing figures such as William Blackwood, Daniel Macmillan,
William and Robert Chambers, Adam Black and John Murray I followed a consistent pattern of
emphasising four key themes that spoke to outward facing Scottish character traits. These
included a belief in self-improvement, a curiosity sparked by a love of inquiry, reasoning and
educational value, personal responsibility rooted in faith (religious and moral), and a commit-
ment to a particularly Scottish civic nationalism. These were presented as a means for reconciling
the values of literature and commerce, as avenues by which they shaped cultural mores in Scottish
contexts while blurring the economic underpinnings of publishing. As one mid-twentieth com-
mentator contended:
The great pioneer Scottish publishers, called by vocation to the cause of knowledge, served and
fostered that cause, being men of principle, and made fortunes out of it, being shrewd… Literature
to them and to their Scottish readers, was more than a tale holding children from play; it was con-
ceived, essentially, as a means of learning, of self-development and emancipation. The nineteenth
century lists and annals of the Scottish firms illustrate the will of the ordinary Scottish folk to better
themselves by study.
(Turnbull 1955, p. 72)
Such principles had their place in the establishment of nineteenth-century Scottish publishing
houses, with self- referential mentions and contemporary advertisements playing up self-
improvement, learned curiosity and personal responsibility as key factors aimed at counteracting
contemporary views of Scots publishers as mere artisans on the make. Civic nationalism in
Scottish terms, on the other hand, evoked a cultural and national identity fashioned not by con-
stant violent upheaval, as exemplified in parallel Irish political history, but by ‘a well behaved,
enlightened appeal to pluralist democracy’, nestled firmly in the nineteenth century within a
larger North Briton identity’ (O’Toole 1996, p. 72). Through these means, nineteenth-century
Scottish society was said to have come to terms with the political realities of the 1707 union
between England and Scotland, the defeat of Jacobitism in subsequent decades of strife, and an
eventual rapprochement that by the 1830s had subsumed previously banned aspects of Highland
culture into safely contained versions of Scottish character.
These traits also manifested themselves in nineteenth-century Scottish publishers’ linking
back to eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment ideals, and in particular to a sense of civic
duty that compelled many to play key roles in local governance, mutual improvement initiatives
and philanthropic missions. The Nelson family donated significant funds to restore and build
hospitals and public libraries. William Chambers endowed Peebles with a public reading room
and library situated in the centre of town, was elected multiple times as Lord Provost of
Edinburgh, and was invited to name the new settlement in New Zealand that would become
Dunedin. William Collins became a leading figure in Glasgow temperance and social reform
movements. William Johnston, Edinburgh cartographic publisher, held civil offices as burgess,
high constable, city councillor and Lord Provost. In turn, Adam Black was elected a Member of
Parliament for the Edinburgh constituency, serving in that capacity from 1856 to 1865, and also
served on the Edinburgh Town Council and as Lord Provost. Thomas Boyd, of Oliver & Boyd,
led on the establishment of the new Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh’s Lauriston Place, acted as
town councillor and as Lord Provost, eventually being knighted in 1881 for his civic services.
Thomas Clark, of publishing firm T&T Clark, was Lord Provost between 1885 and 1888, play-
ing a key role in founding Edinburgh’s Central Library (part-funded by Andrew Carnegie), and
supporting the building of bridges and drainage systems to enhance civic community
(Finkelstein 2007, pp. 99–101).
Such publishing entrepreneurs also built upon the eighteenth-century successes of the likes
of William Creech, William Smellie and Archibald Constable, who had emerged during the
second half of the eighteenth century when strategic location of publishing houses in
Edinburgh had intimately supported the rapid circulation of knowledge, talents and demands
of Scottish thinkers and writers such as Robert Burns, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and
Dugald Stewart.
It was businessman William Creech, based in Allan Ramsay’s old print house and bookshop
in the High Street between 1771 and 1815, who had published Ferguson and Stewart, and
organised the issuing of the first Edinburgh editions of Robert Burns’s poetry in 1787. William
Smellie laid the foundation for the encyclopaedic gathering of knowledge by masterminding the
editing and issuing in conjunction with two other printers the eclectic, 3 volume Encyclopaedia
Britannica in multiple parts by subscription between 1768 and 1771, for which he wrote most
of the articles. Later editions, published over the course of the nineteenth century in tum by
Scottish publishers Archibald Constable and Adam Black, would grow increasingly larger and
more authoritative, and go on to serve as models for future reference works, perfecting the idea
of the encyclopaedia as a source of factual information frequently revised to account for new
information.
While Creech, Smellie and others played their part in encouraging free exchange of ideas in
the capital city, and disseminating the results to the wider world, it was the generation after who
transformed Scottish cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh into publishing powerhouses, threat-
ening to displace London as Britain’s cultural and publishing centre. The shift was facilitated by
the 1774 House of Lords ruling (Donaldson vs Becket) that overturned London booksellers’ claims
to perpetual copyright to published works. The effect was to allow Scots to publish their own
editions of popular works without fear of litigation from London. This coincided with a rise in
Scottish educational opportunities and a burgeoning commercial manufacturing base. As
Stephen Brown and Warren McDougall point out, such developments between 1750 and
1850 led to higher demand for textual information. ‘Scottish publishers made knowledge a
highly prized market commodity by anticipating the economic opportunities to be derived from
the exponentially increasing significance of literacy to the new capitalist and imperial cultures’
(Brown and McDougall 2012, p. 5).
Between 1768 and 1777, Scottish publishers published a total of 4550 general titles, or an
average roughly of 455 titles per year. By 1800, this had risen to an average 520 titles per annum
(Brown and McDougall 2012, p. 18). By 1815, the number had risen again to 565, while English
book production rose more gradually from approximately 372 in 1792 to 580 in 1815. ‘One that
has not examined into the matter’, wrote John Gibson Lockhart in 1819, ‘would scarcely be able
to believe how large a proportion of the classical works of English literature, published in our
age, have made their first appearances on the counters of Edinburgh booksellers’ (quoted in
Murdoch and Sher 1988, p. 135). Edinburgh and Glasgow soon ranked second and fourth to
London in terms of books produced per year.
Other factors contributing to the Scottish publishing boom were the availability of credit
on relatively secure terms to those starting up businesses, the already mentioned expansion
of a reading public eager for more titles, and a large pool of educated writers working in
Scotland. The high-quality books, journals and other printed items that flowed from
Scotland as a result established a publishing ‘brand’ representing ‘reliability, quality and a
democratic impulse in the dissemination of classical and modern learning’ (Brown and
McDougall 2012, p. 12).
Scottish Publishing Innovators
Equally important were the individual entrepreneurs who set this revolution in motion. Among
them was Archibald Constable, the first Scottish publisher to truly challenge the monopoly of
the London book trade, and of whom Lord Cockburn declared ‘the literature of Scotland has been
more indebted than to any other of his vocation’ (quoted in Cockburn 1910, p. 162). As Ian
Duncan has effectively summarised, it was Constable who played a key role ‘in the institutional
transformation of Scottish literature after 1800, in which it devolved from the academic infra-
structure of the Lowland Enlightenment to an industrializing marketplace’ (Duncan 2007,
p. 21). Constable’s innovations laid the ground for Scottish publishing to dominate the
nineteenth-century trade in areas such as literary periodicals, novels and reference publishing.
Archibald Constable (1774–1827), a native of Fife, began his career as a booksellers’ appren-
tice in Edinburgh. He established an office in High Street and in 1798 began publishing ser-
mons and pamphlets. In 1812 he bought over the copyright to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and
between 1814 and 1820 dedicated resources to producing an expanded and revised 6 volume
Supplement in 1820, featuring 699 principal articles and 125 illustrations. It would prove an
immediate success with resounding impact. Priced at 25 shillings each, the first volume quickly
sold 7000 copies, the second 25 000 copies, and overseas sales were ‘brisk’, particularly in the US,
where it was distributed by the bookseller Thomas Wardle (Murray 2007a, p. 307). A further
revised, improved and expanded edition was issued in 1823.
In 1802 Constable took on the responsibility for publishing the monthly Edinburgh Review,
turning it into the leading literary periodical of the day. One of the Review’s editors, Sydney
Smith, suggested to Constable he instigate payment for contributions. ‘If you will give £3200
p.a. to your editor and 10 guineas a sheet [to the contributors]’, Smith wrote, ‘you will soon have
the best review in Europe’ (Clive 1957, p. 33). Constable did so, attracting illustrious names to
the Review’s ranks, contributing to the establishment of reviewing and journal writing as a paid
profession, and setting a precedent that was to be followed by journals to come.
The Edinburgh Review’s authoritative style and approach to critical and philosophical evalua-
tion proved extremely popular, to the point where it became the standard by which subsequent
literary reviews were measured. Its cultural dominance was such that for the next quarter century
the critical essay became a dominant literary form in British high culture reviews and magazines.
As Walter Bagehot famously declared in 1855, British literary reviews owed their existence to
the way the Edinburgh Review had opened up the market for writers in this arena. ‘Review-
writing is one of the features of modern literature. Many able men really give themselves up to
it’, he noted, qualifying however that its popularity was in part due to modern reading habits,
for ‘people take their literature in morsels the way they take their sandwiches on a journey’.
Reviewers, therefore, were crucial guides, for ‘the modern man must be told what to think—
shortly, no doubt—but he must be told it. The essay-like criticism of modern times is about the
length which he likes. The Edinburgh Review, which began the system, may be said to be, in this
country, the commencement on large topics of suitable views for sensible persons’ (Bagehot 1855,
pp. 254, 257).
Among the Scottish-led productions that followed Edinburgh Review’s lead was the Tory tinged
monthly Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, established in Edinburgh in 1817 by William
Blackwood I. Blackwood played a key role in both the periodical and book-publishing field,
revitalising the older Edinburgh tradition of the publishing house as a literary gathering place.
From the beginning he encouraged emerging writers to make his firm’s office a male dominated
literary club, where men of letters communed and span golden words out of nothing. When the
firm moved to new premises in 45 George Street in 1829, Blackwood established the ‘Old
Saloon’, an oval room where literary portraits presided over a large oval table, and confirmed
‘Blackwoodians’ gathered to continue the tradition begun in the early days of discussing, plot-
ting and producing text and series for the magazine and for general publication.
A dedication to self-improvement and the promotion of learning among the labouring classes
underpinned the Edinburgh ventures of Robert and William Chambers, who also ventured into
territories initiated by Archibald Constable. Peebles born and bred, they established themselves
in Edinburgh in 1819. Taking their cue from Constable, they began specialising in inexpensive
educational material and reference works, among their most notable achievements being
Chambers’ Encyclopaedia and Dictionary. More importantly, with the start of the weekly Chambers’s
Edinburgh Journal in February 1832, featuring ‘original and select papers on Literary and Scientific
objects including articles on the Formation and Arrangement of Society’ (Chambers’s Edinburgh
Journal 1832: vol. 1), they demonstrated the success of mass marketing inexpensive periodical
publications.
William’s reasoning for this development, as he noted in his autobiography, was ‘to take
advantage of the evidently growing taste for cheap literature, and lead it, as far as was in my
power, in a proper direction’ (Chambers 1872, p. 233). Robert took on responsibilities for writ-
ing the bulk of the weekly output and acting as co-editor from 1836 onwards. The journal, a
mixture of essays, biographies, instructive works on science, nature, and history, and a dash of
morally grounded fiction and poetry, retailed for one and a half pennies. William Chambers’ aim
was to offer knowledge on a mass and affordable scale. ‘The principle by which I have been actu-
ated’, he announced in the first issue of the journal, ‘is to take advantage of the universal appetite
for instruction which at present exists; to supply to that appetite food of the best kind, in such
form and at such price as must suit the convenience of every man in the British dominions’
(Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 1832: vol. 1). By the 1840s the journal had achieved a circulation
of over 87 000 readers, well above the levels of its higher priced rivals (Bell 2007, p. 9).
Similar intentions inspired the Edinburgh bookseller William Tait to launch his monthly
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1832 as a rival to both Blackwood’s and Chambers’ journals. Tait
concentrated on promoting legal reforms, publishing new works of fiction by Catherine Gore
and Harriet Martineau among others, and featuring contributions from the likes of J.S. Mill,
Leigh Hunt, John Galt, and Thomas de Quincey. At its height it had an estimated circulation of
4000 per month, and under the editorship of Christian Isobel Johnstone between 1834 and
1846, it assumed a significant role as a key ‘shilling monthly’ in literary periodical culture
(Shattock 2009b, pp. 613–614). Johnstone (1781–1857) would also serve as co-editor of Scottish
journals such as The Edinburgh Chronicle, the Inverness Courier, and Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine,
and contribute to monthlies such as Blackwood’s Magazine.
In decades that followed, other Scottish based periodicals were founded aimed at new reading
groups. Of note were the Dundee based illustrated weekly People’s Journal, and the monthly fam-
ily miscellany People’s Friend, founded in 1858 and 1869 respectively by John Leng with the aim
of attracting a working-class readership. Both publications were great successes, with the former,
in particular, reaching a circulation of 220 000 by the 1890s (Fraser 2009, p. 489).
A major area of expansion in the second half of the century was religious periodical publish-
ing. Scottish journals worth mentioning from this period include the quarterly North British
Review, founded in 1844 by members of the Free Church of Scotland, with contributors drawn
from the evangelical wing of the church, Edinburgh legal professionals, and Scottish
universities. By 1846 it had achieved a modest circulation of about 3000, but under the editor-
ship of Alexander Campbell Fraser from 1850 to 1857, it became a serious rival to both the
Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the quality of its literary reviewing, with significant contributions
from the likes of Charles Kingsley, Thomas de Quincey, W.R. Greg, Herbert Spencer, David
Masson, and David Brewster (Shattock 2009a, p. 457). Other Church of Scotland based journals
included Good Words and Good Words for the Young, launched in 1860 and 1861 respectively by
Ayrshire born Alexander Strahan, owner of the publishing firm Strahan & Co founded in
Edinburgh in 1858. Good Words appeared first as a 16-page weekly priced at 3 s. 1/2d. before
switching format in January 1861 to become a 64-page, sixpenny monthly. Edited by the promi-
nent Church of Scotland minister Norman Macleod until his death in 1872, it would be led in
subsequent decades by his brother Donald MacLeod. Its readership grew exponentially in time,
rising from 30 000 copies on its launch in 1860, to circulation figures of 150 000 by 1864, then
settling down in the 1870s to between 80 000 and 130 000 copies per issue, before ultimately
folding in 1911. During its lifetime it focused predominantly on religious instruction and ser-
mons with ancillary stories and articles, attracting contributions from prominent figures such as
Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Gladstone, and J.A. Froude
(Lloyd 2009a, p. 254). Its corollary, Good Words for the Young, an illustrated monthly aimed at a
younger constituency and also priced at six pennies an issue. Edited initially by author George
MacDonald, it was less successful and lasted until 1877, though not before publishing the likes
of Charles Kingsley, W.S. Gilbert, and Dinah Craik (Lloyd 2009b, p. 254).
Literary Formats and Marketing Innovations
Discussions of literary innovations prompt a return to the aforementioned pioneer Archibald

Constable, and his fruitful but ultimately tragic connection with Sir Walter Scott. Their rela-
tionship cannot be underestimated in publishing terms, for between them they revolutionised
and influenced subsequent literary styles, publishing techniques and publishing formats.
Constable’s link with Scott started with the publication of Scott’s long form poem Marmion in
1808, cooled for a period, then restarted with the breakthrough issuing of Scott’s historical novel
Waverley in 1814 in a three-volume format, priced at a guinea, or 21 shillings.
Previously, works had been issued and sold in small batches of 750 to 1 000 copies, and in
varying volume numbers and sizes. With Waverley, Constable changed how fiction was marketed
and issued. Private circulating libraries purchased the three volume sets to lend out multiple
times to readers. Wealthier customers purchased it much as one acquired the latest fashion acces-
sory. It was widely reviewed and highly commended, and soon achieved bestseller status, ‘per-
haps the first work of English fiction which can be meaningfully described by that term’, selling
1 000 copies within a few weeks, and some 6 000 copies within six months’ (Clive 1957, p. 33).
Several cheap editions followed, and by the end of 1829 the work had sold over 40 000 copies.
Similarly, Scott’s follow-up work The Antiquary sold 6 000 copies immediately upon publication
in 1816. Constable’s issuing of Scott’s Kenilworth in 1821 in three volumes, priced at 31 shillings
and sixpence, however, firmly established the standard format and price for novels that would be
used by the British publishing world for the next 70-odd years.
Constable’s publishing flair, strong connections with London distributors, and aggressive and
energetic promotion ensured that Scott’s works were marketed to the fullest extent possible,
demonstrating that possibilities existed for successful large scale publishing endeavours. Walter
Scott’s success with historical fiction sparked further incursions and imitations by other authors,
firmly establishing it as a successful and lucrative genre for writers. More generally, as Ian
Duncan notes,
Scott’s success fuelled the local take-off in Edinburgh fiction publishing. Scotland had accounted for
a mere 0.5% of all novels published in the British Isles in the first decade of the nineteenth century;
this figure rose to 4.4% in the following decade and to 12% in the 1820s, reaching 15%, or 54 out
of 359 titles, in the peak years 1822–1825 – a rate of growth far steeper than the national average.
(Duncan 2007, p. 22)
The three-volume format used by Constable for Scott’s works became a sustainable and winning
publishing formula that dominated the literary market, proving the preferred format for issuing
nineteenth-century British fiction. As Troy Bassett has chronicled in a recent study on the sub-
ject, of the 7272 multi-volume fiction titles that were issued in the UK from 1837 to 1898,
ultimately 71% (5160) were three volume fiction titles (Bassett 2020, p. 31). The three-volume
format disappeared after 1894, when key circulating libraries, notably Mudie’s Circulating
Library and WH Smith, ceased purchasing them in favour of one volume formats.
Mid Century Realignments
Numerous publishers set up in the first part of the century would face major ruptures as a result
of a UK-wide financial crisis in late 1825, which brought down a significant number of publish-
ing houses across the country. The setbacks suffered due to 1825–6 crash saw a collapse in the
industry due to overextension of credit and an over optimistic reliance on non-emergent sales of
commissioned works. Constable was left ruined, dying penniless in 1827. The late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century Scottish and Edinburgh publishing challenges to London (when the
pen of Scott and the publishing of Constable reigned supreme), diminished as a result. Publishing
power and expertise subsequently ebbed southwards, with London reasserting itself as key centre
of textual power, and the Scottish publishing industry adapted, regrouped and rebuilt to deal
with this scenario.
For Scottish publishers to gain maximum influence and exposure of their capital and prod-
ucts, they had to establish bases in London. The Murray firm, initially launched by Scots bred
John Murray I in modest spaces at 32 Fleet Street, shifted under the management of his son John
Murray II to grander quarters at 50 Albermarle Street in 1812, from which they would issue
works by Lord Byron, Madame de Stael, Robert Southey, Jane Austen. Blackie & Sons opened a
London office in 1837, Blackwood’s followed suit in 1840 with premises in the publishing epi-
centre of Paternoster Row, and Thomas Nelson appeared in 1844. Lithographic and cartographic
printers and publishers W&A.K. Johnston joined the crowd late in 1869 (Finkelstein 2007,
p. 103).
With such consolidation came a push outwards from regional positions to international
prominence for several key Scottish publishing and printing firms. The 70-year period that fol-
lowed, between 1830 and 1900, saw the steady development of Scottish based publishing houses
into international brands. Established firms that had weathered the 1826 stock market crash
positioned themselves in the mainstream of British and overseas publishing activity while also
cultivating and developing niche market activities. The period witnessed the rise of Scottish
publishing strengths in areas such as religious publishing, textbooks, children’s books and maps.
It also saw subsequent moves into international spaces through building up strengths in areas
such as educational textbook and government mandated publications. Literary developments
were inextricably intertwined with such areas, as often profits amassed from bread-and-butter
publications such as religious hymnals and school textbooks were used to cross-subsidise the
cultural capital of less financially remunerative literary work.
Family run companies such as William Blackwood & Sons dominated mid-century literary
lists. Blackwood’s published best-selling authors such as George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant,
Anthony Trollope, John Bulwer-Lytton and the historian A.W. Kinglake, championed explorer
John Hanning Speke and the publication of his controversial account of discovering the source
of the Nile in 1864, and built up substantial capital publishing biographies, military histories,
learned society journals, religious hymnals and legal texts.
Other Scottish firms gained substantial reputations in specialised subjects. Oliver & Boyd
would corner the medical publishing market. The Glasgow based William Collins, who began
publishing religious works in 1819, diversified into educational publishing, rising to become
one of the leading suppliers of school textbooks in Britain, alongside Thomas Nelson. Thomas
Nelson specialised in popular religious and educational works, as well as reprints of popular clas-
sics. The Glasgow based Blackie and Son established a reputation for high quality, morally sound
children’s books by the late nineteenth century. Edinburgh based firms Bartholomew & Sons,
and W. & A.K. Johnston, founded in 1826 and 1829 respectively, became world leaders in car-
tographic publishing.
Religious Publishing
In Scotland, a considerable proportion of publishing outputs between 1801 and 1900 included
religious and theological texts. The publishing houses responsible for these differed in aim, size,
and specialisation. Some were businesses that entered the trade with the exclusive, or almost
exclusive aim of publishing religious works, such as the already mentioned firms of Blackie and
Nelson. Others, such as Blackwood and Chambers, were general houses that established and
maintained theological lists for financial sustainability. Blackwood’s, for example, issued the
Scottish Hymnals for use in Church of Scotland services over a number of decades under a mas-
sively profitable contract. Between August 1868 and December 1900, they produced 1 978 405
Hymnals and reaped a sizeable £15 634 in profits from the results (Finkelstein 2002,
pp. 159–163).
Bibles also served an important function as genealogical record: before the passing of the
General Registration Act of 1854, the family bible was accepted as legal evidence of succession
and inheritance in a court of law. Some saw opportunities to widen the scope of public access to
the Holy Gospel. Thomas Nelson’s sought to reach mass audiences through publication of the
Bible in 32-page instalments in the 1820s, a format to which Nelson had originally been exposed
as an apprentice in London, when he trudged streets selling subscriptions for the Stratford
Edition of Henry’s Bible sold in shilling parts (Murray 2007b, p. 289). Blackie & Sons also spe-
cialised in inexpensive Scriptures, publishing the Self Interpreting Family Bible (1828), as well as
a more lavishly illustrated Imperial Family Bible (1841), and an Imperial Bible Dictionary. In 1866
Blackie would make their mark in the Welsh language market by publishing a bible in Welsh:
Y Beibl Teuluaidd Cynwysfawr (Murray 2007b, p. 289).
Key specialists in the theological area were T. & T. Clark, founded in 1821 in Edinburgh as
T. Clark by Thomas Clark. T & T Clark was renamed as such in 1846 when Thomas’s nephew,
also Thomas Clark, joined the firm. It was one of several Scottish publishing firms founded in
the wake of the early nineteenth-century revival in Scottish evangelism. T&T Clark remained
focused on theological publishing as its core business, though later adding legal publishing to
its repertoire in the twentieth century. The firm built a list on a succession of theological
series, such as the Biblical Cabinet (1832) and the Dictionary of the Bible (1898–1900). The
Dictionary of the Bible sold over 90 000 copies between its launch in 1898 and 1920. Other
areas of interest included the lucrative market in religious primers and handbooks, for which
they developed such titles as Bible Class Handbooks (1879 onwards), Bible Class Primers (1884
onwards), and a series aimed at a general readership, World’s Epoch Makers (Dempster 1992:
passim).
Colonial Books
A particular strength of Scottish publishing was its connection with colonial markets. Scottish
publishers used a mixture of marketing strategies to establish their presence and publicise their
products overseas, including developing links with markets in India, Australia, New Zealand
and other English-speaking territories. In 1854, Thomas Nelson became the earliest British
publisher to establish a permanent presence in the U.S., with an office based in New York.
William Collins and Sons moved ahead of the pack in Australia in the 1850s, initially drawing
on the services of the Sydney-based Bright Brothers as agents, then moving over to McGreadie,
Thomas and Nicen as sole agents for Australia and New Zealand, with a separate partner han-
dling India and Ceylon. By 1876 they had established permanent offices, warehouses and show-
rooms in Australia, later expanding in similar fashion across South Africa, India, and then New
Zealand (in 1888) (Finkelstein 2007, p. 103).
When the Education Acts of 1870 (England and Wales) and 1872 (Scotland) created a need
for revamped school textbooks, Scottish publishers aimed themselves at African, Canadian
Caribbean, South East Asian and Australasian educational markets, carving out respected roles
as providers of educational texts for primary and secondary schools around the British colonial
world. Many built on a powerful Scottish network of outwardly mobile booksellers, printers,
publishers, educators and cultural arbiters created by the wave of emigration that had punctu-
ated nineteenth century British expansion overseas. Scots were over-represented in the numbers
who ventured outwards and established themselves in colonial communities.
As scholars have pointed out in recent decades, nineteenth-century Scottish publishing
benefited from the diasporic print communication networks that followed such emigrants and
circulated Scottish books and periodicals across colonial spaces (Black 1996; Black 2000,
Black 2007; Black 2012; Finkelstein and McCleery 2007; Finkelstein 2018; Kirsop 2007). The
Hudson Bay Company, for example, founded in the 1670s to exploit Canada’s natural resources,
ensured that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, employees were well supplied
with reading material shipped over from the UK (Black 1996: passim). Scottish books, periodi-
cals and newsprint were among those circulated across the Hudson Bay Company’s string of
trading posts to its high concentration of Scottish trappers and traders (recruited particularly
from the Orkney Islands), with texts transported by canoe across the Canadian interior where
other means proved impossible (Black 1996: passim).
Print trade specialists also circulated across the English-speaking world through international
tramping and travel networks, aided from the mid-century onwards by print union emigration
grants, specialist emigration agents and personal connections. Such skilled travellers set up print
shops and retail spaces in developing settlements, becoming central to local print communica-
tion needs. (Finkelstein 2018). A good example of this in practice was Andrew Ferguson, a
printer trained in Edinburgh, emigre to Dunedin in 1867, where he would join his cousins in
establishing and running a provincial newspaper, then a settler in the Otago town of Lawrence
(formerly Tuapeka) in 1867, where he established a print shop and retail outlet. Over the next
15 years he would produce the town newspaper, service print and retail needs, and become a key
civic player, witnessing wills, agitating for land reform initiatives, serving as Justice of the
Peace, and running for mayor on several occasions (Finkelstein 2018, pp. 53–57). Ferguson
proved typical of the enterprising Scot among whom Scottish publishers would find willing
readers and circulators of their books, part of the wider skilled Scottish diaspora relocated in
many parts of the nineteenth-century colonial world.
In the Indian sub-continent, Chambers reached diasporic and indigenous readers through the
promotion and sales of its Dictionary and Encyclopaedia. Nelson would capture various colonial
educational markets with mass quantity sales from 1877 onwards of its Royal Readers and Royal
Schools series, which between them encompassed more than 70 titles on various subjects. Within
a year they had become significantly important to the firm’s profitability, evidenced by the fact
that while education titles accounted for 25% of Nelson’s total output between 1878 and 1881,
they accounted for 88% of the firm’s total profits during that time, with Royal Readers making
up 45% of that total profit (McCleery 2001, p. xviii). The impact of such texts would linger
through to the late 1960s, as Valerie Joseph notes in her study of Nelson’s Readers in Caribbean
communities. While most school children often forgot the standard textbooks provided for
learning in primary schools, the Royal Readers were notable exceptions, remaining in their
memories as quotable sources. ‘Not only were the Royal Readers seen as having high educa-
tional value by former students, parents, and teachers in the English speaking Caribbean
-superior to the books that came after, a knowledgeable reinforcement of the quality of the
books could take place because in many cases parents and grandparents had used the same texts’
(Joseph 2012, p. 147).
Conclusion
Towards the end of the century Scottish publishing enterprise began to fade, pushed by London
based entrepreneurial entrants such as William Heinemann, Chatto & Windus, John Lane, T.
Fisher Unwin and J.M. Dent. These upstarts would prove innovative in their creative use of one
volume publishing formats, experimenting with cover design and pricing structures in ways
many older, established firms failed to contend with. Some, such as Thomas Nelson and Sons,
adapted accordingly to face down such incursions. As John Buchan, author and former director
of Nelsons, succinctly concluded in his 1940 memoir, Nelson’s fin-de-siecle pivot in face of such
entrants enabled the firm for a period to maintain momentum and direction successfully through
to the eve of the first world war, namely by focusing on inexpensive reprints of literary works of
all sorts and languages. ‘We were a progressive concern, and in our standardised Edinburgh fac-
tories we began the publication of cheap books in many tongues’, Buchan noted. ‘On the eve of
the war we must have been one of the largest businesses of the kind in the world, issuing cheap
editions of every kind of literature not only in English, but in French, German, Magyar and
Spanish, and being about to start in Russian’ (Buchan 1940, p. 87).
Such endeavours, however, would later fall foul of twentieth-century globalisation and
conglomeration trends, a discussion beyond the range of this inquiry. Nineteenth-century
Scottish publishers, however, left lasting legacies in terms of literary scope, publishing
innovations and far-seeing cultural engagement, laying the foundations for a number of
structures and genres that became integral to nineteenth-century British literary culture
and knowledge.
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of the Book in Scotland, Vol 3: Ambition and Industry,
17
Sentimental Literature
Andrew Nash
Reader in Book History, Institute of English Studies, University of London
The title of this chapter indicates a subject both large and indeterminate. While ‘sentimental
literature’ implies a coherent body of work or an agreed category of writing, the application of
the term ‘sentimental’ to describe works of literature of various kinds and from different histori-
cal periods suggests a critical judgement is at work. Sentimentality is an enduring theme of
Scottish literature and literary criticism, and the subject can be approached in different ways.
This chapter will focus on selected historical moments when the relation between writing and
the sentimental was most conspicuous. It will restrict its focus to fiction and examine a small
number of writers whose works exemplify the main debates.
The terms ‘sentimental’, ‘sentimentalism’ and ‘sentimentality’, though often used inter-
changeably, have different meanings and carry different connotations in their changing historical
usage. They relate closely to the word ‘sensibility’, itself an unstable term. Originally referring
to bodily sensations, in the mid-eighteenth century sensibility came to stand for an individual’s
capacity for emotional responsiveness as the cultivation of refined feeling became the height of
social and literary taste. Todd (1986, p. 9) has argued that it is the changing association of the
adjective ‘sentimental’ to the word ‘sensibility’ that accounts for the confusion of terms. Before
Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), the noun of ‘sentimental’ was commonly
‘sentiment’, indicating ‘richness in moral reflection’. After Sterne, it was more often applied to
sensibility ‘to indicate the heart rather than the head.’ A sentimental person exhibited refined or
elevated sensibility. A sentimental literary work both depicted sensibility and made an appeal to
the presumed sensibility of the reader.
‘Sentimentality’ and ‘sentimentalism’ entered common usage much later. The OED’s defini-
tion of ‘sentimentality’ includes ‘affectation of sensibility, exaggerated insistence upon the claims
of sentiment’. ‘Sentimentalism’ (for which the first illustrative example comes from 1817) is
defined as ‘the disposition to attribute undue importance to sentimental considerations or to be

governed by sentiment in opposition to reason’. The arrival of these two terms illustrates how
the adjective ‘sentimental’ had, by the end of the eighteenth century, ‘turned from the approba-
tory to the pejorative’ (Mullan 1996, p. 236). A sentimental person, the OED records, was no
longer ‘characterized by … refined or elevated feeling’, but ‘addicted to indulgence in superficial
emotion’. It is this changing notion of the sentimental, rather than the larger subject of sensibil-
ity, that will be the focus of this chapter.
The shift in attitude towards the sentimental in relation to reading is visible in an oft-quoted
remark by Lady Louisa Stuart from 1826. In a letter to Walter Scott, she records the changed
impact of Henry Mackenzie’s enormously successful The Man of Feeling (1771 [2009]):
I remember so well its first publication, my mother and sisters crying over it, dwelling upon it with
rapture! And when I read it, as I was a girl of 14 not yet versed in sentiment, I had a secret dread I
should not cry enough to gain the credit of proper sensibility.
(Partington 1930, p. 273)
Re-encountering the work 50 years later elicited a different response:
I am afraid I perceived a sad change in it, or myself? which was worse; and the effect altogether
failed. Nobody cried, and at some of the passages, the touches that I used to think so exquisite? Oh
Dear! They laughed.
(ibid.)
There is more at stake here than changing literary taste. Although the different emotional reac-
tions illustrate the pejorative turn against the sentimental, the anxiety about socially approved
reading remains constant. Revealing, too, is Lady Louisa’s reflection on whether the ‘sad change’
lay in the text or herself. Discussion of sentimental literature involves consideration of both the
depiction of sentimentality within literary texts and the sentimental aesthetic of arousing an
emotional response in the reader. This dynamic explains why sentimentalism is frequently bound
up with the processes of reading and interpretation, something evident in the opening pages of
The Man of Feeling.
Mackenzie’s work is seen as archetypal of the sentimental novels that flooded the market in the
1770s and 1780s. The genre was not the invention of literary historians. The declaration ‘A
Sentimental Novel’ often appeared on the title pages of books, though not that of The Man of Feeling.
The roots of the tradition lie deeper: in the drama of the late Restoration, in forms of eighteenth-
century poetry, and in the novels of Samuel Richardson. Mackenzie directs his reader to a pre-
existing form in the opening frame of his story. The editor who presents the fragmented manuscript
containing the narrative of the life of Harley, the titular character, describes its contents as:
a bundle of little episodes, put together without art […] I was a good deal affected with some very
trifling passages in it; and had the name of a Marmontel, or a Richardson, been on the title-page––
’tis odds that I should have wept: But:
One is ashamed to be pleased with the works of one knows not whom.
(Mackenzie 2009, p. 4–5)
Invoking the names of the writers who set the models for sentimental fiction in French and
English signals that a sentimental text will follow. But Mackenzie also raises the matter of
Sentimental Literature 207
sentimental reading in the editor’s hesitant qualification of his own emotional response to the
text. Here and elsewhere Mackenzie dramatises within the text the act of reading and interpreta-
tion that takes place outside it.
The form of The Man of Feeling establishes other important characteristics of sentimental lit-
erature. The device of presenting the story via a fragmented manuscript means that Harley’s life
is presented in a series of isolated incidents. The narrative commences at Chapter XI and there
are frequent gaps and elisions throughout. This ‘whimsically Ossianic gesture’ (Keymer 2005,
p. 598) has been viewed as ‘artistic ineptitude’ (Burling 1988, p. 146), but the design was delib-
erate. Mackenzie’s letters record that he wanted the work to be ‘as different from the entangle-
ment of a novel as can be’. It began as a series of ‘detached essays’, but a desire to interest ‘both
the memory and the affections deeper than mere argument or moral reasoning’ led Mackenzie to
cast them into narrative form:
In this way I was somehow led to think of introducing a man of sensibility into different scenes
where his feelings might be seen in their effects, and his sentiments occasionally delivered without
the stiffness of regular deduction.
(Thompson 1931, p. 108)
The effect is to subordinate plot to encounter, and psychological development of character to a

series of tableaux where the emphasis falls, not on events, but on the central character’s response
to events.
As a ‘man of feeling’, Harley embodies the sympathetic ideals of the moral philosophers of the
Scottish Enlightenment. Writing in the 1720s in defence of the theories of the English philoso-
pher Shaftesbury, and in opposition to the ideas of ‘self-interest’ propounded by Thomas Hobbes,
Francis Hutcheson (1738, pp. 132, 136) argued that the ‘immediate motive to virtuous actions’
lay in an innate benevolence that precedes reason and ‘excludes self-interest’. Harley’s feeling
towards others is constantly emphasised as virtuous and motivated by instinct rather than reason.
His sympathetic response to suffering and misfortune also links him to the ideas of Hutcheson’s
successors, David Hume and Adam Smith, both of whom emphasised a process of identification
between others through feeling. For Hume (2007, vol. I, p. 378), ‘the sentiments of others can
never affect us, but by becoming, in some measure, our own’, affecting us ‘as if they had been
originally deriv’d from our own temper and disposition.’ This idea is dramatised repeatedly
through Harley’s tearful identification with others. Crucial, however, is the reciprocal effect of
his tears. In the scene where he hears the story of the woman whose lover drowned and who was
forced into an unhappy marriage, the tears he sheds melt words out of a ‘brain’ that has been ‘dry’
(Mackenzie 2009, p. 26) as the woman identifies in him the emotions of her lost lover. The same
effect occurs when Harley sheds ‘a shower of tears’ after listening to the pitiful story of old
Edwards’s catalogue of life accidents: ‘Edwards, from whom the recollection of his own sufferings
had scarce forced a tear, now blubbered like a boy’ (Mackenzie 2009, p. 71). In both incidents,
listening to a story leads to a mutual transference of emotions, playing out Smith’s observation
in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that, ‘by relating their misfortunes’, the victims of suf-
fering ‘in some measure renew their grief. They awaken in their memory the remembrance of
those circumstances which occasioned their affliction. Their tears accordingly flow faster than
before’ and they are ‘sensibly relieved’ (Smith 1976, p. 15).
In moral philosophical terms, then, Harley is virtuous not just because he feels the pains of
others, but because he is able to draw out their buried emotions. This point is played out more
intricately in his encounter with the prostitute, where his sympathy both brings the woman back
from the brink of despair and effects a reconciliation with her father. The placing of the episode
is significant. It is interspersed within another where Harley is deceived by a man he believes to
be benevolent (on the strength of a misplaced ‘skill in physiognomy’) but who turns out to be
one of a pair of noted sharpers who swindle him at cards. Harley’s gullibility is gently mocked,
but the parallel encounter with the prostitute confronts him with a genuine tale of woe where
his benevolence is shown in a positive light. He dismisses the woman’s claim that her misery is
‘of my own procuring’ with the words ‘there is virtue in these tears’, and when he hears her tale
of suffering and disadvantage – the longest narrative section in the text – and that of her father,
‘he could not speak’ but only cry (Mackenzie 2009, pp. 38, 49). His sympathetic listening cre-
ates between father and daughter a tearful communion beyond words.
As Csengsei (2008, p. 953) argues, in The Man of Feeling ‘tears of sympathy form part of a
sentimental reading practice’, one that extends beyond the text. Just as Harley is cast as sympa-
thetic interpreter of other people’s stories, so eighteenth-century readers became sympathetic
interpreters of his story. A notice in the Monthly Review concluded: ‘the reader who weeps not
over some of the scenes it describes, has no sensibility of mind’ (Thompson 1931, pp. 126–127).
In 1783, the 24-year-old Robert Burns told his former schoolmaster in a letter that he prized the
book ‘next to the Bible’, listing it among other works of ‘the sentim[enta]l kind’ as ‘the glorious
models after which I endeavour to form my conduct’ (Roy 1985, vol. I, pp. 17–18). Seven years
later, however, the now successful poet was more sceptical about the work’s usefulness as a con-
duct manual. The book, he told Mrs. Dunlop, was still capable of yielding the most ‘congenial’
‘impressions’ to the ‘susceptible young mind’, but he doubted whether Mackenzie’s writings
were ‘the fittest reading’ for ‘the truly important business of making a man’s way into life.’
(Roy 1985, vol. II, p. 25). The changed attitude no doubt reflects the maturing of Burns’s mind,
and likely owes something to the addressee of each letter, but his observations about the
limitations of the man of feeling as a model for living points to the gap critics have detected
between Harley’s values and their operation in the modern world. As Harkin (1994, p. 324)
argues, Harley is positioned as ‘ideological opponent, as well as victim of the commercial spirit
of the age’. A sympathetic interpreter of tales of suffering, he proves a poor interpreter of the false
benevolence he encounters in a selfish, unfeeling world. Easily tricked, his trusting sensibility
deprives him of any chance he has to secure the crown lands that might increase his fortune,
which is the worldly object of his London journey. He is incapable of advancing his own self-
interest because he embodies Hutcheson’s principle that ‘virtue springs from some other affec-
tion than self-love, or desire of private advantage’ (Hutcheson 1738, p. 134). Significantly, there
are voices within the text that offer a balance to Harley’s extreme sensibility, including that of
the narrator who suggests ‘people of feeling’ would do well to acquire ‘a certain respect for the
follies of mankind.’ (Mackenzie 2009, p. 10)
For Mullan (1990, p. 119), this paradox signals the ‘terminal formula’ of the sentimental
novel: ‘with all its talk of virtue, it cannot reflect at all on the problems of conduct’. In an essay
of 1785 Mackenzie (2009, p. 102) himself emphasised the ‘real practical duties’ of sentimental-
ism, and critics have increasingly questioned not only the impotence of the man of feeling in
worldly affairs but the practical usefulness of his tears. In his 1931 biography, Thompson (p. 122)
argued that Mackenzie ‘created a new and significant type of hero – the humanitarian who not
only feels for the distresses of others but actually helps them’. Consensus among contemporary
critics is the opposite. Keymer (2005, p. 599) concludes that ‘the victims for whom Harley
weeps find little solace in a pity that leaves their losses unrestored, while Harley sinks under the
burden of their grief.’ Yet Harley understands the endpoint of the benevolent values he
exemplifies – the practical relief of unhappiness and distress – even if he cannot always effect
them. He initially objects to the proposed visit to Bedlam, declaring it ‘an inhuman practice to
expose the greatest misery with which our nature is afflicted … especially as it is a distress which
the humane must see with the painful reflection, that it is not in their power to alleviate it’
(Mackenzie 2009, p. 23). And he does manage to alleviate distress at isolated moments of his
travels. His actions in helping to restore the displaced farmer Edwards to the land are unequivo-
cally effectual in moving beyond tears to mend suffering.
The limitations of the man of feeling are nevertheless apparent in the text’s resolution. The
gradual demise of Harley’s faith in the operation of virtue in society leads to his solipsistic
detachment from the world. Harkin (2019, p. 134) suggestively argues that Mackenzie leaves
the cause of his death ambiguous: is it illness or ‘a willed act of suicide’? Significantly, the
account of his decline belongs to so mutilated a part of the manuscript that the editor is forced
to summarise its fragmentary content. The anti-climactic resolution of his love story is easily
missed. Having learned, falsely, that his beloved Miss Walton is to be married, we are told ‘he
had not profited on the occasion by making any declaration of his own passion, after those of
the other had been unsuccessful’ (Mackenzie 2009, p. 93). Harley’s extreme sensibility cannot
‘profit’ in conjugal union any more than in the worldly pursuit of prosperity. His deathbed
resignation that he is leaving the world ‘to enter on that state, which, I have learned to believe,
is replete with the genuine happiness attendant upon virtue’ distances him from sentimental
moral philosophy by casting out the pleasure and happiness which, according to Hutcheson
and Hume, derive from acts of virtue in this world (Mackenzie 2009, p. 95). Miss Walton
voices this objection when she says: ‘Those sentiments … are just: but your good sense, Mr
Harley, will own, that life has its proper value. As the province of virtue, life is ennobled; as
such, it is to be desired’ (Mackenzie 2009, p. 96). Harley’s retreat from life is, ultimately, a
retreat from virtue.
Harley, then, is no moral exemplar. If The Man of Feeling is a conduct manual, it is because its
hero’s refined sensibility elicits in other characters – and in the reader – a recognition of ideal
values that, while impossible, can nevertheless be felt. As Csengsei (2008, p. 962) argues, Harley
becomes a ‘textual locus’ for the attempt to realise a mutuality between self and other. His fate
assumes value as an object of pity for others. When the narrator confronts Harley’s dead body he
feels ‘an enthusiasm in sorrow that forgets impossibility’:
I sometimes visit his grave; I sit in the hollow of the tree. It is worth a thousand homilies! every
noble feeling rises within me! every beat of my heart awakens a virtue! – but it will make you hate
the world – No: there is such an air of gentleness around, that I can hate nothing; but, as to the
world – I pity the men of it.
(Mackenzie 2009, pp. 97, 98)
By the end, it is not Harley but his mourners (who forget impossibilities) with whom the reader
is encouraged to identify.
Among Mackenzie’s other novels, Julia de Roubigné (1777 [1999]) is more complex. Mackenzie’s
recorded aim was to write a story ‘in which the characters should be all naturally virtuous, and
where the calamities of the catastrophe should arise, as frequently happens in actual life, not out
of schemes of premeditated villainy, but from the excess and over-indulgence of passions and
feelings’ (Thompson 1931, p. 148). The catastrophe - Julia’s murder by her husband - arises out
of her decision to deny the instinctive truth of her feelings and accept the hand of Montauban,
a Spanish nobleman, whose pecuniary assistance saves her impoverished father from prison.
Her real love for her cousin Savillon is mutual but undeclared on both sides. Julia’s and
Montauban’s warring subjectivities are presented through their correspondence, but unusually
for the epistolary form, there are no answering letters. Instead, the characters dispute – and in
their minds refute – the cautionary advice of their correspondents. The work presents a fatal
separation of feeling and conscience in both characters. At one point, Julia contemplates whether
‘I mistake the whispers of inclination for the suggestions of conscience’, but concludes: ‘I have
searched my bosom impartially, and its answer is uniform.’ (Mackenzie 1999, p. 55) Her words
invoke Adam Smith’s theory of the ‘impartial spectator’ – the imaginary observer and judge that
an individual invokes to regulate her self-conduct. Julia’s story becomes her struggle against this
impartial spectator. When she resolves fatally to meet with Savillon, she declares: ‘I will think
no longer – This one time I will silence the monitor within me’ (147). Ultimately, this woman
of sensibility is a less privileged sentimentalist than Harley, in danger emotionally and physi-
cally in a world where sentimental transactions are altogether more fraught.
Mackenzie’s wariness of the damaging effects of sentimental literature resurfaced several dec-
ades later when he was called upon to review John Wilson’s Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life
(Wilson 1822) for Blackwood’s Magazine. We only have Wilson’s summary opinion of the assess-
ment – ‘a syrupy dish for young sentimentalists’ – because the author’s complaints led to it being
replaced by a more laudatory notice (Oliphant 1897, vol. I, pp. 270–271). Wilson’s fiction rep-
resents the next major phase of sentimental literature in Scotland, one characterised by a new
emphasis on piety.
Wilson’s writing, like his personality, embodied extremes. In poetry he alternated between ‘a
cloyingly saccharine verse’ and ‘the opposite pole of violent Gothic excess’ (Morrisson 2000,
p. 9). His periodical writings for Blackwood’s combined brilliantly imaginative satire in the Noctes
Ambrosianae with vituperative, slanderous attacks on other writers. It was his reputation as a
literary and literal pugilist that led his contemporary William Maginn to judge that as a novelist
he chose ‘a somewhat peculiar department’ (Swann 1934, p. 225). His immediate motive for
producing fiction was financial – The Foresters (1825) was written expressly to support his wife’s
ill-health. Pecuniary imperatives need not preclude sincerity for the skilled writer, but the sen-
timental mode was an expedient for Wilson. Defending the works to his friend Alexander Blair,
he wrote of ‘these unambitious but surely not degrading compositions’. When Blair persisted in
his negative opinion, a hurt Wilson was moved to ‘acknowledge their utter insignificance’.
(Swann 1934, pp. 230, 235). Yet they were not insignificant to others, not least Charlotte Bronte,
who borrowed themes and ideas from the story ‘Helen Eyre’ for Jane Eyre (1847).
Keymer (2005, p. 575) observes in the reaction against sentimental fiction in the late eight-
eenth century a move ‘to reassert traditional piety, as opposed to the caprice of feeling, as the only
reliable source of benevolent action’. Wilson’s fiction, with its underlying emphasis on ‘a reli-
gious state of feeling’, carries through this tradition (Wilson 1822, p. 321). Points of theology
are largely peripheral, the simple Christian message illustrated by this summary of a charitable
character in The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay: ‘The spirit of religion was, in her opinion, gradually
to rise out of the spirit of humanity […] She used no words unintelligible to uninstructed minds;
enforced no doctrine or points of faith till she saw hearts willing to receive the spirit of
Christianity’ (Wilson 1824, p. 269). Both Margaret Lyndsay and The Foresters demonstrate the
endurance of the faithful soul in the face of suffering, following the central characters through a
series of trials or misfortunes, dramatising episodes of heightened emotion centred around
shame, loss, or grief. Suffering is presented as a positive force. Dying is a stage for playing out
scenes of reconciliation or redemption, and those who drink from the ‘cup of grief’ find ‘at the
bottom, not bitter dregs, but the pure waters of comfort and peace’ (Wilson 1824, p. 277).
Unlike Harley, who drifts into death, contentment in adversity leads Margaret to a ‘desire of life’
(Wilson 1824, p. 349). After her many trials, even ‘grief for the dead became more like joy’
(Wilson 1824, p. 203).
Wilson told Thomas De Quincey that he wished in his fiction ‘to speak of humble life, and
the elementary feelings of the human soul in isolation, under the light of the veil of poetry’
(Gordon 1862, p. 325). In Lights and Shadows the veil is more Wordsworthian than Burnsian,
though Wilson’s admiration of ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’ is evident. The stories typically
move from outdoors to indoors, and the perspective is sometimes that of a traveller whose spirit
is revived by the beauties of the countryside and an imaginative apprehension of the ‘domestic
life of the Peasantry of Scotland’ (Wilson 1822, p. 132). The narration shifts between first and
third person. The first-person narrator is only loosely characterised. He acts as a mediator for the
conveyance of feeling, experiencing the emotions of others sometimes as an onlooker, sometimes
through direct encounter, and sometimes through a story told to him. The shifting perspective
makes the sentimental aesthetic less coherent than in Mackenzie. The operation of tears, for
example, is more varied. In deathbed scenes they signify communal feeling, but Wilson’s char-
acters also weep in solitude, and the repression of tears can indicate positive endurance. In one
story, the narrator recalls Harley when he weeps after listening to a widow ‘indulging the passion
of her grief’ (Wilson 1822, p. 104). But the effect of his tears is to lead the widow to dismiss her
own as ‘foolish’ as the story transcends sorrow: ‘It is not in nature always to be sad; and the
remembrance of all her melancholy and even miserable confessions was now like an uncertain
echo, as I beheld a placid smile on her face … a smile of joy’ (Wilson 1822, p. 102). In Wilson,
tears are not an end in themselves but a path to something else. The final story in Lights and
Shadows ends with the heroine’s tears being kissed away by her beloved ‘then and for ever.’
(Wilson 1822, p. 430).
Wilson’s fictional lexicon nevertheless reveals a debt to the eighteenth-century sentimental
tradition. In ‘The Rainbow’, set in the Highlands in the seventeenth century, a young Englishman
unexpectedly encounters the family of a man he has killed. The story dramatises how ‘sympathies
of a common nature’ arising from an openness in ‘human nature’ to ‘kindness and to joy’ (317)
leads to understanding and forgiveness (Wilson 1822, p. 317). The spontaneous nature of this
understanding is emphasised: ‘sudden revelations of sympathy made between human beings by
a word, a tone, a look, or a smile’ convey ‘truth … of each other’s affection and each other’s worth’
which are explicitly opposed to ‘the hand of interest or self-love’. As in Mackenzie, mutuality of
self and other arises from sympathetic exchange: ‘the sincerity of his sorrow and contrition could
not but affect their soul and bring over their gradually subsiding aversion a deep feeling of sym-
pathy for him who felt so profoundly his own guilt’. (Wilson 1822, p. 326)
In Wilson, however, the word ‘common’ has more than one meaning. When applied to ‘feel-
ing’, ‘sorrow’, or ‘sentiment’ it claims a universality of emotion, but Wilson also refers to a ‘com-
mon’ cottar or farmer. The double meaning exposes the connection between feeling and class
which has provoked the charge that Wilson exploits sentimentalism for political purposes. The
objective of his stories is to portray ‘the calm and resigned contentment which unconsciously
cheers the hearthstone of the blameless poor’. (Wilson 1822, p. 14) ‘Pleasant images of rural
winter life’ are associated with ‘the severe but cheerful labours of the barn’ (Wilson 1822, p. 132)
in a eulogistic rhetoric that leaves all severities intact. The language is telling. One elderly cot-
tager is described as a ‘slave’, but he is willingly chained to his masters whom ‘he loved with a
sober and deep affection’. (Wilson 1822, p. 15) This link between class and feeling is most
evident in a passage from Margaret Lyndsay where a distinction is drawn between transitory
forms of emotion and ‘real sorrow and suffering’ experienced by the poor:
Among the affluent there is sometimes a luxury of grief which is altogether unknown to the poor.
There is such a thing as a pampered sorrow which the heart cherishes without being aware of its own
selfish enjoyment. Indolent, perhaps, and called to the discharge of no duties, the mourners give
themselves up to the indulgence of feelings which are known to be natural, and which they conceive
of as amiable, till the remembrance of the loss sustained becomes evidently fainter and fainter in a
mind still surrounded with the comforts and blessings of life and at last the afflicted return to their
usual avocations without having undergone much real or soul-searching and heart-humbling dis-
tress. But in the abodes of poverty, there is no room, no leisure, for such indulgence.
(Wilson 1824, p. 161).
The language here – ‘luxury’, ‘pampered’, ‘selfish’, ‘indulgence’ – bespeaks the modern pejora-
tive definition of sentimentality. In opposing the sentimentality of the affluent with the genuine
feeling of the poor, however, the sufferings of those in poverty become the object of a narrative
discourse that assumes a sentimentalising vantage point of its own. Wilson makes an immediate
appeal to his readers when introducing the Lyndsay family, declaring that the narrative of their
fortunes ‘may perhaps not be unaffecting to those who feel a deep interest in every exhibition,
however humble, of the joys and sorrows, the strength and the weakness, of the human heart’.
(Wilson 1824, p. 3) The assumption is that the readers are not themselves among the ‘however
humble’.
Wilson introduced a significant new dimension to sentimental literature through his empha-
sis on ‘native feeling’ (Wilson 1822, p. 154). In ‘The Lily of Liddisdale’, the excessively idealised
shepherdess, whose innocent heart remains true, imbibes her naturalness from the land and the
spirit of the Border songs and ballads. This wedding of national character to feeling and poetry,
which Wilson drew from European Romanticism, led to his fiction being judged in terms of its
representativeness. James Hogg praised Wilson’s ‘purity of sentiment and fine writing’ but
found ‘very little of real nature as it exists in the walks of Scottish life’. His Three Perils of Woman
(1823) was evidently written in response to Lights and Shadows. Writing at the end of the cen-
tury, Margaret Oliphant (1897, vol. II, p. 25) found Wilson’s fiction ‘done in tints much too
delicate to represent any real life that ever existed’, judging it representative of ‘the romantic
sentimentalism of the day rather than Scotland or country life or anything else in earth or heaven.’
The same criticism would be applied to the Kailyard fiction of the 1890s which represents the
next significant phase of sentimental literature in Scotland.
The representative figure is Ian Maclaren (Rev. John Watson), whose sketches of life in
Drumtochty, based on his early experiences as a Free Church minister in rural Perthshire, were
among the best-selling works of the 1890s. Like Wilson’s stories, they rely on recurring inci-
dents or plotlines, such as the return of the prodigal and the redemptive deathbed scene –
Maclaren surely drew on Wilson’s ‘The Poor Scholar’ (around whose home some ‘bourtrie-bushes’
grow) for his story of the ‘lad o’ pairts’ who sickens and dies beside the ‘bonnie brier bush’. Like
Wilson, he frequently projects human emotions in relation to natural images and the landscape,
as in the story of Burnbrae, the tenant farmer evicted from the land his family has worked for
generations (Nash 2007, pp. 157–159). The stories typically turn on such moments of loss or
separation – from families or from the land – and the mood is both nostalgic and elegiac. In the
final story of The Days of Auld Lang Syne, a returning émigré is led back into the ‘warmth and the
kindly light’ of Drumtochty ‘while the darkness fell upon the empty harvest field from which
the last sheaf had been safely garnered’. (Maclaren 1895, p. 358).
Like Wilson, there is a religious underpinning to Maclaren’s fiction, but it has a more specific
historical dimension. He was writing during a period of fierce debates over theology, Biblical
scholarship and the relationship between church and state, and his fiction projects a vision of
consensus and reconciliation between warring factions based on shared emotional values. When
Free Kirk and Established Kirk gather together at the funeral of the ‘lad o’ pairts’, trivial matters
of service order are dropped as the minister’s prayer descends from Old Testament scripture to
speaking ‘after a very simple fashion that brought a lump to the throat’ (Maclaren 1894, p. 47).
In a later story, a young minister is subjected to ‘a local inquisition’ by his Elders, but the ‘pedan-
tic arguments of theology’ are swept away by ‘the minister’s human emotion’, which ‘had beaten
upon their iron creed like spray upon the high sea cliffs’. (Maclaren 1907, pp. 41–42). This
depiction of a unified religious climate was designed to move beyond matters of theology and
doctrine. When one minister ‘being still young, expounded a new theory of the atonement of
German manufacture’, he is sorely judged for his ‘blindness of heart’ (Maclaren 1895, p. 30).
‘Heart’ is the word that links everything together in Maclaren’s value system, beating individu-
ally and collectively. Being ‘sound’, ‘sensible’ or ‘simple’ of heart is the way to grace, and senti-
ment is what unlocks ‘the fine delicacy of heart’ that ‘may be hidden behind a plain exterior’
(Maclaren 1894, p. 130). Drumtochty itself has ‘just ae heart’, and in a telling passage, the nar-
rator quotes one of the Scottish Paraphrases, commenting: ‘No Scottish man can ever sing [it]
with a dry heart’ (Maclaren 1894, pp. 49, 96–97). In Maclaren’s universe, it is the truth-telling
heart, not the eye, that weeps tears.
Maclaren’s fiction has been heavily criticised for its selective representation of Scottish life and
character, but its popular appeal points to the strain of sentimental evangelicalism that pervaded
late-Victorian culture. His deathbed scenes reportedly did reduce many readers to tears, suggest-
ing a persistence of the stimulatory forms of writing evident in Mackenzie’s era. While sympathy
and feeling remained a bedrock for many Victorian writers, there was nevertheless a countering
force that drove attitudes towards the sentimental to extremes. Once again, it came from a
Scottish source. Thomas Carlyle’s views on sentimentalism are presented symbolically in his
novel Sartor Resartus (1836) in the chapter ‘The Dandiacal Body’. Extending the metaphor of
clothes that runs through the text, the dandy is presented as someone whose ‘trade, office and
existence consists in the wearing of clothes’, i.e. wearing emotions for their own sake: ‘As others
dress to live, he lives to dress’ (Carlyle 1987, p. 207). Carlyle is less coded in ‘Characteristics’
(1831), his essay on the moral virtue of spontaneity and unconscious action:
The barrenest of all mortals is the Sentimentalist. Granting even that he were sincere, and did not
wilfully deceive us, or without first deceiving himself, what good is in him? Does he not lie there as
a perpetual lesson of despair, and type of bedrid valetudinarian impotence? His is emphatically a
Virtue that has become, through every fibre, conscious of itself; it is all sick … in the shape of work,
it can do nothing
(Carlyle 1899, p. 9).
The language recalls Mackenzie’s ‘sickly sort of refinement’. Just as the ‘Scottish Addison’ gave
up writing novels for essays, Carlyle’s rejection of fiction as a viable mode is linked to his attack
on sentimentalism and what he saw as its avoidance of facts. The co-existence throughout the
Victorian period of contrasting attitudes towards sentimentalism created a dynamic whereby the
moral virtues of sympathy and feeling were confronted by this counter-narrative of suspicion. It
is the tension between these two forces that underlies J.M. Barrie’s fiction.
Barrie is often dismissed as a sentimental writer whose object was to manipulate an emotional
response from his audience. But his fiction is more concerned with the theme of sentimentality.
Thompson (1931, p. 103) likened him to Sterne: ‘that curious person a wilful sentimentalist who
knows his own insincerity’. What seemed curious in 1931 can now be seen as proto-modernist
in its foregrounding of literary form. The early work A Window in Thrums (1889) certainly relies
heavily on sentimental effects. The evocation of a past world has an overwhelming tone of nos-
talgia, and the story of the life of Jess and her son Jamie, who returns home from London too late
to witness the death of his family, is overladen with pathos. The narrative perspective gives
another layer to the text’s sentimental structure, however. The narrator repeatedly draws atten-
tion to the different ways in which his story might be told, consoling himself by ‘mapping out’
a happy ending for Jamie (Barrie 1889, p. 175). As storyteller he is conscious of his power to
manipulate his readers’ response through the window of the narrative, but he is also drawn
towards a sentimental reading of the story himself. It is this link between sentimentality and
storytelling that Barrie explores in his mature fiction.
The sentimentalist became a character type for Barrie which, in a humorous sketch of 1890,
he presented in Carlylean terms as the concealed apostle of cant and hypocrisy:
He found noble sentiments ready to his hand everywhere, and when attacking a person or a custom
at eight o’clock in one company, and becoming defendant at nine o’clock in another, he was equally
in a glow. Sentiment was a horse ever standing ready for him. He jumped on, and away they went.
Then he dismounted with a proud chest, and at once did a mean thing, if convenient. All he remem-
bered next day was his gallop.
(Barrie 1890, p. 6)
Only the espousal of the moral has meaning for the sentimentalist. Barrie explored this character
type ambivalently and at length in Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900). These
two novels, often reductively viewed as autobiographical, trace the life of Tommy Sandys from
his childhood to adulthood, his success as a writer, and the failure of his love affair with Grizel.
Tommy’s sentimentalism is presented as a love of emotion for its own sake. On one occasion in
his boyhood, he exchanges clothes with another boy who is in mourning and agrees to do the
mourning for him. This ‘devouring desire to try on other folk’s feelings, as if they were so many
suits of clothes’ recalls the dandy in Sartor Resartus (Barrie 1896, p. 333). Barrie’s sentimental
anti-hero, however, is aware of his own insincerity. As his schoolmaster judges, ‘sometimes his
emotion masters him completely, at other times he can step aside, as it were, and take an approv-
ing look at it’ (Barrie 1896, p. 333). When he composes a letter for an illiterate woman who
wishes to inform her mother about the death of a friend, the sentiments he conveys not only
induce tears in the letter’s recipient, they reduce Tommy to tears as well. The narrator emphasises
that Tommy is sincere in what he feels on these occasions, but the emotions disappear when he
is outside the moment: ‘his tendency to be anyone he was interested in implied enormous sym-
pathy (for the time being)’ (Barrie 1896, p. 187). For Tommy, sympathetic identification with
others can only ever be transitory.
At the end of Sentimental Tommy, the schoolmaster brands the letters ‘S.T.’ on Tommy’s fore-
head, declaring ‘you will never get those letters off you, you are branded for ever and ever’. The
sentimentalist’s character is thus essentialised as an absence – Tommy’s ‘individuality consisted
in having none’ (Barrie 1896, p. 187). Whereas in childhood his sentimentality is excused – even
celebrated – by the narrative tone, in adulthood it is presented as manipulative and destructive
of others. Grizel, whose love and devotion Tommy proves unable to return, decides ‘he was a man
now, and surely the sentimentalities in which he had dressed himself were flung aside for ever,
like old suits of clothes’. (Barrie 1900, p. 74) But like Carlyle’s dandy, Tommy’s existence
becomes the wearing of sentimental clothes. In Tommy and Grizel his sentimentality is presented
as weakness rather than calculating or unconscious: ‘It was far from his design to play a part … but
an opportunity for sentiment having presented itself, his mouth had opened as at a cherry’
(Barrie 1900, p. 32). When thrust into society he ‘yield[s] … recklessly … to every sentimental
impulse’, inadvertently proposing at one point to a woman he has just met having pretended to
have written her a love letter (Barrie 1900, p. 35).
Tommy’s sentimentality, however, is what makes him a successful writer, and his capacity to
invent emotion and live inside fantasies is presented as the essence of the artistic sensibility. His
sentimental moments always leave him ‘in splendid fettle for writing’, but his art is conceived as
a form of deception that wilfully distorts the reality of his own experience (Barrie 1900, p. 39).
He falsifies his relationship with Grizel when he writes a book about unrequited love, leading
Grizel to declare: ‘No one was ever loved more truly than you. You know nothing about unre-
quited love. Then why do you pretend to know? … It is nothing but sentiment’. (Barrie 1900,
p. 304). Grizel is contrived to be the complete opposite of Tommy so that the destructive poten-
tial of his sentimentality can be intensified. When Tommy pretends to love her, having inadvert-
ently led her to believe that his feelings are genuine, he confuses real emotion with emotion
created through art: ‘The artist who had done this thing was entranced, as if he had written an
immortal page. […] He so loved the thing he had created that in his exultation he mistook it for
her’ (Barrie 1900, p. 157). For Barrie, as for Carlyle, sentimentalism leads only to egoism.
The link between sentimentalism and art extends to the narrative form of the Tommy novels.
It is emphasised that the narrator, who often addresses the reader directly, is writing Tommy’s
biography, and he frequently reflects on the artistic choices he has to make. Early in Tommy and
Grizel, he makes explicit that in writing the story he is attempting to manipulate the reader’s
impression of Tommy: ‘To expose Tommy for what he was, to appear to be scrupulously fair to
him so that I might really damage him the more, that is what I set out to do in this book’
(Barrie 1900, p. 41). At the end of the novel, however, his attitude shifts to one of pity:
But here, five and 20 years later, is the biography, with the title changed. You may wonder that I had
the heart to write it. I do it, I have sometimes pretended to myself, that we may all laugh at the
stripping of a rogue, but that was never my reason. Have I been too cunning, or have you seen
through me all the time? Have you discovered that I was really pitying the boy who was so fond of
games that he could not with years become a man, telling nothing about him that was not true, but
doing it with unnecessary scorn in the hope that I might goad you into crying, ‘Come, come, you
are too hard on him.’
(Barrie 1900, p. 428)
The self-conscious awareness of the link between sentimentalism and reading and interpretation,
visible in Mackenzie but largely absent from Wilson and Maclaren, becomes in Barrie central to
the whole art of writing.
Tommy and Grizel is the only work discussed in this chapter in which the word ‘sentimentality’
appears (Grizel looks up its meaning in the dictionary). None of the works deploy
‘sentimentalism’, and ‘sentimental’ is not used by Mackenzie or Wilson. These facts emphasise
how ‘sentimental literature’ is more about critical judgements than intrinsic characteristics. The
theme of sentimentality remained remarkably visible in Scottish writing in the twentieth cen-
tury when, according to conventional viewpoints, it was swept aside as a value-system by mod-
ernist aesthetics. More research is needed to understand the significance of the repeated use of the
words ‘sentimental’ and ‘sentimentality’ in a work like James Kelman’s A Disaffection (1989), for
example: ‘The unspeakable sentimentality. Doyle’s problem. A fact. At the root of everything,
every last thing’. (Kelman 1990, p. 186).
It will not have passed unnoticed that the writers discussed in this chapter – the chief markers
of Scottish sentimental literature – are all male. Not coincidentally, Scottish women writers have
been among its fiercest antagonists, reaching back to Jean Marishall, who in the 1760s used ridi-
cule and laughter to counter Richardsonian forms of sentimental fiction (DeLucia 2018). The
most outspoken twentieth-century critic of sentimentalism, along with Hugh MacDiarmid, was
Muriel Spark, who in her essay ‘The Desegregation of Art’ called for ‘the liberation of our minds
from the comfortable cells of lofty sentiment … The art and literature of sentiment and emotion,
however beautiful in itself, however stirring in its depiction of actuality, has to go’. (Hynes 1992,
p. 36). For Spark, ‘ridicule’ was ‘the only honourable weapon we have left’ in a post-war, post-
holocaust world. In the same year that he published The Man of Feeling, Henry Mackenzie wrote
to his cousin lamenting how ‘The romantic is now exploded in every Thing … Ridicule, the
great Engine of modern Philosophy has beaten us out of these Heights to a Climate less pleasant’
(cited in Simpson 1988, p. 146). Ridicule may have beaten sentiment out of its momentary
eighteenth-century height, but the inextricable association between the processes of writing and
reading, and what we now understand as sentimentality, ensured that the theme remained a
major component of Scottish literature.
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18
Jacobitism
Daniel Cook
School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law,
University of Dundee, Scotland, UK
Literary Jacobitism can be detected in anything from late-seventeenth century epic to twenty-
first century speculative fiction, and even as far back as the Caroline court poetry of ruralism and
retreat. Is there a canon of Jacobite literature, however elastic? What was read, or at least circu-
lated? Often the references to the Stuart kings or other figures must by necessity remain cryptic.
Common religious, natural, and classical iconography was taken up by either side. To read
Jacobitism is to chase codes across time and space, to recover obscured works, and to reimagine
a transnational body of literature that may or may not carry an obvious political charge. Amid
militaristic attempts to restore the Stuart monarchy major literary figures such as Dryden, Pope
and Swift filled their plays, poems and pamphlets with symbols signalling a pro-Stuart (or anti-
Hanoverian) ideology. Alexander Robertson of Struan, Alastair, mac Mhaighstir Alastair and
other poets who fought in one or more of the 1715, 1719, and 1745 risings less ambiguously
composed reams of biting verse about their lived experiences. Later, Robert Burns, Lady Nairne,
James Hogg and others augmented Jacobite balladry with Romantic-period politics. Walter
Scott, meanwhile, strove to reconcile Jacobite sentiment with Hanoverian settlement, and even
coordinated George IV’s highly publicised visit to Edinburgh in 1822.
Regardless of when Jacobitism ended as a politico-militaristic movement, numerous Neo-
Jacobite societies have appeared (Pittock 2014, pp. 96–101). At the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury and into the next, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan and Violet Jacob, among others,
imaginatively explored the intrigues surrounding 1740s Jacobitism. In the 1920s, D.K. Broster
penned the Jacobite Trilogy, which stars the dashing hero Ewen Cameron, a mainstay of Neo-
Jacobite romance. Some Jacobite literature, following Scott’s Redgauntlet, consider ‘what ifs?’
Joan Aiken’s Wolves Chronicles series (1968–2005) depicts an alternative British history in which
James III has the throne. Novels in different genres continue to appear, but the most popular
recent depiction of Jacobitism comes in Diana Gabaldon’s SF romance series Outlander (1991-),

Jacobitism 219
in which a 1940s nurse travels back to the period leading up to the battle at Culloden. That final,
decisive battle has featured prominently in literature and other cultural works across the globe
(though Prestonpans, Killiecrankie, Glen Shiel and Sheriffmuir have their songs too). Howard
Erskine-Hill puts it well: ‘if there is an epic moment in eighteenth-century British history it is
surely the hopeless charge of Charles Edward’s exhausted and starving Highland army into the
Hanoverian artillery at Culloden’ (Erskine-Hill 1982, p. 59). Politically, the fallout of Culloden
all but ended Jacobitism as a movement. In literary terms that battlefield became (and remains)
a site of creative endeavours ranging from lyrical reflection to anti-war commentary. For conveni-
ence, on the understanding that Jacobitism is a long-running, transcultural, transmedia phe-
nomenon, we will here snapshot printed poems, songs and novels produced in different periods
by Scottish authors. The survey starts with The Jacobite Century (1689–1789), then turns to the
Romantic revival of the early nineteenth century and ends with Neo-Jacobitism in the 1880s
through to the present day. Beyond this study, we might trace para-traditions, such as the Scoto-
Latinate allusions to Aeneas and Ascanius, sentimental-era satire, or the biting back-and-forth of
regional coteries (Kidd 1991; Pittock 2002, 2007b).
The spirit of Jacobite heroism runs through the Ossian poems, though they are set many centu-
ries prior, and rework ancient Irish mythologies alongside Gaelic motifs and Anglo-Scottish senti-
mentalism (Pittock 1997, pp.153–56). Where Macpherson and Hogg favour a return to Scottish
order, before the 1707 Union, Scott’s Jacobite novels and short stories (principally ‘The Highland
Widow’) advocate assimilation into post-Culloden Britishness. If Jacobitism legitimises political
dissent, as Frank McLynn claims, for Scott it provides an aesthetics of fractured identity
(McLynn 1982, p. 99). Is the spirit of Jacobitism rebellious or nostalgic, militant or defeatist,
reconstructionist or radical? As Murray Pittock reminds us, an ‘armed uprising was an extreme
manifestation of Jacobitism rather than a normative one’ (Pittock 1997, p. 109). Even if we limit
political Jacobitism to the years 1689–1746, namely, the commencement of the Highland War to
the Battle of Culloden, there are generational considerations. To some, James II/VII (or Jacobus,
from whom Jacobites derive their name), was the central figure around whom their imagery
revolved. When the exiled king died in 1701 his son James Francis Edward Stuart claimed the title
of James III (as recognised by Louis XIV, most notably), though the Whigs dubbed him The Old
Pretender. Later, to others, the hero was Charles Edward (popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie,
the Young Chevalier, or, in Whiggish parlance, The Young Pretender). While James III has
appeared in twentieth-century British and North American novels, Bonnie Prince Charlie has
cameoed in many more. The spirit, and the key figures, of Jacobitism shift over time.
The Jacobite Century
A standard-bearer to John Graham, 1st Viscount Dundee during the 1689 campaign, James
Philip of Almerieclose commemorated their travails in The Grameid (1691). Modelled on Lucan’s
Pharsalia and Virgil’s Aeneid, the Scottish Latin epic presents Dundee as a Roman patriot fending
off the barbarian usurpers. Born half a century after Philip, William Hamilton of Bangour
wrote – in Scots – a classical ode on the 1745 battle of Prestonpans, ‘Over Gladsmuir’s blood-
stained field’. Philip was not the only Jacobite poet to see battle, though he’s one of the few to
write so extensively in Latin. Alexander Robertson of Struan wrote in Scots and English, and
Alastair, mac Mhaighstir Alastair in Gaelic. Early Jacobite poetry in Irish and Scots-Gaelic
exhibited strongly cognate themes, motifs and tropes, not least of all the aisling, or dream vision,
in which the woman- nation laments the absence of her royal lover (Ó Ciardha 1999;
Pittock 2007a). One of the earliest Scottish Jacobite poets, Sìleas na Ceapaich (Sìleas MacDonald
of Keppoch; henceforward Sìleas), came from the Gaelic-speaking community’s elite. In ‘Do
Rìgh Seumas’ she longs for the arrival of James Francis Edward Stuart, the true king, ‘on the sea
and coming to us forthwith to give courage to his friends’ (MacDonald 1972, p. 17).
While venerations of James (and later, Charles) Stuart and their military leaders proliferated
throughout the Jacobite century – coded or otherwise – there are works that instead spoofed George
I, on whom Sìleas delivered a ‘thousand curses’ (MacDonald 1972, p. 47). An anonymous broadsheet
riff on Addison’s Cato, a Tragedy (1713), William Meston’s Cato’s Ghost (1715a) is not subtle:
Rise Britains [sic], rise, your King demands your Aid.

God and St. George, can Britains be afraid?
In such a Cause break thro’ the thick array
Of the Usurper’s Guard, and force your way.
Some lucky Hand, more favour’d then [sic] the rest,
May charge him home, and reach the Monster’s Breast,
Restore your King, and make your Country bless’d.
(Meston 1715a, p. 1)
Like Sìleas, Meston also wrote elegies for fallen Jacobites. ‘To the Memory of the Right
Honourable John Earl of Strathmore’, who died in the 1715 battle of Sheriffmuir, gives us the
highs and lows of the soldier at the battle itself. First, the bravery amid overwhelming odds:
For his lov’d Prince and Country’s Cause

He scorns to quit the bloody Field,
While many fly whom Danger awes,
And many overpow’red yield.
But ah! What Scythian would approve

Of Foes so cruel and unfair,
Whom neither’s Youth nor Charms could move,
Surrounded and disarm’d, to spare?
(Meston 1715b, pp. 4–5)
Three stanzas later comes a brutal death:
The lovely Youth thus fainting lies

On the cold Ground, and pants for Breath:
Extinguish’d now his radiant Eyes,
And every Charm deform’d by Death.
(Meston 1715b, p. 5)
Overpowered, disarmed, deformed. The violence of the battlefield remained a persistent theme
throughout Jacobite literature, even among the Romantics. Allan Cunningham, many years later,
paints the 1746 Southwark trials of Captain Donald McDonald and other officers in gruesome detail:
His long, long hair, in yellow hanks,

Waved o’er his cheeks sae sweet and ruddy;
But now it waves o’er Carlisle yetts,
In dripping ringlets, soil’d and bloody.
(Cunningham 1825, vol. 3, p. 214)
Jacobitism 221
Scotland’s most accomplished poet in the early eighteenth century, Jacobite or otherwise, Allan
Ramsay was adept in Scots, English and Latin, and in genres as diverse as the pastoral and
satire. In a 1713 elegy for Archibald Pitcairne, Ramsay drew freely on the Aeneid, a translation
of which became closely associated with the Jacobite booksellers Thomas Ruddiman and Robert
Freebairn in 1710. Ramsay acted with discretion amid political threats, of course. The manu-
script of ‘The Archers’ March’, as Pittock has noticed, contains lines elided in the printed
version (Pittock 2008, p. 50). Ramsay nevertheless could be suggestive in print, as we find with
‘Tartana, or the Plaid’:
If lin’d with Green Stuarta’s Plaid we view,

Or thine Ramseia edg’d around with Blue;
One shews the Spring when Nature is most kind,
The other Heav’n, whose Spangles lift the Mind.
(Ramsay 1721, p. 47)
The conventional pastoralism of the imagery augurs the Spring-like renewal of the Stuarts,
though, as Pittock argues, this fertility is ‘too homely to warrant suspicions of rebellion’
(Pittock 2015, p. 56). Ramsay, like James Macpherson later, dove deep into the country’s
past in loose-lipped commentaries on the present shrouded in a nostalgic indirection. A
faux-medieval dream vision published alongside recovered medieval Scots works in The Ever
Green (1724), ‘The Vision’ outwardly deals with the Wars of Independence. Loyalty and
royalty are near allied; together they will prosper. Knavery and slavery, equally allied, will
finally fail.
Quhen Scottish Peirs slicht Saxon Gold,

And turn trew heartit Men;
Quhen Knaivry and Slaivrie,
Ar equally dispysd,
And Loyalte and Royalte,
Universalie are prysd.
(Ramsay 1724, vol. 1, p. 220)
As Pittock avers, Ramsay was ‘clearly a Jacobite’ – but often he was by necessity a closeted one
(Pittock 2015, pp. 54, 57). Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany (1723–1737), however, features major
Jacobite poets such as William Hamilton of Bangour and Alexander Robertson of Struan, and it
did much to promote the popularity of Highland Laddie songs (Donaldson 1988, pp. 55–56).
Robertson of Struan is especially germane to any survey of Jacobite poetry as he wrote in one of
the key modes of the literature, the sacred (Pittock 2015, pp. 46ff). (The other modes are the
aggressive and the erotic.) As Pittock notes, the voices of sacred and erotic Jacobite poetry merge
in ‘Britannia, to her Beloved in Spain’ to convey ‘a message more direct than that of irony and
typology’: ‘Thou, James of my Heart!’ (Pittock 2006, p. 171). A large edition of Struan’s poems,
mostly taken from his manuscripts, appeared during the year he died, 1749. Although filled with
love poems, odes and epistles, eclogues, fables, imitations, retirement verses, and works in other
genres, the innocuously titled Poems, on Various Subjects and Occasions has a sharp Jacobitical edge
throughout. Classical allusions to Jove and other figures barely conceal current restlessness: ‘His
Lightning he scatters, and Pails full of Rain / Showers down to destroy the Delights of the Swain’
(‘An Ode in the Time of a Storm’; Robertson of Struan 1752, p. 9). There are also poems for major
Jacobites. ‘Epitaph on the Earl of Mar’ is elegiac and angry: ‘Alas! that Love of Friends, or Hate of
Foes, / No more can rouse them from their dull Repose’ (p. 11). ‘Epitaph on Alexander MacDonell
of Glengary’ adds despair: ‘O Innocence! O when shalt thou return!’ (p. 12). ‘Epitaph on John
Robertson of Ludejunior’ damns the subject to hell: ‘Proud Lucifer takes Care of thee’ (p. 12).
An early Jacobite, Struan largely champions James III (or ‘James the Eighth’, as he prefers),
though the edition also includes an epitaph for the claimant’s father (‘Bright is his Diadem in
Heav’n’s Abode, / Who lost his Crown rather than change his God’). ‘A Song’ rouses Jamie’s
supporters:
Since Loyalty is still the same,

Whether it win or lose the Game,
To flinch it were a burning Shame,
Since Mar has gain’d a Battle;
Let each brave true-hearted Scot,
Improve the Vict’ry he has got,
Resolving all shall go to Pot,
Or James the Eighth to settle.
(Robertson of Struan 1752, p. 48)
No mere panegyrist, Struan also attacks anti-Jacobite satirists. In ‘To One who wrote some scur-
rilous Verses upon the Prince’, he goes for the jugular:
Beware, if e’er thou offer’st to bestride

The Pegazean Steed, or think’st to ride,
Parnass’ has ordered him to wince, and bound,
To fling, and throw thee headlong to the Ground,
And with his Heel, full planted at thy Face,
To bruise thy Head, thou Serpent of Disgrace.
(Robertson of Struan 1752, p. 133)
The other major Jacobite soldier-poet included in Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany is the much
younger William Hamilton of Bangour (Bushnell 1957; Pittock 2006, pp. 173–75). A poetic
propagandist for Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, he composed a famous ode on the battle of
Prestonpans. As William Donaldson surmises, Hamilton presents the genius of Scotland arising
Phoenix-like from the ashes of defeat:
As over Gladsmuir’s bloodstain’d field,

Scotia, imperial goddess flew,
Her lifted spear and radiant shield,
Conspicuous blazing to the view;
Her visage lately clouded with despair,
Now reassum’d its first majestic air.
(Donaldson 1988, p. 68)
A posthumous collection of Poems presents Hamilton as a gentleman poet who ‘wrote entirely for
his own amusement, and that of his particular friends’, and ostensibly ignores the more political
Jacobitism 223
fare – unless we know where to look (Hamilton 1760, p. iv). ‘Episode of the Thistle’, for one,
imagines a wronged Scotland no longer willing to bear harm:
Emblem of modest valour, unprovokt

That harmeth not, provok’d that will not bear
Wrong unreveng’d.
(Hamilton 1760, p. 106)
Order will be restored: the ‘Thistle happier far… shall rise / Triumphant o’er each flower’. If the
Ramsayan analogy were not clear enough, the faux-medieval vision makes an explicit reference
to the entrenched Stuart dynasty: ‘the fifth / Triumphant James, of Stuart’s ancient Line, /
Restor’d the former grace’ (p. 113). Missing from the collection is an impassioned imitation of
Psalm 137 that directly addresses current events:
On Gallia’s Shore we sat and wept,

When Scotland we thought on,
Rob’d of her bravest Sons, and all
Her ancient Spirit gone.
(Bushnell 1957, pp. 83–84)
As in much Jacobite poetry after 1746, the brutality at Culloden cannot be forgotten:
Remember England’s Children, Lord,

Who, on Drumossie Day,
Deaf to the Voice of kindred Love
‘Raze, raze it quite’, did say.
Reprinted alongside Jacobite songs in many anthologies, Tobias Smollett’s ‘The Tears of Scotland’
ripples with comparable outrage: ‘Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn /Thy banish’d peace, thy
laurels torn!’ (Cunningham 1825, vol. 2, p. 239). As Tom Keymer notes, though, Smollett’s
poem was ambiguous enough to be picked up by both Jacobite and anti-Jacobite miscellanies
(Keymer 1995, p. 127).
After Culloden, two smallish anthologies from each side of the political divide appeared.
They have similar names but are easily distinguished once read: the pro-Hanoverian A
Collection of Loyal Songs (1748) and the pro-Jacobite A Collection of Loyal Songs, Poems, &c.
(1750). Both collections apparently hark back to a short book published in 1745, A Full
Collection of All Poems Upon Charles, Prince of Wales. In a powerful epistle to Bonnie Prince
Charlie that opens the 1745 collection the eponymous figure opposes oppression yet retains
empathy for the enemy:
Thou born to right three injur’d Nations Cause,

To strip Oppressors of oppressive Laws;
Like Heaven, thou comes with Mercy in thy Eyes,
And Tears drop down when ev’n a Rebel dies.
(Anon. 1745, p. 3)
Many of the poems in A Full Collection describe Charlie as at once youthful and god-like, perhaps
messianic. The anti-Jacobite Collection of Loyal Songs dandifies The Young Pretender and, in
‘Willie was a wanton Wag’, damns him as a coward:
Charlie may mourn Culloden muir,

Where a’ his stoutest friends did fa’;
And he stood safely in the rear,
Amang the first to rin awa’.
(Anon. 1748, p. 27)
In an untitled parody of the Highland Laddie songs that even the Duke of Cumberland knew,
Charlie merely frolics before again fleeing:
When he to you began to play,

Bonny laddie, highland laddie;
You quit the green and ran away,
Bonny laddie, highland laddie.
(Anon. 1748, p. 56)
A Collection of Loyal Songs, Poems, &c. nabs some items from A Full Collection such as ‘Hail, glori-
ous Youth! the Wonder of our Age, / The future Object of th’ Historian’s Page!’ (Anon. 1750,
p. 7). The collection also overwrites the frivolity of the Hanoverian collection’s Highland Laddie
tune:
Our Torments from no Cause do spring,

Bonny Laddie, &c.
But fighting for our lawful King; Bonny Laddie, &c.
Our King’s Reward will come in Time,
Bonny Laddie, &c.
And constant Jenny shall be thine, Bonny Laddie, &c.
(Anon. 1750, p. 34)
The earliest print collections of Gaelic verse – Angus and Archibald MacDonald’s Collection of
Gaelic Poetry (1776) and John Gillies’s Collection of Ancient and Modern Gaelic Poems and Songs
(1786) – include few songs of the ’45. Later anthologies, from Patrick Turner’s Comhchruinneacha
(1813) to John MacKenzie’s Beauties of Gaelic Poetry (1841) grew less inhibited (Campbell 1933;
Gillies 1991). The most celebrated Gaelic poet of the Jacobite century, Alastair, mac Mhaighstir
Alastair (Alexander MacDonald), had a particularly fulsome range covering everything from
personal lyricism to occasional satire. Some of the poems revisit Charles Edward’s departure for
France and call for his return. Some lacerate the Campbells. Others attack the Act of Proscription
(Dis-cloathing Act) of 1746: ‘Let me never enjoy wearing my shirt […] unless I am keen to have
it spiked / exiling George and crowning James’ (Thomson 1993, p. 47). By contrast, Rob Donn’s
(Robert Mackay) response to the Dis-cloathing Act rages against George and Charles alike: ‘you
have seen the faults of the pair’ (Thomson 1993, p. 117). Gaelic-language Jacobites have their
panegyrics too. Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir (Duncan Bàn Macintyre) praises at length the
Jacobitism 225
‘excelling and comely’ Lord Glenorchy (Thomson 1993, p. 87). (Having fought at Falkirk, he
also had battle poems.) Another veteran of the ’45, Iain Ruadh Stiùbhart (John Roy Stewart)
captures the callousness of war:
Alas, alas, the white bodies

that lie on the slopes over there,
uncoffined, unshrouded,
lacking burial even in holes.
(Thomson 1993, p. 99)
Writers in the post-Culloden era could not forget that brutal battle, even those born almost two
decades after the fact. Charles Edward Stuart had died in Rome in 1788, but in ‘An Suaithneas
Bàn’ (‘The White Cockade’), Uilleam Ros (William Ross) addresses him directly: ‘There are
many warriors and brave fighters in Scotland who are today bereft of you; those who would have
gone keenly with you in the fray are covertly shedding tears’ (Gillies 1991, pp. 50–51). Literary
collections continued to appear, including a handsome miscellany purporting to contain Bonnie
Prince Charlie’s favourite songs. Many of the pieces are anonymous, aside from those attributed
to Meston and Struan, among others. In any case, the tunes were familiar:
The bonniest lad that e’er I saw,

Bonny laddie, highland laddie,
Wore a plaid and was fu’ braw,
Bonny laddie, highland laddie.
(Anon. 1779, p. 50)
Romantic Jacobitism
Political Jacobitism remained a live concern in the Romantic period, and often merged with
Jacobinism, among other things (Carruthers 2018). Jacobite trials took place as late as 1817.
Some titles were restored in 1824. But the literature of the period largely looked back to the fall
of the soldiers. Scott wrote two novels concerned with the major risings of 1715 and 1745 – Rob
Roy and Waverley respectively – and a third, Redgauntlet, in which he explored a counterfactual
rising in 1765. Important recovery work took place, most notably in James Hogg’s The Jacobite
Relics of Scotland (1819, 1821). Romantic Jacobites composed new songs, too. Carolina Oliphant
(Lady Nairne) produced or perfected many of the best ones: ‘Charlie is My Darling’, ‘The
Hundred Pipers’, ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again’, ‘Charlie’s Landing’, ‘Wha’ll be King but
Charlie’, ‘My Bonnie Hieland Laddie’, ‘Gathering Song’, and ‘He’s Owre the Hills that I Lo’e
Best’ among them. Nairne’s songs were not collected until they appeared in The Scottish Minstrel
(1821–1824), and only then in a small sample without her name attached. Burns was aware of
her, though they never met. Together they transformed ‘single-minded party zeal’ into what
both called ‘national song’ (McGuirk 2006, p. 253). Both knew Alastair, mac Mhaighstir
Alastair’s work intimately and even adapted parts into Scots and English (McGuirk 2006,
pp. 264–269). Burns also owned a copy of The Caledonian Pocket Companion (1751), in which he
found musical texts of many airs whose titles identify them as tributes to an absent king.
Burns anchored the Jacobite tradition more emphatically in ‘personal elegy’, according to
David Daiches (1975, p. 156). William Donaldson (1988, p. 79) credits Burns with shifting the
Jacobite song away from the dominance of dynasticism towards a focus on what Jacobitism
meant for the people. Burns’s efforts on ‘Strathallan’s Lament’, one of his most famous Jacobite
pieces, provides a good case in point for Donaldson’s claim. The lines ‘Thickest night, surround
my dwelling! / Howling tempests, o’er me rave!’ echo ‘The Highland King’, a tune found in The
True Loyalist: ‘Blow ye bleak winds around my head, / No storm nor tempest do I hear’
(Anon. 1779, p. 53). The earlier piece’s speaker prays for the preservation of Charles Edward and
emerges ‘purged and strengthened by his experiences’ (in Donaldson’s words; Donaldson 1988,
p. 79). Burns more emphatically considers the individual’s relationship with the cause: ‘The wide
world is all before us – But a world without a friend!’ (Burns 2003, p. 298). After all, Burns gives
voice to a real man killed at Culloden, William Drummond, 4th Viscount Strathallan, or at least
his son James, who fought alongside him before taking refuge in a cave. Burns also captured the
movement’s demise in the mock-Hanoverian ‘Ye Jacobites By Name’ (‘Your doctrines I maun
blame’), where the ‘Man undone’ finally reveals himself to be a Jacobite warning his listeners
that no further activity can be forthcoming (p. 388). Burns, for Pittock, simultaneously fore-
shadowed the nostalgic Jacobitism of sentiment associated with the nineteenth century and
revealed the continuation of Jacobitism as a live concern inhering in the language of subsequent
struggles (Pittock 2006, pp. 215–222).
Often read as a sentimental song-maker, Nairne was, like Burns, also politically engaged
(Christian 2018). Some pieces rehearse the patriarchal stability offered by Charlie’s return, as in
‘Wha’ll Be King but Charlie?’ (‘Come Ronald, come Donald, come a’thegither, / And crown your
rightfu’, lawfu’ king!’; Nairne 1869, p. 118). ‘My Bonnie Hieland Laddie’ eroticises the relation-
ship between absent ruler and loyal subject: ‘My handsome, charming Hieland laddie!’
(Nairne 1869, p. 120). Others explore the nuances of conflicting political systems through a
witty variation of the romance genre so prominent in the Highland Laddie tradition. In ‘The
Women are a’ gane Wud’ the male speaker rages at Charlie’s arrival as it disrupts the domestic
tranquillity. Sexual excitement is akin to revolutionary fervour:
The women are a’ gane wud,

Oh, that he had bidden awa!
He’s turn’d their heads, the lad
And ruin will bring on us a’.
(Nairne 1869, p. 84)
Proud of what he characterises as his ‘peaceable’ ways, the speaker fails to see the hypocrisy of
expecting others (including his own wife) to ‘doucely behave’. Peace and liberty are at odds. (The
speaker’s Hanoverian bias is easily exposed; the white cockade is ‘the thing that I hate’.) A famil-
iar icon in Jacobite literature, the white cockade received different poetic treatments by Nairne
and Burns. Nairne’s ‘The White Rose o’ June’ recasts the traditional number ‘The Ranting
Roving Lad’ found in David Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, Etc. (1776),
and responds to Burns’s own version, ‘The White Cockade’. Burns’s song (unsigned in The Scots
Musical Museum) presents an unwavering loyalism aligned with romantic feeling: ‘Betide what
may, I will be wed, / And follow the boy wi’ the White Cockade’ (Burns 2003, p. 358). Nairne’s
speaker is less cocksure: ‘An’ oh, that’s the white rose, the white rose o’ June, / An’ may he that
should wear it come back again sune!’ (Nairne 1869, p. 138).
Jacobitism 227
Like Nairne, Lady Anne Barnard grew up in a Jacobite household, which informs many of her
most popular songs such as ‘Charlie is My Darling’, ‘The Hundred Pipers’ and ‘Will Ye no Come
Back Again’. Margaret Maxwell Inglis’s ‘Charlie’s Bonnet’s Down, Laddie’, set to the tune of
‘Tullymet’, likewise captures the twinned themes of Highland glamour and military might:
Let Highland lads wi’ belted plaids,

And bonnets blue and white cockades,
Put on their shields, unsheath their blades,
And conquest fell begin.
(McCue 1997, pp. 64–65)
As with many Jacobite songs and poems, this piece appeared many years after composition. Long
popular, Anne Grant of Laggan’s Poems on Various Subject (1803) traverses a variety of genres. She
devotes lengthy sections of her five-part epic The Highlanders to ‘that brave Youth’, Charles, ‘an
outlaw shrunk in wilds unknown, / Where long his fathers fill’d an awful throne’ (Grant 1803,
p. 80). Incidental references to Culloden adorn ‘A Battle Founded on Fact’ and other pieces.
Towards the back of the book we find ‘On the Marquis of Huntly’s Departure for the Continent
with His Regiment in 1799’, set to the air of ‘The Blue Bell of Scotland’: ‘Oh where, tell me
where, is your Highland Laddie gone?’ (p. 407). Jacobite poetry kept appearing, even when, in
the early 1800s, Jacobitism as a dynastic movement had effectively ended. Real Highland lad-
dies were now held in high regard, not least of all the soldiers who fought in the Napoleonic
Wars (Donaldson 1988, p. 92). The Highland Society of Scotland supervised the publication of
a Gaelic dictionary and sponsored Alexander Campbell’s efforts in collecting auld songs. The
result, Albyn’s Anthology (1816), brought before the general reader genuine Gaelic-language
Jacobite songs in the original and in translation (or imitation). Modern pieces by Hogg and Scott
were included, too.
A year later, Colonel David Stewart of Garth commissioned, on behalf of the Highland Society
of London, James Hogg’s Jacobite Relics of Scotland. Modelled on Joseph Ritson’s Scotish Songs
(1794), from which the editor appropriated some sections, Hogg’s collection catalogues and
contextualises an immense quantity of items. The collection proper opens with the original
Jacobite song, which circulated in the 1640s – ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’ – and runs
up to and beyond Burns. Tunes popularised in English Jacobitism feature throughout, including
‘Over the Seas and far awa’, which readers of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) will recognise. The sec-
ond series, in 1821, includes variations of the oldest Jacobite works, such as ‘The Blackbird’
(‘Good luck to my Blackbird, wherever he be!’) – this piece had a long afterlife among Scottish
and Irish singers well into the twentieth century. Hogg also passed off as genuine his own com-
positions such as ‘Donald Macgillavry’, a ‘capital old song, and very popular’: ‘Come like the
devil, Donald Macgillavry; / Skelp them and scaud them that prov’d sae unbritherly’ (Hogg 2002,
pp. 280, 102). Pastiche or part of a living tradition, Hogg’s contributions were grounded in the
literary histories of Scots and Gaelic Jacobitism. Either way, the Highland Society of London
considered Hogg’s collection a failure as it went beyond their prim brief. Stewart of Garth, their
spokesman, wanted the collection to celebrate the bravery of the Scottish people (Donaldson 1988,
p. 107).
Opening the book, they would have found salacious attacks on the Hanoverian king in ‘The
Sow’s Tail to Geordie’ and other works. References to the Duke of Cumberland’s ‘blood-blushing
hands’ may have been too confrontational in a period of pronounced political assimilation. In the
original commission Stewart of Garth requested a balance between Whig and Tory songs, and
between wit and beauty. Actually, Hogg omitted many offensive songs and bowdlerised freely
(substituting ‘Britons’ for ‘Devils’ and the like). Overall, by his claim, he included less than one-
fifth of the pieces he found – largely to avoid repetition. Hoggian Jacobitism was by no means
restricted to antiquarian-cum-creative work. One of his most famous songs, ‘Bonnie Prince
Charlie’, first appeared in the slim pamphlet The Border Garland (1819). The Three Perils of Woman
(1823) ends with a devasted post-Culloden Scotland peopled by a hypocritical Presbyterian, a
perverted doctor, and a psychotic gravedigger. Walter Scott’s depiction of Jacobitism, similarly,
persists across his poems and prose, sometimes obliquely, often bluntly. Typically, though, discus-
sions of Scott and Jacobitism attend to his first novel, Waverley (1814), in which a young
Englishman is lured into the romance of adventure during the ’45; Rob Roy (1818), which is set
during the ’15 and follows an outlaw; and Redgauntlet (1824), a counterfactual tale in which
Bonnie Prince Charlie plots a further rising in 1765. We might add to the list The Black Dwarf
(1816), Old Mortality (1816), The Antiquary (1816), The Abbot (1820) and Kenilworth (1821),
among other historical novels. Jacobitism meant more to Scott than mere subject matter
(McCracken-Flesher 2012). Scott’s namesake ancestor, Walter ‘Beardie’ Scott, fought in the 1689
and 1715 risings. In his own words, The Author of Waverley had become ‘a valiant Jacobite at the
age of ten’, having heard the stories from battle-beaten survivors (Scott 1932–37, vol. 1, p. 343).
Colin Kidd posits that Scott favoured ‘passive Jacobitism’ and demonised turbulent activism
(Kidd 1998, p. 75). In Waverley, Baron Bradwardine and Fergus Mac-Ivor embody those respec-
tive extremes. Or, put another way, as James Kerr surmises, Flora Mac-Ivor represents Jacobite
idealism, her brother its opportunism, Evan Dhu its crude but genuine nobility, and Callum
Beg, sniping at everyone he perceives as an enemy, the darker side (Kerr 1989, p. 11). Waverley
begins with good Jacobites and bad ones, he writes, ‘and ends with the major figures of the rebel-
lion either dead of domesticated’. Claire Lamont has challenged the neatness of such a conclu-
sion; Waverley’s reconciliation at the end comes amid gruesome penalties for others (Lamont 1991).
Put simply, peace built out of brutality cannot be true peace, not for everyone. The subversive
school in Scott studies invite us to consider a tension between the narrator’s pro-Hanoverian
logic and the lead character’s inner conflict:
Whatever were the original rights of the Stuarts, calm reflection told him, that, omitting the
question how far James the Second could forfeit those of his posterity, he had according to the united
voice of the whole nation, justly forfeited his own. [...] Reason asked, was it worth while to disturb a
government so long settled and established, and to plunge a kingdom into all the miseries of civil war.
(D’Arcy 2005, pp. 58–59)
Peace is the logical choice, but Scott’s third clause cannot be omitted without some sort of vio-
lence, whether by the denial of monarchical rights or by bloodshed. Waverley does not depict the
battle of Culloden. Instead we glimpse Edward Waverley’s post-battle shock. And the naivety of
the youngster, the ‘knight of romance’, is crudely exposed soon after he joins the Jacobite army:
‘looking around him, he saw the wild dress and appearance of his Highland associates […] and
wished to awake from what seemed at the moment a dream, strange, horrible, and unnatural’
(Scott 2007, p. 236). Instead of battles, Scott gives us (sometimes dubious) snippets of verse from
the Jacobite archive: Hamilton, Struan, Dryden, Ramsay (and Virgil), among them (Lamont 1993).
But he also relies on sanitised histories from the government side, chiefly John Home’s History of
the Rebellion (1802).
Jacobitism 229
Even the narrator insists on conferring on the Prince ‘the title due to his birth’, when Waverley
meets him amid much pomp in Chapter 38, however. Pageantry aside, and despite the absence
of the battle of Culloden, we have Prestonpans, a site of Jacobite victory in September 1745 and
a favourite topic among poets. Coming at the end of the second volume, the battle is not described
in detail (the ‘rest is well known’) but what we do have is gratuitous: ‘he saw his former com-
mander brought from his horse by the blow of a scythe, and beheld him receive, while on the
ground, more wounds than would have let out twenty lives’ (Scott 2007, p. 241). And the after-
math of Culloden presented here arrests us all the same. Waverley traverses the battlefield half-
way through the final volume: ‘the traces of war became visible. Broken carriages, dead horses,
unroofed cottages […] and bridges destroyed’ (Scott 2007, p. 315). Where are the dead bodies?
Where are the survivors? Scott did write more extensively about Culloden, in a history of
Scotland aimed at younger readers, Tales of a Grandfather, most notably (Lamont 1991, p. 23).
Trying to extend the movement beyond Culloden, into the 1760s, literarily speaking, Scott
nevertheless wrote the ‘epitaph’ for political Jacobitism in Redgauntlet, in the words of Paul
Henderson Scott – ‘the cause is lost forever!’ (Scott 1981, p. 21).
Neo-Jacobitism
Rumours circulated that Charles Edward Stuart had returned as late as 1763. By that point a
Stuart – John Stuart, the 3rd earl of Bute – had gained leadership of the British government, and
the 1740s legislations had encouraged ordinary Jacobites to regularise their positions in political
office and the military. Since then, a ‘what if?’ (or ‘what next?’) theme has come to the fore of
literary Jacobitism. The world-weary Prince we meet in the final volume of Redgauntlet can no
longer bank on his supporters: ‘Farewell, gentlemen – I will shift for myself’ (Scott 1997, p. 358).
As late as 1831, though, Scott contemplated writing ‘the personal history’ of Charles Edward, a
project that would have completed a 17-year streak of Scottian Jacobitism (Scott 1998, p. 724).
Waverley was not the earliest fiction on the ’45 (Humphrey 1993, pp. 55–57). But Scott set the
basic pattern for many novelists who followed. Like Scott, in Rob Roy and elsewhere, some authors
attend to different phases of Jacobite history, beyond the ’45, whether it’s the Highland Clearances
(Neil M. Gunn’s 1934 Butcher’s Broom) or the Glencoe massacre (Susan Fletcher’s 2009 Witch
Light). Revisiting the 1740s, Robert Louis Stevenson’s chief Jacobite fictions are Kidnapped
(1886) and its sequel Catriona (1893), and The Master of Ballantrae (1889). John Buchan’s
Midwinter (1927) takes us back to 1745; but it has an English setting. Like Waverley, the hero
Alastair MacLean is a stranger in a strange land, a Catholic Gaelic-speaking Highlander travel-
ling undercover as a Jacobite agent. Like Scott and Stevenson, Buchan revisited different facets
of political Jacobitism across his fiction. An earlier Buchan novel, A Lost Lady of Old Years (1899),
is also set during the Charles Edward Stuart era, but its main character, the dissolute Francis
Birkenshaw, cares little for rebellion until seduced by riches.
Buchan’s young protagonists are not secondary Waverleys. Stevenson’s marauding outlaws –
Alan Breck Stewart among them – have little in common with the idealists of Scott’s fictions.
Claiming affinity with Stevenson’s handiwork, Andrew Lang’s Pickle the Spy (1897) purports to
uncover the correspondence of a spy network in papers held at the British Museum. One of the
most famous Neo-Jacobite novels, Violet Jacob’s Flemington (1911) includes strong historical
detail, and even features a thinly veiled version of David Erskine, a prominent Jacobite sympa-
thiser (and the author’s ancestor). Like Waverley, Jacob’s Archie comes from a politically divided
family, though he is less passive than Scott’s hero. Neil Munro’s The Shoes of Fortune (1901) has a
French-speaking, hiccoughing Prince Charlie who nevertheless has ‘something noble’ about
him, and a Waverleyan naïf, Paul Greig (Munro 1949, p. 213). Set a decade after the final rising,
the light-hearted Doom Castle (1901) tracks the adventures of Victor Jean, the Comte de
Montaiglon as he belatedly searches Scotland for a traitor to the Jacobite cause. A third Jacobite
novel by Munro, The New Road (1914), follows Aeneas Macmaster as he investigates his father’s
disappearance at the 1719 battle of Glen Shiel 14 years earlier. Set a little over a year after
Culloden, Naomi Mitchison’s The Bull Calves (1947) depicts Scotland in recovery. But the
Haldanes’ efforts are threatened when members of the family protect a Jacobite rebel. Based on
broader historical records, as the author’s copious endnotes attest, the novel also draws heavily on
Mitchison’s own ancestry.
Neo-Jacobitism has its poets too. Alicia Ann Spottiswoode (Lady John Scott) ingeniously
reworked a short romance, ‘Annie Laurie’, found in Cunningham’s Hoggian Songs of Scotland
(1825). Some but by no means all of Iain Crichton Smith’s The Exiles (1984), with its songs of
loss and return, exile and love, can be read Jacobitically. Some poems, such as ‘Prince Charles’,
are direct: ‘This was in the end his hoped-for home’ (Crichton Smith 1984, p. 26). Stuffed with
versified accounts of treachery and heroism, along with crimson bloody tales, Douglas Ainslie’s
The Songs of the Stewarts (1909) demands a Jacobitical purview: ‘To me the deeds of the Stewarts
appeal more intensely than any other theme’ (Ainslie 1909, p. vii). A.C. MacDonell’s Lays of the
Heather (1896) comprises poems in highly fluid forms, from rapid ballads to contemplative epis-
tles, and even loose variations on the auld Highland Laddie songs. Neo-Jacobite fiction still
revisits the older canon, whether we are referring to the songwriters of the Jacobite century or
the Romantic revivalists that followed them. Introduced in James Robertson’s Joseph Knight
(2003) as an old man reading Scott’s ballads of ‘the rusted, misty half-dream that was Scotland’s
past’, the 73-year-old Sir John Wedderburn had fought as a teenager at Culloden (Robertson
2003, p. 5). Like poets and novelists, and the people of Scotland, characters both real and invented
have their cultural memories too.
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Blackwood.
19
Religion
Linden Bicket
School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
Scottish literary production has long been regarded as intimately connected with religious belief.
Bernard Sellin calls religion ‘a theme which had always permeated Scottish literature’, and, as
many of the chapters in the present volume reveal, issues of faith, devotion, and scepticism have
occupied the minds and hearts of writers from the earliest literary expressions of Celtic
Christianity to the present day (Sellin 2009, p. 127). However, the religious turmoil of Scotland’s
sixteenth-century Reformation – described by Sarah Dunnigan as ‘a religious revolution which
renewed and redefined the relationship between devotional belief, practice and literature’ –
meant that faith became a uniquely contentious issue in Scotland and ensured that there could
be no single or homogenous tradition of Scottish writing with spiritual themes (Dunnigan 2012,
p. 44). Instead, it might be more appropriate to consider Scottish literature as one influenced by
many Christian denominations, which includes both Catholic and Protestant imaginaries, but
which also reflects the increasingly diverse religious landscape of contemporary Scottish life.
Scottish literary criticism has been alert to the role played by the Bible and religious belief
within medieval and early modern texts. However, interest in later devotional works, non-
Christian traditions, and a concerted attempt to re-evaluate some of the literary-critical com-
monplaces concerning religious history have been only relatively recent. Carl MacDougall’s
examination of the relationship between Scottish literature and faith is fully consistent with
‘lasting perceptions of Scottish religion as intolerant, severe, persecuting, and divisive’
(Brown 2012, p. 79). MacDougall claims that ‘Scottish writing has been shaped, and, in many
cases, twisted by faith’ (MacDougall 2004, p. 130). He proposes that a punishing Calvinist
fundamentalism has shaped the national character, writing: ‘it’s hardly surprising literature
suffered’ (MacDougall 2004, p. 138). MacDougall’s notion of Scottish artistic production
‘twisted’ by a spiritually and culturally denuding Calvinism has a long critical lineage which
finds its genesis in the poetry and criticism of the twentieth century ‘Scottish Literary

Renaissance’. Two years after MacDougall’s Writing Scotland, Crawford Gribben’s challenge to the
‘Renaissance’ condemnation of Scotland’s Reformation heritage came in the form of his catalytic
essay, ‘The Literary Cultures of the Scottish Reformation’ (Gribben 2006, pp. 64–82). Quoting
Patrick Collinson’s claim that the Reformation was an ‘immense creative as well as disruptive
influence’, Gribben’s plea for more balanced scholarship on the relationship between Scottish
religious and literary cultures has coincided with, and influenced a range of new critical work,
not least the scholarship of Jane Dawson (Gribben 2006, p. 71). Dawson’s history of Reformed
Scotland identifies that far from having ‘killed minds and restricted culture’ (as Kenneth White
would have it), ‘the early phases of the Reformation brought new cultural expressions, including
congregational singing, sophisticated musical settings of the Psalms, poetic, vernacular litur-
gies, the rich cadences of the Geneva Bible, devotional art, and an insistence on a learned minis-
try’ (White quoted in MacDougall 2004, p. 137; Brown 2012, p. 80). Post-Reformation Catholic
literature, so often thought scarce in Scotland, has also received new critical attention and fresh
interpretations in recent years, and is beginning to be understood as a rich and vibrant part of
Scotland’s literary heritage.1
This chapter, indebted to recent debates about the relationship between Scottish literature
and belief, offers a brief survey of Scottish writing in which religion is a central creative driver.
It focuses chiefly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to appreciate the range of
faithful perspectives which are formed, in tension with, and imaginatively shaped by the
spiritual.
Romanticism, Calvinism, and the Scottish Short Story
Undoubtedly the work most closely associated with religious belief within Scottish writing is
James Hogg’s masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824 [2010]).
Critically neglected until André Gide’s edition of the novel in 1947, Hogg’s powerful fictional
melding of religious fanaticism, murder, penetrating psychological insight and folk belief has
traditionally been understood as religious satire. Hogg’s early eighteenth-century antihero
Robert Wringhim, a disturbed and zealous Calvinist, believes that he is one of the saved – those
who have been preordained to salvation by God irrespective of any merit they possess or good
works they commit. Wringhim’s assurance of his own glory, despite his debauchery, murderous
behaviour, and eventual suicide, has led many critics, including Emma John, to conclude that
‘the plot is a satire on the Calvinist doctrine of predestination’ (John 2009). The Confessions
might more accurately reflect Hogg’s withering mockery of Antinomianism, as he was a sincere
Presbyterian and no anti-Calvinist. But the critical consensus that Hogg satirises the doctrine of
the elect has been widespread, and it has meant that the novel’s more complex engagement with
the Bible is often missed.
Wringhim and his devilish doppelgänger Gil-Martin both use and abuse scripture, frequently
with comic or ironic effect. For instance, when Gil-Martin tells Robert ‘Go thou then and do
likewise’, he echoes Jesus’ command after relaying the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the
Gospel of Luke (10:37) (Hogg 1824 [2010], p. 112). However, instead of urging his companion
to show the mercy of the Samaritan, Gil-Martin (who is possibly the devil himself), implores
Wringhim ‘to cleanse the sanctuary of thy God in this thy native land by the shedding of blood’ –
thus inflating Wringhim’s sense of spiritual pride and encouraging him to break the biblical
commandment against murder (Hogg 1824 [2010], p. 112). In this way, and on many more
Religion 235
occasions, Hogg draws the reader’s attention (if they are sharp-eyed) to the dangers of accepting
storytelling, and biblical quotation, uncritically.
While Hogg’s Confessions might be read as a warning against misapplication of biblical texts,
it does ironically (and perhaps unknowingly) endorse the religiously conservative suspicion that
vain and duplicitous storytelling might distract the reader from the true word of God. Hogg’s
short story ‘The Cameronian Preacher’s Tale’ is made up of equally ‘circuitous and contradictory’
layers of narrative which serve to provoke the reader’s moral acumen and encourage close scrutiny
of the text (Hogg 1829 [1996], p. 22). Gribben’s observation of Scottish Romanticism’s interest
in its ‘confessional legacies’ is certainly in evidence in this short story, largely because of its
‘Romantic mythologising of Scottish Presbyterian history’ and in particular its interest in the
Covenanters – an element it shares with Scott and Galt (Gribben 2011, p. 121). Hogg’s narrator
is John Barclay, a preacher belonging to the radical faction of Scottish Covenanters led by Richard
Cameron (c.1648–1680). The tale’s opening words emphasise ‘the rage of fanaticism in former
days’ (Hogg 1824 [2010], p. 71) by putting emphasis on both oral testimony and the preacher’s
fiery moral purpose. Barclay tells his flock: ‘I have preached and ye have profited; but what I am
about to say is far better than man’s preaching, it is one of those terrible sermons which God
preaches to mankind, of blood unrighteously shed, and most wondrously avenged’ (Hogg 1829
[1996], p. 20). Hogg’s text is rooted in a nineteenth-century Edinburgh periodical print culture
of short fiction (published particularly in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) which ‘played its part
in imagining (or re-imagining) Scottish history, and in particular oral history’, and which catered
to an urban taste for fiction displaying exotic or marginalised mentalities, the supernatural, and
the regional (Killick 2005, p. 49). As the quotation above demonstrates, Hogg’s reader assumes
the role of congregant from the start, and is captive to the preacher’s desire to impart a dire moral
lesson as the instrument of God’s providence. Farley’s vocabulary, saturated with references to
vengeance, bloodshed, and revelation, immediately casts him in the mould of exotic Blackwoodian
narrator with an orally-transmitted tale to tell.
Although the tale is ostensibly an early form of detective fiction, with Farley investigating
the murder of a borders cattle dealer named Walter Johnstone, it can also be read as the study of
an extreme religious mindset. Farley’s account is full of judgement and punishment, and his
recollection of ‘conflicting testimony’ is proof, he insists, ‘of all that is rendered doubtful and
dark by the imperfections of human nature’ (Hogg 1829 [1996], p. 22). Calvinism’s emphasis
on the absolute moral corruption or total depravity of each human person shapes Farley’s account,
which is interrupted by a hellfire sermon in which he publicly rebukes the family of Johnstone’s
murderer. He proclaims:
I discoursed on the wisdom of Providence in guiding the affairs of men. How he permitted our evil
passions to acquire the mastery over us, and urge us to deeds of darkness; allowing us to flourish for
a season, that he might strike us in the midst of our splendour in a way so visible and awful that the
wildest would cry out, ‘Behold the finger of God.’ I argued the matter home to the heart; I named
no names, but I saw Joseph Howatson hide his face in his hands, for he felt and saw from the eyes
that were turned towards him that I alluded to the judgement of God upon his relative.
(Hogg 1829 [1996], p. 24)
This is no comforting message of hope; Farley’s diabolical preaching is intended to smear

this innocent member of his flock, ‘a man sober and sedate’ until his very public shaming
(Hogg 1829 [1996], p. 24). Perhaps the narrator’s fanatical focus on sin, and his desire to try,
punish and convict are evidence of what MacDougall finds in Hogg’s Justified Sinner – namely
‘theological satire’ and ‘a powerful attack on the kirk’ (MacDougall 2004, p. 142). Or perhaps
‘The Cameronian Preacher’s Tale’ might be read as a more complex and multi-layered work,
which is full of slippery testimonies and unreliable accounts, including Farley’s.
Farley’s later claim to have been guided by a ghost light, or ‘corse candle’ to the body of the
murdered man (Hogg 1829 [1996], p. 28) is his proof of God’s providential plan and divine
justice, but we might also read against Farley’s account, and consider that he may well be the
murderer himself – his ‘sermon’ nothing but a long exercise in deflecting blame and the expia-
tion of guilt.2 Ultimately, Hogg’s story is one of ‘the multifarious branches of folklore, fairy tales,
curious anecdotes, ghost stories, shaggy-dog stories, and the many other modes of storytelling
and narrative ephemera’ which Tim Killick argues ‘formed much of the country’s short fiction
output’ in the nineteenth century (Killick 2005, p. 49). But, crucially, it is shaped by Hogg’s
Calvinist imagination, which cannot help but uphold the notion that the only story worth trust-
ing is the one told by the Bible. In this sense, Hogg’s fiction is not satirical but entirely faithful
to his Presbyterian worldview.
Victorian Grief and Consolation
Jenny Calder writes that the work of Hogg’s literary successor Margaret Oliphant (1828–
1897) was clearly indebted to two traditions which also influenced Hogg: that of the Gothic
tale and the Scottish ballads. Calder goes on to note that ‘Presbyterianism absorbed some-
thing of the elemental psychology of the ballads as well as their emotional power. Oliphant
was exposed to both currents’ (Oliphant 2000b, p. xi). Like Hogg, Oliphant’s formation was
Presbyterian (her parents were Free Presbyterians who became members of the Free Church
after the Disruption of 1843). But with Oliphant’s move to England, her faith life as well as
her fiction became more religiously multifaceted. Although many of her best, ghostly short
stories ‘of the seen and unseen’ are set in Scotland and contain Presbyterian characters, these
stories are not theologically straightforward. In ‘The Open Door’, for instance, a Church of
Scotland minister, Dr. Moncrieff, helps the unquiet spirit of a young boy to return to his
mother in heaven, imploring: ‘Lord, let that woman there draw him inower!’ (Oliphant 2000a,
p. 206) The man who accompanies Dr. Moncrieff asks him: ‘Do you believe in Purgatory,
Doctor? It’s not in the tenets of the Church; so far as I know.’ Moncrieff hedges his answer
somewhat, claiming: ‘an old man like me is sometimes not very sure what he believes. There
is just one thing I am certain of – and that is the loving-kindness of God’ (Oliphant 2000a,
p. 207). Alison Milbank, who has written perceptively about the literary contours of
Oliphant’s adopted Anglicanism, argues that Moncrieff’s prayer for the dead in this story ‘has
no validity in Presbyterian doctrine’. Milbank notes that, in fact, ‘the minister imitates the
Catholic practice of invoking the prayers of the saints’ in asking the ghost’s mother to act as
an intermediary (Milbank 2019, p. 49). Oliphant’s religious terrain is then rather more of a
via media between Protestant and Catholic traditions than it is wholly Presbyterian. Her
ghost is a purgatorial one, who is neither the spiritual servant of Hogg’s Covenanting minis-
ter, nor a ghoulish spectre from Hell, as we might expect of the Protestant ghost. This reve-
nant occupies both the liminal threshold between this world and the next that is so
characteristic of Scottish balladry, and the shadowy world of a ‘liberal Anglican version of
purgatory’ (Milbank 2019, p. 50).3
Religion 237
Oliphant’s ghost stories also belong to a broader stream of Victorian sensation fiction, whose
‘apparently settled social structures […] could provide an ordered microcosm into which the
supernatural could intrude’ (Cox and Gilbert 1991, p. xvii). The colonisation of the very ordered
French town of Semur by the dead, and the displacement of the living outside the city walls, is
the subject of her novella A Beleaguered City (1880). First published in the Christmas issue of The
New Quarterly magazine in 1879 (Dobosiewicz 2017, pp. 29–30), this tale, like much spine-
tingling Victorian Christmas fiction, can be read as a ‘moral allegory’ (Pykett 2012, p. 215). Set
within the context of anti-clerical, post-revolutionary France, the text is presented as the Mayor’s
transcript of various testimonies which bear witness to Semur’s haunting. ‘I need not say that to
encourage superstition is far from my wish’ declares Maire Dupin, as he recollects Semur’s visita-
tion by the dead. ‘I am a man of my century’, he continues, ‘and proud of being so; very little
disposed to yield to the domination of the clerical party, though desirous of showing all just
tolerance for conscientious faith, and every respect for the prejudices of the ladies of my family’
(Oliphant 2000a, p. 8). Dupin attempts to present an objective account of the haunting; one
which is based on firmly rationalist principles, religious scepticism, and patriarchal authority,
and he manfully condescends to the religiosity, or ‘superstition’, of Semur’s women, who can
both hear and see the dead. In common with much of Oliphant’s other supernatural fiction, it is
women (‘the more devout sex’) who are the emotional nucleus of the tale, and who, through
mutual care and loving Christian kindness, counter the materialism and worship of money that
has prompted the dead to rise (Oliphant 2000a, p. 2). By contrast, Dupin never quite relin-
quishes his proudly modern scepticism, though he ‘recollect[s] dimly’ that the noises of the dead
patrolling the city ramparts with musical instruments is redolent of ‘a story of classic times’
(namely the conquest narrative of Jericho, in Joshua 6) (Oliphant 2000a, p. 41). Scriptural echo
lurks, as ghostly as the risen dead, throughout the lineaments of A Beleaguered City, to ironize and
challenge the authority of Dupin’s ‘coherent and trustworthy chronicle’ (Oliphant 2000a, p. 8).
Much like Hogg, Oliphant signals to a biblically-literate audience that they ought to read
against the grain of her protagonist’s version of events.
Oliphant’s chilling tale clearly echoes works like Elliot’s Silas Marner and Dickens’s A
Christmas Carol, which critique the hoarding of wealth and its spiritually deadening effects. Like
Dickens, Oliphant deploys the uncanny to impart a moral message. In A Beleaguered City, Dupin
recounts his growing unease at the darkness which shrouds the town during daylight hours.
Despite his proud secularism, he cannot help but be unnerved by the disruption to the town’s
religious life, claiming: ‘The Cathedral doors were shut fast, a thing I have never seen before
since I remember. […] To see those great doors closed which stood always open gave me a shiver,
I cannot well tell why.’ (Oliphant 2000a, pp. 18–19) Dupin’s psychosomatic response to the eerie
darkness and the closed church doors belies his frequently asserted, post-Enlightenment ration-
alism and his firm laïcité. But the dramatic device of plunging Semur into darkness with the
arrival of the dead means that the narrative is strikingly similar to two other Scottish urban
Gothic tales which also have religious questions at their centre. Here, Dupin’s experience chimes
with the visceral response of the flaneur in James B.V. Thomson’s great poem of atheist despair,
The City of Dreadful Night (1874 [1993]). As he wearily traverses a purgatorial-sounding metrop-
olis, Thomson’s speaker observes that ‘Although lamps burn along the silent streets […]/The
sombre mansions loom immense and dismal,/The lanes are black as subterranean lairs’ (Thomson
1874 [1993], III, l.1, ll. 6–7). And this recollection in turn echoes Enfield’s well-known descrip-
tion of his walk in the darkness of the city in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886), where he recounts that he made his way ‘about three o’clock of a black winter morning
[…] through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after
street […] all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church’ (Stevenson 2002,
p. 7). In fact, A Beleaguered City, published seven years before Stevenson’s Strange Case, made a
strong impact on Stevenson. ‘I have cried heartily; I feel the better for my tears; and I want to
thank you’, he wrote to Oliphant (Stevenson 1994, II, p. 301). All three of these Scottish works
depict Victorian cities overcome by darkness, and each includes the unsettling mention of a
moribund church, or cathedral, as part of a broader spiritual crisis.
Lynn Pykett writes that ‘analysts of the form have argued that the ghost story and the tale of
the supernatural filled a cultural and psychological gap left by the rise of positivistic science and
the decline of the supernatural and magical aspects of religion in an increasingly secular age’
(Pykett 2012, p. 216). Oliphant, Thomson and Stevenson’s great, dismal cities of spiritual dark-
ness might well be said to reflect their authors’ disquiet with this ‘gap’. Oliphant herself
expressed frustration with ‘the pretensions of science’, and Calder notes that she believed science
to be ‘the enemy of the imagination as well as of religion’ (Oliphant 2000b, p. xi). But unlike
her two fellow exiles from Scotland (for all three left the country of their birth and did not
return), she never professed her atheism. It can certainly be argued, as Stephen Arata has, that for
Stevenson, the Gothic was an ‘effort to come to terms with a cultural inheritance that put enor-
mous weight on the supposed fact of human fallenness and on the human capacity for wickedness
and self-deception’ (Arata 2010, p. 59). And for Thomson too, Calvinism might have repre-
sented ‘a Gothic view of the world’ (Arata 2010, p. 59). But Oliphant’s Anglicanism, and her
interest in Catholic Semur, might be said to leaven Scottish Calvinist Gothic by making space
for alternative, more hopeful theological possibilities.
The spirits of the dead are finally laid to rest in A Beleaguered City, and Dupin tells his reader
that ‘the Cathedral stood open […] with a glow of tapers gleaming out on every side’
(Oliphant 2000a, p. 98). This desolate symbol of Victorian spiritual decay is resurrected by the
end of the novella, its gleaming candles signalling that the dead have undergone the purification
necessary to enter heaven. If humility, grace, and holiness earned through the purifying effects of
suffering sounds more Catholic than Presbyterian, this is hardly surprising, for Oliphant was
‘surprisingly ecumenical’ in this novella and beyond in drawing together elements of Calvinism,
Catholicism, and Anglicanism (Milbank 2019, p. 55). And yet A Beleaguered City, set in France
and concluding with the purgatorial progress of the dead in the wake of the celebration of the
Mass, is not quite Catholic fiction. Despite her acceptance of new forms of Christian worship
which are quite different in emphasis to the Presbyterianism of her childhood, and her eagerness
to expand the theological contours of her fiction from its roots in Calvinism and balladry,
Oliphant’s novella does not quite embrace the truly miraculous. There is no lasting spiritual
conversion in the hearts of Semur’s townsfolk. As such, Oliphant’s work, saturated in biblical
reference and deeply concerned with eschatological questions, demonstrates a complex herme-
neutical wrestling with both Anglican and Presbyterian faith traditions, and complexifies the
landscape of Scottish literature with religious themes.
The Twentieth Century: ‘the Knox-ruined nation’?
With the twentieth century comes a continuity of tradition in the exchange between Scottish
literature and religion, but there is also a newly-virulent rejection of what is seen as the cultur-
ally stifling effects of Calvinism, particularly in Scottish poetry. Oliphant’s literary descendant,
Religion 239
John Buchan (1875–1940), can be viewed as a transitional figure in this new century. Born a year
after the publication of Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night, his first novel was published in
1895, but Buchan’s work stretched far into the early decades of twentieth century, with his last
novel published posthumously in 1941, and film adaptations of his thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps
(1915) reaching audiences in 1935, 1959, and 1978. Though his writing is rarely discussed
extensively within studies of Scottish literature, his novel Witch Wood (1927) is described by
Milbank as ‘Calvinist and Covenanter Gothic’ (Milbank 2017, pp. 89–101).
In Witch Wood, the moderate, seventeenth-century minister David Sempill comes to the seem-
ingly insignificant parish of Woodilee in the midst of the broader religious and political turmoil
of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The folk of the parish are ardent adherents of the Solemn
League and Covenant (1643), but their nonconformist fervour does not begin and end with strict
Scottish Presbyterianism. Sempill finds to his horror that Woodilee’s parishioners and elders are
engaged in cultic rituals by nightfall in the dark wood, Melanudrigill. The minister’s ensuing
battle for the souls of his flock is thus set against the historical backdrop of religious warfare,
making Woodilee a microcosmic exploration of fundamentalist belief, dissent, and rebellion.
Buchan was himself a firm believer. He was the son of a Free Church Minister, and his mother
‘epitomized Free Church virtues: she was hard, spare, and respectable, hated Rome, and distrusted
established churches generally’ (Matthew 2011). His novel signals its Scottish Reformed heritage
through Knoxian and biblical-sounding chapter titles (‘The First Blast’, ‘The Plague’, ‘The
Judgement’) but Buchan’s Presbyterian imagination is also manifested more subtly in the text and
might be said to conform to Protestant theological thought stressing the dangers of idolatry.
Indeed, the novel was first serialised under the title The High Places; a title which references the
altars set up for foreign Gods in the Hebrew Bible (Macdonald 2012, p. 230). The idolatry prac-
ticed by the novel’s coven under cloak of darkness is not revealed to be genuinely magical or
supernatural, however. Ultimately these practices spring from the parishioners’ atavistic desire for
ritual, colour, and theatre in the midst of dreariness and hardship (Macdonald 2012, p. 227). Led
by Ephraim Caird of Chasehope – kirk elder, coven leader, and a true ‘justified sinner’ in the style
of Hogg’s Robert Wringhim – the folk of the parish engage in what Sempill sees as ‘pagan and
papistical folly’ on ‘the night of Rood-Mass’ (Buchan 2008, p. 87). Far more threatening for the
minister than the leering masks worn by the parishioners, or the ‘witch music as horrid as a moan
of terror’, are the remnants of Woodilee’s Catholic past in the coven’s rites (Buchan 2008, p. 89).
Sempill sees, horrified, that the coven gathers around an ‘uncouth thing [that] had once been an
altar’, confirming the relationship in his reformed mind between Catholicism and paganism
(Buchan 2008, p. 86). While MacDonald argues persuasively that the coven’s practices ‘are a dark
reflection of Witch Wood’s Covenanting ministers and they mirror, in their own distorted rituals,
the malignity of Calvinism gone wrong’, these practices are highly potent and disturbing for
Sempill because they represent a backsliding towards popery – something far more diabolical to
this early modern preacher than error-strewn Calvinism (Macdonald 2012, p. 231).4 Witch Wood is
thus fully consistent with what Milbank calls ‘the founding myth upon which the fear so central
to Gothic writing is engendered’. This is of course the Reformation, ‘in which a Protestant nation
escapes from the priestly thrall of the Roman Catholic past’ (Milbank 2017, p. 90). It is this past,
with its still-perceptible imprint on the land and the cultural memory of the people, which
threatens the reformed social fabric of Sempill’s world.5
But it is not just cultic practices in the woods which thrill Woodilee’s parishioners. In an echo
of Hogg’s Cameronian Preacher, a ‘marrowy sermon’ is preached by the Reverend Ebeneezer
Proudfoot, a man of ‘rude power’, whose ‘fiery energy’ (Buchan 2008, p. 62, 9) places him in
direct contrast to Sempill’s more moderate Calvinism. Proudfoot’s terrifying lesson electrifies his
congregation, and is true to what Stewart J. Brown identifies as experiences of ‘profound psycho-
logical tension’ and ‘great inner turmoil’ that were generated by the holy fairs of early modern
Scotland (Brown 2012, p. 86). The conflation of the political situation with the threat of eternal
damnation causes ‘a hush like death’ and, we are told, ‘a woman screamed in hysterics’, while
‘many sobbed’ (Buchan 2008, p. 63). MacDonald notes that this sermon operates as a sanctioned
form of pleasure, and because the Kirk warns against ‘enjoyment for its own sake’, Proudfoot’s
rant is a licenced, and even titillating form of theatre (Macdonald 2012, p. 227). But signifi-
cantly, the minister’s blazing references to perdition are rained down on his congregation during
a ‘fastday’. While it is true that the reference to the ‘marrowy’ sermon might convincingly indi-
cate a society in the depths of spiritual starvation, Proudfoot’s performance also alludes to the
temptation of Christ by Satan in the synoptic Gospels (Macdonald 2012, pp. 229–230). Jesus’
fasting is preparation for spiritual battle, and Satan tempts him with bread out of stones, for ‘He
fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished’ (Matthew 4:2). Similarly,
Proudfoot’s demonic sermon, which makes no reference to the merciful love of God, is ‘marrowy’
temptation for the famished folk of Woodilee. In fact, Proudfoot is associated with grotesque
imagery of flesh and carrion throughout Witch Wood. He is introduced as ‘a massive sinewy fig-
ure’ and ‘as if to testify against luxury, preferred to pick the bones [of his meat] with his hands’
(Buchan 2008, p. 9). He rails against Rome, ‘the Antichrist’, but, the text suggests, his own
unforgiving, hellfire creed is closer to the worship of Satan than are the dark practises in
Melanudrigill. It is Sempill, the moderate, who truly embodies Christian teachings in the novel.
In Witch Wood, Buchan clearly riffs on previous Scottish literature which makes reference to
Presbyterian religious cultures. As well as being a ‘justified sinner’ who declares: ‘I fear no ill, for
I am in the Lord’s hand until the appointed time’, the elder and coven-leader Ephraim Chasehope
is a mirror image of Burns’s eponymous ‘Holy Willie’. Ebeneezer Proudfoot is also a fictional
cousin of Burns’ preacher in ‘The Holy Fair’, whose ‘piercin words, like Highlan’ swords,/Divide
the joints an ‘marrow’ [my italics], especially in his ‘talk o’ Hell, whare devils dwell’ (Burns 1993,
p. 62, ll.185–ll.187). And of course, the coven’s ‘slow dance’ and the ‘high mad piping’ wit-
nessed by David Sempill makes him a descendant of Burns’ Tam o’ Shanter, who witnesses ‘war-
locks and witches in a dance’ to the music of the devil, who ‘screw’d the pipes and gart them
skirl’ in Alloway Kirk (Buchan 2008, p. 88; Burns 1993, p. 163, ll.115, 123). But the intertex-
tual elements of Buchan’s novel are more than just literary pastiche, and they run deeper than
parody. In Witch Wood, Buchan examines the nature of belief itself. His novel asks questions
about the human need for ritual and communal worship, and proposes that sometimes the most
exhilarating sense of belonging can come in the midst of these collective religious settings. In
this work, Buchan consciously draws upon, and inserts himself within Scottish literary tradition
as he looks forensically at human belief and behaviour.
Although Buchan was resolutely not a part of the twentieth century Scottish ‘literary renais-
sance’, he shares his interest in Calvinist Scotland with many of his renaissance contemporaries,
who were engaged, often, in scrutiny of Scottish religious history. The modernist poet, critic and
translator Edwin Muir (1887-1959) was a major force in establishing Knox and Calvin as his-
torical villains whose strict puritanism and disapproval of creative expression had contributed to
what he saw as a desolate, culturally impoverished modern Scotland (see Gribben 2006,
pp. 68–69). As Stuart J. Brown rightly notes, early modern ‘Parish discipline could be severely
oppressive, banning theatrical performances, discouraging “frivolous” popular songs, fiddling
and dance, and, in the view of some, throwing a shade over the creative arts in Scotland that
Religion 241
would remain into the late nineteenth century, and beyond’ (Brown 2012, p. 87). Muir’s works –
both of poetry and criticism – reflect on this religious severity. In ‘The Incarnate One’ (1956),
Muir’s despair at Scottish Calvinism’s desacralisation of the world, and its subdual of imaginative
expressions of faith, were at the heart of his lament for religious ‘mystery’. Here ‘King Calvin’,
an impostor God, has destroyed the incarnational nature of pre-Reformation Christianity, in
which Christ was encountered through the sacraments and the sacred was imagined in devo-
tional art and material culture. ‘The Incarnate One’ proposes that the Reformation rendered the
sacred dimensions of the everyday profane, and transformed the numinous into an instrument of
discipline and control (Muir 1956, pp. 47-8). If Muir’s view is historically unnuanced, it is also
a product of its post-war time, and it was certainly persuasive (see Bicket 2017, pp. 6–8).
Ironically, it is this very Reformation that inspires such an outpouring of creative work (and
criticism) on the effects of Calvinism on Scottish culture in the ‘Renaissance’ period.
Muir’s early student and fellow Orcadian George Mackay Brown (1921–1996) was resolutely
a part of the critique (and it might well be argued, distortion) of Knox and Scottish Calvinism
at the beginning of his career in poetry. ‘Prologue’, the first poem of his debut collection The
Storm (1954), famously asserts that Scotland is ‘the Knox-ruined nation,/that poet and saint/must
rebuild with their passion’ (Brown 2005, p. 1, ll.14–ll.16). Brown’s work frequently broods on
the damaging effects of the Reformation, but this is outweighed by his tender reflections on the
sacred dimensions of everyday existence, the value of the past, and the operation of grace in
human life. A Catholic convert, Brown’s work in poetry and prose reflects his sacramental under-
standing of the world, in which the liturgical calendar, the turning seasons, and the rhythms of
work at sea and land all sing in praise of a loving God. In this way he expands the more positive
side of the crypto-Catholic Muir’s religious oeuvre (which features several poems with biblical
themes, including ‘The Annunciation’ and ‘Adam’s Dream’) into poetry of passionate Catholic
spirituality.
In ‘The Finished House’, the devotional quality of Brown’s poetry might not at first glance
seem overt (Brown 2005, p. 268). The poem signals its Orcadian heritage and traditions through
its reference to a fire being lit in the hearth; this should always be kept alive and never allowed
to dwindle, lest the beating heart of the house should falter. Then Brown catalogues the gifts and
customs that sacralise a dwelling place. His oft-repeated number symbolism is in evidence
throughout references to ‘the seventh morning’ and ‘the three agonies’ (l.12, l.5); he frequently
used either three, or seven verses, chapters, or perspectives to scaffold his writing. Life is stripped
back to its most essential elements – ‘love, birth, death’ – and, crucially, these are ‘made beauti-
ful with ceremony’ (ll.5–ll.6). The entire poem, with its quality of liturgical or ceremonial list-
ing, is in praise of ritual which gives meaning to the labour of ordinary folk. Music will bring
joy, and ‘lucky salt’ – another marker of locality and custom – is used with almost religious rever-
ence (l.10). The Eucharistic loaf and the bottle will nourish the house’s inhabitants in winter, the
season of Christ’s birth. On the ‘seventh morning’, the final rite occurs: the house is blessed, and
thus sanctified (l.12). It is a place dedicated to the praise of its creator.
Brown’s short poem, tightly compressed and expressed with the concision of the Icelandic
sagas, is a work which finds grace in the simple matter of the everyday. For Muir, it was the ‘fresh
and spontaneous beauty’ of Brown’s poetry that first struck him when Brown studied under him
at Newbattle Abbey. But he was later impressed, he wrote, ‘by something I can only call grace…
in all these poems’ (Brown 1954). It is this quality of grace which marks Brown out as a Scottish
Catholic artist, and one determined to track the hand of God in all things. Brown’s writing
ranges from poetry of Orcadian culture and history, to short stories of Vikings, monks, and
fishermen, to the high point of his opus – the austere, hagiographical novel Magnus of 1973
(which, in notable contrast to Witch Wood, is a devotional novel, rather than a work scrutinising
religious belief). While many of his late twentieth-century contemporaries were producing social
realism, Brown stayed true to a sacramental exploration of Orcadian history and culture, with
grace at the centre of his writerly vocation.
Contemporary Scottish Writing: ‘We dae all kinds of religions’

While most of Brown’s work is set in an Orkney of the past, the work of his Catholic literary
inheritor, Anne Donovan, is resolutely urban. Donovan writes in Glaswegian Scots, and her work
has a strong faith element. It focuses on the lives of (mostly) Catholic characters, but also reflects
the plurality of religious faiths evident in contemporary Scotland. Donovan’s novel Buddha Da
(2003) traces the search for enlightenment of painter and decorator Jimmy McKenna, a lapsed
Catholic who develops a yearning for religious meaning in his life. Jimmy’s turn to Buddhism
mystifies (and eventually alienates and estranges) his family, and his attempts to divest himself
of attachment to worldly pleasures are at different times comic and poignant. Donovan’s ear for
language and keen sense of the absurd converge in Jimmy’s rapturous New Year’s Day stroll in
Kelvingrove Park, in which his brief moment of self-congratulatory contemplation is swiftly
undercut by creation itself. After enthusiastically admiring the beauty of the snow, Jimmy gazes
round beatifically, his wide smile convincing another walker to retreat quickly. He decides to
feed a squirrel some nuts and tells the reader:
So there am ur, daein ma St Francis a Maryhill act, convinced ah’m noo an enlightened bein. And a
wee squirrel hops ower the path, runs up ma leg ontae ma airm and afore ah can say Rinpoche, the
wee bastard looks me straight in the face, bites me in the finger and runs aff. The blood’s pourin ooty
me, ah feel as if ah’ve been savaged by a bloody wolf, no a fuckin squirrel. Ah cannae believe it. It
was the way he just looked at me, just looked, as if tae say, ‘up yours, pal’.
(Donovan 2003, p. 145)
Jimmy’s radiant appreciation of his surroundings is comically undercut by Donovan’s witty con-
temptus mundi, which recalls her Catholic predecessor Muriel Spark at her most acerbic, encourag-
ing us to believe that Jimmy’s rhapsody in Kelvingrove Park is really based on self-regard. He
has not managed to achieve enlightenment, and while his delight in ‘the meditatin, the light,
the snaw’ is most sympathetically seen as a type of powerful self-actualisation, he might also be
accused of spiritual pride (Donovan 2003, p. 144). In his walk through the pure, white snow,
Jimmy is neither the enlightened Buddha, nor a figure of Jesus – radiant in his transfiguration,
nor is he St Francis of Assisi, gently tending to one of God’s creatures.
It is when he is less self-consciously absorbed in his own religious development that Jimmy
experiences his most profound moments of spirituality. He finds intense moments of peace and
connection in listening to rain on the roof, or in the intricate work of painting cornicing in a
tenement flat. After he leaves his wife and daughter (in an echo of the life of the Buddha) he stays
in a nearby Buddhist Centre and offers to decorate it by painting an impressive mural. When he
discovers that his wife, Liz, is pregnant with someone else’s child, Jimmy energetically destroys
Religion 243
his carefully painted mural, in a totally unconscious replication of the Buddhist ritual destruc-
tion of sand mandalas. But this marks a turning point in the text. Once Jimmy’s mural has been
destroyed, and he accepts the transitoriness of life and the preciousness of his family, he reconciles
with Liz. Buddha Da ends, and the McKenna family’s future begins, with the birth of a baby.
This nativity-esque ending, with new life promising peace and reconciliation, is nonetheless
ambiguous. We are not to know whether the family will remain together.
Donovan’s novel does not focus solely on Buddhism and Catholicism. Jimmy’s daughter Anne
Marie reflects that, like her grandmother’s house, with its reminders of the family’s Irish roots,
her friend Nisha’s family home is ‘dead cosy, though the calendar on Nisha’s wall was of Sikh
temples, no scenes of Donegal’ (Donovan 2003, pp. 98–99). Anne Marie and Nisha eventually
arrange a version of the Marian hymn, Salve Regina, that fuses Tibetan and Latin chanting with
Punjabi and English. Buddha Da makes it plain that Glasgow is a multicultural city made up of
immigrants, and one which reflects Scotland’s increasingly plural religious communities.
Donovan has gone on to examine this in greater depth in her subsequent novel, Being Emily, in
which the friendship between a Catholic girl and a Sikh boy, Jas, is explored. Her work, writes
Fiona McCulloch, ‘relocates, reconfigures and reclaims “hame” to accommodate cultural others
regarding gender, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity’ (McCulloch 2017, p. 1). It also looks
closely at the search for faith, meaning, and religiosity in the lives of her twenty-first century
city-dwellers. Donovan’s contemporaries Leila Aboulela and Suhayl Saadi enrich the landscape of
modern Scottish writing with religious themes still further. In their interrogation of the Scottish
Muslim experience, their works are in line ‘with a trend in post-devolution Scottish literature to
turn away from a concern with negotiating a stable national identity and instead emphasise cos-
mopolitan and postnational frameworks’, as Jessica Homberg- Schramm rightly claims
(Homberg-Schramm 2021, p. 64).
The concern of the twentieth century Renaissance to diagnose a fractured sense of Scottish
national identity was based in part upon the supposedly anglicising and culturally devastating
influence of the Reformation. But Scottish literature of the modern era has been challenged and
inspired by the nation’s religious history and its divergent faith groups, practices and multitudi-
nous perspectives. Scotland’s Reformation rendered faith a live, hotly contested issue that rings
through centuries of writing. But that writing is anything but creatively and culturally stunted.
Whether they diagnose fanaticism and hypocrisy, or explore Christian altruism and the gendered
nature of belief, or investigate moments of deep spiritual crisis and solace, Scotland’s writers have
examined their souls and their consciences through the writing of literature. Essentialising
notions of cultural nationalism – a by-product of Renaissance angst about Scottish religious his-
tory – might suggest that Scotland has only produced disillusioned or satirical writers of Calvinist
formation. But as more nuanced recent studies reveal, there is much more to Scotland’s faithful
fictions than Calvinist satire. Hogg’s Calvinism looms large, but other Christian traditions,
including Anglicanism and Catholicism, are represented in this body of work too, as is atheism.
More research still has to be published on the faithful perspectives of twentieth-century writers,
like the Presbyterians Anna Buchan and Nancy Brysson Morrison, the Brethren poet Robert
Rendall, and the Episcopalian Dorothy Margaret Paulin. And recent Scottish fiction
demonstrates that the nation’s literature is seriously engaged with Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism.
But, as Buddha Da’s Jimmy McKenna observes in his description of the studies carried out in his
Glaswegian Buddhist centre, ‘we dae all kinds of religions’ (Donovan 2003, p. 89). Scottish
writing does too, and is all the more enriched and complex for it.
Notes
1 See Bicket (2017), Carruthers (2019), and Russell (2019). 4 The fear of popery and Woodilee’s Calvinist ‘malig-
2 Hogg’s story is a fascinating example of the contested nity’ echo what Brown calls ‘the darker side to the
nature of ‘the Protestant ghost’ in Scottish fiction. godly commonwealth’, namely the 1563 Witchcraft
Martha McGill notes that ‘if the correct interpretation Act, which, in Witch Wood, mandates the ‘pricking’
of ghosts was ambiguous before the Reformation, it and killing of an innocent woman. Brown notes that
theoretically became clearer thereafter. Protestantism ‘the Reformed authorities also persecuted Roman
stripped away Purgatory, and for most theologians, Catholics’. Brown (2012, p. 81).
this meant that ghosts could not exist’. However, ‘In 5 The novel’s Protestant texture is first signalled by the
the mid-seventeenth century, the Covenanters’ empha- its frame tale, in which a modern narrator (who owes
sis on communion with divine forces, combined with a clear debt to the ‘editor’ in Hogg’s Confessions) gazes
the surge of accounts of special providences coming on the land, ‘a thing antique and wolfish, tricked out
from war- stricken England, reinvigorated the idea for the moment with a sheep’s coat.’ (p. 3) As Andrew
that God made direct interventions in the world’, Hadfield points out, ‘The common Reformation
allowing ghosts to be reclaimed as ‘religious servants’. image of the Catholic wolf letting out the blood of
(2018). Ghosts in Enlightenment Scotland, pp. 24, 48. the Protestant sheep derives from Matthew 7:15.’
Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press. (2017). Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From
3 Milbank describes George MacDonald’s ‘At the Back the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance, p. 150.
of the North Wind’ (1871) in this way. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Edinburgh University Press. Night. Edinburgh: Canongate.
20
Folkways
Corey Gibson
University of Glasgow, Scotland
In Scott and Scotland, Edwin Muir (1887–1959) mused on a spatial and temporal ‘Nothing’ at the
heart of Walter Scott’s imaginary: ‘living in a community which was not a community’; carrying
on a ‘tradition which was not a tradition’. Before Scott, Muir identified a ‘few disconnected fig-
ures arranged at abrupt intervals’ with only the ‘rude buttresses of ballads and folk songs’ to keep
them from collapsing into the same void (1936 p. 12). Muir’s account of the ‘predicament of the
Scottish writer’ points to the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution as two of the historical
forces behind this state of cultural dislocation. Folk culture is here conceived as both bulwark
against modernity and metonym for a lost authenticity. Since the late eighteenth century literary
approaches to Scottish folk culture have often imagined it in these terms: as perpetually dying
but never quite dying out (cf. Dundes 1969). Wherever it is encountered as ‘folk’ it is already
distanced from its origins (or, ‘ur-texts’) and decontextualised through what is taken to be a
substantially anonymous process of oral transmission. It therefore signals both continuity and
rupture, and this paradox makes it uniquely transportable. For Muir, Scottish poetry had been
diminished to the ‘level of anonymous folk song’ because it had been preserved in the self-same
‘vacuum’ (p. 21). The ‘buttresses’ of folk culture keep Scottish literature standing, if only to
confirm its archaism.
This chapter argues for a modern history of such ideas about the relationship between folk and
literary cultures in Scotland. It starts from Sarah Dunnigan and Suzanne Gilbert’s contention
that ‘in bringing back traditional modes and cultures of expression into the “fold” of Scottish
literary history we can uncover relatively unexplored layers within what we understand as ‘litera-
ture” (p. 2). The proximity of ‘literature’ and ‘folk’ – in the relationship between orality and
textuality, song and lyric, folk belief and fantasy, for example – is often central to studies of older
Scottish literatures, this is not usually extended into the twentieth century. This chapter claims
that generalist Scottish literary histories from the late Victorian period and continuing into the

Folkways 247
1960s absorbed critical assumptions about the foundational place of folk culture from earlier
literatures. These critical interventions imagined folk culture to be at once timeless and ephem-
eral; ambient and irruptive. The notion of ‘folkways’ is foregrounded here to help balance these
conceptualisations of folk as both bounded artefact and boundless process.1 From antiquarian-
ism, through ballad scholarship, tale-type taxonomies, collection tours and field recordings, the
slippery task of locating the ‘folk’ has been taken on in such a way as to fix it, contain it, or
instrumentalise it. Finally, this chapter suggests that a modern history of literary ‘folkways’
might contribute to revisionist accounts of Scottish literary history by describing unpredictable
irruptions and dispersals, instead of a pattern of overarching continuity or slow absorption.
Buttresses and Sumps
Tracing the modern history of Scottish literature as a discrete subject for criticism Gerard
Carruthers begins with Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) and the importance of ‘Celticism’ to his
model of ‘English literature’ as civilising project (Carruthers 2009, pp. 5–10). Arnold insisted
that though the ‘lineaments of the Celtic genius’ must not be lost altogether, they should only
be maintained as an object of ‘scientific’ and ‘historical’ study. The ‘Saxon’, having won the ‘race
of civilization’, could swallow up or absorb as much as they chose (‘there is nothing to hinder
us’). And though ‘Celtic power’ had nothing to contribute ‘in the outward and visible world of
material life’ it might yet – in its subsumption – contribute something of worth to the ‘inward
world of thought and science’ (Arnold 1867, pp. 14–15). Carruthers describes the emergence of
a ‘new literary nativism’ in Scotland inspired by Arnold, one that would extend through the
Celtic Twilight and into the twentieth century, without wholly confronting its basis in the pseu-
doscience of biological race.
The pervasiveness of literary folkways has been crucial in critics’ efforts to assert the distinctive-
ness and the cogency of ‘Scottish literature’, especially through the cultivation of a vernacular tradi-
tion. In criticism before the mid-twentieth century this connection was not usually attributed
explicitly to ‘folk culture’, but either euphemistically to a ‘popular’ mode (as opposed to a ‘literary’
one) or to constitutive elements of folk (most especially balladry, but also song, myth, lore, tales,
customs, beliefs, and proverbs) and read through their importance to canonical writers, including
antiquarians, collectors and anthologists.2 Though critics tended to foreground figures of the ‘ver-
nacular revival’ and the Romantic period, these were often also conduits for reaching back further:
to the ballads in their oral pre-histories, to unrecorded Gaelic epics, to the Makars of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, and to the unnamed bards and minstrels of the Middle Ages.
Arnold’s epigraph in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) comes from Macpherson’s Ossian
and signals the grim historical determinism that saw the ‘genius’ of that tradition lost and over-
come: ‘They went forth to the war, but they always fell.’ Later, Patrick Geddes (1854–1932)
modelled his Evergreen (1895–1906) after Allan Ramsay’s anthology of older Scots poetry, The
Ever Green (1724) and, in particular, its aim to ‘stimulate the return to local and national tradi-
tion and living nature’ (Shaw 2019, p. 1). In borrowing from Ramsay, Geddes aligned his pan-
Celticism and his proposed Scottish cultural renaissance with a ‘vernacular revival’ that had
strategically elided literary and folk-cultural affects. Ramsay had recast the Bannatyne manu-
script and the Makars as part of a national tradition of popular demotic culture, in which songs
(The Tea-Table Miscellany [1723–1737]) and proverbs (A Collection of Scots Proverbs [1737]) were
equally important.
In Scottish Vernacular Literature, T. F. Henderson (1844–1923) made an explicit case for a

continuum of folk culture against which historical ruptures and their literary historical corollar-
ies might be measured:
Old ballads entirely pagan in sentiment, and old songs of a gaiety and frankness and ingenuous
indecency which bespeak relation with an age of primitive simplicity, survived in the oral traditions
of the people, the anathemas of the Kirk notwithstanding […]
(Henderson 1898, p. 14)
For all its qualities Henderson saw the revived literary vernacular (from Robert Sempill to Robert
Burns) as an essentially ‘exotic’ imitation of this older vernacular. The ‘great fall’ that followed
the Reformation had left the literary tradition ‘hopelessly dissevered’, unable to reconstitute
itself as ‘national symbol’ (Henderson 1898, p. 14). While transmission (oral versus textual) was
important in accounting for the difference between continuity and rupture here, so too was
authorship. Where it had been assumed that balladry had descended from a professional class of
minstrels, only to be bowdlerised in their circulation among common people, Andrew Lang
(1844–1912) contended that ballads:
spring from the very heart of the people, and flit from age to age, from life to life, of shepherds,
peasants, nurses, of all the class that continues nearest to the natural state of man [; they] make
music with the flash of the fisherman’s oar, with the hum of the spinning-wheel, and keep time with
the step of the ploughman as he drives his team.
(in Henderson 1898, p. 344)
Henderson did not share Lang’s confidence in the communal origins and transmission of bal-
ladry, he did however allow for a clear divergence in the relative fortunes of folk and literary
vernaculars in the sixteenth century, and in the legitimacy of their respective claims to an unbro-
ken cultural lineage thereafter.
Later, G. Gregory Smith’s (1865–1932) notorious ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’ described the
‘polar twins’ of the Scottish Muse: her ‘maudlin affection for the commonplace’ and ‘the airier
pleasure to be found … in the horns of elfland and the voices of the mountains’ (Smith 1919,
p. 19). These ‘poles’ correspond with two of the most popular and enduring forms of Scottish
folk song: the cornkister (or bothy ballad) and the ‘muckle sang’ (or classic Scots ballad). The
difference is that between ‘The Barnyards of Delgaty’ in its comic first-person description of the
daily life of an itinerant farm labourer and ‘Thomas Rhymer’ (Child no. 37), where the titular
hero is abducted by the queen of elf-land and granted powers of prophecy.
In locating the ‘antisyzygy’ as part of the Scottish character – that is, somewhere before ‘rheto-
ric’, ‘[precluding] any relationship by literary suggestion’ – Smith turns repeatedly to supernatu-
ral folk beliefs, to folk customs, and even folk dance. In summing up his conception of the ‘two
moods’ that distinguish Scottish literature (sometimes in contradiction; sometimes in synthesis)
he points both to Walter Pater’s conditions of poetic ‘particularisation’ and ‘delight in concrete
definition’; and to the spectres haunting Burns’ childhood imagination: ‘fairies, and brownies,
and witches, and warlocks, and spunkies, and kelpies’ (Smith 1919, p. 40). The core concept of
Smith’s Scottish Literature: Character & Influence accrued cachet in later Scottish criticism because
of the durability of this seemingly modern triangulation: where a closer look at incongruities
helped to ‘better explain their remarkable synthesis’; and where the scrutiny of ‘breaks and
thwarts’ only revealed the broader ‘continuity of a literary tradition’ (Smith 1919, p. 5).
Folkways 249
Much of John Speirs’s (1906–1979) The Scots Literary Tradition had previously appeared in
Scrutiny, and as such it bears the imprint of F.R. Leavis’s influence. It bemoans the absence of a
‘discriminating’ reading public and considers the problem of modern Scottish literature: ‘how to
recreate, or find some equivalent for, the tradition, or traditions, which have been destroyed’
(Speirs 1940, p. 155). In The Great Tradition, Leavis would famously dismiss Scott in a footnote:
‘a kind of inspired folklorist’ out of whom a ‘bad tradition came’ (Leavis 1948, pp. 5–6).3 Speirs
went further, asserting that: ‘There has been no Scottish literature […] since the eighteenth
century’ (Speirs 1940, p. 154). The Makars had constituted a national literature because their
work rested on the three estates of an old regime: ‘there was on the one hand a strong peasant life
and on the other, in Catholicism, something European, and […] there was a centre for it in the
existence of a Scottish court’ (Speirs 1940, pp. 100–101). With the Reformation and the Union
of the Crowns two of these pillars were demolished, with only the peasantry surviving to carry a
‘popular’ vernacular tradition from Christis Kirk on the Green and Peblis to the Play – with their
depictions of ‘peasant life’ in ‘peasant speech’ – through to Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns. Even
in their success, these eighteenth-century writers were, for Speirs, only forestalling the inevita-
ble: The Industrial Revolution would ‘virtually destroy the old Scottish community which is
implied in [their] poetry’ (Speirs 1940, p. 104).
Speirs located the ballads as ‘poems chiefly of the eighteenth century’, rejecting the argu-
ments of so-called ‘primitivists’ who claimed an older provenance. Despite ‘springing […] from
the imagination of the “folk”’ they, too, belonged to the last gasps of Scottish literature
(Speirs 1940, pp. 131, 141). Before the Industrial Revolution finally put paid to their stubborn
survival, the ‘folk’, the ‘peasantry’, or the ‘old Scottish community’ (as Speirs variously terms
them) had been the only foundation for a Scottish literature. In the revised 1962 edition, Speirs
notes that his earlier emphasis on the provenance of the Ballads was wrong: ‘[they] are a residue
from medieval poetry – therefore, with a long oral tradition behind them’. The folklorist and folk
poet Hamish Henderson (1919–2002) took credit for convincing Speirs on this point
(Henderson 2004, p. 384). And though Speirs did not amend his central thesis, this concession
does provide an important exception to the picture of totalising ruptures thought to be typical
of the early modern period. The Ballads represent a continuity that is both ‘popular’ and ‘liter-
ary’, that belongs to the peasantry and to a professional class of poets.
Kurt Wittig (1914–1970?) was even more forthright in connecting ‘the moral, aesthetic, and
intellectual values inherent in the Scottish literary tradition’ with the persistent influence of the
‘folk element’. Though he was ambivalent towards the Arnoldian idea of ‘inherited racial char-
acteristics’ he insisted on expressions of national character ‘as shaped, inter alia, by geography,
climate, history, social conditions, education, religious beliefs, and various conventional Scottish
attitudes, opinions, and prejudices’. Whatever the origins and influences of the tradition, Wittig
points to the ambient though often undocumented presence of ‘oral transmission’ in its continu-
ance – among and between Gaelic and Scots speakers, all over the country, and across historical
epochs: ‘how powerfully the stream of Scottish literary tradition still flows through such subter-
ranean channels’ (Wittig 1958, pp. 4–6).
The three-part structure of Wittig’s The Scottish Tradition in Literature describes a cycle of sea-
sonal tides: the ‘Spring Tide’ of the Makars; the ‘Autumn Tide’ of Burns and Scott; and lastly,
‘Another Spring?’ with the twentieth-century ‘renaissance’. One effect of this structure is to
soften the dramatic breaks common to Henderson and Speirs’ accounts of the tradition: these are
no longer anomalous historical ruptures that require explanation – just tides. Within these
‘tides’ individual writers, schools, or movements embody something of the cycle in process.
Burns and Scott, for example, represent the ‘High Water Mark’ before the ‘Backwash’ of the
Victorian period. Uniquely, the ballads do not conform to this ebb and flow. They are, instead, a
‘Treasure-trove’ sometimes submerged and sometimes revealed by the tide, but unmoved by it.
Their narratives exist in ‘a timeless chronology based on the incessant rhythms of the farmer’s
year’, and they deal in a ‘tragic’ though defiant ‘fatalism’ – embodied in their characteristic
expressions: ‘Ever’ and ‘Never’ (Wittig 1958, pp. 139, 144).
Wittig was an early proponent of an essentially ‘egalitarian’ and ‘democratic’ spirit of the
Scottish literary tradition; an idea that would become dominant in the cultural nationalisms of
the late twentieth century. Folkways in all their forms – ‘folk life’, ‘folk memory’, ‘folk history’,
‘folklore’, ‘folk poetry’, ‘folk tales’, ‘folk song’ and ‘folk dance’ – from John Barbour to Neil
Gunn, allowed the Scottish literary tradition to exist on an historical axis, whilst also borrowing
from the transhistorical indeterminacy of ‘folk culture’ so conceived. Wittig drew from the self-
same currents of ‘folk wisdom’ to characterise the combative nature of this peculiarly Scottish
strain of egalitarianism: ‘I kent his grandfaither’ (keeping upstarts in their place with a levelling
familiarity); ‘scarting and biting is the Scots folk’s wooing’ (hostility only proving common kin-
ship) (Wittig 1958, pp. 64, 96; pp. 76, 310).
In the 1960s both David Craig and David Daiches fixed upon Scotland’s long eighteenth
century as the site of a defining rupture that can be summed up by the concurrence (and partial
congruence) of the popular ‘vernacular revival’ and the neo-classical Enlightenment. Craig’s
Scottish Literature and the Scottish People: 1680–1830 presented a social historical approach
‘[through] which the life of the people seems to reveal itself most genuinely, and hence to give
actuality to themes such as community, society, class, speech-idiom, tradition – which are so apt
to remain vague’ (Craig 1961, p. 11). In rendering these ‘themes’ precise in application, however,
Craig still relied on some deferred abstraction in the form of an ‘old communal culture’ stub-
bornly surviving beyond its time. Perceived by Scotland’s elites to be of the ‘underground’ and
the ‘backwoods’, this ‘old communal culture’, which was given poetic expression by Ramsay,
Fergusson, and Burns, was shared by and familiar to ‘all classes, aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and
working folk alike’. However, due to the ‘alienation from things native’ wrought by an ascendant
‘polite’ culture, this would nevertheless be the ‘last phase in Scottish history in which a distinc-
tively native mode of expression held together’ (Craig 1961, pp. 19–20). Daiches’ The Paradox of
Scottish Culture explained the same compromised continuance: ‘the Edinburgh literati had no use
for the Scots vernacular tradition and accepted it only when it was embodied in a poet whom
they could regard with interest as confirming their theories about the nature of untutored sensi-
bility’ (Daiches 1964, p. 92). For both critics, the vernacular revival’s appeal to the ‘folk’ –
through language and social relations – was both the cause of its fundamental decline (as social
formations shifted) and the value-as-curio it continued to hold.
The long shadow of the Herderian revolution provides some context for this potted history of
generalist Scottish literary criticism. In most of these surveys a ‘nation’ and a ‘language’ are
imagined as at least potentially co-constitutive of a ‘people’, and though this cultivation of
national difference is often marked by deformation and failure it is nevertheless deemed to be the
common project of the writer and the critic. Folkways are afforded some precisely articulated and
historicised literary lives in these studies, but they are also often made diffuse so that they might
span the historical ruptures that literatures could not. Folk culture is the quagmire literature can
sink back into, and the ‘rude buttress’ that bolsters it; it is dislocated and dislocating; it signals
authenticity, yet it is easily (and frequently) mimicked, even forged. As Penny Fielding writes of
the ‘oral’, it is ‘oddly positioned between the absolute, and the absolutely conditional’
Folkways 251
(Fielding 1996, p. 4). In Out of History Cairns Craig described this same critical history as ‘veering
between models of Scottish culture as fragmentary failure or false unity’ (Craig 1996, p. 110).
The diffuse influence of folkways accommodated this ‘veering’. While many later critics were
still concerned with the relative coherence – or peculiar incoherence – of the national literary
history, they were generally less likely to transmute the burden of these ideas into folkways.
Placing and Misplacing the ‘Folk’

In The Ballad in Literature, T. F. Henderson warned that folklore ‘is the happy hunting ground
for the sciolist […] fruitful in fallacies for the rash theoriser’ (Henderson 1912, p. vii). By con-
ceptualising folk song as the cultural afterlife of a ‘pagan … age of primitive simplicity’ so that
it might provide the necessary continuity to shore up a national vernacular literary tradition, he
shared in some of this ‘rash’ theorisation. However, those who isolated folk culture as the princi-
pal object of their work have also had to contend with its immensity and inscrutability. In navi-
gating his dual role as folklorist and folk revivalist in the post-war period, Hamish Henderson
found some reassurance in Antonio Gramsci’s (1891–1937) words: ‘there is nothing more con-
tradictory and fragmentary than folklore’ (Gramsci 1985, p. 194). The Sardinian Marxist under-
stood folklore not simply in the ‘picturesque’ element to which it was commonly reduced, but as
a diffusion of counter-hegemonic conceptions of the world and life. In this formulation it cannot
be ‘elaborated’ or ‘systematic’ because ‘the people’ who have borne it out are ‘the sum total of the
instrumental and subaltern of every form of society that has so far existed’ (Gramsci 1985,
pp. 188–189). This goes some way to explaining the social formations of ‘folklore’, its transhis-
torical reach (in the cultural afterlives of anachronistic class formations), and its reliance on
modes of transmission not easily assimilated by ‘officialdom’. It also accounts for a history of
collection and revivalism that could not sort or popularise folk culture without imposing some
degree of ‘elaboration’ and ‘systematisation’. Margaret Laidlaw Hogg, who provided Scott with
material for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–1803), famously expressed this disconnect:
‘They war made for singing, an’ no for reading; but ye hae broken the charm now, an’ they’ll
never be sung mair’ (in Atkinson 2014, p. 83). Efforts to locate the ‘folk’ and their ‘ways’ have
often involved similar impositions, acknowledged and unacknowledged biases, and editorial
interventions.
David Herd (1732–1810), in his Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads &c, (1769) for
example, was relatively light touch in collating multiple variants and including incomplete
ones. Whereas Scott’s editorial ‘improvements’ in the Minstrelsy came out of a view of balladry as
the residue of an older National Muse, one that was tarnished by its long exposure to oral trans-
mission and that required careful restoration. William Motherwell’s ballads went unexpurgated
due to his apparent faith in the oral tradition:
But fragile and capricious as the tenure may seem by which it has held its existence for centuries, it
is worthy of remark how excellently well tradition serves as a substitute for more efficient and less
mutable channels of communicating the things of past ages to posterity.
(Motherwell 1827, p. 3)
Motherwell in turn inspired Francis James Child (1825–1896) in his endeavour to ‘include every
obtainable version of every extant English or Scottish ballad, with the fullest possible discussion
of related songs or stories in the “popular” literature of all nations’ (p. xxvii). Editorial approaches
were informed in part by collection techniques and source selections. The proliferation of broad-
sides and chapbooks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, combined estab-
lished fare and new compositions. Collectors had to contend with the resultant confusion,
especially since they were concerned with the pedigree and provenance of songs in shoring up a
discrete national tradition. As well as collecting tours, studying manuscripts, and maintaining
large networks of correspondents, it was common to absorb and recast the published and unpub-
lished collections of predecessors. See the enduring influence of Ramsay and Motherwell in those
who came after them, for example, or the prominence of Anna Gordon (Mrs Brown of Falkland)
(1747–1810) in the collections of Robert Jamieson (Popular Ballads and Songs 1806) and Child
(see Brown 2011). In the disparities between her sung variants, Gordon inspired David Buchan
to apply oral formulaic composition theory to Scottish balladry – that is, the idea developed by
Milman Parry (1902–1935) and Albert Lord (1912–1991), that, through established formulae,
oral poets improvise their works anew with each performance and that this is the foundation of
the oral tradition. Buchan’s argument, however, rested on the familiar claim that mass literacy
condemned the ballad tradition as Gordon had received it to extinction (Buchan 1972). Similar
anxieties around textuality and literacy afforded special significance to the anonym. Cecil Sharp
(1859–1924) and Gavin Greig (1856–1914) both held that if the author of a song was known,
it could not be counted as a folk song. Such questions around authorship and transmission were
foundational to the identification of folk culture with the national paradigm. If these songs and
this lore once belonged to everyone, of every class, and were national in that respect, then they
might do so – or at least be made to appear to do so – again. This restoration of a national culture
would, however, depend on an oral tradition most intimately associated with the ‘old communal
culture’ of a disappearing peasant class.
Like its forerunners, the twentieth-century post-war Scottish folk revival was, in its concep-
tion, a literary-political project that claimed the national culture for a particular class formation.
Its novelty was in trying to transmute this so-called ‘peasant’ culture to incorporate the contem-
porary proletariat and its cause (see Gibson 2015; Munro 1996). For Henderson, the ‘folk tradi-
tion’ he looked to unearth and intervene on behalf of was itself constituted by a series of historical
revivals and remissions. Echoing the literary critics cited above Henderson often wrote of a
peculiarly intense and intricate ‘cross-fertilisation’ between literary and folk cultures in Scotland
(Henderson 2004, pp. 3, 28, 427). Following Gramsci, Henderson conceptualised folk culture as
a perennial ‘underground’: an implicit and sometimes explicit challenge to the worldviews
through which elites justified themselves, in Scotland as elsewhere. When their institutions –
from the Kirk to the BBC – could no longer successfully suppress or erase this culture, these
elites looked to ‘take possession’ of it, ‘bowdlerising’ and enervating it in the process
(Henderson 2004, pp. 31–36, 45–50). Through the revival Henderson and his peers sought to
construct a radical national tradition that would resist such systems of control. They invoked the
displaced and disappeared peasantry, whose passing had been lamented by bourgeois revivalists
of the past, and who had been customarily identified with the ‘folk’ and looked to induct the
proletariat as their contemporary inheritors.
As folklorists this was attempted by turning attention to the lore and song cultures of urban-
industrial working-class communities, and collecting there alongside established sites like the
Borders, rural Aberdeenshire, and the West Highlands. Portable reel-to-reel recording technol-
ogy also allowed folklorists to bring field recordings back to the city, to be shared among future
‘tradition-bearers’. As revivalists, the workshops and ceilidhs that grew out of these encounters
Folkways 253
combined the songs of manuscript and archive with the field recordings of working collectors,
from pub and playground to berryfield and brae. The gathering national significance of this
project was given radical heft in the revivalists’ choice of folk heroes, principal among them,
John Maclean (1879–1923). Martyred for the cause of a Scottish Worker’s Republic, Maclean’s
life and lineage echoed the social history of a dislocated rural peasant class becoming an alienated
urban industrial working class. Combining Highlands and Lowlands in his family, and the ‘red
and the green’ in his politics, Maclean yoked the struggle of Scotland’s workers to an internation-
alist cause against the capitalist-imperialist war. The radical ‘folk’ tradition was brought up to
date with workshopped and published songs marking the ‘reiving’ of the Stone of Scone
from Westminster in 1950; protesting the docking of US Polaris missiles at Holy Loch from
1961; and a constellation of other professedly ‘rebel’ causes (e.g. The Rebels Ceilidh Songbook
[1954–1967]).
The post-war revivalist conception of the ‘folk’ was also given historical depth by Henderson’s
‘discovery’ in the early 1950s of the stewardship of an ‘ancient but vital’ tradition among
Scotland’s travelling people (Neat 2002, p. 65). Counting the travellers’ camps among the great
‘zones’ of Scottish folk culture (alongside the borders, the northeast, and Gaeldom) his so-called
‘Tinker Project’ reflected a broader hermeneutic turn in fieldwork and saw Henderson living,
singing, and collecting among the travellers. In their history, their heritage and their ‘unprop-
ertied lifestyle’ he came to imagine the travellers as ‘the unframed mirror within which Scotland
can view and be herself – backwards and forwards in time’ (Neat 2002, p. 195). Henderson
posited that a community living at a remove from the bourgeois state – its class formations and
its commercial cultures – could preserve an oral folk culture with less disruption: still absorb-
ing exogenous influences, but not being overwhelmed or displaced by them, at least, not with
the same intensity as settled populations. They could therefore simultaneously embody a dis-
tant past, an alternative history in which more of that past had been retained, and an alternative
future. In Henderson’s view this was all embodied in what seemed an impossibility in the mid-
twentieth century: a non-alienated culture. This Janus-faced aspect helped to situate the ‘folk’,
not just as an historical phenomenon that might be conjured or lamented in support of a
national cultural tradition, but as an order of cultural unity that might be worked for quite
self-consciously.
Henderson and his peers would, in a sense, become ‘folk’ in their fieldwork recordings and
transcriptions: their original compositions were encountered out in the field; and they some-
times recorded one another, thereby recognising their presence and influence. This slippage
between ‘collector’ and ‘informant’, or ‘reporter’ and ‘contributor’, as the roles have been vari-
ously termed, shows the collecting encounter – where the ‘folk’ are located – to be self-fulfilling.
Fieldworkers developed methods to minimise their influence and foreground the lives of those
they were recording, but the dialogue would nevertheless introduce expectations, priorities, and
terminology that would shape the findings and their framing (see Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches
for examples). In her comparative study of the Scots song archives of the School of Scottish
Studies (University of Edinburgh) and the Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection (1981–2002), which
emerged respectively from the post-war revival and the earlier fin-de-siècle revival associated
with Sharp and Child, Caroline Macafee describes this dynamic. Where Greig’s scholarly rigour
prompted his collaborators to understand the collection-work as mediating their relationship
with posterity, those recorded for the School seemed to be more taken up by their immediate
relationship with the collector ‘whom they were prepared to humour and oblige’. In working with
travellers for instance, Henderson and his colleagues cultivated a distinctive ‘traveller mystique’,
whereas Greig and Duncan approached them through a ‘fog of euphemism’ (Macafee 2021,
pp. 39, 52–53). In these instances, the ‘folk’ are neither ‘discovered’ whole, nor wholly imposed
from without. They are co-constituted in the act of collection, but are no less circumstantial for
it, and no more representative.
That this process is necessarily distortive seems to confirm Gramsci’s assertion on the ‘contra-
dictory and fragmentary’ nature of folklore. Henderson quipped that collecting among the trav-
ellers’ camps in the berryfields of Blair was like ‘holding a tin-can under Niagara Falls’
(Henderson 2004, p. 102). The boundlessness of the material in its full reach and motion was a
common concern for the collector, especially when compared with the straitened access to which
they were restricted. Greig imagined the field reaching forth ‘to the ends of the earth through
countless affinities, and back to primeval times through an unbroken chain of derivation’ (in
Henderson 2004, p. 93). Collectors reached as far as they could along these temporal and geo-
graphical axes. David Johnson describes the typical late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century
collector’s story about a given song variant:
that that he took it down from a woman of eighty, who had learned it in the same form in childhood
also from a woman of eighty, who had known it since her childhood—giving the song a recorded,
unaltered transmission of a century and a half.
(Johnson 1972, p. 88)
The idea that song can travel so unobtrusively through intergenerational transmission is often
set against a backdrop of relative historical tumult. The implication is that skeins of cultural
inheritance are all that survive of a pre-history of comparative stasis – before the end of an ‘old
communal culture’. As Suzanne Gilbert has noted, though antiquarians did help to preserve folk
culture, as part of the broader field of Enlightenment thought they also ‘conspired with social
changes to hasten its demise’ (Gilbert 2013, p. 108). In 1954, as the post-war revival was gather-
ing pace, the International Folk Music Council adopted a definition that would allow some space
for these difficulties of perspective and agency:
Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been developed through the process of oral
transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are: (i) continuity which links the present with the
past; (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; and
(iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives.
[emphasis added]
(Karpeles 1955, p. 6)
Drawing from this definition, A.L. Lloyd in Folk Song in England, theorised folk song creation –
in composition, transmission, and collection – as a ‘vital dialectic’: ‘between the collective and
the individual, between tradition and innovation, between what is received from the community
and what is supplied out of personal fantasy, in short, the blending of continuity and variation’
(Lloyd 1967, pp. 16–17).
This dialectic of continuity and variation prompted diverse methodologies among scholars.
The scientific turn that followed Child’s reach for exhaustiveness was compounded by a deepen-
ing commitment to the classification of underlying structures. Consider, for example, Propp’s
Morphology of the Folktale (1928, trans. 1958), Thompson’s Motif Index (1932–1936), the Aarne-
Thompson Tale Type Index (1910, 1928, 1961) and later, Claude Leví-Strauss’ structuralist
theory of myth in Mythologiques (1964–1971). Anthropologists later responded to similar
Folkways 255
challenges by breaking with the notion that there was a ‘place of over-view’ from which to sort
and survey human culture: ‘one cannot occupy, unambiguously, a bounded cultural world from
which to journey out and analyse other cultures’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986, pp. 7, 22).
Nevertheless, efforts to locate the ‘folk’ without imposing upon them, to aspire to become ‘folk’,
or even just to study ‘folkways’, carry with them a self-awareness and a degree of abstraction that
risks insinuating these kinds of hierarchies.
Reflecting on his collection work for the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music in
the early 1950s, Alan Lomax once remarked on a seeming paradox in Scotland’s folk tradition –
its being amongst the most ‘lively’ and the most ‘bookish’: ‘Everywhere in Scotland I collected
songs of written or bookish origin from country singers, and, on the other hand, I constantly
encountered bookish Scotsmen who had good traditional versions of the finest folk-songs’ (in
Henderson 2004, p. 24). The ‘cross-fertilisation’ between folk and literary cultures that this
‘liveliness/bookishness’ describes was determined by this long history of collectors and revival-
ists. And as this chapter has shown, it was reified by a shorter history of generalist Scottish liter-
ary criticism with all its ‘rude buttresses’ and ‘subterranean channels’.
Irruptions and Dispersals
This chapter has examined some of the ways in which Scotland’s literary folkways have been read: for
example, as reminders of a lost cultural unity and signals of contemporary anachronism in the liter-
ary tradition; or, as the timely irruptions of a boundless, but submerged continuum of contradictory
and fragmentary folklore. Elaborating on his understanding of Scotland’s history of folk-literary
‘cross-fertilisation’, Henderson drew from Jane Ellen Harrison’s (1850–1928) work on ancient Greek
religion in describing the dynamic as that between the Olympians (named literary greats, such as
Dunbar, Henryson, Burns, Scott) and the Chthonic rituals underpinning them: ‘being the vast anon-
ymous treasure-house of balladry and folksong – with all the manifold possibilities that existed and
exist of constant interfusion’ (Henderson 2004, p. 433). Though this holds something in common
with the gestural reliance on a bedrock of folk culture that is evident in the generalist literary histo-
ries, it departs from those by shifting the emphasis towards the complexity and constancy of the
‘interfusion’ itself. It uncovers a pervasive and constitutive presence for folkways in and through
literature, whilst also allowing for its inscrutability, its substantial invisibility, and its resistance to
instrumentalist abuses – for example, as either scaffold or storm drain for the literary heights.
In this formulation, particular literary folkways might still signal the burden of a national
tradition, but they will also describe the simplification and circumvention that that reading
demands. The fact of a history of folk culture, then, becomes no more a guarantor of continuity
or cogency than the fact of a literary history. Though this chapter has not provided a detailed
survey of literary folkways, it has explored how important these have been for critics in deter-
mining the character of a national literary tradition. It has also detailed the history of folklore
collection as a series of efforts to locate the ‘folk’ that must either defer the task through broad
abstractions of process, or else isolate singular exchanges that quickly lose their representative
heft. It remains to sketch out a few of the ways in which a modern history of literary folkways
might reveal the diverse and generative influences of these slippery, ahistorical conceptions of the
‘folk’ in the context of a national literary history.
Margaret Oliphant’s (1828–1897) supernaturalism, William McGonagall’s (1825–1902) idi-
osyncratic hybrid of occasional lyric and folk-song forms, Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1850–1894)
folk tales and J. M. Barrie’s (1860–1937) Tinkerbell, for example, are all familiar vectors. John
Francis Campbell’s (1821–1885) celebrated Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860–1862) con-
stituted an important strand of fin-de-siècle Celtic Revivalism. George Douglas Brown could
only satirise the vacuousness of the folk wisdom of the ‘bodies’ because the Kailyard writers had
grounded the same in the social fabric of Thrums and Drumtochty. The poetry of the early inter-
war literary renaissance saw the careful adaptation of folk forms and their pastoral settings (Violet
Jacob, Marion Angus, and William Soutar). And the chief sources from which MacDiarmid
cultivated his ‘synthetic’ Scots – John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language
(1808) and James Wilson’s Lowland Scotch as spoken in the Lower Strathearn district of Perthshire
(1915) – drew from proverbs and folk songs as often as literary sources. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s
A Scots Quair (1932–1934 [1995]) is built around set-piece folk performances. And as the trilogy
progresses the historical consciousness conjured by folk culture shifts in significance, connecting
to and breaking from ‘the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk’. Muriel Spark
(1918–2006) made extensive use of balladry: it provides motifs, implies supernatural phenom-
ena, invokes narrative paradigms of tragic determinism, and offers a foreshadowing of bloody
acts of violence proffered with little psychological interiority or emotional engagement, and not
only in The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960).4 In theatre, John McGrath and 7:84 adapted the ceilidh
form in The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1973), and ballads and skipping rhymes
bookend Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987). Tom Leonard’s
Radical Renfrew (1990), in its regional and internationalist emphases, helped to restore a history
of working-class verse (often folk inflected) in opposition to the distortions of the national para-
digm. In other words, folkways can be readily traced in the history of Scotland’s most celebrated
writers, even after Scott.
A history of Scotland’s literary folkways might, however, do more than track canonical allu-
sions to folkways in uncovering the ‘relatively unexplored layers’ of what constitutes ‘literature’
(Dunnigan and Gilbert 2013, p. 2). It might, for example, incorporate the popular post-war folk
revival itself as a substantially literary project.5 In the twenty-first century, Karine Polwart can
be situated as a contemporary inheritor of that movement. Wind Resistance, which combines
‘landscape and ecology [writing], local history and memoir, traditional storytelling and song’
explores new political applications and decentred narrative possibilities, even radically repurpos-
ing the idea of intangible cultural heritage: ‘We are each other’s wind resistance, a human skein./
And we’re not going to make it on our own.’ (Polwart 2017, p. 44). A new history might also
incorporate neglected writers such as Dorothy K. Haynes (1918–1987), whose short stories give
psychological depth to the strange, suspended landscapes and temporalities of ballads and folk-
tales (e.g. Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch [1947]). Contemporary short story writers in the folk
horror mode, such as Helen McClory and Kirsty Logan continue this work. Travellers’ tales and
memoirs, which saw some commercial success in the late twentieth century, might also become
part of this literary history. Betsy Whyte (1919–1988), who wrote Yellow on the Broom (1979), and
Duncan Williamson, the storyteller behind Fireside Tales of the Traveller Children (1983), had both
been recorded by the School’s fieldworkers. Their work therefore contributed to the cultivation
of the ‘mystique’ described above, whilst also providing important documents of local and social
history. The resonance of diabolist Masonic-style ritual might be traced across literary modes in
the secret society and guild of the Horseman’s Word: from Henderson’s ethnographic studies;
through Edwin Morgan’s concrete poetry sequence, The Horseman’s Word (1970); to George
Mackay Brown’s depictions of the ritual punctuating the narrative of Greenvoe (1972). Finally, the
Folkways 257
enduring popularity and political valences of the figure of the ‘witch’ might be followed through
the work of, for example, John Buchan (1875–1940), Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999), Agnes
Owens (1926–2014), Emma Tennant (1937–2017), Elspeth Barker (1940–2022), Rona Munro
(b. 1959), and Jenni Fagan (b. 1977).
Though we need not join Henderson in visualising the relationship between Scotland’s folk
and literary cultures as that of the Chthonic ritual still lurking behind and beneath the Olympian
gods, a broader, modern history of Scottish literary folkways might nevertheless reveal just how
far this complex of connections and irruptions resists instrumentalist manipulation. Muir wrote
that ‘the reality of a nation’s history lies in its continuity, and the present is its only guarantee’;
where that continuity is broken, the past turns into ‘legend, into the poetry of pure memory’
(Muir 1936, p. 161). In this view the ‘buttresses’ of folk culture are implicated as both symptom
and underlying cause. However, a modern history of Scottish literary folkways might yet reveal
the paradox of this bounded artefact and boundless process to be more generative and more inter-
esting than the useful continuities or defining ruptures of a national cultural tradition.6
Notes
1 Cf. ‘Oral Literature’ in Mulhern 2007 and ‘Traditional 5 The author has argued elsewhere for this approach:
Literatures’ in Dunnigan and Gilbert 2013. Literatures and Politics of the Post-War Folk Revival.
2 The term ‘folklore’ was coined in 1846 by the anti- In The Cambridge History of Scottish Literature. (ed. I.
quarian William Thoms (1803–1885) in a column Duncan), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
for the Athenaeum. (forthcoming).
3 He would reserve qualified praise for stories resem- 6 The author has developed this idea of ‘folkways’
bling oral folk tales, e.g. ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ as marked by irruption and dispersal – rather
and ‘The Two Drovers’. than continuity and accretion – in a survey of lit-
4 See also, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Hothouse erary allusions to ‘The Flowers of the Forest’
by the East River (1973), The Takeover (1976), and (Gibson 2019).
Symposium (1990).
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21
Mapping Murder – Places in Scottish
Crime Writing
Carol Baraniuk
Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Academic discussions of crime fiction occasionally seem haunted by a misgiving that such popu-
lar material may be unworthy of consideration as serious literature. Crime writing can lay bare
the darkness of the human heart; it raises serious societal, political and philosophical questions.
Yet one may ask whether real depth can be achieved within an often formulaic, ‘page turner’
medium. Writing specifically of Scottish crime fiction David Goldie has identified a
fundamental incompatibility between the idea of a serious national literature which aims to illuminate the
unique conditions of a particular people in a particular place, and an international genre that is concerned
with entertaining a wider audience according to a limiting narrative of transgression and correction.
(Goldie 2012, p. 200)
The present discussion acknowledges the contradiction but urges, nevertheless, that as Scottish
crime fiction has proliferated the genre has matured, especially in the works of those writers who
have deftly exploited the land and cityscapes of the nation.
Cities
Though the country house murder is a recognisable trope of Golden Age detective fiction, tradi-
tionally crime has been associated with urban squalor and delinquency. Raymond Williams has
demonstrated that even in the works of Quintillian and Juvenal, the city is portrayed as a breed-
ing ground for criminality (Williams 1973 [2011], pp. 46–47). Tartan Noir is both a cliché and
a contested term, but Clydeside Noir is suggested by the present writer as a useful label for the
gloomy sub-genre of works set in the city of Glasgow and its environs. ‘Noir’s universe’, it has

been argued, ‘is bleak and divested of meaning’, defined by a ‘prevailing mood of pessimism’
(Simpson 2010, p. 189). Glasgow-set crime fiction, from William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw (1977)
and its sequels, to Malcolm Mackay’s more recent Glasgow Trilogy (2013–2015), frequently
portrays the city as bleak, disfigured and desolate. Yet a search for meaning and renewed purpose
is at the core of both series.
McIlvanney published Laidlaw in 1977 when Frankie Vaughan’s attempt to broker peace
between the gangs of Easterhouse was well within memory. The sequels, The Papers of Tony Veitch
(1983) and Strange Loyalties (1991) appeared in the era and aftermath of the drug trade’s ‘Ice
Cream Wars’. The books communicate Glasgow’s tough town image while also implying the
centre’s growing sophistication in the later twentieth century. One of the strengths of Laidlaw is
its evocation of the city, evident from the outset as a perpetrator on the run frantically names the
streets he passes along, and later when DI Jack Laidlaw deprecates the dismal Drumchapel dis-
trict. This neighbourhood, he opines, proves that Glasgow people must be ‘nice people. Otherwise
they would have burned the place to the ground years ago’ (McIlvanney 2013 [2018], p. 35).
Laidlaw himself is an original maverick – a swearing, heavy drinking, hard man who has little
patience with rule book obsessed superiors, and whose marriage falls apart as the novels progress.
But this seeming embodiment of the streetwise cop is also an intellectual manqué who occasion-
ally drops quotations from T.S. Eliot into conversations with his DC. He is genuinely troubled
about the causes of crime, causes which in Laidlaw he finds are rooted in Glasgow macho culture
and religious bigotry. McIlvanney produced an enlightened work for the time, sympathetically
portraying gay characters whose sexuality would then have been regarded as deviant. He also
demonstrated credibly how brutality and prejudice can propel an insecure or abused individual
into a terrible act. Extenuations notwithstanding, however, in the 2020s a reader sensitised to
the high incidence of male sexual violence might baulk at Laidlaw’s summation of his case,
which involves the rape-murder of a young woman, as ‘a love story’ and ‘maybe Romeo and Juliet
upside down’ (McIlvanney 2018, p. 273).
At times the style of the series is Chandleresque, sardonic and ostentatious in the employment
of improbable similes such as, ‘He was about as easy to explore as the Louisiana Purchase’
(McIlvanney 2018, p. 62). It is enlivened by Laidlaw’s wisecracking, and by characters with full
command of the knowing Glasgow ‘patter’ that contributes to the sense of place conveyed, as does
Laidlaw’s frequent insistence on walking rather than driving through the streets, questioning
pedestrians and passers-by. He finds Glaswegians direct, lacking in pretension: ‘They hate to be
had. Come on honestly and their tolerance can be great’ (McIlvanney 2018, pp. 54–55).
Laidlaw’s musings find occasional outlet in declamatory conversational turns when he treats
colleagues to his reflections. Nothing could be in greater contrast to the spare mode of Malcolm
Mackay’s Glasgow Trilogy in which direct speech is kept brusque and minimal in an uneasy pre-
sent tense narrative that discloses the thought-lives of his characters. Noir-style paranoia and
pessimism feature heavily across the three novels, beginning with The Necessary Death of Lewis
Winter (2013). The books offer a chilling depiction of highly organised drug rackets and car rings
that function as businesses with legitimate fronts. This network is a shadow city, with power
structures comprised of bosses and their lieutenants, elite hitmen, arms suppliers, and lower
orders of drivers and muscle men. Central to the racket is the ‘club’ with its bars and pool tables,
where pitilessly urbane Peter Jamieson and his henchman John Young plan operations and order
assassinations that are carried out by the young hitman Calum MacLean, or the ageing gunman
Frank MacLeod. The anonymous club is of a piece with the dreary and featureless cityscape across
which the characters range. Few place names are employed; interiors are sparsely described.
Mapping Murder – Places in Scottish Crime Writing 261
While huge sums of money change hands in the illegal rackets, and large fees are paid to the
hitmen, there is little sign that the fruits of crime are greatly enjoyed. Successful operatives and
bosses always avoid ostentatious displays.
The violence is clinical and emotionless. Jamieson and Young discourage attention-attracting
sadistic acts, so Mackay delivers a credible series about contract killings with little sensationalist
brutality. The atmosphere is tense due to the gunmen’s constantly watchful routines – any parked
car, any passer-by is a potential tail. A hired killer knows too much, so he cannot hope to be
permitted a comfortable retirement. In essence, this trilogy is the hitman Calum’s story. At the
commencement the reader finds him engrossed in Somerset Maugham’s classic, The Painted Veil.
This taste for elegant prose on the theme of redemption offers a clue to his aspirations as he finds
the life he has chosen increasingly oppressive. Since completing the trilogy Mackay has written
further Glasgow crime novels with some recurring characters from the original books.
Writers of Clydeside Noir often draw on memories and myths of Glasgow several generations
ago – the ‘mean city’ that became a byword for deprivation and violence. Craig Russell’s private
detective Lennox plies his trade, coping with gangsters in 1950s austerity. Despite the dismal
ambiance and the thugs, Lennox is comfortable with Glasgow which he regards unsentimentally,
as ‘a giant village’ and ‘not a place you can get lost in’ (Russell 2009 [2019], loc.704–710). Alan
Parks’s DI Harry McCoy novels begin with Bloody January (2017), portraying Glasgow during
the 1970s. The tone is established at the opening in the notorious Barlinnie prison, confronting
the reader with the volatility of the place, and with its stench. Parks opts to portray more explicit
violence than either McIlvanney or Mackay, but McCoy, a survivor of childhood abandonment
who sometimes voices hostility to the church, remains conscious of Catholic values and is more
complex than he at first appears. Parks draws the city in different moods and seasons; landmark
buildings such as the Mitchell Library and the People’s Palace mentioned in February’s Son (2019)
lend the illusion of stability, but a refashioning process is well underway, evidenced by allusions
to the pedestrianisation of Buchanan Street, and the construction of the motorway that would
prepare the city centre for gentrification and commuter traffic (Parks 2019, p. 2).
In the texts discussed thus far, males dominate plots devised by male writers. Women usually
appear as girlfriends, sex workers or mothers and have little agency, unless occasionally as foren-
sic scientists. Clydeside Noir has broadened however, with female voices refreshing the genre,
and guiding it in different directions. Lin Anderson, creator of forensic scientist Dr Rhona
MacLeod, declares her intention to explode ‘the myth that detection must be carried out by a
man with angst and a drink problem’ (Anderson 2011). Alex Gray, who has produced a long
series of police procedurals featuring the short-tempered but benign, art-collecting DCI Lorimer,
astutely identifies a split personality in contemporary Glasgow which she recognises as both
‘City of Culture and city of crime’ (Gray 2002: p. 50).
Louise Welsh exposes what lies beneath the façade of the more genteel Glasgow in The Cutting
Room (2002), which exploits the Gothic vibe of the city’s West End Victorian townhouses. She
then supplies an academic twist in Naming the Bones (2010), in which her frequently hapless
protagonist, Dr Murray Watson of the University of Glasgow, seeks to discover the truth about
the life, works and death of a minor 1970s poet. The academic quest with its searches of docu-
ments, its picking apart of recalled remarks and conversations, its piecing together of timelines
and relationships has many similarities with the methods of police procedurals. Murray is as
driven as Laidlaw, and has an even more chaotic personal life. His name, Dr Watson, is surely no
accident. He appears fit to be the eternal plodding sidekick, but he lacks a Holmes, the brilliant
principal investigator. The Glasgow University settings are sketched with succinct references to
the cloisters and the campus streets, a scholarly locale which gives cover to deadly sexual and
professional rivalries. Welsh has identified another of Glasgow’s dualisms – the city of the intel-
lect is also a city of crime.
Welsh’s work re-routes the crime novel, by-passing the mean streets and hard men of conven-
tion. Denise Mina has produced the acclaimed Garnethill series which gives voice to damaged
female protagonists, showing that they can be overcomers both of abuse and of hostile systems.
But both Mina and Liam McIlvanney have reached into the tenebrous Glasgow of the 1950s and
1960s and drawn inspiration from true crimes. Mina’s The Long Drop (2017) re-imagines the
depravity, trial and execution of the infamous Peter Manuel, hanged in HMP Barlinnie on
11 July 1958. In her partly fictionalised account, Mina renders vividly a smoky, unrenewed
Glasgow. This is a city of volatile, angry men, of shipyards, factories, tenements with shared
‘dunnies’, of spit and sawdust pubs, seedy nightclubs, and sectarian battles: ‘The Billy Boys
wielding razors, and knives and broken bottles […] calling out the Irish to meet them’
(Mina 2017, loc. 1759). Such images pervade much Glasgow fiction and are a fitting backdrop
for Manuel, rapist and murderer, who might now be diagnosed as a psychopath. The narrator
remarks that ‘The jury hate him […] He clearly isn’t stupid. He is very something but they don’t
know what it is’ (Mina 2017, loc. 2859). On trial for murders in which he has desecrated the
homes of his victims, and for a series of sexual crimes, Manuel conducts his own swaggering
defence, on which Mina turns a sceptical, female gaze. Repeatedly the narrative exposes the
misogyny of the era, evident in Manuel’s crimes against women but also in the entirely male-
staffed court system, and in brief pen portraits of witnesses, one of whom beats his wife every
night (Mina 2017, loc. 1765). Disconcerting too is the abject enthusiasm for the case shown by
women who queue overnight for seats in the gallery.
A final flourish in Mina’s evocation of the city comes when she imagines how the news of
Manuel’s conviction, and the excitement it generates, spreads far and wide: ‘It billows into shops
and stations, around the looming black buildings of the begrimed city […] It surges down
through the black glowering valleys of Gorbals tenements’ (Mina 2017, loc. 2961). Like the case
itself, the images ring true in their cheerlessness and distance.
Bible John, another hideous rapist-killer, has further boosted Glasgow’s urban-Gothic legend.
Even during his active period in the late 1960s he was invoked as a type of bogeyman to cow
naughty children. Named Bible John because a witness recalled him speaking of a strict moral
code and quoting scripture, he was never conclusively identified and remains unapprehended.
His uncanny vanishing is one reason for the frisson his name still generates. Troubling too are
the Biblical and sexual aspects of the case, which hint at repression and hypocrisy, or conversely
at divine retribution visited on the murdered women.
For his novel The Quaker (2018) crime writer and academic Liam McIlvanney has drawn on
some of the circumstances of the Bible John case, in which on three separate occasions during
1968 and 1969 a smartly dressed man picked up young women at the celebrated Barrowlands
ballroom, then attacked and murdered them, leaving the bodies in downbeat city locations.
McIlvanney’s work is more fully fictionalised than Mina’s. It alters names and characters, and
takes the story forward in freshly imagined directions. It centres on enquiries conducted by DI
Duncan McCormack, a Catholic detective from Ballachulish, who has been posted to Glasgow to
close down the floundering enquiry into a serial killer dubbed ‘The Quaker’. McIlvanney exposes
anti-Catholic bigotry against his investigator. He too identifies misogyny, detailing how his
Bible-quoting Quaker exposed the sanitary towels of his menstruating victims. In today’s idiom
this ‘period shaming’ adds further insult to each murder. Particularly striking are the novel’s
d esolate monologues in which the ghosts of the murdered women voice loneliness and loss,
expressing the responsibility they feel for their own murders. They reflect both vulnerability and
a type of victim blaming that has not yet been eradicated from attitudes in wider society: ‘I knew
he was out there too. I knew it all along. We all do’ (McIlvanney 2018, p. 14).
Set in an era of urban renewal, the narrative captures the hope of escape from deprivation and
delinquency that vigorous redevelopment projects seemed on the cusp of fulfilling: ‘The city itself
was changing, its map revised by the wrecking balls […]. Whole neighbourhoods lost as the build-
ings came down […] the grime of the tenements left behind’ (McIlvanney 2018, p. 5). Viewed in
retrospect, the process never produced such straightforwardly positive results. New housing
schemes built to replace the squalid tenements soon grew squalid and crime-ridden in their turn.
Changing Glasgow’s, or any city’s, outward appearance does not deal with the darkness lingering
in the human soul that can emerge embodied in the shape of a Quaker, or a Manuel, or a Bible John.
In contrast to Glasgow, the city of Edinburgh has, or had until recently, a refined profile
against which writers of both literary fiction and crime fiction have tilted. Witness, for example,
Irvine Welsh’s novels, and Tony Black’s, hard boiled Gus Dury books, beginning with Paying For
It (2008). Ian Rankin’s long-running DI John Rebus series has been a publishing phenomenon
since the 1980s, from the outset acknowledging Edinburgh’s dark side. Rankin himself has writ-
ten, spoken or left clues within his texts that indicate the influence on his thinking of
doppelganger-themed Scottish classics such as Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886). Appropriately, therefore, the first novel Knots and Crosses (1987) reaches its climax in the
gracious interior of the Central Lending Library, passing from there to the sinister network of
tunnels beneath the city’s Old Town.
Rebus has a Laidlaw-style disruptive, maverick personality, and a typically dysfunctional per-
sonal life. But his creator has proved adept in maturing him over nigh on 35 years of the series.
A Song for the Dark Times (2020) shows Rebus in retirement. Suffering from COPD he is forced
to abjure smoking and to moderate his drinking and sexual activity. Characteristically, however,
he interferes in the investigation of a murder case that implicates his adult daughter Samantha,
from whom he had become partly estranged. The outcome hints at a measure of restoration, in
keeping with an occasionally elegiac tone in some of the later books such as Saints of the Shadow
Bible (2013), which has near its beginning a meeting with old comrades, and an old love
(Rankin 2013, pp. 52–55). The series also reflects cultural and political developments during
the period. In Knots and Crosses, on the verge of a sexual encounter, Rebus is shown suffering
‘Scottish Protestant’ guilt about his lapsed church attendance. The Edinburgh of 1985 when the
book was written, as Rankin points out, still observed the Sabbath with most city centre shops
closed (Rankin 1987 [2011], pp. x–xi). In a recent novel he incorporates allusions to Brexit
while nimbly reminding the reader of Scotland’s pro-European credentials (Rankin 2020, p. 45).
The early books chart the capital, mentioning well-known sights that authenticate Rebus’s
patch, nowhere more so than when the detective, located on Calton Hill, takes in the view from
Princes Street across Queensferry and the Firth of Forth into Fife (Rankin 2011, pp. 56–57). It
is a dramatic, even prophetic opening to the long running series, foreshadowing the decades-
long dominance of its leading character. Later, in the streets of the Old Town, Rebus is conscious
of the city’s enlightened intellectual history. Streets associated with philosophers and literati,
however, give way as the series progresses to the night clubs of the Cowgate, or deprivation hot-
spots like Craigmillar where Black and Blue (1997), one of the most remarkable entries in the
series, begins at a police station tellingly nicknamed ‘Fort Apache – the Bronx’. Rebus’s inquiry
leads him across the nation from Edinburgh to Glasgow, Aberdeen and on to Shetland where he
feels ‘just about as foreign as he ever had in his life’ (Rankin 1997 [2008] , p. 417). Even Bible
John is revived to trouble the investigation, showing how much this unresolved case haunts the
Scottish imagination, or certainly that of its writers.
The Jekyll and Hyde trope to which Rankin alludes opens the door to a subgenre of Edinburgh-
set crime fiction in which the city is imagined in a variety of nineteenth-century incarnations,
several exploring feminist themes and linked to the university medical school. These include
Kaite Walsh’s series featuring medical student sleuth Sarah Gilchrist, and David Hutchison’s
‘Doctresses’ books, partly inspired by the experience of the first female medical students.
Undoubtedly the ill-lit streets of Victorian Edinburgh supply a perfect milieu for crime and
criminals. Recent fiction by ‘Ambrose Parry’, actually crime writer Chris Brookmyre and
anaesthetist/historian of medicine Marisa Haetzman, effectively maximises this locale. Parry’s
tales, beginning with The Way of All Flesh (2018) convincingly recreate 1840s Edinburgh. The
plots are fictional, but thoroughly researched to include real events and people, such as the obste-
trician and pioneer of anaesthetics James Simpson. Scenes in the Edinburgh medical school’s
lecture halls and dissecting rooms make a strong sensory impact, as does Flockhart and Duncan’s
imposing chemist shop at the corner of Princes Street and the North Bridge, with its shelves of
glass-bottles stretching ‘all the way to the ceiling’, holding ‘powders, liquids and oils with
exotic-sounding names’ (Parry 2018, p. 73). Issues such as sex work, women’s rights and the
unregulated abortion trade are tackled without diminishing an authentic representation of con-
temporary mindsets. The texts sparkle with occasional humorous flashes, and the graphic also
has its place, usually in shocking accounts of difficult births or amputations.
Nowhere does the city of Edinburgh’s split personality of Old Town and New Town, vicious
criminal underworld and world-beating medical research centre, come more vividly alive than in
a frantic run made by medical apprentice Will Raven from the university buildings and down
the Mound, then across Princes Street. Rushing to prevent, so he imagines, his mentor Simpson
and guests from poisoning themselves in an ill-advised after dinner experiment, he is confronted
by a couple of petrifying ruffians who intend to blind him, but whom he disables with two well-
aimed doses of peri-peri powder. The episode echoes some of Brookmyre’s individually authored
crime fiction with its velocity and black comedy, and reflects the partnership approach of the
writers who bring together ‘Chris’s handling of pace and plot and Marisa’s forensic attention to
detail’ (Parry 2018, p. 363).
Rather than focusing on the city’s past, Paul Johnstone’s Quint Dalrymple novels are set in an
Orwellian future Scotland. Here Edinburgh is rigorously policed by a City Guard, surely an echo
of Robert Fergusson’s much resented guarding force of ‘black banditti’ (Ferguson 2021, p. l. 65).
Val McDermid has written several crime series set outwith Scotland, but her cold case inves-
tigator DI Karen Pirie works in and around Fife and Edinburgh. Historic case inquiries take her
as far afield as Croatia, Ireland and Paris, but early books where the action is in Fife exploit its
topography and symbols. The ruined St Mary’s church, the castle towers and dungeon, the North
Sea coast with its formidable cliffs render the university town of St Andrews a distinctly inimical
site in The Distant Echo (2003). McDermid also addresses the region’s recent history, with
the community rivalries and bitterness of the 1980s miners’ strike supplying a vital strand in the
narrative of A Darker Domain (2008). Contemporary issues, such as the Syrian civil war and the
plight of migrants are raised in Out of Bounds, but this novel also discloses the ‘hidden ways’ of
Edinburgh (McDermid 2016, p. 19). Along these partly reclaimed weedy tracks at the edge of
Leith, Pirie tramps after nightfall. Here she makes contact with a group of Middle-Eastern refu-
gees and resolves to alleviate the harsh conditions in which they exist, their presence unguessed
at by the tourist throngs on the Royal Mile. Pirie proves a refreshing female lead. Plainspoken,
a little overweight and with bad hair, she is as tough as Rebus or Laidlaw, but quick witted
enough to rein in her frustration when handling the obstructive superiors with whom fictional
detectives traditionally are saddled. ACC Markie is a particularly satisfying creation of this
type – a female boss, glamorous and poisonous in equal measure.
With Glasgow and Edinburgh perhaps over-populated with fictional crime fighters, Stuart
MacBride chose his home city of Aberdeen as territory for DI Logan McRae (Smith 2013). MacBride
gives incidental shape and substance to the city, alluding briefly to the docks, the Torry district, or
the Marischal College and the characteristically inclement weather. ‘It was pissing down outside’,
we learn at the outset of the investigation in Cold Granite, and there is little relief until the conclu-
sion (MacBride 2005, p. 2). Bolstered with humour as black as the crimes committed, these are
police procedurals in a decidedly hard-boiled, even sensationalist tradition. Corpse mutilation,
serial rape, nose severing and torture all feature in the series, while the femmes fatales of the classic
noir era are traded for a ‘ball breaking’ female officer (MacBride 2019, p. 17). All That’s Dead
(2019) involves the abduction of a politically unionist university academic. Near the conclusion a
character remarks, ‘I want a Scotland of the Enlightenment; a nation of fairness and equality […]
A nation that welcomes everyone: aye, even the English […]. What I don’t want is some sort of apart-
heid shitehole’ (MacBride 2019, pp. 427–428). In a series which does not shrink from portraying
immoderate violence this seems a plea for moderation, at least in the independence debate.
Highlands and Islands
While its climate may not reach the extreme levels of Scandi-noir territory on the North Sea rim,
Scotland has sufficient remote island communities, peninsular regions and wilderness environ-
ments for writers to people with murderers and their crime-fighting nemeses. J.D. Kirk’s multi-
volume series featuring DCI Jack Logan and beginning with A Litter of Bones (2019) is one such,
in which Kirk, a master of suspense, sites disturbing and gruesome crimes in magnificent,
untameable landscapes of mountain, moorland and loch. Douglas Skelton’s Thunder Bay (2019),
featuring the investigative journalist Rebecca Connolly is similarly set in sublime territory
which provides cover for shocking crimes of violence, such as an earlier era’s practice of conceal-
ing illegitimate pregnancies with the drowning-murder of the babies on delivery (Skelton 2019,
p. 280). In Highland Fling (2020) Sarah Sheridan takes her Cold War era sleuth Mirabelle Bevan
on a Scottish excursion far from her usual zone in Brighton. The Russian émigrés, blackmailers
and Communist plots she encounters are linked to two murders in a Scottish country house, situ-
ated in stunning, mountainous terrain. Sometimes unjustifiably patronised as ‘cosy crime’, the
refined period tone of Sheridan’s work is unusual in the canon of contemporary Scottish crime
fiction and bears comparison with the novels of a distinguished Scottish crime writer of the
Golden Age, Josephine Tey.
The majority of writers here discussed position their narratives within a genuine, though
partly fictionalised geography. Denzil Meyrick’s DCI Daley series, beginning with Whisky from
Small Glasses (2012) unfolds on the Kintyre Peninsula, but Meyrick alters placenames so that
Kinloch, the main town, in many respects replicates Campbeltown yet can diverge from it if
required. Since early times Kintyre has experienced invasion and inward migration – the Irish
Scoti, the Vikings, Druids and evangelising Christian saints have all left traces or memories
on the Peninsula and are recalled in Meyrick’s narratives. The area is within sight of Ulster’s
north-eastern shore, a proximity alluded to as Meyrick delineates his district’s inlets and sea-
scapes and the intricate surrounding network of lochs and outlying islands. This is a geography
that criminals can exploit.
At first Kinloch reminds Daley of Paisley a generation ago. A local, couthy ethos is effected
through recurring characters such as the formidable Annie who runs the hotel bar in no nonsense
style: ‘Aye, an whoot’s wrong wi’ a’ yous? […] Jeest get back tae yer conversations’ (Meyrick 2012
[2015], loc. 992). She employs broad Scots, since this Highland district is unusual in being
home to a sizeable Scots-speaking population in addition to Gaelic speakers. Entertained with
whisky, gentle humour, nostalgia, vernacular language, and at least one resident who has the
second sight, the reader might almost believe herself on ‘kailyard’ ground, were it not for the
grisly murders, as soul-sickening as any in the sensationalist strand, that call for the investigative
skills of Daley and his foul-mouthed, decent-hearted sidekick DS Brian Scott. Crimes include
contemporary institutional corruption, drug running and a Viking-style execution by slow
asphyxiation (Meyrick 2016, p. 114). Daley himself is portrayed as suffering from the emotional
strains of the job, and he has the customary difficult marriage. Meyrick’s narratives, and those of
several other crime writers, allude also to the changing landscape of policework as regional
forces, Strathclyde, Grampian, Lothian and Borders et al, merge to become Police Scotland.
Some of the most compelling works of crime fiction have been sited in Scottish island com-
munities. Barbara Pezzotti, exploring Mediterranean scenarios, succinctly explains why an island
makes an ideal scene of crime:
The sense of mystery it generates is a vital element for crime fiction. Moreover, an island provides a
crime writer with a small community where many of the inhabitants are interrelated, where secrets
are deeply hidden, and from which a quick escape can be physically difficult or impossible.
(Pezzotti 2012, p. 125)
Allan Martin’s Inspector Angus Blue novels, set on Islay and Jura, begin with The Peat Dead
(2019) and the discovery of bodies hidden since the Second World War. The series reminds the
reader of island history and social structures – the close connection to the Kirk, the inter-related
families, the migration of island young people, and the flourishing high-end trade in whisky.
The series, authored in the era of Brexit and of Scottish independence aspirations, expresses
distrust of the British establishment through its presentation of overbearing Special Branch
officers (Martin 2020), and suspicions of Westminster government plans to encroach on the
autonomy of Scottish institutions (Martin 2019, p. 30).
The Orkney Islands do not, at the time of writing, have a resident fictional detective, though
writers including Allan Guthrie, Lin Anderson and Doug Johnston have set novels, or parts of
novels within this cluster. Most recently Margaret Kirk’s DI Lukas Mahler, from her relatively
new Inverness based series, is sent to Orkney for an investigation eerily permeated with folklore
and links to the occult. Kirk skilfully deploys desolate locations away from the capital Kirkwall
and tourist sites for unsettling effect: ‘there’s an odd, overlooked kind of feel to the place that Etta
can’t explain, one that makes you glance over your shoulder if you walk down to the shore’
(Kirk 2021, p. 14). Still further north, the Shetland Islands are, in the physical sense, the closest
to a Nordic Noir environment that one can find in the British archipelago. It is an environment
distinct in itself and also varied. The islands are linked by a sophisticated system of ferries, inter-
nal flights and pelagic vessels which visitors must decode; and when moving around the cluster,
hearing residents speak the Shetlandic form of Scots, the visitor grows aware of subtle alterations
in prosodics and pronunciation even though the distances between communities are small.
Anne Cleeves, creator of DI Jimmy Perez who is based in Lerwick on Shetland Mainland, experi-
enced island life while working as a cook in the bird observatory on Fair Isle. She describes her books
as ‘traditional crime fiction’ with ‘a murder at the beginning of the book, a limited number of sus-
pects and a resolution’. Key interests for her within this framework are ‘families, the effect of place
on character’ (Dudman 2010). Over the course of an eight volume series she sites murders through-
out the islands, communicating something of the cluster’s diverse character. Perez has a personal
story which develops in tandem with his investigations. Uncompromising, but compassionate and
self-critical, he enjoys the respect of his staff and the islanders, though they think of him as a little
apart – as ‘the detective from Fair Isle’. This, the most isolated island in the chain, is where Perez
grew up, where his parents live and the place to which he briefly considers returning for a traditional
crofting life. Cleeves has skilfully crossed his detective persona with some attributes of a Romantic
fiction hero; reflective, sometimes conflicted, tough but fundamentally kind, his relationships are
broken due to misfortune or the intrusion of criminal violence, not to a maverick’s selfishness.
The narratives are woven around the islands’ topography, history, legends, and social calendar.
Much of the action in Raven Black (2006) occurs as the Lerwick community prepares for and
participates in the spectacular Up Helly Aa festival. Thin Air (2014) melds investigation of the
suspicious death of a wedding guest on Unst with rumoured sightings of a ghostly drowned
child. The springtime-set Red Bones (2009) depicts an archaeological dig on the sparsely popu-
lated island of Whalsay and recalls the islands’ fifteenth-century role within the Hanseatic trad-
ing network, implicitly challenging twenty-first-century and metropolitan assumptions about
‘important’ places. Blue Lightning (2010), last in the first Shetland quartet,1 takes Perez and his
partner to Fair Isle, the setting for several killings. It is a place of extremes where the night-time
views of Sumburgh lighthouse, far across the dark seascape, reinforce a sense of isolation and
vulnerability. This is not a scenario in which any detective would wish to be trapped without
back up while an unidentified murderer is at large.
Shetland is also the setting for Marsali Taylor’s sailing mysteries in which the central char-
acter Cass Lynch, skipper of the small ship Khalida, makes an unusual investigator of capital
crimes, being neither a detective nor a journalist. Indeed, due to the disappearance of her lover
at sea – a traumatic incident in her past – and to her propensity for stumbling across murder
victims, in the early novels she is at times a potential suspect. As a character in a recent book tells
her, ‘You’ve got a reputation […] You’re the girl that murder follows’ (Taylor 2020, p. 135).
Cass’s first person narrative reveals an engaging heroine; plucky and independent, she refuses to
conform to gendered expectations. Love of the islands’ sea-washed shores and of sailing are the
keys to her character, along with her Catholic faith.
Through Cass’s sailing life, the novels strongly signal the islands’ identity, rooted in their
centuries-old relationship with ‘the seas and oceans as a “space of connection and communica-
tion” rather than as boundaries and borders between distinct national spaces’ (Brannigan, quoted
in Campbell 2019, p. 167). In the first book Cass sails from Bergen home to Brae on Mainland,
tracing an ancient sea route between Norway and the islands; a later novel briefly memorialises
Shetland’s support of Norwegian resistance and the fabled ‘Shetland bus’ during the Second
World War. Cass’s journey seems a type of odyssey, a momentous homecoming as, from the per-
spective of the voyager, the islands take on epic proportions:
I began to see a faint mistiness on the horizon, which thickened to a shape […] From here Shetland
seemed one island, over a hundred miles long, curving up at the south to the high cliffs of Sumburgh
Head and rising again to Hermaness at the north.
(Taylor 2014, p. 24)
Later books explore an apparent eerie revival of local traditions of witchcraft, or take up the
recurring island theme of family secrets which emerge in the wake of a suspicious death. Without
losing pace, Taylor reminds the reader every so often of the islands’ spell-binding loveliness:
I stood on the forehatch for a moment, breathing in the sweet air, filled with the green of grass, the
seaweed uncovered by the falling tide, the salt of sea-encrusted rock. This was country Shetland […]
the cluster of houses tucked in behind the headland, their window-squares shining gold in the dusk.
(Taylor 2016, loc. 528–536)
Since crime is general all over Scotland this, rather than mean streets, is the patch Cass must
negotiate.
Writing of ‘the peculiarity and inscrutability of Sardinian culture’ that emerges in the detec-
tive novels of Marcello Fois, Barbara Pezzotti notes the numerous references to the past in his
Sardinian trilogy, and argues that thanks to the narrator ‘Sardinia retains a typical function of
space as a “landscape of memory”’ (Pezzotti 2012, pp.149, 156). Similarly, Peter May’s Hebridean
trilogy, centred on Lewis, weaves the discrete history, memories and customs of island culture
into his contemporary narrative, confirming that here the past is never really over and done with.
In the first novel, The Blackhouse (2011), DI Fin Macleod travels from Edinburgh to investigate
a murder on Lewis, the island home he had left 18 years previously. His returner impressions
acquaint the reader with life there as he recalls it, but also underline how external forces are
encroaching on traditional ways. Lewis is the most northerly of Scotland’s western isles, a Gaeltacht
district, separated from the mainland by the notorious Minch. Arriving by small commercial air-
craft, Macleod observes familiar-seeming terrain – slate-grey seas, bogland, a treeless, windswept
wilderness. On the ground every location or individual triggers a memory. Macleod remembers
scavenging on the seashore with his crofter father and recalls the island’s drystone, chimneyless
blackhouses, a key symbol of close-knit, indigenous life. He thinks of his first schooldays when,
only able to communicate in Gaelic, he was shamed in class for his ignorance of spoken English.
Once in the capital Stornoway, however, the changes wrought by modernity intrigue him – a spar-
kling new ferry terminal renders the old pier neglected; Gaelic is supported and encouraged in the
education system; the authority of the Free Church has receded, and along with it rigid
Sabbatarianism.
May’s narrative conjures the ‘mysterious and ethereal’ beauty of the islands and the ancient
seas, nowhere more so than when Macleod, in the trilogy’s second volume, drives south from
Lewis. The prose is not merely decorative; it serves to underscore Macleod’s troubled cast of
mind, while the journey also signifies his quest for truths hidden within unresolved mysteries
and unhappy memories of times long past. Having made a ferry crossing over the Sound of
Harris he passes along a system of bridging causeways through Berneray, the Uists, ‘the barren
moonscape that was Benbecula’ and on to Eriskay. The mist, the mirror-like seas, cast a solemn
spell. North Uist is gloomy, with its ‘skeletons of long-abandoned homes’, ‘brooding sky’ and
‘inhospitable bogland’, but on South Uist his spirits lift at the sight of the ‘fertile plains’ of the
machair, sandy soil characteristic of the coastal areas of the Western Isles (May 2012, pp. 251–254).
Though fecund and life-supporting, the machair signifies the islands’ liminality, edged by the
shifting ocean. Fragile and gradually being reclaimed by the sea (May 2011, prelim page), it is
hardly secure as a symbol of hope.
May, an accomplished storyteller and one time co-writer of the Gaelic ‘soap opera’ Machair,
comprehensively evokes island life, expertly incorporating hidden, shameful episodes from his
characters’ pasts, or from Scotland’s social history. These include accounts of ‘homers’, children
sent with the blessing of the church from local authority homes to island families. Many were
used as unpaid labour and many were abused (May 2012, pp. 304–305). Nor does the term
‘crime fiction’ on its own appear adequate to categorise these novels. Though resolution of crimes
is absolutely central to all three, geology, topography, religion, folklore and pre-history are skil-
fully integrated within the narratives. The tales are as pacey, well-plotted and characterful as
Buchan’s, Stevenson’s or Crockett’s, works in a classic, popular fiction tradition. A striking ‘set
piece’ in the first novel is the chronicle of the guga hunt – a yearly harvest of young gannets from
the barren rock of Sula Sgeir, rising far out in the wild Atlantic. In Macleod’s recollections the
expedition becomes a rite of passage, a traditional male bonding ritual disrupted by a shocking
twist in events. It makes a supremely edgy read.
The Bloody Scotland (Anderson et al. 2017) anthology, in which crime writers set short stories
at iconic locations from Orkney to Edinburgh, points directly to the significance of place in
Scottish crime fiction. This chapter has sought to elucidate further how places have been deployed
imaginatively by a succession of, mainly, Scottish writers of crime fiction set in Scotland, and to
show how this trend has contributed to understanding of the nation’s various identities, associ-
ated with its physical regions. Scottish island-set crime fiction, in particular, imparts an impres-
sion of landscapes and cultures that are unique, connected only tenuously with the Central Belt
and its cities. Undoubtedly the crime fiction genre endorses, promotes and celebrates a Scotland
that, far from being ‘small’, seems indeed ‘multiform’, and, in the opportunities it affords crime
writers, ‘infinite’ (MacDiarmid 2006, p. 424).
Note
1 The novels in the first Shetland quartet are inspired

by the seasons in rotation; the second four by the
elements – water, air, earth and fire.
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Mackay, M. (2013, 2014, 2015). The Glasgow Trilogy: The Rankin, I. (2013). Saints of the Shadow Bible. London: Orion.
Necessary Death of Lewis Winter; How a Gunman Says Rankin, I. (2020). A Song for the Dark Times, (Kindle Fire
Goodbye, The Sudden Arrival of Violence (Kindle Fire edn. 2020). London: Orion.
edns.). London: Pan Books. Russell, C. (2009). Lennox, (Kindle Fire edn. 2019).
Martin, A. (2019). The Peat Dead, (Kindle Fire edn.). London: Constable.
Edinburgh: ThunderPoint Publishing. Sheridan, S. (2020). Highland Fling, (Kindle Fire edn.).
Martin, A. (2020). The Dead of Jura, (Kindle Fire edn.). London: Constable.
Edinburgh: ThunderPoint Publishing. Simpson, P. (2010). Noir and the psycho thriller. In: A
May, P. (2011). The Blackhouse. London: Quercus Publishing. Companion to Crime Fiction (ed. C.J. Rzepa and L.
May, P. (2012). The Lewis Man. London: Quercus Horsley), 187–197. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Publishing. Skelton, D. (2019). Thunder Bay. Edinburgh: Polygon
McDermid, V. (2003). The Distant Echo, (Kindle Fire edn. [Birlinn].
2018). London: HarperCollins. Smith, M. (2013). No matter what you write, people are
McDermid, V. (2008). A Darker Domain, (Kindle Fire always going to do worse things. Glasgow Herald
edn.). London: HarperCollins. (14 January). https://www.heraldscotland.com/life_style/
McDermid, V. (2016). Out of Bounds, (Kindle Fire edn.). arts_ents/13088005.no-matter-write-people-always-
London: Little, Brown. going-worse-things/ (accessed 14 October 2022).
McIlvanney, W. (1977). Laidlaw, (Kindle Fire edn. 2013). Taylor, M. (2012). Death on a Longship, (Kindle edn.
Edinburgh: Canongate Books. 2014). Abercynon: Accent Press.
McIlvanney, W. (1983). The Papers of Tony Veitch, (Kindle Taylor, M. (2014). A Handful of Ash, (Kindle edn.).
Fire edn. 2013). Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Abercynon: Accent Press.
McIlvanney, W. (1991). Strange Loyalties, (Kindle Fire Taylor, M. (2016). Ghosts of the Vikings, (Kindle Fire edn.).
edn. 2013). Edinburgh: Canongate. Abercynon: Accent Press.
McIlvanney, L. (2018). The Quaker, (Kindle Fire edn.). Taylor, M. (2020). Death from a Shetland Cliff, (Kindle
London: HarperCollins. Fire edn.). London: Headline Accent.
Meyrick, D. (2012). Whisky from Small Glasses, (Kindle Welsh, L. (2002). The Cutting Room. Edinburgh:
Fire, revised edn. 2015). Edinburgh: Polygon [Birlinn]. Canongate Books.
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edn.). Edinburgh: Polygon [Birlinn]. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
Mina, D. (2017). The Long Drop, (Kindle Fire edn.). Williams, R. (1973). The Country and the City, (reprint,
London: Harville Secker. 2011). Nottingham: The Russell Press.
22
Children’s Literature
Sarah M. Dunnigan
English Literature, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
‘Tell us a real giant story, Mammy,’ said Horace.

And don't let it be a story that can be explained,’ added Tom.
‘But don't let it have a moral at the end,’ remarked Stephen.
‘It mustn't end sadly,’ pleaded Charlie.
– So this was what she told them.
Jessie Saxby, Snow-Dreams, or, Funny fancies
for little folks (1882)
As acknowledged by the child protagonists of Jessie Saxby’s ‘The Giant’s Pie’, part of a collection
of children’s stories published by the prolific Shetlandic writer,1 there are many ways to tell a
story. So too, their responses imply, are there diverse ways of absorbing a story, emotionally and
cognitively. Of course, this holds true of readers of all ages; but Saxby’s example highlights in
miniature the profound reach and formative power of storytelling on the hearts and minds of
young people. This is important to bear in mind as we navigate a preliminary path in this chap-
ter through the history of children’s literature in Scotland. Writers, educationalists, and moral-
ists from the early modern period to the present, in vastly different ways, have acknowledged the
variety of impactful effects which stories and words can have, and often in conflicting ways − the
soul and morality of young readers was a contested issue in the historical emergence of children’s
literature. It has also been a site for the projection of cultural dreams and fears, a vessel for the
expression of national identities, perhaps most famously seen in the little book of fairy tales first
published in Germany in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm and its legacy. In short, children’s litera-
ture matters.
It is all the more surprising, then, that writing for children and young people, and the idea of
children’s literary cultures more broadly, have not been especially visible in Scottish critical

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c22.indd 09:37:44
n arratives, however much there is ample recognition of justly famous and loved children’s clas-
sics, such as Treasure Island, Peter Pan, and The Wind in the Willows, which occupy a starry place
in the global context of children’s literature. Their creators, the Scottish writers Robert Louis
Stevenson, J.M. Barrie, and Kenneth Grahame, acquired complex, shifting cultural identities.
Their stories of pirates, fairies, and amphibians can be traced to a rich mix of Scottish childhood
influences, British and European literary, folkloric heritage, and their own imaginative singu-
larities. Absorbed into anglicised, global histories of children’s literature, these texts have shed
their Scottish skins. Similarly, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is the children’s fantasy story
(1997–2008) which became a global, multi-modal franchise, its ‘Scottishness’ now commodified
in terms of Edinburgh and Highland cultural heritage.2 Despite this, the notion of a distinctive
Scottish tradition culture of children’s literature, and acknowledgement of Scottish writers
beyond these canonical figures who have imagined diverse literary worlds for young people, has
not taken firm critical root. Significant work to redress these omissions has been done by Maureen
Farrell, Fiona McCulloch, and Kirsten Connor,3 but this remains a critical map whose cartogra-
phies remain to be charted in detail. The present essay offers a summative outline of the histori-
cal emergence of children’s literature in Scotland. It begins by suggesting some historical seeds
of development in medieval and early modern literature, and in chapbook culture which offers a
richly variegated seam of popular reading material for children and young people. It then consid-
ers the emergence of the principal genres of children’s literature from the nineteenth century
onwards, including adventure fiction, fairy tale and fantasy, moral realism, and poetry. It is also
important to acknowledge that Scottish publishing houses left a deep imprint on the history of
educational and religious literature for children (such as Edinburgh’s Thomas Nelson, and Oliver &
Boyd), and their catalogues offer a fascinating insight into changes in popularity and taste in the
history of children’s books.4 Adaptations and editions of Walter Scott for children also became a
staple of educational classroom and home-reading for children from the mid-nineteenth to early
twentieth centuries, with Robert Cadell’s Readings for the Young from the Works of Sir Walter Scott
(first published in three volumes in 1849).5
It is vital to acknowledge that any such overview or holistic narrative is criss-crossed by a vari-
ety of contingencies. Children and young people’s access to literary culture is mediated by inter-
secting identities of age, class, gender, and race; these, in turn, profoundly impact on literacy and
reading competencies, and raise challenging questions of social and cultural accessibility. We
should also be mindful of the varieties of its transmission, and that the printed, literary materials
with which this chapter is broadly concerned can only present a partial picture of how children
and young people came to stories (and, indeed, continue to do so). Children have always entered
diverse story worlds through listening to tales, rhymes, lullabies, anecdotes, jokes, and so on, told
by their caregivers; in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they would hear some of
these performed from chapbooks (discussed in more detail below) at markets and fairs as well as
in household settings. The division between oral and print worlds is, however, fragile; a mutually
enriching process can exist between both, as chapbooks exemplify, and a crossover of influence has
always existed between literary fairytale writers and folkloric culture. It is necessary, too, to
observe how children’s literature also bridges another divide in its frequent synthesis between
word and image; from the earliest picture-books, the importance of illustration is vital, as well as
the very materiality of the books themselves which can perform a sensory, haptic function.
As always, given the multi-lingual contexts of Scottish culture, the question of language
medium and choice in the emergence of, and indeed current situation of, children’s literature is
crucial. The tragic suppression of the Gaelic language as a medium of education after the 1872
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Chapter No.: 42 Title Name: <TITLENAME> c22.indd
Children’s Literature 273
Education (Scotland) Act, and the punitive measures taken against children who spoke their
language in this context, had devastating and far-reaching consequences, both within the educa-
tional system itself and in terms of the sustainability and development of a written Gaelic
children’s literature. With the reinstatement of Scottish Gaelic language education in the 1980s
and its present resurgence, the situation in terms of children’s books in Gaelic has changed dras-
tically. Sìm Innes and Kate Mathis have explored how some writers associated with the turn-of-
the-century Scottish Celtic Revival composed plays and other literature, in both Gaelic and
English, for children, drawn largely from the heroic traditions of the Fionn and Ulster cycle, but
much further work in this field is necessary.6 In terms of Scots-language writing for children, the
impact of the Reformation, and the radical influence of its spiritual and educational ideals,
ensured a linguistic bias towards Anglicisation, and the earliest printed instructional literature
(discussed below in more detail) survives in English. This homogeneity is modulated, however,
with the Romantic and nineteenth-century rediscovery of oral and folk culture materials, and a
sense of both the political and affective potentialities of Scots and its varieties. In the contempo-
rary literary and storytelling scene, as we shall see, Scots is securely established as a dynamic,
flexible medium for children’s book and oral cultures.
The final qualification to be made relates to the very concept of ‘children’s literature’ for, as a
recognised genre or category, it is delicate, shifting, and historically contingent.7 The idea of a
literature explicitly or exclusively for children emerged as a slow, organic process, often depend-
ent on practical expediencies of publication and marketability (as is arguably the case now). It is
a problematic field, not just in terms of definition, but with respect to questions of cultural
agency and appropriation. By and large, it is the grown-ups who write children’s books and who
exert (at least a degree of) control over their cultural lives. And for ‘children’s literature’ to exist,
the very notion of ‘the child’, and the concept of ‘childhood’ itself, had first to come into being,
both culturally and imaginatively. From the seventeenth century onwards, at least in British and
Western European cultures, there was a gradual, and sometimes fraught, recognition of chil-
dren’s distinctive emotional, moral, spiritual, and intellectual needs – the recognition of their
separate, autonomous ‘personhood’, however much we would now not perceive it as a child-
centred perspective.8 In creating our critical narratives of children’s literature, then, we should
be mindful that there is no such unitary idea of the historical ‘child reader’; They existed in all
their experiential diversity behind the imagined reader, sometimes idealised, often chastised in
these early texts. Any form of ‘top-down’, historical-cultural survey inevitably diminishes the
sheer vitality of a book -the diversity of responses it elicits, as described in the little extract from
Saxby – when experienced by, or held in the hands of, a child.
Beginnings to Early Nineteenth Century
When does children’s literature begin in Scotland? If we ask when did the first books explicitly
intended for children and young people appear, then we might cite one of the earliest educational
hornbooks, such as the one published by the printer Edward Raban in Aberdeen in 1622.9 Before
the availability of cheap paper production, pedagogical and instructional material – alphabets,
basic spelling and numeracy, the Lord’s Prayer − was made using a leaf of paper mounted on
board and covered with a sheet of protective cattle horn; the resulting object was then held or
attached to a child’s belt or worn round the neck, supposedly for accessibility.10 In terms of
imaginative literature, we might cite Robert Henryson’s Morall Fabillis, circulating in manuscript
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and, by inference, in oral circulation from the late fifteenth century, and first printed in an edi-
tion of 1571. Adaptations of Aesop’s collection of moralised animal tales are widely regarded as
one of the earliest instructional texts in medieval Europe. Henryson’s extended, lively, and often
comedic vernacular versions might have offered a source of both ‘merie sport’ and ‘sweit sentence’
for medieval Scottish children. If we cast our net wider to include texts which have young people
as subjects of representation, then medieval literature offers some interesting examples, ranging
from infancy to adolescence. William Dunbar’s bleak poetic litany of death’s powers, familiarly
known as Lament for the Makaris [Lament for the Poets], shows us ‘the bab full of benignite’ [the
baby full of goodness] lying at his ‘moderis breast sowkand’ [sucking at his mother’s breast] – a
fragile symbol of mortal innocence which has echoes of the portrayal of youth in memento mori and
emblematic traditions. The strong Marian lyric tradition in late medieval Scots poetry evokes
adoration both of the Christ-child, and the maternal love of the Virgin Mary. There are directly
instructional and didactic texts. The Spectakle of Luf (1492), for example, ascribed to one ‘M.G.
Myll’, offers a fierce litany of advice to the young male reader, an echo-chamber of the standard
warnings, caveats, and expedient advice of medieval antifeminism. Another, much lengthier
‘father-son’ dialogue exists in medieval Scots literature, the anonymous Ratis Raving (c. late fifteenth
century). Its prologue portrays a more curious and compassionate interest in childhood.
Maturation is seen as natural and organic as the growth of a tree as the text portrays the develop-
mental potentiality of each stage in the young life-cycle (from birth to three years old; and from
three years to seven), and includes a rather beautiful elaboration of child’s play:
Sa lang havis child wyl alwaye

With fluris for to Jap and playe;
With stikis, and with spalys small
To byge up chalmer, spens and hall;
To mak a wicht horss of a wand;
Of brokin breid a schip saland;
A bunwed tyll a burly spere;
And of a seg a swerd of were;
A cumly lady of a clout;
(Girvan 1939, p. 32
[ll.1128–1136])
For a long time a child will always play with flowers/With sticks, and with small twigs/To build a bed-
room, pantry, and hall/To make a strong horse out of a slender branch/or a sailing ship out of a piece of
broken bread/A ragwort [makes for] a fiercesome spear/And a sedge a sword for war/A lovely lady [ie a
doll] out of a cloth
Dolls, ships, swords, and the like grow out of the most ordinary everyday things. Naturally,
given such creativity, the child’s day, the poem, acknowledges, is quite filled up; but there is no
sense that this is not part of that ‘tree-like’, natural growth. These are activities which do not
expressly nurture ‘gud Judgment’ (Girvan 1939, l. 1143) but exemplify the young child’s capac-
ity for curiosity and inventiveness, for making and discovering ‘play’. Child protagonists also
appear in the late fourteenth-century Scots collection of saints’ lives. This is partly because of the
close generic affinities between saint’s life and romance (and folktale too). Children are the agents
of separation and reunion between families; longed for by childless kings and queens; or unwanted
and cast off to sea in a casket to be fostered elsewhere. These provide suggestive affective moments
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in a popular genre which might have been heard by children and young people, along with those
fables, parables, ballads, and stories which formed a continuum of oral culture between home,
church, and other sites of communality in the Middle Ages.
By and large, however, imaginative literature was seen as undesirable by the arbiters and
institutions of mainstream culture; its very fictionality made it morally problematic. ‘When
thou canst read, read no Ballads or foolish Books’, cautioned Thomas White in his A Little Book
for Little Children (1660). Famously, the seventeenth-century Scottish divine, Zachary Boyd, was
horrified that ‘their schools and country were stained, yea pestered, with idle books, and their
children fed on fables, love-songs, baudry ballads, heathen husks, youth’s poison’ (Harvey 1903,
p. 23). In terms of print culture, Scotland reflects England and Europe in terms of the predomi-
nance of works of religious instruction -books explicitly designed to care for the welfare of a
child’s soul, and these largely belong to Protestant reformed traditions. In the later seventeenth
century, for example, such ‘soul-reading’ might consist of a little book of prayers, adapted and
moulded for a younger audience. Certain texts which did not start out life as necessarily a child’s
or young person’s book became staples of the early reading canon, for example, The Pilgrim’s
Progress by the English Puritan writer, John Bunyan, was printed copiously in abbreviated and
specially adapted editions for children, meaning that spiritual and moral salvation could -quite
literally -always be very close to hand. Another hugely popular work was the collection known
as the Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715) by the Dissenting
English minister and hymn writer, Isaac Watts (1811) (and later parodied by Lewis Carroll in
Alice in Wonderland). These verses, often devised in the first person, enabled children to praise the
divine creator; to ask forgiveness for ‘our childish rage’; or learn from the hard-working labours
of ‘emmots’ [ants]. There was also advice aplenty for parents on how best to take care of their
child’s soul. Such parental ‘advice manuals’ included John Witherspoon’s popular Religious
Education of Children, a version of a sermon preached in ‘New York on the 2nd Sabbath in
May 1789’ by the Ayrshire-born Presbyterian minister.
Even in later eighteenth-century instructional and educational writing for children, spiritual
intent and warning was never far away. In Easy Lessons for Children, published in Glasgow in
1799, as Valentina Bold points out, the diligent schoolchild must also be morally and spiritually
literate; failure to be so results in fairly terrifying consequences – ‘He minds that his book shall
have praise, but he that will not earn must feel the rod’ (quoted in Bold 2019, p. 55). In this later
period, however, Scottish writers provided a strong vein of didactic, instructional literature.
These often took the form of extended versions of conduct books, such as the hugely influential
and widely published A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1761) by John Gregory (1724–1773),
Scottish Enlightenment physician, moralist, and philosopher. Originally conceived as private
instruction to his daughters after his wife’s death, it was published by Gregory’s son in 1771.
A lengthy expression of ‘paternal tenderness and vigilance’, its cornerstone is the value of ‘pro-
priety’ in all aspects of a young woman’s spiritual, moral, and emotional navigation of the world -
a conservative ideology famously challenged by Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the
Rights of Women (1792). Another influential contemporary of Gregory was the Aberdeenshire-
born William Fordyce Mavor (1758–1837) whose instructional works for young women pro-
vided a template for middle- class female morality, variously reflected in the work of
eighteenth-century Scottish women writers such as Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton, and
Susan Ferrier (Anderson and Riddell 1997, p. 180). The Belfast-born Hamilton (who came to
Scotland as a child to live with her aunt after her father’s death) was herself an educationalist with
an interest in young female education, shaped by her Scottish-Irish Presbyterian upbringing.11
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Debates about the education of young people, especially adolescent girls, continued, as Rhona
Brown has shown, in the Scottish periodical press in the 1780s and 90s which increasingly ques-
tioned the rigidity of prescribed social and educational morality.12
The final major stand of literature for children and young people to be discussed in this
section comes from chapbook culture which flourished in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Chapbooks were a form of cheap, accessible print. Produced from publishing houses in
London, Newcastle, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, but also in smaller, regional centres such as
Montrose, Dumfries, and Ayr, these small books, constructed from both single and multi-sheets
of paper folded over, made for portable material objects.13 So much a part of ordinary ‘household’
life, they were available to buy from the ‘baskets’ of itinerant chapmen at fairs and markets,
along with a whole plethora of little household items, as Walter Scott memorably puts it, such
‘[needles, thimbles, pins, buttons, tapes, ribbons…combs, knives scissors and various knick
knacks]’ (Cowan and Paterson 2007, p. 14).14 Chapbooks contained an eclectic, diverse range of
material, often drawn from oral culture such as folktales, comic narratives, satire, bawdry, leg-
end, drinking songs, seafaring ballads, and occult folklore. Kirsten Connor and Valentina Bold’s
work on Scottish children’s chapbooks implies that there was not an extensive separate chapbook
tradition for children, though the firm of James Lumsden & Son in Glasgow developed their own
specific imprint of children’s chapbooks or ‘juvenile books’.15 In the early nineteenth century,
they produced, for example, ephemera known as ‘lotteries’ or more popularly ‘dabbities’ which
were sheets of children’s illustrations or pictures, plain or coloured, forming part of a children’s
game.16 The visual dimension of chapbooks as a whole – they were frequently illustrated, often
in woodcut style -combined with their circulation in the domestic sphere suggests both their
accessibility and appeal to children. Instructional material in the shape of religious hymns,
prayers, and popular catechisms was available in chapbook form but so, too, was popular litera-
ture. The earliest known chapbook in Scotland appears to be a 1682 Edinburgh imprint of Tom
Thumb his life and death (Cowan and Paterson 2007, p. 22). This derives from the earliest known
version of the story in English, ascribed to Richard Johnson (1573–1659?), and places the min-
iaturesque hero in Fairyland and at the court of King Arthur. Indeed, fairytale narratives com-
pose a significant part of British and Scottish chapbook content. Drawn from the classical
Western fairytale canon, and in particular early modern French culture, abridgements of
Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots abound, along with individual tales abridged
from the One Thousand and One Nights. There are also examples from vernacular folktale tradition,
such as the Jack cycle of tales, and folk hero tales such as Lothian Tom, a comic, trickster or
prankster figure, a sharp-witted conman, and subsequently appears in later nineteenth-century
tale collections such as George Douglas’s Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales.
Expansion and Development – the 1800s Onwards
Nineteenth-century Scottish literature expands and enriches the genre of ‘adventure stories for
young folks’, to use R.M. Ballantyne’s phrase. Ballantyne is one of its most famous and popular
exponents, and along with Robert Louis Stevenson (whom he deeply inspired), and J.M. Barrie,
shared a fascination with the transgressive alterity of pirates, maritime romance, and the play-
grounds of ‘exotic’ islands – all of which formed a backdrop for the adventures in masculinity
that made their writing so popular. Written while he stayed on a house in Burntisland,
Ballantyne’s The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean, was first published by the major Scottish
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publishing house for children, Thomas Nelson & Sons, in 1857. The tale of three boys marooned
on a South Pacific island, survivors of a shipwreck, espouses a dream of Christian colonialist
empire as they create their new ‘home’ with muscular creativity, resourcefulness, and violence (it
influenced William Golding’s Lord of the Flies).17 It is a strangely hybrid text, a jarring blend of
pseudo-ethnography, botany, piety, and politics along with some dream-like surrealist sequences
of the island’s beauty, akin to George MacDonald’s nature worlds. Fifteen-year-old Ralph Rover
is also a compelling narrator of this journey to, and exile from, ’Paradise’: ’I was a boy when
I went through the wonderful adventures herein set down. With the memory of my boyish feel-
ings strong upon me, I present my book specially to boys, in the earnest hope that they may
derive valuable information, much pleasure, great profit, and unbounded amusement from its
pages’ (Ballantyne 1884). That same voice of young masculinity is vividly captured in Jim
Hawkins’ narration in Stevenson’s Treasure Island. First serialised in the journal Young Folks in
1881–2, under the pseudonym ‘Captain George North’, later published in 1883 by Cassell and
Company, Stevenson had written: ‘If this don’t fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since
my day. Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it begins in the Admiral
Benbow public house on the Devon coast, that it’s all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny
and a derelict ship’ (Booth and Mehew, 1994‑95, pp. 3 : 125). Without a trace of evangelical
moralism, Treasure Island is expansively and joyfully transgressive.
Of these two deeply popular boys’ adventure stories, Stevenson’s remains the most alive and
celebrated today, spawning a plethora of multi-media adaptations, including film, graphic novel,
and theatre production appealing to ‘cross-over’ young person and adult audiences. But Scotland’s
role in the success of the ‘boys’ own adventure story’, was also enabled by a woman writer, Jessie
Saxby, the Shetland-born writer with whom this essay began. Saxby was astute in the way she
carved out the trajectory of her writing career, swiftly realising the commercial potential of boys’
popular adventure stories in a marketplace in which children’s fiction was partly segregated by
gender. Saxby was clearly conscious of the ideological allure of Empire and Frontier in the boys’
fiction market. One of her novels alludes to the ’romance-hallowed regions of Robinson Crusoe
and Mungo Park’ (Saxby 1887, p. 127) and the Boys Own Paper, in which Saxby regularly pub-
lished, was partly ‘stimulated’ by real-life accounts of the explorers Mungo Park and David
Livingstone. But Saxby’s boys’ stories are singular because her boy-heroes mostly navigate the
terrain and topography of the Shetland archipelago. Their masculinity is tested and formed by
encounters with whales and other wild-sea creatures; with navigating the wild seas, crags and
reefs of the island archipelagos. Being a Shetlandic boy-hero also involves connecting with a
distinctive Viking heritage. In Viking Boys (1892), the 15-year-old Yaspar dreams of ’the olden
days, when his native Isles were the haunts of Vikinger, whose ships were for ever winging their
way over those waters bearing the spoils of many a stormy fight’ (Saxby 1892, p. 1). Saxby’s fic-
tions have their lineage in the Victorian fascination for the Vikings.18 The romance and ideology
of ‘old northernism’, in which the ancient Norse kingdoms of Shetland and Orkney play a special
part, takes root in Yaspar’s fascination for the men, and their culture, who once upon a time
inhabited his islands. Saxby’s boys’ fiction has its own distinctive matrix of masculinity, fuelled
by the ideologies of empire, war, romance, and a fusion of ‘British’ values, ‘northern-ness’, and
evangelical Christianity.
Religion, especially evangelicalism, significantly drives the growth of moralistic, realist
fiction-writing for children throughout the century – a mode in which women writers are espe-
cially prolific. This brand of religious moralism ensured the relative popularity of this fiction
amongst a family reading public at whom a wealth of Sunday School magazines, religious society
c22.indd 277 10-25-2023 09:37:44

publications and journals were newly aimed; but it has also eclipsed these writers from main-
stream literary history. Grace Kennedy (1782–1825), Ayrshire-born but resident in Edinburgh
most of her life, creates some of the earliest strongly moralistic and socially conservative fiction,
such as Anna Ross: A Story for Children (1824), where the titular orphaned heroine undergoes a
coming-of-age full of worldly temptation, only to be welcomed by a new and safely devout sur-
rogate family at the end. Many of these fictions are strongly female-centred, imaginatively trans-
posing contemporary cultural and social anxieties around young women’s maturation processes
into religious morality tales, as exemplified in the fiction of Mary Gordon (Mrs Disney Leith)
(1840–1926).19 Many women were writing socially aware and politically engaged work. One of
the most interesting and prolific was the Edinburgh writer Robina F. Hardy (1835–1891) whose
work with the city’s desperately poor and disenfranchised communities led to a series of novels
(such as Jock Halliday: A Grassmarket Hero [1883]), portraying lives of hardship through a child-
centred perspective. A strong social and cultural activism was the energy behind the work of
writers such as Isabella Fyvie Mayo (1843–1914), who also published under the pseudonym,
’Edward Garrett’; Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929); and Henrietta Keddie (1827–1914). As Lois
Burke has recently shown,20 the work of these writers (articles, stories, poetry, often with an
educational focus) in popular journals and periodicals such as The Young Woman fostered a sup-
portive dialogue with the young, creatively aspiring women and girls who wrote to them, engag-
ing with shifting cultural ideals of young femininity at the fin-de-siècle.
Yet the genre which arguably dominates nineteenth and early twentieth-century Scottish
children’s literature is fantasy, in all its varieties, whether immersive, portal quest, intrusive, or
liminal fantasy, to use Sara Mendlesohn’s fourfold definition. Its popularity bridges back both to
the prominence of fairytale material in chapbook culture and to Robert Chambers whose collec-
tion includes vernacular Märchen, folktales with magical content (for example, ’Rashin-Coatie’, a
Scots version of the Cinderella cycle). In her relatively well-known novel, Holiday House. A Book
for the Young (1839), Catherine Sinclair (1800–1864) presents two innovatively curious and diso-
bedient children. Mid-way through its realist narrative, Laura and Harry listen to ‘Uncle David’s
Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies’, a comically grotesque, pseudo-moral fairy tale in
which Master No-book is educated through an encounter with two rival fairies who respectively
tempt children through virtue or moral decadence.
In his famous essay ‘The Fantastic Imagination’, George MacDonald (1824–1905), the
Aberdeenshire-born writer and profound influence on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, argued for
the radical power and spiritual beauty of fairy tales, delineating how their meaning unfolds
organically and non-prescriptively in both child and adult readers for each belongs on the same
emotional and intellectual continuum.21 His stories are often laced with humour, as in The Light
Princess with its self-referential witch and mockery of contemporary science and materialism.
Influenced by German Romanticism and Christian spirituality, MacDonald’s fairy stories adum-
brate the redemptive, cathartic journeys of dream and imagination but they are unafraid to take
children into complex other worlds. At the Back of the North Wind presents us with the child
Diamond’s death but it differs from the maudlin piety of other contemporary presentations. The
tree in the northland which Diamond climbs to see the people he loves back home is a tender
symbol of the inseparability of the living and the dead, a vision of death for children which is
religiously informed yet symbolically redolent of cyclical fairytale processes of death and rebirth.
A little-known volume of fairy tales by Mona Noel Paton (1860–1928), Two Old Tales Retold
(1889) retells two well-known narratives, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, from the earlier French conte des
fées culture, and ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, from vernacular folkloric traditions. The daughter of
c22.indd 278 10-25-2023 09:37:44

Joseph Noel Paton, the renowned fairy painter (Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald were
frequent visitors to her childhood home in Edinburgh’s George Square), her reinvented tales
demonstrate how the mode offered women writers in particular capaciously magical worlds in
which the impossible and the transgressive might be realised. With marginal embellishments in
neo-Celtic design, Paton’s tellings are laced with quirkiness and humour; her narrator takes
delight in describing the ‘weird regions’ of their Jack tale, and views the machinations of erotic
desire in a tolerant and compassionate way. ‘People do not need to be quite good for one to love
them,’ her Beauty character decides at one point. The world of fairy tales, then, gifted the bohe-
mian Paton with an expressive, indeed ‘experimental’, means of articulating desire, interweaving
the boundaries between child and adult readerships.22
By the turn of the century, Andrew Lang’s series of Fairy Books had secured a permanent
place in the children’s Christmas gift-book market whilst his own writing for children
included The Gold of Fairnilee (1888).p. 280, a post-Flodden Borders fairy quest narrative with
child protagonists.23 Scottish folk and fairy tales were infused with new creative energy from
the Celtic Revival which, in turn, influenced children’s literature. Traditional ballad collec-
tions designed for young readers appeared, such as Mary MacGregor’s volume, illustrated by
the artist Katherine Cameron, Stories from the Ballads told to the Children (1910); Louie
Chisholm’s Celtic Tales Told to the Children (1910);24 and Elizabeth Grierson’s The Scottish Fairy
Book (1910), illustrated by the Welsh artist, Morris Meredith Williams. Scotland’s most
enduring fantastical creation, and a staple of children’s pantomime, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan
appeared in the early decades of the twentieth century in several different incarnations (for
example, children’s story; fairy play). Barrie’s story is multi-faceted – a fable of nostalgia,
enchantment, freedom; a bricolage of European and North American literary influence with
roots in traditional Scottish fairy lore; a dark allegory of loss; and, for Jacqueline Rose famously,
an embodiment of ‘the impossibility’ of children’s literature itself (Rose 1984). This period
also saw the publication of Violet Jacob’s fairy tales for children, The Golden Heart, and other
Stories, as well as Jessie Saxby’s northern, Scandinavian-inspired stories.25 Fantasy’s roots extend
deep into children’s literature mid-to late-century. Naomi Mitchison’s The Big House (1950)
is a powerful example of postwar children’s fantasy, sensitively interweaving Scottish history
(especially Gaelic culture) and folklore with a compelling narrative dynamic which traces the
efforts of two wartime Highland children to rescue fairyland’s captives.26 Mid-century, Eric
Linklater published The Pirates in the Deep Blue Sea. A Story for Children (1965), a Stevensonian-
inspired, Hebridean-inflected boys’ adventure story transposed to an energetically fantastical
sea-world. In the prolific work of Mollie Hunter (1922–2012), children’s fantasy expands its
historical, mythic, and folkloric reach. In The Two Fiddlers (1974) and Pictures in the Cave
(1977), George Mackay Brown’s Orcadian and folkloric-inspired children’s stories evoke
MacDonald’s mode of spiritualised, symbolic fantasy.27
Such diversity and range in fiction should not obscure the importance of Victorian verse cul-
ture for children, a radically neglected area which Kirstie Blair has recently brought to light.28
Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, first published in 1885 and movingly dedicated to his
nurse, Alison Cunningham, is much loved, evoking the psychological imagination of childhood’s
liminal, dream-like spaces, with an Andersen-like sensitivity to play-worlds.29 But there is a
significant vernacular poetic tradition which begins with Robert Chambers’ publication, Fireside
Rhymes in 1826, reissued extensively thereafter. Shaped by the legacy of the Romantic folk
revival, the volume’s section, ‘Rhymes of the Nursery’ collates both oral and written materials,
with commentary and annotation.
c22.indd 279 10-25-2023 09:37:44

‘The Wee Wifie

Tune – The Rock and the wee pickle Tow
There was a wee wifie row't up in a blanket

Nineteen times as hie as the moon;
And what did she there I canna declare,
For in her oxter she bure the sun.’
(Chambers 1842, p.36)
Chambers’ work has been viewed as part of a problematic tradition of ’infantilising’ vernacular
folk culture, though such an assumption runs the risk of denigrating the idea of children’s liter-
ary culture itself. Though its intended reader is adult rather than child, it still opens a window
onto a living tradition of children’s folk-play and culture in Scots. This is sustained and devel-
oped in the widely popular publications, Songs for the Nursery (Glasgow, 1844) and Whistle-Binkie
or The Piper of the Party (Being a Collection of Songs for the Social Circle) (Glasgow, 1878), including
poems and rhymes by James Ballantine, William Miller, and Alex Rodger, which reflect working-
class oral traditions. This vein of Scots rhymes and songs were negatively viewed and dismissed
by the exclusive intellectual agendas of Modernist Renaissance poets such as MacDiarmid. Yet,
as Blair describes it, much of this material is ‘innovative, lively, linguistically playful, and radi-
cal’ (Blair 2019, p. 96). Lyrics such as Miller’s ’Williewinkie’ (not usually known in its entirety)
and ‘Gree, Bairnies, Gree!’, with their distinctive verbal and structural energies, portray the
chaos and tenderness within domestic worlds, the mirrored vulnerabilities of both child and par-
ent as captured in lullaby form, and a shared and inclusive cultural identity. This is a legacy
which continues into the twentieth century with the collaborative folkloric and illustrative work
of William and Norah Montgomerie. Their anthology, Scottish Nursery Rhymes, first published by
The Hogarth Press in 1946, is an extensive collection of children’s vernacular song and rhyme,
thematically organised, frequently with provenance of place:
‘Easter
Monday’s the Fast,
And I’ll be daft,
And I’ll be dressed in blue,
Wi reid ribbons roon ma waist,
An sweeties in ma moo.
Dundee’
(Montgomerie &
Montgomerie 1985, p. 75)
William Soutar’s volume of ‘bairnsangs’, Seeds in the Wind (1933), represents another kind of
vernacular experimentalism which tenderly evokes ideas of rootedness and home. The collec-
tion’s power and radicalism tends to be underestimated. Echoes of Chambers, Stevenson, and
Miller, of children’s folk rhyme, play, and culture, breathe through the dense aural soundscapes
of Soutar’s poems. The lyrics resonate with invitation and collectivity – ‘[c]ome oot an’ see’
‘Baukie -the bat’ ‘[a]ttour the lum the wee, broon baest/Gangs loupin’, laichlie as a ghaist’
(Soutar, p. 28) – but also a sense of the metaphysical poignancy and wonder of a child’s vision.30
In this essay, I have focussed on the major genres of Scottish children’s literature, and traced
their historical development from the late Middle Ages to the late twentieth-century. It has only
c22.indd 280 10-25-2023 09:37:44

been a survey, pointing to some significant writers, modes, and texts, but implying a wealth of
scope for further research. The vitality of a culture is measured by its present moment, and litera-
ture for children and young people in contemporary Scotland is rich in its diversity. Publishing
houses such as Floris Books, dedicated to children’s literature, produce new editions and retell-
ings of Scottish myth, legend, and folktale, such as Lari Don’s The Tale of Tam Linn (2014).
Duncan Williamson’s Fireside Tales of the Traveller Children remains in print (as does the
Montgomeries’ Scottish Nursery Rhymes and Folktales). The Itchy Coo publishing imprint, co-
created by the writers Matthew Fitt and James Robertson in 2002 (and partly inspired by
William Soutar) in collaboration with Black & Whyte Publishing, has produced a diverse range
of books for children and young people in Scots, including translations of Robert Burns,
J.K. Rowling, Julia Donaldson, and traditional fairy tales, and Susan Rennie’s Wee Animal ABC:
A Scots Alphabet.31 It also involved inclusive outreach and engagement with school pupils, and
support for, and input into, the teaching practice of Scots language in primary and secondary
education settings. The live storytelling scene is dynamic, including practitioners who offer
plays, spoken-word sessions, and taletelling in a variety of settings, including outdoor spaces
which are often therapeutically designed.
Writing for young adults (YA fiction) is especially strong in Scotland. Fantasy in particular,
bleeding into other genres such as fairy tale, Gothic, utopia and dystopia, cyberpunk, and magical
realism, represents a diversity of experience. As Fiona McCulloch has extensively argued,32 it pro-
vides a powerful symbolic conduit for the exploration of alternative political visions, sexualities,
and ways of emotional being. Fiction by writers such as Ely Percy, Sylvia Hehir, and Ross Sayers,
imagine queer characters, lives, and spaces, with the potential to offer powerful models of identity,
recognition, and belonging for LGBTQIA-plus young people. In the collection, Wain: LGBT
Reimaginings of Scottish Folktales (2019), Rachel Plummer and the artist Helene Boppert, take
inspiration from the pluralistic, metamorphic figures and otherworlds of Scottish myth and fairy-
lore. Jackie Kay’s first novel for children, Strawgirl, tells the tender story of ‘Maybe’ Macpherson,
a girl of mixed-race heritage growing up on a Highland farm who has to cope with her father’s
sudden death and her mother’s grief, as well as bullying and isolation. These multiple, intersect-
ing experiences of loneliness and otherness are gradually healed by her relationship with the ‘girl
made entirely of straw’, whom she meets one day, with the eyes ‘the colour of crab apples or hazel-
nuts’ (Kay 2002, pp. 62, 66). Series such as Julia Bertagna’s fantasy trilogy, beginning with Exodus
in 2002, portrays the human cost of environmental catastrophe in the displaced peoples and refu-
gees who fill the texts’ underworlds.33 Its horror lies not just in its representation of a futuristic
technological dystopia, which atomises its people’s lives and shreds meaningful communication,
but in exposure of its fear and hatred of the dispossessed and powerless, of anyone or anything
which appears other. Prescient, and more timely than ever, Bertagna’s fiction (and those by other
YA writers such as Ross MacKenzie) also offer hope. The principal heroine, Mara Bell, is strong;
her journey suggests that acts of individual resistance, collective struggle, and a recognition of the
ties of kinship which bind us to each other, and to the earth, light a way forward.
Contemporary writing, then, imagines ways of being young which are sensitive, inclusive,
and pluralistic. This brief historical survey has shown, that ‘nearness’, or otherwise, to a child’s
world has been realised in various ways, shaped by a range of artistic, moral, and ideological
concerns. It was noted at the essay’s start that historically children’s access to books -to a printed
world of literary heritage -was not universal but mediated by a variety of contingent material
circumstances and intersectional questions of culture, ‘power’, and accessibility. In the present
moment, a cost-of-living crisis, an ever-widening poverty and educational attainment gap, and
c22.indd 281 10-25-2023 09:37:45

sustained cuts to the educational and library sectors mean that children’s equality of access to
books – and story culture in all its forms – is desperately uneven. At its best, literature for chil-
dren and young people both exemplifies, and nurtures, the power of empathy – imaginative
experiencing of other lives, other emotions, with all the opportunities for identification and
recognition of difference that affords. But for that to happen, we need both the heritage and
contemporary vitality of Scottish children’s literature to be there for all young readers.
Notes
1 On Saxby, see Smith 2004 and Smith 2014. also produced, most often of 24 pages’ (Cowan and
2 For reasons of word limit and focus, this essay does Paterson 2007, p. 12).
not discuss Rowling’s series but there is an extensive 14 Cowan and Paterson also mention Crockett and
body of critical work; Heilman 2009 remains a use- Barrie and their nostalgic reflections on their boy-
ful starting point. hood reading of chapbooks (pp. 20–2).
3 See, for example, Farrell 2006, 2009; McCulloch 2016; 15 See Roscoe and Brimmel 1981.
Connor 2010; Alison and Renton 2003; Dunnigan 16 See https://www.nls.uk/collections/rare-b ooks/
and Lai 2019. collections/childrens-books/. Thepictures were cut
4 See further Potter 2007; Hagen 2019. out and placed separately between the pages of a
5 Barnaby 2019 makes the fascinating point about book. Tickets were then sold to the child’s playmates
suggests the potential for young people’s emotional and the lottery drawn by opening the book at the
identification with ‘Scott’s heroes’ [who] are page corresponding to the number on the ticket’.
essentially children, unable to act of their own 17 For criticism, see Ayyildiz 2018.
volition’ (p. 37). 18 See further Wawn 2000.
6 See Innes and Mathis 2019. 19 See further Powney and Mitchell 2019.
7 For a recent, helpful overview on concepts of chil- 20 See Burke 2022.
dren’s literature in a huge and diverse scholarly field, 21 There is an extensive critical literature on MacDonald,
see Beauvais and Nikolaijeva 2017. but for helpful overview and perspective see MacLachlan,
8 Ariès 1973 is the classic study, but has been subse- Pazdziora and Stelle 2013.
quently challenged and updated; for example, 22 See further Dunnigan 2017.
Redford 2016. On concepts of childhood and youth 23 See further Hines 2012, 2013.
in a Scottish historical context, see the landmark col- 24 See further Mathis, 2020.
lections by Ewan and Nugent 2008, 2016. 25 See further Dunnigan 2019.
9 For a digitised image and brief account, see 26 See further Burgess 2008.
‘The Spread of Scottish Printing’, National 27 See further Bicket 2011.
Library of Scotland’, https://digital.nls.uk/printing/ 28 See further Blair 2019.
title/74482002. 29 See especially Reid 2010.
10 For a digitised image and further information, see ‘A 30 See the beautifully republished edition by Hubbard
child’s hornbook’, National Library of Scotland, and Cant 1999. On Soutar (1999), see further https://
https://www.nls.uk/collections/rise-o f-l iteracy/ www.williamsoutar.com/index.html; for criticism on
hornbook. Soutar, see Pruger 1998.
11 See Hamilton 2010 and Perkins 2010. 31 See further http://www.itchy-coo.com/index.html.
12 See further Brown 2019. 32 See McCulloch 2016.
13 ‘Chapbooks […] were typically of 8 pages -made 33 Julia Bertagna, Exodus (London: Young Picador,
from one sheet of paper, printed on both sides and 2002); Zenith (London: Young Picador, 2007); Aurora
folded twice – but a good many larger books were (London: Macmillan Children’s, 2011).
c22.indd 282 10-25-2023 09:37:45

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23
Scottish Drama and Theatre
Ian Brown
Department of Scottish Literature, Glasgow University, Scotland
Department of Drama, Kingston University, London, UK
Recent scholarship has given the lie to the miserablist myth that drama and theatre were sup-
pressed in Scotland for centuries after the 1560 Reformation. Certainly, playhouse theatre as a mode
was relatively late in development in Scotland, appearing intermittently – chiefly in Edinburgh –
in the later seventeenth century before developing throughout the country by the end of the eight-
eenth. To define Scottish drama –participation – and theatre – spectating – only in playhouse
terms, with its need, generally, for a critical mass of urban population and, until the nineteenth
century in Scotland, its relatively narrow socio-economic base is to miss much. Scottish popular
theatre and, more generally, folk drama was widespread from centuries before the Reformation as
was the employment of performativity and theatricality in ceremonial public events. These included
royal progresses, especially with regard to entries into towns, as assertions and enactments of hier-
archy and power. Further, drama before, but more particularly after, the Reformation was fostered
in schools (Durkan 2013, passim): classical plays or occasional pieces by masters were performed at
least annually for local magistrates, ministers and, sometimes, patrons on festive or end-of-school-
year occasions. As modern productions by Edward’s Boys, based in Shakespeare’s Stratford alma
mater, demonstrate, such performances can achieve high professional standards.
While the first Scottish performer/actor whose name we know is Peter/Padraig, Robert the
Bruce’s (r. 1306–1329) jester (Maloney 2006, p. 142), whose memory reminds us that a recur-
rent feature of Scottish drama and theatre is the centrality of performers as opposed to play-
wrights, there was a wide range of earlier folk and religious drama. In 1226, for example,
Dumbarton received
the right to hold an annual fair of eight days duration on the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the
Baptist (24 June) [where] communal entertainments revolved around ‘ludi’ – loosely ‘games, or
‘play’ – quasi-dramatic folk festivities that originally celebrated the old pagan rituals of the spring

Scottish Drama and Theatre 287
and winter. Depending on local custom in different parts of the country, these took on a variety of
different forms and elements, from processions, pageant, tableau and role-play to dance, song, mime
and storytelling, and probably constituted the roots of Scottish drama
(Maloney 2006, p. 142).
Meantime, Bill Findlay identifies most frequent mention of festivities celebrating seasonal
change in fifteenth and sixteenth century records (Findlay 1998, p. 3). In one such manifesta-
tion, a mock king was elected with responsibility for organising the ‘May play’, sometimes called
the ‘May game’. In this, people performed in costumes, usually with musicians accompanying.
Another such folk-drama involved the figure of Robin Hood. Findlay suggests this may be
linked to the Fool who officiated in fertility rites, identifying over 17 sites across Scotland where
such plays took place, including Perth, where on 26 June 1503 James IV sponsored a perfor-
mance (Findlay 1998, pp. 3–4). Although after the Reformation there was censorship of theo-
logical content, Kirk Sessions required drama production in schools to continue. Meanwhile, as
late as 1599, a Glasgow decree required compulsory attendance at a play on Corpus Christi Day
(sixty days after Easter), suggesting to Findlay continuity with medieval tradition ‘even though
that tradition was by then near to extinction’ (Findlay 1998, p. 15).
Ceremonial performance and public enactment were other lively dramatic traditions. John
McGavin highlights a semantic issue important to be aware of in discussing the history of
Scottish theatre
Early Scottish use of the word ‘theatre’ is usually humanist and does not occur before the sixteenth
century. It applies to ancient theatres […and] is not a word in common use in those records which tell
us about actual performances. […] The usual term used at the time for activities we would now define
as ‘theatre’ was ‘play’, and ‘playing place’ is used by Gavin Douglas as the Scots term for a theatre.
(McGavin 2007, p. 2)
McGavin draws attention to a confluence of public ceremonial with its flavour of folk-drama and
potential for socio-political dispute when he cites the example of John Pill of Aberdeen. Pill ‘refused
in 1524 to take part in the town’s Candlemas procession in which he was expected to carry the sign of
his craft, a representation of tailor’s shears’ (McGavin 2007, p. 19). Pill’s recalcitrance was shared by
the majority of the town’s guildsmen who apparently either did not turn up for the ceremony or
turned up but, like Pill, refused to participate with their craft symbols. The grounds for this appear
to be that they perceived carrying the signs not a mark of craft pride, but of subservience in the town
hierarchy to tradesmen. For his refusal to perform, Pill was obliged to do full penance in church bare-
foot, bareheaded and carrying the sign of his craft, in what McGavin calls ‘a public display of social
subordination’ (McGavin 2007, p. 20). McGavin explores such examples of theatricality marking
social standing or protest even earlier. Such enactments extended to the highest authority, whether in
the processions in due rank-order at Scottish Parliament openings, arguably first stage-managed in
early-modern format in the 1520s by David Lindsay (1490–1555), actor-poet-playwright and Lord
Lyon King at Arms, or royal entries to towns. Henry Anderson (fl. 1576–?1627) included reference
to explicit theatrical performance in his Latin panegyric on James VI’s June 1580 entry to Perth.
Quid amoena theatra

innumeris foecunda jocus?
(Reid and McOmish 2020, p. 132)
[What delightful theatres abounding in innumerable jokes?]
Anderson’s Latin composition reminds us that, for many centuries, Latin was as much a language
of Scottish literary composition as Gaelic, Scots or English. Indeed, Scotland’s arguably greatest
playwright, certainly most internationally influential, George Buchanan (1506–1582) wrote at
least four plays in Latin. Besides his two Latin translations of Greek tragedies, his original
Senecan tragedies, Baptistes and Jephthes, first performed by his students around 1540 when he
was based in Bordeaux, were key influences in the development of seventeenth century French
neo-classical drama by Corneille and Racine and had long-term Europe-wide impact, being pro-
duced, for example, in Poland for three centuries.
If Buchanan is arguably father of modern European playwriting, his use of Latin, making his
work in his time widely accessible, now limits his accessibility, as does the tendency of his plays
written in Scotland to be for specific court occasions, like the christening of James VI. When
Buchanan writes these, he joins a long tradition of court drama, often with political impact. In
1285, during the wedding feast at Jedburgh for Alexander III and his second wife, Yolande, the
celebrations were dramatically interrupted by ‘ane ymage of ane dede man, nakitt of flesche & lyre
[skin], with bair banys [bones]’ (Findlay 1998, p. 32), a memento mori performance, while on
Good Friday 1535 John Kyllour’s Historye of Christis Passioun was performed on the Stirling play-
field (of course, playfields were common throughout Scotland) in front of King, Court and towns-
people. When questioning of the Catholic church’s role was growing, the religious leaders
condemning Christ were presented as reflecting contemporary clergy. For this, the Catholic hierar-
chy hunted Kyllour down: in 1539, by order of Cardinal Beaton, he was burned in Edinburgh.
Arguably the most dangerous period to be engaged in drama in Scotland was not under a later
Calvinist Kirk, but in the years preceding the 1560 Reformation. Yet, in 1540 James V encouraged
David Lindsay, his childhood mentor, to write an Interlude presented at Linlithgow to the assembled
court which satirised religious and civic corruption. Lindsay developed these themes, writing Ane
Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, performed in playfields at Cupar in 1552 and, before the dowager Queen,
in Edinburgh in 1554. Lindsay, a senior courtier, was protected, but James Wedderburn (c. 1495–
1553), whose plays satirising the clergy, including Beheading of Johne the Baptist and Historie of
Dyonisius the Tyranne, were performed on Dundee’s playfield around 1540, perforce fled to France to
avoid persecution, where he died in 1553. In 1555, after Lindsay’s death, not only was his Satyre
publicly burned, but the pre-Reformation parliament banned theatre, an Act repealed only after
the Reformation which is so often claimed to have been theatre’s enemy.
The court of Mary, Queen of Scots, was entertained by plays and dramatic performances
besides Buchanan’s pièces d’occasion: Philotus, modelled on the classic comedy trope of the old man
wooing and failing to win a young woman, may have been written by Robert Sempill (c. 1530–
1595) and possibly performed in 1567 to celebrate a marriage at court (Reid-Baxter 2002,
pp. 52–68). James VI’s court was also theatrical, featuring masques in which Queen Anna,
whom he married in 1589, performed and at least one of which he wrote. It is thought unlikely
that John Burel’s (fl. 1590) sexually cynical Pamphilus, speakand of lufe was played at court, but
James would have had access to it as closet drama, when it was published in 1590/91. By the
time Philotus reached publication in 1603, the theatre-loving James was moving to London,
where one of his first acts was to adopt the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, led by William Shakespeare
and Richard Burbage, as his King’s Men. The absence of Scots-language court-sponsored drama
that ensued has been argued as a loss to Scottish theatre. At the same time, the importance of
drama in the education of young members of the elite remained.as did, as we have seen, varieties
of folk drama. Further, in the Gàidhealtachd, a strong tradition of folk drama was developing
which complemented the communal performances embedded in the cèilidh (Newton 2011,
pp. 41–46). In other words, drama flourished outside of the playhouse in Scotland in the first
part of the seventeenth century at least until the Cromwellian suppression of Scottish autonomy
in the 1650s. Yet, even in 1659, Aberdeen Town Council actually required quarterly school visi-
tations where various classical or renaissance pieces were played.
The Restoration initiated a version of Scottish court theatre that gradually evolved into its
modern tradition of playhouse theatre when, by 1662, the Scottish nobility patronised the Tennis
Court Theatre in the grounds of Holyroodhouse (which under Cromwell had been run down),
protecting it, in the context of the Stuart post-Restoration settlement, from church or civic hos-
tility. In 1663 the advocate William Clark’s (fl. 1663–1699?) Marciano, or The Discovery, the first
post-Restoration play written in Scotland, was performed. The preface to its published text
relates the Crown’s Restoration to the theatre’s, attacking the ‘hell-hounds, assassinats of our
liberties [who] snatch’d the very reins of Government [… and voted] down all Scenick Playes
[… to suffer] in the same sentence with Monarchy’ (Clark 1663, pp. 5–6). However, while the
Kirk encouraged drama of certain kinds, such court-sponsored theatre represented to many, well
into the 1700s, a restored, forsworn, religiously oppressive, class-bound, above all Episcopalian,
enemy. Thomas Sydserf or St Serfe, (fl. 1667–1669?), the Bishop of Galloway’s son, a royalist
who fought under Montrose, managed an acting company based in Edinburgh which performed
intermittently through the 1670s. Meanwhile, during 1679–1682 the Catholic Duke of York
(the future James VII/II) took up residence at Holyrood. Between 1671 and 1678, this palace
had under Sir William Bruce’s design been massively expanded – again asserting the triumphant
Restoration – to the architectural form we now know, set in the grand amphitheatre between
Arthur’s Seat and Calton Hill. York encouraged masques and plays, bringing over a company of
Irish actors for a time; in 1681 his daughter Anne, later Queen, appeared in Nathaniel Lee’s
Mithridates, King of Pontus before him and his entourage (Findlay 1998, pp. 68–71). Such theatri-
cal activity as the Killing Time began can only have reinforced any Presbyterian sense that court-
theatre was suspect. Indeed, until the late 1700s, Scottish drama’s regular background was recent
civil turmoil and cultural conflict.
Other outlets for Scottish dramatists existed. One was the London stage, even if it was tightly
controlled. Sydserf’s Tarugo’s Wiles appeared there in 1667, before its 1668 Edinburgh première.
Other writers of Scottish Restoration drama include Catherine Trotter (1679–1749), David
Crawford (1665–1726), and Newburgh Hamilton (1691–1761). The latter two wrote comedies,
while Trotter’s plays are mainly tragedies, including her lively political verse-drama The Revolution
in Sweden (1706). Plays also circulated in the form of closet drama, outside Master of the Revels
control and designed for private performance. One such, Archibald Pitcairne’s (1652–1713)
The Assembly (1692), unpublished until 1722, lambasts the General Assembly’s pedantry and
obscurantism in both Williamite and Jacobite sectarianism. Mocking presbyterian hypocrisy, it
is remarkably frank about perceived ministerial lechery.
Following James VII’s 1688 deposition and William’s arrival – whether invitee or effectively
invader with a Dutch army of 20 000 – drama, public or closet, remained a lively part of politico-
religious debate. Under the Williamite settlement, there was a lull in playhouse theatre, although
none in other forms of drama: public performance of school drama, for example, continued. In
1711, Aberdeen Town Council actually required a public theatre to ‘be erected in some publict
place of the toune, as the counsell shall think fit and there some publict action to be acted by the
schollars of the said school’ (McKenzie 1955, p. 104). Jack McKenzie demonstrates similar pro-
ductions were widespread, citing Dalkeith, Dumfries, Dundee, Dunkeld, Forfar, Forres, Glasgow,
Haddington, Hamilton, Kirkcaldy, Lanark, Leith, Montrose, North Berwick, Paisley, Perth and
Selkirk. Even a small village like Lundie in the Gowrie, produced its play: in 1688, a pivotal
year, Dunkeld Presbytery suspended the master, William Bouok, for ‘acting a comoedie wherein
he mad a mock of religious duties and ordinances’ (McKenzie 1955, p. 106). Here the issue was
not theatre’s morality, but its use to challenge establishment values. Unsurprisingly, after school,
student-players continued acting at Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities, sometimes,
as in Edinburgh in 1681, in theatro publico and occasionally controversially. In 1720 university
authorities opposed Glasgow students’ desire to play Tamerlane [probably Nicholas Rowe’s 1701
play], especially men’s dressing as women. The students resisted; some masters supported them;
permission to perform, but not on university premises, was finally allowed; the performance hap-
pened on 30 December in – naturally! – the Grammar School (McKenzie 1955, pp. 106–107).
In 1715, an Irish playhouse company visited Edinburgh and Carrubber’s Close Theatre was
established there as a musical, acrobatic and comedy venue; in 1725, under the aegis of Allan
Ramsay (1686–1758), the English actor Anthony Aston was welcomed by council and social
élite, not only as an actor, but as a tutor in newly-‘polite’ anglicised speech. By 1727, however,
he faced attack – moral from the Kirk and financial from creditors – decamping in April 1728.
Nonetheless, in that October the Edinburgh Company of Players, having a Royal Patent so that
throughout ‘their stay in Edinburgh, the company never had the least difficulty with either the
magistrates or the Church’ (Campbell 1996, p. 8), began playing regular seasons in the Taylor’s
Hall, later also touring Dundee, Montrose, Aberdeen, Newcastle and Scarborough. In this
period, Ramsay’s importance in theatrical developments was central. Against anglicising mod-
els, he wrote in Scots for the stage, publishing an early version of The Gentle Shepherd (1725).
1728 saw his Some Few Hints, in Defence of Dramatical Entertainments, where he defended
‘Dramatick Actions […] which in all Ages and Nations, have always been esteem’d the most
noble and improving Diversions’ (Ramsay 1728, p. 2). As a significant animateur, he sold tick-
ets for the Edinburgh Company through his bookshop, employing marketing innovations like
season tickets and two-for-one offers. His The Gentle Shepherd has pro-Stuart/Jacobite, anti-
Whig/Calvinist hints as it tells of exile, disguise, true love, honour and order’s restoration and
is best-known now in the version performed by Haddington Grammar School boys, directed by
their master, his friend, John Leslie. Marking the seriousness with which such performers must
have been taken in their time, highlighting a creative relationship between school drama and
professional stage, they premièred the full version in Taylor’s Hall, the Edinburgh Players’ pro-
fessional venue. The play became ‘the most popular pastoral in eighteenth century British thea-
tre’ (Scullion 1998, p. 93). This example suggests only one way in which, in combination with
rural and community drama, masters like Leslie developed a seedbed for eighteen century
Scotland’s theatre. In 1730, besides promoting the Edinburgh Players, Ramsay organised visits
of London companies.
When the Players lost their Patent, folding in 1736, Ramsay took over Carrubber’s Close
Theatre as home for his own permanent company, which included some Edinburgh Company
players. The prologue at its November opening proclaimed, ‘Long has it been the business of the
stage/To mend our manners, and reform the age’. The claim marked Ramsay’s continuing defence
of theatre’s moral value against any religious and civic opposition. After seven months, however,
Walpole’s 1737 Theatre Licencing Act forbidding buildings to present spoken drama without a
Royal Patent gave opponents a weapon. Ramsay’s theatre had, like others in Britain, to close.
Attempts to reopen in 1738 and 1739, perhaps because of magistrates’ nervousness of public
gatherings following the 1736 Porteous Riots, failed. Yet, a legal quibble allowed reopening. In
December 1739, after a concert of music, The Provok’d Husband was played ‘gratis’ as an afterpiece.
In December 1741, the precedent having being established, Thomas Este began presenting,
under the patronage of the Duke of Hamilton, concerts-and-‘gratis’-plays in Taylor’s Hall.
While these playhouse practices developed, the role was widespread of what Janet Sorensen
calls the spectacular performing body and dangerously embodied performance in constituting
alternative communities (Sorensen 2007, p. 135). This role, she suggests, was especially impor-
tant to Jacobite sympathisers. She identifies, for example, the Aberdeen-based long-lived ballad-
singer, Charles (‘Mussel-mou’d Charlie’) Leslie (c. 1667/77/87–1782) as travelling Scotland,
hawking ballad broadsheets and chapbooks. In turn, these would become central to community
performance which would also foreground ballads of the kind found in popular plays like The
Beggar’s Opera (1728) and recur in the nineteenth century National Drama.
Meantime, leading Scottish expatriate writers in other literary genres wrote for the English
stage, including James Thomson (1700–1748), David Mallet (Malloch; c. 1705–1765) and
Tobias Smollett (1721–1771). The baroque bravura of Thomson’s first play Sophonisba (1730)
was satirised, but his Agamemnon (1738) was better received by the party around Frederick,
Prince of Wales, the classical plot being comprehensible in terms of Hanoverian court politics.
Indeed, the Lord Chamberlain, given such power by Walpole in 1737, banned his Edward and
Leonora (1739) for its implied references to the royal family’s civil war, though it was published.
Mallet’s Eurydice (1731) was accused of being a coded Jacobite play and his next play, Mustapha
(1739), attacked by implication Walpole and the Queen’s encouragement of George II’s hostile
treatment of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Mallet (dialogue) and Thomson (lyrics) produced The
Masque of Alfred (1740) where the Anglo-Saxon hero emerges from disguise to drive out the
Danes. Concluding with Thomson’s ‘Rule Britannia’, sung in duet by Alfred and his queen
Eltruda and asserting Britain’s need to rule the waves rather than maintain Hanoverian concern
with the European mainland, its political significance (‘Rule’ is here a call to action) is clear.
Indeed, the proposed Drury Lane 9 February première was replaced by one at the Prince’s
Cliveden retreat on 1 and 2 August. Thomson soon achieved European fame with Tancred and
Sigismunda (1745), dedicated to Frederick and exploring tensions between public duty and per-
sonal fulfilment.
Such playhouse success by Scottish dramatists on the English, and even European, stage was
gradually reflected, despite continuing opposition from the Evangelical wing of the Kirk in
developments in Edinburgh. Under Thomas Este’s management and the Duke of Hamilton’s
patronage, the device of musical concert followed by gratis play was established in Taylor’s Hall
by visiting companies and soon by a resident company (Findlay 1998, p. 95). Sarah Ward, hav-
ing arrived around 1745, soon set up her own company and in November 1747 the new
Canongate ‘Concert Hall’ opened with Hamlet. The next year, the Taylor’s Hall company recon-
ciled and joined Ward’s company as she sought intermittently to develop a touring function –
not always successfully, facing, for example, Aberdonian magistrates’ opposition. Nonetheless,
the building became entitled Canongate Theatre, though the ‘gratis’ ploy remained necessary.
This was so even for the December 1756 première of minister of the progressive Moderate wing
of the Kirk John Home’s (1722–1808) Douglas. This had been nurtured – including through
what we now would call a ‘workshop’ – by Enlightenment figures, including his relative David
Hume, Hugh Blair and William Robertson, the last two Moderate ministers. The play had been
rejected for a London première by David Garrick, perhaps because its themes of secrecy, hidden
identity, betrayal, and social rebellion were still, post-Culloden, too sensitive. After its highly
successful Edinburgh launch, it was presented in London and proved a success Britain-wide for
well over a century: a playbill for the Theatre Royal Greenock for 10 January 1874 promotes this
‘great national tragedy’. Moderates overcame Evangelical attempts at the 1756 General Assembly
to excommunicate David Hume and there can be little doubt that Home’s play formed part of
mid-century culture wars between more and less liberal social views. In January 1757, the local
Presbytery censured ministers who attended the play, issuing an Admonition and Exhortation
declaring playhouses immoral. Such bluster had little real impact, censured ministers simply
apologising without further sanction and Home resigning his charge for a career in London thea-
tre. Edinburgh saw more and more theatre activity, some like Eleonore Cathcart, Lady Houston’s
(1720–1769) The Coquettes (1759) failing, while her cousin James Boswell’s (1740–1795) A View
of the Edinburgh Theatre during the Summer Season, 1759 is evidence of a busy production pro-
gramme. New Scottish plays emerged. Examples include John Baillie’s (fl. 1763) Patriotism
(1763), a political farce supporting Prime Minister Bute, Andrew Erskine’s (1740–1793) She’s
Not Him, and He’s Not Her (1764), a cross-dressing love farce, and John Wilson’s (fl. 1764) Earl
Douglas; or, Generosity Betray’d (1764), exploring political betrayal surrounding the 1440 Black
Dinner. Playwright Jean Marishall’s novel The History of Miss Clarinda Cathcart and Miss Fanny
Renton (1766) shows her heroines, having just arrived in Edinburgh, quickly ‘at the play’
(Marishall 1766, vol. 2, p. 162).
Such lively dramatic activity encouraged the granting within the 1767 Edinburgh’s New
Town Act of a patent for a Theatre Royal Edinburgh, a title the Canongate adopted until the
opening, at the north-east end of the North Bridge, of the new Theatre Royal on 9 January 1769.
Its first play by a Scot, The Prince of Tunis (1773) was by Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831), who,
among his work in other genres, wrote for both Edinburgh and London stages, including The
Shipwreck (1784) and Force of Fashion (1789), his first comedy. The Theatre Royal company in
Edinburgh and on tour presented many other plays by Scots, some romantic, some classical,
some historical, featuring figures like Mary Queen of Scots and William Wallace, and some, in
the new fashion, Ossianic. Its members encouraged developments outside the city, as George
Sutherland did the career of Archibald Maclaren (1755–1826) as actor-playwright, his plays
including The Highland Drover (1790) incorporating Gaelic dialogue, and the foundation of the
Theatre Royal Dumfries which opened in 1792. By 1800, there were nine permanent theatres
(Edinburgh [2] Aberdeen, Glasgow, Dundee, Dumfries, Paisley, Ayr, Greenock) spread through-
out Scotland, besides a lively touring and closet/community scene.
Poet-playwright Christian Carstairs’ (fl. 1780) The Hubble-Shue, published in 1780 and pos-
sibly written as a zany proto-absurdist closet drama for country-house performance, reminds us
of the importance of this genre. As Alasdair Cameron has pointed out, beside school and village
performance, amateur acting ‘amongst the upper and professional classes was very widespread in
the Lowlands in the eighteenth century. [… Small touring companies] could call on local actors
in most towns to perform parts in a play when, as often happened, there were not enough actors
to fill all the roles’ (Cameron 1987, p. 203). While Cameron also argues ‘Scots had little oppor-
tunity to train as actors [… when the repertoire] consisted of either declamatory tragedy or
verbal comedy, both of which put the Scot, with distinctive speech patterns, at a considerable
disadvantage’, by the 1790s, a Scottish actor like Henry Erskine Johnston (1775?–1845), ‘The
Scottish Roscius’, was a star north and south of the Border. Meantime, playwriting continued
developing: in 1798, Joanna Baillie’s (1762–1851) first volume of plays, often seen as closet
drama, though several were to be produced, was published. Her De Montfort (1800) follows
continental contemporaries like Schiller: it explores tragic issues of loyalty, duty, love and honour
in early-modern history, as does The Family Legend (1810) where Scottish clan rivalry is the
dramatic context. Modern critical consensus is that Baillie’s plays, like those of her friend
Walter Scott (1771–1832), are stilted, even given the period’s declamatory acting styles, but
that her published prefaces are fascinating explorations of theatrical theory and practice.
Eighteenth century Scottish theatrical development, as we have seen, was particularly dra-
matic and many eighteenth century dramatic elements shaped later Scottish theatre, not least the
playwriting, acting and management of the ‘National Drama’. Its fount is often seen as the early-
nineteenth century Theatre Royal Edinburgh. Certainly, this was a crucially important National
Drama promoter through both its in-house and touring productions and their frequent focus on
adapting Scott’s novels. Such was the impact of its Rob Roy adaptation and the actor Charles
Mackay’s playing Bailie Nicol Jarvie that ‘the real Mackay’ became a mark of quality (Moffat 1955,
p. 126), the phrase sometimes Americanised to ‘the real McCoy’. Yet, both London and Scottish
Borders touring company adaptations preceded their first Edinburgh appearance, while anteced-
ents go back further to such plays on themes of Scottish history and identity as Smollett’s 1749
The Regicide, dramatising James I’s assassination, or Wilson’s 1764 Earl Douglas. Drama as a
means of enacting national identities can also be seen in the work of both Schiller and Joanna
Baillie. Like other nations’ ‘national drama’ – Croatia and Norway offer examples (Brown 2016,
pp. 14–17) – so Scotland’s National Drama grew out of a complex interaction of dramatic and
linguistic material, including incorporation of song derived from the street theatre of broadside
ballads. So prevalent was this movement that even Douglas, in the 1874 playbill already cited,
could be defined as a ‘national’ tragedy. These plays had as much a role in the assertion of Scottish
identity during the high period of nineteenth century empire as that other widespread performa-
tive manifestation, Burns Suppers. Even as the development of the railways enabled a UK-wide
commercial touring circuit, largely centralised on London’s West End (although a key player in
that industrialised structure was Edinburgh-based Howard and Wyndham), the National Drama
remained popular in major Scottish theatres for most of the century. Even when commercial
exposure in these slackened, National Drama was found in the popular temporary theatres – geg-
gies – often set up in the midst of annual fairs, including Glasgow Fair which, throughout the
nineteenth century featured several theatres as part of its fairground activities. National Drama
occasionally recurred even in the twentieth century. The actor-playwright Graham Moffat records
his performance in three Howard and Wyndham 1932 revivals – Rob Roy, Heart of Midlothian and
Guy Mannering – marking the centenary of Scott’s death (Moffat 1955, p. 126). Edinburgh’s
Royal Lyceum Theatre presented a royal gala performance of Rob Roy during the King of Norway’s
1962 state visit, echoing a gala performance before George IV during his 1822 Edinburgh visit.
Another aspect of popular performance underlies a further major strand of Scottish theatre,
still prevalent today. Paul Maloney has demonstrated the debt music hall and variety theatre,
including pantomime, owe, not only to the ‘free-and-easies’ (early nineteenth century participa-
tion entertainment in public houses) as in the English tradition, but to the earlier Scottish tradi-
tions. These include touring geggie theatres presenting National Drama and even older traditions
like that of the balladeers whether in country bothies or, like Mussel-mou’d Charlie, in the
streets. Moreover, the influx of Highlanders and Irish workers serving Glasgow’s industrial revo-
lution brought the cèilidh. This, besides leading to staged rather than spontaneous cèilidhs,
influenced the nature of Scottish free-and-easies and, so, music hall and variety, its later, more
respectable version. An additional shaping element was performers’ crossover between legiti-
mate and popular stages. Mackay performed both in National Drama and as solo entertainer, as
did later prominent Victorian figures like W F Frame and James Houston. This boundary-
transgressing Scottish theatre tradition remains widespread: the twentieth century careers of
stars like Rikki Fulton, Russell Hunter, Una Maclean and Duncan Macrae embody this as do the
twenty-first century ones of Andy Gray, John Ramage, Elaine C Smith and Jordan Young, to
name only a representative sample.
At the end of the nineteenth century, three Scottish playwrights in different ways developed
their craft in London: J M Barrie (1860–1937), Fiona Macleod (William Sharp, 1855–1905) and
Graham Moffat (1866–1951). Barrie was especially interested in the potential for life-changing
shifts and the regret at potential missed. He explored the provisionality of social status in The
Admirable Crichton (1902), a play whose very text is provisional: several versions of its ending
exist. Barrie’s writing crossed genre boundaries and variability and elusiveness of artistic expres-
sion is most evident in his treatment of Peter Pan themes: he first appears in The Little White Bird
(1902), a novel for adults, then the most widely-known version, the 1904 play, Peter Pan, or the
Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, was a great success and Barrie published Peter Pan in Kensington
Gardens including relevant chapters from the novel, before producing the 1911 novel Peter and
Wendy. Meantime, What Every Woman Knows (1908) showed acute insight into gender politics,
class attitudes and political and social climbing on a par with the best work of Bernard Shaw or
Harley Granville Barker. Barrie’s dramatic experimentalism returned him to the themes of sec-
ond chances and irretrievable passing of opportunity in such plays as Dear Brutus (1917) and
Mary Rose (1920). He wrote in – and between – both Scots and English and his interest in the
slipperiness of borders and boundaries between reality, dream and Neverland – or Lob’s Wood in
Dear Brutus – embodies a central aspect not only of Scottish drama, but of Scottish literature as
whole. His concern with the elusive and conditional nature of love and society is, however, often
expressed in dialogue that is for modern audiences sentimentally cloying. Nonetheless, in his
time he was seen, worldwide, as a theatrical genius and over the last century he is certainly by
any measure the most internationally successful Scottish playwright.
William Sharp is less well-remembered, although at the beginning of the twentieth century
he was influential on the development of modern theatre, having been elected in 1900 President
of the Stage Society. This promoted progressive drama at Sunday evening readings, a role lasting
for 40 years, and under Sharp was clearly committed to experimental modern drama with a con-
tinental European perspective. As part of this programme, W B Yeats encouraged Sharp in the
persona of ‘Fiona Macleod’ and The House of Usna (1900) shared a bill with two Maeterlinck
plays: ‘Macleod’ was theatrically at the intersection of Celtic revival and European Symbolism,
though in language often as cloying as some of Barrie’s. Sharp/Macleod’s second play, The Immortal
Hour, enters more deeply into his Expressionist interests, relating Irish legend to classical myth.
After Sharp died in 1905, his two plays were largely forgotten, representing a strand of once-
progressive theatre seen as a dead end. Yet, The Immortal Hour was adapted as an opera by Rutland
Boughton in 1914 which ran for 376 West End performances in 1922–1923 and was revived in
New York in 1926. Fiona Macleod’s plays mark one way in which early twentieth century
Scottish dramaturgy sought experimental themes and forms.
Moffat, rather than experiment, wrote plays which were, rather like several of the Irish play-
wright Dion Boucicault’s, concerned with small-town life. An actor, he began playwriting by
writing comedy sketches that were included in variety bills. He came to explore Presbyterian
hypocrisy and, working out of Glasgow, some of his plays succeeded not only in London, but in
the United States and British Empire, presumably, at least partly, supported by the Scottish
diaspora. His West End success, A Scrape of the Pen (1909), was followed by Bunty Pulls the Strings
(1911). This ran for over 600 London performances, opening in parallel in the same year on
Broadway, also proving a hit there and at once touring North America. Thereafter, over the next
two decades, it was from time to time revived and toured internationally. The play’s draft title
was Causey Saints, referring to the Scots saying ‘Causey saints; deils at hame’, describing public
virtue and private vice. This original title may have been too ‘Scottish’ for the West End, though
the play was performed in Scots both there and in the USA, even if the published version was
largely translated into English (Brown 2014, pp. 65–66).
The creation of the Stage Society with its embrace of European experiment reflected a wider
movement in British theatre, an element of which was admiration for the Saxe-Meiningen
ensemble and commitment to what we would now call the repertory theatre as seen in Annie
Horniman’s establishment of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre (1904) and Manchester’s Gaiety Theatre
(1908). Following this model, dedicated to ‘serious’ drama and the company principle, Alfred
Wareing in 1909 established the Glasgow Repertory Theatre, the first of its kind in Scotland.
Though World War One saw the company go under, it offered a model followed later in the
century by such building-based reps as Perth (1935), Dundee (1940), Glasgow Citizens (1943),
Pitlochry (1951), and Edinburgh Gateway (1953). In 1908 Moffat has established his Scottish
National Payers in Glasgow specialising in Scots-language plays, but his commercial success
distracted him. In 1921, another company under the same name began touring with Scottish
drama, including plays by John Brandane (1869–1947), a strong company supporter, James
Bridie (1888–1951) and Joe Corrie (1894–1968), although it remained at best semi-professional,
so frustrating its aspirant playwrights, and ceased operation in 1947. The Players presented early
work by Brandane. This included The Glen is Mine (1923) and The Lifting (1925), both typifying
aspects of the Players’ repertoire, the first concerned with Highland community preservation
versus exploitation, the latter a somewhat sentimental Jacobite romance. Bridie explored differ-
ent territory, beginning with the somewhat surrealistic The Sunlight Sonata (1928) before writing
The Anatomist (1931), his first major success, exploring the scientific ethics surrounding Burke
and Hare’s bodysnatching (and murders) and medical research priorities. Much of Bridie’s work
was concerned with such large issues, though he managed to combine the fanciful and the pro-
found in his Mt Bolfry (1943) as the devil tests the faith of a wartime Highland community.
Bridie was another Scottish playwright who had substantial West End success, his Daphne
Laureola (1949) starring Edith Evans. Meanwhile, ‘Little Theatres’ started in Glasgow, in effect
studio theatres often playing in adapted drawing-rooms and premiêring work by playwrights
like Robert McLellan (1907–1985) in the 1930s. Another important development was the
launch in 1927 of Bertha Waddell’s Children’s Theatre, a pioneering company touring at first
locally in the Glasgow area, but soon Scotland-wide, with a bill of song, dance, sketches and
mime that by the time Waddell retired in 1968 seemed old-fashioned, but had been the first
introduction for very many enthralled Scottish children to theatre.
By contrast, Corrie had a more radical focus, starting playwriting in 1926 for the local Bowhill
players which became Fife Miner Players (1928–1931). His major work was In Time o Strife
(1926), about the General Strike’s impact on a family. Later, he wrote many one-act plays, often
comedies, for the companies of the Scottish Community Drama Association, founded in 1926.
Following the Fife example, a number of left-wing or workers drama groups were established
including Glasgow Workers’ Theatre Group, Clarion Players, Glasgow Players (formerly Scottish
Labour College Players), Glasgow Corporation Transport Players and the Jewish Institute
Players, who would in 1941 combine to form Glasgow Unity Theatre. This in 1946 established
a professional wing, which would in 1947 be one of the creators the Edinburgh Festival Fringe,
when the International Festival was launched that year without Scottish theatrical representa-
tion. Unity launched the careers of several major Scottish actors including Russell Hunter,
Andrew Keir, Roddy McMillan and Marjorie Thomson. Its major playwriting discovery was
surely Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep (1947), now recognised as a classic, having been
performed in the 2010s by both the South Bank and Scotland’s National Theatres. Glasgow
Unity foundered, however, in 1951, allegedly because of Scottish Arts Council, chaired by
Bridie, antipathy to its radicalism.
Michelle Macleod has observed that the ‘development of Gaelic drama in a form that would
be recognisable as such to a modern audience (excluding the concept of “folk drama” […]) is
inextricably linked with the influx of Gaels into the Scottish cities’ (Macleod 2021, p. x). Links
between cèilidh house and popular theatre have already been noted. A further nineteenth century
development was ‘the popularity of the còmhraidhean (conversations) as a literary form in Gaelic’
(Macleod 2021, p. xi) promoted by Rev. Norman MacLeod (Caraid nan Gàidheal, 1783–1862).
Such dialogues between at least two were published regularly in magazines and probably per-
formed, if at all, not professionally but, like closet drama, in domestic contexts. Gaelic-speakers’
urban influx created communities which sustained themselves through their own societies
including, pre-eminently, An Comunn Gaidhealach (1891), and came into contact with play-
house theatre. The twentieth century saw developments in the writing of Gaelic-language stage
plays. Ruairidh Erskine of Marr (1869–1960) was a leading early advocate: he began publishing
playtexts in 1912 with Domhnall nan Trioblaid (Donald of the Troubles) by Domhnall Mac na
Ceàrdaich (Donald Sinclair) (1885–1932). By then, Iain N. MacLeòid’s (John Macleod, 1880–
1954). Rèiteach Mòraig (Morag’s Betrothal) had appeared in 1911 and, although it was a relatively
intermittent process, Gaelic drama could by 1963 produce a modernist/absurdist play like
Fionnlagh MacLeòid’s (Finlay Macleod, b.1937) highly-regarded Ceann Cropic. This repertoire
was added to by, among others, Ian Crichton Smith (1928–1998) and Tormod Calum
Dòmhnallach (Norman Malcolm MacDonald, 1927–2000), whose Anna Chaimbeul (Anna
Campbell, 1977) was influenced by Japanese Noh Theatre. Gaelic drama has been nothing if not
wide-ranging and ambitious and encouraged companies like Fir Chlis (1978–1981) and Tosg
(1996–2007/8) whose successors have presented plays like Donald S Murray’s Sequamur (2015),
Muireann Kelly and Frances Poet’s Scotties (2018) and Màiri Nic’IlleMhoire’s (Mairi Morrison)
2018 Bana-Ghaisgich (Heroines).
These developments highlight a key dimension of Scottish theatre, one touched on regarding
Buchanan’s Latin plays. Language has been a recurrent issue in Scottish theatre at least since the
1706/7 Treaty of Union after which one element contributing for some to opposition to play-
house theatre was the role of English actors as tutors of anglicised ‘polite’ speech. Ramsay wrote
in Scots; Thomson in English; both for clear political reasons. The twentieth century saw Corrie
write in Scots, Bridie in English and the Gaelic initiatives just described. McLellan wrote in
Scots, his early plays tending to a somewhat sexist sentimentalisation of Border reiving and
Scottish history; his later work – perhaps above all The Flouers o Edinburgh (1948) – embodies
subtle characterisation and engagement with substantial cultural issues. His colleague Alexander
Reid (1914–1982) explored more expressionist dramaturgy in The Warld’s Wonder (1958), and
explicitly argued the importance of writing in Scots.
In more recent years, a significant influence in both catalysing and directly affecting the crea-
tive corryvreckan of Scottish theatre and drama has been the Edinburgh Festivals and their pre-
senting a wide range of international practitioners. Sometime the impact has been immediate
and relatively local: the Jouvet Company’s 1947 visit inspired Let Wives Tak Tent (1948), Robert
Kemp’s (1908–1967) classic Scots-language version of Molière’s L’École des Femmes. Other influ-
ences were longer-term: the Traverse Theatre’s 1963 launch by, inter alia, Jim Haynes and
Richard Demarco, with its commitment to experiment and new writing, owed much to the
experiences the Festivals had offered the founders. There is much debate about when a perceived
current renaissance of Scottish theatre began, but in historical terms it is hard to ignore the fact
that so much of that renaissance emerged in the two decades following the opening of the
Traverse. Key theatres welcomed new directors: the Royal Lyceum, succeeding the Gateway as
Edinburgh’s repertory house, Tom Fleming (1965), then Clive Perry (1966); Perth Joan Knight
(1968); Citizens Giles Havergal (1969), only Fleming and Havergal being Scots. A new genera-
tion of Scottish playwrights with dynamic attitudes to language and staging emerged: Stewart
Conn, Stanley Eveling, Joan Ure, Bill Bryden (also an influential director), Hector MacMillan,
Marcella Evaristi, Liz Lochhead, Peter Arnott, Sue Glover, Stuart Paterson, Jackie Kay, Anne-
Marie di Mambro, Anne Downie, David Greig, David Harrower, Nicola McCartney, Stephen
Greenhorn, Raman Mundair, Douglas Maxwell, Zinnie Harris – the list goes on. A range of
touring companies have come – and some gone – each making lasting contributions to Scottish
theatre’s nature: 7 : 84 (Scotland), launched by a team led by playwright-director John McGrath
(1935–2002), whose first production, The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil (1973) with
its post-Brechtian take on the highland cèilidh and Clearances retains its significance, while such
phenomena as the physicality of Gerry Mulgrew’s Communicado and the impact of the women’s
theatre company Stellar Quines retain their importance. For children, companies like Catherine
Wheels and Wee Stories take forward in contemporary terms Bertha Waddell’s work, as does the
Scottish International Children’s Festival – now renamed Imaginate – which since 1990 has
brought the best of international theatre for the young into relationship with Scottish companies
and Scottish children.
What is clear from this analysis of Scottish theatre and drama to date is that there is
considerable continuity from at least the thirteenth century in the interaction of dramatic
arts and Scottish social and politico-cultural life. This continuity has not always been con-
stant – naturally, lacunae occur – but it is clear that there has been a long-term fruitful
interrelationship of many varieties of Scottish theatre, drama and stage language over the
centuries.
References
Brown, I. (ed.) (2014). Scots language in theory and prac- Findlay, B. (1998). A History of Scottish Theatre. Edinburgh:
tice in Graham Moffat’s playwriting. Scottish Language Polygon.
33: 65–81. Macleod, M. (ed.) (2021). Dràma na Gàidhlig: A Century
Brown, I. (ed.) (2016). History as Theatrical Metaphor: of Gaelic Drama. Glasgow: Association for Scottish
History, Myth and National Identities in Modern Scottish Literary Studies.
Drama. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Maloney, P. (2006). Entertainment and popular culture.
Cameron, A. (1987). Theatre in Scotland 1660–1800. In: In: Changing Identities, Ancient Roots: The History of West
The History of Scottish Literature, vol. 2 (ed. A. Hook), Dunbartonshire from Earliest Times (ed. I. Brown), 142–
91–205. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. 181. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Campbell, D. (1996). Playing for Scotland: A History of the Marishall, J. (1766). The History of Miss Clarinda Cathcart
Scottish Stage 1715–1965. Edinburgh: Mercat Press. and Miss Fanny Renton. London: Francis Noble and
Clark, W. (1663). Marciano; or, the Discovery (ed. W.H. John Noble.
Logan). Edinburgh: privately published [1871]. McGavin, J. (2007). Theatricality and Narrative in
Durkan, J. (2013). Scottish Schools and Schoolmasters, 1560– Medieval and Early Modern Scotland. Aldershot:
1633. Woodbridge: Scottish History Society. Ashgate.
McKenzie, J. (1955). School and University Drama in Reid-Baxter, J. (2002). Philotus: the transmission of a
Scotland, 1650–1760. Scottish Historical Review 34: delectable treatise. In: Literature, Letters and the
103–119. Canonical in Early Modern Scotland (ed. T. van
Moffat, G. (1955). Join me in Remembering: The Life and Heijnsbergen and N. Royan), 52–68. East Linton:
Reminiscences of the Author of ‘Bunty Pulls the Strings’. Tuckwell Press.
Camps Bay: Winifred L. Moffat. Scullion, A. (1998). The eighteenth century. In: A History
Newton, M. (2011). Folk Drama in Gaelic Scotland. In: of Scottish Theatre (ed. B. Findlay), 80–136. Edinburgh:
The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (ed. I. Brown), Polygon.
41–46. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sorensen, J. (2007). Varieties of public performance: folk
Ramsay, A. (1728). Some Few Hints, in Defence of Dramatical songs, ballads, popular drama and sermons. In: The
Entertainments. Edinburgh: Allan Ramsay. Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 2 (ed.
Reid, S.J. and McOmish, D. (2020). Corona Borealis: S. Manning), 133–142. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Scottish Neo-Latin Poets on King James VI and his Reign, University Press.
1556–1603. Glasgow: ASLS.
Further Reading
Brown, I. (ed.) (2011). The Edinburgh Companion to McDonnell, V. (2019). Sugar, Ships and Showbusiness:
Scottish Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Entertaining Greenock, vol. I. Greenock: WL Publishing.
Press. Reid, T. (2012). Theatre & Scotland. London: Palgrave
Brown, I. (ed.) (2013). Scottish Theatre: Diversity, Language, Macmillan.
Continuity. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Tobin, T. (1974). Plays by Scots 1660–1800. Iowa City:
Findlay, B. (1998). A History of Scottish Theatre. Edinburgh: University of Iowa Press.
Polygon. International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen
Maloney, P. (2003). Scotland and the Music Hall, 1850– (2000-present), https://ijosts.glasgow.ac.uk (accessed 9
1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press. August 2022).
24
Gender and Sexuality
Carole Jones
Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh
This chapter examines the representation of gender and sexuality in Scottish fiction from the
early twentieth century to the contemporary period. This diverse range of literary representa-
tion exhibits parallels with developments in theorising gender, particularly those critiques that
contest the legitimacy of repressive norms and the exclusionary hegemonic models informing
identities, roles and relations. I will trace in the fiction a trajectory that foregrounds the chal-
lenging and dissolving of the boundaries that conceptually divide and fix genders and sexuali-
ties, and explore the transformative literary strategies that attend this troubling of
heteronormativity.
It is crucial to note, as Gifford and McMillan state in their ground-breaking volume A
History of Scottish Women’s Writing (Gifford and McMillan 1997, p. xix), ‘the “Scottish Tradition
in Literature” has been both male generated and male fixated’. And in relation to the critical
study of Scottish literature, the theoretical paradigm that led the way in analysing gender
representation was tardily taken up in the field as Glenda Norquay (2012, p. 5) observes,
‘There is a general agreement that Scottish literature was relatively late in its deployment of
feminist critical approaches to understanding a body of writing’. Much subsequent critical
work concerns itself with the relation between gender and nation in a field focused on the
provenance of the national in writing and identity (e.g. Hagemann 1997; Christianson 2002).
This understandably fixes on women and the feminine as excluded, non-privileged and sup-
pressed components of Scottish culture. The figure of woman as nation, a widespread historic
trope, is also subtly dissected with regard to all its complications in the Scottish context by
Kirsten Stirling in Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text (2008). Unsurprisingly, in such a
‘male generated and male fixated’ field which has tended to take man as the universal perspec-
tive, a rise in interest in the study of masculinity in any critical manner has been relatively
recent (e.g. Jones 2009).

This chapter intends a more targeted analysis to examine the innovative literary representa-
tions that have effectively constructed a critique of hegemonic conceptions of gender and
sexuality in modern and contemporary Scottish fiction. To appropriate Judith Butler’s famous
characterisation, gender and sexuality are trouble, troubled, and troubling in Scottish culture, as
elsewhere. However, as Scottishness is often typified as invested in the primacy of the white male
and an over-determined heterosexuality, these troubles are often foregrounded through the oth-
ered figures of these privileged constituencies – women, non-whites and queers. From John
Knox (‘the monstrous regiment of women’) to Hugh MacDiarmid (‘Scottish women of any his-
torical interest are curiously rare’, quoted in Breitenbach 1997, p. 83), the racism of the ques-
tioner’s ‘Where do you come from?’ in Jackie Kay’s poem ‘In My Country’ (Kay 1993, p. 24), to
the observation as late as 1995 that ‘to be gay and to be Scottish, it would seem, are still mutu-
ally exclusive conditions’ (Whyte 1995, p. xv), Scottish national identity has forged its exclu-
sions and foregrounded the burnished surface of the hard man figured in highlander, soldier,
industrial worker, radge. In critical discourse this compensatory hypermasculinity is often
attributed to ‘a reaction to stereotypes of cultural inferiority imposed upon Scottish culture’
(Stirling 2008, p. 78). We can discern the troubling of this anxious Scottish patriarchy in the
representational challenges of modern and contemporary writers; where gender is concerned
‘trouble is inevitable’, concludes Butler, so the task should be ‘how best to make it, what best
way to be in it’ (Butler 1990, p. vii).
The question of gender is an eternal one: what is gender? Is it naturally fixed or socially
constructed, an historical concept subject to change? As Claire Colebrook points out, gender is
‘one of the most common figures for thinking the basic differences or difference from which all
life emerges’ but she cautions that ‘the primary contrary in mythic accounts is not that between
a male and female body, but between two polarities, tendencies or principles – two kinds or
modes […] the concept of maleness and femaleness as primarily sexual and biological is a rela-
tively modern notion’ (Colebrook 2004, p. 1, p. 2). This chapter is concerned with the chal-
lenge across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to that ‘relatively modern’ essentialising
notion and to the dominant conceptualisation of the fixed nature of this difference and the
strong and stable boundaries between maleness and femaleness, men and women, it projects. I
will trace a course in Scottish fiction towards the radical anti-essentialism of late twentieth-
century theories such as Butler’s influential undoing of gender identity and the normative vec-
tors of sexual desire where both gender and sexuality are ongoing performative productions
never concluded. The socially sanctioned immobile gender binary, in which maleness and
straightness are privileged, can be challenged by transgressing the conceptual and embodied
borders of identity. Such a strike at the boundaries of being gives rise to exhilarating fictional
experiments in Scottish writing, innovations which often leave a queering trail of representa-
tions that ‘dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex,
gender and sexual desire’ (Jagose 1996, p. 3).
The Scottish context is appropriately productive for such a challenge as Scotland and
Scottishness have their own precarious relation with borders, conceptual as well as geographical.
The political parameters of the nation are blurred due to its place in a union signified by the
British state. Since the institution of that union in 1707 the Scottish consciousness has been
characterised as doubled, bifurcated, as a Caledonian Antisyzygy or conjunction of opposites
which has its contemporary emanation in Bahktinian dialogism (Stirling 2008, p. 103) and
postmodern multiplicity. The conceptual ambivalence of national boundaries is memorably
evoked by Nan Shepherd in The Quarry Wood (1928 [1987]): ‘Martha said it over and over to
Gender and Sexuality 301
herself: Scotland is bounded on the south by England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the
Arory-bory-Alice, and on the west by eternity’ (Shepherd 1987, p. 20, italics original). Borders here
are infinite and mystical, conjured rather than charted, both imaginative and material
(Carter 2000, p. 53). Such imagery signals a serious playfulness in concerns with borders, high-
lighting their unstable and incorporeal existence, though they are no less effective in their
boundarying of existence for that. Challenging the boundaries of being, and gender in particular,
is in the air of the modernist period. At this same moment Virginia Woolf was meditating on
borders in A Room of One’s Own (1928 [2008]) after experiencing the gendered limits of a
Cambridge college. ‘Audaciously trespassing’ on the grass she is shooed away by a ‘man’s figure’
and instinctively realises that ‘only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the
place for me’ (Woolf 2008, p. 7). Woolf, in these early pages of her famous polemic, charts and
questions the borders of gender while simultaneously dismantling them in her fiction (her
gender-switching novel Orlando was published the same year). Contemporarily, Shepherd’s asser-
tion of the ‘lifeless propriety of a fence’ (1987, p. 4) signals similarly evocative questions in
Scottish modernist discourse.
Confronting the naturalised states and relations of gender is a major theme of fiction in the
Scottish Renaissance, most memorably in complex and compelling female central characters of
novels by, for example, Shepherd, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Catherine Carswell and Willa Muir who
challenge the traditional circumscribing of women’s lives in assertive and emphatic ways.
However, prior to these more renowned fictions the issue of female constriction is never more
powerfully staged than in Violet Jacob’s short story ‘Thievie’ from her collection Tales of My Own
Country (1922), a ‘tale of parricide in spirit if not in deed’ (Anderson 1992, p. 38). Here patriarchal
authority is grasping, exploitative and venal; its protections are exposed as hollow. ‘Auld Thievie’,
a ferryman whose box of savings is his ‘god’, has exploited his daughter Janet with little affection
or recompense since her mother died (Jacob 2010, p. 245). In the story the occasion of the river
flooding gives Janet hope of her freedom if Thievie is lost; dramatically, he throws himself into the
river rather than give up the box to her. This is a story of frustration and powerlessness in which
normal social and psychological boundaries are dissolving along with the geographical ones. The
river is overflowing its banks, the landscape is hidden in mist and, at the mercy of the tide, Janet
and her father in their boat are ‘isolated from everything in a universe without form and void’, a
‘blankness’ which encompasses the muddling of traditional gender relations (Jacob 2010, p. 252).
Janet’s physical domination of her father undermines patriarchal relations though his clinging to
his economic power causes the ruin of both of them as he drowns and Janet is left to a lonely life
of drudgery. The contours of Janet’s victimhood, though, are blurred. Unsympathetically drawn –
as well as her parricidal thoughts she is a ‘thickset, bony woman’ who is ‘unremarkable in feature’,
‘hardy’, and ‘had inherited her father’s love of money-making’ – the story is, nevertheless, clear in
highlighting Janet’s dependence on men; her one possible suitor is only tempted by the money to
consider ‘how far she would be endurable as a wife’ (Jacob 2010, p. 243; p. 246). Her ‘great long-
ing to be like other women, a factor in the male world’ is doomed as the mist recedes to place her
back in the cramped world of men (Jacob 2010, p. 246). In ‘Thievie’, Violet Jacob presents a suc-
cinct portrayal of a sexual, economic, psychological and emotional borderland, outwith the fixed
structures of traditional heteronormativity. Her revelation of the possibilities that can be gleaned
amidst the confusion of disappearing boundaries is quickly shut down and thwarted by patriarchal
intransigence. However, her complex and contorted portrayal of gender relations in this devastat-
ing story exposes the hypocrisies of the family, of romance, and the founding myths of
heteronormativity.
Jacob’s ‘remarkably modern’ (Anderson 1992, p. 40) depiction of the complex domination
of women and the extreme psychological challenges this presents is reiterated elsewhere, not
least in Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932). This novel about the decline of rural culture in
north-east Scotland around the period of the first world war is centred on female experience
as it charts the young life of Chris Guthrie, Gibbon’s ‘centre of gravity’ (Dixon 1990, p. 289).
The author’s sympathy to the plight of women is foregrounded; early in the narrative Chris’s
mother commits suicide and infanticide, unable to bear being pregnant yet again, making
Chris herself a target of her father’s brutalised sexuality. Amidst this harsh environment
Chris’s ambivalence towards the limits of her life is figured in doubleness – ‘Two Chrisses
there were that fought for her heart and tormented her’ – and equivocation – ‘she hated also
and she didn’t hate, father, the land, the life of the land’ (Grassic Gibbon 1996, p. 32; p. 31).
Dispelling the ‘English Chris’ of learning, she takes over the croft after her father’s death,
demonstrating the strength of women to survive this tough life. However, Gibbon’s critique
of traditional gender can be said to be lessened by the paralleling of Chris’s sexual develop-
ment with the farming year and nature’s cycles of fertility. The novel’s sections coincide with
stages in Chris’s life from girl to married woman and mother: ‘The Unfurrowed Field’,
‘Ploughing’, ‘Drilling’, ‘Seed-Time’, ‘Harvest’. The blatant symbolism reiterates stereotypes
associating women with land and nature, questioning the social role and status of women,
and potentially placing them outside history. This is compounded for some critics by the
manner of Gibbon’s portrayal of Chris’s sexual agency, an active female sexuality that he pro-
moted in much of his fiction. This sexual self-discovery is often depicted in mirror scenes,
like the one where Chris examines her naked body, thinking this ‘third and last Chris […]
sweet and cool and fit for that lover who would some day come and kiss her and hold her, so’
(Grassic Gibbon 1996, p. 71). For Keith Dixon this constructs a ‘“natural” sexuality of
women’, a reading potentially borne out by the novel’s structuring but for Dixon referring to
women’s sexuality ‘not being limited to relations with men, but often discovered alone’
(Dixon 1990, p. 294). However, these scenes are open to accusations of voyeurism and the
objectifying force of the male gaze (Murray 1994). Gibbon’s strategy signals, then, his strug-
gle to construct a model of female sexuality outside of naturalised, male-centred paradigms.
There is an apparent awareness of this problem in the text: in another contemplative scene
before her wedding day Chris is ‘looking down at herself naked as though she looked at some
other than herself, a statue like that of the folk of olden time that they set in the picture gal-
leries’ (Grassic Gibbon 1996, p. 147). This reference to the Western tradition of the nude
betrays the pressure of apprehending the female body through given discourses of gendered
power relations founded on the objectification of women. And as John Berger has written, ‘In
all [methods of painting nudes] there remains the implication that the subject (a woman) is
aware of being seen by a spectator’ (Berger 1972, p. 49). The accusation of voyeurism is ten-
able, then, but the knowingness of Chris’s solo appreciation of her body suggests a process of
complicity and critique: the installing of female nudity in order to expose the ways in which
it is consumed and, in Chris’s agency, escape those relations of domination. Also, as Norquay
points out, ‘in the context of the 1930s [Gibbon’s mirror scenes] arguably offer a frank and
challenging recognition that women can engage with their own sexual beings rather than
only being subject to the male gaze’ (Norquay 2015, pp. 82–83). In Sunset Song, then, we
have a complex engagement with gender relations and particularly female sexuality that still
resonates and that for some critics should be read as feminist in its challenges to dominant
normative worldviews (Burton 1984; Dixon 1990; Lumsden 2003).
Grassic Gibbon’s explicit questioning of gender identity in Sunset Song was preceded by the
radical potential of Nan Shepherd’s fiction, beginning with The Quarry Wood. Her work also
attempts to escape traditional models of identity but presents us with life in process, a ‘journey
into Being’ as she describes it in The Living Mountain (2008 [1977]), her eulogy to the Cairngorm
mountains (Shepherd 2008, p. 84). The dismantling of borders and their significance is inherent
in her writing as she alerts us to ‘the contrast between the lifeless propriety of a fence and the
lively interest of shooing a hen’ (Shepherd 1987, p. 4); in The Quarry Wood the promotion of the
lively over the lifeless is a structuring motif. In Martha Ironside, the protagonist of this
Bildungsroman, we witness its development as she strives to find her place in the world on her
journey from tenant farmer family to education and a job as a teacher. A significant aspect of this
labour is her desire and her relation to men and the contrasting versions of masculinity that
tempt her desire: Luke, the intellectual who believes she embodies his ideal that ‘a woman could
be all spirit’, ‘like a crystal of flame’ he says, pleased with this lifeless simile (Shepherd 1987,
p. 119; p. 49); and Rory the colonial South African expat whose wooing is described in the lan-
guage of possession and domination – ‘he was stretching out his hand to claim a little portion of
the world he found there. The little portion was Martha […] a riderless girl’ (Shepherd 1987,
p. 45). Each lover objectifies her, one as spiritual and one as physical, and each is a threat to
Martha’s liberty and agency. Her realisation comes in a defiant rejection: ‘Am I such a slave as
that? Dependent on a man to complete me! I thought I couldn’t be anything without him – I
can be my own creator’ (Shepherd 1987, p. 184). And she goes on to demonstrate an independent
female life by ending the novel embedded in her community but as a teacher and as a single
mother to an adopted child, ‘[got] for herself by herself (completely without the participation of
a man)’ (Smith 1995, p. 35). This vigorous challenge to the gendered boundaries of propriety –
the nuclear family and the couple – is complemented in the text’s apprehension of the environ-
ment. The landscape is denied the fixed features of Sunset Song’s standing stones vantage point:
this is an ‘insubstantial world, hazed upon its edges, unstable where the hot air shook’; ‘hills
trembled, so liquid a blue that they seemed at point of dissolution’; and the individual blends
with this unstable environment, as walking at dusk in the wood ‘your body hadn’t substance – it
was all dissolved away’ (Shepherd 1987, p. 114; p. 113; p. 119). Moreover, Shepherd overturns
the traditional association of women and nature when finally it is Geordie, Martha’s placid father,
who is most connected with the land: ‘her father and his team were blotted out, one with the
earth […] his eyes had been bent so long upon the darkness of the earth that he seemed to share
its life, know his way with it by touch’ (Shepherd 1987, p. 204). This feminised contrast to
Rory’s dominating gaze – ‘wait till you’ve seen the Veld’ – highlights Shepherd’s ‘debunking of
the fantasies suspended between genders’ and the principal mode of this challenge, the ‘invigor-
ating unmaking’ of the self and the world (Shepherd 1987, p. 147; Smith 1995, p. 35;
Lumsden 2000, p. 70).
In contrast, the symbolic challenge to existential boundaries in Willa Muir’s Imagined Corners
(1996 [1931]) is the sea: ‘Elizabeth turned her back upon the land and revelled in the reckless-
ness with which the walls of water hurled themselves headlong’ (Muir 1996, p. 69). The sea and
its refusal of containment embodies another common trope of the feminine and its mysterious
unboundedness and relationality – ‘we’re only separate like waves rising out of the one sea’
(Muir 1996, p. 192). Elizabeth’s yearning for oneness is offset in the novel by its preoccupation
with doubles and complementary pairings in a gendered model of the self that in its heteronor-
mative form threatens female being. At the start, Elizabeth Shand, recently married to Hector
and settled with his family, soon encounters the constrictions of this provincial life. Although
educated, marriage has reduced her to a consort and, significantly, the moral guarantor and
guardian of her husband’s behaviour: ‘she must form him and […] reform him’ (Muir 1996,
p. 165). Significantly, Hector too finds the constrictions of bourgeois marriage impossible and
after several affairs decides to leave for colonial adventures. The text then proffers its second sig-
nificant pairing which is, in contrast, an enabling doubling of Elizabeth with a second ‘Elizabeth
Shand’, Hector’s elder sister now known as ‘Elise’ who is visiting her home town after abscond-
ing to Europe years before with an older man. On meeting Elise for the first time Elizabeth ‘was
looking for her other self’ and ‘actually fell in love with her at first sight’ (Muir 1996, p. 165).
They do, in Elise’s words, ‘make one damned fine woman between us’, a vibrant combination of
nature and reason (Muir 1996, p. 246). With this burgeoning relationship Elizabeth makes her
own escape, leaving with Elise for Europe at the end of the narrative. As Smith observes, ‘Muir
suggests that at least for the moment the answer to this completion [finding a complementary
balance between opposites] lies in the support of the right woman rather than the wrong man’
(Smith 1995, p. 38). However, the outcome betrays an emancipatory confusion more dynamic
than the stasis of ‘balance’ suggests; Elise was ‘returning with a brand-new daughter, or sister, or
wife, or whatever it was, having carried her off like a second Lochinvar’. As her vivacious friend
Ilya asks, ‘have you then given up men?’ (Muir 1996, p. 279; p. 281). This question hangs over
the end of the novel, a queering assurance of challenge to the stifling and stagnant boundaries of
sex and gender left behind in Scotland.
These texts document the period’s confronting of the gendered proprieties of social life in
bold fictional form and imagery to illustrate physical and psychic borders dissolving and dispers-
ing, becoming permeable and traversable. Writers imagine gendered selves and relations differ-
ently, predicated on an emancipation of the feminine into worlds of work, politics, travel and
adventure. If women are the agents of radical psychological change here, by the post-World War
Two era the continuing social constriction and prejudice that more generally circumscribed
women’s lives inform two revealing works of fiction in troubling ways. In Jessie Kesson’s The
White Bird Passes (1991 [1958]) the reader is taken back to the 1920s but not to the inspirational
liberation of Shepherd and Muir. The novel tracks the development of Janie from childhood to
the edge of adulthood, from her young life with her mother Liza in the slum of ‘Lady’s Lane’ to
the anticipated entry into the life of work as dictated by the trustees of the orphanage where she
spends her adolescence. Kesson dares to vividly engage the marginal in a text intent on exposing
and subverting social hierarchies and borders. Liza’s status as outsider, or ‘ootlin’ as Kesson
names this positioning, is a result of the strict sexual proprieties of the time; as an unmarried
mother she is rejected by her father and she and Janie exist at a distance from her respectable
farming family. This resistance of patriarchal authority leaves Liza and Janie on the margins of
society where life in Lady’s Lane appears as ‘an unruly human body, representative of a threat to
order, probity and respectability’ (Norquay 2000, p. 124). Controversially blurring the bound-
ary between work and pleasure, sex work on The Lane is presented through the sensuality of
Mysie and Liza is shown to make money from sex but also, on one occasion, reject the transac-
tional nature of these encounters. This is not, however, a ‘romantic image of prostitution’
(Norquay 2000, p. 128) as Mysie commits suicide and Liza later dies from syphilis. Though
tragic for Liza, through Janie we encounter the ‘imaginative richness’ (Norquay 2000, p. 126) of
these peripheral worlds, a celebration of the borderlands of travellers and itinerants, which
frighten but also enthral and, therefore, enable an alternative relation to the world for Janie in
which she confronts the constrictions of respectable society. For all Kesson’s genre-bending
style – incorporating fairy tale elements and a prioritising of imagination – we are denied a
c omfortable closure as Janie, on the cusp of stepping out into the world, is reminded of its dan-
gers. Referring to Janie the mill men ‘laugh amongst themselves […] “She’s no’ that young […]
She’ll soon be ready for the knife”’ (Kesson 1991, pp. 121–122). This enigmatic declaration fol-
lows Janie’s increasing awareness of men’s acknowledgement of her body, that ‘there was some-
thing cruel and fierce in their knowing’ (Kesson 1991, p. 119). So Kesson presents a vision of
developing femininity potentially freed from patriarchal constriction through its immersion in
the liberties of imagination as lived on the margins of social propriety. However, the suggestions
of gendered violence at the close marks female adulthood as exposed and endangered, a position
exacerbated by class and materially and psychically impoverished circumstances.
If the danger is externalised in Kesson’s novel, for Muriel Spark in The Driver’s Seat her female
protagonist’s destruction is self-ignited. Published in 1970 we cannot avoid associating Spark’s
troubling text with second wave feminism which is finding a confident and radical voice at this
moment, the year of publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Kate Millet’s Sexual
Politics, and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. These revolutionary texts expose the vio-
lent oppression of women. ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them’ claims
Greer, and proceeds to detail the loathing and disgust that men feel for women, and that women
often feel for themselves (Greer 1973, p. 249). Spark enters this sex war from an extreme position
constructing a central female character who spends the narrative of The Driver’s Seat seeking and
eventually finding her murderer. The finely balanced horror Spark finds in the absurd here – the
seemingly motiveless and unreasonable self-destruction of Lise – is achieved via the vehicle of the
experimental fiction of the nouveau roman in its ‘depthless’ form and ‘neutral registering of sensa-
tions and things’ (Baldick 1991, p. 151). My suggestion is, though, that Lise has a good idea of
the extent of men’s hatred of women, and Spark sets out to expose this oppression as fearlessly as
those feminist revolutionaries.
Pejoratively described as the ‘least feminine of women writers’, Spark in fact occupies the
extremes of femininity in The Driver’s Seat composed in her most radically experimental period
of fiction writing (Gregson 2006, p. 107). From the beginning Lise behaves bizarrely, choosing
the most garish outfit for her upcoming holiday after forcefully rejecting a ‘stain-resisting’ dress
(Spark 2006, p. 8). Gradually we comprehend that Lise desires the mark of her presence and the
murderous end of that presence to be noticed and remarked on. Acting beyond the bounds of
decorum and propriety, Lise’s excess, including her outlandish outfit and her hysterical laughter
that is ‘without possibility of restraint’, marks a radical departure from her previous life working
in an accountants’ office and living in a one-room flat where everything folds away so that it is
‘as if it were uninhabited’ (Spark 2006, p. 69; p. 13; p. 15). The subjective austerity evoked
signals a lack of agency and a life lived by rote. The contrasting excessive seeking of attention is
how Lise takes control of her life in order to orchestrate its annihilation, her own destruction at
the hands of a man she badgers and equips to kill her. Lise’s motivation is not disclosed by the
taut present tense of the narrative which is never allowed beyond the surface of her behaviour;
she is not permitted an interior life. She is a mystery, then, who perplexes every time she speaks
or acts. She is ultimately a tool for Spark to expose and unravel the patriarchal myth of female
subjectivity, that in speaking and acting women are ‘asking for it’, demanding their own viola-
tion. The text presents the extreme implications of this deeply embedded cultural narrative,
inexplicable as they are. As Gerardine Meaney argues, ‘[Lise] is a figure for the feminine subject
whose options are no options. She can either choose a subjectivity which kills her or lose subjec-
tivity and all ability to act’ (Meaney 1993, p. 185). This state of femininity informs Spark’s text;
it shocks the reader in the absurdity of its depiction of gendered life and relations so constituted
in meaningless violence and so casually and seemingly heartlessly related. The boundaries of
propriety are bloodstained in Spark’s fictional world.
The impossibilities of gender continue to seep through Scottish fiction of a later generation
when not only women but men too are represented as failing to cope with unreasonable gendered
responsibilities and expectations. In the 1980s and 1990s the postmodern fracturing of the
authority of singular truth, self, and representation produced fiction that often portrayed break-
down, destabilising and disintegrating literary form and subjectivity to evoke the precarity of
identity in a world of broken traditions, especially with regard to gender roles and relations.
Increased equality generated anxiety for, as well as liberation from, lost certainties. Janice
Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1991 [1989]) exemplifies the paralleling of personal and
textual breakdown where Joy Stone’s narrative of loss, grief and despair flits in fragments across
the pages with reference to various literary modes, genres and with typographical disarray as
playscripts, lists, footnotes and marginalia confound the reader’s attention. Though alienated
and self-objectifying – ‘I watch myself from the corner of the room’ – Joy, unlike Lise, is allowed
interiority and a first-person voice to document her vulnerability after the death of her married
lover in a swimming accident (Galloway 1991, p. 7). Transgressing the borders of propriety
destabilises other boundaries here as fungus invades Joy’s property and anorexia distorts the lim-
its of her body. Amidst her liberation as an independent working woman, a teacher, Joy’s social
positioning in her community is determined by those traditional proprieties of marriage and
family as at Michael’s memorial service she is displaced: abjected and disappeared, his wife and
children take precedence as ‘The Rev Dogsbody … had wiped me out’ (Galloway 1991, unnum-
bered p. 79). Joy, however, evades her annihilation, and survival is figured through ‘picturing the
sea’ and contemplating learning to swim; she forgives herself and figuratively embraces the
expansiveness of ‘still water’ and ‘empty space’ in a deterritorialized bid for the uncharted beyond
(Galloway 1991, p. 235; unnumbered p. 236). If the writers of the 1920s and 1930s were opti-
mistic in their heroines’ outcomes, female writers of this later period are intent on qualifying
hope and laying bare the effort necessary to challenge for those freedoms that are legislated for
but often stymied and distorted in reality. Similarly disenchanted, A.L. Kennedy’s fiction of the
1990s is preoccupied with trauma, its threatening presence underlying the most ordinary exist-
ence. In her first novel Looking For the Possible Dance (1993) Margaret is hemmed in by the violent
patriarchal anxieties and demands of her father, boss and lover. Characterising the political cli-
mate as an absurd world where ‘they had decided that they lived in a country where pointless
gestures were all they had left to make’, rather than escape to a new life the novel ends when
Margaret ‘sinks into brilliant air, becoming first a moving shadow, then a curve, a dancing line’
(Kennedy 1998, p. 39; p. 250). Her abstraction closes as many possibilities as it opens and is,
perhaps, just such a pointless gesture. In So I Am Glad (1996 [1995]) Jennifer is another detached
Sparkian character – ‘I am not calm, I am unspontaneous. When something happens to me, I
don’t know how to feel’ – with trauma-induced destructive tendencies which are expressed out-
wards in S&M role play where boundaries are dangerously transgressed in ‘finding an edge and
stepping beyond it and finding an edge and stepping beyond it and gripping that edge and
throwing it away’ (Kennedy 1996, p. 5; p. 127). Letting go of the limits of feeling is a violent
process that fails to heal past trauma. However, after an affair with an imagined or reincarnated
Savinien, Cyrano de Bergerac – his existence is undecidable – Jennifer ends her confessional nar-
rative with the words ‘I will miss this and I will miss Savinien and I will be glad’, an ambiguous
expression of feeling that poses as resolution (Kennedy 1996, p. 280). These are abstract and
ambivalent endings; the protagonists often end up in the same location if not the same psychic
place at the end as at the beginning, intimating a difficulty in imagining a future for these trou-
bled female characters constrained by a world struggling to adapt to renewed gender settle-
ments. These texts appear freshly conscious of the precarious nature of the acceded boundaries of
femininity and especially masculinity.
Representations of masculinity in this period amplify this precarity. If traditionally the privi-
leged characteristics of masculinity were strength, control and the secure boundaries of body and
psyche – ‘a man in power, a man with power, and a man of power’ – in the Scottish literary con-
text this translates into the prioritising of a working-class masculinity safeguarding the values of
male dominance (Kimmel 2004, p. 184). In a widely referenced essay, ‘Masculinities in
Contemporary Scottish Fiction’ (1998), Christopher Whyte refers to a ‘representational pact’
that posits the infamous Scottish hard man as ‘embodying and transmitting Scottishness’ in the
fiction of the 1980s and 1990s as opposed to the deferential anglicisation of a ‘denationalised’
middle class (Whyte 1998, p. 275). However, under the conditions of de-industrialisation in this
period, this particular ideal of male authority is severely undermined and the precarious circum-
stances of working-class existence inform the uncertain and anxious representations of masculin-
ity found in a range of fiction. Now male characters occupy a borderland of disorientation where
the previously fixed parameters of masculinity disintegrate in self-doubt, dependence and disem-
powerment. This is signalled early in this period in Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine (2003 [1984]),
a text exemplifying radical typographical experimentation which greatly influenced Galloway.
Similar to The Trick is To Keep Breathing we encounter the disintegration of a single mind, this
time male, against a backdrop of a Scottish culture of increasing surveillance and subservience to
metropolitan and global geopolitics. The text uses pornographic imagery to conceptualise a rela-
tion between desire and economics: ‘A whole theory of political sexuality is enunciated here […]
that our erotic fantasies parallel our political and economic behaviour, or are even versions of each
other’ (Gifford 1987, p. 115). The novel is structured around narrator Jock McLeish’s alternating
pornographic fantasies and political rants; in between he gets drunk, has a nervous breakdown,
takes an overdose, recovers, and re-tells the story of his life. His transformation is announced in
his recognition of himself in the object of his fantasising, Janine: ‘O Janine, my silly soul, come
to me now’ (Gray 2003 [1984], p. 331). His fantasy involving a woman ‘corrupted into enjoying
her bondage and trapping others into it’ is ‘the story of my own life’ (Gray 2003, p. 183). For all
the heated debate over the appropriateness or efficacy of such a parallel, the novel’s explicit con-
nection of male wage bondage with female sexual exploitation via the discourse of pornography
effectively illustrates Angela Carter’s assertion that ‘sexual relations between men and women
always render explicit the nature of social relations in the society in which they take place and,
if described explicitly, will form a critique of those relations, even if that is not and never has
been the intention of the pornographer’ (Carter 1997, p. 20). Significantly, the other principal
illustrator of male insecurity in this period, James Kelman, tends to frustrate sexual expression
in his male protagonists who are increasingly socially isolated, alienated, disaffected and disem-
powered. In contrast with the iconic Scottish hardman, these depictions of masculinity are poised
to undermine the dominant fiction of male subjectivity, emphasising uncertainty and anxiety.
Kelman’s style maintains a sustained focus on the inner life of these characters while the hybrid
narrative voice that vacillates between the internal and external worlds – between ‘I’, ‘he’, ‘you’ –
exacerbates the tenuousness and contiguity of subjectivity. Kelman’s men such as Sammy in How
Late It Was, How Late (1998 [1994]), who goes blind after a beating by the police, are often flail-
ing in hostile social environments and become dependent on feminised ways of being which
emphasise relationality over autonomy and, in Sammy’s case, a reliance on the nearness of touch
after his failed eyesight deprives him of perception at a distance. Boundaries, bodily and psychic,
lose their stability and impermeable status, often painfully; in You Have to be Careful in the Land
of the Free (Kelman 2004) Jeremiah spends the second half of the narrative desperate to urinate.
With little control over bodies and minds, and little direction, Kelman’s men fail hegemonic
masculine ideals to bring meditative nuance to gender identity and relations that challenge the
normative boundaries of both, though that critique has nowhere to go in his work; Sammy’s
disappearance in the last line of How Late – ‘that was him, out of sight’ (Kelman 1998, p. 374) –
reverberates with the pointless gesture of Margaret’s dissolving ‘into brilliant air’ at the end of
Looking For the Possible Dance.
It is in the queering texts of the 1990s and beyond that the implications of collapsed gen-
der boundaries begin to be more gainfully explored. Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (2016 [1998]), Luke
Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy (Sutherland 2004) and Ali Smith’s Girl meets boy (2008 [2007]) all
present gender as changeable and fluid in varying ways, often deploying elements of fantasy to
convey this instability. The emphasis here is on unfixing gender and the effects of that for
undermining the heteronormative fiction of stable relations between sex, gender and sexual
desire. LGBT characters have gradually been taking up space in Scottish fiction in the work of
well-known authors such as Louise Welsh, Zoë Strachan, Ali Smith, Jackie Kay, Val McDermid,
Christopher Whyte and Kirsty Logan, writing in various genres, and bolstered by the publica-
tion of several landmark collections of LGBT short stories, including Out There (Strachan 2014).
If gay and lesbian characters are now common in the landscape of Scottish fiction to the point
of a homonormative familiarity, a more fundamental troubling of the borders of gender occurs
in texts with less categorizable outcomes. Kay’s Trumpet tells the story of Joss Moody, a black
Scottish jazz musician who has lived his life as male though designated female at birth. This
situation is exposed after he dies, as related by close family members, colleagues, friends and
the professional administrators of death. Joss’s transgender circumstance is therefore given no
origin story or rationalisation in the text; only its effects are addressed in his happy family life
and successful career. The novel asks, if the gender boundary can be so easily crossed, what is
its point apart from ideological segregation, the racial associations of that term adding com-
pelling nuance to Kay’s challenge. In Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy Cupid, also known as Désirée,
is the boy with a gift for sex, where his touch produces ecstasy, ‘visions: tunnels of light,
orchards, and angels’ for those involved (Sutherland 2004, p. 50). Exploited by a pimp who
forces him to take female hormones, Désirée overdoses on them in protest at this attempt to
fix his fluidity and literally turns into gold, the ultimate arbiter of commodified value. Fixity
means death here, closing the door on ‘knowledge of the divine’ which is Désirée’s gift to those
stuck in oppressive singularity (Sutherland 2004, p. 145). Smith also flirts with the divine in
Girl meets boy, her re-writing of the Iphis myth for the Canongate Myths series. In Ovid’s myth
Iphis is a girl who is brought up as a boy to avoid being slaughtered at birth. When as a
grown-up she falls in love with a girl the goddess Isis transforms her into a boy so they can live
happy ever after. In Smith’s text the Iphis character, Robin Goodfellow, captures the heart of
Anthea Gunn. for whom ‘she is the most beautiful boy I had ever seen’; Robin’s inbetweeness
makes her the occupier of ‘the grey area’, misnamed because ‘really the grey area was a whole
spectrum of colours new to the eye’ (Smith 2008, p. 45; pp. 83–84). Smith presents a vision
of gender-troubling as magical, mythic possibility, and as integrally connected with social
justice as Robin and Anthea transform Inverness’s landmarks with sloganeering exposés of
gender inequality and protest against the inequities and iniquities of capitalism in its glo-
balised mode. As with Gray, the political and sexual are intertwined, but the purpose here is
celebratory, as liberatory as Smith’s joyful language and imagery. Freed from realism Smith
reminds us how imagination can transport us beyond the borders of gender, assuaging our
fears and facilitating the wonder of boundless opportunity, an optimism not encountered in
this chapter since the writers of the 1920s and 1930s.
The troubling of the conventions of gender and sexuality has been in symbiotic relation with
experiments in fiction in Scottish writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As this
chapter has traced, this fiction challenges the boundaries of gender and sexual identities and rela-
tions, destabilising fixed borders with the language and imagery of dissolving, disintegrating
landscapes, mutable bodies, and shifting politics. Writers continue to advance the representa-
tional challenge, manipulating literary form and genre to trouble the natural and promote the
dynamically relational, the always unfinished business of gender and sexuality as in Jenni Fagan’s
The Sunlight Pilgrims (Fagan 2016) which brings together climate crisis, a metamorphosing
Scottish landscape in a new ice age, and the struggle for selfhood of trans teen Stella. Works such
as this impart confidence in Scottish fiction’s ongoing development as a transformative space in
step with the wider culture’s most radical questioning of sex and gender hierarchy, hegemony
and tradition to urgently pursue the prospects for a responsible and ethical politics in a drasti-
cally changing world.
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25
Race and Ethnicity in Scottish
Literature
Joe Jackson
School of English, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England
In Hannah Lavery’s Lament for Sheku Bayoh (2021), racism in Scotland is treated with glib denial,
that there is ‘No problem here pal/None at all’, counterbalanced by the demand for even a bare
recognition of the ‘problem’, that ‘You can start by seeing that we have a problem, that the
problem is here pal’ (Lavery 2021, pp. 10, 30). Lavery’s stage play takes the form of a ‘keening’
commemorating Bayoh, a black man who died in police custody in Kirkcaldy in May 2015; the
manner of his death under conditions of ‘police restraint’, poetically recreated in snatches of
transcription, media reports, and conversation, mirrors deaths in the United States such as that
of George Floyd which have impelled the global Black Lives Matter protests over the last decade.
In the light of Bayoh’s death, Lament attests not only to institutional racism in Police Scotland,
but to a national culture of denial that informs the instinctual ‘no problem.’ The language of that
denial is pointed, echoing the recent sociological analysis of No Problem Here: Understanding
Racism in Scotland (Davidson et al. 2018, p. 9). Neil Davidson’s introduction identifies a ‘narrative
of an absent racism in Scottish history’ that has existed in synergy with the prevailing political
branding of the Scottish Government since its inception (p. 9). In this account, racism is a lacuna
in Scotland that is obscured by the example of England – Lament delivers an injunction to ‘stop/
looking over that border’ – and by differentiation from an abstract British imperial history that
doesn’t touch a modern narrative of the civic nation promulgated by the Scottish Government
(Lavery 2021, p. 9). It is one reason why Scotland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries has been identified as a ‘new geography’ of racism, waiting for the kind of sustained
analysis that has been longstanding in English metropolitan areas like London and Birmingham
(Dwyer and Bressey 2008, pp. 8–9). Lavery’s Lament provides a timely intersection with Black
Lives Matters, but it is also part of what has been a larger, active tendency in Scottish writing to
address precisely that gap in both Scottish historical memory and political discourse – part of a

broad body of works produced not just by black writers but, in the language of American race
politics increasingly dominant in Britain, writers of colour more generally, and also by white
Scots encoding a particular anti-racist politics.
When Second in Lament denies racism as a ‘problem’ in Scotland, the implied denial is of the
everyday understanding of racism as an individual moral failing, as ‘prejudice’, as the speaking of
racist sentiments and the carrying out of racist actions (Lavery 2021, p. 28). While such acts are
important, not least in the effect they have on the victims of racist violence, they should be under-
stood as manifestations of a deeper strata of racial ideology. Alana Lentin describes modern racism
as a ‘project of the nation-state’, a tool which provides for the ‘consolidation of state power’ via
symbolic exclusions and institutional discrimination (Lentin 2004, pp. 51, 36). The deep impe-
rial continuities of race, and a contemporary British state politics of race, are neglected in any
account which ‘culturalises, psychologises and individualises [racist practices] so as to relegate
them to the societal margins’, accounts common in the British mediascape (Lentin 2004, p. 36).
Any analysis of ‘race and racism’ therefore must push beyond those individualised practices
towards the structural conditions that create them and the public political culture that sustains
them. Scotland has its own specific relationship to those racial structures, entangled in the British
imperial project, a constituent part of the British state form, but not coterminous with it; often in
direct competition with Britishness, or defined against it. The ‘no problem’ problem can conse-
quently be understood as a product of Scotland’s very non-statehood – a slipstream position where
the racist debts of Empire and the embedded racism of Britain’s public political culture accrue to
Westminster while the credit of egalitarianism accrues to a new and increasingly post-British
Scotland. Locating and excavating the ‘problem’ becomes a project of national consequence in
Scotland, and one in which literature has been a crucial site of both raciological invention and
anti-racist contestation.
One place to see the consequences of racial history for Scottish writing is in one of the most
important early interventions in conceptualising the relationship between race and literature: a
special issue of Critical Enquiry, ‘Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes’, edited by Henry
Louis Gates Jr. Gates offers a number of observations on the historical discourse of race that have
implications for Scotland (Gates Jr. 1985, pp. 1–20). The first is his argument about a canonical
national literature emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an idea ‘coterminous
with the shared assumption among intellectuals that race was a “thing”, an ineffaceable quantity,
which irresistibly determined the shape and contour of thought and feeling as surely as it did the
shape and contour of human anatomy’ (Gates Jr. 1985, p. 3). If national literatures sought to
cement an implicit racial basis for nationhood, the case was doubly true for Scotland seeking not
only to establish its own ‘national character’ but to yoke national fortunes to the enterprise of
British imperialism. While canons were being lined up to secure the cultural legitimacy of
nation-states, Scotland’s national future was being bound more tightly within the larger British
imperial state, and the literary imagination – with Walter Scott to the fore – actively promoted
both the quasi-racial character of romanticised Celtic Scotland and a racial ‘Teutonic’ commonal-
ity in the Union (see Pittock 1999, pp. 56–57 and Duncan 2007, pp. 108–115). Not only did
national literature secure the overlap of race and nation, but the literary was also the grounds on
which admission into full humanity could be won, a school of thought that found authoritative
expression in the Scottish Enlightenment. As Gates points out, it was David Hume in ‘Of
National Character,’ itself a burnished example of eighteenth-century ‘racial nationhood’, who
framed the inferiority of ‘any other complexion than white’ as a proven by their lack of ‘arts’:
Race and Ethnicity in Scottish Literature 313
I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or
five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to whites. There never was a civilized nation of any
complexion other than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No
ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences.
(Gates Jr 1985, p. 10)
Hume’s explicit hierarchal polygenism – ‘species of men [. . .] inferior to whites’ – might have
occurred in a footnote, but for Gates it is the precursor to racial hierarchies espoused by later
European Enlightenment figures such as Kant and Hegel (Gates Jr 1985, pp. 10–11). The legacy
of that Humean thought endures in the contemporary nation and informs, directly and indi-
rectly, contemporary Scottish fiction and poetry.
In 1985, Gates could speak confidently about the way that in literary studies, ‘race has been
an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence’ (Gates Jr 1985, p. 2). Since that point,
race has rapidly become more central to the analysis of literature, impelled first by insurgent
scholarship such as that marked by ‘Writing “Race”’ and later by the institutionalisation of
‘postcolonial studies’ and, more locally, ‘Black British literature’. That discipline has had little
to say about Scotland but, even if belatedly in comparison to the United States or England,
Scottish literary studies have pursued similar critical lines. Surveys such as Suhayl Saadi’s
‘Infinite Diversity in New Scottish Writing’ or Alasdair Niven’s ‘New Diversity, Hybridity
and Scottishness’ have enumerated and championed what is euphemistically called the ‘diver-
sity’ of writing in Scotland – that is to say, the range of racialised subject positions now pro-
ducing writing and attracting critical attention (Niven 2007, p. 331; Saadi 2000). While
some accounts of Scotland’s postcolonial status have placed it within the ‘colonised’ world, or
defined Scots as racialised, many others have repudiated such claims and instead critically
track Scotland’s imperial and racialising history itself: Liam Connell’s influential ‘Modes of
Marginality’ broke ground in this regard (Connell 2003, pp. 41–53). Connell and Graeme
Macdonald, among others, have worked at theorising Scotland as a racialised landscape: in the
former case trying to refute the logic that sees Scotland as colonised by England and the people
of Scotland as victims of British raciology; in the latter attempting to map some of the repre-
sentations of race and racism which have already emerged in Scotland (Macdonald 2010,
pp. 79–107). Attempts to situate Scotland in comparative analysis with post-colonial writing,
crystallised in Scottish Literature, Postcolonial Literature (2011), have also offered perspectives on
race and racism, not least Michael Gardiner’s provocative argument in the collection’s intro-
duction which argues for a Scottish nationalism fundamentally oppositional to racism, as an
opportunity to eschew continuity Britishness and to ‘escape from the racial into citizenship’ via
a civic model (Gardiner 2011, p. 7).
The gradual development of a Scottish sub-discipline of black writing in the late twentieth
century can be indexed by the career of Jackie Kay, Scotland’s most prominent black writer
and a literary polymath. Kay’s early works were created in, and addressed, an English context
that nurtured and consumed black writing and creative arts to a much greater extent than
Scotland; emblematic here is the stage play ‘Chiaroscuro’ (1986 [2011]), produced, set, and
first performed in London with Bernardine Evaristo in a leading role. The main body of her
work as a poet, novelist, and short story writer however shifted attention to Scotland itself,
with a marked engagement with, among many other things, blackness, mixed racedness, and
racism. When she took the position of the Scots Makar in 2016, Kay became a nationally
representative figure, moving her critical focus on race and racism more directly into the literary
centre ground, and into closer proximity to an official mode of devolutionary nationalism.
That transition, from quasi-émigré writer, through eventual critical and popular acclaim, to
national poet, is suggestive of the general tendency towards writing on race and racism in
Scotland – a movement from margin to centre. That is not to suggest that Kay’s work is par-
ticularly fitted to a redemptive narrative of benevolent pluralism. On the contrary, it often
registers some of the more political, and conceptually difficult, dimensions of writing race.
‘Chiaroscuro’ presented an early critical position – early even in terms of Black British critical
thought – on the assumptions and exclusions of blackness in relation to gender, sexuality,
nationality and colour through the entwined stories of four women, each with a distinct relation-
ship to a core political idea of blackness (Kay 2011, pp. 59–118). Kay’s first poetry collection,
The Adoption Papers (1991), made explicit the everyday racism of life for a young black girl in
Scotland. Adoption, as John McLeod has reflected, provides its own distinct social history of
racism in Britain in the ‘colour sorting’ of adoption agencies (McLeod 2016, pp. 211–224).
But adoption in The Adoption Papers and Kay’s later novel Trumpet (1998) also provides for a
profound interruption to racial logic in the form of the challenge to the eminence of consan-
guinity presented by adoption practice, both to what McLeod calls ‘consanguineous norms’ of
familial structure and to the idea of imagined community – nation – as a shared ‘blood’ or
haemocentrism (McLeod 2016, p. 218).
Kay is the most prominent of a number of black poets who have explored race and racism in
Scotland, often converging on key areas of interrogation: colonial history, contemporary encoun-
ters with racism, international anti-racist and black solidarity, experiences of mixed racedness,
and a larger British state politics of race. Maud Sulter produced pioneering early work in two
collections, As a Black Woman (1985) and Zabat (1989). Lacking local resources for the literary
imagination of black experience, Sulter looked south to poetic exemplars in England like Linton
Kwesi Johnson, echoing a critique of state racism on the streets and in the police; she looked
outside of Britain and pinned her work to Afrocentrism and to a transnational black modernity
that anticipated the ideas Paul Gilroy would later formalise in The Black Atlantic (1993). Sulter
did represent black life in Scotland, however. Like Kay’s The Adoption Papers, Sulter’s poems
speak to a sense of racialised difference, an inescapable visibility and projected cultural essence
born from a pervasive and homogeneous, and yet unexamined, whiteness – what Sulter describes
in various moments as Scotland’s ‘white ethereal cultural void’ (Sulter 1989, p. 22). Her poetry
is oriented around emphatic and emplaced blackness, that seeks ‘to rejoice/in the blackness/of the
skin’ and reacts to a vulgar racism where ‘Nigger Darkie Paki/all means the same to them’
(Sulter 1985, pp. 11, 23). Kay’s ‘Chiaroscuro’ depicted the delicate texturing of ‘colour hierar-
chies’ within black political organisation in England; Sulter’s poetry, like that of poets who fol-
lowed her, represents Scottish racism as a homogenising discourse that congeals difference into a
fungible set of abuse terms.
The preoccupations of Sulter’s work are echoed in Kokumo Rocks, a performance poet whose
collection Stolen from Africa takes its name from a phrase popularised by Bob Marley’s ‘Buffalo
Soldier.’ Many of Rocks’s poems addresses a state politics of race in Britain, registered in the
outrage of ‘Gypsies, Not In My Backyard’, ‘Refugees Welcome Here (Not)’, and ‘Darfur Why
For’ (Rocks 2007, pp. 25, 56, 57). The eponymous poem intently focuses on Scottish imperial
history, commemorating slave revolts ‘. . . from Haiti to/The Scottish lands’, with explicit refer-
ences to abolitionism in Scotland in the figures of ‘Black men like [Robert] Wedderburn/
And [David] Spens’ (Rocks 2007, p. 3). Her poetry also directly addresses the psychology of
racialisation in Scotland, most clearly in two poems that invite comparative analysis. ‘Belong
Where’ offers a recurring ‘identity crisis’ that lies between the recognisable taxonomies of white-
ness and blackness: ‘Mixed race/Mixed face/Mixed hair/Mixed roots/Mixed up/Belong here/
Belong where/Nowhere!/Scream!’ (Rocks 2007, p. 11). ‘Two Girls’ offers the alternative of racial
solidarity: ‘Two girls/Same eyes/Same skin/Same hair/Same love/Mirrors/Mirrored/Reflections/
Looking black/Talking black/Together’(Rocks 2007, p. 48). On the basis of the blackness out-
lined in Kay and Sulter’s works, these poems may well feature the same subjectivities in different
orientation to race – one whose isolation and exclusion from blackness means she ‘belongs
nowhere’; the others ‘talking black together’, participants in a shared experience of blackness
providing social resilience in Scotland.
A poet like Hannah Lavery can thus be understood as part of a genealogy of black poets in
Scotland. Lavery’s poems in Blood Salt Spring (2022) have a broad scope, but a marked race con-
sciousness. ‘Scotland, You’re No Mine’, one of the iconic poems in the collection, is an explicitly
national address that invokes a problem-denying, history-defying ‘sepia-tinged cross eye’ of ‘for-
getful Caledonia’ averted from the source of ‘swept-away, blood stained, sweat-/stained sugar for
your tablet’ (Lavery 2022, pp. 49, 50). Sugar for tablet alludes to Stuart Hall’s metaphor of the
West Indian migrant as the ‘sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea’, tracing the national-
colonial past in mundane but resonant commodities; the poem indicts Scotland’s post-imperial
melancholia, ‘Sitting atop a that shite and broken bones/weeping/poor me’, but circles round to
a claim of citizenship bound up with anti-racist resistance: ‘And you can say, I dinnae belong to
you – go on/-but I am limpet stuck on you’ (Lavery 2022, p. 49). Much of the collection has a
quality of testimony, staying close to the ‘problem’. The first poem in Blood Salt Spring, ‘Question
of Percentage’, presents a bald critique of haemocentric race in two short couplets: ‘are you done/
with the percentages – yet?/which side are we/falling down on – then?’; those ideas are echoed in
‘Remix for the Brown Girl’, where ‘They go on remixing/my mixed blood/my fractured sense//
to be newly named/parsed and recorded […]’ (Lavery 2022, p. 25). The emphasis on the taxo-
nomic, the measurable, or the managerial character of race seems at once to gesture backwards in
time to Victorian-era raciologies, the logic of slavery and the ‘one drop’ rule, and simultaneously
to the present, to a culturalist politics in Scotland, inherited from British state politics of race,
that ‘keeps track’ of race as evidence of a modern and confident pluralism. Meanwhile, ‘Everyday
Racism’ showcases the effectiveness of poetry in registering the unspeakable quality of racist
abuse, where the ambling establishment of a quotidian day culminates in a concluding exchange
between mother and racially-abused child: ‘Hush – now. Hush – now. Hush – now. Hush –
now – /Mum, they called me a …/Hush now. Hush now. Hush–’ (Lavery 2022, p. 45). The
‘hushing’ that precedes and succeeds the line acts doubly, as the consolation of the mother, but
also as a prohibition on that racist language, part refusal to reinscribe, part unbearable emotional
pain. It is not, however, a problem dodged but only deferred, returned to moments later in ‘Hush
Now (Shitty Brown)’ and the plaintive excuses of white parents who recentre the encounter on
their own bafflement, upset, and ‘irritation’ (Lavery 2022, pp. 47–48).
In fiction, Kay’s Trumpet and Luke Sutherland’s Jelly Roll (1998) were both significant post-
Trainspotting works that address blackness in Scotland in a devolutionary moment. Each encodes
some of that moment, looking to a national history of racism and framing questions about a
Scottish future. Through recollection and testimony from diverse figures, Trumpet maps the
absence of the black trumpeter Joss Moody in the aftermath of his death. Moody, and his
adopted son Colman, are mixed-race men shaped by racism named and implied, where abuse
terms like ‘darky’ and ‘ape’ bubble up from the near past, and the question of nationhood is
constantly posed and reframed (Kay 1998, pp. 27, 54). Scotland is Colman’s ‘father’s country’,
owned and secure, but growing up in England it is only ‘the country where Colman himself was
born’; in the absence of that the strong affiliation of his father, Colman contemplates affirming
all the racial-national profiling – ‘Morocco, Trinidad, Tobago, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone,
Jamaica’ – that comes his way, asking ‘[w]hat does it matter anyway?’ (Kay 1998, pp. 181, 58).
Joss’s strong relationship to Scottish nationhood and black collectivity is in part because of
what he sees as their civic character. Africa, blackness, ‘bloodlines’, nation, are elective: ‘you
pick the one you like best and that one is true’ (Kay 1998, p. 59). This is less a postmodern
fluidity of self, a source of considerable frustration to Colman, than an implied return of politi-
cal agency and a break from biological or geographical determinism that chimes with the his-
torical moment.
If Colman’s relationship to Scotland in Trumpet is vexed by distance, Liam Bell in Jelly Roll
occupies a similar near-remove: a black saxophonist from Ireland, the dominant presence of the
narrative but not the dominant voice, who exerts a disordering effect during a concert tour of
Scotland that draws racist assumptions to the surface. Liam is part of a band which Graeme
Macdonald suggests is microcosmically suggestive of a Scottish polity; he points to the ‘future
[of the] progressive collective’ and the ‘power struggle for executive control’ in the novel as
indicative of its Scottish devolutionary character (Macdonald 2010, pp. 92–93). Jelly Roll
undoubtedly responds to Trainspotting, another novel often construed as constitutional. Its title
is both a jazz reference and a narcotic allusion, and the fast-paced, invective Glasgow dialogue
exchanged between the all-male band at its heart is a mixture of camaraderie and mutual loath-
ing recognisable from Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, and the others. But it draws race and racism
much further into the centre than that era-defining work, as well as the oppositional and often
macho anti-racism at work in Scotland. Liam is subjected to recurring abuse from the psychotic
rival saxophonist Malc and from surreal groups attending gigs on the band’s carnivalesque tour,
rugby scrums chanting ‘you black bastard’ or men wandering around with ‘WOGS OUT!’ written
in white over gold body paint (Sutherland 1998, pp. 243, 383). Liam’s own reactions and moti-
vations are obscured, observable only in brief, scattered moments, maintaining a constant and
urgent focus on a kind of white derangement spread throughout a broad geographic scope of
Scotland covered by the tour, from Glasgow to Orkney. The terrible act of racist violence revealed
at the conclusion of the novel, a racist abuse term scarred into Liam’s stomach by Malc, is defini-
tively literal, meanwhile, and affirms both Gates’s judgement of race as a ‘pernicious act of lan-
guage’ and the understanding of a literature as a site for that act and its contestation (Gates
Jr 1985, p. 5).
These accounts of black life in Scotland, and the imperial history they register, cannot ‘stand
in’ for all experiences of race and racism defined under a unifying, but outdated, sign of black-
ness. In his ongoing critique of what is now often called ‘political blackness’, Tariq Modood has
observed that ‘conceptualizations of race and racism, and hence also of antiracism and racial
equality, have been too narrowly defined’; Modood argues that ‘Britain [cannot] be understood
in terms of a racial-dualist framework’ that breaks down along black-white lines (Modood 2005,
p. 6). Modood’s direction towards a critical focus on ‘Asianness’, a contingent racial category that
itself is liable to further revision and compartmentalisation, is vital in Scotland where the largest
racialised minority in census terms is ‘Asian Pakistani’ (McCrone 2017, p. 333). Suhayl Saadi’s
interrogation of race draws on the specific experience of Scots historically connected to the
Pakistani diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the psychosexual dimensions of raced
difference. Those elements recur in his collection The Burning Mirror (2001). In ‘Ninety-Nine
Kiss-o-grams’, the young Glaswegian Sal travels to Lahore to take possession of a plot of land, a
literal inheritance from his Pakistani grandfather to read alongside the psychological inheritance
from his transgressive father. Sal’s racially-charged fantasy of ‘wee white breasts pushin intae his
broon face, fillin his mooth, his body so that he couldnae breathe for the whiteness’, recalls
Frantz Fanon, who reads in sexual conquest the seizing of masculine colonial power as a consola-
tion to the social annihilation of racism: ‘I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.
When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and
make them mine’ (Fanon 1952[1986], p. 63; Saadi 2001, p. 5). Sal bears witness to that
ambiguity, describing:
the men who’d been seen hauding honds wi mini-skirtit gorees an walkin doon the street. And he’d
despised those men and yet, at the same time, he’d wantit tae be wan ae them.
(Saadi 2001, p. 7)
Sal finds himself pressured from both sides of a racially-defined divide, to see the promiscuity of
‘gorees’ – white women – as both morally repugnant and as a symbol of prestige and power, the
restoration of masculinity and dignity. Sal’s aspiration towards sexual conquest is both inspired
and pre-emptively forbidden by his father’s elopement with a white woman: ‘his faither had gone
and done that, and made it impossible fur Sal. Now, he would nivir be able tae surrender’
(Saadi 2001, p. 7). For a Glaswegian, the injunction against ‘surrender’ is immediately recognis-
able as a shibboleth of the British entanglement in Ireland: ‘no surrender’ to the Irish Republican
Army a rallying cry for Unionists everywhere. Sal is fatefully locked into a British future of
racially defined propriety.
The encounter between brown Pakistani and white Protestant Glasgow is palpable in ‘Queens
of Govan’, which depicts the kebab shop working lives of Ruby and Qaisara. The story manifests,
and disrupts, the Clydesideism of an imagined white, heavy-industrial Glaswegian proletariat,
‘loose an pasty like a used punchbag’, filled with ‘rage ae the dead ships an the closed factory
gates an the games lost and won; an the rage of the marchers with their blue-an-orange banners’
(Saadi 2001, pp. 24, 32). Ruby valorises Glasgow as ‘real’ because there are ‘[n]ae blond wigs in
Glasgae. Aw that stuff wis for them in London, where ye might pretend tae be anything an no
one would give a shit’ (Saadi 2001, p. 24). The Clyde however rebels against its reliable realist
character, becoming Gothic threat or agent; Ruby’s violent confrontation with her alcoholic
father at the story’s culmination results in her lapsing into unconsciousness as she ‘felt the cold
waters of the Clyde flow around her and take her down intae a darkness without end’ (Saadi 2001,
p. 35). This immersion into the Clyde signals more a renegotiation than outright rejection of
‘Clydesideism’, in which the aesthetics, and the labour and tenacity of Glasgow people associated
with that literary mode benefit from an expanded franchise that rejects its essentially white char-
acter and recognises a larger and heterogeneous Clydeside.
Clydesideism in ‘Queens’ is symptomatic of Saadi’s pronounced intertextual recasting of
prominent works of Scottish writing. Psychoraag (2005) depicts the six-hour run of the final
iteration of the eclectic ‘Junnune’ radio show on the soon-to-close underground station Radio
Chaandni. The psychotropic experiences of the novel follow a pattern established in Trainspotting
and include, among other allusions, the subtle reimagining of ‘Tam O’Shanter’ as a heroin high.
The narrative action transpires in a space that Graeme Macdonald describes as ‘marginal’, ‘parti-
tioned’, ‘peripheral’, and ‘compromised by its representative vulnerability’; in short, a meta-
phorical registration of the precarious – and again, in ‘partition’, a world historical – condition
for expressing Scottish Asian life (Macdonald 2010, p. 91). Like the stories from The Burning
Mirror, Psychoraag draws on the influence of Fanon’s psychically corrosive sexual economy of race
difference. Zaf and his white girlfriend Babs are entangled in a literal ‘colonial desire’: ‘[s]he
needed his brown-ness – just as he needed her white. They were both conquerin territories’
(Saadi 2005, pp. 25–26). Zaf’s desire for Bab’s whiteness recasts Fanon’s ultimate desire for the
racialised people of European empires to become white:
he had wanted to obliterate himself, to merge his being in their white-ness. He had wanted, so
badly, to be accepted and loved that he would’ve been willin to have scraped the blackness from his
skin, cell by fuckin cell, until all that would’ve been left would’ve been the bones. And they were
white … For a long time, he had wished that he wis white.
(Saadi 2005, pp. 134–135)
Although Zaf wants to de-epidermalise himself, removing his ‘blackness’, it is in fact the uncer-
tain racialisation of ‘brown-ness’ that affects him acutely. Describing his self-hatred, he observes
that ‘if you were in between, now that was the real locus of purgatory [. . .] It wis right down
inside of your skin and it turned and twisted until you were turned and twisted’ (Saadi 2005,
p. 134). Zaf’s sense of racial indeterminacy – poised between hegemonic whiteness and his ide-
alisation of stable blackness – is made palpably a Scottish literary phenomenon by its explicit
linking to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The psychic link and embodied
transference experienced between Zaf and his ‘gangster’ alter ego Zafar is Stevensonian and
explicitly racial, with Zaf drawn into Zafar’s ‘scars’, ‘hate’, and critically, the ‘black-and-white of
his blood’ (Saadi 2005, p. 257).
Zaf’s anxieties of brownness dominate Psychoraag, but a novel purporting to address Pakistani
Scottish life is necessarily imbricated with another major ‘racialising’ discourse in the late twen-
tieth and early twenty-first centuries: the Muslim. Zaf is a lapsed Muslim who often reflects on
Islam through his index of cultural references and the experience of his parents fleeing Pakistan.
Modood points out that the taxonomy of ‘Muslim’ is the most pressing contemporary race dis-
course in Britain, and that ‘[e]ven before September 11, it was becoming evident that Muslims,
not blacks, were being perceived as “the Other” most threatening to British society’
(Modood 2005, p. 186). That has purchase in a Scottish context where, according to David
McCrone, Muslims are the second-largest religious group after ‘Christian’ (McCrone 2017,
p. 333). In tracing the deep history of Islam in Scotland from the Middle Ages, Silke Stroh and
Manfred Malzahn single out the contemporary as a crucial period marked by ‘multiculturalism,
integration, Islamophobia, and the racism often lurking behind western liberalist façades’ (Stroh
and Malzahn 2021, p. vi). While ‘Muslim’ is not a biocentric raciology, it is a de facto racialisa-
tion on the basis of an imagined cultural essence circulated in dominant representative practices
and discursive coding. In practice, this culturalist racism differs little from ‘biological’ racism –
both project culturally essential traits onto groups defined according to bogus scientific or
social-scientific taxonomies. That process of ‘culturalism’ does not replace racialisation entirely,
however, and often intersects with it; a Muslim might be racialised in other ways – as black, as
Arabic, as South Asian – as Zaf himself is.
Counter to a recited history that sees the 11 September attacks as the genesis point for con-
temporary Islamophobia, Leila Aboulela’s writing points to the racialisation of Muslims at an
earlier point in Scotland, impelled by the first Gulf War. Aboulela’s The Translator (1998 [2001])
depicts the life of Sammar, a bereaved woman from Sudan working as an Arabic translator at the
University of Aberdeen. The place of Islam in Scotland forms a significant element of the narra-
tive: Sammar’s prayers are pointedly evicted from the public realm, where they are treated with
suspicion, into the private sphere of her austere accommodation; in the context of the first Gulf
War, ‘suddenly everyone became aware that Sammar was a Muslim. Once a man shouted at her
in King Street, “Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein”’ (Aboulela 1998 [2001], p. 99). Sammar’s
experiences diagnose local racist utterances as symptomatic of structural conditions – in this
instance, the heavily mediatised Gulf War and the construction of the antagonistic Muslim per-
sonified by Saddam Hussein. A common thread through Aboulela’s writing is the emphasis of a
quotidian quality of Muslim life, engaging in a process of naturalisation and habituation in
opposition to the radical Othering which increasingly characterises representations of Muslims
in Britain. That naturalisation is often rendered most clearly in the calling to, or choice to adopt,
the Islamic faith. Sammar is romantically drawn towards Rae, a specialist in contemporary Islam;
Rae, like Sammar emergent from the ruined possibility of a nuclear family, eventually converts
to Islam and they marry. Aboulela’s short fiction also includes a number of examples of conver-
sion, the man who successfully manages to ‘draw his foreign wife to Islam’ in ‘Souvenirs’, or the
Catholic convert to Islam at the heart of ‘Something Old, Something New’ (Aboulela 2001,
pp. 16, 130–131). Normalising the idea of Islamic conversion, like Rae’s decision to speak the
shahadat, can be read as a reversal of the demands of assimilation that are implied by a state poli-
tics of multiculturalism, and pulls against the total victory of a markedly British liberal
universalism.
Where Aboulela’s prose ameliorates the distancing effect imposed on Islam through culturalist
narratives and a public political culture of Islamophobia, other writing adopts a more combative
stance on the exclusionary practices and racist discourses applied to Islam and to Muslims in
Scotland. Imtiaz Dharker work’s foregrounds the racialisation of Muslims both before and after
the events of 9/11. In ‘Pariah’ from Postcards from God (1997), the persona is ‘an untidy shape/on
their street, a scribble leaked/out of a colonial notebook,/somehow indiscreet’ (Dharker 1997,
p. 27). The alien quality of the Muslim figure is immediately discernible, an invasive presence
on ‘their’ street whose ink-like ‘untidiness’, bound up with the colonial past, suggests the
visibility of both racialisation and the immediate recognisability of certain forms of Islamic
dress – the hijab or niqab. The figure in ‘Pariah’ is characterised by an ‘indiscreet’ visibility, a
quality Dharker also emphasises in poems like ‘Image’, ‘Aperture’, ‘Frame’, and ‘In camera’.
Here, her recurring fascination with apertures and lenses, with cameras, and with the captured
image, invokes the epistemological-taxonomic logic of a longer racial history and recognises the
privileging of visual signs in defining race categories; they also, of course, acknowledge the satu-
ration of surveillance technologies in Britain generally and specifically targeted at Muslims, and
the mediatisation of the figure of the Muslim during and after the first Gulf War (Dharker 1997,
pp. 67, 87, 90; 2006, p. 102). Dharker’s third collection, The Terrorist at my Table (2006), is
animated by a fierce engagement with the events of 9/11 and the so-called ‘War on Terror’,
referencing the planes themselves in ‘Before I’; the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in ‘Still’, and
the ongoing occupation in Palestine that obliquely chains together so many of the injustices of
the Arabic-speaking and Muslim world in ‘The Terrorist at my Table’ (Dharker 2006, pp. 38,
40, 22–23).
While racialised and ‘culturalised’ writers ranging from Kay to Dharker have focused on race
and racism, colonial history and racial justice in Scotland, those critiques have also been advanced
by scholars working in an increasingly diffuse postcolonial field, and by white Scottish writers
themselves. Devolution has been accompanied by a more acute focus on Scottish imperial history,
and on the colonised world as a site where race has been formed by Scots and exploited for the
material benefit of Scotland. The administration of slavery was the path narrowly avoided by
Robert Burns, but one which enriched many Scots; the work of thinkers like Carla Sassi and
Michael Morris have placed Scotland’s literary imagination at the heart of its imperial project
(Sassi 2007, pp. 131–198; Morris 2015). British colonies were laboratories of race formation, and
that raciological history has been excavated and interrogated in contemporary fiction, such as in
Robbie Kydd’s The Quiet Stranger (1991), a novel of Scottish colonisers in Tobago which main-
tains a dialogue with Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. James Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003)
excavates the history of an early and crucial court case on the legitimacy of slavery in Scotland
and in so doing reflects on the processes by which colonial histories are lost, wilfully forgotten,
or creatively reimagined. Closest to literary historiography is Andrew O. Lindsay’s Illustrious
Exile (2006), placing Robert Burns, and significantly the Scots language of Burns, in alignment
with the racial domination of the plantation. Lindsay’s novel is interspersed with reworkings of
Burns’s poems, resituated in Caribbean plantation society; indicatively, the reimagined ‘A Man’s
a Man for a’ that’ directly addresses the institution of slavery and ‘Beneath the skin, the man
within’, the common humanity beyond race difference (Lindsay 2006, p. 268). Chris Dolan’s
Redlegs (2012) takes as its subject the invention of, and exclusion from, whiteness, defined starkly
in the strict haemocentric racial demarcations of the Caribbean. These texts don’t include the
kind of ‘Scottish literature’ written from a perspective outside of Scotland; one salient example
would be David Dabydeen’s Johnson’s Dictionary (2013), which places Scots in, and connects
Scotland to, the geographies and economies of slavery in colonial Guyana; another is Shara
McCallum’s collection No Ruined Stone (2021), which, like Lindsay, imagines a counter-factual
account wherein Burns journeys to Jamaica and his wife and descendant subsequently migrate,
historically re-emergent, back to Scotland.
Writers like Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Irvine Welsh have also produced work
engaged with contemporary race and racism in Scotland, often calling back to colonial history
which by implication structures, and haunts, the present. Both Gray’s Lanark (1981) and
1982, Janine (1984) allude to a history of race in momentary but significant references to
blackness, to raciological thought, and, in the latter, to the psycho-sexual dimension of
slavery. Kelman’s early novels acknowledge quotidian racism in Scotland, well in advance of
the secure establishment of postcolonial thinking in a broader Scottish literary context. In
A Disaffection (1989), for example, brazen deployment of racist terms is Gavin Doyle’s strat-
egy for signalling the growing class divide he perceives with his brother Pat, now a teacher
(Kelman 1989[1999], pp. 304–307; see Kovesi 2007, p. 99). Some of Kelman’s later works,
his ‘American’ novels, are particularly attentive to race as a ‘pernicious act of language’. The
Scot Jeremiah Brown in You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004) muses on the privi-
leges of whiteness granted to him and not to his co-workers, and whose inferences are sensi-
tively attuned to the marked language of race difference in the United States as applied to his
girlfriend Yasmin. Murdo, the young narrator of Dirt Road (Kelman 2016), is a suitable foil
to establish the contradictory and confounding logic of race as an adolescent thrust into the
casual racism of his family in the southern States, juxtaposed against the communitarian
welcome offered by African American zydeco players with whom he shares a passion for the
accordion. In the treatment of Spud’s cousin Dode, Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) had already
signalled a recognition of particular forms of anti-black racism in Scotland with British
imperial history at their heart, but his most sustained engagement with Scotland’s history
of colonial racism was expressed in Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995). Marabou Stork Nightmares
ventriloquises the adventure narratives of authors like John Buchan in its satirical coma-fantasy
of African colonisation and the exploitation of its people, a persistent dream of white suprem-
acy that roils around in the national subconscious as a form of what Gilroy calls ‘postimperial
melancholia’ (Gilroy 2004, p. 98). Gilroy’s focus is undoubtedly an English Britain, but
Marabou Stork Nightmares inflects that melancholia for Scotland, its dreamscape a rendition of
the ‘unacknowledged pain of [Empire’s] loss and the unsettling shame of its bloody management’
(Gilroy 2004, p. 110).
As Lavery’s Lament reveals, the death of Sheku Bayoh invalidates comforting myths in circula-
tion, named in the play, which see Scotland as less prone to racist acts, and which sees the insti-
tutional racism readable in Bayoh’s death as a problem local to the English metropolis. But the
recognition of proximity between Scottish and English institutional racism, specifically in the
police force, already had a sharp literary observation. Welsh’s Filth (1998), published almost two
decades before Bayoh died in 2015, is centred on the murder of a black man, Efan Wurie. Filth
dramatises the meandering search for his killer among uninterested police officers for whom rac-
ist abuse terms pepper everyday speech. Even through the moral degeneracy of the main focal-
iser, Bruce Robertson, it is apparent that the racism that allows Wurie’s death to go unsolved is,
as per Lentin’s definition, a result of institutional police norms and Scotland’s public political
culture. Robertson, his name indelibly Scottish-national, is the true killer of Wurie, who is
killed in revenge for an imagined slight inflicted by another, unidentified black man. As such, it
is explicitly not his personhood that instigates Robertson’s crime but his blackness. Wurie’s
death is described in typical Welshian excess. It is not the death of Sheku Bayoh, discursively
presented in the media in the sterile language of state agencies. Welsh’s novel does, however,
puncture through that veneer to expose imaginatively the inner workings of those agencies, lay-
ing bare the structures that led to Bayoh’s death.
Any attempt to map race and racism across the staked-out territory of national literature is an
expansive project with limitations and vexations. Readings and arguments presented here con-
stitute only an introductory working-through of race and racism in devolutionary Scotland.
Much remains unsaid about the deeper roots of Scotland’s raciological past and the racial imagi-
nation in the historical sweep of Scottish literature, especially during the heyday of the British
Empire. Likewise, a more extended canon than that referenced here might include works by
writers like Aminatta Forna or Zoë Wicomb, writers whose prose fiction brings Scotland and
Africa closer together. As Corinne Fowler has observed, literary economy directly influences the
narratives of racialised experience made available to a wider market (Fowler 2008, pp. 75–94).
Published and promoted literature – many of the authors referenced here are the recipients of
national and international prizes – is only the most noticeable frontier in writing race in Scotland.
Both Niven and Saadi’s perspectives on ‘diversity’ properly recognised that many writers of col-
our are still working at the margins, looking for opportunities to circulate their work. That
edgework can be seen in Gutter magazine’s Spring 2020 edition, which brands itself as ‘the first
ever Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic feature issue of a Scottish literary magazine’ (Pirmohamed
and Ying 2020, p. 1). Meanwhile, the story of anti-Irish racism is both deeply embedded in
Scottish history and an everyday reality in contemporary Scotland, yet it lacks political recogni-
tion and much in the way of sustained cultural engagement or criticism – another area that
would justifiably bear interrogation under a sign of race and racism in Scotland. Finally, it would
be a mistake to think of race and racism as issues limited to a defined body of works that name
and directly represent those formations and experiences. Racial history is human history, and race
can prospectively be examined through any text within a taxonomy of ‘Scottish writing’.
References
Aboulela, L. (1998 [2001]). The Translator. London: Kelman, J. (1989 [1999]). A Disaffection. London:
Heinemann. Vintage.
Aboulela, L. (2001). Coloured Lights. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kelman, J. (2004). You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the
Connell, L. (2003). Modes of marginality: Scottish litera- Free. London: Hamish Hamilton.
ture and the uses of postcolonial theory. Comparative Kelman, J. (2016). Dirt Road. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23 Kovesi, S. (2007). James Kelman. Manchester: University
(1&2): 41–53. of Manchester Press.
Dabydeen, D. (2013). Johnson’s Dictionary. Leeds: Peepal Kydd, R. (1991). The Quiet Stranger. Edinburgh:
Tree Press. Mainstream.
Davidson, N., Liinpää, M., McBride, M., and Virnam, S. Lavery, H. (2021). Lament for Sheku Bayoh. Edinburgh:
(ed.) (2018). No Problem Here: Understanding Racism in National Theatre for Scotland.
Scotland. Edinburgh: Luath Press. Lavery, H. (2022). Blood Salt Spring. Edinburgh: Polygon.
Dharker, I. (1997). Postcards from God. Newcastle: Lentin, A. (2004). Racism and Anti- Racism in Europe.
Bloodaxe. London: Pluto Press.
Dharker, I. (2006). The Terrorist at my Table. Tarset: Lindsay, A.O. (2006). Illustrious Exile: Journal of my Sojourn
Bloodaxe. in the West Indies. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.
Dolan, C. (2012). Redlegs. Glasgow: Vagabond Voices. Macdonald, G. (2010). Scottish extractions’: ‘race’ and
Duncan, I. (2007). Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic racism in devolutionary fiction. Orbis Litterarum 65 (2):
Edinburgh. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 79–107.
Dwyer, C. and Bressey, C. (ed.) (2008). New Geographies of McCallum, S. (2021). No Ruined Stone. Leeds: Peepal Tree
Race and Racism. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Press.
Fanon, F. (1952 [1986]). Black Skin, White Masks (trans. McCrone, D. (2017). The New Sociology of Scotland.
C.L. Markmann). London: Pluto Press. London: Sage.
Fowler, C. (2008). A tale of two novels: developing a McLeod, J. (2016). Adoption aesthetics. In: The Cambridge
devolved approach to Black British writing. Journal of Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–
Commonwealth Literature 43 (3): 75–94. 2010) (ed. D. Osborne), 211–224. Cambridge:
Gardiner, M. (2011). Introduction. In: Scottish Literature Cambridge University Press.
and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Modood, T. (2005). Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity
Perspectives (ed. M. Gardiner, G. Macdonald and N. and Muslims in Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
O’Gallagher), 1–12. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University University Press.
Press. Morris, M. (2015). Scotland and the Caribbean c. 1740–
Gates, H.L. Jr. (1985). Writing “race” and the difference 1833: Atlantic Archipelagos. London: Routledge.
it makes. Critical Enquiry 12 (1): 1–20. Niven, A. (2007). New diversity, hybridity and
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, MA: Scottishness. In: The Edinburgh History of Scottish
Harvard University Press. Literature, Vol. 3: Modern Transformations: New Identities
Gilroy, P. (2004). After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial (from 1918) (ed. I. Duncan), 320–331. Edinburgh:
Culture? London: Routledge. Edinburgh University Press.
Gray, A. (1981). Lanark. Edinburgh: Canongate. Pirmohamed, A. and Ying, J.G. (2020). Editorial. Gutter
Gray, A. (1984). 1982, Janine. London: Jonathan Cape. 21 (Spring): 1–3.
Kay, J. (1986 [2011). Chiaroscuro. In: The Methuen Drama Pittock, M. (1999). Celtic Identity and the British Image.
Book of Plays by Black British Writers (ed. L. Goddard), Manchester: Manchester University Press.
59–118. London: Methuen. Robertson, J. (2003). Joseph Knight. London: Fourth Estate.
Kay, J. (1991). The Adoption Papers. Newcastle: Bloodaxe. Rocks, K. (2007). Stolen from Africa. Edinburgh: Luath
Kay, J. (1998). Trumpet. London: Picador. Press.
Saadi, S. (2000). Infinite diversity in Scottish writing. Stroh, S. and Malzahn, M. (2021). Mosques, Manses, Muirs,
Glasgow: ASLS. https://asls.org.uk/infinite-diversity- and “Moors”: representations of Muslims and Islam in
in-new-scottish-writing (accessed 01 August 2022). Scottish culture. Scottish Literary Review 13 (1): v–x.
Saadi, S. (2001). The Burning Mirror. Edinburgh: Polygon. Sulter, M. (1985). As a Black Woman. London: Akira Press.
Saadi, S. (2005). Psychoraag. Edinburgh: Black and White Sulter, M. (1989). Zabat: Poetics of a Family Tree. Hebden
Publishing. Bridge: Urban Fox Press.
Sassi, C. (2007). Acts of (un)willed amnesia: dis/appear- Sutherland, L. (1998). Jelly Roll. London: Anchor.
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Further Reading
Jackson, J. (2020). Writing Black Scotland: Race, Nation

and the Devolution of Black Britain. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
26
Magazines, Devolution and Makars – the
Institutions of Scottish Literature
Eleanor Bell
Senior Lecturer in English Studies, School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
In a New Statesman article published in 2013, ‘The Spirit of Bannockburn’, Scottish poet Kathleen
Jamie discusses her trip to the site of the Battle of Bannockburn, at the invitation of the National
Trust for Scotland. Jamie and a group of other poets, she explains, were invited there as part of
the planning process for its new visitor centre. Each poet ‘was invited to submit an inscription;
these would be made available on the NTS website so the public could voice an opinion. Then a
panel of literary and NTS people would meet to choose one to be engraved on the monument’.
Huddling in the rain, the poets felt the weight of responsibility: ‘the whole Bannockburn thing
was ours in a small way to redirect. What sort of gesture to make, what to say? In what language?
In what tone?’ (Jamie 2013). The fact that this was taking place one year before the
2014 Independence Referendum, tying in with the centenary of the Battle of Bannockburn, was
not lost on Jamie either. As this chapter will explore, over the last few decades, writers and artists
in Scotland have often been called upon to give direction in such ways. Looking specifically at
Scottish literary magazine culture, this chapter will explore examples of the ways in which writ-
ers and critics have subsequently been involved in shaping some of the most important cultural
institutions in Scotland during the last few decades.1
Scottish literary magazines have provided one of the main outlets for representing the views
of writers, have often created a space for national and cultural self-reflection, and in doing so have
captured snapshots of some of the most interesting discussions of their moment. They have often
provided the space for little-known writers to be published for the first time, with many now-
established writers expressing their debt to publications such as Chapman, New Edinburgh Review
and New Writing Scotland for this opportunity.2 Literary magazines have also provided a platform
for venting frustration with the status quo, testing boundaries and conventions, at times helping
to guide cultural debate. Through tracing some examples from Scottish International, Chapman

Magazines, Devolution and Makars – the Institutions of Scottish Literature 325
and Cencrastus over the past few decades, it will be suggested that literary magazines have often
not only tapped into the mood of their times, but in doing so have served a catalytic function in
their discussions and provocations. Usually operating on restricted budgets, often precarious in
nature, they have been naturally drawn to exploring the pressures and limitations of creating art
in a small nation, all of the tensions that entails.
Much work has already been conducted on the modernist context of literary magazines
and their interconnections with the interwar Scottish literary renaissance period
(McCulloch 2009; Craig 2009). In the last 10 years in particular, however, attention has
turned to the post-war context, specifically from the late 1950s onwards (Bell 2018). Some
of these literary magazines have inevitably been more concerned with culture and politics
than others, and it is not the intention here to suggest that all magazines should be consid-
ered similarly in this regard. However, through reflection on three publications from the late
1960s through to the 1990s, it will be suggested that certain magazines have been particu-
larly open to engaging with their moment, which in turn makes them exceptionally useful
resources for understanding broader cultural trends and shifts.3 It will therefore be suggested
that in their active engagement with Scottish culture, magazines such as Scottish International,
Chapman, and Cencrastus can be thought of as of cultural institutions, which in turn have
played their small part in helping to generate the mood for the development of larger-scale
cultural institutions, examples including the Scottish Poetry Library and the National
Theatre of Scotland.
The Scottish Arts Council (SAC) and Scottish International (1968–1974)
An important marker in this discussion is the establishment of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC)
in 1967. As Duncan Glen (editor of Akros magazine from 1965 to 1983), notes in his article on
‘Scottish Periodicals of the 1960s and 1970s’:
The financial patronage that became important in the 1960s to Scottish magazine publishers was,
of course, State patronage. I would suggest that it could be convincingly argued that the single big-
gest influence on the development of Scottish literature since 1960 has been the grants and subsidies
given by the Scottish Arts Council. From 1945 until 1967 the name agreed in London was the
Scottish Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1967 the Committee was renamed as
the Scottish Arts Council and had near enough autonomy to spend the block grant-in-aid given to
it by the Arts Council of Great Britain. Whatever may be in a name, since 1967 the SAC has been
a major player in the game of the arts and literature in Scotland.
(Glen 1998, p. 72)
From its inception in 1967, the SAC therefore had an important role in shaping literary maga-
zine culture. One of the first projects that the SAC became involved with was the setting up of
a new magazine, Scottish International Review, the first edition of which appeared in 1968 (‘Its full
name was Scottish International Review. Its masthead simply proclaimed Scottish International’
[Tait 1997, p. 63]). The emergence of this magazine sparked controversy for several reasons. Not
only was it generously funded from the outset (indeed before the first edition was published), but
the editorship was given to Bob Tait, then a young undergraduate at Edinburgh University. Tait
had previously been involved in the short-lived Feedback magazine (1966–1967), which was
floundering financially after only two issues, so handing over the reins of a new magazine that
was to receive generous financial support was viewed as highly questionable in some quarters.
As Trevor Royle (Literature Director of SAC from 1971 to 1979) states in interview with John
Herdman and Walter Perrie:
Those critics were absolutely right… Although it had an independent existence, in that it was run
by a board of directors, the fact remained that it was SAC-funded. And in the early 1970s we backed
it to go monthly and Bob Tait had very ambitious plans for it to become more The New Statesman
than a literary magazine. So I found myself having to defend it in the Council because people were
critical of it because they thought it was becoming increasingly politicised and they thought it had
a nationalistic slant to it.
(Herdman 2013, p. 102)
Throughout its publication run the magazine explored a wide range of topics, including, for
example, a series of provocations on the direction that Scottish culture should take artistically,
sociologically and politically; all while tapping into the experimental aesthetics of late 1960s,
early 1970s culture. The magazine firmly viewed itself as an intervention – a space to take stock
of Scottish culture and the arts in a period of substantial change. Its aim was to be international
in outlook, Scottish in point of view. As Tait commented in his editorial of issue seven: ‘Its
particular function is to promote Scottish writing and the arts but recognises a need to a style
of publication that can properly integrate national culture with world culture. Its policy is to
encourage Scottish writers to relate contemporary intellectual and artistic developments to
their own context’ (Tait 1969, p. 3). Notably, the magazine also created the space for literary
works to be showcased for the first time – for example, extracts of Alasdair’s Gray’s Lanark were
published in issue 12 (1970), providing Gray with an early outlet for this work in progress.
Archie Hind, who had published The Dear Green Place in 1966, was a regular contributor, and
an extract from his novel in progress, Fur Sadie, appeared in vol 6, no. 6 (1973). This remained
unpublished until first printed (unfinished) by Canongate in 2008. Unusually for its time, the
magazine also regularly published work by women writers, including Liz Lochhead, Joan Ure,
and Elspeth Davie.
The magazine saw itself as a testing ground for the arts in Scotland. Though it only existed for
a few years (1968–1974), Scottish International tapped into many important discussions concerning
the role of the arts in society. A pertinent example here is Archie Hind’s participation in the
Easterhouse Project, first conceptualised in 1968 after Frankie Vaughan pledged £10 000 to help
bring an end to gang disputes in the area.4 In issue 11, ‘A Novelist in Easterhouse’, Bob Tait
interviewed Hind on his participation in this project (which Hind joined in 1968, leaving in
1969). In this discussion, Hind outlines some of the basic inadequacies of the infrastructure in
Easterhouse at the time, the forces that conspired against its resident’s chances of flourishing
there – the difficulties and expense of travelling to work, the lack of shops and amenities, a general
lack of structure and order. As Hind comments, ‘I had the advantage when I went to Easterhouse
of being a skilled listener and a skilled observer, you know? That is, I was a professional novelist –
I went in with a cold fishy eye, and I think I saw what was happening very quickly’ (Hind and
Tait 1968, p. 16). Some other notable examples of cultural engagement include an interview with
Ronald (‘Bingo’) Mavor, Director of the Scottish Arts Council (1965–1971) on what the SAC
should do, and for whom (no. 13, February 1971), Ian Dunn’s piece on ‘Gay Liberation in Scotland’
(March 72, vol. 5, no. 3) and Tom McGrath’s piece ‘IT’s Alternative Market’, discussing the pro-
gress and direction of the underground press, specifically his own International Times. In his article,
for example, McGrath points out what he feels is the corresponding need for a cultural shift to
take place within Scotland, which he felt was being slow to move with the times:
The change must take place in your locality – your town, your street, your house, your head… I have
looked around Scotland and discovered the big bluff everywhere: in the universities, the poetry
rooms, the arts labs, the magazines, a culture game is going on that constitutes a closed circuit
without much relevance to anything other than itself.
(McGrath 1969, p. 40).
During his time as editor, Tait was always keen to experiment, to take the magazine beyond the
page where possible. In his editorial in October 1972, for example, Tait announced that: ‘A week-
end conference under the aegis of Scottish International and bringing together speakers and partici-
pants from all over Britain, will be held in Edinburgh University premises on the 6–8 April 1973.
Called “What Kind of Scotland?”, the conference will be a gathering of important critical view-
points on the nature of Scottish society and its future’ (Tait 1973, p. 3). Attracting over 400 del-
egates over the three days, the conference went on to explore topics such as ‘What kind of society?’,
‘What kind of culture?’, ‘What kind of economy and environment?’, ‘What kind of democracy?’
and ‘What action now?’ While the conference was viewed by many as a great success, as Tait and
others have attested it was the performance of 7 : 84’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
on the Saturday evening that brought most people together across the political divide.5
It was through his role as editor of Scottish International that Tait managed to commission John
McGrath to write the play. As McGrath has commented:
Bob Tait… had got together, in Edinburgh, a conference of 450 people from all over Scotland to
discuss what kind of Scotland they wanted. They were politicians, union men, writers, social and
community workers, academics, and ordinary people who cared about the future of Scotland. We were
to perform our new play for them, before setting off on a six-week tour of the Highlands and Islands.
The problem was, as I explained to Bob, by the 16th March we’d only just got the company together,
and not a line of the play was written. Could he find somebody else? No. That was what he wanted.
(McGrath 1981, p. v)
Such energetic engagements were therefore at the heart of Scottish International. The publication was
relatively short-lived, had exhausted itself by 1974 (Tait handing editorship to Tom Buchan in 1973,
by which point the magazine was already starting to fizzle out). During its publication period, how-
ever, it is clear to see that Scottish International’s key motivation was to ruffle feathers and take risks. Its
aim was to create a platform for new types of discussion, to see where these might lead. In this sense
it was putting cultural institutions to the test, but not in order to overturn them in an anarchic way.
Rather, as Tait points out in the editorial of no. 14, ‘Scottish International is not an “underground”
magazine. “Underground” is not a useful category for the kind of activity and debate necessary in
Scotland. The point is to get the “overground” more aware of what is being done, sometimes in their
name’ (Tait 1971, p. 3). Tait goes on: ‘This magazine is in the business of open and public debate.
Anyone can join in. How will we approach the problems in Scottish culture and society’. In reflecting
deeply on cultural institutions at the time, Scottish International therefore positioned itself as integral
to discussions of how these might be shaped in future, what their underlying political and moral ethos
should be. As John Herdman comments: ‘The long-term significance of Scottish International was that
for all its flaws it was an early part of the nascent movement towards a mature political, economic and
cultural debate about the future of Scotland’ (Herdman 2013, p. 102).
In ‘Facts Sacred, Comment Free, and Art for Everybody’s Sake’, one of his final pieces for the
magazine, Tait reflected on his editorial approach:
Basically, I’ve seen this magazine as a kind of exploration vehicle, getting as far as possible into the
depths – some of them murky – of the society and culture within viewing range. The focus has
therefore been on Scottish society and culture, though forays have been made wider afield where it
has been relevant to do so, and this has always been an important aspect of the magazine’s work as
far as I have been concerned.
(Tait 1973b, p. 33)
Tait goes on to suggest that in its focus on controversial topics and experimental form of writing,
the magazine generated ‘welcome charges of electricity into the atmosphere’ (Tait 1973b, p. 33).
While for some critics this intense focus on Scottish culture made it seem as though the magazine
had a nationalist bias, ironically, for some nationalist critics, the magazine seemed far from
espousing nationalist values; the radical, experimental nature of the publication instead upend-
ing the very grounds of such possibilities.6 Nonetheless, while the magazine resisted clear forms
categorisation, Scottish International is important to this discussion for the pioneering way in
which it simultaneously fostered experiment across many areas of literature, politics and the arts,
with a strong self-consciousness of itself as a vehicle for cultural change.
Chapman (1970–)
The Chapman (later Chapman) was formed in 1970 by George Hardie and edited by Hardie and
Walter Perrie. Joy Perrie began co-editing with Walter Perrie in 1972, then became sole editor
(as Joy Hendry) in 1977; in doing so, becoming the first female editor of a literary magazine in
Scotland (Bell 2020, p. 218). Unlike Scottish International, Chapman was not initially funded by
the SAC, and often faced financial difficulties throughout its print history (last published 2010,
though the magazine has not officially ceased publication). Commenting on her early years as
solo editor, Hendry states:
Being a young editor, and female, wasn’t easy then and that may be why the Scottish Arts Council
about a year later, threatened to withdraw Chapman’s grant, by then £1700. After a public battle,
they reinstated it, but unfortunately at only two-thirds of the original amount. By then (1979) a
firmer editorial policy was in place… the commitment to the Scottish arts was deepened.
(Hendry 1996, p. 3)
Throughout her time as editor, Hendry was committed to representing the changing Scottish
cultural and political context as well as in generating interconnections with the wider interna-
tional scene. While the magazine was in print for 40 years, and played a major contribution to
Scottish literary culture and the arts, there is only space here to focus on a few particular, notable
editions which have resonated and contributed towards a wider cultural agenda.
In her editorial to ‘Woven by Women’ in 1980, Hendry commented:
This issue of Chapman is not meant to be a feminist tract, but to focus attention on this much
neglected area of the arts. Astonishingly, there is almost no critical work on Scottish women artists,
and all that can be done here is to scratch the surface. Much more work is needed to supplement this
very preliminary study.
(Hendry 1980, p. 2).
‘Woven by Women’ was therefore not only a ground-breaking issue in terms of its focus on
contemporary Scottish writers, but also in its recuperative assessments of the role of Scottish
women in literature and the arts throughout history. While simultaneous revisionist discus-
sions were taking place, perhaps most notably within the Women’s Liberation Movement in
Scotland at the time, this edition of Chapman undoubtedly served to energise and focalise dis-
cussion concerning women’s contribution to literature and the arts in particular. It included, for
example, reflections on the work of Helen Cruickshank, Joan Ure, Willa Muir, and Jessie
Kesson, amongst others, many of whom had not been critically discussed for decades.7 While
this reclamation and resurgence of interest in Scottish women’s writing is often thought of as a
1990s phenomenon, arguably this edition of Chapman in 1980 created a generative spark for
what was to follow.8 Hendry later followed up with further editions on women’s contribution
in 1993 and 1994 with ‘The Women’s Forum: Women in Scottish Literature’ (issue 74–75),
where, for example Alison (before she became ‘Ali’) Smith reflected on the then emerging work
of Jackie Kay, Janice Galloway, Kathleen Jamie and A.L. Kennedy, and ‘The Women’s Forum:
Women in the Arts in Scotland’ (issue 76). In this way we can again see the catalysing influence
of the magazine on bringing emerging voices to prominence, the process of encouraging their
work into the cultural sphere.
Elsewhere I have discussed Chapman 35/36, ‘The State of the Scotland: the Predicament of the
Scottish Writer’, perhaps the most discussed and controversial number of the magazine
(Bell 2004). The impetus for this edition stemmed from a Polygon event in 1982 marking the
republication of Edwin’s Muir’s Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer. This event,
however, was regarded by some critics as a disappointment – in Hendry’s terms, the ‘Cultural
Non Event of the Year’ (Hendry 1983, p. 1). For Hendry, this was a missed opportunity to take
stock of the role of the writer in society at that moment, and she felt driven to revisit the topic,
inviting a wide range of contributors to share their views on the ‘state’ of Scottish writing at the
time, reflecting on whether the Scottish writer was actually in a ‘predicament’, or not, for a spe-
cial edition of the magazine. In this determination to create a follow-up publication to the
Polygon event, we can again see the role of magazines as an important conduit for capturing
aspects of the cultural and political mood. As with the reception of Scottish International, opinion
on this ‘predicament’ issue was divided, with some viewing it as capturing valuable aspects of its
moment, others seeing it as unnecessarily polemical for a poetry magazine.
In her ‘Workers in the Spirit’ article for this edition, for example, Tessa Ransford exam-
ined the need to foster a creative, collaborative environment for writers, against what she
viewed as the deep lack of confidence within Scottish culture. Ransford then went on to
explore possible ways out of what she regarded as the ‘deadlock’ in Scottish literary culture
at the time. For Ransford, one major way out of this was the creation of a Scottish Poetry
Library. She writes: ‘This is envisaged as a centre of information, a meeting point, the focus
for people interested in and involved in poetry, a means of generating events and tours and
visits, and a space where small press publications may be found.’ (Ransford 1983, pp. 37, 38).
Interestingly, Ransford went on to found the Scottish Poetry Library just one year after her
Chapman article, in 1984.9
As well as discussions surrounding the Scottish Poetry Library, throughout the 1980s there
was also much discussion for the need for a National Theatre of Scotland. Once again, much of
the debate surrounding this this often appeared in small magazines – an ideal platform for dis-
seminating views quickly, and in concentrated form, in the pre-internet era. Through magazines
such as Chapman we therefore get a sense of the changing mood of cultural debate in Scotland at
the time, the ways in which this was often deeply interrelated with the emergence of new c ultural
institutions. We can see a clear example of this in 1986, when Hendry published a special issue
of Chapman on ‘Scottish Theatre’. In interview, Hendry has commented that the theatre issue:
…allowed a tremendous welling up of discontent which I was not really aware, not fully aware, was
there. I certainly did not do a theatre issue with the cynical intent of unleashing this howl of rage
upon the Scottish Arts Council. But what did emerge was the profounder dissatisfaction with the
way that Scottish theatre was being organised and patronised in Scotland and that too little was
being done to encourage Scottish writing and not nearly enough money given to the new theatre
companies who were doing experimental work, people like Communicado and 7 : 84 Theatre
Company and so many others that were trying to do what they saw as innovative new theatre with
no support at all from the Scottish Arts Council….
(Görtschacher 2000, pp.726–727)
As Hendry points out, ‘the term “National Theatre” was hardly mentioned in the issue, but the
response to its publication by a number of other people was that it is the time to re-open the
debate about whether there should be a National Theatre for Scotland’ (Görtschacher 2000,
pp. 726, 727). The following year, in May 1987, the Advisory Council for the Arts in Scotland
(AdCAS), organised a conference to discuss whether there was an appetite for a National Theatre.
Edited highlights of this discussion were included in Chapman 49, summer 1987, with the con-
tributions demonstrating an overwhelming support for the establishment of a National Theatre,
even from practitioners who had previously been sceptical, including Communicado Theatre’s
Gerry Mulgrew.10 The AdCAS conference, it was concluded:
considers that there is a pressing need for a Scottish National Theatre company to consolidate the
Scottish tradition in all aspects of the theatre, calls upon all theatre companies in Scotland to cooper-
ate towards this objective of national importance, urges the Scottish Arts Council and all levels of
government and other potential funding bodies to give active support…
(Hendry 1987, p. 75).
In addition, a working party was established, comprising Kenneth Ireland, Alex Clark, Gerry
Mulgrew, Gerda Stevenson, Alex McCrindle, Tom Fleming, Frank Dunlop, Kirsty Adam, and
Joy Hendry. As the Chair of the event, Paul Scott subsequently pointed out that, ‘It took much
campaigning and several other conferences to establish the National Theatre. It was eventually
achieved, not by the Scottish Arts Council who continued to resist, but by the Scottish Parliament
in September 2003.’ (Scott 2012).
While the discussions surrounding whether or not there ought to be Scottish National Theatre
had been slowly bubbling for some time, for Hendry Chapman acted as a vital ‘kick-start trigger’:
It is very exciting and gratifying for me to have seen Chapman as, if you like the kick-start trigger of
this recent wave, because the idea of a Scottish National Theatre goes back many, many years, but as
the kick-start to this particular new wave of it and the foundation of it and having therefore been
able to be involved all along in the argument… It is to be able to see how a small magazine can play
a part in that rather larger debate.
(Görtschacher 2000, pp.726–727)
Again it is clear to see the catalytic function of literary magazines, providing the forum for
much-needed critical and cultural debate. Magazines in this way can be viewed as relatively
modest cultural institutions, working within a nexus of larger ones. However, at particular times
it is clear to see that they have acted as arbiters of cultural change, setting wheels in motion for
ideas which have gone on to develop further traction.
Cencrastus (1979–2006)
Cencrastus magazine was established by Edinburgh University postgraduates in the immediate

aftermath of the 1979 devolution referendum. It received strong support from Father Anthony
Ross, the Catholic Chaplain at Edinburgh University, who had also been instrumental to the
earlier development of Scottish International. Anthony Ross helped to find accommodation for the
magazine within the University, which in turn placed the publication in a stronger position for
receiving SAC funding (which it duly received). Another central figure to the success of Cencrastus
was Cairns Craig, who had recently become a member of the Edinburgh English Department. As
Craig has commented on this:
I was involved in a discussion about setting up a magazine soon after I arrived in Edinburgh in 1979.
But I did not think it was appropriate for me to try and take a lead in it, because it was post-graduate
students who were keen to set up a magazine and to keep the debate going about a Scottish… if not
Scottish Independence, at least a Scottish Parliament. And so I helped them produce the first issue
of the magazine and I wrote a piece for that and then they invited me to join the editorial board,
along with several other non-students, to help give direction to where the magazine was going to go
thereafter.
(Craig, personal communication)
From its inception, the magazine was set up as a direct reaction to what the editors perceived
as both a deep political pessimism and crisis of confidence in Scottish culture at that moment.
The magazine therefore sought to re-energise debates, creating a dedicated space for the explo-
ration of new developments in Scottish literature, the arts, and politics. While the impetus
behind Cencrastus was on re-invigorating Scottish culture, it did so by both creating strong
roots in Scottish tradition, while also looking to international developments in literature and
the arts.11
From issue one it is clear to see both the ambition and diversity of the magazine. As well as
poems by Norman MacCaig, Robert Garioch, and Sorley Maclean, the first number contained an
interview with Margaret Atwood, Eduardo Paolozzi (on ‘Junk in the new Arts and Crafts
Movement’), a piece by Anthony Ross (‘The Silent Scream’) on the controversial Barlinnnie Jail
Special Unit, Josef Raszkowski on ‘The Legend of John MacLean’, Jenni Calder on the death of
actor John Wayne, Duncan MacMillan on ‘The Tradition of Painting in Scotland’, as well as
Cairns Craig’s ‘The Body in the Kit Bag: History and the Scottish Novel’ (an influential article
which would go on to appear in his seminal Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in English and
Scottish Culture [1996]).
This wide approach, investigating literature the arts from a variety of political, sociological,
national and international perspectives, as well as the inclusion of a detailed reviews section cov-
ering all recent notable publications, was typical of Cencrastus issues. At the heart of the maga-
zine was a recognition that many areas of Scottish literature, culture, politics and the arts had yet
to be properly acknowledged within critical histories. As Cairns Craig points out, one of the
drivers of the magazine was therefore to assert the validity of Scottish cultural value:
[Cencrastus] said, we know there has been a valuable and dynamic culture here in the past and that
it is simply our ignorance of it, or the biased nature of the ways in which it has been judged, that
makes the Scottish past seem like a deformation or an emptiness. I guess we kind of made a bet with
our own sense of the value of our traditions and set out to prove that they existed with a richness that
had not been recognised. We had a very strong agenda on reconstituting a sense of Scottish tradi-
tions and of the significance of these traditions. We were looking at Scottish culture, not in compari-
son with English or French culture, or from the perspectives of cultural theory as developed in
England or France but in terms of the values of the culture itself, in terms that were appropriate to
a small and peripheral culture, and looking for comparisons with other cultures of a similar kind.
What we wanted to do was to establish how different Scottish cultural value was and to value its
differences.
(Stein and Wright 1999, p. 85)
Especially in the first two decades of its existence, Cencrastus created an important space for
dialogue and investigation of Scottish culture. As one of the main outlets for this form of cul-
tural and political discussion, Cencrastus was acting not only as a means of recording what was
happening in Scottish cultural life, but also, crucially, as a provocation for taking some of
these debates further. At the heart of this was also a determination to readdress what some
contributors felt were common misconceptions, absences and misrepresentations in Scottish
cultural and artistic and life. Such arguments, were, for example, explored in essays such as
‘Inferiorism’ by Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull (1982), in which, drawing on the work
of Frantz Fanon, they challenged what they described as the ‘inferiorist mentality’, which had
come about, they asserted, as ‘the Scottish intelligentsia have internalised a metropolitan
assessment of Scottish life which inevitably misjudges its character and potential and auto-
matically sees specifically Scottish culture as inferior to metropolitan styles’ (Beveridge and
Turnbull 1982, pp. 4, 5). Beveridge and Turnbull later went on to expand this chapter, pub-
lishing The Eclipse of Scottish Culture, which became the first book in the Determinations series
by Polygon in 1989.
Another interesting aspect of Cencrastus, however, were the tensions emerging within the edito-
rial group at the time. In direct response to Beveridge and Turnbull’s work on ‘inferiorism’, for
example, Glenda Norquay and Carol Anderson published their article on ‘Superiorism’ in 1984,
critiquing what they viewed as the dominant, controlling masculinist narrative within Scottish
literary studies at the time, calling for gender-inflected readings of literary culture (Anderson and
Norquay 1984; Norquay 2012). This article clearly resonated with many readers, generated a
series of detailed responses over the next few issues of the magazine (Bell 2020, pp. 223, 224).
In marking the editorial of the tenth edition of the magazine in 1982, the editors set out that
while ‘since its inception, Cencrastus has studiously eschewed any editorial statement of aims…
we trust we might be pardoned some self-indulgence’. Reflecting on their perceptions of the
dark mood within Scotland at the time, the editors go on to state:
The founders of Cencrastus were similarly depressed by the general air of despondency, but felt that
it should be a time not for extinguishing flames but for rekindling them, no matter how humbly.
As a nation, albeit one lacking political institutions, Scotland is a plural society, and as such it
requires a plurality of newspapers and journals for analysis, discussion and reviewing. The narrow
terms in which the Devolution ‘debate’ had been conducted highlighted how badly needed were
alternative forums. Cencrastus, we thought, might make a small contribution by providing one such
forum. However, we were and are under no illusion that it is any more than a small contribution…
(Beveridge and Turnbull 1982, p. 3)
While the editors were modest about the potential reach and scale of their contribution, Cencrastus
nonetheless played an important role in literature and the arts up until it ceased publication in
2006. In many ways the magazine helped to capture aspects of the changing society around it,
acting as a sounding board and enabler of discussion.
Returning to ‘The Spirit of Bannockburn’ article, mentioned in the introduction to this chapter,
Kathleen Jamie commented that ‘It is a cherished half-truth that the success of the 1997 devolution
bill was achieved partly by the work of writers and visual artists. In the years between the 1979
devolution referendum, which failed, and the one in 1997, Scotland invigorated itself, not in flag-
waving but in self-interrogation and self-examination. It was a vibrant time, culturally speaking’
(Jamie 2013). It is also true, however, that the extent to which the path to devolution in Scotland has
been shaped by its writers and artists has been subject to much debate in recent years. While some
critics have viewed writers and artists as the ‘unacknowledged legislators’ of cultural and political
change (Crawford 2014), other critics have taken a much more sceptical line of approach (Hames 2020;
Thomson 2007). In The Literary Politics of Devolution (2020), for example, Scott Hames refers through-
out to this debate as a tension between, in his terms, ‘The Dream’ vs ‘The Grind’ of national politics
(that is, the ‘dream’ of cultural nationalism as represented in literary, cultural and artistic narrative
of the nation vs the ‘grind’ of everyday politics in the public sphere). While it has not been the inten-
tion to make overly grand assertions about the contribution of literary magazines within this cultural
nationalism debate, regardless, what can be seen from the examples in this chapter is that they have
nonetheless played an important role, often catching the Zeitgeist of their moment in ways which
have then brought ideas to prominence in the public eye.
In this chapter it has only been possible to touch on just a few of the magazines, the ways in
which they have acted as catalysts, generated interventions. As has been demonstrated, literary
magazines are necessarily deeply intertwined with many other cultural institutions. In some ways
they have been dependent on larger cultural institutions for their very existence (the SAC for fund-
ing, Edinburgh University as base for Scottish International and Cencrastus, and so on). While the
issue of SAC funding has at times been controversial, with some of the longest-running magazines,
such as Chapman, only ever having received modest funding, this has not deterred them from hav-
ing a strong influence on literary and cultural debates. Often these magazines have acted as provo-
cations, tested out controversial ideas within their publications as a means of generating reaction.
In the examples discussed, it is possible to discern some of the ways in which literary magazines
have generated an energising spirit, acted as a galvanising force. What this chapter has explored,
therefore, are the ways in which literary magazines, in their own relatively modest ways, have often
made significant contributions to Scottish culture in ways that should not be underestimated.
Notes
1 For a further discussion of cultural institutions in Kathleen Jamie, Ian Rankin and Irvine Welsh, first
Scotland see Scott Hames and Kirsteen McCue appeared in New Writing Scotland (Thornton 2022).
‘Institutions’ in Ian Duncan (ed), The Cambridge 3 The work discussed in this chapter is part of a forth-
History of Scottish Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge coming larger, more comprehensive study of Scottish
University Press. (forthcoming). literary magazine culture from the 1950s through to
2 See, for example, Valerie Thornton’s article on ‘New the 1990s.
Writing Scotland at 40’, where she points out that the early 4 ‘In 1968, at the height of concerns over youth gangs in
work of many well-known Scottish writers, including Glasgow, the popular entertainer Frankie Vaughan
swooped into the city in a blaze of publicity. Meeting Aileen Christianson’s (2000) collection Scottish Women’s
with gang members from the relatively new Easterhouse Fiction: Journeys into Being; and Aileen Christianson and
housing scheme, Vaughan promised to help them organ- Alison Lumsden’s (2000) Contemporary Scottish Women
ise a youth centre in exchange for a promise to end the Writers’. (Bell 2020, p.219).
violence. Weeks later, police organised a weapons 9 As David Finkelstein points out, Ransford had been
amnesty on an area of waste ground deemed “neutral.” working on the project to establish a Scottish Poetry
Despite an appeal to the public to stay away, the Glasgow Library for over a year at this point: ‘The idea for the
Herald reported an audience of around 200 spectators, a Scottish Poetry Library began to take shape in the early
large crew of photographers and television cameramen, 1980s. At the 1982 Sydney Goodsir Smith memorial
four ice-cream vans and two fish and chip vans! Just over lecture, given by the poet Norman MacCaig, attendees
six months later, Vaughan’s intervention culminated in were invited to join the Scottish Poetry Library
the opening, by Lord Kilbrandon, of the Easterhouse Association. Spearheaded by poet Tessa Ransford, the
Project. From the beginning it courted negative public- organisation initially sought a space where published
ity, eventually closing in 1971 before re-opening as a works of poetry could be gathered, retained and lent,
police-run project’. (Bartie and Fraser 2014, 38). and from where readings and other initiatives could be
5 ‘But it was undoubtedly on the Saturday evening, dur- launched to educate, inspire and enhance the under-
ing the 7 : 84 theatre Company’s production of their standing and enjoyment of the life and work of Scottish
new play “The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black and international poets. Underpinning this idea was a
Oil” and the discussion that followed immediately, strong sense that Scotland’s poetical traditions in their
with most of the audience staying on for it, that all the various languages needed a centre to make them mate-
recognitions came together like a series of flashes in rially visible and accessible. Much was out of print, not
the long night. There they all were, the problems, the to be found in libraries or universities, not catalogued or
needs, the people, the treacheries, the latent radical- cared for.’ (Finkelstein and McCleery 2007, pp. 50–51).
ism, the vision of possibilities’. (Tait 1973a, 15). 10 ‘When I came here today, I thought my attitude
6 See John Herdman’s Another Country: An Era in Scottish might be no, I do not want this because that means
Politics and Letters (2013) for a detailed discussion of the my grant is going to be taken away. It means that the
controversy surrounding the reception of the magazine. small companies, in whose company I go around, are
7 For further reading see Sarah Browne’s The Women’s going to suffer. But I’ve changed my mind… I came
Liberation Movement in Scotland (2014). here to argue my own small corner – and I still will
8 ‘In this respect “Woven by Women” undoubtedly continue to do that, because I believe that diversity,
established important groundwork for the renaissance and the planting of seeds for the future are going to
of Scottish women’s writing that was to follow over the make the place more culturally active. But at the
following decade, with important volumes including same time, I have to support the need for a Scottish
Moira Burgess’s (1987) collection The Other Voice: Scottish National Theatre.’ (Hendry 1987, pp. 71–2).
Women’s Writing since 1808; Douglas Gifford and 11 The magazine was also known as the ‘curly snake’,
Dorothy McMillan’s (1997) collection A History of a reference to the Celtic symbol of wisdom and
Scottish Women’s Writing; Catherine Kerrigan’s (1991) An eternity in MacDiarmid’s long poem, To Circumjack
Anthology of Scottish Women Poets; Carol Anderson and Cencrastus.
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27
Diaspora
Paul Malgrati
University of the Highlands and Islands
The Scottish diaspora stands out in the history of global migration. Shaped by a project of
imperial domination, but united by a distinctive sense of ethnic belonging, international Scots
appear a Janus-faced community. This unusual profile contrasts with the more conventional
instances of ‘victim diasporas’, including exiled Jews, enslaved Africans, famished Irish folks and
disseminated Armenians (Cohen 2008, p. 2; Leith and Sim 2014, p. 13). Certainly, the difficult
episodes of the ‘Highland Clearances’ point to the traumatic fate of many Scottish emigrants,
evicted from their land in violent conditions. However, theirs remained a minority experience
amidst the exodus of more than two millions of Scots, generally encouraged by the opportunities
that the imperial network provided for white protestant Anglophone settlers (Leith 2014,
p. 97).1 As summarised by Murray Pittock, ‘even Scots displaced through poverty, oppression or
war could – if networked – find support in their exile abroad’ (Pittock 2022, p. 28). After all, in
1707, it was religion and the riches of Empire which had prompted Scotland’s subscription to
the British project. The bulk of Scottish emigration was, in other words, not forced, but the
result of this national impetus for imperial expansion.
Yet Scottish settlers are also distinct as an imperial cohort. From ancient Romans and medieval
Islamic kingdoms to modern Spanish and French settlers, colonisers have historically tended to
embody and implement standardising norms – often pitched as ‘civilised’ or ‘universal’ – in
conquered territories (Bang and Kołodziejczyk 2012, pp. 208–310; Pitts 2012, pp. 230–240). By
contrast, Scottish diasporic culture highlighted the ethnic diversity of Britain’s imperial narrative.
Indeed, the striking ‘clannishness’ of Scots abroad, organised into Caledonian societies, Presbyterian
churches, Scottish freemasonic societies, Burns clubs, pipe bands, or Highland dancing
groups, created Scottish enclaves in the Anglophone Empire (Bueltmann 2014, pp. 5, 6).

Diaspora 337
Such ‘ethnic associationalism’, however, should not be read as defensive or averse to the colonial
venture. Instead, as analysed by Tanja Bueltmann, diasporic club-making reflected a Scottish
kind of agency which built on the multi- ethnic foundation of the United Kingdom
(Bueltmann 2014, pp. 5, 6). Indeed, ‘active agency in collective identity-making is a fundamen-
tal point of difference to migrant groups whose identity is largely determined by the ascriptions
of outsiders’ and potentially hostile hosts (Bueltmann 2014, p. 5). By contrast with marginalised
migrant communities, the proud ethnicism of Scotland’s ‘dominion diaspora’ was a paradoxical
sign of its global power.2
Such peculiar characteristics have led the cultural historian Cairns Craig to replace the notion
of a ‘Scottish diaspora’ with the more accurate ancient Greek concept of ‘Xeniteia’ (Craig 2018,
p. 65). ‘Xeniteian migrants’, Craig explains, ‘do not arrive in their new territories as victims of
forced expulsion dreaming of a return to the homeland but as masons or architects who carry
with them the plan by which they will rebuild the familiar structures of their homeland in a
foreign place’ (Craig 2018, p. 65). Unlike victimised diasporas, in other words, and unlike the
contemporary French Empire, which aimed at a more homogeneous form of civilisation,
‘Xeniteian’ Scots benefitted from the ‘composite’ foundation of the United Kingdom which
empowered Scottish particularism within Britain’s universalist Empire (Belmessous 2013,
pp. 16–60).3 In this regard, emigrant Scots might be better compared not to the victimised Irish
diaspora, but to their closest imperial partners: the diasporic English, whose culture of ethnic
association, from Albion to St George’s societies, also thrived off British pluralistic power
(Bueltmann 2016).4
Scotland’s ‘Xeniteia’ had a tremendous effect on the development of modern Scottish litera-
ture. Indeed, Scotland’s dominion within the British Empire reinforced the power of Scottish
authors within the growing discipline of English. As Craig describes:
England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales might have been partners in an imperial project that required
the projection of ‘English Literature’ as one of the defining elements of the cultural superiority that
justified the continuous extension of Empire throughout the nineteenth century, but they were also
engaged in an internal struggle over the origins and the dynamics of that literature, and about the
role of their national literatures within the consolidating discipline of English.
(Craig 2018, p. 46)
Yet that struggle was not just an ethereal debate between rival scholars. It was also rooted in the
material resources, numbers, and organisation of diaspora.
Indeed, Scotland’s diasporic growth accompanied the development of its literary might. The
creative, emotional strength of modern Scottish writing expanded with both the economic
powers of its production and the rise of its populous diasporic audience. Such a materialist link,
between ‘the power of a multitude’ and the ‘power of emotions’ ruling that multitude, can be
found in Baruch Spinoza’s concept of imperium (Lordon 2015, pp. 19–20). According to Spinozist
scholar Frédéric Lordon:
imperium, defined as the power of multitude, is the principle by which any given group, building on
each of its members, has the power to affect all of its members and moves them to act in a certain
way […] It is the multitude’s capacity to self-affect which turns it into a tighter group, distinct from
a scattered collection of people.
(Lordon 2015, pp. 20, 118)
In other words, the imperium of the 2.5 million emigrants who left Scotland between 1750 and
1914 increased the affective strength of Scottish literature, which, in turn, reinforced the iden-
tity of Scotland’s ‘Xeniteia’ (Bueltmann et al. 2013, p. 57).
The following pages detail this process. Unlike previous articles about Scottish literature and
diaspora, emphasis is not laid on the individual qualitative input of Scottish emigrants (or of
their descendants) to the canon of Scottish literature (see Leask 2007, pp. 153–162;
Carruthers 2012, pp. 275–288). Instead, by drawing on Spinoza, the present essay analyses the
collective imperial power of diasporic Scots in increasing both the international influence of
Scottish writers and the authority of Scottish literature as a discipline. This implies a more spe-
cific focus on the diasporic circulation, imagination, reception, and standardisation of modern
Scottish literature.
A direct consequence of Scottish emigration on Scottish literature was the expansion of the
modern Scottish book trade during the eighteenth century. Certainly the international circula-
tion of books was nothing new, having shaped the development of Scottish writing since the
medieval era. For instance, John Barbour’s seminal epic about the exploits of Robert I, The Brus,
owed much to Scottish translations of Middle French romance, while the English of Geoffrey
Chaucer provided a framework for the poems of Robert Henryson and William Dunbar
(Corbett 1999, p. 19; Scheps 1987, pp. 44–59). During the Renaissance, the progress of print
had already enabled George Buchanan to influence continental monarchomachs (Erskine and
Mason 2012). Yet such interactions between Scottish and European literary elites remained lim-
ited in comparison with the flurry of Scottish books across oceans that followed the rise of
Empire. Rather than relying on foreign editors, external translations, and slow printing tech-
niques, eighteenth-century Scottish authors could now count on cheaper production costs and on
a more homogeneous Anglophone book market peopled by keen diasporic publishers.
Expatriate Scottish publishers played a considerable role in introducing Scottish literary
works to new audiences. For instance, Richard Sher has discussed the powerful Scottish compo-
nent of the London publishing industry during the Enlightenment era (Sher 2006, p. 274).
Crewed by proactive members of Scotland’s ‘near diaspora’, including bookseller Andrew Millar
and publisher William Strahan, this ‘syndicate’ was key in establishing a ‘publishing axis’
between London and Edinburgh, allowing for mass reprints of promising Scottish works
(Sher 2006, p. 274).5 Indeed, the Scottish authors James Thomson, Tobias Smollett, David
Hume, James Boswell, and Hugh Blair all benefitted from Millar’s London-based patronage,
which placed them at the heart of the heavily centralised ‘world republic of letters’ (Casanova 2004).
A few years later, this London connection also proved essential for the career of the young Robert
Burns, whose Edinburgh publisher, William Creech, was one of Strahan’s longstanding business
partners (Sher 2006, p. 295).
Yet the London ‘syndicate’ was only a fraction of the fast-developing network of international
Scottish publishers. ‘Xeniteian’ Scots were especially important in setting up the American book
trade. Sher has identified two waves of expatriate Scottish merchants who, from Robert Bell,
David Hall, and Robert Aitken in the 1770s, to William Young, Thomas Dobson, Peter Stewart,
and Robert Campbell in the 1790s, ‘revolutionised American publishing, using the Scottish
Enlightenment as [their] primary source’ (Sher 2006, p. 511). All based in Philadelphia, these
publishers were responsible for the first American reprints of James Macpherson’s Ossian (1766),
Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1782), James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1784), Hugh Blair’s
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1784), Robert Burns’s Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect
(1788), and most of the key works of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy (Sher 2006,
Diaspora 339
pp. 531, 538). Moreover, it was in Philadelphia that the Scottish-Irish Hugh Maxwell published
the first American version of Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805).
Scottish booksellers were also active in other Northern American cities. For instance, as early
as 1787, only one year after the publication of the Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s Poems, the
New York-based J. & A. Maclean launched a successful subscription campaign to fund the second
American edition of Burns’s works (Sood 2016, pp. 52, 53). A few months later, in Newfoundland,
a similar attempt was made by the Scottish-Canadian publisher James Robertson (Black 2012,
p. 55).6 Further afield still, in Australia, Sydney’s first modern bookseller was the Glasgow-born
William McGarvie. His circulating library, opened in 1828, featured many Scottish classics,
including Thomson’s The Seasons, Burns’s Poems, and Scott’s Kenilworth (Brodsky 1973, p. 18).7
Later in the same century, McGarvie’s legacy was continued by David Angus and George
Robertson – two Scots keen on Burns, Scott, and Presbyterian theology. Their publishing empire
shaped Australian literary taste until the mid-twentieth century (Jones 2006, pp. 1–18).
Alongside established publishers, the broader network of diasporic booksellers, librarians,
and journalists was also key to the circulation of Scottish texts. Fiona A. Black’s Canadian-
focused case study of Burns’s reception details the Scottish catalogues of Scotland-born book
merchants (Black 2012, p. 67). This includes, for instance, the large Scottish bookstock of John
Kidston, the editor of Halifax Journal, whose collections also fed the readers of the local North
British Society during the 1790s (Black 2012, p. 67). Most of these books were imported directly
from Britain, as were the volumes by Allan Ramsay, Robert Burns, James Hogg, and Walter
Scott which stacked the shelves of George Dawson’s library in York (Toronto) during the 1820s
(Black 2012, p. 63). Like Kidston, Dawson was involved in journalism, and regularly reprinted
extracts from Scottish authors in the local press. Such coverage of Scottish literature in colonial
periodicals was not unique. In Australia, for instance, McGarvie’s Sydney Gazette also featured
lengthy pieces by Burns, Scott and Hogg.8 Such practice remained commonplace throughout the
Victorian British Empire and culminated at the fin-de-siècle with newspapers specifically targeted
at Scottish emigrants, including John Imrie’s Scottish Canadian and its Australian counterpart,
The Scot, At Hame and Abroad (Murphy 2016).
The imperial circulation of Scottish books went hand in hand with the global expansion of
Scottish literary imagination. Indeed, from the eighteenth century onward, Scotland’s diasporic
horizon merged with, and often crossed the lives of, many authors. Combined with a rising
awareness of the overseas book market, the temptation to adopt new themes and tones also grew,
spreading the creative powers of Scottish literature beyond its peripheral station on the edge of
Europe. This was evident, for instance, in Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) – a novel set at sea
that encompassed British, European, West African, Caribbean, and South American scenes.
Partially based on Smollett’s own experience as a surgeon in the Royal Navy, this book was one
of the first bestsellers to circulate across Scotland’s diaspora, alongside other novels by the same
author (Carruthers 2012, pp. 275–276; Black 2012, p. 61).
Similar observations can also be made about Robert Burns, a poet who never travelled outside
Britain, but who envisaged a fate as a Jamaican slave driver during his mid-twenties. Burns’s
early friendship with the Ayrshire sailor Richard Brown had raised his awareness of Scotland’s
transatlantic network. His 1786 poem, ‘On a Scotch Bard, Gone to the West Indies’, begging
‘Jamaican bodies’ to prepare a warm welcome for a ‘dainty chiel […] fou o’ glee’ seemed to place
hopes in the connivance of a global, Scots-speaking community (Kinsley 1968, vol. I, pp. 239,
l.49). Unbeknownst to him at the time, diasporic support would not come in the form of
Jamaican employment but in the prompt reprint of his Poems, across the diaspora, from London
to Philadelphia. There is no doubt that such transatlantic support provided Burns with both the
financial and symbolic power to continue his writing career with an increasingly global outlook.
His famous egalitarian anthem, ‘Is There for Honest Poverty’ (1795), praying for the day when
‘man to man the warld o’er/Shall brothers be for a’ that’, has often (and rightly) been interpreted
in light of French Revolutionary ideals (Kinsley 1968, vol. II, pp. 763, ll.37–ll.40; Butler 1997,
p. 102). Yet the universalist pith of Burns’s song strikes one not only as a radical cry, but also as
a statement of authority from a poet who was indeed read ‘the warld o’er’. While ‘A Man’s a Man’
would inspire generations of anticolonial and pro-abolition orators, its affective power was built
on a diasporic capital fed by the toil of so-called ‘coward slaves’.9 Such was the Janus face of
Scotland’s literary imperium.
Links between transatlantic emigration, imperial trade, and Scottish creative imagination
are perhaps nowhere more explicit than in the works of John Galt – the Romantic author and
cunning founder of the Canada Company, which aided colonisation in Upper Canada. Galt was
a well-networked author and a regular contributor to Edinburgh’s prestigious literary journal,
Blackwood’s Magazine. In 1826, he used his contacts with Blackwood’s to advertise his colonial
project, thus creating a new Scottish platform for Canadian writing while broadening the
circulation of the Edinburgh journal (Scott 2013, pp. 368–382). This economic connection
was soon reflected in Galt’s creative writing. After his return from Canada in 1831, Galt pub-
lished the three-volume Bogle Corbet; or The emigrants, depicting a settlement of Glasgow-born
weavers in Upper Canada. Blending fiction with the more practical advice of an emigrant
guidebook, Galt’s work etches an enthusiastic picture of Scotland’s ‘Xeniteia’. As noted by
Josephine McDonagh, Bogle Corbet develops a colonial ‘acoustic’, whereby ‘regionally inflected
speech and Scottish dialect words’ provided a ‘basis for the community’ in its new Canadian
environment (McDonagh 2021, p. 102). Just like Galt himself, who in his Autobiography
(1833) remembers singing an ‘old Scottish ballad’ while chopping trees in an ancient Canadian
forest, Scottish voices in The emigrants fill the silent gaps of Ontario’s conquered habitat
(McDonagh 2021, p. 104).
The material network of Scotland’s diaspora expanded both the creative terrain and the cul-
tural authority of Scottish literature. Moreover, the affective power of Scottish writers was also
reinforced by their diasporic reception. Imported overseas, Scottish books shaped representations
far beyond their original place of production. This led Scottish themes to blend with various
local contexts, which, in hindsight, sharpened Scotland’s global literary profile while also turn-
ing Scottish classics into templates for international writing. The first Scottish book to play such
a broadly influential role was Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, celebrated from continental Europe
to America’s shores. In the United States, Ossian’s primitive verse fed the myth of the pioneer,
blending Caledonian and American landscapes and influencing both the ecological writing of
Henry David Thoreau and the blank verse of Walt Whitman (Carpenter 1931, pp. 405–417).
Similarly, Burns’s reception throughout the Anglophone world led to multifarious, often con-
flicting interpretations. In the United States, Burns’s works influenced both Frederick Douglass’s
anti-slavery campaign and the Confederate ideal of the Southern farmer (Sood 2016, pp. 174–187).
In India, Burns’s song, ‘Is There for Honest Poverty’, inspired the Bengali Eurasian poet Henry
Derozio, who railed against the Hindu caste system during the 1820s – a standpoint which was
then shared by the Pirali Brahmin Rabindranath Tagore, who translated Burns into Bengali a cen-
tury later (Leask 2011, pp. 180, 181). Across the Indian Ocean in New Zealand, Burns would also
inspire settlers in the suburb of Dunedin, who named their town ‘Mosgiel’ as a tribute to the poet’s
first farm. Created in 1849, this small Scottish colony erased the local Māori names, Whakaraupuka
Diaspora 341
and Makamaka. Yet Burns’s poetry could also encourage a r approchement between incomers and
indigenous peoples, as exemplified in the works of the Dunedin-based poet James Keir Baxter
during the 1960–70s. For Baxter, Burns appeared a ‘tribal’ sort of poet, whose vernacular pith
could bridge the gap between the descendants of Gaelic-speaking settlers and Māori natives
(McIlvanney 2010, pp. 8, 9).
Such ambiguity is also evident in the diasporic legacy of Walter Scott. Famously accused by
Mark Twain of being almost single-handedly responsible for the American Civil War, Scott’s
novels shaped the feudal imagination of the slave-owning states of America (see Rigney 2012,
pp. 117–119). According to Celeste Ray, however, Scott’s influence became even greater after the
war, as the racist myth of the ‘Old South’ became identified with the ‘lost cause’ of the Scottish
Jacobites (Ray 2001, pp. 188, 189). Such a Southern reading of Waverley was also encouraged in
the North for its ultimately unionist message, allowing for regionalist nostalgia while encourag-
ing a united future. Similarly, across the Pacific Ocean, Scott’s works also helped shape the
national identity of white Australasians. As noted by Graham Tulloch, the popularity of Ivanhoe-
inspired plays in Melbourne theatres provided their ‘Australian audience with the opportunity
to imagine themselves back into the medieval past which their new country so conspicuously
lacked’ (Tulloch 2019, p. 19). Nonetheless, Scott’s patriotic fictions could also be turned against
colonisation. Like Burns, Scott became a key reference for Bengali literati who supported Indian
independence. Amongst them was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee – the so-called ‘Scott of Bengal’ –
whose 1882 novel, Anandamath drew on Scott’s Old Mortality to heroicise the 1770s rebellion of
the Hindu monks against the East India Company (Dutta 2009, pp. 123–147).
Overall, the broad diasporic dissemination of Scottish books, which paved the way for their
even larger Anglophone reception, had two major consequences. First, it bolstered the universal
credentials of Scottish authors, securing Scotland’s place within the ‘world republic of letter’,
whose romantic standards required both a sharp national character and a powerful transnational
currency (Casanova 2004 pp. 105, 106, 220). In other words, at a time when the subject of
Rhetoric and Belles Lettres entered imperial universities – often under the supervision of emi-
grant Scottish scholars – the global reception of Scottish authors enabled their access to the emer-
gent ‘English’ canon (Worth 1998, pp. 207–225; Casteel 2000, pp. 127–152). Indeed, as noted
by Katie Trumpener, the ‘transperipheral’ success of Macpherson, Burns, and Scott, exported from
the edge of Europe to far-flung colonies, was key in sustaining the utopian vision of an Empire
allocating cultural capital fairly to all its shareholders (Trumpener 1997, pp. 245–255).
Secondly, by foregrounding Scottish authors in the global imagination, Scotland’s diaspora
developed its own sense of transcontinental belonging. Such a Spinozian process, whereby
diasporic Scots expanded Scottish literary imperium, which, in return, fed diasporic affects, is
nowhere clearer than in the history of the Burns supper. The first celebration of Burns, with
Scottish food and drinks, was held by nine freemasons in July 1801 in Ayr at the poet’s birth-
place. All participants were seeped in the eighteenth-century male club culture which was key
to Scottish emigrant sociability throughout the Empire (McGinn 2018, pp. 37–51). Their jovial
feast, repeated at Greenock in January 1802, was widely reported by the diasporic press. Within
10 years, Burns suppers had already reached Carlisle (1804), Baltimore (1806), and Bombay
(1810). In 1820, celebrations arrived in Montreal, swiftly followed by Sydney in 1821
(McGinn 2018, pp. 54, 402, 403). Those early international suppers, which adapted Burns to
emigrant taste, had a strong influence on the ritual’s format. For instance, in the 1820s, it was in
the United States that Burns’s ‘To a Haggis’ became an increasingly compulsory part of the cer-
emony (McGinn 2018, p. 274). Likewise, in 1818, the first communal singing of ‘Auld Lang
Syne’ was a Philadelphian initiative (McGinn 2018, p. 339). Homesick Scots certainly revelled
in Burns’s nostalgic song, which was soon turned into the diaspora’s unofficial anthem
(Grant 2021, pp. 207–230).
A few decades later, in January 1859, ‘cups of kindness’ clinked on the shores of every ocean to
celebrate Burns’s Centenary. This milestone in the poet’s afterlife also proved climactic for Scottish
diasporic identity. As declared by the Glasgow-based Burnsians who initiated plans for a global
commemoration, Burns’s anniversary was an opportunity to tie a ‘lasting bond of union between
the inhabitants of Caledonia and those of every country and clime who sincerely adopt as their
creed – “A man’s a man for a that”’ (Rigney 2011, p. 72). Such ambitions to assert Scotland’s
global imperium came to fruition, as more than 1200 Burns suppers were held across both Britain’s
Empire and the United States (see appendices in McGinn 2018, pp. 401–455). Excitement was
heightened by the newly invented telegraph, which Burnsians used to share words of friendship
from Edinburgh to London and from Montreal to New Orleans. According to Ann Rigney, such
correspondence shaped perception of the event ‘as a sort of Live-Aid or Twitter-fest avant la lettre,
a worldwide happening that involved people across the globe and their imagining “one world” of
globalised simultaneity made possible by Burns and reinforced by modern technologies’
(McGinn 2018, p. 75). Moreover, the convivial format of Burns suppers, with their fleshy focus
on food, drinks, and performance, meant that the ‘imagined community’ of scattered Scottish
emigrants could be experienced, for one day at least, as an ‘embodied’ reality – at once local,
global, and national (McGinn 2018, p. 94). Indeed, the universal tenor of commemorations was
nuanced by their very ethnic pith, celebrating the particular Scottish enclave in Britain’s global
dominion. Emigrant Scots had spread Burns’s words throughout the Anglosphere; in return,
Burns’s legacy united Scotland’s diaspora, projecting its collective might across the globe.
Certainly, such displays of diasporic belonging were not merely sentimental. They reflected
emigrant ownership of both imperial and cultural resources, which not only outgrew those of
their homeland, but which could also shape Scottish identity from the outside. In other words,
by elevating Scottish literature, emigrant Scots also gained influence over the design of Scotland’s
brand, emphasising the bygone, feudal traits of the land left behind. However, as the nineteenth
century unfolded, emigrant nostalgia became increasingly jarring with the reality of Scotland’s
industrial life. Away from diasporic representations, the Lowlands’ chimney-dotted skyline was
now inspiring various strands of realist, urban literatures, from James Thomson’s City of Dreadful
Nights (1874) to George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901) to local
working-class verse (see Blair 2019). Yet those bleaker kinds of books could hardly compete with
the more expected, rural, or Highland themes of J. M. Barrie’s Auld Licht Idylls (1888) and
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1893), whose London editions, swiftly reprinted across the
Atlantic, continued to feed the nostalgic demand of their diasporic audience.
Such opposition between diasporic taste and Scottish modernity remained subtle until the early
twentieth century, as emigrant Scots still endorsed the role of an imperial ‘Xeniteia’, disseminating
Scottish soft power overseas while providing hope of national aggrandisement. However, this
‘Xenitean’ dream ended abruptly during the First World War. As noted by Craig:
the core areas of the Scottish empire in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and even, perhaps, in
the parts of India and Africa where Scottish culture had a particular hold had, through their partici-
pation in the War, begun to assert their own independent national identities and to discover the
meaning and value of their own national traditions.
(Craig 2018, p. 179)
Diaspora 343
As the gulf widened between Scotland and its diaspora, so did the dichotomy between diasporic
expectations and Scottish literary aims. It seemed the cultural imperium of overseas Scots, build-
ing on an increasingly distant kind of nostalgia, was becoming burdensome for the authors who
wished to escape the tropes of Scotland’s hackneyed brand (Craig 2018, p. 194).
In many ways, the mid-twentieth-century Scottish ‘Renaissance’ movement can be seen as a
reaction against diasporic imperium. This is particularly explicit in Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk
Man Looks at the Thistle (1926 [2008]), which execrates international Burns suppers and their
philistine, sentimental attendees, including:
Croose London Scotties wi their braw shirt fronts

And aa their fancy freens, oicingg’
That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo,
Bagdad – and Hell, nae doot – are oicing’
Burns’ sentiments o’ universal love,
In pidgin English or in wild-fowl Scots,
And toastin’ ane wha’s nocht to them but an
Excuse for faitherin’ Genius wi’ their thochts.
(MacDiarmid (1926 [2008]), pp. ll.44–ll.52)
For MacDiarmid and his supporters, diasporic uses of Scottish literature did not lead to cultural
expansion, but instead to a form of dispossession. They blamed Union and Empire for turning
Scottish culture into a tartanesque or ‘Kailyardic’ fake which drew on the fantasies of deracinated
emigrants (Craig 2018, pp. 181, 182). This diluted ‘predicament’ of modern Scottish literature
was, for instance, key to Edwin Muir’s criticism of Walter Scott – an author whose ‘picture of life
had no centre, because the environment in which he lived had no centre’ (Muir 1936, p. 12). For
Muir, in other words, diasporic dissemination was not an empowering blessing but rather a curse
on the development of Scottish literature. It seemed Scottish writers were now standing at a
crossroads, between post-imperial dissolution and the revivalist erasure of three centuries of
diasporic corruption (MacDiarmid 1927, p. 35).
This spiteful treatment of diaspora was further reflected in the traumatic depiction of Scottish
emigrant experiences in twentieth-century ‘Renaissance’ novels. With an emphasis on the worst
episodes of the Sutherland Clearances, Neil Gunn’s Butcher’s Broom (1934) and The Silver Darling
(1941), Fionn Mac Colla’s And the Cock Crew (1945), and Ian Crichton Smith’s Consider the Lilies
(1963) all describe emigration as a violent uprooting with devastating consequences for Scottish
native culture. From Gunn’s character of Dark Mairi, mauled by sheepdogs as she refuses to
emigrate, to Finn’s father in The Silver Darlings, press-ganged into the Royal Navy, to Smith’s
Mrs. Scott, whose son and neighbours are forced on a Canada-bound ship at the sound of the
bagpipe, clearance novels placed the traumatic experience of Scotland’s ‘victim diaspora’ at the
heart of twentieth-century Scottish memory. By contrast, the more mundane experience of most
expatriate Scots, who both expanded and benefitted from Scotland’s shares in the imperial mar-
ket, appeared irrelevant – if not repellent – for Scottish modernist writers.
Against alleged risks of diasporic dissolution, the Scottish ‘Renaissance’ movement aimed to
recast Scottish literature through alternative kinds of cosmopolitan – generally European –
connections. It seemed a counter-diaspora could spring from the revival of Scotland’s early mod-
ern intellectual network with the continent. This is evident, for instance, when MacDiarmid’s
Drunk Man ‘seek[s] the haund o’ Russia as a freen’ in an effort to blend communist idealism with
a potential Eurasian realignment of Scottish culture (MacDiarmid 1926 [2008], p. l.1567).

Likewise, European or Soviet leanings are apparent in the lifework of most twentieth-century
Scottish literati, from Edwin Muir and Naomi Mitchison’s journeys through central Europe to
Muriel Spark and Hamish Henderson’s connections with Italy to Sydney Goodsir Smith and
Edwin Morgan’s translations of French, Russian, and other European texts. Such hopes to reposi-
tion Scottish literature in the post-imperial world were almost fulfilled in 1959, when the Soviet
Union stole the show of Burns’s bicentenary commemorations. Building on Samuil Marshak’s
best-selling translation of Burns’s Poems into Russian, communist celebrations of the ‘people’s
poet’ included a visit of the Soviet ambassador in Ayr, a mass gathering in Moscow, and the
printing of a special Soviet Burns stamp (Malgrati 2023, pp. 112–125; Vid 2011). Certainly, in
sharp contrast with 1859 commemorations and in the context of the Cold War, these bold uses
of Burns turned the public’s attention away from the more conventional Burns suppers that took
place across the Anglosphere.
A few years later, in 1973, the ideal of a counter-diaspora was refined under the pen of Tom
Nairn. In his ‘Open Letter’ to the magazine Scottish International, the essayist followed Muir and
MacDiarmid in stressing the rootlessness of modern Scottish culture, debased by Union and
Empire and appropriated, from the outside, by nostalgic emigrants (Nairn 1973, p. 7). Yet
unlike MacDiarmid, Nairn eschewed the revivalist hope to unearth the nation’s essence ‘as the
necessary precondition of “true” inter-nationalism’ (Nairn 1973, p. 7). Against both emigrant
nostalgia and the dream of ethnic ‘Renaissance’, Nairn claimed that ‘not having “roots” of the
requisite kind’ was the ‘chief advantage’ of Scots in the postnational, post-
imperial era
(Nairn 1973, p. 7). Indeed, the time had come for rootless Scottish intellectuals to become
‘Europe’s new “Jews”’, embracing a ‘delinquent’, ‘nomad’ position on ‘the outer edge’
(Nairn 1973, p. 8). Only this elite counter-diaspora, wandering across the continent and
rekindling ‘the brief era of cosmopolitanism before nationalist cultures were entrenched every-
where’, could liberate Scottish culture from the nostalgic prison of colonial imperium.
Today, the influence of this twentieth-century critique of Scotland’s ‘dominion diaspora’
remains palpable. Building on the corpus of continental, ‘French theory’, which developed at
the time of Nairn’s writing, the new wave of Scottish antiracism has shed a bleak light on the
history of Scottish emigration. While the memory of the Highland Clearances continues to
feed patriotic grievances, the sordid roles of Scots in both the transatlantic slave trade and the
East India Company have become saliant in the national imagination. The result is an increas-
ingly dark picture of Scottish emigrant lives in contemporary books. This can be seen, for
instance, in Abir Mukherjee’s crime novels, A Rising Man (2016) and A Necessary Evil (2018),
featuring the character of Sam Wyndham, a Scottish detective in the 1920s Raj, who wit-
nesses the odious, racist acts of his countrymen yet fails to overcome the system of which he
is a part. In similar vein, a recent flurry of works has tried to expose Scottish colonial crimes
by imagining Robert Burns’s alternative fate as a plantation overseer in Jamaica. From
Andrew Lindsay’s Illustrious Exile (2006) to Jackie Kay’s ‘Five Poems’ (2015) to Shara
McCallum’s No Ruined Stone (2021), Burns’s lens is used to address Scottish culpability, plac-
ing the repulsive image of the slave owner at the centre of current representations of Scotland’s
diaspora (Kay 2017).
Yet such a gloomy approach to Scottish emigration, blending the modernist, anti-diasporic
tradition with contemporary antiracism, is not shared by all contemporary Scottish writers.
Indeed, it contrasts with the more liberal, post-modern tradition in Scottish literature which has
been trending since the 1990s. As argued by Scott Hames, Scottish writing in the late twentieth
Diaspora 345
century was marked by the politics of Scottish devolution – an attempt to assert Scotland’s voice
in the pluralistic ensemble of post- imperial Britain (Hames 2019). Unlike the interwar
‘Renaissance’ movement, which had sought to preserve Scotland’s essence from diasporic corrup-
tion, Scottish writers from the 1990s tended to embrace a more multicultural approach to
Scottish identity.10 However, despite clearly liberal, anticolonial intentions, such a composite
vision of Scotland paradoxically recalled the federal, multi-ethnic dream of Empire. Indeed, it
seemed that the legacy of ‘Xeniteian’ Scots, which had upheld Scottish singularity throughout
the Anglophone world, could now serve to project a distinctly diverse Scotland within the plural
status quo of devolved Britain.
This paradigm of a composite Scotland is instanced throughout 1990s Scottish poetry. It is
found in Robert Crawford’s influential collection, A Scottish Assembly (1990), celebrating mod-
ern Scotland’s as an ‘explosion reversed’ – a global ‘micro-nation’ whose Hawick-born magi-
cian, Peter McEwen (1861–1935) could hold New York and ‘Dunedin breathless’ and whose
small village of Kingsbarn, in Fife, once hosted the Scottish-American poet Robert Frost
amongst its ‘multimillion sheaves of barley’ (Crawford 1990, pp. 42, 43, 45, 51). Similar ref-
erences to a both disseminated and all-encompassing Scotland are apparent, for instance, in
W.N. Herbert’s Cabaret McGonagall (1996) describing ‘Scotland exploding like a hand-
grenade’ into outer space while importing Tarzan into the Highlands and ‘returning’ the Elgin
Marbles to the town of Elgin (Herbert 1996, pp. 26, 36, 80). Likewise, David Kinloch’s
tongue-in-cheek poem, ‘Braveheart’ (2001) conflates Mel Gibson, Walt Whitman, William
Wallace, and Glasgow’s Mount Florida in a transatlantic vision of both homosexual and
national liberation. Such constitutional use of broader Anglophone themes is also significant
in Liz Lochhead’s Bagpipe Muzak published by Penguin in both London and New York in
1991. Throughout the book, symbols of cultural globalisation, including ‘Coca Cola’, ‘Scotch
Wool’ made in Hong Kong, and Australian vacations serve a realist depiction of an intercon-
nected Scotland which culminates, in the title poem, with a vision of imported ‘L.A. lager’
fuelling Glaswegian threats to ‘brekk up the United Kingdom’ (Lochhead 1991, pp. 26, 48,
34, 37, 75).
This expansive vision of a global Scotland, surfing on the legacy of diaspora, found a political
complement during the 2000s, as the newly created Scottish Executive prepared an eventful
‘Year of Homecoming’. The plan was to invite hundreds of thousands of people with Scottish
ancestry to visit Scotland for the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns, in 2009. Though hosted
by Alex Salmond’s SNP government, this festival of ‘Homecoming’ was not a nationalist stunt
but rather a post-devolution project, initiated earlier in the decade by the Labour-Liberal
Democrat coalition to celebrate Scotland’s federal shares in the Anglosphere (see Malgrati 2023,
pp. 175–185). With more than 300 official events, 3,500 Burns suppers recorded in January
2009, huge numbers of (mostly American) tourists, and an estimated £53 million profit accord-
ing to the Scottish Executive, the success of Homecoming was tangible (McGinn 2018, p. 209;
The Telegraph, 8 September 2010, p. 5).11 It put Scotland’s diaspora in sharp focus, echoing the
1859 commemorations of Burns’s Centenary and demonstrating that, despite increasing que-
ries about the colonial backdrop of Scottish migration, Scottish literature could still mobilise
hundreds of thousands worldwide.
Overall, the ambiguous treatment of diaspora in Scottish contemporary writing, at once
enthusiastic about Scottish multiculturalism and critical of past Scottish domination,
reflects the Janus-faced development of Scotland’s literary imperium in the modern era. As a
substantial cohort in Britain’s multi-ethnic Empire, Scottish emigrants played a key role in
securing the international reputation of their native literature. In return, Scottish writing
provided them with a sense of belonging whose sentimental power upheld Scottish com-
munities overseas while prompting literary trends (and reactions) at home. Certainly, since
the early twentieth century, the gap between conventional diasporic taste and modern
Scottish literature has become considerable. If the notion of diaspora remains exciting for
many Scottish writers, it tends to be as a bank of unfamiliar, multi-ethnic stories, allowing
for the globalisation of Scottish tropes, rather than as an international display of tartan
homogeneity. For other writers, unwilling to distinguish Scottish emigration from British
imperialism, the theme of diaspora appears only relevant as a touchstone to expose Scottish
historical criminality. In either case, however, it is clear that literary representations of
Scotland’s diaspora reflect the continued, past and present influence of Scottish emigrants in
defining the nation from the outside.
Could Scottish literature ever free itself from the influence of its past imperium? Perhaps the
ties between Scottish emigrants and their homeland should not be overemphasised. Certainly,
it is reassuring to believe in the cultural fidelity of those who departed the country’s shores.
Modern Scottish politics and scholarship – including the previous pages – have been anxious to
prove the emigrants’ fondness for their native land, revelling in those markers of nostalgia
which paradoxically allowed twentieth-century critics to contrast Scottish modernity with
diasporic sentiments. Yet if Scotland has changed, so have its descendants. The success of
Scottish émigrés in escaping their Scottish determination, reinventing a life, a culture, and a
home in profoundly different worlds, is undoubtedly one of their most underrated achieve-
ments. Such a lesson could serve the future development of Scottish letters. Beyond both ethnic
identity and imperial hybridity, the legacy of diaspora might pave the way for a liberating kind
of radical alterity. But to follow this lead would transcend the scope of the present Companion.
Notes
1 An estimated 2.3 million Scots left for America and 7 Sydney Gazette, 13 March 1830, p.1.
Australasia between 1825 and 1945 according to 8 Extracts from Scott’s Life of Napoleon were, for
Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton (2013), p.1. instance, reprinted on 30 January 1828, p.3, and so
2 The concept of ‘dominion diaspora’ was coined by was James Hogg’s poem, ‘The Skylark’ on 11
Cohen, Global diasporas (2008). October 1831, p.4.
3 Regarding the concept of ‘composite’ Britain, see 9 The phrase ‘coward slave’ is used by Burns in his
Pittock, Global History, p.23. song, l.2. See also Nigel Leask ‘“Their Groves o’
4 Regarding the status of Ireland’s ‘victim diaspora’, see Sweet Myrtles”: Robert Burns and the Scottish
Enda Delaney, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, Irish Economic and Colonial Experience’ in Murray Pittock (ed.), Robert
Social History, 33, (2016), pp. 35–45. Burns in Global Culture, Lewisburg: Bucknell
5 The concept of ‘near diaspora’ for England-residing University Press (2011) pp.172–188.
Scots was put forward by Bueltmann in Clubbing 10 The shift from the first ‘indigenist’ Renaissance to
Together, (2014) p.27. the so-called ‘second Renaissance’ of the 1980–90s is
6 There is no evidence that this subscription proved suc- studied in Hames (2019), pp. 45–74.
cessful, however. The catalogue of McGarvie’s circu- 11 While the Scottish Executive announced £53.5 mil-
lating library was detailed in the 13 March 1830 issue lion, independent economist Geoff Riddington calcu-
of the Sydney Gazette, p.1. lated a total of £38.8 million.
Diaspora 347
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28
Teaching Scottish Literature in the
English Classroom
Gillian Sargent
Celtic and Scottish Studies
The global pandemic COVID-19 – the first confirmed case of which was recorded in Scotland on
1 March 2020 – catalysed a paradigm shift in Scottish curriculum design and assessment prac-
tice. With staff and pupils required to work from home for significant periods (Swinney 2020)
and the May external diet of Senior Phase examinations cancelled in 2020 and 2021, the pan-
demic affected rapid change, particularly within the sector of Secondary education. Such trans-
formation on a national scale – digital upskilling, pedagogical innovation, and the shift to
teacher-assessed National Qualifications – would, in normal times, take decades for any educa-
tion system to enact successfully. Notwithstanding these enforced pressures on the system, the
findings of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) independ-
ent review of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence were published simultaneously (Into the
Future 2021), casting further doubt on the shape of future teaching and learning in the upper
secondary. The report’s recommendations (including the scrapping of the Scottish Qualifications
Authority and streamlining of a multi-tiered qualifications system) were accepted in their
entirety by the Scottish government’s education secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, in June of
that year, with an advisory panel (headed by Professor Ken Muir) established to deliver on reform.
A subsequent publication, ‘Upper-secondary education student assessment in Scotland: A com-
parative perspective’ (Stobart 2021) built on the initial OECD findings by presenting ways in
which global comparators have tackled misalignments in curricular aspiration and assessment
practice. Necessary though these publications are for the continued self- improvement of
Scotland’s education system, they each threatened the security of a hard-fought for examination
in English: a mandatory Scottish Set Text (SST) paper at National 5 (N5) and Higher (H) that

has inadvertently become a teach-to-the-summative-assessment exercise of the kind seemingly

invalidated by the OECD’s findings.
As Scottish Education enters another cycle of modernisation, its subject specialists wonder how
assessment reform (moving from the legacy tradition of examination-heavy qualifications) will
impact directly upon the job they do. Therefore, it seems a befitting point at which to audit the
provision of Scottish literature in the Secondary, considering what mooted reforms might mean
for its place in English. While recognising the role of Primary practitioners in exposing learners
to Scottish (con)texts – working from the same Broad General Education (BGE) literacy and
English benchmarks as their secondary counterparts – this chapter speaks directly to an audience
of English ones. Aiming to reflect the present curricular picture, the chapter evaluates policy
documents in which the teaching of Scottish literature and language has been encouraged or man-
dated, before considering ways to enhance practitioner confidence in handling Scottish material,
pre-empting future curricular change by suggesting ways of exposing learners to Scottish (con)
texts in a more systematic and consistent way than stand-alone literary studies presently afford.
Policy
To understand where we are now, at the outset of the 2020s, it is necessary to understand how we
got here. Scottish educational policy and curricular frameworks for English have, for almost half
a century, conferred value upon the study of Scotland’s literatures and languages. In simultaneity
with the growth of Scottish Literature and Language as an academic discipline in Scotland’s
Higher Education institutions (and an increased interest in the subject internationally), the cur-
ricular insistence on the value of exposing learners to Scottish literature has been sustained by
significant socio-political developments in the country over the same period (from the post-
legislative referendum of 1979 to the coming to power of the Scottish National Party in 2007
and the strengthening of its position at Holyrood and Westminster under Nicola Sturgeon). In
describing the literary output of post-Devolution Scotland, Scott Hames has noted a measured
convergence of institutional and cultural identity, describing the process as a ‘gradual naturalisa-
tion […] of the Scottish national frame’ (Hames 2020, p. 6). The term is helpful in allowing us
to understand the educational approaches to developing a sense of a Scottish cultural identity
within learners that occurs over the same period. Scottish Literature in the Secondary School (Scottish
Office Education Department (SOED) 1976), a report recognised as pioneering in the 1970s,
maintained that Scottish literature ‘should be an essential ingredient’ of cross-sector language
provision. By the beginning of the 1990s, with the implementation of a new 5–14 curriculum,
arrangement documents outlined the need for Scottish writing and writing about Scotland to
‘permeate’ (SOED 1991, as cited in McGillivray 1997, p. 147) the Primary and Secondary lan-
guage curricula. Although not compulsory within the frameworks of the Senior school English
qualifications, the New Higher English arrangements offered gentle encouragement to English
teachers to consider a Scottish text of sufficient literary merit to study with Senior learners.
Publications such as Scottish Literature in the New Higher (Scottish Consultative Council on the
Curriculum (SCCC) 1989) offered a range of practical applications or suggestions for undertak-
ing a meaningful study of writing from and about Scotland with pupils aged 15–18. By the late
1990s, with the Higher Still qualification in development, and with teachers unclear of how the
study of literature would look in that paper, academics and educationalists were again compelled
to positively advocate on behalf of Scottish texts. Teaching Scottish Literature: Curriculum and
Teaching Scottish Literature in the English Classroom 351
Classroom Applications (McGillivray 1997) went further: in offering a range of classroom-based

activities and suggested reading lists, this publication attempted to concretise the nebulous
policy-speak of 5–14 and New Higher into something serviceable for teachers.
A new millennium brought an innovative educational philosophy, Curriculum for Excellence
(CfE), a framework to promote more effective curricular practice. CfE was implemented in August
2010, an educational policy reboot that centred learner journey at the heart of curricular design.
Intended to offer a more coherent, flexible, and enriched experience for learners, the CfE model (if
successfully realised) would furnish learners with requisite knowledge, skills, and attributes to
thrive in a twenty-first century global workforce. Theoretically, the curriculum would empower
all young people to become successful learners, effective contributors, confident individuals, and
responsible citizens. Once again, those with responsibility for designing policy pertaining to
English and literacy for a cross-sectoral BGE acknowledged the role that studying the nation’s
indigenous languages and literatures could play in such capacity building. The first publication
within the Building the Curriculum series, ‘Building the Curriculum 1’, tacitly acknowledges that
‘studying Scottish literature allows children and young people to develop their own sense of one
of the creative forces within Scottish culture’ (Scottish Government 2006). Later, in Building the
Curriculum 4 – skills for learning, skills for life and skills for work (Scottish Government 2009), prac-
titioners are reminded that ‘language is itself a key aspect of our culture. Through language,
children and young people can gain access to the literary heritage of humanity and develop their
appreciation of the richness and breadth of Scotland’s literary heritage’ (Scottish Government 2009,
p. 32). Once more, this new curricular advice documentation appeared to policy virtue-signal: the
assertion itself – that young people will ‘develop their appreciation of the richness and breadth of
Scotland’s literary heritage’ is, at best, an equivocal statement that reveals little about how it is to
be realised, supported, or measured by practitioners in the classroom. As Mark Priestley noted in
an early review of CfE, even the best-intentioned, highest capacity teacher ‘will find it difficult to
fully enact CfE in the face of tensions within policy, its complexity, the absence of structured sup-
port and leadership for curriculum development’ (Priestley et al. 2018, p. 902).
Even though CfE English attempted a more systematic approach to the summative assess-
ment of pupils on aspects of Scottish literature, tensions abound between CfE’s BGE and Senior
Phase English provision. Arrangements documents for BGE invite practitioners to think lati-
tudinally in their coverage of Scottish texts but Senior Phase English tapers in focus. SST at N5
and H (first certified in 2014 and 2015 respectively), requires practitioners to select one author
from a narrowly defined list (most writers from the late twentieth century onwards) and to
prepare candidates to undertake a close critical reading of a learned text in exam conditions (see
Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) 2018a,b). In its first attempt at curating a set of
Scottish texts that were thematically interesting, geographically wide-ranging, academically
challenging, accessible, and appealing to teachers, the first iteration of the SQA’s lists contained
eight women across the two qualifications: men made up the other fourteen places. Only two
writers – Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson – produced work before the twentieth cen-
tury. To ensure ‘relevance and to allow new texts to be introduced’ (SQA 2017, p. 1), the defined
list was to be subject to a three-yearly review and refresh process, although when it was pub-
lished in 2017, the refresh might have felt, to some, reasonably conservative. Here, drama
options remained unchanged, while poetry sets had two poems swapped in/out, with no new
writers added. In terms of the shorter prose options, the refresh witnessed a reduction in the
number of short stories pupils were expected to study, from six to four. Only one writer – Janice
Galloway – was removed from the list altogether owing to ‘low uptake’ (SQA 2017, p. 2).
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was inserted instead at Higher and would serve
as a new crossover text (between National 5 and Higher) from academic session 2018–2019; his
novel Kidnapped was relegated in the process. Covid-19 put paid to a second refresh of Scottish
Texts in 2020.
With no limitation on texts to be studied for the remaining part of the Critical Reading
paper, English teachers can – and many often do – study a second Scottish text with certificated
classes. For those who criticised the compulsory component 10 years ago, the scenario of some
teachers already using Scottish texts willingly, was reason enough to oppose the SQA’s decision
to impose a mandate (see Denholm 2012). Even those who supported the introduction of a man-
datory component initially might not be satisfied with how the paper was realised. For students
to tackle this paper well, knowledge of poetic traditions or literary contexts are unrequired. The
configuration – an extract with questions – invites practitioners to reduce a set of poems, a play,
or a novel down to an essence, a rudimentary understanding of the text(s) and handful of quota-
tions for learners to remember for use in the final 8-or 10-mark comparison question. The SST,
like many SQA-designed papers, reinforces the dominance of the examination, encouraging rote
learning, retrieval practice and didactic pedagogy. It offers its learners little opportunity to think
about cultural significance or relevance of the text they were co-opted to study, nor does it invite
pupil-led creative, comparative, or collaborative responses. Moreover, as it approaches 10 years
old the SST has mistakeably become the very thing its initial design promised never to result in:
a rigidly defined canon of writers, the majority of whom are male and/or white and/or modern or
contemporary. Additionally, and rather dispiritingly, the National 3 and National 4 English
awards place no requirement on learners to study Scottish texts, a design flaw that critics of the
SST seized upon from its inception. At the opposite end of the Scottish Credit and Qualifications
Framework (SCQF) spectrum, CfE Advanced Higher (AH) English (first certified in 2016) simi-
larly includes no compulsory study of Scottish literature. As a prescription was inserted for most
learners at N5 and H, so the decision was made to remove the prescriptive aspect within the AH
award (SQA 2019). At SCQF Level 7, teachers – theoretically – have more (not less) freedom but
the number of Scottish texts studied here is minimal. Rather than leading to a state of pervasive-
ness, CfE literacy and English in the BGE continues (on paper) to dilute Scottish literature.
None of this, however, should deny or detract from the great progress made by Scotland’s English
teachers over the last decade to equip learners as best they can for an end-point examination on
a prescribed Scottish text in the Senior Phase. The volume of high-quality learning and teaching
resources on Scottish literature that has been generated in this time by English teachers at the
chalk-face is hugely commendable.
Nonetheless, for 50 years, educators have moved along a curricular möbius strip with regards
to Scottish literature: each curricular refresh promises progress but the imprecision of policy
rubric or lack of procedural clarity results in pedagogical déjà vu. This might be the most obvi-
ous reason to explain why texts from Scotland do not permeate English courses in the way that
many envisaged they could.
Pathways to Progress
In rethinking assessment in the Senior Phase, change will happen. But how to ensure Scottish
literature not only survives potential change but also thrives in the classroom? Regardless of the
shape summative assessment takes in the future, teachers can find ways to increase the prevalence
(as well as ensure the continued contemporary relevance) of Scottish texts. What follows takes
the form of a ‘To Do’ list, necessary action points that foreground areas of English courses that
would benefit from enhanced focus on texts from Scotland. It is the intention only to identify
gaps and absences; to be more prescriptive in setting out the specific texts with which to fill
them would be counterintuitive. It is hoped that teachers finding themselves reaching the end
of this chapter might find themselves inclined to (re)visit preceding chapters in the present
Companion (as well as a wider body of literary criticism) with renewed focus on seeking out the
voices and texts that best fit their own teaching purposes, contexts, and young people.
Broad and General
Approaches to teaching literature – no matter the literary tradition from which a text derives –
remain constant. Preliminary lessons in blocks of learning contextualise the author and the
period in which they write, as well as the specific setting (in time and place), subjects, or themes
about which they choose to write. The type of text being studied will depend on where the unit
goes next: a schema on poetry might include lessons on specific poetic forms or metres; a unit on,
for example, folk ballads might necessitate lessons on the conventions particular to that genre; a
text containing characters that speak in rich dialect will require pupils to be shown how to read
that voice. In creating lessons, teachers are often called upon to do a bit of research and practi-
tioners, overall, tend to prepare lessons very well. Therefore, it might be disingenuous to argue
that teachers lack confidence in teaching Scottish texts because they do not know how to. It is
perhaps more accurate to describe English teachers in Scotland as being unfamiliar with – rather
than unable or unwilling to teach – a wide range of Scottish literature (see Ashbrook 2012).
Scotland’s English teachers are tasked with furnishing learners with a broad conception of the
country’s cultural heritage, but how to achieve this when practitioner familiarity with Scottish
texts remains variable from one local authority to another? A core priority moving forward is to
solidify practitioner expertise in readily accessible ways. In so doing, we might hope that most
learners (regardless of the academic stream they are on) will emerge from their BGE with a
broader and richer appreciation of texts from Scotland and the voices contained therein. With
a wealth of literary criticism and teaching resources at their disposal, teachers looking to gain a
better understanding of Scottish literary history (in terms of a timeline; major writers along that
timeline; major works and traditions; and the interaction of these texts with comparative literary
traditions) might make quick and effective use of the number of Scottish literary primers now
available to enhance their knowledge base.
This present volume represents the most comprehensive critical overview of Scotland’s liter-
ary output, a resource that will allow practitioners to support the practical implementation of
policy advice in pursuit of richness and breadth of experience when using Scottish texts. As valu-
able as the present Companion is, it stands at the head of a line of scholarly appraisals that are
themselves useful classroom resources for English teachers to have at their disposal. Now more
than 20 years old, the Edinburgh University Press series on Scottish language and literature is a
complete set of resources designed with Scotland’s Secondary English audience in mind. In par-
ticular, the substantial Scottish Literature (Gifford et al. 2002) is an accessible critical reader that
pupils themselves can use. Within its periodical survey the book explores the literary contexts
and traditions that emanate from Scotland, from the Medieval to the turn of the millennium. In
foregrounding significant voices, periods, thematic strands and genres, the editors offer a clear
route map through Scottish literature, showing sites of contradiction and comparison between
writers and other world traditions. Detailed bibliographies are provided for each section of the
book, both general historical and cultural background reading lists, as well as author-specific
ones. The accompanying volume, Teaching Scottish Literature: Curriculum and Classroom Applications
(McGillivray 1997) remains the most complete set of practical strategies for integrating Scottish
texts in English. Each chapter begins by offering a series of cogent arguments that reiterate the
worth of teaching Scottish literature in a serious and committed manner; these arguments are
supported by a sequence of exemplars – lesson plans – on how to practically realise the advice.
Texts selected are chronologically diverse, with helpful recommendations for ages and stages for
study and suggested timings for the sequence to facilitate planning and preparation. Learning
intentions are defined, as are the intended products of the learning experiences (i.e. a broadly
creative response or annotated copies of texts, etc.). Despite an abundance of plans, it is not sim-
ply the case that teachers (at the outset of the 2020s) can pick a lesson and deliver it without
some modification that takes into consideration digital technologies and contemporary peda-
gogy (such as flipped classrooms, Making Thinking Visible, or collaborative learning). Roderick
Watson’s two-volume survey, The Literature of Scotland (Watson 2007), is another classroom
essential. Over two volumes, Watson situates important writers in their historical context, offer-
ing readers a contextual foundation in advance of more focused study. Volume One showcases a
broad range of cultural highlights from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, while vol-
ume two appraises those of the twentieth. The clear chronological division (while never entirely
neat) proves advantageous for practitioners looking to find Scottish literary substitutes for the
familiar English literary equivalents they turn to presently.
One common teacher complaint is that SST seems to have ring-fenced the poetic ‘big-hitters’,
leaving nowhere else for teachers to turn in the BGE. To have courage to move beyond pre-
defined lists of poets, an overview of Scotland’s poetic tradition across the ages is vital. The
International Companion to Scottish Poetry (Sassi 2016), is an excellent place to find inspiration.
Divided into three distinct sections – covering languages and chronologies, poetic forms, and
topics and themes – this International Companion is an informed and supportive guide through the
history of poetry in Scotland from the early Middle Ages to the twenty first century. The book
does not aim to be an exhaustive history, but rather an inclusive one that reveals the complexity
inherent in the country’s lyrical and poetic writing. An overview of the entire poetic tradition is,
obviously, not necessary for teachers to deliver a unit of work on an individual text or writer.
However, to expand horizons, to find writers who are satellites of those with whom we are
already highly familiar, the overview provides teachers with a timeline that can be particularly
useful when thinking about how to introduce older Scottish texts to learners. Chronically under-
represented in our classrooms, periods such as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are treas-
ure troves that remain untapped: we must create opportunities for our young people to encounter
them. For the generally interested teacher looking for avenues in with older texts, the International
Companion to Scottish Literature 1400–1650 (Royan 2018) offers a useful survey, while The Mercat
Anthology of Early Scottish Literature 1375–1707 (Jack and Rozendaal 2008) is the storehouse for
texts in both extract and long-form) that come with textual apparatuses such as glossaries and
authorial sketches, that make them classroom- ready. More teaching and student- friendly
resources are undoubtedly required to fully realise the potential of this literary period for
Secondary English.
Another area of perceived weakness, according to Ashbrook, is Scottish drama. For practition-
ers who are inclined to agree (perhaps finding it difficult to list Scottish plays not on the drama
SST at N5 and H), The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (Brown 2011) is a crucial read.
Beginning pre-Reformation, with a survey of quasi-theatrical performance methods (such as
pageants and masques), the Companion describes a range of contexts in a way that makes apparent
drama as a well-established and diverse artform in Scotland through the ages. Scotland’s dra-
matic output has been strengthened during the first decade of CfE, with the growth of Scotland’s
National Theatre. Landmark productions include adaptations of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Jenni
Fagan’s The Panopticon, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart by
David Greig, Edwin Morgan’s Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as Rona Munro’s trilogy of histories,
The James Plays (2016) and Eve, a reflective account of the transition journey by Jo Clifford
and Chris Goode. The NTS’s newly established Education Portal (a branch of the website
designed for school and community outreach) is a welcome addition to the company’s drama
offer. Resources, such as those built around Hannah Lavery’s Lament for Sheku Bayoh, can be
accessed on the Portal, freely available to schools. Portal resources include audio, visual and writ-
ten articles linked to the themes of the plays and selected to help teachers tackle sensitively key
themes. With recent productions of SST’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil and Bold
Girls, Scottish theatre (despite the significant financial set back of Covid-19) seems creatively
buoyant. There is, nonetheless, much progress to be made in bringing Scottish drama texts to
life in English.
By casting our nets wider, by utilising a broader range of texts, we can begin to think about
securing breadth, finding depth, and extending challenge. However, even with enhanced prac-
titioner awareness of Scottish cultural heritage, getting learners to a point of deep knowledge
is logistically problematic. Given continuous academic streaming and movement of learners
from year to year, it is unrealistic to expect classroom teachers to teach a cohesive programme
of learning that takes one learner through a selection of texts ranging anywhere from the Early
Modern to the Contemporary, and to do these important texts any justice in that time. But
there are expedient ways of giving all pupils a foundational understanding of Scotland’s cul-
tural heritage in S1, for example, when classes tend to arrive in mixed groupings. To ensure
that all pupils within a year group have a rudimentary awareness, a departmental approach to
topic-based (rather than text-based) learning would be necessary. Engaging learners in the
same fact-finding process outlined above for practitioners, could result in an entire year
group working collaboratively to research distinct periods in Scotland’s cultural history, iden-
tifying an important writer from designated periods and locating them within their historical
context. From here, pupils might identify a key text (or passage from a text) and summarise
the plot and/or key ideas that stem from it. Learners could collate findings in a learning
resource (i.e. a digital bookshelf through the ages) to be used by associated Primary clusters as
a transition resource. Another possibility is the generation of an individual or whole school
reading list/challenge that involves staff and pupils for the year ahead (i.e. ‘Ten Scottish Writers
to Read in the BGE’). In accordance with principles of flipped learning, this type of activity
allows pupils to take individual and collective responsibility for the acquisition of conceptual
knowledge. We do not always have to pore over texts with younger pupils, when awareness-
raising of the tradition might itself be knowledge enough for the age and stage. Making
effective use of pupil voice, teachers could build on pupils’ feedback by choosing a popular
writer or period for an in-depth literature study later. What has captured the attention or
imagination of learners as they have researched? For the bold practitioner, asking which texts
do not appeal and why might offer more interesting avenues for further exploration, study, or
conversation.
Depth and Challenge
Secondary BGE affords time to study ‘sets’ of texts by stylistically, thematically, or formally
similar writers but we perhaps do not do enough of this yet. Scaffolding the learning – by
comparing two poems or short stories on the same subject in S1, three in S2 and four in S3 –
is a great way to hone the skills of comparison and move beyond shallow and episodic learn-
ing to deeper knowledge of poetic styles and traditions. Two recently published teaching
resources lead the way in modelling this approach with Scottish texts for teachers. Voices from
Scotland, the 2019 publication from the Association of Scottish Literary Studies, is a collec-
tion purpose-built for the pursuit of depth and challenge in blocks of learning around poetry.
Designed for use within the BGE, this carefully curated selection brings together writing
from across centuries and is made accessible to learners by thematic organisers. With well-
conceived classroom activities accompanying each poem, practitioners can use this resource
flexibly, either as the departure point for a much larger literary study or as self-contained
exercises that hone proficiencies in textual analyses or writing. There is further value in this
anthology as it offers practitioners a model on which to base their own resources for the com-
parative study of Scottish short stories, scenes from drama or novel extracts. Similarly, From
the Line: Scottish War Poetry 1914–1945 (Goldie and Watson 2014) facilitates deeper learning
on genre, extending challenge to learners while shining a light on an under-studied area of
Scottish writing. The collection presents for the first time Scottish poetic voices from the
front line and home front during the two Great Wars. Teachers who regularly tap into an
English literary tradition when teaching the conventions of war poetry can now tap into a
body of Scottish writing about war and conflict. From the Line is accompanied by a Scotnote
study guide (Goldie 2017). Together, they offer practitioners opportunities to read widely
within the genre, wide enough to discern patterns and shared themes.
Using Non-Fiction to Improve Literacy Outcomes in Reading
In Reading for Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation (RUAE) at CfE N5 and H, the national
average sits at approximately a half marks pass (i.e. a score of 15/30). Understanding this long-
term trend, practitioners recognise the need to systematically read prose non-fiction within the
BGE curriculum, as a means by which to bring consistency to teaching the skills of reading.
More than this, with the current educational focus on improving literacy attainment through
closing vocabulary and reading gaps (see Quigley 2018, 2020; Mortimor 2020), there is a press-
ing demand for teaching resources linked to high-quality prose non-fiction texts. Scottish prose
non-fiction is having a contemporary moment: with an abundance of material with real literary
merit, Scottish literature has much to offer English teachers who require to strike a balance
between reading for pleasure and reading for purpose.
Genre hybridity marks contemporary Scottish prose non-fiction out as worthy of study. The
Orwell Prize-winning Poverty Safari (Luath Press 2017) offers a good example of the Scottish
literary movement towards generically fluid non-fictive texts. Melding the conventions of
memoir and social commentary, McGarvey delivers a salient polemic on the lived experience
of deprivation. Carefully selected chapters could work as distinct RUAE papers at Levels Three
and Four. Should a companion piece be sought (to develop pupils’ ability to comparatively
analyse key ideas), a text such as Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn (Chatto and Windus 2019), a moving
memoir and social document of a peripatetic childhood lived in disarray and abject poverty,
would work well. There are endless possibilities for planning thematically or stylistically
linked prose non-fiction units: Deborah Orr’s Motherwell (published posthumously, W&N
2020) can be carefully extracted and turned into RUAE papers for upper BGE. Moreover,
sequences of lessons that show creative non-fiction texts in dialogue with each other is a way
to establish the skill of making connections across texts and writers, a skill that is currently
assessed in questions within SST and RUAE papers in Senior Phase. Notable Scottish creative
non-fictive texts that would work well in this way are the memoirs of John Burnside, Janice
Galloway, and Jackie Kay. Moreover, Daunderlust (Ross 2017a [2014]), a series of dispatches
from unreported Scotland, is a perceptive and useful collection of 32 journalistic essays on
numerous aspects of Scottish life. In it (and its companion piece The Passion of Harry Bingo,
Ross 2017b), writer Peter Ross takes us on a geographical grand tour of Scotland, from its
borders to its islands, from its fetish clubs to its football clubs, revealing the whole tapestry of
twenty-first century Scotland. More can be done with these texts than merely extracting pas-
sages for the analysis and evaluation of language features in the form of an RUAE paper – they
do make for great models for Broadly Creative and Broadly Discursive pieces at National 5 and
Higher – but offering pupils the chance to read lived experiences and hear authentic voices of
those who hail from the same places as they do, is vital. To raise the prestige of Scottish prose
non-fiction, using these types of texts as literature studies, or models for Broadly Discursive
writing, would allow learners to not only analyse and evaluate the stylistic devices underpin-
ning quality prose non-fiction and develop their own discursive pieces in response, but also see
the literature’s inherent worth.
Improving Literacy Outcomes in Writing
Prolonged school closures in 2021 significantly impacted young people’s literacy. As well as
widening vocabulary gaps that impacted directly upon reading proficiency, it widened gaps in
written skills and oracy (Education Endowment Foundation 2021). The more diversely and
widely a reader reads in BGE, the more knowledge of literary conventions they might bring to the
writing desk when they themselves are asked to generate short pieces of prose fiction in Senior
Phase as part of a Folio of writing. The production of a creative piece of between 1000 and
1300 words is a taxing process, owing largely to the fact that candidates have not read widely
enough, either in the short story form, in genre fiction or distinct voices to allow them to plan,
edit and execute a piece of real quality. To combat this, the Scottish short story, if used strategi-
cally, could offer an expedient way to improve writing outcomes across BGE and Senior Phase.
There are some fine examples of the genre to be found in The Oxford Book of Short Stories (Dunn 2008),
an anthology that brings together writers from across the centuries. There is also no shortage of
noteworthy modern and contemporary single-author short story collections to tap into, including
those of A.L. Kennedy, James Kelman, Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, and Kirsty Logan. Beyond
this, the potential of the Scottish literary periodical goes untapped: New Writing Scotland, Gutter
and Extra Teeth platform shorter Scottish literary writing with an international reach. The Middle
of a Sentence (2020), from Glasgow-based press The Common Breath, is interesting because it
champions short fiction in its most diminutive form (the original brief for contributions sought
pieces of between 6 and 500 words). Fragments, vignettes, snapshots, and moments are inter-
spersed with complete stories (but in miniature), with new and emerging writers afforded the
same platform as more their more established and esteemed counterparts. No two texts within
this collection feel similar. Making better use of Scottish short texts, by showing pupils how to
engage in literary experimentation and creative play with texts (in the sense of cutting into, mim-
icking, parodying, adapting, and extending, etc.) is one way to develop the next generation of
Scottish authors,
Into the Future

Skills 4.0 – A skills model to drive Scotland’s future (Skills Development Scotland (SDS) 2018)
foregrounds the core skills and human capacities that will be of benefit to those entering the
dynamic and unpredictable workspaces of tomorrow. Innovation – encapsulating the meta-
cognitive capacities of curiosity, creativity, sense making and critical thinking (SDS 2018,
p. 8) – is central to everything we do in English, but also sits at the heart of Scottish literature
with so many texts that can ably exemplify how to use literature and creative writing to ‘visu-
alise alternative solutions or states of being’ (SDS, p. 15). Flipping the classroom, by encourag-
ing pupil-led research projects that take a local or national focus, could facilitate an inventive
and consequential engagement with Scottish literature as a result. An arbitrary example of
what this might look like in practice: a learner living in the centre of a post-industrial town or
village who was interested in the development (or indeed the eradication) of their community
or community’s identity might opt to explore the history of place by reading literary represen-
tations of people who inhabited that space before them. Extracts from novels such as William
McIlvanney’s Docherty (1975) or memoirs such Damien Barr’s Maggie and Me (2013), where
descriptions of places in industrial decline abound, lend themselves well to an approach like
this. A novel, such as Graeme Armstrong’s The Young Team (2020) could offer a third perspec-
tive in just such a project, giving insights into the identities that are shaped in places stripped
of their economic purpose. Using literature in this way, as a means by which to open closed
communities or common experiences to learners, fosters those skills of ‘sense making’
(SDS 2018, p. 8), the process of determining deeper meaning or significance in what is being
expressed through a Scottish prism. Additionally, Skills 4.0 is clear in its vision that develop-
ing learner curiosity requires practitioners to provide opportunities for learners to view the
world, ideas, and issues from unconventional perspectives (SDS 2018, p. 8). To give practical
application to this in the classroom teachers might (as an example) explore traditionally mar-
ginalised Scottish LGBTQ+ experiences by comparatively analysing literary depictions against
the types of source documents more familiar to Modern Studies (such as newspaper articles on
the privately funded political ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign from 2000). This approach, based
on learner curiosity and enquiry, ought to result in increased pattern recognition (as in identi-
fying similarities and differences between the experiences described in the texts) and an
enlarged capacity to think holistically (as in seeing the bigger social picture and understand-
ing subtle nuances between texts). In the future, learner progress might be measured in their
ability not only to progress through a unit study to write an essay or pass an exam, but also by
their ability to complete collaborative projects or engage in rich discussions guided by their
own curiosity, that allow them to make connections between the literature they have read, the
real communities in which they live and the skills they will need to compete in the
contemporary global community in which they will work.
Writing for Change
As the host nation for COP26 (the summit of the member parties of the United Nations)
Scotland in 2021 served as the backdrop for the decisive international discussion on climate
change. It posed a stark reminder that there has never been a more apposite time to draw upon
the rich corpus of Scottish nature and ecological writing to engage, or re-engage, our young
people with the natural world. The race to net zero challenge is the most pressing and vital our
age will face. As well as offering descriptive accounts of the natural world, Scottish nature and
ecology writing examines the profound and lasting impact on identity that our surroundings
have. Classic novels such as Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Highland River by Neil
Gunn, as well as Jenni Fagan’s Sunlight Pilgrims, the poetry of newly installed Scottish Makar
Kathleen Jamie, and the Orcadian duo of The Outrun by Amy Liptrot and George Mackay
Brown’s An Orkney Tapestry, are texts that confront readers with the distinctiveness and value of
our landscapes. But it is in contemporary Scottish children’s or young adult fiction (the texts we
seek out for BGE Levels 1–4) where we can, arguably, source the most interesting reflections on
climate change, sustainability, and global citizenship: presently, it is also where we find the
greatest experimentation with literary genre and style. Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000)
is set in a Scotland of 2090, with melting polar ice caps and a super virus (‘Senga’) running ram-
pant; the great flood has left in its wake parishes or floating cities. Similarly, Julia Bertagna’s
Exodus envisions a Scottish 2090s, and like the Scotland of Fitt’s dystopian future, Bertagna’s
Scotland floats in a world that is gradually drowning in a world of melting Arctic ice caps. The
spirited heroine – 15-year-old Mara – is an asylum seeker forced to flee her disappearing home
to seek refuge in a city foreign to her, one that was built on the drowned remains of Glasgow. In
the Exodus series, climate change goes together with political corruption and injustice. In these
two texts alone, there are enough thought-provoking moments to generate progressive and pas-
sionate discussions with young people about climate change, and to stimulate their own pieces
of writing for change.
Citizenship
CfE was founded on the need to grow citizens who can thrive in the global community. Scotland’s
schools are diverse places, as are the workplaces that our learners will inevitably enter. Scotland’s
literatures have started to reflect this diversity. As one example, novelists Suhayl Saadi and Leila
Aboulela, and poets Imtiaz Dharker and Scotland-based Nadine Aisha Jassat, have written crea-
tively about Scottish-Muslim identities and experiences. While we are prone to covering the
sectarian divide using literature, are we using Scottish texts to reflect the variety of faiths within
our classes? Moreover, with a need to rethink Scotland’s relationship with race and indeed its
complicity in the pursuits of Empire, Jackie Kay’s hybrid text The Lamplighter (2020) or James
Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003) are texts that present various opportunities to challenge precon-
ceptions and assumptions. When constructing course outlines, we ought to be considering how
to incorporate the types of texts and titles referenced above, as decolonising the curriculum and
developing culturally sensitive pedagogies (Scottish Government 2021) are educational priori-
ties at the forefront of curriculum planning and Initial Teacher Training Education programmes
at the outset of the 2020s. English teachers must be more pro-active in recognising through
their literature choices the diversity of the communities and country in which they work, and the
life experiences of every young person that they support. While literary criticism has taken
a noticeable shift toward literary cosmopolitanism and transnationalism (see Dominguez
and D’haen 2015), inclusivity, and diversity, this trend has not yet permeated our classrooms,
but it must.
Conclusion
At the outset of the 2020s, Scottish literature has degrees of protection in the educational frame-
work, its position hard-won by practitioners, academics and policymakers who have, for at least
half a century, understood the benefits to our young people of studying it and advocated posi-
tively on its behalf. Nonetheless, as this chapter has argued, that teaching Scottish literature and
language exists as a standing item in an arrangements document in the BGE does not in itself
guarantee that its implementation nationally will be well-planned, consistent, or coherent. Even
a mandatory ‘Scottish’ component within Senior Phase qualifications cannot do justice to what
Scottish literature in the classroom can, could and indeed ought to be. There is evidently much
progress to be made and diversification to happen. In aiming to be of use to new and established
practitioners, this chapter has proposed uncomplicated quick fixes, modifications to practice
that require minimal resources (in terms of time and money) to implement. Although simple,
they are intended to catalyse the development of individual practitioner or departmental think-
ing around handling Scottish texts. Engaging in professional reading – by tapping into existing
literary primers, critical companions, study guides or notes – is an expedient way to grow a
teacher’s knowledge base and give them the subject-specific tools to plan learning that moves
beyond episodic knowledge encounters (i.e. teaching a Burns’ poem in January) to deliver fully
on the policy definition that pupils ought to have an ‘appreciation of the richness and breadth of
Scotland’s literary heritage’.
As we consider how to move forward with the OECD recommendations on knowledge-rich
(Ashbee 2021) and skills-based curricula fit for the twenty first century, the time is right to
discuss what tacit knowledge – both declarative and procedural – we want our learners to know
about Scottish literature by the end of their time in English, and indeed how we expect them to
obtain it. As past curricular refreshes have proven, knowing what we would like learners to ‘get’
is ultimately pointless if we do not have practitioners who are empowered and tooled to deliver.
Bigger questions – how to ensure Scottish literature is embedded within our teaching of English
and Literacy (from Early/First Level through to AH, along the Primary, Secondary and Further
Education continuum) and how best to support practitioners in this pursuit – are ones that will
take longer (and tangential thinking) to answer adequately. Joined-up thinking, collaboration,
and innovation on the part of each stakeholder involved in the Education process is certainly
required. Carving out more opportunities for knowledge exchange and sharing of best educa-
tional and academic practice across sectors and institutions, as well as building upon the invalu-
able resource generation and sharing taking place within online communities that collaborate
without geographical borders, are vital next steps in the process. As we move into the second
iteration of CfE, the literature of Scotland throughout the ages has a significant role to play, one
that can satisfy the foundational curricular principles (challenge and enjoyment; breadth;
progression; depth; personalisation and choice; coherence; and relevance) on which it is founded.
It can – and must – be used to develop capacities in learners – social skills, citizenship, critical
thinking, and creativity – that can better prepare them to enter the modern workforce. We know
this already. The challenge is to ensure that we find ways to systematically embed Scottish texts
in the English classrooms so that in fifty years from now educators are no longer required to
prove the inherent worth of studying Scottish literature in the English classroom; it simply per-
meates it.
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29
Scottish Literature in the 21st Century
and the New Media
Craig Lamont
Lecturer in Scottish Studies, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow
Artists have always tried to imagine visions of the future. Throughout the twentieth century
some works explored the unknown reaches of the universe, others warned of political and envi-
ronmental catastrophes lying in wait. Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932) and Kubrick’s film
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), for example, retain cult status for their fantastical visions of the
future. One of the fundamental dystopian themes that science fiction tends towards is the cen-
tralisation of authority, sometimes in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the subsequent
breakdown of traditional human interaction. But, for all the advancements in technology we
have made (AI included), most of them rely on competent human ‘users’ in order to function.
Take Edwin Morgan’s poem ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ (Morgan 1968), with its
semantic word- pairings – ‘jollymerry/hollyberry’ – leading to the comical payoff –
‘MERRYCHRYSANTHEMUM’ – for an example of the artist portraying dysfunctional technol-
ogy. There are many more examples like this in Morgan’s imaginative landscape of poetry.
Similarly, George Mackay Brown’s first novel, Greenvoe (1972), with its community-shattering
‘Black Star’ project, and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), with its adjacent-dystopian portrayals of
‘another’ Glasgow, are part of this same landscape: Scotland’s past is invoked to conjure an
unknowable future. More recently, the works of Iain M. Banks – the ‘M.’ applying mainly to the
science fiction titles of Iain Banks, best known for The Wasp Factory (1984) – have been cited as
having inspired the Halo series (2001–present), one of the highest-grossing video game fran-
chises of its day. Indeed, we may draw a line in Scottish Literature between writing which envi-
sions a future Scotland and Scottish writing which envisions a future. But such lines are often
arbitrary, and perhaps unnecessary. With this notion in mind, this chapter will consider the

many manifestations of Scottish Literature in the new media of the present century. But before
this can be done it should be asked: what is ‘new media’?
Put simply, new media is an emerging or recently-emergent method of sharing content.
Improvements to printing, from woodblock to lithography and, eventually, digital, are some of
the best examples of new print media. Following the advent of cinema in the late nineteenth
century the sensational and immersive nature of art was enhanced like never before. In the digital
age, the experience of reading books is echoed in scrolling through e-text. Avid cinema-goers
might choose to stream a new release at home, in private. Recent developments such as apps, and
improvements to wearable virtual reality kits, have undoubtedly created more ‘users’, or con-
sumers, of new media. Scholars were quick to define these new media, and a specialist field with
a focus on the arts and humanities has since emerged. Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation:
Understanding New Media (2000) remains seminal for offering insights into computer/video
games, television, virtual reality, and the internet (or ‘world wide web’) itself, grounding them
in theories of electronic networks and the effect on the self. They theorise that new media comes
with an expectation of immediacy, in which we can experience something like ‘the real thing’ or
‘being there’ by peering beyond the ‘thing’ that gets us there, to inhabit a new space that is nei-
ther real nor imagined (Bolter and Grusin 2000, p. 6). Portal AR is a fitting example of how this
works sans wearable technology. Downloadable as a smartphone app, you are instructed to scan
the floor of your room with your smartphone camera and then, looking at your screen, ‘step
through’ the portal into a Scottish location – such as the cloisters of the University of Glasgow
or Walter Scott’s Abbotsford – of your choice. Some locations are just 360° panoramas which
move as you move; others contain video clips. The intention to transport the user is in keeping
with Bolter and Grusin’s theories, even if the experience is, by the most recent technological
standards, hardly ground-breaking. New devices, with better cameras and software, are rolled
out annually, and with each passing year our expectations of new media tend to increase. This
chapter will consider the ways in which Scottish Literature has found its way into these new
media, with key characters from a handful of Scottish authors being reinterpreted time and
again. These utterances of ‘classic’ Scottish works represent an emanation of the original, form-
ing part of the legacy or cultural memory of the text. Sometimes, as with Robert Burns, the
author becomes the subject of the reinterpretation: the embodiment of an important era in
Scotland’s literary history.
Scottish Literature as a Collective
It is tempting to consider the dawn of the previous century and ask how the Modernists defined
Scottish Literature. While it is not possible to cover this ground in great detail here, it should be
noted that Smith’s attempt to theorise the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ (Smith 1919, p. 4), and T.S.
Eliot’s rebuttal (1919), represents something of a schism. Before Smith, Arnold (1867) and
Vietch (1887) had dug out the Celtic remains of Scottish Literature, the ancient embers of which
partly explained the romantic turn in Scottish poetry. Smith complained that Ramsay and Scott,
for instance, were often guilty of describing too much while casting their eyes to the customs of
an even older age (Smith 1919, p. 6). Eliot’s review suggests that Smith only (unintentionally)
succeeds in capturing the geographical conditions of Scottish writing by way of ignoring the
makeup of ‘the Scotch mind’ (Eliot 1919, p. 8). This casts the work almost as anthropology: a
study not in celebration – or even confrontation – of Scottish Literature, but of an ancient, even
foreign collection of rites and customs which bear some resemblance to English Literature. These
Scottish Literature in the 21st Century and the New Media 365
modern classifications begin to resemble something like Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890), thus
rendering Scottish Literature even more mythic and obsolete, anticipating Edwin Muir’s infa-
mous description of Burns and Scott as ‘mummied housegods’ in ‘musty niches’ (Muir 2006,
p. 23). This is not to judge modern writers entirely: the emerging mechanical world – in the
World Wars as well as the workforce – undoubtedly wrought a new age. Benjamin’s seminal
essay declared that, unlike historic reproductions (i.e. founding and stamping), mechanical
reproductions of art represented something new. Specifically, the ‘presence in time and space’ is
something which even an excellent copy cannot transfer (Benjamin 1969, p. 3). Examples are
given: ‘The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral
production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room’
(Benjamin 1969, p. 4). The Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s poems, for example, may be read in
the same way as in 1786, but much can change when new methods of printing were invented
and, even more so, when those poems are typed out and displayed on a computer screen. This
leap from the mechanical to the digital age represents a new schism altogether; one which we are
perhaps too busy improving to completely comprehend.
Michael Joyce’s review of new media and literary studies (2004) is an intriguing, often playful
take on the new and exciting world of the digital age. ‘Googling’ is highly encouraged, as it
represents not only a new verb but an instantaneous journey to enlightenment via the growing
network of resources online. While Joyce breaks down the Google results of ‘new media’ to take
stock of the field, searching ‘Scottish Literature’ should yield many meanings of the phrase, at
least for now. At the time of writing (June 2022) the first result is a snippet advertising the
Scottish Literature degree programme at the University of Glasgow, and its unique position
amongst UK academic units. The remainder of the top ten are:
2. Scottish literature – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_literature
3. Scottish Literature | Scottish Poetry and Books
https://www.scotland.org/about-scotland/culture/literature
4. Scottish literature | Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/art/Scottish-literature
5. Scottish Authors & Literature | VisitScotland
https://www.visitscotland.com/see-do/attractions/arts-culture/scottish-literature
6. The 20 Scottish books everyone should read | The Scotsman
https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/20-scottish-books-everyone-should-read-2461777
(28 December 2005)
7. MA Scottish Literature | The University of Edinburgh
www.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergraduate/degrees/index.php?action=view&code=Q531
8. What is Scottish Literature?
https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/free_downloads/wisl
9. Scotfax: Scottish Literature on Undiscovered Scotland
www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/usscotfax/arts/literature.html
10. Literature and language | National Library of Scotland
https://www.nls.uk/learning-zone/literature-and-language
Definitions (2, 4, 8), academic prospectuses (1, 7), tourism and library guides (3, 5, 9, 10), and
lists (6, 10) represent the healthy and active industry of Scottish Literature. We could in theory
do the same for any nation, or even city, and find meaning in the patterns of each search. For us
it is important to see which figures rise to the top of these pages most often, particularly in the
tourism websites, which are required to make selections based on perceived popularity of Scottish
writers. Unsurprisingly, it is Burns, Scott, and Stevenson who are held up as either the entry-
point or destination for the would-be tourist. This is where Googling (a product of new media)
connects directly with the nineteenth-century craze of monument building: lists are often built
using existing sites of interest, which themselves were determined by the Victorians, creating an
echo of Victorian cultural memory into the twenty-first century. This online presence seems to
contradict the modernist rejection of eighteenth and nineteenth century Scottish Literature.
Lavoie’s study (2013) of the global ‘Scottish Presence’ in the published record, using WorldCat
and other bibliographic data, is helpful here. Publications dated up to and including 1850 are shown
to represent only 6% of the total global library resource, while in Scotland the figure is 25%. This,
the largest block of material in the Scottish Presence, suggests that the age of Burns, Scott, and their
predecessors do in fact represent the most vital period in Scottish literary history. Lavoie does note
that such publications ‘are valued not only for their content but also as historical artefacts, and may
receive special curatorial interpretation, preservation, and security’ (Lavoie 2013, pp. 20–21). The
next largest block of material (21%) range from 1976 to 2000. But the top performer according to
the data is Robert Louis Stevenson. Lavoie traces 3,456 distinct publications associated with Treasure
Island, 1,700 with Jekyll and Hyde, and 1,346 with Kidnapped (Lavoie 2013, p. 25). Treasure Island
also tops the list of works most widely held in library collections (Lavoie 2013, p. 26). Among the
others most published and widely held are Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Boswell’s Life of Johnson,
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Barrie’s Peter Pan. There are various reasons why these texts domi-
nate the data, too many to deal with in this chapter. It should be noted that Burns, for example, has
a complicated position because his ‘works’ are dealt with under two titles: ‘The Poetical Works of’
and ‘The Complete Poetical Works of’. This helps explain why easily-discerned entities such as the
novels and plays are perhaps easier to disseminate than the dispersed works of a writer chiefly known
for their poems.
There are other factors to consider, such as the influence of Smith’s Wealth of Nations on eco-
nomic and historical discourse, or the role of cinema and adaptations for children driving new
editions of Treasure Island and Peter Pan. These factors nonetheless lead us to conclude that there
are a handful of enduring characters thriving in new media, conceived by Scottish authors, none
more so than Long John Silver, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, and Peter Pan. One of the
most popular ways of sharing content now in the digital age is through social media. When
YouTube was launched as a video-sharing platform, the first upload was an 18-second clip of
co-founder Jawed Karim, titled ‘Me at the zoo’ (2005). Popular now as being the first video on
the platform, this short video of Karim describing some elephants, has now gained 153M views.
The video is a watershed moment for social media itself, with the final words – ‘that’s pretty
much all there is to say’ – welcoming a whole generation of self-fashioned vloggers who had
much more to say. Jean Bookish Thoughts is one such example. The Scot, with 81K subscribers,
recommended a series of Scottish books in 2018, offering short reviews and synopses along the
way. Jean’s combination of contemporary works by Ali Smith, Kirsty Logan, and Gail Honeyman,
with the cult novels Sunset Song (1932) by Grassic Gibbon and Poor Things (1992) by Gray, as well
as nod to the Bard – The Complete Works of Robert Burns (Waverley Books, 2011) – represents yet
another cross-section of Scottish Literature for the twenty-first century. The replies, which are
very positive on the whole, also suggest how well people know these works, their authors, and
whether or not Jane had missed any obvious classics. The freedom of social media, then, creates
an instantaneous upload/reaction dynamic. Whoever does something like this in the future
might choose a different list entirely, and receive different responses based on their personal
choices. This social dynamic is one of the key factors of the digital age which allows the myriad
manifestations of literatures to emerge.
E-Text
Jerome McGann was among the first to make the case for developing e-text alongside traditional
publishing in order to push the boundaries of scholarship. One of his key positions about organ-
ising text on-screen, or online, is that ‘unlike a traditional book, the HyperText need never be
“complete” […] it will evolve and change over time, it will gather new bodies of material, its
organizational substructures will get modified, perhaps quite drastically’ (1995). This certainly
rings true in the digital age that has flourished in the decades since, though the graveyard of
deceased web-based projects is larger than we might have expected. The Rossetti Archive (2008),
edited by McGann himself, is one of the notable survivors. As Sutherland says, it marks ‘a shift
in focus from old book-bound author-editor alliance to an editor—reader/user partnership, bro-
kered by the computer’ (Sutherland 2009, p. 18). The website contains e-text (electronic versions
of Rossetti and commentary by the editor), images, hyperlinks and a search engine. There is a
helpful link for ‘recent additions’, which, for any project more than a few years old, is crucial for
appearing ‘alive’. There are many good resources online gathering digital dust, with newsfeeds
and blogs, even attached social media accounts long out of use. Worse still is the abundance of
dead links leading to blank screens or the dreaded ‘404 – not found’ auto-display. For this reason
there are a handful of online repositories which serve as stores for e-texts.
The oldest digital archive is Project Gutenberg, which commenced in 1971 with the posting
of the U.S. Declaration of Independence on ARPANET (the ancestor of the Internet). From 2003
onwards, hundreds of classic texts were put on to CDs and DVDs as well as through the website.
Bartleby.com began life in 1993. The next year it was the venue for the first classic book to be
published on the web: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It is currently owned by Barnes & Noble,
though its e-text archive retains the original look of the older webpages. Like Project Gutenberg,
it contains only e-text with some accompanying imagery. The Internet Archive (1996) on the
other hand provides access to multiple kinds of media. Sound files, video files, and books. Books
are presented as facsimiles, or scanned originals, and may be read on screen as though ‘in real life’
(i.e. IRL). Each of these has its benefits. For scholars and students eager to read, for example, a
particular edition of Burns or Scott, the Internet Archive is a more useful destination. One down-
side to reading the facsimile (yellowed-page and all) is that the HTML is often automated and
unreliable. It can be searched, but the HTML itself is not as easily readable as Project Gutenberg
or Bartleby, which are built on e-texts themselves. The latter websites might be more attractive
for pulling blocks of text or for more reliable searching, though each user will have their own
needs and expectations. These online archives largely depend on material being out of copyright,
and so it makes sense that only certain authors are represented. Copyright extends to 70 years
beyond the death of the author, meaning the work of Arthur Conan Doyle (d. 1930) is freely
available while Muriel Spark, who died in 2006, will not feature on the likes of Project Gutneberg
or Internet Archive until at least 2076, assuming we have not rendered those sites obsolete by
then. Let us return to Robert Louis Stevenson for the moment.
Treasure Island, of which we noted there are over 3,000 distinct publications held in libraries,
was published in book form in 1883, after appearing in serial form in Young Folks between 1881
and 1882, under the pseudonym ‘Captain George North’ (Prideaux 1903, p. 26). Beside two
illustrated editions in 1885 and 1899, other editions soon followed under the banners ‘Library
Edition’, ‘Popular Edition’, or ‘People’s Edition’. The popularity of the work had been firmly set
before the turn of the century, and the bibliographical nuances of The Sea Cook: a Story for Boys –
as it was known before 1883 – soon forgotten. How, then, is it represented as an e-text? On the
Literature Project website (c. 2000), it is unclear what the source text is. On Project Gutenberg,
there are several distinct versions, including audiobook chapters, two e-texts in English and one
each in Spanish, German, and Finnish. The more popular of the two English entries was uploaded
in 1994 (and edited in 2020), based on the 1915 Harper & Brothers edition, with over 100
illustrations by Louis Rhead. The other text was entered in 2009, using The Illustrated Children’s
Library edition illustrated by Milo Winter, published by Gramercy Books in 2002 (Winter’s
illustrations are copyright 1915). The transcriber has noted that the revision of minor spelling
and typographical errors has taken place without note. On Internet Archive there are even more
options (as digital facsimiles), from the 1883 first edition to a Toronto reprint dated 1926, com-
plete with child’s doodle on the flyleaf. There is also the option to borrow, for free, an adapted
Junior Classics edition (2014).
As the next section will show, games play a crucial role in perpetuating the legacy of such
characters, often with very intriguing attempts to represent the core intentions of the work being
adapted. This, and all other available e-texts, are like digital echoes of any one original. But
while academic efforts such as those found on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online provide more
reliable and authoritative e-texts, with all the editorial apparatus adapted for ‘users’ rather than
readers (i.e. McGann’s HyperText), the surfeit of alternative and cost-free options make it more
difficult to discern the original. In the digital age there is perhaps the misconception that more
is better, when often there is too much information to choose from. This is likely why Sutherland
gently questioned the ‘limited worth or usefulness’ of large-scale digital editions and archives
(Sutherland 2009, p. 18). Scholarly work which aims to be exhaustive, then, needs to occupy
more digital space than it currently does. The means of carrying this out are not yet known,
though academics are more inclined towards collaboration than ever before, often working with
commercial partners to broaden the impact of their research. In most cases, this takes the shape
of ‘interaction’, where the distance between the final object, the text, is shortened with an invit-
ing interface with which the user may be welcomed into the fray of the project in question.
Games and virtual reality are often the best new media venues to do this.
Games
In 2000, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) was used as the core of an online, e-text game. It emerged
following a conversation between Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker about the ‘many alter-
native possibilities’ within the story itself, and the possibilities this opened up to essentially
intervene with the text. Taking the subject of anti-Semitism into account, McGann posited that
we should not be afraid to rewrite and reimagine the work as the Victorians did (McGann
et al. 2004). The game includes rules, moves, and there was even a planned Computer Player, all
in the name of using critical theory and historical knowledge to reinterpret a classic work. The
links to the game itself are scattered and many are broken. In any case, the Ivanhoe game is better
understood as a new digital concept than a fully functioning case study, especially considering
McGann’s note that ‘the game can clearly be played effectively on paper.’ The computerised
aspect essentially helped expedite the process of playing the game (McGann n.d.). That Walter
Scott comes into play here is the main point of interest. There have been other, more successful
versions of e-text games such as Patchwork Girl (1995), which takes image and text – based on
Shelley’s Frankenstein and Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz – as part of the narrative progression.
But no matter how successful games like this may become, they are perhaps already too late.
Computer, or video, games and interactive web-based games using movable characters are much
more attractive to the user. Grand Theft Auto, one of the most successful and controversial com-
puter game series of all time, has its roots in the city of Dundee, where DMA Design was based.
DMA was later renamed Rockstar North (now based in Edinburgh), one of the main studios for
the Rockstar Games enterprise. We have also seen how the settings and scenes of Iain M. Banks’s
science fiction inspired the Halo games. But these are Scottish success stories worth expanding
on elsewhere. More pressing for the concerns of this chapter is to trace the presence of Scottish
Literature in the new media, including these computer games, and to determine how its legacy
has been affected.
The first example of this being done is, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the reworking of Stevenson’s
Treasure Island. In 1981 the arcade game Treasure Island involved surmounting a sinking pyramid
terrain (or island), bearing only minor reference to Stevenson’s work, with fantastical elements
such as monsters and energy fields added in to the gameplay. In 1984 and 1985 the title was used
by Mr. Micro and Windham Classics respectively, where the plot and characters were utilised as
far as the limited gameplay made possible. A more recent and successful example can be found
in the world of PC gaming. In Destination: Treasure Island (France 2006, North America 2007),
the characters of Stevenson’s novel are reprised and reimagined four years after the events of the
novel. The game features high quality graphic renders, maps, and puzzles. It is important to note
the generational importance of games here. Of course, Treasure Island has been reimagined for
cinema since 1918, gaining an intense period of popularity in the 1980s and 90s, including the
musical Muppet Treasure Island (1996) featuring Tim Curry as Long John Silver and Billy Connolly
as Billy Bones. The importance of these cinematic reinterpretations of the novel are important in
terms of cultural memory, but these does not necessarily dictate the role of new media in rework-
ing the original. One glowing review of the PC game Destination: Treasure Island begins:
One summer, when I was a child, my mother was a little concerned about the amount of time I spent
playing video games. Her solution was a trip to the library to expand my mind, and the result was
‘Treasure Island’ by Robert Louis Stevenson, which quickly became one of my favorite books of all
time. I read the story of Jim Hawkins with the wide eyes of a young child who loves adventure, and
15 years later, Kheops Studio has given me a chance to return to the Caribbean to revisit young
Hawkins and the loveable villain, Long John Silver
(Lawton 2007).
The film versions are tellingly missing in this nostalgic introduction. This is not to say the
author was not aware of any of the cinematic releases, but the direct connection between the book
and game reveals the potency of new media for (recent) past and present generations. As Berger
and McDougall have shown, this can work another way: the myriad ‘utterances’ of a story can be
traced across films, games, music and novels in a ‘bricolage’ (Berger and McDougall 2013,
p. 148). The pedagogical aim of their research allows for what they call a ‘“flattened” hierarchy’,
where any and all manifestations of x are given equal importance. A good example of this crystal-
lisation of reference can be found in Birthplace of Ossian (c. 2017), an intriguing walking simulator
based on Glen Coe. James Macpherson’s epic poem points to ‘the streams of Cona’
(Macpherson 1784–1785, p. 238), i.e. Glen Coe, as the birthplace of Ossian, leading to the
romantic artistic depiction of the scene throughout the nineteenth century. The simulator, which
is an openly traversable impression of the setting with impalpable additions, borrows from
Henry Okun’s essay, in particular the notion of ‘greyness’ and being ‘drowned in eternal mist’
(Okun 1967, p. 328). The maker of the game, Connor Sherlock, explains:
Now not only did I have my memories of Highlander, but also early romanticism’s take on 3rd century
oral tradition, as well as a whole subgenre of landscape paintings inspired by the Macpherson
version. […] I dug into all these as I made the game, though I haven’t yet read the entirety of
Macpherson’s work [which is free online!]
(Priestman 2017).
This interconnected frame of reference to various media being used in the digital world perhaps
strengthens the view taken by Berger and McDougall, that viewing artworks as ‘bricolage’ allows
for as many inputs or experiences as possible. Priestman’s interview with Sherlock links the
reader to the Internet Sacred Text Archive (ISTA, 1999), a resource for e-texts which leans
towards religion, mythology and folklore, for a freely available version of Macpherson’s work.
There are other studies which seek to position computer games at the heart of the humanities.
Rockwell (2002) lays out a brief history of video games before arguing that they are becoming
the main form in which users come across hypertext and are asked to think critically, thereby
making them a perfectly suitable medium for the humanities to consider. As recently as 2019,
Coltrain and Ramsay were questioning whether a humanities scholar can ‘use a video game to
convey his or her interpretation of the literary, historical, or theoretical significance of a novel or
of the broader meaning […] of a specific historical event’ (Coltrain and Ramsay 2019, p. 38).
They argue that, while a game ‘anticipate[s] the moral leanings of its players as part of the emo-
tional choices it presents’, so do any written work with their vignettes and their personal anec-
dotes and asides (Coltrain and Ramsay 2019). The idea of ‘active participation’ is what drives the
new media of computer games into the future, especially where moral, humanist discourse is
concerned (Coltrain and Ramsay 2019, p. 41).
Going back to Stevenson, there is another game worth discussing. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(Japan 1988, North America 1989) is a side-scrolling computer game released on the Nintendo
Entertainment System (NES). Unlike other utterances of original Scottish literary works in
games, Bandai-Toho’s reworking of Stevenson’s classic novel has gained notoriety not only for its
frustrating and cumbersome gameplay, but for how that gameplay echoes the intended meaning
of the text. This is where social media comes in useful. James Rolfe, the self-styled ‘Angry Video
Game Nerd’, has posted two videos to YouTube concerning the game. The first review (2006)
has gained almost 5M views for its comic takedown of a game so bad that viewers are advised to
‘just stay the fuck away from this awful piece of shit’ (Cinemassacre 2006, at 5:05). In 2011,
however, Rolfe revisited the game in a new review (7.2M views). This time (and with added
comical editing skills) with a more positive outlook. The game is played through thoroughly,
and at one point Rolfe stops to consult the book, confirming that ‘shooting fireballs at ghosts,
demonic babies and brains with legs’ does not happen in Stevenson’s original (Cinemassacre 2011,
at 8:18). The tongue-in-cheek conclusion, that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the best game ever
made because it ‘exposes the dual nature of the human spirit’ by forcing the user into overcoming
the desire to play Hyde, choosing the less enjoyable experience of playing as Jekyll, in order to
win the game (Cinemassacre 2011, at 15:13). Napolitano agrees that while this in-game con-
struction is not exactly intuitive, it allows the user to experience the central conflict of the novella,
rendering it one of the best adaptations to date (Napolitano 2019, p. 29). The aim is for the user
to move to the right, as Jekyll, across town to the church to marry Miss Millicent. There are two
meters: health and stress. If the stress meter fills up, by way of encountering or being struck by
too many obstacles, Hyde takes over, and the game world is mirrored and transformed into a
nightmarish version of reality. If Hyde, now moving to the left, is hit too many times, the game
is over. Ideally, Hyde kills fictional enemies and transforms back into Jekyll, allowing the jour-
ney to the church to continue. There is an added element, however, which was the source of
confusion in Rolfe’s first review. If Hyde, whose game world is inverted, goes beyond the place
of Jekyll in the route, a bolt of lightning strikes him down and the game is over. It is not initially
clear that Hyde must return to Jekyll by reducing his ‘stress’ before this paradox of time–space
occurs. This revelation has enhanced the cult status of the game, largely thanks to Rolfe’s han-
dling of it alongside his very appropriate ‘Angry Video Game Nerd’ persona. A new Nintendo
version, MazM: Jekyll and Hyde (2020) was built with original music and illustrations, perpetu-
ating the core theme of Stevenson’s work for the next generation of gamers.
Calum Rodger’s Rabbie Burns Saves the World! (2020), developed for Book Week Scotland
(Scottish Book Trust), is also interesting for its overview of Scottish Literature more generally. In
this free game, you awake as Burns, startled and confused in the world of today. ‘Who are you?
And where am I??’ Burns asks Edwin Morgan, who is ‘tucked inside the bowels of Glasgow’s
famous Mitchell Library!’ Burns has to save Scotland from a (comically vague) ‘UNSPECIFIED
CATASTROPHE’ by gaining the help of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jackie Kay, Nan Shepherd,
and Muriel Spark. At the heart of this game is an excellent series of exchanges between these
writers and their well-known characters, while Burns’s retorts playfully code-switch from English
to a self-aware (twee) Scots. Rodger is doing much more than showcase Scottish Literature, he
satirises the very nature of authorship and Scotland’s literary heritage is poked at in good spirits.
Games like this, as well as new releases which reimagine or base themselves on the worlds created
by Scottish writers, are part of the legacy of Scottish Literature in new media. The next step is to
consider the immersive, rather than interactive, technologies which aim to take our experiences
to another level.
Immersive Experiences and Apps
Like reading, playing video games invites you into a new world. The apparatus with which you
inhabit and move around that world is always evolving: interaction with e-reading takes the
reading experience to a new digital realm, and games are becoming more and more realistic,
gaining more of a foothold in popular culture and critical discourse. But they both require the
focus of the user’s concentration on a specified surface (i.e. page, device, TV screen). With immer-
sive technologies come new possibilities. Primarily, these entail Virtual Reality (VR), the wear-
ing of a headset which transforms the user’s field of vision into a completely different virtual
world, and Augmented Reality (AR), where VR is blended with the still-visible physical world
using headsets or smartphones (Pittock 2018, p. 5).
Virtual Reality as a concept has been circulating in the public imagination since the early
1990s, with the technologies already under development since the 1970s (Ellis 1991, p. 321).
Today, major entertainment companies are competing to produce the best commercially-available
headsets, often in line with their consoles, such as Sony’s PlayStation VR (PSVR), which sold
5M units in the three years since its release in 2016 (SIE 2020). It should be noted that these
kinds of VR experiences tend to build on the pre-existing popular world of video gaming.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017), for example, was playable on the PlayStation 4 and the PSVR,
making for an altogether more terrifying, immersive experience of the popular horror game.
A good example of AR working well is the 2016 game Pokémon Go. Using their device camera,
users would travel on foot looking for ‘wild’ (as per the original series) Pokémon, capture them,
and train them for battle. The virtual ‘PokésStops’ and trainer ‘gyms’ which feature in the game
were often situated in large public spaces like parks, where users of the game would gather. In
other words, the successful coexistence of the real and virtual worlds. Public concerns that ‘ghost’
Pokémon spawn inside or near graveyards is an interesting digression into the inevitable sensi-
tivity revealed issues when these worlds collide. We can envisage something similar for Scottish
Literature heritage trails around Edinburgh using almost the exact same technology, hunting for
literary references to specific sites rather than imaginary creatures. Marie-Laure Ryan, whose
extensive work in the field of narrative and media theory has been seminal since the 1990s,
makes the point that while games like Pokémon Go might ‘promote a more comprehensive view
of the city’ or civic space by encouraging people to visit new places, the user, who is ‘fixed’ on the
task at hand (like finding Pokémon) may in fact ‘become blind to the surrounding environment’
(Ryan and Fenech 2016, p. 278). This notion that we all experience our surroundings in indi-
vidual ways – regardless of technology – is a strong argument in support of new immersive
media becoming part of the community experience.
Immersion in a controlled environment, such as an art gallery or classroom, is a useful spatial
limit to impose here. Visiting the birthplace or workplace of a prominent writer, like many
major tourist attractions, often comes with audio (headset) tours in several languages. Visitors to
these places are now asking how this experience can be enhanced with new media such as VR and
AR. In a forum discussion prompted by Ching, Sonya J. Smyk refers to a change in ‘atmosphere’
when she learned through an audio tour that Scott ‘was in fact a prisoner’ in his Abbotsford
study, ‘writing frantically to pay off his debts’ (Smyk 2015). Murray Pittock’s report (Pittock 2018)
into new ‘immersive experiences’ draws together the Scottish Heritage Partnership (SHP) and
the associated cultural venues in which VR and AR take place. Places like Culloden and
Bannockburn allow for history to be interpreted through battle experiences, while the Riverside
(Glasgow) and Robert Burns Birthplace Museum (both cottage and museum) can bring people
and cultural artefacts into new environments. Among the key findings of the report was the
preference for blended immersion and, in the case of VR, the preference for the option to handle
objects rather than just observe or passively experience the environment (Pittock 2018, p. 24).
To date, the only significant immersive experience relating to Scottish Literature comes in the
form of the Bard. In January 2021 the University of Glasgow and Edify collaborated to produce
a ‘Burns Beyond Reality’ VR Lecture experience, presented by Pauline Mackay, Lecturer in
Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. Wearing the tech, Mackay guided the users
around a digitally reconstructed Alloway Kirk, before presenting a short film (projected in the
digital setting) with readings from Burns’s ‘Tam O’ Shanter’ (the ghastly tale set in said Kirk one
evening). Along with interactive digital objects and settings, the Edify collaboration has great
potential for vaulting the very rich world of Burns Studies into new media. And there are plenty
more opportunities for other utterances of Scottish Literature in new immersive experiences. As
Limina’s report (2018) describes, Shakespeare features as a storyteller in two immersive experi-
ences: England’s Historic Cities (p. 37 [AR app now named England Originals]) and The Lost Palace
(p. 53 [audio only, with bespoke handheld wooden devices]). It is not difficult to imagine his-
toric Edinburgh in the works and words of Stevenson or Scott, for example.
There are also apps and websites which help promote and preserve literature, though not in
the same immersive framework as ‘Burns Beyond Reality’. And there is irony here, too, for these
apps which seek to make literature more accessible in the digital age are themselves often short-
lived. Take the Bookspotting app (2014) for instance. According to Claire Squires’ research report
the ‘aim of the Bookspotting app project was to explore the “mobilisation” of Scottish books, and
ways to offer readers pathways and signposts to guide them into different genres, authors, loca-
tions and books in a digital age’ (p. 1). In its first week the app was downloaded onto 2,647
Apple and Android devices (p. 2). The geographical focus is certainly an important one where
historic and contemporary Scottish literature is concerned, and the clever play on Irvine Welsh’s
ever-popular Trainspotting would surely have served as an extra incentive for users. That the app
is no longer available might be down to a number of reasons, and does not necessarily speak to
any weakness in the planning or maintenance of the app itself, but does seem indicative of new
digital ventures which seek to consolidate a large amount of disparate data and ideas. This is
where academic research and interdisciplinarity can serve useful ends. In the same spirit, per-
haps, as Bookspotting, is LitLong: Edinburgh (2015). Working on a smaller, and therefore more
manageable scale, LitLong is a web-based, searchable and interactive map of Edinburgh. Each
marker represents a distinct piece of writing about a specific place in Edinburgh. Importantly,
the still-functioning website has explained the fuzziness and limits of its data-mining parameters:
the reliance on digitised books, the changing nature of place-names, the ‘garbled’ or inaccurate
text lifts, and the not-perfect georeferencing are all listed in the ‘about’ section. This lends the
project more integrity than those which claim to be comprehensive, or cutting-edge, or any of
the buzzwords which are often the pitfalls of digital innovation.
It is fitting to end this chapter by way of mentioning social media, which, though an ever-
growing immersive experience in its own right, may wield enough discussion for a separate
study. In Scottish Literature, there are plenty of networks, avatars, and even bots which offer a
continuum in new media for the popular figures of the canon. In 2014 Francesca Baker explored
the issue of whether social media was damaging literature, reminding us that literature ‘itself is
media, a tool for messaging, communication, and art, and more often than not is social, reliant
upon an interaction with at least one other human being’ (Baker 2014). This remains true, and
the many attempts to serialise fiction on Twitter, or to render tweet-sized stories in print, will no
doubt inform future discussions of literature in the digital age. As far as Scottish Literature is
concerned, the debates and the dividing lines will be drawn and redrawn, with pencil, pen, and
digital stylus. As with the officialisation of the literature of any nation, these lines may as well
be drawn on sand. Add to this the shifting ground of the digital world and the unimagined new
media that will wash up during the rest of the twenty-first century, and we return again to the
text: the words themselves, and what they mean to us.
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PART III
Writers
30
Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
Nicola Royan
School of English, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, UK
Introduction
Our understanding of Older Scots poetry is shaped by a triad of writers, Robert Henryson,
William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, all active in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.
Without question, they are exceptional poets, and their work draws modern readers into d ifferent
worlds, some contemporary with these poets, such as Dunbar’s descriptions of the court of James
IV, some far removed from the poets’ lived experience, such as the adventures of Orpheus and
Aeneas, retold by Henryson and Douglas. A generation younger than Henryson, Dunbar and
Douglas both knew their predecessor’s work, as well as each other’s. All three wrote in Older
Scots, and were familiar with Scottish and English poetic traditions alike, both those of rhymed
verse associated with Chaucer and more southern English production and the alliterative verse
more commonly associated with the North of England. They also drew models, sources, and
inspiration from mainland Europe, certainly in Latin, almost equally as certainly in French
(Calin 2014), most probably in German (Lyall 2002), and perhaps in Italian (Jack 1972,
pp. 7–14, 22–28). Their poetry is very different, however, even as they address similar concerns
and use similar techniques, and it is not hard to differentiate the work of one from another. There
are many ways to characterise these differences, but in this chapter I will use only three: their
choice of styles, their representation of morality and their use of poetic and narrative voice.
Although there is much to say on the work of each poet under each heading, discussion will focus
on one of the three in each section: Dunbar in style, Douglas in morality and Henryson in narra-
tive voice. First, however, I will locate these poets in their contexts.

Context
Robert Henryson is the oldest of three, who was born probably sometime around 1430. Much of
our knowledge of his biography is inference from very scant record, discussed by Fox (1981,
pp. xiii–xxii). Maister Robert Henryson is associated with Dunfermline, which seems regularly
to have employed notaries public as school masters. He is likely to be the Maister Robert
Henryson in the records of the University of Glasgow in 1462: incorporated rather than matricu-
lated, indicating that his degrees – in law and in arts – were gained elsewhere, and with the
designation venerabilis, suggesting maturity. No student with that name appears in the records
of the University of St Andrews, so Henryson must have taken his degrees elsewhere, but it is
impossible to know where. His major works are narrative: The Moral Fabillis, The Testament of
Cresseid, and Orpheus and Eurydice. The shorter works include meditations on age and death, satire
and parody, and some devotional pieces: these are not studied as much but present interesting
questions. Dunfermline seems regularly to have employed notaries public as schoolmasters, so
Henryson may well have had both roles. Notaries public are common figures in Older Scots
literature, as scribes as well as writers, and it is entirely likely that Henryson belongs in that
grouping. Because of Henryson’s epitaph in Dunbar’s ‘I that in heill wes and glaidnes’
(Bawcutt 1998, p. B21), we can infer that his work was known outwith Dunfermline in his
lifetime and that he died before 1505, the putative date assigned to Dunbar’s poem. Of the three,
Henryson is the only one not to have a recorded place at court; in consequence, perhaps, his view
of power is less sanguine than that of the other two.
William Dunbar the poet is identified with a William Dunbar who appears in the records of
St Andrews University, becoming ‘master’ in 1480. Working back from that date, he was prob-
ably born around 1460. His name – and the insults that Kennedy throws at him – suggests that
his family came from Lothian, but there is no surviving evidence to provide any more detail
(Bawcutt 1992, pp. 5–8). He can be found in the court records between 1500 and 1513, as a
pensioner of the king. His first pension, £10 per annum, was small, but in 1510 it was increased
to the substantial £80 per annum, suggesting that his value to the king and the court was
equally significant (Bawcutt 1998, vol 1, pp. 2–3). In addition to these records, Dunbar can also
be found celebrating mass, as a priest, and acting as a legal advocate, and although there is no
surviving evidence that he studied outwith Scotland, it is certainly possible. His work is primar-
ily and unusually lyric: shorter verse, sometimes occasional, on a wide range of topics, from
expressions of religious devotion, to moral reflections, to requests for financial support, to
accounts of court life. He also wrote longer dream visions, notably the ‘Ryght as the stern of day
begouth to schyne’ (The Goldyn Targe, B59) and (‘Quhen Merche wes with variand windis past’,
B52), but his longest work is ‘Apon the Midsummer Ewin’ (The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen
and the Wedo, B3), an account – allegedly – of what women talk about when men are not present.
Dunbar’s final appearance in the court records is in May 1513, five months before Flodden. What
happened to Dunbar after this point is unknown, but his particular courtly milieu no longer
existed after James IV’s death.
Since he was the third son of the 5th Earl of Angus, we know more about Gavin Douglas
than the other poets (Bawcutt 1976, pp. 1–46). He was born c. 1470, probably in the family
seat at Tantallon Castle. He graduated from St Andrews University in. It seems like that he
spent some time studying in Paris: the circumstantial evidence includes his appearance as a
figure in a dialogue by the scholar John Mair, and he demonstrates his knowledge of current
humanist scholarship in his notes and prologues to the Eneados. Helped by this family
Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas 381
connections, Douglas forged a career in the church, appointed as provost of St Giles Cathedral
in Edinburgh by 1503. Douglas dates the completion of his major work, the Eneados, to 22 July
1513 (Bawcutt with Cunningham 2021–2022, vol 3, pp. 1–5); his minor work, The Palice of
Honoure, is dated just over a decade earlier, c. 1501. After completing the Eneados, and, of
course, after Flodden, Douglas moved his attention from poetry. His nephew, Archibald 6th
Earl of Angus, married the queen dowager, Margaret Tudor, and Douglas’s energies were turned
towards political service. Such service saw him rewarded, after some struggles, with the bish-
opric of Dunkeld; it also saw him exiled in England while on a diplomatic mission in 1519. He
died in London, probably of plague in London in 1522, still in exile.
Style
Of the three, William Dunbar is the most obvious experimenter with style: he might be described
as a poet who keeps his goods in his shop window. Among his best-known works are those at the
stylistics extremes: the high register of his dream vision ‘Quhen Merche wes with variand winds
past’ (Bawcutt 1998, B52) is a startling contrast to the series of insults sprayed out in the Flyting
(Bawcutt 1998, p. B65). Register rests in a variety of factors (Smith 2012, pp. 51–67). The most
obvious is the lexical choice. High style pieces tend to have a greater prevalence of words derived
from French and Latin, which in turn tend to be polysyllabic. They also tend towards more
ornate syntax, marked by extensive subordination. Finally, complex stanza forms are also associ-
ated with high registers. All these are features of ‘Quhen Merch was’, as can be seen from the
opening stanzas:
Quhen Merche wes with variand windis past,

And Appryll had with hir siluer schouris
Tane leif at Nature with ane orient blast,
And lust May, that mvddir is of flouris,
Had maid the birdis to begyn thair houris
Amang the tendir odouris reid and quhyt,
Quhois armony to heir it wes delyt –
In bed at morrow sleiping as I lay,

Me thocht Aurora with hir cristall ene
In at the window lukit by the day
And halsit me with visage paill and grene,
On quhois hand a lark sang fro the splene:
‘Awalk, luvaris, out of Your slomering,
Se how the lusty morrow dois vp spring!’
Me thocht fresche May befoir my bed vpstude,

In weid depaynt of mony diuers hew,
Sobir, benyng and full of mansuetude,
In brycht atteir of flouris forgit new,
Hevinly of color, quhyt, reid, broun and blew,
Balmit in dew and gilt with Phebus bemys,
Quhill all the hous iluminyit of her lemys.
(B52, pp. 1–21)
The stanza is rhyme royal, a seven-line stanza used by Chaucer, and appropriate to love poetry, a
heading under which this poem might fall. It has three end-rhymes in a stanza, and ends with a
couplet, so each stanza tends to feel complete in itself, even if the syntax of the poem runs over.
Here the first sentence runs over two stanzas: ‘Quhen’ (l.1) opens a subordinate clause, for which
the main verb is ‘me thocht’ (l.9). Although it is a separate sentence, the third stanza repeats the
structure of stanza 2, with the same main verb, ‘Me thocht’ (l.15), and all three together set up
the situation. The first two stanzas also have relative clauses with additional detail (‘Quhois
armony’ (l.7), ‘quhois hand’ (l.12)): the form of the relative pronoun – ‘quhois’, rather than
‘that’ – also suggests a formal register. Words such as ‘benyng’ (benign: derived from French) and
‘mansuetude’ (gentleness: derived from Latin through French) also suggest a high style.
Altogether the opening to the poem indicates the lofty concerns of the content, a dream vision
celebrating James IV’s marriage to Margaret Tudor. Similar patterns can be seen in other poems
with lofty themes, most famously ‘Ryght as the stern of day begouth to schyne’ (The Goldyn
Targe, B59) and also ‘Gladeth, thoue queyne of Scottis regioun’ (B15), and ‘Illuster Lodovick, of
France most cristin king’ (B23).
At the opposite point of the rhetorical scale, ‘low’ style or register, words tend to be shorter
and have Germanic roots, syntax tends to be simpler, references are more homely and verse forms
tend to look simpler. The best-known example of Dunbar’s low style is of course The Flyting of
Dumbar and Kennedie (B65). A typical stanza runs like this:
Nyse nagus nipcaik with thy schulderis narrow,

Thow lukis lowsy, loun of lounis aw,
Hard hurcheon hirpland, hippit as ane harrow,
Thy rigbane rattillis and thy ribbis on raw,
Thy hanchis hirklis with hukebanis harth and haw
Thy laithly lymis are lene as ony treis.
Obey, theif baird, or I sall brek thy gaw.
Fowll carrybald, cry mercy on thy kneis.
(B65, pp. 177–84)
This stanza runs together a list of insults, in two sentences in one stanza. The list is built up with
asyndeton, joining together insults of Germanic etymology through rhyme and alliteration. The
insults are common words, one or two syllables, focusing on physical ugliness. Of course, none
of these features should be taken to imply that the poem’s construction is unsophisticated: in
fact, the stanza is tightly rhymed, heavily alliterated to give force to the insults, and highly
imaginative in its metaphorical reach. Effective low style does not suggest a lack of sophistica-
tion, but it addresses different rhetorical purposes from high-style material, here denigration
rather than celebration. A stark difference in purpose but similarity in technique can be seen in
‘Hale sterne superne’ (B16), where praise of the Virgin is also cumulative within a very tight
metrical framework (Gray 2001). In both of these poems, sound, both rhyme and alliteration, is
key to the power of the words, linking together the descriptions, and enhancing praise or con-
demnation as appropriate.
Another distinctive metrical feature of Dunbar’s work is found in ‘Apon the Midsummer
Ewin, mirriest of nichtis’ (B3, The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Women and the Wedo). There Dunbar uses
an alliterative long line, not found in any other surviving Older Scots verse, in contrast to the
alliterative rhymed stanza used satirically by Douglas and Henryson. In Dunbar’s hands the long
line is a striking form, for the alliterative patterns, often extending over two or three lines, force
links and contrasts between what the women say and what they do. Here is an extract from the
widow’s teaching to her companions.
I schaw yow, sister, in schrift, I wes a schrew euer,

Bot I was schene in my schrowd and schew me innocent;
And thought I dour wes and dane, dispitois and bald,
I wes dissymblit suttelly in a sanctis liknes.
I semyt sober and sueit and sempill without fraud,
Bot I couth sexty dissaif that suttilar wer haldin.
(ll.251–6)
In this quotation, there is a pattern across the first four lines – l.251 and l.253 – reveal the widow
as she is, whereas in l.252 and l.254, she describes her pretence at being demure. The alliterative
patterns also cross the passage: it begins with /ʃ /, moves to /d/ and then to /s/. The closeness of
/ʃ/ and /s/ serve to underline the difference between the pretended sweetness and the underlying
shrewishness, while the /d/ links her deceit to her key characteristics (‘dour’, ‘dane’), and rein-
forces that with ‘dissaif’ two lines later. The repetition of forms of ‘suttel’ champions both the
Wedo and women in general, for not only is the Wedo herself clever, but she is cleverer than the
men held to be above average (l.256). By such careful handling of sound patterns, Dunbar dem-
onstrates his mastery of style and its function in supporting meaning.
Despite the breadth of his stylistic range, much of Dunbar’s poetry is not quite so pyrotech-
nic as The Flyting or The Targe or as egregious as The Tretis. A large proportion of his verse is
shorter lyrics, often in a four or five-line stanza, where a plainer style can camouflage the careful
construction. One of the better-known describes what sounds like a crashing migraine. ‘My
heid did yak yester nicht’ (B35) is only three stanzas of five lines, but he describes two kinds of
headache pain (‘Perseing my brow as ony ganyie’ (l.4)and ‘dullit in dulnes and distres’ [l.10])
with impressive efficiency. In describing his extenuation for not having a poem for the king
(‘schir’ [l.6]), he produces a poem to explain the lack of a poem. The language here is not
ornate – there is no space – but the very tight form and the careful use of alliteration show off
its cleverness.
Henryson’s style is less conspicuous than Dunbar’s more extravagant works. His most
common form is rhyme royal; other forms are used for his shorter poems and embedded in
both Orpheus and The Testament. In Henryson’s use, stanzas are commonly end-stopped, so
that each stanza forms a unit of sense, but within them, there are complex sound patterns
to draw out particular concerns. For instance, like Dunbar, Henryson uses alliteration to
make implicit links. As Dunbar does with Wedo, discussed above, so Henryson does with
Cresseid:
O fair Creisseid, the flour and A per se

Of Troy and Grece, how was thow fortunait
To change in filth all thy feminitie,
And be with fleschelie lust sa maculait,
And go amang the Greikis air and lait,
Sa giglotlike takand thy foull pleasance!
I haue pietie thow suld fall sic mischance!
(Fox 1981, Testament, ll.78–84)
The alliteration here links positive and negative aspects of Cresseid: her ‘feminitie’ is associated
with ‘flour’ and ‘fair’ but more destructively with ‘filth’, ‘fleschelie’ and ‘foul’. In such company,
‘fortunait’ seems less mischance and more inevitable, because of her fairness and her femininity.
Henryson’s use of alliteration here underlines the tensions of the poem, around misogyny, the
role of the narrator, and Cresseid’s agency, just as Dunbar’s poem does not necessarily resolve our
opinion of the Wedo.
Within his narratives, Henryson embeds other genres, including dream vision and complaint.
Both Orpheus and Cresseid lament their conditions in complaints marked out by form as well as
style. Orpheus laments Eurydice in 10-line stanzas, with a refrain of ‘Quhar art thow gane, my
luf Erudices?’ (Fox 1981, Orpheus, ll.134–183). Cresseid laments the loss of worldly glory, in
nine-line stanzas, marked out as ‘The Complaint of Cresseid’ (Fox 1981, Testament, ll.407–69).
Her lament is more general in that she presents her situation as a warning to ‘ladyis fair or Troy
and Grece’ (Fox 1981, Testament, ll.452), whereas Orpheus is entirely concerned with his own
grief, but both of these complaints evoke empathy. Other contexts bring different reactions. For
instance, the cock in The Cock and the Jasp addresses the gem he has found in the same elegant
terms used by Cresseid and Orpheus:
Quhar suld thow make thy habitatioun?

Quhar suld thow duell, bot in a royall tour?
Quhar suld thow sit, bot on ane kingis croun
Exalt in worschip and in grit honour?
Rise, gentill Iasp, of all stanis the flour,
Out of this fen, and pas quhar thow suld be;
Thow ganis not for me, nor I for the.
(Fox 1981, Fabillis, ll.106–112)
There are rhetorical questions, Latin words (‘habitatioun’, ‘honour’), and the attribution of nobil-
ity to the stone. However, the allocation of such a speech to a cockerel is more equivocal: on the
one hand, he seems to express a nice humility in the face of the stone’s beauty and to recognise
his place in the world, and on the other, that this kind of speech should be given to a bird on a
dung hill seems mildly ridiculous. Here lies Henryson’s skill, to use style to unsettle as much as
to confirm readerly expectation: in the case of this fable, any sympathy for the cockerel here is
rudely overturned in the moralitas. Similiarly, in The Cock and the Fox, the loss of the cockerel is
dismantled by the response of his wives (ll.418–455): initially Pertok offers a formal lament
(ll.495–508) but this is challenged by Sprutok (ll.509–522) and Pertok admits her fraudulent
grief (ll.524–529). Henryson uses style to change point of view and perception throughout his
poetry, demanding readerly attention to all the detail.
Douglas’s style, across both his works, compares to both Henryson and Dunbar. In his transla-
tion of the Aeneid, Douglas describes himself as tied to Virgil’s poem as if to a tree: ‘Quha is
atttachit ontill a staik, we se, / May go na ferthir bot wreil about that tre’ (Bawcutt with
Cunningham 2021–2022, Prologue 1, ll.297–8). He works hard to represent the Latin text
fairly and clearly in five-stress couplets, an Older Scots form honed by Hary (McDiarmid 1968–
1969). In the prologues and in The Palice he has greater stylistic freedom. There are a variety of
metrical forms in the prologues, including rhyme royal, rhymed stanzas of a variety of lengths,
as well as the rhymed alliterative stanza. Douglas chooses his stanza form in accordance with the
subject matter of the subsequent book, whether rhyme royal to discuss love before Book 4, which
deals with Dido, or the alliterative stanza to problematise dream vision before Book 8, which
presents political prophecy and divine visitation. These serve to guide the reader to understand
Douglas’s approach to Virgil’s text and the very different world-view of first century Rome.
The Palice of Honoure is more freely exuberant in some aspects of style and structure. Douglas
composes the poem in three tightly controlled and quite rare stanza forms. Within those, he
employs a rich and ornate style, instantly reminiscent of Dunbar’s The Goldyn Targe (Lyall 2001,
p. 69–84). The Palice is constructed around set piece description. These are notable for their lists,
such as the court followers for Calliope:
Thair was the greit Latine Virgilius

The famous Father Poeit, Ouidius,
Dictes, Dares and eik the trew Lucane,
Thair was Plautus, Poggius and Persius,
Thair was Terence, Donate and Seruius,
Francis Petrache, Flaccus Valeriane,
Thair was Esope, Cato and Allane,
Thair was Gaulteir and Boetius,
Thair was also the greit Quintiliane.
Thair was the Satir Poet, Iuuenall,

Thair was the mixt and subtell Martiall.
Of Thebes Brute their was the Poet Stace,
Thair was Faustus and Laurence of the vale,
Pomponius, quhais fame of lait, sans faill,
Is blawin wide throw euerie Realm and place.
Thair was the Morall, wise Poet, Horace,
With mony vther Clerk of greit auaill,
Their was Brunell, Claudius and Bocchas.
(Bawcutt, 2003, p. E, ll.898–915)
Such pouring out of detail is often called ‘fouth’ (Bawcutt 2003, p. ll.1401), and it adds to the tex-
tual richness. It is the most distinctive stylistic feature of The Palice, even to the point of being over-
whelming. Yet the mass of detail is controlled within tightly wrought stanzas. The tension between
style and form repeats at structural level, where the structure, full of diversions and detail, militates
against the thematic desire for poetry to be clear of purpose and a moral arbiter. Nevertheless, it
remains a constant in the poem that words matter, that poetry and literature have a duty to support
and characterise goodness, whether in kings or courtiers, and that discipline and skill are learned.
Such an unabashed view of the value of poetry is key to Douglas’s consistent moral vision.
Morality
All of these poets address moral questions in their poetry, and each does it in a different way.
Dunbar does it effectively but conventionally: in most cases where he engages with such ques-
tions as the transitory nature of the world or the inherent problems of court life, his conclusion
is familiar. For instance, in ‘Fredome, honour and nobilness’ (B13), the moral lesson is empha-
sised by the refrain ‘for caus of covetyce’. The poem is not exceptional for its content, but for its
wit and expression. In 11 quatrains, with a repeated rhyme on ‘covetyce’ in each one, Dunbar
goes through all the ranks subject to covetice, the harm it does to them, and the harm that they
do to others. The poem concludes with two stanzas on the earthly misjudgement of those ‘that
dois deidis of petie’ (l.33) and ‘quha can revie vthir menis rowmis’ (l.37), and then a final one
urging ‘man’ to ‘pleis thy makar’ (l.41). This is very conventional advice, but it is exceptionally
well expressed. The gift of effective rhetoric is not to be despised.
Even Dunbar’s recommendation to James IV in ‘Quhen Merche wes’ that he be faithful to his
queen is conventional enough. What is less familiar perhaps is the manner of its expression,
directly to James and unambiguous within the frame of the dream vision. His most open conclu-
sions are those to The Tretise and The Goldyn Targe. In the first the conclusion, ‘Quhilk wald ye
waill to yourt wif, gif ye suld wed one?’ (l.530), puts the question to the audience, suggesting
some kind of public performance. In the second, the poem is so concerned with its own beauty
that its significance is unclear. Of course there are among Dunbar’s poems some that express
moral positions unacceptable today: we condemn the casual racism of ‘Lang heff I maed of ladyes
quhytt’ (B28) and the dark treatment of sexual morals in ‘This hinder nycht in Dunfermling’
(B76). Such attitudes are more obvious in Dunbar’s work than in that of the other two, largely
because of the range of topics he discusses. Both Henryson and Douglas have been accused of
misogyny, particularly in their commentaries on Dido and Cresseid (Desmond, 1994,176-94;
Riddy, 1997). As with Dunbar, such views would be common to their age, and yet their repre-
sentation of women can cause even a modern reader to think again about agency and
self-determination.
Douglas’s morality may be described as metatextual. He is above all concerned about the value
of poetry and writing to those who read it, and the poet’s duty in acting for the good. For instance,
in The Palice, poetry and rhetoric are seen to have a role in the presentation and preservation of
Honour: Cicero beats back the rebel Catiline with a book, presumably of his speeches.
(Bawcutt 2003, p. l.1772) The Scottish kings mentioned in Douglas’s list all have their reputa-
tions preserved by narratives, and representing the king well is seen as a reciprocal duty where the
sovereign is good (Bawcutt 2003, pp. ll.2026–2028). Yet in Book 1 of the poem, Douglas’s nar-
rator responds to Venus firstly by pointing out her faults, and his praise of her is recompense for
the offence caused by his first piece. Poets, here figured in the narrator, need to learn appropriate
writing as defined by other powers – Venus, Calliope as a determiner of good writing, Honour as
a provider of material fit for the record. Ironically, given the poem’s ebullient structure, the poet
needs to learn discipline. The Palice dreamer does not complete his education in the poem, because
his courage to deal with the fate of the wicked fails him. Those condemned are:
Quhilks be wilfull manifest Arrogance,

Inuyous pride, pretendit Ignorance,
Foull dowbilnes and dissait vnamendit,
Enforcis thame their selfis to auance
Be sle falsheid, but lawtie or constance,
With subtelnes and slichtis now fommendit
Betraisand folk that neuer to thame offendit,
And vpheis thame self throw fraudefull lipps,
Thocht God cause of their eirdlie gloir eclipps.
And nobillis cummin of honorabill Ancestry

Thair virtuous Nobilitie settis nocht by,
For dishonest vnlefull wardlie wauis,

And throw corrupit couetous Inuy.
Bot he that can be dowbill, nane is set by.
Dissait is Wisdome; Lawtie, Honour away is.
(Bawcutt 2003, pp. E, ll.2035–2049)
None of these is a crime of strength or physical violence, but rather crimes of the mind, deceit,
misrepresentation and betrayal. Particularly shamed are those of ‘honorabill Ancestry’ who turn
aside from their expected nobility of character. However, because of his ‘cowardice’, perhaps the
unwillingness to face his own failings, the Palice dreamer trips on his way to see, and conse-
quently returns to his waking garden without fully appreciating their crimes or their punish-
ments. As a result, his education is not complete, and the close of the poem depicts him lamenting
this failure. However, he still has Venus’ commission, of a book to translate, and this too will
offer an education in the true meaning of nobility and demonstrate the value of poetry.
In the Eneados, Douglas is deeply concerned with fair representation of Virgil’s work, where
accurate translation is not simply an intellectual exercise, but one of moral duty. This is the
same is true of Douglas’s expressed anxieties towards translating the Aeneid, since at precisely
the same point in Prologue 1 where Douglas asserts his intention to translate accurately, he
reveals the difficulties, if not the impossibility of so doing (Bawcutt with Cunningham 2021–2022,
Prologue 1, pp. ll.347–404). Nevertheless, the benefits of a reliable translation to enable
Douglas’s contemporaries to engage with the problems facing Aeneas are significant in his view.
In seeing the Aeneid as educative, Douglas is participating in a wider tradition. Virgilian
reception studies point to the poem’s use in educating the governing classes of Europe for centu-
ries (see, for instance, Kallendorf 2007, pp. 5–13). Douglas’s insistence on refurbishing Virgil’s
view of Aeneas (in contrast to that found in Ovid) suggests a particular focus on the lessons to be
learned from the person of Aeneas. In Prologue 1, Douglas dedicates the translation to Henry,
Lord Sinclair; by the closing paratexts, Douglas talks about the value of his translation to the
Scottish nation, in particular schoolmasters in need of a crib. Thus his translation offers educa-
tion in learning about commitment to one’s (divinely-set) goals, and about best behaviour in
difficult circumstances.
Neither The Palice nor the Eneados suggest that moral education can be easily completed. The
Palice dreamer directly articulates his frustration with his failure at the end of the poem;
the Aeneid famously ends abruptly with Aeneas slaughtering his rival Turnus, a violence that the
additional Book 13 does not really mitigate. At no point, however, does Douglas – through his
narrators – suggest that education is impossible or too hard to be attempted: if anything, the
message is the opposite, that there should be continuous intellectual striving whether in litera-
ture, or in Douglas’s own case, in literature as a preparation for politics.
In contrast, and counter-intuitively, Henryson’s poetry offers much less moral certainty.
While his long poems all contain moral interpretations of sorts, more often than not, the
moralitates seem to run against the grain of the preceding story. Such is the case with The Cock and
the Jasp, discussed earlier, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, told with tenderness and
sympathy, is turned into a hard moral of the perils of worldly desire. At other points, moral
improvement and educability is thrown into doubt, most obviously by the figure of Aesop in The
Lion and the Mouse. Indeed it has been argued that the very structure of the Moral Fabillis, as they
are found in Bassadyne’s 1571 print, emphasises humanity’s moral frailty and inevitable corrup-
tion (Lyall 2006). That is of course a moral lesson in itself, but its pessimism seems at odds with
the careful detail and sympathy of the narratives. In consequence, Henryson’s work can seem
rebarbative. Part of the difficulty is that it is much harder to contextualise Henryson’s narrators,
whereas Douglas’s enthusiasms and Dunbar’s carefully crafted conventions can be more easily
located in an imagined world of court and scholarship. The question of narrator presentation,
then, is the subject of the last section.
Narrator
Our challenges in confidently reading this poetry are compounded by the narrative voices and
how we should read them. On the one hand, post-Romantic readings of lyric quite often identify
the poetic directly with the author; on the other, recent criticism foregrounds the alignment of
mediaeval poetry with performance, and the ways in which it might be articulated through the
physical presence of the reader – who might also be the author (Spearing 2005, pp. 1–36). This
perspective, considering the performativity of poetry, is particularly powerful when reading
Dunbar (King 2020, pp. 89–101). Dunbar’s lyrics and indeed Dunbar himself are rooted in a
known court culture, where other figures are given roles in the poetry, and where the original
audience is presented as complicit in the construction of the work. This is obviously true of The
Flyting and The Tretis. It is also true of the other courtier poems, for without a real James Doig,
or John Damian, Dunbar’s poems of insult would lose some of their savour, and where a little bit
of apparently biographical detail allows the reader to create a scenario. However, it is also true
that Dunbar’s voice is mercurial: it moves from elder adviser, to rival, to pensioner, to devout
worshipper, and in each case we get enough detail to locate the voice in the role it is playing
(Bawcutt 1992, pp. ll.19–ll.38). This can be problematic, for although the evidence of the poems
might suggest a particular relationship with Doig or Damian, or even Kennedy, inferring those
conclusively may be inaccurate. Indeed, we may occasionally misplace the tone of a poem
(MacDonald 1994, pp. 274–279). Recognising Dunbar as a role-playing poet in a context which
expected performance and entertainment enables an appreciation of his craftsmanship without
demanding knowledge of his soul.
Of the three, Douglas and his narrator seem most consistently and comfortably associated. The
biographical details offered in the poems lines up with what we know of Douglas’ life: the Palice
narrator declares himself to be a priest, the dedicatee of the Eneados, Henry Lord Sinclair was
indeed a contemporary of Douglas. The character of Douglas’s letters, moreover, seems entirely in
keeping with the projection in the poems (Bawcutt with Cunningham 2021-2022, v. 1, p. 1).
There are also occasionally realist details in Douglas’s description of his surroundings, notably in
Eneados Prologue 7 (ll.126–ll.162), where the battle between a warm bed and the call of the unfin-
ished work seems all too familiar. Just as importantly, we can locate the intellectual concerns of
the poems in the context of northern humanism, noting the Virgil edition that Douglas used, the
commentators to whom he makes reference, and the acute philosophical and theological difficul-
ties that Virgil’s poem posed to a Christian world. There is a distinct attraction in inferring more
personal details: the English printer William Copland uses a marginal note to draw a direct link
between Venus’ commission in The Palice with the Eneados (Bawcutt 2003, p. L ll.1756). Douglas’s
narratorial voice does not surprise or confuse the reader, by acting out of the character set up at the
beginnings of the poems. As a result, it survives the most extraordinary events in three dream
narratives – Prologues 8 and 13 of the Eneados as well as The Palice. In these events, the narrator is
often comic, pusillanimous and stupid: a position acceptable in a figure exploring ideas, but
perhaps less so as a directly autobiographical depiction of a senior churchman. Stability and

realism do not necessarily equate to unmediated self-representation.
Henryson’s narrative voices offer a completely different set of challenges, both externally and
internally. Of these poets, we know least about Henryson from contemporary sources and records,
and it is harder to define his milieu in Dunfermline. Henryson does not mention patrons by
name, only ‘my maisteris’ (Fox 1981, Fabillis, p. l.29). Internal detail is also absent: Henryson’s
narrators are commonly solitary, who provide very little individualising detail. Henryson’s nar-
rators are created by their texts and it becomes very tempting to equate them with Henryson
himself. Yet, ‘Robene and Makyne’ demonstrates that Henryson was capable of dramatic writ-
ing. This poem, a subversion of standard seduction poems where Makyne takes the lead, is con-
ducted almost entirely in dialogue between the two speakers, a shepherd and a young woman
intent on his affections. Its comic nature distinguishes it from Henryson’s other work, but it
highlights Henryson’s practice of giving his characters voices, throughout the Fables, in the
Testament and in Orpheus.
The relationships of the narrator to these voices are central to critical readings of these poems.
Their description is not straightforward. In the Prologue to the Fabillis, the narrator draws atten-
tion to the fictiveness of the stories that follow, justifying them in terms of the moral lessons that
can be drawn. However, those lessons, provided in the moralitates, are often conditional (the
auxiliaries ‘may’ and ‘micht’ appear regularly) and, as in The Cock and Jasp, are sometimes sur-
prising, so the narrator provides no certain interpretation. The complexity increases, however,
when characters from a fable appear in the moralitas, as in The Scheip and the Doig, so that the
narrator overhears them in the world of interpretation, or when the narrator aligns with the
villain, as in The Preiching of the Swallow, where human intervention directly harms the birds. In
the central fable of the collection, The Lion and the Mouse, the levels of narration increase, for the
fable is told by Aesop, whom the narrator encounters in a dream. As a result, boundaries between
the fictive and the non-fictive are blurred and compromised, and the reader is provided with no
certain interpretation. Instead, the moral work is returned to the reader – akin to the readerly
work undertaken by Douglas’s narrator for the Eneados.
The narrator of The Testament of Cresseid is also a reader: he draws attention to this with his
discussion of Chaucer and with his reference to ‘ane vther quair’ (Fox 1981, Testament, p. l.61).
Cresseid is mediated through that reading, and some of the critical controversy regarding the
poem might be characterised as questioning whether the narrator reads his texts correctly. The
concluding verse, for instance, with its bleak attribution of blame to the frailities of womanhood,
responds to earlier narratorial interventions, and positions the poem as misogynist. At the same
time, however, the self-description of the narrator, as older, as praying for his rejuvenation in
love, offers parallels with the description of Cresseid: the conclusion can thus look like a wilful
refusal by the narrator to reflect on his own follies. If we read the narrator as a projection of
Henryson, we have to choose between a figure blind to his own weakness or one entirely comfort-
able with misogyny – neither satisfying critical positions. If, on the other hand, we read the
narrator as a dramatised figure, distinct from Henryson, we are in danger of attributing modern
sensibilities and bowdlerising the poem, rather than reading it carefully. In this, Henryson can
be compared to Chaucer, whose work produces similar critical debates around his representation
of Criseyde; with Chaucer, though, some of the challenges arise from knowing too much about
the poet, notably his conviction for raptus, rather than too little. Nevertheless, it is precisely
frustrations around the narratorial ambiguities of The Testament that make it great, because they
demand work from the reader to resolve, even temporarily. They may be amplified by our lack of
knowledge of Henryson’s context, but fundamentally, they are woven deep in the fabric of the
poems to demand careful reading and engagement.
Afterlives
Henryson’s early reputation indicates a deep respect for his work. Dunbar and Douglas pay their
respects to Henryson, whether through naming him in a poem, or naming him in the commen-
tary to a poem. Douglas pays his respects to Dunbar in The Palice. David Lyndsay refers to them
all in The Testament of the Papyngo: ‘Dunbar, quhilk langage had at large’, ‘Henderson . . . thocht
[he] be ded, [his] libels bene levand’ and ‘Gawane Douglas . . . [who] had abufe vulgare Poetis
prerogatyue’. (Hamer 1931, pp. 56–57, l17, l.19–l.20, l.27–l.29). Lyndsay’s description places
Douglas at the head of a rich Scottish tradition: this may have been personal taste, or personal
knowledge, but it shows a deep familiarity with a wide variety of poetry.
Lyndsay was not alone in his respect for these writers. Their work continued to circulate
throughout the sixteenth century. Dunbar was the first Older Scots poet to have his work printed
while he was alive, for surviving Chepman and Myllar prints include ‘The Ballade of Lord
Bernard Stewart’, ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy’, and ‘The Tua Mariit Wemen and the
Wedo’, among others (https://digital.nls.uk/firstscottishbooks/items.html). Curiously, after
Chepman and Myllar, Dunbar’s works do not seem to have appeared in print until the eighteenth
century, in Allan Ramsay’s anthology, the Evergreen (1724). This does not mean that they did not
circulate, however, for both Richard Maitland (in the Maitland Folio) and George Bannatyne (in
the Bannatyne Manuscript) copied extensive amounts of Dunbar’s work into their eponymous
collections. These manuscripts are the major witnesses to Dunbar’s work, as they are to much
Older Scots verse, and with Bannatyne in particular, it is interesting to see how he attempts to
categorise the poems and to provide them with titles.
Some of Henryson’s work also survives in the Chepman and Myllar prints, including ‘The
Praise of Age’ and ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’. The subsequent textual history of Henryson’s works
is complex, as different parts circulated differently. Like Dunbar’s work, some poems appear in
the major anthologies, the Bannatyne Manuscript and the Maitland Folio; some of the Fables
appear in another major anthology, the Asloan Manuscript, and a small amount in the Makculloch
Manuscript too. The first surviving print of ‘The Testament of Cresseid’ is English, however, as
it is included, attributed to Chaucer, in William Thynne’s edition of Chaucer in 1532. It is not
clear how Thynne’s misattribution arose; ‘The Testament’ differentiates itself quite clearly from
Chaucer, but perhaps Thynne did not read that carefully. In any case, his edition spawned a num-
ber of English editions of the poem, dismissed by Fox as riddled with mistakes. In Scotland,
while the presence of The Testament in the contents list of Asloan as well as some of the Fables
surviving in the manuscript suggests that they might have been printed by Chepman and Myllar,
those prints do not survive. The first two surviving print of the Fables both date from the late
sixteenth century: one by Thomas Bassadyne in 1571, and the other by Robert Lekpreuik for
Henry Charteris in 1569/70. The indefatigable Charteris was also responsible for printing The
Testament in 1593. Of Henryson’s longest works, Orpheus and Eurydice seems to have received least
attention, for although it was printed by Chepman and Myllar and dutifully copied by Asloan,
otherwise the Bannatyne Manuscript is its only other sixteenth-century witness.
Although no early manuscript witnesses of The Palice survive, the Eneados circulated in manu-
script throughout the century: our primary witness is a manuscript written by Matthew Geddes,
Douglas’s secretary, but there are six others from the sixteenth century. Like The Testament, the
Eneados circulated in England, for it is clearly an influence on the earl of Surrey’s translation of
Book 2 and Book 4, and was well enough known to be considered worth printing south of the
border. The first surviving complete prints of both Douglas’s works were made in England, by
the printer William Copland c. 1553. There is a fragment of The Palice of Honoure from a print
by Thomas Davidson, printer to James V during the 1530s, but the rest of the print is lost. There
was another print of The Palice in 1579, by Charteris again, different enough from Copland’s
print to suggest that their source texts came from different transmission traditions, indicative
perhaps of a lively manuscript tradition, now lost.
The reputations of Dunbar and Douglas continued into the eighteenth century. The Eneados
was edited by Thomas Ruddiman and published in 1710, and Douglas was adopted as an avatar
by Allan Ramsay around the same time. Ramsay also printed Dunbar in the Evergreene, published
1724, and thus contributed to his poems’ continued circulation. Two hundred years later,
Douglas and Dunbar were rediscovered by modern poets: Ezra Pound used the Eneados to model
his own translator’s language (Katz 2012, pp. 190–195) and Hugh McDiarmid (1952) edited
Dunbar. Henryson had not perhaps received the same flurries of attention, until some of the
Fables and The Testament (2009) were translated by Seamus Heaney, a poet familiar with hard
questions of injustice and vindication. As I said at the beginning, as a trio, they are used as short-
hand for the tradition of Older Scots poetry: Dunbar’s stylistic range, Douglas’s anxieties about
the purpose and effect of poetry, and Henryson’s difficult voices mean that such a shorthand is
not entirely unfair.
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31
Poets in the Age of James VI
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Division of Literature and Languages, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland
Ane rype ingyne, ane quick and vvalkned vvitt,

VVith sommair reasons, suddenlie applyit,
For euery purpose vsing reasons fitt,
VVith skilfulnes, vvhere learning may be spyit,
VVith pithie vvordis, for to expres zovv by it
His full intention in his proper leid,
The puritie quhair of, vveill hes he tryit:
VVith memorie to keip quhat he dois reid,
VVith skilfulnes and figuris, quhilks proceid
From Rhetorique, vvith euerlasting fame,
VVith vtthers vvoundring, preassing vvith all speid
For to atteine to merite sic a name.
All thir into the perfyte Poete be.
Goddis, grant I may obteine the Laurell trie.
(James 1584)
This description of the ‘perfyte poete’, published by the 18 year-old king, James VI, opens his
own guidebook for poetic composition, ‘Ane Schort Treatise, Conteining Some Reulis and
Cautelis to be Observit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie,’ and paints a picture of what the monarch
saw as the ideal Renaissance writer of verse. They were intelligent, witty, technically skilfull,
able to fully express themselves in their native tongue, well-read, intimately familiar with
Renaissance rhetoric, and possessed the talent to distill their natural abilities into polished verse.
James, having passed his youth under the none-too-tender tutelage of the great humanist George
Buchanan, who ‘gar me speik latin ar I could speik Scotis’, knew what a good poet looked like
(Warner 1893, p. lxxii). As Aysha Pollnitz has demonstrated, the prince’s tutors ensured his

grounding in the classical writers while also recovering the looted library of his mother,
Queen Mary, a collection rich in more ‘courtly’ literature, including Ronsard, du Bellay, and
Dante, among other continental poets, and which was read with attention by their student
(Pollnitz 2015, p. 282).
When he reached his majority, then, the young king was already well-versed in ancient and
modern literature, even by the standards of an erudite age, and it is unsurprising that he followed
the lead of Joachim du Bellay, the French poet and critic, whom he had read as a teenager, in
producing a manifesto for composing poetry in his national (if not, native) language.
The overwhelming presence of the scholar-king in Scotland before 1603 and his equally over-
whelming absence thereafter has defined older accounts of Jacobean poetry which often take it as
given that the ‘perfyte poete’ of James’s poem could only exist within the sheltering confines of
a scholarly, Edinburgh-based court.1 After 1603, we are told, poetry withered on the vine in the
bereft north as the courtly literature of the ‘Castalian Band’ – James’s coterie of like-minded
poet-courtiers – gave way to a barren landscape of anglicising imitation.
Recent work has challenged almost every aspect of this narrative. The project of demolition
began in 2001 when Priscilla Bawcutt brilliantly demonstrated how the modern myth of the
‘Castalian Band’ had originated from careless readings and unjustified preconceptions about
James and his circle (Bawcutt 2001). More recently, Sebastiaan Verweij (2016) has shown that
poetic and manuscript production in Jacobean Scotland was by no means limited to the king and
his circle and, indeed, that few manuscripts survive which can be directly linked back to the
members of the so-called ‘Band’ while far more originate in diverse and decentred loci of reading
and writing. Yet the long shadow of the older narrative remains, exemplified in Sarah
Dunnigan’s 2012 assessment that ‘[w]ith the Union of the Crowns in 1603, and the absorption
of king and court within London, there could be no artistically unified centre within Scotland.
The pressures of Anglicization … were now more or less absolute’ (Dunnigan 2012, p. 50).
Where does this leave the modern scholar and, indeed, the young king? A less well-known
anecdote of the latter offers an alternative way of conceptualising Scottish poetry during his
reign. Six years after the publication of his Essayes, James was in Denmark celebrating his nup-
tials with Princess Anna, the young daughter of Frederik II, king of the multiple monarchy of
Denmark-Norway (ODNB). In March 1590, while waiting for good weather and the voyage
home, he visited the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe at his observatory Uranienborg on the
island of Hven in the Øresund (Gassendi 1654, pp. 122–124). There he was pleased to find a
portrait of his late tutor Buchanan hanging alongside Copernicus, Ptolemy, and other worthies
(the gift of a previous embassy) and enjoyed the conversation of the learned astronomer
(Gassendi 1654, p. 123). In thanks, and at Brahe’s request, he composed a glowing prose ‘privi-
legium’ and two Latin liminal verses for the astronomer’s magnum opus, the posthumously-
published Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata (Brahe 1602). These two Latin poems, signed
‘King James wrote these with his own hand’ (‘Iacobus rex f. manuque propria scripsit’), present
the reader with a different side of the king’s poetic personality from that evident in the Reulis and
Cautelis.
The first 11-line poem speaks the language of Ptolemaic astronomy, with its ‘twice five
spheres of the firmament … turned by the engine of the world’ and its explicit linkage of
astronomy with astrology, but is not lacking in striking turns of phrase, describing the ‘high
vault of Olympus … encrusted with fires and painted everywhere with glittering lamps’ while
‘the planets shine in their deserted, crystalline houses’. ‘Lege, disce’ – ‘choose, learn’ – the reader
is told and ‘you will see a wonder’, the heavens and earth in this book by Tycho. At first, the
Poets in the Age of James VI 395
polished, somewhat rote compliments of the young king, framed in the language of Renaissance
natural philosophy and seasoned with images from the storehouse of his Neo-Latinity, might
seem a world away from his better-known writing in Scots, but this sense of dissociation owes
more to the modern monolingual scholarly tradition than it does to the transnational, multilin-
gual reality of Scottish literature.
This introduction to the poetry of James’s reign takes it lead from the king himself and tres-
passes across national, linguistic, and generic borders to sketch a three-dimensional portrait of
literature in Scotland and amongst Scots at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seven-
teenth centuries. Organised by language, it looks first at the court of the young king and other
writers in Scots before turning west and north to consider their counterparts composing in
Gaelic. It then opens up the underexamined field of Scots writing in English before looking
outwards to the rich but still poorly understood galaxy of Scottish Latin writing, both at home
and abroad.2 Its argument: we must read Jacobean Scotland in all of its languages, both at home
and abroad, to understand the literary Zeitgeist of James’s reign.
Scots
James’s reign saw the last flowering of Middle Scots as a poetic language before its decline over
the seventeenth century and subsequent evolution and revival as the Modern Scots of Ramsay,
Fergusson, and Burns. That flowering was centred on, though not limited to, the court of the
young king and was exemplified by James’s own ‘Schort Treatise Conteining Some Reulis and
Cautelis to be Observit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie’, part of the teenage monarch’s larger
Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie (1584). James’s treatise was inspired by Joachim du
Bellay’s 1549 Défense et illustration de la langue française and forms part of a tradition of manifestos
arguing for the poetic potential of the European vernaculars (Fleming 2002, pp. 125–126). In it
he distinguished Scots from the classical languages, ‘as being come to mannis age and perfec-
tioun’ while Greek and Latin represented only ‘the infancie and chyldheid’ of art and emphasised
its separate status from English as ‘we differ from thame in sindrie reulis of Poesie’ (James VI and
I 1584: sig. K2r-v). The extent to which such a treatise was inevitably political as well as poetical
has been repeatedly emphasised, but James’s Essayes also circulated widely amongst contempo-
rary poets in both countries, offering a new model for vernacular writers (Verweij 2014).
Chief amongst these were the literary clients of James VI at his pre-1603 court, men such as
Alexander Montgomerie, John Stewart of Baldynneis, and William Fowler. Of the three,
Montgomerie was the most diverse and prolific in his output. A laird’s younger son, he spent a
turbulent life as a soldier, conspirator, and poet, sometimes simultaneously in royal favour and
accused of high treason, before his death in 1598 (Lyall 2005). He is best known for the Cherrie
and the Slae, a dream vision in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, which achieved sufficient
international success to be translated into Latin some decades later, but also composed a diverse
oeuvre of sonnets, flytings, psalm translations, epitaphs, and miscellaneous poems which place
him in the first rank of writers in Middle Scots (Montgomerie 2000).3
Montgomerie spent substantial periods of his life in Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany
and this transnational background was shared by other leading poets at James’s court. His near
contemporary, John Stewart of Baldynneis (c.1545–c.1605), a Perthshire laird and the daughter
of one of James V’s former mistresses, had also travelled in France and Italy before settling at court
(Heddle 2008, p. 2). There he made a name for himself as both an original poet and translator,
dedicating a folio manuscript of his work to James with the explicit acknowledgment that,
‘haifing red 3our maiesteis maist prudent precepts in the deuyn art of poesie, I haif assayit my
sempill spreit to becum 3our hienes scholler’ (Stewart 1913, p. 3). The manuscript contained a
translation into Scots of the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso as well as a series of
‘Rapsodies of the Authors 3outhfull braine’ – secular poems in the style of James and
Montgomerie – and a contrasting ‘Schersing out of trew felicitie’ describing his turning to sacred
from secular subjects.
While Stewart remained on his Perthshire estates during the momentous removal of the court
from Edinburgh to London, another of his contempoaries, William Fowler (1560/1–1612), fol-
lowed James south (McDiarmid 1950, p. 62). From an Edinburgh burgess family, Fowler stud-
ied in France, served as English agent in Scotland, and came to the attention of the king through
the patronage of Francis Stewart, 1st Earl of Bothwell. He was one of the Scottish representatives
who concluded the marriage of James to Anne of Denmark and travelled in that country and
Italy during the 1590s before taking up a post as secretary to the new queen and settling in
London (ODNB). As well as translating Machiavelli’s Prince and the Trionfi of Petrarch, Fowler
wrote a lengthy sonnet sequence, The Tarantula of Love, and a quantity of miscellaneous verse
(Fowler 1914–1940, ed. H. W. Meikle). His work as a whole represents the most substantial
engagement with Italian literature by a poet writing in Scots (Jack 1970).
Writing poetry in Scots was limited neither to men nor to the court. One figure on the edge
of court culture who stands out is Marie Maitland (d. 1596), compiler of the Maitland Quarto
Manuscript and daughter of the poet-courtier Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (Martin 2015).
Her manuscript miscellany, dated 1586, is important for the Jacobean poems it collects but also
for her own contributions, including the first lesbian amatory poem known in Scotland
(Farnsworth 1996). Like many female writers from this period, study of her work has been com-
plicated by her anonymity and by the place of her writing within a multi-authored miscellany
(Newlyn 2004). An equally outspoken female poet in Scots during this period is Elizabeth
Melville (fl. 1599–1631). Known in her lifetime for Ane Godlie Dreame (1603), a dream vision in
the tradition of Montgomerie’s Cherrie and the Slae and the first book of poetry by a woman to be
published in Scotland, she was also the author of a substantial corpus of manuscript religious
verse which, since its redicovery in 2002, has positioned her as one of the leading poets of the
Presbyterian faction during the first decades of the seventeenth century (see Reid-
Baxter 2004, 2017; Ross 2019).
While comparatively well-studied and benefitting from renewed interest in the nineteenth
century, the Scots poetry of James’s reign was, like its linguistic siblings, inherently fragile
and survives only in part, often in unique manuscripts or printed exemplars. An example of
such fortuitous survival and, by extension, an indicator of what may have been lost, is the
single Scots sonnet by Mark Alexander Boyd (1563–1601), ‘Fra banc to banc’, which has been
frequently anthologised. It survives as a unique broadsheet pasted into a larger work and is
most probably the sole survivor of a much larger but now lost Scots poetic output by Boyd
(Donaldson 1994).
Scots poetry from James’s reign is characterised by its debt to French and Italian literature of
the earlier sixteenth century, its ongoing dialogue with the king’s own works, and its essentially
humanist outlook, whether Protestant or Catholic. These writers and their contemporaries rep-
resented a remarkable outpouring of poetic ability, facilitated but also limited by the patronage
of their poet-king. The map of Jacobean poetry appears very different, however, when considered
from the other side of the Scots-Gaelic linguistic divide.
Gaelic
Scots was the language of the court, at least until 1603, but Gaelic was, by definition, a language
of opposition. James VI and I continued his forebearer’s attempts to assimilate the Gàidhealtachd
and bring it under control of the central government in Edinburgh, a policy which after 1603 was
expanded to include similar acts of cultural violence in Gaelic Ireland. The failed plantation on
the Isle of Lewis (1598–1609) had less impact on Gaelic culture, however, than did the Statutes
of Iona (1609) which encouraged the existing shift of Hebridean elites away from traditional
models of rule and clanship towards an aristocratic mindset in line with the Lowlands. Both poli-
cies stemmed from a royal mindset which was antithetical to the idea of a culturally distinct
Gàidhealtachd and saw the existence of two vernaculars and two cultures in Scotland not as a
strength but as a problem to be solved.
The cumulative effect of this can be seen in the gradual breaking down of the traditional
bardic culture of the Gaelic world and a consequent period of transition and experimentation in
Gaelic verse.4 The filidh, the professional, hereditary bards, were still present at the courts of the
highland chiefs but were finding themselves increasingly embattled, and vernacular poetry, freed
from the more restrictive conventions of traditional bardic verse, was on the rise. Understanding
these shifts in detail is made challenging, however, by the paucity of Gaelic literature surviving
from this period and the difficulty of accurately dating what does survive. For some of the most
important Gaelic poetry of the Jacobean era we must rely on two slightly later works, one print,
one manuscript: the Adtimchiol an chreidimh (Edinburgh, 1631) and the Fernaig Manuscript com-
piled by Donnchadh Mac Rath in 1688.5
The Adtimchiol an chreidimh is a Gaelic translation of Jean Calvin’s Catéchisme de l’Église de
Genève (first published in 1542), possibly the work of Niall MacEoghain, poet to the Campbells
of Argyll (Thomson (ed.) 1962; Reid and Innes 2018). Prefixed to the body of the work are five
poems in classical Gaelic metres including ‘Faoisid Eoin S[t]evart Tighearn na Happen’ (‘The
Confession of Eòin Stiùbhart of Appin’) and two poems by Athairne MacEoghain, father of the
supposed translator, both major authors of Gaelic religious poetry.6
Only three poems by Eòin Stiùbhart of Appin survive, the ‘Faoisid’ and two in the Fernaig
Manuscript, but they are sufficient to identify him as a poet of considerable importance (Ó Baoill
and MacAulay 1988, p. 26). Little is known of his life. Chief of the Stiùbharts of Appin on the
northwestern coast of Argyllshire, he was active as early as 1570, played a minor role in the mur-
der of the Earl of Moray, and was dead by 1595 (Stewart and Stewart 1880, pp. 110–111).
Despite his close association with his mother’s family, the Catholic Gordons of Huntly, his reli-
gious poetry, which remains confessionally ambiguous, was evidently seen as sufficiently
reformed to merit its inclusion in an explicitly Protestant work.
Still less is known of Athairne Mac Eoghain. His family were a bardic family who by the early
modern period were attached to the household of the Campbells of Argyll and his son Niall was
active early in the reign of Charles I; further information is elusive (McLeod and Bateman 2007,
p. 59). The poems attributed to him in the Adtimchiol, however, demonstrate a command of the
register of Classical Gaelic and a range of allusion and imagery exemplified in the extended con-
ceit of ‘duille an bheatha bhudh bláth bréige’ (‘the petals of life are false blossom’) in ‘Is Mairg
Do-Ní Uaille as Óige’ (McLeod and Bateman 2007, pp. 58–60).
In contrast to the religious content of the Adtimchiol, the Fernaig manuscript, composed by
Donnchadh nam Pìos Mac Rath, a Jacobite, Episcopalian laird in Ross, exhibits a range of sub-
jects and registers, including contemporary political commentary (Thomson 1974, p. 153). As
well as the poems by Eòin Stiùbhart, it also includes the work of several otherwise unknown
Jacobean and Caroline poets from whom Donnchadh Mac Raoiridh can be singled out as of par-
ticular interest. Mac Raoiridh, who may have been a professional bard like the Mac Eoghains,
composed several elegiac poems which seem to date from the 1620s (Thomson 1974, pp. 111–112).
His ‘Rainn do rinneadh leis na shean aois’ (‘Verses made by him in his old age’), dating from this
period, vividly paint the life of an ageing bard in a world of change, ‘Gun mhiann gun aighear
gun cheòl’ (‘devoid of desire or music or joy’) (Mac Phàrlain 1923, pp. 141–143).7
Not represented in the foregoing volumes is Niall Mòr MacMhuirich, the Jacobean repre-
sentative of a poetic family which had been attached the MacDhòmhnaills for generations
(ODNB; Thomson 1977). His verse ranges from the rambunctious celebration of a
MacDhòmhnaill-MacLeòid wedding in 1613, ‘Do Ruaidhri Mòr, Mac Leòid’, at which ‘fiche
meisge linn gach laoi’ (‘twenty times were we drunk each day’), to the remarkable aubade,
‘Soraidh Slán don Oidhche A-Réir’ (‘Farewell Ever to Last Night’) (Ó Baoill and MacAulay 1994,
pp. 64–67; McLeod and Bateman 2007, pp. 298–301). The latter’s intense interiority and psy-
chology – ‘Tocht an ní chuireas an chiall | ar shilleadh díochra na súl’ (‘silence is what makes
sense | of the intense look of the eyes’) – has attracted recognition in recent times as one of the
finest love poems in Gaelic (McLeod and Bateman 2007, pp. 300–301).
Although embattled, Gaelic remained a vibrant and innovative poetic language during this
period, looking backward to the classical bardic tradition and forward to the innovations of post-
bardic vernacular literature. Its engagement with the printed word in the Adtimchiol an Chreidimh
as well as its wide awareness of the archipelagic world points to larger changes in the Gàidhealtachd
which would profoundly influence subsequent cultural and literary developments.
English
When James VI succeeded to the English throne as James I in 1603 he set the scene for a
dramatic change in Scottish culture: the adoption of English as a literary language amongst
the Scottish elites. Whether this came about through direct exposure to the new court in London
or via the ever-increasing trade in English books north of the border, it led to the latter part
of James’s reign seeing a flourishing tradition of poetry in English composed by various
‘Scoto-Britons’.8 Modern scholarship, inflected by the perceived need to define a national Scottish
literature in terms of Scots writing alone, has not been kind to the Scoto-British tradition, but
there are signs that some of these long-neglected writers are enjoying a new renaissance in the
more linguistically open-minded environment of the twenty-first century.9
The Scottish poets who turned to English were a generation younger than the group sur-
rounding James during his youth in Edinburgh and most notable amongst them were Sir Robert
Aytoun, Alexander Craig of Rosecraig, Simion Grahame, and William Drummond of
Hawthornden. Sir Robert Aytoun (1570–1638), like many courtiers (and poets) a younger son of
a landed family, was educated at St Andrews and in France before arriving at the court in London.
His flattering poems to the monarch probably played some role in his 1608 appointment as
groom of the privy chamber and soon after, in 1612, he succeeded William Fowler as secrerary
to Queen Anne, remaining at court until his death (ODNB). Aytoun’s poetry, with a few Latin
exceptions, was unpublished during his lifetime but circulated widely in manuscript (Ayton 1963,
pp. 251–258). His surviving works are in Scots, English, and Latin, but one contemporary
believed that he had also composed in Greek and French, making him one of the most polyglot
Scottish poets of his era (Dempster 1627, p. 62). His English output includes love poetry and
songs, courtly verse, and accomplished translations and adaptations of continental poets, includ-
ing works well-known across Europe such as Giovanni Battista Guarini’s ‘Tirsi morir volea’ and
Honorat de Porchère’s ‘Sur les yeux de la marquise de Monceaux’ (Ayton 1963, pp. 165; 179).
R.D.S. Jack attempted to rebrand Aytoun and his contemporary Craig as ‘Metaphysicals’, but it
would be more accurate to see him as simultaneously participating in the mainstream of early
seventeenth-century British poetry – including that labelled ‘Metaphysical’ – as well drawing on
the Franco-Italian inheritance which informed the Scots poets of the previous generation
(Daemen-de Gelder 2006).10
Aytoun’s friend Alexander Craig of Rosecraig (1567?–1627) also followed the king to London
but with more modest success. His time at court resulted in two collections of poems published
in London (the Poeticall Essays and Amorose Songes, Sonets, and Elegies) as well as the more solid
achievement of a royal pension of £400 Scots which allowed him to retire to his native Banff and
pursue a quiet life as a poet, gardener, and, briefly, burgh commissioner to parliament (ODNB).
His anagrammatical and allusive sonnets to Penelope Rich, Mary Sidney, and others found little
favour with his younger contemporary Drummond who wrote that ‘such sillie rime can not make
women love’, but such an easy dismissal belies the complexity of his verse (Roberts 1986, p. 129).
Seen by R.D.S. Jack (1969a) as the first Scottish Metaphysical, his work, however categorised, is
rich, surprising, and dramatically understudied.
Simion Grahame, OM (c.1570–1614), probably also found himself in London after the union
of the crowns as it was the London printer Humfrey Lownes who published his Passionate Sparke
of a Relenting Minde (Grahame 1604). A slim quarto, each page is printed within elaborate wood-
cut borders depicting the names of God and Jesus, allegorical figures, and other motifs, making
for a stately, even lavish, production. It was succeeded five years later by The Anatomie of Humors
(Grahame 1609), this time printed in Edinburgh, suggestive of a similar retrograde movement
on Grahame’s part as had been the case of Craig. Once again, an attention to typography and
physical layout is evident with the borders and ornaments of the Anatomie representing some of
its printer Thomas Finlason’s most skillful work. Like other peregrinatory poets of his age, such
as John Leech below, he did not remain in the British Isles for long but left for the continent
around the time he joined the Order of Minims; he died in Carpentras on a journey back to
Scotland (Dempster 1627, p. 328).11
The giant amongst Jacobean writers in English, however, was William Drummond of
Hawthornden (1585–1649) whose creative life spanned the reigns of James and his son Charles.12
A polymath – poet, musician, historian, satirist, and book collector – Drummond studied in
Paris and brought back a substantial library, heavy in the literature of southern Europe, before
settling into Stoic retreat on his estate of Hawthornden.13 During his early life he was acquainted
with many of the leading English and Latin poets of his generation and produced a series of
accomplished verse works: Teares on the Death of Meliades (1613), Poems (1616), Forth Feasting
(1617), and Flowres of Sion (1623) (Kastner 1913).14 Collectively these represent one of the most
sophisticated engagements by a Scottish writer with the contemporary literature of France, Italy,
and Spain – building upon and surpassing that of his uncle, William Fowler – with many of
Drummond’s poems being adaptations, translations or reworkings of poetry by Marino, Ronsard,
Petrarch, Sannazaro, and others (Kastner 1957; Jack 1969b). Ironically, this intertextuality has
led to him being dismissed as derivative and his current reputation is still unequal to his undeni-
able role as one of the key poetical figures in James’s reign. Modern scholarship has yet to fully
unpack the Anglo-Romance axis on which Drummond’s works balance, though an important
statement of his literary principles can be found in an undated letter to Arthur Johnston in
which he reacts strongly to ‘some Men of late (Transformers of every Thing) [who have] con-
sulted upon [poetry’s] Reformation, and endeavoured to abstract her to Metaphysical Idea’s, and
Scholastical Quiddities’ (Drummond 1711, p. 143).
Latin
Poetry written in Latin was an essential part of Scottish literary culture throughout early moder-
nity and James’s reign was no different. Indeed, the era was a golden age of Latin poetic composi-
tion. It was characterised by close connections to the French literary world, a sophisticated
technical and philological understanding of the classics, and a use of Latin as a means of main-
taining ‘a form of intellectual common ground’ with the absentee James after 1603 (Reid and
McOmish 2016, p. 7). It is something of a paradox, then, that this period is also book-ended by
Scotland’s two best known Latin poets: George Buchanan (1506–1582), ‘easily the prince of
poets of our time’ on one side and Arthur Johnston, who played a key role in the publication of
the 1637 Delitiae poetarum Scotorum, Scotland’s most important anthology of Latin poetry, on the
other.15 While these two have attracted increasing modern attention, including new poetic trans-
lations by Robert Crawford, as well as editions, monographs, and doctoral theses, the Latin poets
of Jacobean Scotland have been much less well served.16
Amongst the poets of this era who have received comparatively little attention, David Hume
of Godscroft (1558–1629 or 1631) is best-known not for his poetry but for his role as a propo-
nent of British union in the De unione insulae Britannicae (Hume 2002 [1605]) and as a historian
in his History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus (Hume 1996, 2005).17 De unione, however, should
be read alongside the complex Daphn-Amaryllis (Hume 1605), a poetical meditation on union,
both ideal and actual, which indicts James, in the character of Daphnis, for abandoning his
beloved Phyllis, Scotland.18 Equally rich are his Lusus poetici (Hume 1605/1639) which contain
elegies, epigrams, and a variety of other poems on autobiographical and contemporary subjects.
A younger contemporary of Godscroft was the irrepressible, petulant, and self-centred John
Leech, a talented but obscure poet known through a handful of publications and his correspond-
ence with other figures in the Jacobean literary world.19 Leech, the son of a minister and a gradu-
ate of King’s College, Aberdeen, fell in and out of favour with patrons including Archbishop
Spottiswoode and John Scots of Scotstarvet, studied in Paris and Poitiers, and spent time in a
London prison for publishing a graphically sexual epigram, before disappearing for some dec-
ades, only to reappear briefly as a professor of eloquence and philosophy, apparently again in
France, in 1637.20 Leech’s Anacreontica and his Epigrammatum libri quatuor represent a very differ-
ent side of Jacobean Scottish poetry to that familiar from traditional accounts: narcissistic, erotic,
baroque, and pleasure-seeking, taking delight in unusual or transgressive language and form.21
That Leech was also close to the centre of Scottish poetic culture, the friend both of Drummond
of Hawthornden and Scot of Scotstarvet, should encourage a radical reevaluation of the suppos-
edly puritanical character of early seventeenth-century Scotland.
Before the 1637 Delitiae came the earlier and almost equally important Muse’s Welcome, a 1618
anthology of Scottish Latin poetry celebrating James’s belated return to Scotland in the previous
year (Adamson 1618). Containing over 130 poems by over 60 poets, it has been likened to ‘a group
photograph (one of the livelier kind)’ and charts the king’s progress across his native country
(Green 2016, p. 127).22 Amongst the poets who contributed, familiar names reappear such as
Drummond, Craig, and Leech, but many of the poets are more obscure and their presence is indica-
tive of the high pitch to which Latin poetry had been cultivated in the schools, universities, and
burghs of the country. As Roger Green has demonstrated, the king also took a personal interest in
this volume, approving of its publication and securing forty copies to be distributed as he saw fit
(Green 2016, pp. 159–160). It is indicative of James’s new role as ruler of the multiple monarchy
that he was now patronising the international learned language rather than the Scots vernacular.
Although much of his work was written after James’s death, no treatment of Jacobean poetry
would be complete without a discussion of Arthur Johnston (c.1579–1641) whose life, like that
of his friend and contemporary Drummond, stretched across the reigns of James and his son
Charles. Johnston, another Aberdeenshire lad like Leech, spent most of his young adult life
abroad, departing from Scotland in 1599 and only returning around 1623 (Farquhar 2016,
p. 206). In that time he composed a substantial amount of poetry including the Querelae
Saravictonis et Biomeae, a commentary on the early stages of the Thirty Years War, as well as satire,
praise poetry, and work in a variety of other genres.23 Most of his continental period was spent in
the Huguenot Academy of Sedan where he composed large parts of his 1632 Parerga and
Epigrammata. It is, in many ways, appropriate to conclude a survey of Jacobean poetry with a poet
who both commemorated the king’s death – in his In obitum Jacobi pacifici elegia (1625) – and
whose other works looked forward to the disastrous conflict which dominated Europe during the
middle of the seventeenth century.
Conclusion
This brief survey has given an overview of poetry during the reign of James VI and I. In doing
so, it highlights the extent to which Scotland was a country of four literary languages – Scots,
Gaelic, English, and Latin – languages whose fortunes varied widely in the centuries thereafter.24
It shows that the court’s move to London did not stymie existing literary culture, but was rather
an incitement to growth and diversification as English language and poetical habits were incor-
porated into the Scottish vocabulary. Likewise, while the king and the court played a key role in
the literature of this period – as can be seen by the number of individuals discussed who were
immediately or peripherally related to the monarch – they were not the only locus of Scottish
poetic creativity in the era and were complemented by a rich poetic culture elsewhere in Scotland
and amongst Scots abroad.
These conclusions should not be controversial, but they nonetheless represent a notable depar-
ture from the traditional narrative surrounding late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century
Scottish poetry. As Scottish literature as a discipline develops in the twenty-first century, it is
essential that we recognise this earlier period’s multivocality, its resistance to easy summary, and
its profoundly international outlook. Only by doing so can we begin to recover and better under-
stand the still largely understudied corpus of Jacobean Scottish poetry.
Notes
1 A crucial point in the evolution of his narrative was twentieth-century version of the court-centric model
the publication of Helena Shire’s Song, Dance and of Scottish culture. For a more moderate reading see
Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King James VI Mapstone, S. (2007). Older Scots Literature and the
(Cambridge 1969) which enshrined the later Court. In: The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature,
Volume I: From Columba to the Union (until 1707) (ed. 15 Describing Buchanan as ‘poeta sui saeculi facile prin-
T.O. Clancy and M. Pittock) (Edinburgh 2007), ceps’ was a commonplace of the period; see Ford, P.
273–285. (2009). Poeta sui saeculi facile princeps: George
2 See Ronald Black’s chapter on the Gàidhealtachd and Buchanan’s Poetic Achievement. In: George Buchanan:
Alasdair A. MacDonald’s on the seventeenth century Poet and Dramatist (ed. P. Ford and R.P.H. Green)
in this Companion. (Swansea 2009), 3ff.
3 For the 1631 Latin translation by Thomas Duff, 16 For recent work on Buchanan see George Buchanan, ed.
OSB, see Mark Dilworth, ‘The Latin Translator of Ford and Green, George Buchanan: Political Thought in
The Cherrie and the Slae’, Studies in Scottish Literature 5 Early Modern Britain and Europe, ed. Caroline Erskine
(1967), pp. 77–82. and Roger A. Mason (Farnham 2012), and Philip J.
4 See Derick Thomson, An Introduction to Gaelic Poetry Ford, George Buchanan: Prince of Poets (Aberdeen,
(London 1974), chapter. 3. 1982), and for Johnston see Alexander Farquhar,
5 Adtimchiol an chredimh comhaghalluidhedar an Arthur Johnston and the Fostering of Scottish Letters
maighiser, agas an foghluinte: Aghon, minisder an tsoi- (University of Oxford DPhil Thesis 2014), and
ogeil, agas an leanamh (Edinburgh 1631), ESTC Farquhar, ‘Arthur Johnston (c.1579–1641): A Scottish
S91281, survives in a unique copy in the National Neo-Latin Poet in Europe’, in Neo-Latin Literature and
Library of Scotland. The Fernaig Manuscript is Literary Culture, 203–222. Robert Crawford translated
located at Glasgow University Library MS Gen 85, selections from both poets in his Apollos of the North
and has been edited as Lamh-Sgrìobhainn Mhic Rath: (Edinburgh 2006). The neglect of Scottish Latinity is
Dorlach laoidhean do sgrìobhadh le Donnchadh Mac rapidly changing, however, having been spearheaded
Rath, 1688, ed. Calum Mac Phàrlain (Dundee 1923). by the ‘Bridging the Continental Divide’ project at
6 The latter two are edited and translated in Duanaire the University of Glasgow, https://www.dps.gla.ac.uk,
na Sracaire / Songbook of the Pillagers: Anthology of and is bearing fruit in work such as Neo-Latin Literature
Scotland’s Gaelic Verse to 1600 (ed. W. McLeod and M. and Literary Culture, ed. Reid and McOmish, and
Bateman) (Edinburgh 2007), pp. 58–65. Corona Borealis: Scottish Neo-Latin Poets on King James VI
7 Translated in Gàir nan Clàrsach/The Harp’s Cry: An and his Reign, 1566–1603, ed. Steven J. Reid and
Anthology of 17th Century Gaelic Poetry (ed. C.Ó Baoill David McOmish (Glasgow 2020).
and M. Bateman) (Edinburgh 1994), 80–81. 17 See also Williamson, A.H. ‘Radical Britain: David
8 For ‘Scoto- Britons’ see Steve Murdoch, ‘Anglo- Hume of Godscroft and the Challenge to the
Scottish Culture Clash? Scottish Identities and Jacobean British Vision’. In: The Accession of James I:
Britishness, c.1520–1750’, Cycnos 25 (2008): 1–16 at Historical and Cultural Consequences (ed. G. Burgess,
7–8. et al.) (Houndmills, 2006), 48–68.
9 See, for example, Jacobean Parnassus, edited by 18 See the hypertext edition and translation by Dana F.
Alasdair A. MacDonald (Glasgow 2022). Sutton, http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/hume4
10 See R.D.S. Jack, The Italian Influence on Scottish (accessed 30 September 2022).
Literature (Edinburgh 1972). 19 Leech’s biography remains fragmentary and obscure
11 The author of the ODNB, misreading Dempster and but the best treatment is in the introduction to John
evidently unfamiliar with the mendicant orders, Leech, Epigrammatum libri quatuor, ed. and trans.
incorrectly claims he was a Franciscan. Jamie Reid Baxter and Dana F. Sutton, http://
12 The only book-length study is the now badly out- www.philological.bham.ac.uk/leech (accessed 30
dated David Masson, Drummond of Hawthornden: The September 2022).
Story of his Life and Writings (London 1873). 20 Verse by ‘I. Leocheus Scotus Eloquentiæ & Philo.
13 cf. R.H. MacDonald, The Library of Drummond of Profeß’. appears on a 1637 Parisian copperplate
Hawthornden (Edinburgh 1971). portrait of the poet René Gentilhomme,

14 For his prose works it is neccesary to rely on The Porträtsammlung der Herzog August Bibliothek
Works of William Drummond (Edinburgh 1711). Wolfenbüttel, A 26872.
21 See the Epigrammatum, ed. Reid Baxter and Sutton, Note that the English ‘arguments’ provided by
and Leech, Anacreontica, ed. Dana F. Sutton, http:// Geddes are not translations but rather prosaic sum-
www.philological.bham.ac.uk/anacr (accessed 30 maries of Johnston’s Latin.
September 2022). 24 Scotland’s multilinguality – in implicit comparison
22 See also Stevenson, J. (2013). Adulation and with England’s monolingualism – has been observed
Admonition in The Muses’ Welcome. In: James VI and I, before, e.g. by Robinson, C. and Ó Maolalaigh, R.
Literature and Scotland: Tides of Changes, 1567–1625 The several tongues of a single kingdom: the lan-
(ed. D.J. Parkinson) (Leuven 2013), 267–281. guages of Scotland, 1314–1707. In: Edinburgh History
23 The standard edition of Johnston’s works is to be of Scottish Literature, i. 153–163, but languages other
found in the first two volumes of Musa Latina than Gaelic and Scots have received only short shrift
Aberdonensis, 3 vols., ed. William Duguid Geddes (Robinson and Ó Maolalaigh omit English entirely
and William Keith Leisk (Aberdeen, 1892–1910). and give Latin a single paragraph at 158).
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32
Women’s Writing to 1700
Sarah M. Dunnigan
Department of English and Scottish Literature, LLC, University of Edinburgh, 50 George Square,
EH8 9LH, Scotland, UK
‘Thy absence causeth paine & death/It killeth love, and woundeth faith’: in an unpublished poem
composed in December 1674, Lilias Skene (1626/1627–1697), articulates a moment of spiritual
and emotional crisis. It is one of many expressions of vulnerability which animate the single
extant copy of her religious poetry and strikes a contrast with the dynamic public activism asso-
ciated with her conversion to Quakerism a decade earlier.1 Skene’s poetry belongs to a significant
body of work by early modern Scottish woman writers still in the process of archival recovery,
and valuably highlights for us the fluidity which can be found within a single creative voice. Her
surviving work, both poetry and prose, records the flux and movement of her journey as a Quaker
who is both radical and active yet burdened by self-doubt and pain.2 Just as Skene’s poetry holds
this apparent contradiction, so too should we acknowledge both singularity and diversity within
the work of later medieval and early modern women writers in Scotland. The last decade has seen
a resurgence in scholarship in this field, especially in terms of textual and material culture, 3 but
any survey chapter runs the risk of eliding such singularity; imposing misleading categories of
homogeneity; or selectively highlighting particular texts, writers, or genres.
From the outset, then, it is important to recognise the extent to which women’s writing –
from the late fifteenth to late seventeenth centuries – is criss-crossed by many different allegiances
and affiliations: the reach of politically charged religious difference, for example, encompasses
the poetry of the Catholic Jacobite, Sìleas na Ceapaich (c. 1660–c. 1729), and the Presbyterian
Royalist Barbara Mackay (c. 1615–1690). Women’s creativity in both early modern
Ghàidhealtachd and Lowland cultures means that a range of national and local, individual and
collective, identities intersect throughout their work. Literary creation in early modern Scotland
took place against a background of linguistic change and fluidity across the languages of
Gaelic, Scots, and English, and within cultural environments which made artistic use of Latin,
French, and Italian. Women writers created within a range of distinctive, and sometimes

Women’s Writing to 1700 407
overlapping, linguistic cultures; Mary Stuart’s poetry is a rich example of such hybridity, as is the
extraordinary illustrative work of the French Huguenot exile and calligrapher, Esther Inglis
(c. 1569–1624). Women’s composition in vernacular Scots is seen in a range of surviving manu-
script examples from courtly culture and coterie exchange, such as the dedicatory poems ascribed
to women which point to a fascinating culture of ‘conversational’ and poetic ‘gift’ exchange
(discussed below). This evidences an autonomous Scots literary culture in the pre-Union period;
yet the shift towards Anglicisation in literary composition should be recognised as more gradual,
complex, and flexible than sometimes portrayed. Such flexibility is mirrored, for example, in the
printing history of Elizabeth Melville’s Ane Godlie Dreame; the rapidly produced anglicised ver-
sion of the original Scots text of her Calvinist dream vision shows a linguistic shift to accom-
modate popular demand and wider cultural transmission.4 Subsequently, in terms of Scottish
women’s printed work in the seventeenth century, English and Anglo-Scots becomes the domi-
nant medium, as seen in Anna Hume’s 1644 translation of Petrarch’s Triumphs into English.
Here, the idea of vernacular eloquence is gendered, rather than seen as an explicit sign of national,
cultural affiliation, and interlinked with ideals of feminine wisdom and intellect.5
At the same time, a holistic overview such as this brief chapter offers is helpful in sketching
out both shared and divergent artistic and cultural pathways in an area where significant critical
work remains to be done, despite recent scholarly developments. Early modern Scottish women’s
writing encompasses a rich diversity of genre – lyric, prose, life-writing, memoir, sometimes
challenging, and fusing genre boundaries and styles as, for example, in the lyricality of much
seventeenth century prose writing which – in form and intent – is not primarily conceived as
‘literary’.6 Religious devotion and spirituality is arguably the dominant subject matter of early
modern Scottish women’s literature; even when erotic love, praise, or elegy is the generic or the-
matic frame of a poem, the shadow of spiritual allusion is usually present (for example, the con-
clusion of Mairghread nighean Lachlainn’s lament ‘Do dh’Eachann mac Iain Diùraich/To Eachann
son of Iain Diùraich’ where the last line simply wishes the deceased a journey to heaven).7 Some
writers are active across genres (Skene, for instance, in prose and poetry), while certain genres and
modes recur more frequently. The sonnet, for example, with its formal intricacy and Italianate
and French inheritance which made it such a popular form at the Scottish court in the latter
decades of the sixteenth century, is adopted in a variety of ways by women writers. Mary Stuart,
Queen of Scots and Elizabeth Melville, for example, demonstrate its power as an adaptable
medium for the communication of erotic, religious, and political subjects.8 The genre of formal
elegy is especially strong within Gaelic tradition, seen as early as 1470 in the example of
Aithbhreac nighean Coirceadail’s well-known mourning lament for her husband, the earliest
surviving poem by an identifiable female poet in Gaelic tradition. It flourishes in the work of
later poets such as Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh (c. 1615–c. 1707) and Sìleas na Ceapaich
where the reach of loss embraces the deaths of children and clan chieftains.9
Though this essay is largely concerned with ‘literary’ modes of articulation, it is important to
acknowledge those expressive modes which exist beyond and alongside them. Firstly, early mod-
ern women’s written expressiveness can be found in other modes of textuality, such as recipe
books; letter-writing; and songbooks, each of which gestures towards the household and the
private domestic realm as spaces of creativity.10 Other textual forms and modes nurture alternate
modes of expression: for example, the richly allusive emblematic poetry which Mary inscribed on
the margins of her Book of Hours, as well as her tapestry and needlework which have been read
as elaborately coded symbolic forms11; and the complex intersections between word and image
laced through the illustrative work of Esther Inglis.12 Secondly, the transmission of female voices
and creativity carries through traditional and oral culture in the form of balladry and storytelling.13
This helps to modify an otherwise socially homogenous vision of early modern women who are
culturally active, largely consisting of elite and privileged women (from royalty; the courtly
aristocracy; gentry). Vernacular Gaelic poets ‘were themselves from the higher strata of Gaelic
society, and familiar with the forms and structures of bardic verse, which they combined with the
vernacular language to create a new form of poetry’ (Frater 1997, p. 1). Oral and literary tradi-
tions are frequently entwined. Surviving vernacular poetry in Gaelic from the sixteenth and
seventeenth century periods is rooted in song culture, their preserved manuscript form the tex-
tual imprint of oral performance. In Lowland culture, too, the prevalence of women’s poetry in
manuscript form attests a social culture of both informal and formal circulation, implying the
possibility of performance and transmission within this coterie context (for example, the sonnet
ascribed to ‘Christian Lyndsay’ implies a feminised intervention in Jacobean court culture, sug-
gesting an intimate familiarity with the rhetoric and codes of a largely male coterie).14
This essay seeks to chart a path through this immensely varied material in two ways primar-
ily. Firstly, it discusses it as a distinctive body of ‘cultural work’ which roots the articulation of
women’s literary voices within particular social and communicative contexts. Secondly, the essay
explores its imaginative fabric – those threads of formal, aesthetic, and figurative qualities which
bind and differentiate these women’s texts from one another and create work which is striking in
its expression of affect and emotional power. This approach, it is hoped, will build on the emer-
gent critical sense of women’s writing in the later medieval and early modern period as a form of
political and religious intervention, rooted in particular material cultures of textual exchange;
but it will also return attention to the artistically compositional nature and affective power of its
stories and voices, which can sometimes be overlooked. The range of work discussed here reflects
different life-stages and moments, and is therefore often movingly experiential: Mary Stuart’s
spiritual sonnets belong to the period before her execution, while Marion Stewart begins her
memoir ‘being in the 17th year of my Age’ (Trill 2004, p. 206; Wodrow Quarto XXXI, ff. 211,
212).15 Elizabeth Blackadder draws on a girlhood afflicted by fear of ‘apparitions or spirits’ until
the end of her memoir which sees her observe that ‘[t]he infirmities of old age are clasping me
fast about, and the Lord is graciously (not violently) loosing the pins of this clay tabernacle’
(Mullan 2003, pp. 386, 409). Lastly, while this essay charts ways in which women found
expressive voice, it is important to note that they did so within cultural parameters more often
designed to oppress rather than enable female agency and articulation. Nowhere is this more
starkly seen than in the alleged burial stances, ‘face-downwards’, of Gaelic women poets, as if to
ensure their eternal silence apparently in the face of ‘a deep fear of women poets “and their pow-
ers of transgression, whether potentially imagined or actually realised”’ (Ó Baoill, cited in Frater
and Byrne 2012, p. 26).
The early historiography of early modern Scottish women’s writing focussed on individual
writers – part of an archival ‘recovery’ process – rather than sustained exploration of how wom-
en’s creativity was configured within wider social and cultural worlds. More recent criticism has
valuably discussed how a figure such as the Calvinist poet, Elizabeth Melville, for example, can
be located within a wider textual and geographical community created by a circle of reforming
protestants who see writerly expression as part of a communal activism. Sarah Ross comments on
the ‘local, intensely religious and highly productive networks of the East Neuk poetic commu-
nity’, noting that Melville’s manuscript networks are ‘insistently material and insistently place-
based’ (Ross 2019, p. 55).16 This can be seen in her sonnet to John Welsh, an expression of
solidarity and sympathy for an imprisoned dissenting minister. But it also invests her longest,
frequently reprinted work, Ane Godlie Dreame, with an underlying material locality and specific
spiritual intent which is belied by the poem’s broader visionary and allegorical compass. Melville’s
dreamer is seemingly anonymous but assumes a powerful exemplary role and instructional a
purpose, a model of inspiration and identification. This communicative intent underpins
Melville’s other lyrical work too: Ross cites an anagrammatic poem addressed to ‘Isabell COR’ as
an offering of ‘spiritual succour, to the addressee’ (a particularly interesting example of women’s
religious kinship) while Reid Baxter notes that ‘any good Calvinist could use [Melville’s poems]
as a form of spiritual exercise’ (Reid Baxter 2017, p. 52). Placing a writer such as Melville within
a wider textual and spiritual community is important for it suggests both her reputational
stature, and the ways in which her creative work found active meaning ‘in the world’.
This is a pattern repeated across the range of surviving Scottish religious women’s writing.
Discussing the dissenting activism of women such as Elizabeth Cairns and Marion Veitch, David
Mullan observes how their writing reflects the ways in which they were ‘drawn into the rela-
tional concerns of a religious community’ (Mullan 2003, p. 187). Lilias Skene’s poetry interest-
ingly charts the antagonisms and fragility of bonds within her religious community, evoking
fracture rather than unity at times (for instance, the ‘spat with Isabell Keile’ in her poem, ‘Come
cure my many bruises’) (DesBrisay 2004, p. 167). Resistance rather than solidarity is sometimes
the keynote of Skene’s work, as Potter (2020) observes, and an impulse towards withdrawal and
retreat in comparison to what might be termed the ‘spiritual sociability’ of Melville. In that
sense, it has surprising affinity with the religious poetry of another woman poet from a different
faith denomination, the Catholic Mary Stuart. The queen’s spiritual work (the long ‘Meditation’
and a collection of sonnets) registers the tension between a lone, individual voice, embodied in
the intimacy and immediacy of lamentation, and the blending and configuration of penitent,
queen, archetypal sinner, and political martyr – those public Marian personae which fed into
contemporary and posthumous martyrology narratives. Mary’s poetry can be read as a defence of
her faith, one which agonistically couples corporeal and emotional pain with the tender endur-
ance of her ‘Mère, l’Eglise’.17
We can see how individual and collective spiritual identities are juxtaposed across the work
of all these religious women in different ways. Some writers are particularly focussed on the com-
munication of specific doctrinal intent – Elizabeth Melville’s Calvinist theology of salvation, or
Sìleas na Ceapaich’s richly nuanced engagement with Marian devotion.18 The anticipation of
Judgement Day is a motif which binds Melville and Skene’s work, framing their lyric speakers
in different states of doubt and anguish as they question their fitness to receive divine grace.
Specific dedicatees imply particular allegiances and expressions of religious and political kinship
(Barbara Mackay, Lady Reay, from Sutherland in the northeast, for example, dedicates her spir-
itual poems to the Countess of Caithness).19 While Melville’s poetry often presents a prophetic,
preacherly voice, other women (such as Skene and Mary) intrude doubt as to the efficacy of their
voice. But the work of each of these women seems united in a shared purpose of ‘bearing witness’
to some form of spiritual struggle which may be individual or collective in nature.
This relationship between individual and collective voice is also mirrored in some of the pow-
erful political poems and songs by women in Gaelic tradition. In these, the first-person lyrical
voice is the bearer of praise for clan victories (for example, in the panegyric work of the Harris-
born poet, Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh [c. 1615–1707], addressed to Clan MacLeod leaders),
or witness to the vagaries of clan politics or the repercussions of a leader’s death. In her poem, ‘Do
Chlainn Ghilleathain air do na Caimbeulaich buaidh fhaotainn orra/For the Macleans when the
Campbells had defeated them’, Mairghread nighean Lachlainn twins collective mourning with
personal lament. In this extract, it is suggestive how only in the latter act of individualised grief
is the promise of future political renewal implied:
Ach cò e an neach a tha gun mhùtha,
Mar na nialaibh air an aonach?
Cinne làidir nan lann rùisgte
Bhith mar tha iad roimh na Duibhnich!
Cha choma etc
Gu bheil m’ inntinn-se fo smalan

Is mo shùilean gu bhith galach
Gus am faic mi rìs an latha
‘S am bi dol suas air sìol mo thaighe.
Cha coma etc
But who can remain without change, as the clouds on the moorland must change? That the mighty
clan of the bared blades should be in the state it is in before the Campbells!
My mind is melancholy and my eyes going to be tearful until I see again the day when the seed of
my house rises in triumph.
(Ó Baoill 2009, pp. 38, 39 (ll.85–ll.91)).
The work of Sìleas na Ceapaich, ‘a fiercely partisan Jacobite and MacDonald, a committed c omposer
of Catholic hymns in a period of Presbyterian ascendancy’, can be seen as a powerful political tool
during the period of the uprisings in 1714–1715 (Frater and Byrne 2012, p. 24). ‘Composed from
a clan perspective, praising the Clan Donald for their support for, and actions during, the Earl of
Mar’s rebellion in 1715’, Sìleas’s poetry is nonetheless, as Anne Frater notes, unafraid to be outspo-
ken, pointing to criticism of those who expediently surrendered in the interests of self-protection
in the song, ‘Do dh’Arm Rìgh Sheumais’/To King James’ Army’ (Frater 1997, p. 4; Ó Baoill 1972,
pp. 46, 47). Sìleas’s poem (and many others) identifies the casualties of war beyond soldiers and clan
leaders, extending far into the reach of ‘every family’, to bereaved women and children. Gaelic
women’s poetry, then, offers a distinctively engaged, committed kind of presence within commu-
nity. The female poetic voice possesses powers of praise and exhortation, commemoration and
critique; a conduit for, and arguably at times active re-shaper of, their culture’s values.
The notion of community is differently manifest in the seemingly fragmentary, more disparate
nature of women’s secular literature in Lowland culture which seems to lack the firmer social and
cultural ‘scaffolding’, as it were, of its religious counterpart. And yet there are ways in which
even a single poem, ascribed to a female author, might gesture outwards to a broader cultural
resonance. William Fowler’s translation of Petrarch’s Triumphs, a key text of the Jacobean Scottish
courtly renaissance, is prefaced by dedicatory praise poems, including two sonnets which have
been ascribed to Elizabeth Douglas, Countess of Erroll (fl. 1587–1615): ‘E.D. in praise of
Mr. Wm Foular her friend’ and ‘E.D. in commendation of the author and of his choise’ (Ewan
et al. 2018, p. 118).20 Douglas’s praise of Fowler’s ‘choise’ astutely glorifies both Petrarchan sub-
ject matter and Fowler’s patron, Lady Jean Fleming, who is glorified as a second Laura (Petrarch’s
beloved and the honorific subject of the ‘Triumph of Chastity’). Douglas’s poems, along with
another Fowlerian connection in a sonnet ascribed to Mary Beaton, Lady Boyne (c. 1543–1597)
which encourages Fowler to ‘assaye’ [attempt] the Trionfi translation, point to the ways in which
women clearly participated in the cultural and intellectual conversations of courtly circles
(Dunnigan 1997, pp. 26, 27; Verweij 2016, pp. 86, 87). While the mode of panegyric usually
demands a certain amount of authorial self-effacement or elision, texts such as Douglas’ and
Beaton’s, can also be seen as desiring visibility too – creating their own imprint, or tangible
record, within a broader creative culture. They have a stake in commemorative art – commemo-
rating not only Fowler’s achievement but Jacobean courtly culture more broadly and, in that
respect, make their own intervention, however small, in a broader act of cultural renewal.
Anna Hume’s mid-seventeenth century work also provides a vivid, sustained sense of the
woman writer as participant within a wider literary debate. Her translation of the first three of
Petrarch’s Trionfi, The Triumphs of Love: Chastity: Death (1644), obviously renews the Italian
humanist legacy from the Jacobean era but it creates new, multiple frameworks. These consist of
a dedication to Elizabeth, Princess Palatinate and the daughter of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia;
the creation of an intimate, affective bond with the figure of Petrarch’s beloved Laura, the incar-
nation of chastity, virtue, and intellect; and, in the commentaries attached to each trionfo, partici-
pation in a wider European humanist tradition of Petrarchan commentary.21 In that sense,
Hume’s is a ‘sociable’ text. While we do not know if the Princess Elizabeth received this work,22
or more information about its reception history as a whole (there was only a single printing in
1644), it still creates an imaginative textual community. It appeals to readers who are themselves
encouraged to reflect on their own interpretative practice, and effects its own approach to r eading
as a delicate negotiation between intellect and affect:
If any aske me, What is then my end?

‘Tis to approve my selfe a reall friend
To chaste Lauretta, whom since I have tane
From the dark Cloyster, where she did remain
Unmarkt, because unknown.
Hume 1644, Sig. A3, pp. ll.17–ll.21
The final brief example in this discussion of secular women’s writing and the idea of literary
intervention is drawn from the Maitland Quarto manuscript, one of the most important
sixteenth-century Scottish lyric collections, and the provenance of a poem articulating same-sex
female desire which, in the last two decades, has generated its own critical history.23 The poem’s
female-identified speaker constructs a vision of gendered metamorphosis for the female-identified
addressee (‘My sex intill his vaill convert/No brutus then sould caus us smart/as we doe now
vnhappie wemen’), articulating a realm of queer possibility which challenges the heterosexual
marriage framework that oppresses and depresses them both (Chowdhury 2013; Dunnigan 2004a;
Newlyn 2004; Douglas 2021; George 2020). Through the evidence of inscription, the manu-
script is associated with Marie, or Mary, Maitland, one of the daughters of the politically and
culturally influential Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, and she may have played a large part
in its collation and curation.24 A dedicatory lyric to ‘Maistres Marie’ places the latter within a
trinity of female writers which includes Sappho (‘sapho saige’) and Olympia Fulvia Morata
(1526–1555), the Ferrara-born poet, humanist, and biblical scholar. A convert to Protestantism
deeply influenced by her father’s religious affiliations, she seems a richly suggestive model for
Marie Maitland. Compared to the Folio, the other significant manuscript collection associated
with the Maitland household, the Quarto presents a significant thematic arrangement which
foregrounds concerns with locale and place, family and lineage, and – as the lyric above attests –
with the social and emotional lives of women. The latter need not, in and of itself, necessitate
female curation but the resonance is still striking and suggestive.
Here, it is worth noting the fascinating extent to which women’s poetry in Gaelic tradition is
harnessed to themes of family, lineage, marriage, and children (including songs in the voices of
nursemaids and foster mothers). But it often presents a view of some of these ritualistic, thresh-
old moments of transition in women’s lives from challenging, if not subversive, positions. In an
interesting parallel to the Maitland poem above which resists a coercive marriage, Frater draws
attention to the abundant ‘evidence in Gaelic women’s songs of the heartbreak which […]
arranged marriages caused’, referring to dynastic, political alliances within ‘the upper echelons
of Gaelic society’. In one song, a female speaker ‘bewails her abuse at the hands of her husband,
Maclean of Coll, and his household: “Rinn iad mo leab’ aig an doras/Comaidh ri fearaibh is ri
conaibh’ (‘They made my bed at the door, alongside the menservants and the dogs’)” (Frater and
Byrne 2012, p. 27). In another example of how women poets deftly manoeuvre the ostensible
boundaries of genre and convention, Frater also notes how the popular form of the cradle-song
could give ‘women a voice on political matters and the social changes which ensued, changes
which could adversely affect her charges’ (Frater and Byrne 2012, p. 27). This delicate yet
ultimately powerful negotiation between conformity and subversion is also seen in Sìleas’s
well-known song, ‘An Aghaidh na h-Obair Nodha/Against the New Work’, in which the speaker
counsels young women to preserve their virginity (and, by implication, their moral status within
the community):
Chì thu gruagach rìomhach

Is crios sìoda oirre an ceangal,
Ach meallar i os n-ìosal
Is strìochdas I don a’ ghnothach;
Dannsaidh si air ùrlar
Gu sùnndach an déidh a leithid,
Ach ’nuair a thig am pàisdean
B’ fheàrr bhith mar bha i roimhe.
‘You will see an elegant maiden with a silken belt fixed about her, but she will be deceived by stealth
and submit to the deed; she will dance merrily on a floor after such a thing, but when the baby
comes it were better to be as she was before’
(Ò Baoill 1972, pp. 80, 81 (ll.947–ll.954)).
Natasha Sumner interestingly challenges the poem’s prevalent biographical reading which interprets
it as self-condemnatory (it may indeed have been circulated deliberately to exclude her, as a
female poet, from social and cultural acceptance), seeing it instead as a conscious and skilful
‘manipulation of disparate generic models’ (Sumner 2012, p. 322). And as much as the poem
advocates a life of vigilant purity for the speaker’s community of ‘beloved girls’, it also indicts
men for their duplicity, corruption, and insincerity. Early modern Scottish women writers and
poets, in both Lowland and Gaelic cultures, therefore find richly different ways in which to
articulate voice(s) in a range of social, cultural, and political contexts which, as we have seen,
both constrain and nurture their imaginative expression.
As the previous section suggests, many women writers found active presence ‘in the world’,
sharing and participating in a variety of textual, religious, and imaginative communities; at the
same time, their work often registers the difficulty of that expression. In writing about early
modern women’s religious narrative, David Mullan notes the frequency with which they
‘[remark] upon the limitations of narrative as a means of embodying the transcendent mystical
substance of their lives’, citing Elizabeth Cairns’ assertion that ‘what I met with, in my being
brought thus near [to God], I can neither word nor write, but it is such as my soul knows right well’
(Mullan 2003, p. 186). Cairns gestures towards a wordlessly empathic intuiting of divine grace,
but her admission echoes across the body of women’s religious writing. The latter must always
negotiate the challenge of capturing what Lilias Skene neatly expresses as a paradox: how ‘[t]hat
which is infinite is of too great extent for finite reach’ (Mullan 2003, p. 145). At times, anxieties
about articulation may relate to the challenge of voicing words and desires within an unsympa-
thetic or actively antagonistic culture. The controversial, so-called Casket sonnets ascribed to
Mary Stuart offer an obvious but compelling example of this. Famously used as part of a wider
propagandistic and polemical campaign to discredit the queen in the wake of Darnley’s murder
and increasing religious and political hostilities, ironically they explore questions about the moral
and spiritual value of female love. Whether the speaker is overtly Marian or not, the sequence can
be seen to challenge a variety of antifeminist tropes about the hollowness and unpredictability of
women’s desire. Directly addressing the beloved, the speaker defensively challenges
assumptions:
Vous estimez mes paroles du vent.

Vous dépeignez de cire mon las coeur.
Vous me pensez femme sans jugement
you thinke my wordes be but wind,
you paint my wery hart, as it were of waxe,
you imagine me a woman without iugement’.25
Such questions regarding authenticity and integrity resonate throughout this sequence to pre-
sent a philosophy of female love which argues for the necessary congruence between words and
desire.
This longing for transparency and truthfulness carries resonance throughout Mary’s other
writing, especially in her spiritual poems where, despite external depredations and a bodily self
in dissolution (a ‘vn ombre vayn/a vain shadow’ to herself), a core of inner sanctity, ‘mon lieu de
franchise/my place of liberty’, still remains intact. Despite the challenges to imaginative embod-
iment which the examples of Cairns, Skene, and Mary highlight, this diverse body of women’s
religious writing is marked by a distinctive aesthetics of articulation. Much of this literature is
highly metaphorical and imagistic. Lilias Skene’s poetry, composed across four decades, is knit
together by a vivid thread of visuality, which draws on varieties of light (sun and ‘starlight’) to
illuminate spiritual growth:
He said he wold perfect me mor

And yet again me wold restor
And mor & mor inlighten me
Even with the livings light to sie
AUL MS 2774, p. 44
Skene’s abundant use of radiance as metaphor reflects one of the most important Quaker c oncepts,
the doctrine of the inner Light, and it unfolds across her lyric work along with organic seed and
natural growth imagery. But it is not unique to her figurative repertoire. Sìleas na Caipeach
composes an entire ‘Laoidh an t-Soluis/Hymn on Light’ which draws an equivalence between the
luminescence of sun, moon, and stars (‘Tha grian is gealach is reulan/Anns na speuran os ar
cionn’) with that of the Catholic church (‘S e ‘n lanntair an creideamh naomh/Tha ‘n Eaglais
daonnan a leughadh/The lantern is the holy faith which the Church is ever expounding’)
(Ó Baoill 1972, pp. 88, 89). Interestingly, David Mullan notes in relation to Elizabeth Cairns,
daughter of a Covenanting family, that her ‘narrative is marked more than any other by a visual
element which caused some to express concern about the nature of her piety. Following “a sight
of God’s glory,” she shared her mind with an “experienced Christian” who told her that “sensible
manifestations were reserved for eternity (p. 47), that is, she was in danger of transgressing the
boundary between earth and heaven” (Mullan 2004, p. 184). The choice of expressive language
had consequences.
Despite (or perhaps because of this), a powerful language of emotion and affect runs through
this body of spiritual work, uniting some geographic and culturally distinctive traditions. Lilias
Dunbar on one occasion alludes to her communion with God as a form of inexpressible but pro-
found feeling, both in: ‘What I have felt of God in my soul, which I cannot express (and yet I
have felt but little) is an evident proof to me that he is hid from this world, and that it is but a
small part of him that is known even to his own’ (Mullan 2003, p. 179). Lilias Skene attains a
rare moment of spiritual peace in her lyric work when emotion is experienced as a form of
intuited and immediate knowledge:
Then did I know by feeling

What thow art oft reveeling
That all my loss was gain
By bitternes and pain
I had obtiened peace
AUL MS 2774, p. 50
This richly experiential discourse is manifest in a variety of ways in these women’s spiritual
journeys. A poem by Sìleas na Ceapaich culminates in an understanding of suffering and salva-
tion, giving formal praise to ‘Mhac Muire/the Son of Mary’ who inflicted pain upon her only to
reveal that the ‘Redeemer would come again to save me and give me life/Gus ab tigeadh mo
Shlànair/A rithisd ‘gam shàbhaladh beò’ (Mullan 2003, pp. 62, 63). The prefatory stanzas
describe an acute experience of bereavement – the double loss of both her husband and daugh-
ter. The final salvific moment only comes at the end of a raw, intimate portrait of grief that
recognises loss as the perpetual awareness that small rituals of togetherness (marital and familial)
will never come again:
‘S mór mo mhulad ‘s mi ‘m ònar,

‘S mi ‘m shuidhe ann an seòmar gun luaidh,
Is nach faic mi tighinn dachaidh
Fear cumail mo chleachdaidh a suas,
Fear a dh’fhadadh mo theine...
Great is my sadness as I sit alone unnoticed in a room, without the prospect of seeing, on his way
home, the one who maintained my normal life; the one who would light my fire…
(Ó Baoill 1972, pp. 58, 59 (ll.1–ll.5)).26
The range of Sìleas’s extraordinary powerful poetry on death might be seen as a kind of c ollective ars
moriendi: teaching the living to meditate on death, rather than preparing the dying for death, except
that through the interstices of spiritual reflection raw tender moments of experience and remem-
brance surface (‘S ann ri d’ ghnùis a dhèanainn faoilte-/Sùil chorrach ghorm, gruaidh mar chaorunn/I
used to rejoice in your face – blue rolling eye, cheeks like the rowan’(Ó Baoill 1972, pp. 64, 65).
The particularities of spiritual and emotional experience are often chronicled in fastidious
detail in other examples of female religious writing. Elizabeth Blackadder (1659/1660–1732),
recounting a moment of transformation in which the physical and spiritual realms become vividly
aligned: ‘The summer after this was the sacrament to be given at Lasswade, to which I went, but
when I was there, on the Saturday night found myself under prevailing deadness and carnality so
that I was most unfit to approach that holy table. I went alone into the wood, and being in some
measure sensible of my very unsuitable frame and want of preparation for the great gospel
feast, I was in deep soul-perplexity, but O how surprisingly was I prevented by a kind visit from
heaven so that I am sure I had cause to say, “It is the voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh skip-
ping over the mountains and leaping over the hills.” And I believe he never leapt over higher hills.
I was so much ravished with his love that I scarce knew where I was’ (Mullan 2003, p. 391). This
excerpt from Blackadder’s memoir effects a swift transition from a condition of spiritual exile to
one of spiritual bliss, realised through the discourse of affective piety.
This is a deep vein which runs through the work of almost all these religious writers, both in
prose and poetry, and despite different faith denominations. Largely medieval in inheritance, the
discourse of spousal mysticism unites the writer/speaker with the divine in using a language of
embodiment and metaphor drawn from a more familiar register of erotic love. This sacralisation
of love provides some of the most powerful and affecting moments of these women’s spiritual
experiences. Lilias Dunbar declares that, ‘my soul hath fallen in love with him [the Messiah], and
I would have others do so likewise’, interestingly deflecting that tender recognition outwards
into shared affect (Mullan 2003, p. 157). Melville’s dreamer encounters ‘ane Angell bricht . . ./
With luifing luiks’ who reveals themselves as ‘thy spous that brings thee store of grace;/[. . .]I
am thy luif quhom thy wald faine embrace’.27 The apprehension of the divine is portrayed in
sensual, tangible terms; a rich somatic experiencing described in metaphors of absorption and
repletion (‘I am full and abound’) (Mullan 2003, p. 178). At the same time, this intensely sen-
sory relationship may be inverted: the withdrawal of divine love felt as visceral abandonment or
inflicted as bodily punishment. This is the case in Mary’s spiritual poetry which pleads for the
violent expiation of her sinfulness; and in Melville’s and Skene’s poetry where physical wounding
and violence is imagined as a means of purgation. These are raw and disturbing moments,
inflected by our awareness of gendered dynamics (though it is a moot point the extent to which
these women perceive themselves as gendered beings in relation to the divine in these moments).
But there are instances of other affective relationships and bonds in this work: identification with
other spiritual figures is found (in particular, the figures of Mary Magdalene and Job); and inti-
macy is imagined in other relational ways (Elizabeth Blackadder alludes to her ‘mercifull Lord’
as ‘a most affectionate, kind, sympathising parent’) (Mullan 2003, p. 390).
This essay has sought to illuminate the richness and diversity of women’s creative expression
in early modern Scotland. It has taken a holistic approach to a wide generic range of texts from
different cultural and linguistic contexts in order to discern threads of commonality as well as
interesting juxtapositions. A great deal of archival and interpretative work still needs to be done
on individual writers, as well as further exploration of this literature within international,
national, and archipelagic frameworks (Prescott 2022). If cultural and critical narratives of
Scottish literature tend to fasten on questions of identity, then this body of work offers some
compelling intersectional identities. It suggests how early modern Scottish women saw literary
composition (written and oral) as a means of both asserting and questioning the contours of
political, regional, and religious affiliations. It is striking, too, for the depth of relational and
emotional perspectives which it portrays. Women speak, often in complex and nuanced ways,
from the positions of lover, mother, daughter, friend, and in the roles of elegist, panegyrist,
prophet, preacher, translator, compiler. They do so often from a position of cultural marginality
(‘neither in nor out’, to use Colm Ó Baoill’s phrase) which can be precarious but also empower-
ing. It is a body of work, this essay suggests, which is often both expressively and emotionally
powerful, making for a combination of artistry and affect perhaps best summed up in Katherine
Hamilton’s allusion to ‘the thoughts of the imagination of my heart’ (Mullan 2003, p. 371).
Notes
1 Aberdeen University Library [AUL], William as ‘self-consciously meta-textual’ and inter-related to

Walker Papers, MS 2774, p. 39 [dated 1674]. All ‘visual material’ (p. 810).
extracts from Skene’s poetry are based on this text. 12 See Ziegler 2000; Scott-Elliot and Yeo 1990.
For a fuller account of Skene’s surviving corpus and 13 See Gilbert 2012; Brown 1997; Petrie 1997;
its complex textual history, see DesBrisay 2004. Stevenson 2012 (pp. 360–364).
2 On Skene’s poetry, see DesBrisay and Potter 2020; 14 See Dunnigan 1997 (pp. 15–17); van
Dunnigan 2024. Heijnsbergen 2002.
3 For early survey work in the field, see Dunnigan 1997; 15 NLS Wodrow Quarto XXXI, ff. 211–12.
Giles 2004; Frater 1997. For more recent cultural 16 cf. also Larouche 2005; Reid Baxter 2017.
and textual studies, see Stevenson 2012; Reid 17 See Dunnigan 2003.
Baxter 2017; Ross 2015; Verweij 2016 and 2022. 18 For example, ‘Laoidh Mhoire Mhaighdean / Hymn to
4 See Reid Baxter 2010 (Introduction) for a printing the Virgin Mary’, in Ó Baoill 1972 (pp. 94–101).
history; also Stevenson, 2012 (pp. 335–345) for an See also Sumner 2012, p. 305.
interesting discussion of print culture in early modern 19 See Ewan et al. 2018, p. 272; Wodrow Quarto xxvii,
Scotland. ff.9v-28, ‘To the Right Honourable the Countess off
5 See further Dunnigan 2004b. Caithness’); Stevenson 2012, pp. 336, 337.
6 See further Mullan 2003 (‘Introduction’, pp. 1–22). 20 See Verweij 2016, pp. 84–7.
7 This is the first overt religious reference in the poem: 21 See Dunnigan 2004b.
‘S Dia thoirt rathad ga ionnsaigh fhèin duit / may 22 It is interesting to note that Lilias Skene also wrote ‘a
God grant you a pathway to Himself’ (Ó Baoill 2009, series of warmly-received evangelising letters to the
pp. 70, 71). The poet was born on the island of Mull, Princess Elizabeth of the Rhine, cousin to the Stewart
c.1660. kings, but these have not survived or remain to be
8 See further, for example, Mary Burke 2000; found’ (DesBrisay 2004, p. 162).
Smith 2005 and 2012. 23 See Martin 2015; Martin 2013.
9 See Frater 1997 (p. 1. On Gaelic women’s elegy in 24 See Martin 2015; Chowdhury 2013; Newlyn 2004.
general, see Frater 1997; Frater and Byrne 2012; 25 Detectioun of the Duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes
Martin and Mathis 2018. ([London]: John Day, [1571]), sonnet 7, ll. 9–13.
10 See Trill 2004. 26 This poem also forms a poignant contrast with the
11 See further Hunter 2022; Frye 2011; Dunnigan 1997. poem to her daughter while still alive, a tender
Also Wingfield 2021 on the notion of Mary’s poetry record of their relationship.
27 he Poems of Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross. Unpublished Reid Baxter pp. 75; 77 (ll.92–3; ll. 130; 132). The
work from manuscript with ‘Ane Godlie Dreame’ text is based on the Edinburgh edition published by
(Edinburgh: Solsequium, 2010), edited by Jamie Robert Charteris in 1603.
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33
Robert Burns and the 18th Century
Vernacular Revival
Steve Newman
Department of English, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA
In a letter to his friend Alexander Cunningham dated March 3, 1794, Robert Burns asks for help
in designing a seal to mark his new eminence, though he waggishly acknowledges that he ‘does not
know [if] my name is matriculated, as the Heralds call it’ (Burns 1985, p. 285).1 In so doing offers
a sort of metonymy of the Scots Vernacular Revival, which specializes in the knowing and even false
modesty of the comprehensive miniature as its practitioners often disavow and make claims for the
value of writing in Scots. Having positioned himself, however tongue-in-cheek, as the nation’s
bard, he describes his coat of ‘ARMS.’ One of its mottos, ‘Wood-notes wild,’ from Milton’s L’Allegro
characterizing Shakespeare, gives Burns a canonical two-fer that allies him with the quintessence of
English literature so-called. This reminds us that however focused the Revival is on Scotland, it
frequently (if suspiciously) casts an eye across the Tweed and its concentration of political, eco-
nomic, and cultural capital. ‘Wood-notes wild’ also acknowledges Burns’s image as ‘the Heaven-
taught ploughman,’ notoriously bequeathed to him by Henry Mackenzie in his Lounger review of
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and which he happily exploits to underscore his native
genius while cannily underplaying for the literati his deep and wide reading. This meshes with the
second motto, ‘Better a wee bush than nae bield,’ which brings him back to the homely Scots essen-
tial both to his ‘heav’n-taught’ reputation and his actual accomplishment.2 The bush in question is
a holly, which furnishes the bays for the humble Scottish laureate in The Vision, a poem that itself
constructs a comprehensive miniature in its bid to justify Burns’s poetic vocation in Scots.
It is fitting that a version of the proverb Burns cites is collected by Allan Ramsay in his 1737
compendium.3 For Ramsay, as Burns acknowledges, is an essential precursor to his own work as
a Scots poet, and, more particularly, the iconography of Scots pastoral. Here, that iconography is
mediated by David Allan, who provided the celebrated engravings for the deluxe edition of

The Gentle Shepherd published by Foulis in 1788. Explaining to Cunningham what he means by
the ‘Shepherds pipe and crook’ he wants as part of his crest, he ‘do[es] not mean the nonsense of
Painters of Arcadia; but a Stock-and-horn, and a Club; such as you see at the head of Allan
Ramsay, in Allan’s quarto Edition of the Gentle Shepherd’ (Burns 1985, p. 285). For Burns,
Allan is the proper antidote to the ‘nonsense’ of an Arcadian pastoral unmoored from any specific
time and place. This is in keeping with the reputation of The Gentle Shepherd for providing in its
diction and its representation of rural Scotland a locally grounded alternative to the idealizations
of classical pastoral.4
This letter, to which we will return at the end, thus sketches many of the key elements of the
Vernacular Revival. If in the Anglocentric views prevailing post-Union, Scots is suited only to
the low, the humorous, and the local, the authors responsible for the Revival elevate the value of
that terrain while also contesting Enlightenment dicta around progress and politeness that seek
to restrict Scots to it. Yet, as has been recently argued by Liam McIlvanney (2005) and David
Shuttleton (2013), the relationship between Revival and Enlightenment is one not of simple
opposition but rather of ‘interaction and intersection.’ This is true not only because the best-
known figures in the Revival – Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns – engage with the Enlightenment
in complex ways but also because a broader sense of the Revival reveals a range of authors whose
social positions and individual views pull their writing in various directions.
Ramsay’s Founding Vision
To understand how the Vernacular Revival unfolds the way it does, we need to dig a bit more
deeply into Ramsay’s work and its contexts. When Ramsay begins publishing poetry in the
1710s, work in Scots was hardly unknown: Watson’s A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots
Poems Both Ancient and Modern (1706, 1709, 1711) had recently been published; there was also
the 1710 edition of The Aeneid done into Scots by Gavin Douglas, edited and published by
Thomas Ruddiman, who would become Ramsay’s publisher. As the ‘modern’ in Watson’s collec-
tion indicates, Scots was not limited to the past of Dunbar, Douglas, and Drummond of
Hawthornden; there were living poets who wrote in the vernacular, like William Hamilton of
Gilbertfield. But, as the piece by Hamilton suggests – an elegy to Bonny Heck, a greyhound
hanged for being too slow -Scots, when Ramsay arrives on the scene, is as a living poetic l anguage
largely confined to the jokey subgenres of mock elegy, or to the simple, even simpleminded,
robust and carnal world of pastoral as we find it in ‘Cold and Raw,’ ‘The Last Time I Came O’er
The Moor’ and similar Scots songs by Thomas D’Urfey and other English songwriters, though
actual Scots vernacular is very sparse in them (D’Urfey 1684, pp. 14–16). Here, while we may
have a certain realism in terms of earthy attitudes and actions, there is nothing in these poems
recognisably grounded in Scotland.
Ramsay’s earliest work in Scots deals in these two subgenres, both making their earliest
surviving appearances in print in 1718. There is the trio of mock elegies to Maggy Johnston
(1718b), a brewer of ale; John Cowper, a tight-fisted and censorious Kirk-Treasurer; and Lucky
Wood, an alehouse-keeper. There is also Scots Songs, a slim gathering mostly of refined English
lyrics, most of which refer to Scots tunes in their titles: ‘The Lass of Peattie’s Mill,’ ‘Auld Lang
Syne,’ ‘The Lass of Livingston’ and ‘Peggy I Must Love Thee.’ But in that same year Ramsay
also indicates that his ambitions for his own poetry and for Scotland extend beyond these gen-
res, projecting an urbane but also historically grounded vision of the nation. As Murray Pittock
(2007) has shown, he aims for a ‘decolonisation of genre.’ He publishes Tartana (1718d), a
Robert Burns and the 18th Century Vernacular Revival 421
substantial poem praising traditional Scottish dress; ‘Edinburgh’s Address to the Country’
(1718a), attesting to the capital city’s many attractions; and ‘The Scriblers Lash’d’ (1718c), a
Popeian critique of the Edinburgh equivalent of Grub Street hacks, setting himself above the
more debased precincts of an emergent print culture. These poems are almost entirely in
English – the rare bits of Scots, like ‘dings’ in ‘Edinburgh’s Address’ (l.22), seem more like an
inattentive slip into the vernacular than a conscious move (Ramsay 2023a, vol. 1, p. 87).5
However, in 1718 he also published in multiple editions of his redaction of and additions to
Christ’s Kirk on the Green. Attributed variously to James I and V (Ramsay assigns it alternately
to both in separate editions published in 1718), it tells of a fracas at a county fair. Although the
poem may tie Scots to burlesque, it also points to its durability and its availability for modern
poets to try their hand at updating it, as Ramsay adds two cantos to it.
But it is in Ramsay’s Poems in 1721 that we can see the true scope of his ambition for Scots
and Scottish poetry.6 In the preface, he defends himself against ‘Pedants’ who would ‘confine
Learning to the critical Understanding of the dead Languages, while they are ignorant of the
Beauties of their Mother Tongue’ (Ramsay 2023a, vol. 1, p. 34). After thanking his sophisti-
cated friends for reassuring him that his ‘small Knowledge of the dead or foreign languages is
nothing to my Disadvantage’ and ‘the Ladies’ for singing and reading his work, he owns that he
has ‘express[ed] my Thought in my native Dialect’ (Ramsay 2023a, vol. 1, p. 35). The virtue of
Scots extends beyond its familiarity; where other languages sound rough and suffer from ‘scanty’
lexicons, Scots is ‘liquid and sonorous, and much fuller than the English, of which we are Masters,
by being taught it in our Schools, and daily reading it’ (Ramsay 2023a, vol. 1, p. 35.). After
citing the example of Scots and English words for ‘empty,’ an interesting choice after lauding the
fullness of Scots, Ramsay cites an English authority, George Sewell, who in the preface to
Ramsay’s pastoral ‘Patie and Roger’ praises Ramsay’s ‘Scotticisms, which perhaps may offend some
over-nice Ear’ for ‘giv[ing] new Life and Grace to the Poetry, and become their Places as well as
the Doric Dialect of Theocritus’ (Ramsay 1720, p. vi). By drawing on Sewell, Ramsay not only
situates Scots in prestigious classical territory, with Scots made analogous to the energetic sim-
plicity of the Doric. It also reminds the reader that he seeks an audience in England, just as ‘Patie
and Roger’ includes dedicatory verses to and an English translation by Josiah Burchett (1720),
former M. P., longtime admiralty official, and naval historian.
The value he attributes to Scots is also reflected in the range of poems he writes in his ‘native
Dialect.’ The volume concludes with an index classifying the poems into the serious, comic,
satiric, pastoral, lyric, epistolary, and epigrammatical. But his commitment to Scots and his
inventiveness is perhaps most evident in his epistolary poems, especially his multiple exchanges
with another Scots poet, Hamilton of Gilbertfield, in ‘Standart Habby,’ which gets its stanzaic
name from Ramsay’s first reply (Ramsay 2023a, vol. 1, pp. 135–37, l.36). In these poems,
Ramsay demonstrates how Scots can serve as a language of sociability that can bind together a
literary community seeking its rightful place in British and European letters. In his second and
third replies, he makes good on his claim in the preface about the expressiveness of Scots. In the
Preface, he cites ‘toom,’ a synonym for ‘empty,’ as an example of the greater expressive range
Scots allows; in these replies, he uses ‘toom’ as a verb for sociable drinking: ‘Lang may ye help to
toom a Barrel’ (Ramsay 2023a, vol. 1, p. 35, l.38); ‘Then left about the bumper whirl / And toom
the Horn.’ (Ramsay 2023a, vol. 1., p. 145, ll.39–40). ‘Toom’ is thus one of many signs of a
national culture that Ramsay helps to construct.
After 1721, Ramsay’s ambitions for Scots poetry and Scottish culture increase as he launches
three large-scale projects that expand and clarify the lineaments of his vision: The Tea-Table
Miscellany (1723–1737), which collects and revises an array of Scots songs, as well as those from
the London theatre and other sources; The Ever Green, being a collection of Scots poems, wrote by the
ingenious before 1600 (1724); and his expansion of ‘Patie and Roger’ into The Gentle Shepherd, a
Scots Pastoral Comedy (1725). The Tea-Table Miscellany offers up a classificatory system, scanty but
suggestive, that indicates whether a song is newly made (if to an old tune), of unknown author-
ship, simply old, or old with additions (Ramsay 2023b, p. 25). Moreover, if the exchanges with
Hamilton root Scots poetry in a world of sociable masculinity, The Tea-Table Miscellany features
women, albeit as singers/fully-embodied vessels rather than authors, in its dedication to ‘ilka
lovely British lass’ – again, looking beyond the borders of Scotland – who set off the beauties of
the songs as they ‘Aris[e] saftly through your Throats’ (Ramsay 2023b, p. 33). In the Preface to
The Ever Green, Ramsay mounts a defense of national poetry without ‘foreign Embroidery,’ such
as modern ‘Makers of Pastorals’ do, although he acknowledges there will be a ‘class of Fops’ who
will refuse to honor ‘the most elegant Thoughts in a Scots Dress.’ (Ramsay 1724, pp. vii, viii, xi).
In The Gentle Shepherd, as the title indicates, he offers a pastoral that is set in a Scottish milieu and
declares himself satisfied if his dedicatee, Susanna, Countess of Eglinton, finds that ‘the Shepherds
speak as they ought, and there are several natural Flowers that beautify the rural Wild’ (Ramsay
2022, p. 55).7
All of these projects shape the Vernacular Revival. The Tea-Table Miscellany goes through
many editions, and the songs it collects are circulated in countless volumes, helping to set the
parameters for the national song collections to follow, Scottish and otherwise, such as The Scots
Musical Museum or the various collections assembled by George Thomson.8 The Ever Green is not
as commercially successful but points the way for future work in recovering pre-1700 literature
in Scots, such as that by David Herd, even as later antiquarians, operating with other ideas of
authenticity, lament that it includes work of Ramsay’s own devising.9 Most influential is The
Gentle Shepherd: By Burns’s death in 1796, it had already gone through over 100 printings and
there are records of more than 200 performances in Edinburgh, London, the British provinces,
colonies, and the United States.10 It also generates its share of critical commentary. Days after its
publication, Ramsay’s patron and friend, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, praises it as at least the
equal of any pastoral before it, though he also criticizes Peggie for ‘speak[ing] and sing[ing] in a
fulsome dialect’ (quoted in I. Brown 1986, p. 40).
A sense of the shifting critical standards that Ramsay helped to pioneer can be seen in William
Shenstone’s interleaved copy of The Gentle Shepherd (1758). These annotations allow us to see how
the Scots Vernacular Revival fed into the broader Ballad Revival that emerges in the British Isles
and becomes a pan-European phenomenon and the even broader interest in vernacular languages
that Janet Sorensen (2017) has recently illuminated. A key advisor to Thomas Percy in his
groundbreaking Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Shenstone must have spent a great many
hours annotating Ramsay’s play. He begins with ‘Some General Rules for Understanding the
Scotch Language.’ Building on Ramsay’s own prefatory remarks in the glossary for 1721 Poems,
he goes through each letter of the alphabet, noting any differences in Scots usage. Shenstone does
not restrict himself to the meanings of single words. To explain ‘graith’ in ‘freath the graith’
(I.2.382), he cites an Act of Parliament from 1429, which he then glosses further (p. 22).11 In
addition, his glosses situate Scots as part of a broader European linguistic heritage ranging from
Ancient Greek to Anglo-Saxon to Teutonic to French and as the repository of a shared English
heritage dating back to Chaucer and before, though it does not reduce it to merely antiquarian
interest.
It is important, however, not to overstate the acceptance of Scots, even among cultural author-
ities in Scotland. In the most influential text on rhetoric from its publication until well into the
nineteenth century, Hugh Blair praises the play but laments: ‘It is a great disadvantage to this
beautiful Poem, that it is written in the old rustic dialect of Scotland, which, in a short time, will
probably be entirely obsolete, and not intelligible’ (Blair 1783, p. 150). Adam Smith, in remarks
reported after his death, accused Ramsay of failing in ‘the duty of a poet to write like a gentle-
man’ (Amicus 1791, p. 6). This is in keeping with the oft-cited discouragement of ‘Scotticisms’
by David Hume, Sir John Sinclair, and other Enlightenment literati.12 Even at the end of the
century, Burns needs to lobby George Thomson, the editor of A Select Collection of Scottish Airs for
the right to ‘at least a sprinkling of our native tongue’ (Burns 1985, p. 149).13
‘Bield’ and ‘Caller’: Keywords from Ramsay to Nairne
The trajectory of the Revival that Ramsay did so much to initiate can be tracked by briefly con-
sidering a word Burns uses in the proverb to be inscribed into his projected coat of arms – ‘bield.’
Also spelled ‘beild,’ Ramsay defines it as ‘a shelter’ in his 1721 glossary (Ramsay 2022, p. 563).
This meaning is expanded upon by Jamieson in his Etymological Dictionary (1808), which monu-
mentalizes the language at the core of the Revival. Taking issue with Ruddiman, who in the first
modern glossary of Scots appended to his edition of The Aeneid argues that its root is in ‘build-
ing,’ Jamieson claims that it is more plausible that the English word is derived from ‘bield,’
citing Blind Harry’s Wallace as evidence, as well as finding a shared origin in Icelandic and
Swedish Gothic (Jamieson 1808, vol. 1, pp. 158, 159).
‘Bield’ crops up repeatedly in Ramsay’s work, including in the very first line of The Gentle
Shepherd – ‘Beneath the South-side of a Craigy Beild.’ In an alteration in the second edition
(Ramsay 1726, p. 27), the loyal old nurse, Mause, decries that she is reputed to be a witch
because she is old, impoverished, and lives in a ‘lanely Beild’ (II.2.610–11), a passage later cited
in an appendix on witchcraft in John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities (Brand &
Bourne 1777, p. 323n.). But the most interesting example comes in another change to the sec-
ond edition. There, Sir William Worthy, the laird who had returned after the Restoration to
reclaim his own and to reveal the title character’s gentle pedigree, surveyed his estate and laments
‘[h]ow do those ample Walls to Ruin yield, / Where Peach and Nect’rine Branches found a
Beild.’ (Ramsay 1726, p. 35). This is the only Scots word that appears in the soliloquy that con-
stitutes this scene, and one of the only vernacular words Sir William uses, his ‘English’ English
a sign of his high status. Here, ‘bield’ acts as a figure of a gracious Scottish past that Sir William
explicitly says will be restored (Ramsay 1726, p. 85), a figure for Ramsay’s own aspirations for
Scottish literature by way of Scots. If Ramsay embraces Enlightenment improvement, he imagi-
nes it happening in and through Scots.
‘Bield’ makes many appearances in Scottish texts over the next century, from Douglas’ Aeneid
(Virgil 1710, p. 136) to Alexander Ross’ The Fortunate Shepherdess (Ross 1768, p. 27) to Anne
Grant’s ‘Nilecrankie,’ which sets ‘Killiecrankie,’ a tune commemorating a Jacobite victory, to
new lyrics recounting the imperial struggle for Egypt between the vaunting French and the
victorious English (Thomson 1802, 3: 127). Further resonances of ‘bield’ can be detected in the
work of the poet between Ramsay and Burns who did the most to expand the remit of Scots –
Robert Fergusson. He uses it in his first published Scots poem, ‘The Daft Days.’ In this paean in
Standard Habbie to Edinburgh’s comforts in the midst of winter, he declares: ‘Auld Reekie!
Thou’rt the canty hole, / A bield for mony caldrife soul’ (Fergusson 1956, p. 33, ll. 19–20). But
elsewhere in his work, the word sounds a characteristically ironic and elegiac note. For instance,
in ‘On Seeing a Butterfly in the Street,’ which anticipates Burns’s ‘To a Mouse’ and other animal
poems that expose the follies of so-called civilization, the butterfly in this unusual context is
likened to the dandyish professionals of Edinburgh who decorate their black dress with
‘PEACOCKS feathers,’ all frantically seeking a ‘lyther bield’ when a shower threatens
(Fergusson 1956, p. 155, ll. 26, 34). Though this carries with it the satiric echo of Swift’s
‘Description of a City Shower,’ a more poignant note comes in as the speaker observes that these
delicate creatures are unprepared for the ‘pining woes’ that he has by implication suffered
(Fergusson 1956, p. 155, l. 37). In the end, Edinburgh offers no shelter; the butterfly has chosen
poorly in trading the safety and beauties of the country for an urban landscape, where envious
Nany will pull its wings off for rivaling her fashion, violently turning it back into a worm
(Fergusson 1956, p. 156, ll. 49–58). The human world is similarly corrupt in ‘Ode to the
Gowdspink.’ The bird’s bright plumage makes it the target of man’s acquisitiveness, and, caged,
he can only lament that he is now ‘steekit…[f]rae ilka fav’rite houff and bield’ (Fergusson 1956,
p. 177, ll. 35–36). He is thus emblematic of the dangers posed to ‘liberty’ by material plenty;
while the gowdspink may now be well-fed, he has lost his freedom.
The national context that informs this ode is made explicit in ‘The Ghaists: A Kirk-Yard
Eclogue,’ where ‘bield’ helps paint a picture of a Scotland fallen from past glories. Ironizing the
pastoral eclogue, it moves the scene from the countryside to Greyfriars Kirk and from dawn or
sunset to night. There, the shepherds lamenting their unrequited love typical of the eclogue are
replaced by the shades of George Heriot and George Watson decrying the Mortmain Bill, which
Scots feared would discourage charitable donations because it allowed trustees to invest their
endowments into government funds and at rates that might do much for a Westminster-
dominated government but little for the Scottish economy. This, as Heriot observes, is sympto-
matic of a broader collusion between money-grubbing Scots happy to ‘sell their country’ and an
Anglocentric state eager to take them up on it. While these ghosts may seek to ‘tak bield’ in the
kirk-yard (Fergusson 1956, p. 141, l. 16), there is no secure shelter from the skaith Scotland suf-
fers from English aggression and the complicity of the Scots who rule over the national institu-
tions that remain. In both ‘Ode to a Gowdspink’ and ‘The Ghaists,’ then, we see Fergusson
characteristically using Scots to raise sharp questions about the gains attributed to the Union and
the Enlightenment.
If ‘bield’ spurs us to consider the Revival as a phenomenon grounded (perhaps tenuously) in
Scotland, another word that Fergusson uses more frequently – ‘caller’ – gives us a way to see the
complexity of the relationship between Scots and Scottish literature. ‘Caller’ (one of many spell-
ings) means not only literally ‘cool’ – to be distinguished, Jamieson says, from ‘cold’
(Jamieson 1808, vol. 1, p. 249) – and ‘refreshing’ but also ‘fresh’ when advertising fish, vegeta-
bles, and other goods. It thus calls attention at once to the virtues of the countryside and, if
attached to goods for sale, to the mutual dependence of city and country (or, as we will see, sea-
side), and the goods or evils that may come from commerce.
It appears in its less-commercial meaning in an eclogue Fergusson publishes in The Weekly
Magazine to commemorate the death of ‘Dr. William Wilkie, late Professor of Natural Philosophy
in the University of St. Andrews,’ where Geordie praises his transformation of an unpromising
landscape of ‘thirstles’ and ‘dockans’ to a place where ‘thrivin hedges drink the caller dew’
(Fergusson 1956, p. 84). Here, Fergusson follows Ramsay in having Scottish shepherds lament
the death of a prominent figure, calling attention to the distance between the high reputation of
the departed and the humble situation of the shepherds and the Scots they use, with the Scottish
author knowingly mediating between them. But where Ramsay marks the passing of English
authors, like Addison and Matthew Prior, signaling his familiarity with elite English culture and
his ambition to be included in it, Fergusson memorializes a Scot. (His disgust for any who
truckle to such attitudes is clear from his scathing address to the principal and professors of his
alma mater, St. Andrews, for their obsequious reception of the notorious Scotophobe,
Dr. Johnson, in ‘To the Principal and Professors of the University of St Andrews, on their superb
treat to Dr Samuel Johnson’ (Fergusson 1956, pp. 182–184)). Indeed, Wilkie was known by
some as ‘the Scottish Homer’ for his epic The Epigoniad (1757), roundly abused by the London
press in part out of anti-Scottish prejudice but defended by David Hume and others, in part on
nationalist grounds (Lindfield-Ott 2018, p. 366). Fergusson attests to this as Geordie proclaims
that his ‘Sangs that for ay, on Caledonia’s strand, / Shall fit the foremost ‘mang her tunefu’ band’
(Fergusson 1956, p. 83).
But, as Fergusson’s use of ‘caller’ indicates, Wilkie is memorable for more than his poetic
accomplishments; he also outstrips ‘ilka shepherd swain’ in his skill in cultivating the ground.
This leads to his being called by those in the neighborhood ‘an uncanny wight’ who ‘had the
second sight,’ the subject of a tale told by ‘grannies spinnin at the ingle side’ (Fergusson 1956,
p. 85). He may be likened here to Ramsay’s Sir William Worthy, also credited with second sight
when he appears as a spae-man. But where Worthy’s foreknowledge is grounded in his authority
to own Patie as his heir, Wilkie’s authority stems from his (un)canny Enlightenment knowledge
of agricultural improvement – a practice Sir William also gestures at when he imagines restoring
his ruined estate in The Gentle Shepherd. In this way, Fergusson furthers Ramsay’s program of
localising and nationalising pastoral; Wilkie’s fame is likened to that of Virgil, ‘the Mantuan
swain’ (ibid.) in the poem’s concluding line, but this comparison with the most prestigious pas-
toralist from antiquity is made to honor a Scottish poet and agricultural improver in Scots –
again, the great in what is conventionally thought of as the small.
As we have already seen, Fergusson did not limit his use of Scots to rustic set-pieces for the
delectation of a more sophisticated audience. This is clear from a better-known instance where
he uses ‘caller,’ ‘Caller Oysters.’ Borrowing from the street cry announcing fresh oysters – though
it was typically shortened to ‘caller ou’ – Ramsay offers another paean in Standard Habbie to
their pleasures and virtues. It begins with an epigraph from John Phillips’ mock-Miltonic
‘Splendid Shilling,’ which not only signals Fergusson’s familiarity with the English tradition but
also situates the poem within the miniaturizing, great-in-small, high-in-low gesture we have
seen repeatedly. It ends with a promise that those unable to stand ‘[w]han twice you’ve toom’d
the big ars’d bicker’ will be able to hold their drink as well as ‘greedy priest or drouthy vicar’ if
they mix ‘caller oysters wi’ [their] liquor’ (Fergusson 1956, p. 68). Looking back to ‘toom,’
Ramsay’s paradoxical word for ‘empty’ that illustrates the fullness of Scots, and looking forward
to Burns’s case for Scottish cuisine in ‘To a Haggis,’ Fergusson paints a convivial picture of the
nation that draws together everyone willing to acknowledge their taste for oysters, its secular
orientation indicated by the jest at the hypocrisy of the clergy, clinched by the pairing of ‘liquor’
and ‘vicar.’ Like the oysters from the Firth of Forth, Scots poetry in Fergusson’s hands is fresh,
locally sourced, and bracing.14
This position is amplified and subtilized in a song by Carolina Oliphant (Baroness Nairne),
‘Caller Herrin’’. First published in The Scottish Minstrel (1821–1824), it may date from the pub-
lication of Nathaniel Gow’s famous air of the same name (1798–1799), reminding us of the
intimate relationship between music and text in the Vernacular Revival. Unlike Fergusson’s
poem, this one has as its centre not a consumer but a seller and someone intimately familiar with
the dangerous labor required to get these ‘caller’ delicacies to market. Set to Gow’s stately and
mournful tune, which she refers to in the text (‘Gow has set you a’ a singin’ (Smith (1824),
p. 19)), the speaker riffs off of her cry for custom by pointing out to her hearers that while they
were resting on their ‘pillows,’ they were not dreaming of ‘our puir fellows’ risking their lives
amidst the ‘billows’ in order to ‘fill the willows,’ the baskets holding the fish (Smith (1824),
p. 18). These quadruple rhymes – kin to Standard Habbie – display the singer’s wit even as the
jump of an octave ratchets up its emotional urgency. In a turn off of the ‘ca’ in ‘caller,’ she cut-
tingly adds that although their supposedly refined consumers may ‘ca them vulgar faring /
Wives and mithers, maist despairing / Ca’ them lives o’ men,’ (Smith (1824), p. 19) pointing to
both their economic dependence on these fish and the risks they take to secure them.
Given Nairne’s brilliant intervention into national identity, class, and gender, it is not sur-
prising that the song has attracted much critical attention of late. Carol McGuirk’s reads it as a
rebuke to ‘Whiggish displays of self- important pomp’ (McGuirk 2007, p. 275); George
S. Christian as materializing ‘a national community’ in ‘communal solidarity against bourgeois
and ‘foreign’ products, manners, and ideologies’ (Christian 2018, p. 687); and Anne McKee
Stapleton as contrasting with ‘negative stereotypes of Scottish fisherwomen’ in Scott, Tannahill,
and Reade and ‘empowering the voices of these Scottish working-class women’ (Stapleton 2020,
p. 483). Seen within the larger sweep of the Vernacular Revival, ‘Caller Herrin” points to the
persistent and insistent use of ‘low’ subjects and genres as figures for the nation. The song does
not look to powerful figures like Henry Dundas, though there are poems of this type, or institu-
tions like the Kirk, the courts, or the universities; those higher in the status hierarchy are objects
of critique. This is not an ode or some other conventionally high form; it is a Street Cry in Scots
set to a popular tune, written by a woman who does not sign her name.
‘Caller’ appears only twice in Burns. In ‘Bess and Her Spinning Wheel’ (Burns 2014b, p. 438)
Burns imagines a country girl in a situation very unlike the scarcity and danger of ‘Caller Herrin’.
She delights in her weaving – ‘O leeze me on my spinning-wheel’ (l.1) – the self-sufficiency it
brings matching the quiet beauties of her pastoral situation, where the ‘little fishes caller rest’
and ‘[t]he sun blinks linkly in the biel’ (ll.14–15), as our other keyword also makes an appear-
ance.15 We may be predisposed to doubt this scene of pastoral equipoise, with its idealization of
humble life, its hand tipped by the speaker referring to herself in the third person. But in its
attention to the material world of spinning, buying, and selling, and in its affectionate represen-
tation of a Scottish natural world of cushats, lintwhites, and pairtricks, along with its critique of
‘the great,’ there is an ecological specificity and solidity, however situated beyond the depriva-
tions of rural life that Burns knew all too well as he sought to make his way as a ploughman and
a poet before landing a punishing job in the Excise.
Conflict is more evident in the other appearance of ‘caller’ in Burns. The Holy Fair begins:
Upon a simmer Sunday morn,

When Nature’s face is fair,
I walked forth to view the corn,
An’ snuff the callor air:
(Burns 1968, p. 129; ll.1–4)
Here, ending with an echo of a phrase in the first speech from The Gentle Shepherd, Burns sets off
on his brilliant updating of the carnivalesque Scots tradition of ‘Christ’s Kirk on the Green,’
which he would have known from Ramsay’s The Ever Green or his first volume of Poems, and from
Fergusson’s experiments in the form in Leith Races and Hallow Fair. By going from ‘Hallow’ to
‘Holy,’ Burns grafts religious hypocrisy to the carnal joys of the fair; here, ‘callor’ is a figure not
only for the invigorating air of nature but also the freshening breeze of Burns’s satire. But it is
not as simple as an easy opposition between ‘fair’ Nature and the holy hypocrisies of the annual
Mauchline Communion. We can see some of the complexities in play when one particular
preacher’s ‘harangues’ fall on hostile ears: ‘His English style, an’ gesture fine,’ and his reliance on
‘moral pow’rs an’ reason’ run afoul of Auld Licht justification by faith (Burns 1968, p. 133, ll.
118–35). This is underscored by the ‘antidote’ in the next stanza, when the next preacher drives
out ‘Common-Sense’ (Burns 1968, pp. 133–134, ll.136–142). Here, it would seem, the moder-
ate voice of Enlightenment has been unjustly driven out by his fanatical antagonists. Yet there is
a significant difference between the ‘callor air’ of Burns’s perspective and the seeming echo in the
‘cauld harangues’ of Smith’s preaching. For in its reasonable politeness, revealingly described as
‘English style,’ it lacks the sap, the native Scottish energy common both to Auld Licht preach-
ing, however hypocritical and destructive, and the fleshly pursuits of those gathered here. And,
of course, it lacks the energy of the verse itself, which revels in an old Scots form designed to
represent revelry and in its thick Scots lexicon, as we can see from the concluding stanza:
How monie hearts this day converts,

O’ Sinners and o’ Lasses!
Their hearts o’ stane, gin night are gane
As saft as ony flesh is.
There’s some are fou o’ love divine;
There’s some are fou o’ brandy;
An’ monie jobs that day begin,
May end in Houghmagandie
Some ither day.
(Burns 1968, p. 137, ll.235–43)
The yoking together of ‘love divine’ and ‘brandy’ is a zeugma that would not be out of place in
Pope (‘When husbands or when lap-dogs breathe their last’). Here, however, it is used in an
unmistakably Scottish context, with the drunkenness of ‘fou’ adding to the sense of excess, as the
speaker looks forward from the Holy Fair to ‘[s]ome ither day,’ the mundane, workaday world
where the ineffably Scots word ‘Houghmagandie’ will win out over religious diktats, as it always
does. As Jeffrey Skoblow puts it, ‘Scots, fucking and song’ are Burns’s (Un)Holy Trinity
(Skoblow 2001, p. 170). As one of the most substantial poems in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish
Dialect (1786), ‘The Holy Fair’ gives some sense of how far he is willing to push the boundaries
of Scots poetry. Although, in a miniaturizing move we’ve seen repeatedly, he begins the Preface
to the Kilmarnock volume by disavowing his poems as ‘trifles’ (Burns 2014a, p. 172) although
he imagines a critic dismissing his ‘doggerel, Scotch rhymes’ (ibid), although he refuses the idea
that he would compare himself with ‘the genius of a Ramsay, or a poor, unfortunate Ferguson’
(Burns 2014a, p. 199), these bows to modesty belie the ambition that the poems themselves
illustrate.
A Trip to the Bield Inn
After sketching the seal in the letter to Cunningham with which we began, Burns returns to
vernacular song. George Thomson, who had apparently sent him a scolding letter, has re-ignited
Burns’s commitment to his song-collecting project. Burns then discloses ‘a plot which I have
been contriving; you and he shall, in the course of this Summer, meet me half-way; that is, at the
Bield Inn; and there we will pour out a Drink Offering before the L–d, and enter into a solemn
League and Covenant, never to be broken nor forgotten’ (Burns 1985, p. 286). He ends the letter
with lines from ‘Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut,’ that commits the three to a prodigious drinking
bout. It’s unknown if this wished-for meeting ever occurred; it does not seem like it would have
suited Thomson. However, in Burns’s imagining he parodically displaces the Kirk’s ‘solemn
League and Covenant’ with a happy and raucous gathering of friends, its lineaments described by
a vernacular song. A concluding snapshot, then, of the Vernacular Revival as imagined by Burns
and his predecessors – an Enlightenment questioning of inherited institutions, especially reli-
gious ones, succeeded by indigenous forms of sociability in a companionable and familiar Scots,
the ‘bield’ at the heart of the endeavor.
Notes
1 Thanks to Prof Kirsteen McCue for her help in 10 A compendium of performances of The Gentle Shepherd
revising this essay. can be found here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/
2 See McGuirk 2014: pp.187–88 and Leask 2010: critical/research/researchcentresandnetworks/
pp.44-45 for readings of this letter. robertburnsstudies/edinburghenlightenment/
3 ‘A wee Bush is better than nae Bield,’ in reception/performances.
Ramsay 1737: p.9. 11 For a parallel reading of Shenstone’s annotations,
4 On Ramsay’s pastoral realism, see Newman 2002; Allan (2008); pp.120–21.
Pittock 2007; Leask 2010: pp.54–65. 12 Images and transcripts from these texts, including
5 On Ramsay’s poetry within the context of the Alexander Geddes’ defense of Scots, have been
Union, see Davis 2012. helpfully collected by the National Library of
6 For a strong reading of the 1721 Preface and more Scotland: https://digital.nls.uk/learning/scottish-
generally of the self- presentation of Ramsay, enlightenment/scotticisms/.
Fergusson, and Burns, see R. Brown 2019. 13 For an expert account of Burns’ dealings with Thomson,
7 The 1725 and 1729 versions of The Gentle Shepherd, see McCue, Introduction (2021), pp. xxv-lxiii.
along with collations with the manuscripts and the 14 See Simpson 2003: pp.116–18.
1726 and 1728 editions and the musical examples 15 A fuller account of ‘bield’ in Burns would also
Ramsay may have drawn on can be found in consider ‘To a Mountain Daisy,’ ‘A Scotch Bard
Ramsay 2022. Gone to the West Indies,’ and ‘O Wert Thou in the
8 For a broad view of national song during this era, Cauld Blast.’
including Scotland, see The Romantic National 16 The Edinburgh Almanack of 1799 records a Bield Inn
Song Network, https://rnsn.glasgow.ac.uk/. a bit over a mile outside of Edinburgh on the road to
9 On Ramsay’s antiquarianism, see Kinghorn 1970, Dumfries (113).
Pittock 2007, and Strabone 2018: pp.77–121.
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Further Reading
Andrews, C. (2004). Literary Nationalism and Eighteenth- Davis, L., Sorensen, J., and Duncan, I. (ed.) (2004).
Century Club Poetry. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism. Cambridge:
Carruthers, G. and Black, R. (2016). The eighteenth cen- Cambridge University Press.
tury. In: The International Companion to Scottish Poetry MacLachlan, C. (2012). Scots poetry before Burns. In: The
(ed. C. Sassi), 54–64. Edinburgh: Association for Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 2:
Scottish Literary Studies. Enlightenment and Expansion 1707–1800 (ed. S. Brown
Crawford, T. (1979). Society and the Lyric: A Study of the and W. McDougall), 561–569. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Song Culture of Eighteenth-Century Scotland. Edinburgh: University Press.
Scottish Academic Press. Simpson, K. (1998). Poetic genre and national identity:
Daiches, D. (1964). The Paradox of Scottish Culture: Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns. Studies in Scottish
The Eighteenth-Century Experience. London: Oxford Literature 30: 31–42.
University Press.
34
Women’s Writing, 1700–1900
Ainsley McIntosh
School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
In Retrospect of a Long Life (1883), Samuel Carter Hall reflects that Jane and Anna Maria Porter
were ‘authors of many novels, which, though now forgotten, obtained when they were written–
the greater part of a century ago–more than renown–popularity of most extended order. The one
was born in 1776, the other in 1780’. Of the elder sister, he continues:
The “Scottish Chiefs” was Jane Porter’s most famous work. Who reads it now? Who knows even by
name “Thaddeus of Warsaw?” or who can talk about “The Pastor’s Fireside?” Yet seventy years ago
those works were of such account that the first Napoleon, on political grounds, paid Jane Porter the
high compliment of prohibiting the circulation of “Thaddeus of Warsaw” in France.
(Hall 1883, vol. 2, p. 144)
Hall conflates two anecdotes involving Porter and Napoleon. It was The Scottish Chiefs (1810)
which proved so popular that Napoleon had the novel proscribed, declaring it ‘dangerous to the
state’ on account of the struggle of its hero, William Wallace, against an oppressive tyrant
(Porter 1816, p. xii; Porter 1831, p. xxvi). Nonetheless, his point stands: by the late nineteenth
century, consequent to a collective act of literary amnesia, both Porters had faded into a state of
obscurity from which they would struggle to recover (and even then only partially so) for almost
a century to follow. Nor did their literary reputations and readership sink in isolation. For much
of the twentieth century, eighteenth and nineteenth century Scottish women’s writing was rele-
gated to a predominantly invisible, largely forgotten, and sadly neglected tradition. It remains
today under-represented in critical discourse, and largely absent from course reading lists and
booksellers’ shelves.
Throughout this period, however, a significant number of women within Scotland, and across
the Scottish diaspora, produced an astonishing body of writing in every form and genre available.

Women’s Writing, 1700–1900 433
They wrote privately and for a public readership, for pleasure and for profit. They penned letters,
journals, memoirs, household books, biographies, ballads, songs, plays, poetry, short sto-
ries, travel literature, children’s literature, and nature writing; and this list is by no means
exhaustive. They generated a wealth of critical reviews, sketches and essays, thereby contributing
materially to the periodical press and magazine culture. They played a crucial part in advancing
Scotland’s cultural and literary heritage as translators, editors, journalists, printers, publishers,
historians, and ethnographers. Moreover, they were key participants in the rise of the novel. In
short, the variety and volume of female-authored writing between 1700 and 1900 was as vast
and vibrant as the heterogeneous multitude of women engaged in its production. Such multifari-
ousness makes problematic any attempt to squeeze their stories into a homogeneous narrative
(nor would that be desirable, even).
The story of this increasingly vast outpouring sits within a larger tale of two centuries during
which Scotland was radically transformed through the powerful politico-cultural forces unleashed
by the Act of Union (1707), followed by four decades of Jacobite uprisings and subsequent
reprisals, the Enlightenment, Romantic and Victorian period. In a complex historiography, the
overarching narrative is one of improvement and, through forced and voluntary migration, mass
movement. In literary-historical terms, career-writing opportunities were significantly different
for women born after 1800 than those available a century earlier, with growing print possibilities
matched by a rapidly expanding readership at home and abroad.
Given this great mass of literary production, circulation, and consumption, the conspicuous
silence and absence of women’s voices and works from the period is perplexing. It has been
accounted for by a range of factors, many of which relate to materiality and circumstances of
production, including limited print runs produced specifically for subscription circulation,
anonymous and pseudonymous publication, and the ephemerality of the periodical press.
Undoubtedly, these conditions present a challenge to the preservation and attribution of women’s
writing. However, they are conditions that apply irrespective of gender. Of greater significance
to the subsequent erasure of this group was their dismissal by leading Modernist and Scottish
Renaissance figures, notably Virginia Woolf and Hugh MacDiarmid. Such disregard was in turn
aided by the vagaries of Victorian editors who, in bowdlerising the works of these women w riters,
obscured much of their original merit.
Since the 1970s, recovering this rich heritage has been ongoing in Scottish literary studies
(Craig 2007, p. 17). A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (Gifford and McMillan, 1997)
marked a watershed in this process. The group is equally well represented in The Edinburgh
Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing (Norquay, 2012).1 Important book-length studies have
emerged in the last decade, including Pam Perkins’ Women Writers and the Edinburgh
Enlightenment (2010), Clare Grogan’s Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton,
1756–1816 (2012), Andrew Monnickendam’s The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary
Relations Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, and Christian Johnstone (2013) and Juliet Shields’ Scottish
Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: the Romance of Everyday Life (2021a). The
Women’s Print History Project stands out amongst recent digital research tools. Meanwhile,
work continues on the monumental Duke-Edinburgh Edition of The Collected Letters of
Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Furthermore, recovery continues to give rise to path-
breaking developments in the field, such as the recent rediscovery by researchers at the
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) and Scotland’s Early Literature for
Children Initiative (SELCIE) of Scottish Victorian women’s writing, and their important, but
forgotten, role in the first Golden Age of children’s literature, 1865–1915 (Dunnigan and
Fang-Li 2019; Burke 2020). This has created exciting new avenues for critical enquiry
and paved the way for significant future projects.
Recovery, however, also raises questions of inclusion and exclusion; visibility and invisibility;
the extraordinary and ordinary. To borrow from Rivka Swenson, it ’reminds us implicitly of
ongoing problems, [...] gaps in the discourse, absences in the architecture’ (Swenson 2018).2
Consider, for example, an event hosted by Glasgow Women’s Library in 2021: ‘Women of Letters’
focussed on four ‘forgotten’ contemporaries of Walter Scott – Elizabeth Hamilton (1756–1816),
Mary Brunton (1778–1818), Susan Ferrier (1782–1854), and Catherine Sinclair (1800–1885) –
stressing the need to revisit their work and re-evaluate their worth.3 This suggests the ambiva-
lence that lingers around the literary reputation of even these better rehabilitated writers; they
are stuck in limbo, always arriving but never quite arrived.
And yet, these same writers were never entirely gone nor wholly overlooked. William St Clair
has demonstrated that Ferrier, for example, continued to be a bestselling author into mid-
Victorian era Britain: between 1831 and 1855, 4000 copies of her works were sold as part of the
Bentley’s Standard Novels edition (St Clair 2004; reprint 2007, p. 565). Circa 1850, John Gall
sculpted her death mask into a marble bust, now prominently displayed in the Scottish National
Portrait Gallery alongside other great writers of the age, including Burns and Scott. The late-
Victorian scholar John Hepburn Millar examines her work and worth in A Literary History of
Scotland (Millar 1903, pp. 539–548). She featured in literary surveys and criticism throughout
the twentieth century, often being singled out for full chapter coverage, and continues to attract
modest yet sustained scholarly interest (McIntosh 2012). She is the biographical subject of two
studies (Grant 1957; Cullinan 1984). Moreover, Marriage (1818) has the distinction of being in
print continuously since being repackaged as a paperback in 1986. This paradox of visibility and
invisibility, which sits at the heart of long nineteenth-century Scottish women’s writing studies,
is an issue of central interest to this chapter.
It is a paradox that raises pertinent questions: At what point does the status and reputation of
a female writer shift from fragility to incontestability? How do we decide who (and what) is
worthy of recovery? What do we do with these women and their works once they have been
recuperated? Until these acts of biographical and bibliographical reclamation generate more
monographs and reliable editions of works that are currently accessible only in special or private
collections, of what sustained benefit are they to students and readers? Over 20 years ago,
McMillan remarked on the ‘abundance of uncollected, unpublished and out of print writing by
women within the period [1700–1900]’ (McMillan 1999, p. xi). Not only does this situation
persist, print editions which were available at that point, or at intervals since, are now impossible
to source.
Notwithstanding these challenges, recent critical approaches to studies of the long-eight-
eenth and nineteenth century have offered fresh insights into, and ways of engaging with,
Scottish women’s writing. In the place of former delimitations there has arisen a more nuanced
awareness of the fluidity arising between the private and public sphere, manuscript and print
culture, and literary gender identity in the period. Alongside engaging in its own act of literary
retrieval, the remainder of this chapter is informed by these ideas. Drawing on new archival
research and developments in the field of book history, it offers an alternative viewpoint from
which to rethink the critical narratives surrounding Scottish women’s writing between the years
1700 and 1900.
Social Authorship and Scottish Women’s Writing

in the Long Eighteenth Century
If early modern Scottish women’s writing circulated largely through religious networks and texts
(Dunnigan 1997, pp. 15–43; Dunnigan 2012, pp. 11–21), Pam Perkins has shown the signifi-
cance of social networks for the dissemination of eighteenth- century women’s writing
(Perkins 2012, pp. 44–52). Borrowing from Margaret J.M. Ezell’s concept of ‘social authorship’
(Ezell 1999, pp. 21–44), Perkins demonstrates that women were active participants in the
Republic of Letters through the private, yet extensive, circulation of their writing – primarily in
the form of songs, poems, and letters. Precluded from attending University, practising law or
medicine, preaching in Church, or enlisting in the military, women were inevitably excluded
from professional networks and public life. Nevertheless, Alison Cockburn (1713–1794), Frances
Dunlop (1730–1815), Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock (1747–1815), Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard
(1750–1825), Anne Grant of Laggan (1755–1838), Lady Louisa Stuart (1757–1851), Joanna
Ballie (1762–1851), and Mary Somerville (1780–1872) were some of the many females who
operated at the heart of dynamic literary and social circles. Their correspondence and life-writing
reveals that they belonged to a cross-gender community highly engaged in intellectual debate,
literary criticism, and manuscript exchanges. As critics have recognised, these women expected
their letters and enclosures to reach a far wider audience than the individuals to whom they were
addressed (McMillan 1997, pp. 71–90; McMillan 1999, pp. xi–xiv; Williamson 2007, pp. 57–70;
Christianson 2012, pp. 75–83). Crucially, for them, choosing not to print was ‘not the same
thing as choosing not to write or to cultivate literary interests’ (Perkins 2012, p. 44). Moreover,
choosing not to print was not the same thing as remaining unread or unappreciated by an audi-
ence, the limits of which could be set by the author herself.
As Juliet Shields suggests, the real question is why would a woman writer commit to print
when her output had been created for manuscript circulation amongst an audience of family and
friends? (Shields 2021b, pp. 136-137). Betty Schellenberg’s examination of manuscript-producing
coteries in eighteenth-century Britain demonstrates, however, that the relationship between script
and print was not one of mutual exclusion (Schellenberg 2016). Michelle Levy extends the appli-
cation of Schellenberg’s findings to the Romantic period, arguing that not only did manuscript
culture ‘flourish even in an age of intensified print production’, it exerted a ‘vital influence’ on
Romantic literary culture as a whole (Levy 2010, pp. 1015–1016). Like Levy, Lynda Pratt high-
lights the persistence of non-publication and the prevalence of dual publishing practices for even
the most prolific, and now canonical, authors of the day (Pratt 2018, pp. 495–509)4.
These findings counter the established narrative that print superseded manuscript culture in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They deflate the perception that print media
was situated atop a hierarchy that placed less value on scribal works and, by extension, their
authors. They illuminate the presence of a sociable readership, situated between a strictly private
and wholly public audience, and assign greater authorial control over who that audience was.
Further, they challenge the notion that women alone eschewed print, and that all male writers
sought a public readership. This reshapes our understanding of the literary landscape, and
Scottish women writers’ role and value in it. Their absence (in print, at least) is part of a larger
pattern of private circulation and non-publication.
This chapter considers these ideas in relation to Elizabeth Rae Keir (b. 16 October 1745 or
1746, d. 3 November 1834).5 It compares Keir’s printed and manuscript work to examine how
she fits into the pattern of social authorship formulated by Ezell, Perkins et al. It appraises the
extent to which Keir can be read as an exemplar of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
Scottish women writers. Specifically, it considers how she adheres to the pattern of visibility and
invisibility that characterizes women’s writing in the period and continues to occupy a central
place in critical narratives about it. Finally, it asks what her story contributes to the wider history
of Scottish women’s writing.
Elizabeth Rae Keir (1745–1834)

In 2018, Jane Rendall added Elizabeth Rae Keir to The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish
Women, identifying her as ‘one of the few Scottish women novelists of the eighteenth century’
(Ewan et al., 2018, p. xxxvi, 227).6 As if this were not cause enough for renown, Keir was one
of the few published novelists in Britain in the years when her two epistolary novels were
issued. The two-volume Interesting Memoirs was one of only 47 novels published in 1785; The
History of Miss Greville, Keir’s follow-up triple decker, one of just 51 published in 1787
(Garside et al. 2000, vol. 1, pp. 359, 410). Interesting Memoirs merited three editions within
its first year and, while both titles were produced anonymously, Keir clearly built on the
reputational success of her first work: the title page of Miss Greville bears the designation ‘by
the Author of Interesting Memoirs’. Beyond being published in Edinburgh and London, both
works enjoyed transnational, and even transatlantic, circulation: Interesting Memoirs was trans-
lated into French (1788), and published in New York (1792) and Boston (1802); Miss Greville
was published in Dublin (1787) and translated into German (1802) (Garside et al. 2000, vol. 1,
pp. 359, 410).7 They are sentimental-domestic novels, characterised by thin plots, a pious
tone and moral sentiment.Within a specifically Scottish context, Keir’s epistolary mode
extends Presbyterian and Enlightenment discourses expounding the importance of
self-knowledge.
Keir’s entry into the world of print publication, and her adoption of this formulaic but
popular genre, was driven by economic necessity: following the premature death of her
physician husband, William, in June 1783, she needed money to pay for their children’s
education. In his travelogue Lettere sopra L’Inghiterra Scozia e Olanda, Luigi Angiolini, a pro-
gressive Italian diplomat and an avid admirer of Keir after meeting her in Edinburgh in
1788, reveals that the publication of Interesting Memoirs provided her with an income of over
£100 a year, and that Miss Greville received ‘equal, and indeed greater welcome’ still
(Angiolini 1790, vol. 2, p. 364)8. By cannily establishing a foothold in both the London and
Edinburgh markets Keir ensured the widest domestic distribution of her work. Her choice of
the London publisher (Andrew) Strahan and Cadell is noteworthy. The firm’s founder, Andrew’s
father, the Scotsman William Strahan, was responsible for publishing The History of Miss
Clarinda Cathcart and Miss Fanny Renton (1765), and Alicia Montagu (1767), works by Scotland’s
first printed female novelist, Jean Marishall (1765–1788). Both Marishall and Keir spent time
living in London and their shared gravitation to a firm with a strong Scottish connection sug-
gests an underexplored network of Scottish authors and publishers there (Garside 2012,
pp. 477, 481–82). The anonymous publication of Keir’s novels led to their wrongful attribu-
tion until the late-twentieth century.9 Correcting this error is significant because it establishes
the emergence of the professional Scottish female novelist class more than a decade before
Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796). This in turn paves the way for
new comparative critical analysis of early Scottish women novelists, adding to admirable exist-
ing scholarship in the field (see, for example, DeLucia 2021; Perkins 2010).10
Keir leveraged her social network to boost the domestic circulation of her printed work: her
first novel is dedicated to Queen Charlotte, her second to the Countess of Glasgow. And she was
quick to emphasis its instructional objectives, thereby distancing herself from any reputational,
and commercial, loss associated with novel writing. Catering to a market where, as she notes in
the Preface to Interesting Memoirs, there is a ‘prevailing rage for Novels’, she does not hesitate to
denounce novels as ‘the vehicles by which the most fatal poison is often conveyed to the heart’
(Keir 1785, vol. 1, p. 2). Keir states that she writes in the hopes of ‘counteracting the effects of
such productions’ (p. 2) and for ‘the improvement as well as amusement of Youth’ (pp. v–vi); to
the readers of Miss Greville, she desires to impart a sense of ‘honour’ and ‘religion’ (Keir 1787, vol.
1, p. vi). She thus shrewdly situates her work both within and above the discourse of novel writ-
ing. The self-consciously moral-corrective objectives of Keir’s work contributed to its favourable
reception in leading periodicals such as The Critical Review and the Monthly Review, with reviewers
further distancing Keir from the association of female authorship with a corrupting influence (see
Anon 1786a, p. 78; Anon 1786b, p. 307). The Minerva-style plots of Keir’s novels reveal, how-
ever, that if she was writing with one eye on morality the other was firmly on the market.
Keir’s rare status and her emergence in the literary marketplace directly after Tobias Smollett,
Jean Marishall, and Henry Mackenzie, ought to secure her place in Scottish literary history, and
attract scholarly attention beyond that of book historians interested in the development of the
Scottish novel. However, there is a further significant strand to her writing that demands serious
critical reassessment. It is only by recovering both aspects of her literary output that we can fully
understand how Keir both engages in social authorship and serves as a fitting case study for
Scottish women’s writing in the long eighteenth century.
Long before and after writing her two novels, Keir was a prolific, albeit unprinted, poet. Over
420 of her poems are contained in two fair copy bound volumes, which carry the descriptive titles,
embossed on their spines, ‘Poems’ and ‘Poetry’ respectively.11 This is quite possibly the largest
collection of Scottish women’s verse extant from the period. Volume one also contains a letter
written on 12 May 1778, addressed to her sister, Isabella Rae, and their father, the pioneering
dental surgeon and lecturer, James Rae, in which Keir wittily confides her first impressions of
London; and an excerpt from John Kay’s Edinburgh Portraits (1836–1837) containing a biographi-
cal sketch of James. Portraits provides a unique record of late-eighteenth century Edinburgh soci-
ety and, like Keir’s letter, sheds valuable biographical light on her family background. Whether
Keir wrote more poetry than this, or if other of her letters have survived, is unknown. Certainly,
these pieces were considered important enough to be carefully organised and preserved.12
The poems are arranged chronologically and cover a period of nearly 60 years. Volume one
includes 134 poems written between the years 1766 and 1774. Volume two extends over a much
greater period, from July 1774 to October 1825. It contains 640 numbered folios (in comparison
to 299 in volume one), but the final eight folios are blank with further numbered but blank
sheets within.13 The largest chronological gaps fall between the final three poems, which are
dated considerable years apart in 1812, 1820, and 1825. ‘Contents of Volume 2’ lists the first
152 poems only, stopping between the years 1790 and 1791. Nearly 150 further poems follow.
These lacunas are suggestive of a life being lived beyond the confines of paper and ink; one about
which so much is frustratingly unknowable. Nonetheless, both volumes add much to the bio-
graphical and literary record of Keir’s life, and to our understanding of Scottish women’s writing
in the period.
First, they support the critical discourse surrounding social authorship, its role in Scottish
literary society, and its especial relevance for female writers. Like her novels Keir’s poems were
circulated anonymously. The essential difference was their intended audience and reach. If her
novels were intended for wide commercial distribution, her poetry was to be shared within a
prescribed social circle. Dedicating her verse to Mrs. Maxwell of Carriden, Keir confides that she
can never acknowledge authorship but continues, ‘Permit me, however, under the sanction of
your name, to introduce them to that circle of chosen friends for whom alone they are design’d’
(Keir 1773a, ACC.8363.1). This highlights the currency of patronage for the dissemination of
Keir’s poetry, despite the difference in its intended audience and purpose from her printed work.
Through the circulation of her manuscript verse, Keir consented to the private (or domestic)
publication of her poetry, which allowed her to determine and set the limits of her ‘chosen’ audi-
ence and to explore subject matter that she may have been hesitant to deal with publicly. In
‘Epistle to Miss Marianne Rae’ (1769), Keir reveals her expectation that this poem will be
enjoyed and read aloud by her audience. She trusts that ‘Lords and Ladies, / [. . .] will read my
verse, / And even at Coteries rehearse’ (1.52).14 As these lines suggest, performativity accompa-
nied the distribution of Keir’s verse. The poem’s playful quality further suggests how scribal
publication freed Keir from restrictive social and literary conventions. In contrast to the
moralistic tone she adopts in print, Keir’s poetry is intimate and self-reflexive; witty and engag-
ing; complex and emotive. It can be startlingly raw, even; and increasingly so as it follows the
trajectory of a life profoundly marked by loss which is mitigated only, and yet not wholly, by
Keir’s strong Presbyterian faith. Many of the poems are verse epistles and conversation poems,
befitting their addressed audience of family and friends. Many are written from her family home,
and a number bear this location in their title. However, their scope reaches far beyond the
domestic and quotidian. The topics that Keir covers contributes to our understanding of her
education, reading habits and literary writing practices.
Keir’s poetry further reflects the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the importance of women’s
education and participation in intellectual life, albeit in a social context (Carr 2014, pp. 92–93;
Towsey 2010, pp. 294–295; Perkins 2010, pp. 24–36). She was abreast of politics, philosophy,
and current affairs, with scribal publication and social circulation affording her a platform from
which to comment on these issues. Of greatest interest to this study is Keir’s obvious immersion
in literary culture, her literary aspirations, and her social network of influential literary figures
such as Alison Cockburn and Walter Scott. Keir repeatedly addresses, or openly imitates, her
poetic contemporaries. James MacPherson’s Ossian and James Thomson are both figures of
admiration (see 1.97; 1.176; 1.273). Scott and Burns attract tribute (Keir 1773b 2. 67–68; 2.
237–240). She delights in the ‘genius’ of the minor Scottish poet and hymnist, Michael Bruce
(2.308). ‘Albert’ (2. 344–354) imitates another Scottish poet, William Julius Mickle, whose
work is judged to be ‘beautifully moral and descriptive but too diffuse’ (2.344). She admires and
imitates the English poet Mark Akenside (1.242) and the French poet Nicholas Boileau-
Despréaux (1.53). In these, and further examples, Keir not only skilfully imitates her literary
contemporaries, she actively critiques and situates herself alongside them.
A further striking feature of Keir’s verse is its ability to capture and convey the contiguity of
Enlightenment and Romantic sensibilities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her nature
poems. ‘To a Redbreast’ (1.64–65) and ‘On discovering a Plover’s nest at Fernington’ (2. 85–86)
demonstrate the poet-narrator’s deep and empathetic communion with creation. ‘On the death
of a Hare’ (1.34), written in 1769, denounces hunters who, in pursuit of their ‘barbarous sport’
threaten or kill these ‘harmless’ creatures. ‘The Partridges’ (2.34–38), written in 1775, is
similarly imbued with anti-hunting sentiment, anthropomorphizing a female pheasant’s heart-

break over the loss of her children at the barrel of a hunter’s gun. In its representation of experi-
ence from a mouse’s perspective, Anna Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ (1773) is recognised as
the first animal rights poem. Keir pre-empts Barbauld in her sympathetic portrayal of animal
subjectivity. She engages with late-eighteenth century philosophical discourses that opposed
cruelty to animals and sat alongside debates surrounding other forms of inequality, including
slavery (Bellanca 2003, p. 3; Barker-Benfield 1992, pp. 231–232). Her poetic sentiments align
with Burns’ 1789 poem ‘On Seeing a Wounded Hare Limp by Me, which a Fellow Had Just Shot
At’ (see Mackay 2021, pp. 182–183). Keir is also an early advocate of nature’s ability to nurture
the soul and assuage grief (see, for example, ‘Sonnet’ [2.421–422]). Grief and death are recurring
themes, both volumes are replete with elegies and epitaphs. In her articulation of loss Keir’s
voice is at its most powerful, timeless and universal.
More than simply a fascinating case study in isolation, Keir exemplifies the wider pattern of
dual publishing practices observable of writing, and particularly women’s writing, in the long
eighteenth century. She suggests too the fluidity with which authors of the age approached
scribal and print publication. Writing letters, verse, novels and autobiography, she illustrates the
pattern of female writers honing their craft across multiple literary forms. K eir was, and remains,
a shadowy literary figure. In itself, this makes her emblematic of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-
century Scottish women’s writing. She was both lost and forgotten: as a novelist through wrong-
ful attribution, as a poet because her verse resided in the private domain for more than two
centuries. Her twofold recovery lends to our ongoing reconfiguration of Scotland’s literary his-
tory and its female participants.
Passing in and out of Print Persona: Nineteenth-Century

Scottish Women’s Career Writing
By the opening decades of the nineteenth century, more women were producing more writing
across more genres and reaching a larger audience, at home and abroad, than ever before. The
exponential growth of their contribution to Scotland’s public literary culture can be illustrated
by examining women’s activity in two key areas of literary production: novel writing and writing
for the periodical press. The impact of female-authored fiction can be measured most tangibly by
sales numbers, print runs, sale of copyright negotiations, and spread of circulation. Analysis of
such data demonstrates the significant success of even the earliest Scottish female novelists
(Perkins 2010, pp. 287–290), and that women continued to produce bestselling fiction through-
out much of the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, Jane
Porter, Catherine Sinclair, Margaret Oliphant, and Annie Shepherd Swan feature prominently in
this category.
In addition to private sales, the number of copies spread across libraries (subscription, circu-
lating, and endowed) indicate an author’s reach. Analysis of Scottish borrowers’ records by the
‘Books and Borrowing, 1750–1830’ project is currently enhancing our appreciation of Scottish
women authors’ status. Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811) has long been acknowledged as ‘one
of the few unqualified successes to come from Scotland before Waverley’ (Garside et al. 2000,
vol. 2, p. 79). As Anthony Mandal notes, it ‘was the [literary] sensation of the year, an overnight
bestseller’ with 3000 copies of three editions selling out in its first year of publication
(Brunton 2014, pp. xiii, xxv–xxvi). Current research reveals its frequent appearance in borrow-
ing registers across multiple libraries in Scotland, stretching from Orkney to Wigtown
(Halsey 2021; Yeoman 2022). Beyond being prohibited in France, Porter’s Scottish Chiefs was
translated into German and Russian, becoming a bestseller in Europe, and reaching ‘even far
distant India’ (Porter 1831, p. xxvi). At Westerkirk Parish Library, Dumfriesshire, it was bor-
rowed more than 160 times between 1813 and 1816, ‘making it by far the collection’s most
borrowed novel for that period, and second most popular holding overall’ (Deans 2021).
Interestingly, there is no record of borrowings from this library for Waverley. Within a broader
British context, Self-Control was housed in 18 out of 22 circulating and subscription libraries;
The Scottish Chiefs in 20 out of 22 (Garside et al. 2004). This reshapes our appreciation of which
books, and authors, proved most popular across social classes and regions in their moment of
publication.
Despite this demonstrable success, many women writer remained incognito. The pattern of
visibility and invisibility that characterised previous generations had merely shifted, not gone.
The prevalence of this practice in Scotland is evident in the Scottish Fiction Reserve (Burgess, 1986).
To an extent, women’s reluctance to publish under their actual name s uggests the very real fear
of the social stigma attached to openly avowing authorship. Clandestine publication protected
their private life from public censorship. Anonymity f urther afforded women a space in which to
experiment with multiple personas and voices, and forward opinions on ‘unfeminine’ topics.
However, the decision to produce unsigned and pseudo-signed works was just as often driven
and determined by publishers, and one just as often taken by men. Henrietta Keddie was given
the pen name Sarah Tytler by Alexander Strahan (The Scots Pictorial 1898, p. 354).15 Over nearly
60 years, she produced between 75 and 100 novels (https://orlando.cambride.orgprofiles/tytsa),
moving between anonymity, ‘the Author of’, and her alias. For most of his novel-writing career,
and in his contributions to periodicals, Walter Scott hid in plain sight behind a variety of pseu-
donyms and easily-detectable personas: the Author of Waverley, Wizard of the North, Malachi
Malagrowther. He was also ‘the Great Unknown’ (emphasis mine), which places him at the head
of a multitudinous hive of anonymous authors. Again, these examples complicate the narrative
of gender-based inclusion and exclusion from the canon.
James Raven has demonstrated that approximately 80% of all novels published in Britain
between 1750 and 1790, and again during the 1820s, were done so anonymously (Raven 2003,
p. 143). In 1785, nearly one-third of all novels published, including Interesting Memoirs, bore the
tag ‘By a Lady’. However, some male writers assumed this identity and several young women
pretended to be male (Raven 2003, p. 145), which opens up questions about literary gender
identity in the period. Annie S. Swan (1859–1943) ‘wrote 162 novels under her own name and
at least 40 under the male pseudonym David Lyall’ (Dickson 1997, p. 329).16 The decision to
openly acknowledge authorship or to remain anonymous had no bearing on the success of a work
or the longevity of its author’s reputation. As Perkins points out, Hamilton and Grant acknowl-
edged authorship of everything they wrote, but arguably remain in the shadow of Ferrier
(Perkins 2010, pp. 14–15), who famously declared ‘I never will avow myself [. . .] I could not
bear the fuss of authorism!’ (Ferrier 1929, p. 178).
In a prolific career that spanned five decades, and in addition to writing 98 novels, at least 50
short stories, and multiple non-fiction works, Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) produced more
than 400 articles for periodicals (Oliphant 1990, p. vii). Helen Sutherland argues that, for
Oliphant, anonymity was a rhetorical strategy, which allowed her to alternate between a male
and female voice in her opinion pieces for the press (Sutherland 2012, pp. 84–93). On 5 January
1850, Francis Jeffrey wrote to ‘the Author’ of Passages in the Life of Margaret Maitland (1849):
When I first read the book I settled it with myself that it was the work of a woman—and though
there are pronouns in the letter of the author now before me which seem to exclude that supposition,
I am so unwilling to be disabused of this first impression that I still venture to hope that it was not
erroneous, and that these words were introduced only to preserve the [author’s] incognito.
(Jeffrey quoted in Oliphant 1974, pp. 154–155)
Jeffrey’s letter suggests that anonymity, and its resultant androgyny, was a rhetorical strategy that
Oliphant employed from the very outset of her writing career. As a war correspondent in South
Africa for the Morning Post, Lady Florence Dixie (1857–1905) produced articles using the pseudo-
nym ‘Zululani’ (Bold 2021), which suggests that pseudonymous publication might lead to the
untethering of identity in other ways too. Periodical and magazine writing increased identity
fluidity further still, enabling contributors to sign articles with their initials only. Initials ‘could
become distinctive enough to become a branded identity’, although this was not necessarily the
case because initials could flux across owners and genders, even (Mole 2018, pp. 472–73). As
Rosemary Wake has shown of ‘the signature-shifting Beatrice Grant’ (1761–1845), a d ecades-long
and successful career could be built by contributing to multiple magazines using a ‘cluster of
signatures’ (Wake 2020, pp. 3, 7).17 Despite Jane Porter’s claim that Thaddeus of Warsaw was her
first major publication, McMillan notes Fraser’s Magazine named her as the anonymous author of
the three volume romance, The Spirit of the Elbe (1799) (Fraser’s Magazine 1835, pp. 404–405;
McMillan 2004). McMillan further identified her as the ‘I. Porter’ who penned Two Princes of
Persia: Addressed to Youth (1801). In her later years, Porter continued to write shorter pieces for
journals, alternating between anonymity and signing off simply as ‘J. P’ (McLean 2009, p. 47).
Clearly, literary identity, and anonymity, played out in a variety of ways, and to various ends.
As this chapter has argued, visibility and invisibility was a paradigm that characterised
eighteenth and nineteenth century Scottish women’s writing in its own moment, as well as
retrospectively. It is wrong to assume that women’s absence in print, or in propria persona,
implies a lack: of autonomy, of ambition, of an audience, of achievement. Further, the assump-
tion that this position was thrust upon female authors by agency other than their own is not
wholly accurate; nor was it one adopted by women alone. Recognising this allows us to resituate
this group within their wider historical and literary moment.
Notes
1 It should be noted that this work ‘does not represent 5 There is no record of Keir’s birth at the National
itself as an act of recovery’ (see Norquay 2012, p.2). Records of Scotland. ‘Written on my Birth-day 16
2 https://www.scottishwomenwritersontheweb.net. October 1797 at Meadow-bank’ (2.511–513; see
3 https://womenslibrary.org.uk/2021/05/13/ also 2.407) provides the day and month. Her year of
forgotten-scottish-authors (accessed 20 September death, and the information that she lived to be
2021). 89 years old, is inscribed on the family headstone in
4 Dual publishing practices here refers to manuscript Greyfriars Kirkyard. Simple deduction places her
and print publication. year of birth in 1745 or 1746.
6 I am grateful to Jane Rendall at the Centre for Scotland purchased them from Jarndyce Antiquarian
Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, for so Booksellers in 1983, which precedes Jarndyce’s
generously discussing her research on Keir with me. database records.
7 The first edition of Miss Greville has variant title- 13 Volume Two contains 43 blank but numbered folios.
pages; an alternative imprint reads ‘Printed and Sold Their significance is not clear.
for the Author at Mr. Carruthers, No. 36 Cheapside; 14 References to Keir’s poems are cited as volume num-
and by T. Cadell’. This likely indicates ‘a division of ber followed by folio number(s).
the edition for the London and Edinburgh sales 15 The Scots Pictorial muses on the merits or otherwise
respectively’ (Garside 2012, p. 482). of ‘adopting “writing names”’, noting Keddie ‘had
8 I am indebted to Mercedes Durham, University of been occasionally criticised’ for assuming the moni-
Cardiff, for her meticulous translation of Angiolini’s ker Tytler but that it was no fault of her own as ‘the
letter. name was put upon her’ by her publisher (p. 354).
9 Her novels were misattributed to Susannah Harvey Keddie’s autobiography, Three Generations: The Story
Keir (1747–1802). Jane Rendall discovered the of a Middle-Class Scottish Family (1911), makes clear
ESTC’s basis for correction in their newsletter that this imposition did not harm her relationship
Factotum 9 (1980), p.6. with Strahan (see p.344).
10 We can add Jane Porter to this reappraisal (see 16 In a further (less noteworthy) shift of identity, she
penultimate paragraph of this chapter). signed her later novels with her married name, Mrs.
11 Juliet Shields, University of Washington, has my grat- Burnett-Smith.
itude for sharing her rediscovery of these volumes. 17 My thanks go to Rosemary Wake, independent
12 The identity of the person who bound these volumes scholar, for allowing me to quote from her as-yet
is currently unknown. The National Library of unpublished work.
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35
James Thomson
Sandro Jung
College of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Fudan University, 220 Handan Rd,
Shanghai, 200433, People’s Republic of China
Born in Ednam, Roxburghshire, on 11 September 1700, James Thomson was to become the
most cosmopolitan of all eighteenth-century Anglo-Scottish poets, his works being translated
into French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish, among others. At the same time, his mag-
num opus, The Seasons (1730–1746) was widely imitated by other poets and mediated by visual
artists. Artistic engagement with the poem resulted not only in hundreds of illustrations for as
many editions but also in a varied material culture that introduced Thomson’s work into the
households of the well-to-do (Jung 2015, 2023). This chapter aims to offer a survey of the poet’s
major works, including his early poetic productions, The Seasons, his tragedies, and his Spenserian
long-poem, The Castle of Indolence (1748). It will also contextualise his writings as part of his
involvement in the Whig Patriot Opposition to Sir Robert Walpole’s administration.
Thomson’s earliest experience of literature was through the medium of the classics, but also
through works written in literary English. Robert Riccaltoun, a clergyman and schoolmaster
working in the same presbytery as Thomson’s father, fostered the young Scotsman’s early poetic
aspirations and instructed him in Latin and Greek. Following his father’s death, Thomson
moved to Edinburgh to study at the college in 1716: it was there that he became acquainted
with the poetry of William Hamilton of Bangour, Allan Ramsay, Joseph Mitchell, and David
Mallet (Malloch). The anonymously published Edinburgh Miscellany: Consisting of Original Poems,
Translations, &c. By various Hands (1720) included three poems by Thomson: ‘Verses on
Receiving a Flower from a Lady’, ‘Of a Country Life’ and ‘Upon Happiness’. The publication of
these poems was a significant achievement for Thomson, especially since he consciously aligned
himself with writing literary English rather than ‘Ramsay’s new-minted Scots poetic idiom
which he was becoming aware of in his Edinburgh years’ (Carruthers 2000, p. 172): the latter
two are the most finished productions in the manuscript collection of ‘Juvenile Poems wrote by
James Thomson Author of the Seasons’ (known as the Newberry Manuscript) that the young

poet assembled during his student days. Even before having his poems published in the
Edinburgh Miscellany, however, Thomson, aged 14, had addressed a short epistle to Sir William
Bennet of Grubbat, Bennet bearing ‘a high character for wit and genius, being regarded by the
poets as a minor Maecenas’ (Allardyce 1888, p. 39). The Newberry Manuscript volume also
included Thomson’s ‘Upon Marle-feild’, Sir William’s estate south of Kelso, in Roxburghshire,
adjoining Wideopen, the estate owned by Thomson’s mother. Thomson’s first poem to be pub-
lished in London, where his friend Mallet had moved in 1720 to take up the post of tutor to the
two sons of James Graham, Duke of Montrose, was ‘The Works and Wonders of Almighty
Power’, a production written while he was studying divinity in Edinburgh. It was included in
the Plain Dealer, a periodical edited by Aaron Hill and William Bond, in August 1724, and it
was introduced to readers as ‘evidence to show that polite learning was then flourishing in
Edinburgh’ (Drennon 1934, p. 33).
In 1725 Thomson moved to London, where he soon became tutor to the son of Charles
Hamilton, Lord Binning. He was looking for aristocratic patronage and found it in connections
he had been able to establish in Edinburgh; the ‘patrons Thomson was [initially] seeking for
himself and finding in London were … Scottish Whigs who dabbled in literature. Lady Grizel
Baillie [a distant relation of Thomson’s mother and one of his first supporters in London] wrote
Scotch songs; her husband, George Baillie of Jerviswood, was a Member of Parliament [and] a
staunch Hanoverian’ (Sambrook 1991, p. 30). His post allowed him to continue writing poetry,
and he joined the literary circle of Aaron Hill, which included such like-minded poets as Mallet,
Richard Savage, and John Dyer. On 10 July 1725, he sent Mallet a letter in which he reproduced
the first version of ‘Hymn on Solitude’. The poem was not published until 1729, but represents
an important intertext for his seasonal poems on which Thomson started work in late 1725.
Writing to his friend William Cranstoun, he informed him of his earliest drafts of what would
become the devotional poem, Winter: A Poem: ‘Nature delights me in every form, I am just now
painting her in her most lugubrious dress; for my own amusement, describing winter as it pre-
sents it self, after my first proposal of the subject’ (McKillop 1958, p. 17). It was, however, only
with Mallet’s help that Winter: A Poem, ‘the work of an obscure stranger, whose name could be no
recommendation to it’, was published in April 1726. After several repulses, Mallet submitted
the work to the Anglo-Scottish bookseller, John Millan (originally MacMillan), ‘who without
making any scruples, printed it’ (Shiels 1753, vol. 5, p. 196). The initial sales were slow, but
Thomas Whately undertook to advertise and commend the production by going ‘from Coffee-
house to Coffee-house, pointing out its beauties, … [and thereby] rescuing one of the greatest
geniuses that ever appeared, from obscurity’ (Shiels 1753, vol. 5, p. 197). Soon afterwards, the
‘manly classical spirit’ of the poem was commended, and Thomson’s ‘digressions, too, the over-
flowings of a tender benevolent heart, charmed the reader’ (Murdoch 1762, vol. 1, p. vii). The
dedication of Winter: A Poem was to Sir Spencer Compton, later Baron Wilmington, whose per-
mission does not appear to have been sought before the publication of the poem, however.
Programmatic and focused on the renovation of poetry, Winter: A Poem aspired to the sublim-
ity of classical models, Hill not only recommending the work in the Plain Dealer but also char-
acterising its peculiar qualities in a letter to Thomson: ‘There is an Elegance & Clearness, in the
Language which I shou’d never have done wondering at, if It were not still more distinguishable
by a Certain Fullness, & luxuriant Richness, without Waste … . There is also a Magnanimity,
and moral Dignity of Sentiment, that glitters aptly, … while it ornaments the Poem’
(McKillop 1958, p. 23). Thomson’s concern with the sacred is expressed in the ‘Preface’ to the
second edition of Winter: A Poem, which was published in July 1726. He notes that ‘the strong
James Thomson 447
Light of Poetry’ reflects ‘the most exalting Force of Thought, the most affecting Touch of
Sentiment’. He appeals to the reader to ‘let Poetry, once more, be restored to her ancient Truth,
and Purity; let Her be inspired from Heaven, and, in Return, her Incense ascend thither; Let Her
exchange Her low, venal, trifling, Subjects for such as are fair, useful and magnificent; and, let
Her execute these so as, at once, to please, instruct, surprize, and astonish’. The poet insists that
there is ‘no subject more elevating, more amusing; more ready to awaken the poetical Enthusiasm,
the philosophical Reflection, and the moral Sentiment, than the Works of Nature’ (Thomson 1726,
pp. 10, 12, 15).
The poem is divided into three parts: firstly, a description of the arrival and effects of the
season on human beings, fauna and flora, including various addresses to Winter and deities asso-
ciated with him; secondly, the poet-speaker’s introspection and withdrawal from the external
effects of the season to an engagement with the ‘mighty Dead’ with whom he ‘hold[s] high
Converse’, and lastly the recognition of the established reign of Winter with the awareness of the
impossibility of survival, combined with the hope for relief after death. As a poem celebrating
the beauty and sublimity of Nature and the implied authority of God within it, Winter: A Poem
stages the creative forces and power of Nature in relation to human existence, the poet-speaker
trusting to the hope for rebirth after death, that is, to a new spring after winter. The sublime that
John Dennis, an acquaintance of Thomson’s, had theorised in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry
(1704) is used as a defining mark of the powers of Nature, and of God in nature, who is addressed
as ‘Father of Light, and Life’ (Thomson 1726, p. 209). Dennis considered enthusiasm one of the
essential characteristics of sublime address and observed that ‘Poetry was a Language which they
[the classical poets] reserv’d for their Gods, and for the Things which related to them’
(Dennis 1704, p. 24).
Winter: A Poem was only the starting point for the genesis of a large-scale seasonal poem incor-
porating central features of Virgilian Georgic that would involve the production of three more
separately issued works, Summer: A Poem (1727), Spring: A Poem (1728) and Autumn: A Poem
(1730), and culminate in the publication of The Seasons in 1730. The long-poem would subse-
quently be revised again and published in new variant states in 1744 and 1746. In the revisions
of the individual seasons and as part of their integration in the composite seasonal cycle, the focus
on the divine qualities of Nature was diluted and no longer featured as centrally as in Winter: A
Poem. Rather, the poet set up a framework of opposition in which he juxtaposed the individual
seasons. By the time that all the seasons poems were integrated in the first edition of The Seasons,
Thomson had realised that he needed to provide more explicit structural pointers than merely
rely on the sequential and chronological progress of the seasons in the year. The 1730 variant of
‘Winter’ (now part of The Seasons), therefore, was preceded by an ‘Argument’ (not used in the
earlier editions of the poem) which Thomson added to assist readers to identify the overall pro-
gress of the poem. The ‘Argument’ to ‘Winter’ is an index of the revision process in that it
records the main themes and subjects that Thomson introduced from 1726 to 1730. By the time
Thomson completed work on the 1744 variant of The Seasons, the poem had transformed from a
largely deistic reflection into a poetic account of man’s position within the natural cycle, intro-
ducing many miscellaneous references to historical progress and statements that were inspired,
especially in the mid-1730s, by Thomson’s involvement in the writing culture of the Patriot
Opposition to the administration of Sir Robert Walpole.
The song-of-praise theme – the hymnal element in Thomson’s Winter: A Poem, in particular –
is also central to A Poem to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton where Thomson reveals that ‘I aspire/In
Nature’s general symphony to join’ (A Poem; Thomson 1986, pp. 10–11). Published by Millan
on 8 May 1727, Thomson’s work commemorated Newton, who had died on 20 March 1727.
It was dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole, rewarded with £50, but the dedication was omitted in
all subsequent printings of the text. Thomson was an admirer of Newton and had been intro-
duced to his theories while at Edinburgh. Once he had left the household of Lord Binning, he
worked as a gentleman’s tutor at Mr. Watt’s Academy in Little Tower Street which, according to
Douglas Grant, ‘was the centre for the popular study of Newton’s revolutionary philosophy’
(Grant 1951, p. 58). Newton’s theories were understood by contemporaries of Thomson as a lens
through which the works and creative power of God could be comprehended. Through his sci-
entific research, Newton was understood to have unlocked the secrets and mysteries of the
creation. His discoveries concerning optics are related to an insight into the order of things as
well as a knowledge of the vision underlying the creation. The philosopher’s ‘amazing mind’ (26)
is capable of the ‘unequal task’ (18) to experience the ‘raptures’ of the ‘All intellectual eye, or
solar Round/First gazing thro’ (39–40). Thomson invokes him as ‘All-piercing sage’, thereby
allowing Newton to join the pantheon of classical philosophers introduced in Winter: A Poem.
In A Poem to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, Thomson deployed the religious sublime that he
had used in Winter: A Poem in praise of the divinity, but he also linked this discourse with the
philosophical and natural-scientific rhetoric of Newton’s discoveries, thereby laying the ground-
work for the natural description of Summer. The category of the ‘descriptive’, which Thomson
intended to examine in the ‘Essay on Descriptive Poetry’ (advertised in the proposals for the
1730 edition of The Seasons but never published), consists in those qualities of differentiation and
picture-painting that Newton’s work on the colour spectrum had popularised. The new empha-
sis on description and the significance of painterly prospects are also reflected in the revision and
expansion of the different versions of Summer: A Poem: between 1727 and 1746, the season stead-
ily increased in length (1726 : 1146 lines; 1730 : 1206 lines; 1744 : 1796 lines; 1746 : 1805 lines).
While Thomson revised the text of the individual seasons, he also repeatedly reordered material,
at times moving previously published passages from one season to another. His descriptions of
the spiritual, mythological and seasonal figures presiding over both nature and man are linked
with passages of extended natural description and interpolated tales introducing human life
sentimentally or dramatically. The revision process involving Summer reveals a repositioning and
centralising of human concerns. The personifications of the season are contrasted with life on
earth. It is this shift towards an anthropocentric popular reading of Thomson’s production that
responded to the sentimental reading habits of the mid-century.
Andrew Millar, who had purchased Millan’s copyrights of the individual seasons, commis-
sioned four full-page engravings, based on designs by William Kent, for his 1730 quarto edition
of The Seasons. These plates visually interpreted the poem’s representation of the interrelationship
of man and nature, while also highlighting the spiritual elements of mythopoeia that illustrations
from the 1770s onwards would no longer use in their visual retelling of Thomson’s poem. In his
design of one of the two interpolated episodes in ‘Summer’ – the story of Damon and Musidora –
he introduces a tale of morally ambiguous voyeurism and desire, ‘a lurid striptease’ (Desroches 2008,
p. 14), in the process singling out this anthropocentric tale. While Kent’s plate attempts a com-
prehensive reading of the multiple actions and a painterly realisation of descriptive passages from
the season, he foregrounds the nude Musidora in the right-hand corner of the engraving: her gaze
is turned towards and openly confronts (and, implicitly, invites) her spying lover Damon, a mis-
reading of Thomson’s story. The tale increasingly gained in significance in the revision process, for
in the original Summer: A Poem the tale had extended to only seven lines, whereas the 1744 variant
featured a version of 17 lines. In the revised passage, Damon is integrated in a natural landscape
James Thomson 449
that echoes his complaint. The poet focuses on the love that Musidora will reveal to Damon. But
revision could also involve omission, Thomson deleting the account of seafaring men caught in a
dangerous tempest. This tale, in the first edition of Summer, had followed a scene of a violent
thunderstorm and death in which Celadon’s lover, Amelia, was struck by lightning. Both the tales
of Damon and Musidora and Celadon and Amelia had lasting sentimental currency. They were
illustrated in editions of The Seasons and served as subjects for paintings and other literary material
culture up to the mid-nineteenth century.
Thomson’s revision process was characterised by a frequent reworking of other texts, as well
as by assembling a polygeneric, ‘hybrid’ work combining hymnal, pastoral, and Georgic ele-
ments, among many others (Potkay 2011, p. 178; Jung 2007). Individual seasons were ‘altered
and enlarged by subsequent revisals, as the author supposed his judgement to grow more exact,
and as books or conversation extended his knowledge and opened new prospects’ (Johnson 2006,
vol. 4, p. 104). The poet’s revisions also reflected Thomson’s growing ‘sense of scientific accuracy
and relevance of poetry’s representational virtues’ (Bergstrom 2002, p. 182). In addition to
Paradise Lost (1667), Mallet’s The Excursion and Savage’s The Wanderer are variously echoed.
Thomson develops Milton’s creative principle of diffusion, ‘dwell[ing] on the overwhelming
abundance of forms as itself an expression of divine energy’ (Reid 2003, p. 673). He also inte-
grates geographical and ethnographical sources such as Martin Martin’s Voyage to the Outer Hebrides
(1698) and John Harris’s Travels (1705), the latter furnishing the poet with information about
Africa, including its fauna. As a result, in the 1744 edition the passages on mental travel and
‘imaginative self-projection’ increase (Oldfather 2015, p. 445). In the revisions that Thomson
undertook in 1744, he departed from the ideal of rural retirement that he had praised in the
‘Preface’ to Winter: A Poem. Altogether, the religious cast of The Seasons was reformulated and
authenticated on the basis of Thomson’s reading of historical, political, natural-scientific and
philosophical, as well as travel, accounts.
In the late 1720s, Thomson made a significant generic transition; he experimented with trag-
edy, and his contacts with politician patrons encouraged him to contribute to the Opposition
critique of Walpole’s administration. In the course of the 1730s, Thomson succeeded in estab-
lishing himself as a dramatist central to the literary-political circle of George Lyttelton, the
Prince of Wales’s equerry. He became clearly associated with the patriot ideology of such
Opposition figures as Lord Bolingbroke. Fashioning himself as a political poet, Thomson’s plays,
Sophonisba and Agamemnon, were designed to dramatise patriotism under threat from government
corruption, thereby furthering the more abstract engagement with ideas of patriotism and hon-
our that he had developed in the late 1720s in his long-poem, Britannia. These works aspired to
high-cultural recognition, and Thomson’s choice of the long-poem (as the closest approximation
to the epic) and heroic tragedy was directly motivated by the political Opposition’s need to find
a medium of expression, other than the periodical press, which could convey anti-Government
propaganda.
Thomson’s Sophonisba was first performed at Drury Lane on 28 February 1730 and ran for ten
nights. One reviewer noted that the ‘Tragedy is allow’d, by the best Judges, in its Poetry, to be
hardly inferior to any Piece the Stage has produc’d for many Years’.1 Thomas Rundle, the Bishop
of Derry, insisted that when ‘it was acted … the sentiments of virtue and honour were universally
felt with pleasure’ (McKillop 1958, p. 71). Members of the royal family attended the perfor-
mance, and Thomson dedicated the printed play to the Queen. While the making and staging
of Sophonisba had been supported by literati such as Hill, Mallet and Alexander Pope, one response
to the play was far from flattering. The anonymous author of A Criticism on the New Sophonisba, a
tragedy severely criticised the play (and its author) for its lack of originality. The writer had an
anti-Scottish bias and implicitly compares Benjamin Martyn’s recently produced Timoleon with
Sophonisba. In fact, Martyn’s play had at first been rejected by the managers of Drury Lane, but
then – upon a recommendation from the court that the management would (or could) not
ignore – performed on 26 January, running for 14 nights.
Thomson loosely based his tragedy on classical accounts (particularly Livy, but also Diodorus
Siculus and Appian) of the story of Sophonisba at the time of the Second Punic War. The most
recent dramatisation of the narrative that Thomson would have been able to view in London in
the 1720s was Nathaniel Lee’s Sophonisba (1676). Addison’s Cato (1713) is also a significant inter-
text, and Pope and Mallet co-wrote the prologue. The play concentrates on the central conflicts
between the love of individuals and the patriotic but no less fervent love of one’s country.
Sophonisba, the Carthaginian Queen, embodies the passionate patriot prepared to sacrifice her-
self for the glory of her country. Her marriage to Syphax, her first husband, was motivated by her
conviction that he would be able to serve the interest of Carthage; she did not love him, but
favoured the Numidian youth, Masinissa, who is later recruited by the Romans – Sophonisba’s
arch enemies – and then defeats Syphax in battle. Both Syphax and Masinissa function as ‘psy-
chosomatic antitypes’ (Hammond 2000, p. 25). The latter has absorbed the politics and ideolo-
gies of Rome, but, once he meets Sophonisba after her husband’s fall, finds his love for the Queen
rekindled and commits to saving her from Roman bondage. While he loves Sophonisba impetu-
ously and passionately, Sophonisba consents to marry him not because she reciprocates his love
but because this marriage will secure her from enslavement and facilitate her continued fight
against Rome. Once Scipio, the model of a Roman patriot, visits Carthage and learns of Masinissa’s
imprudent marriage, he remonstrates with him, forcing him to acknowledge that his love of
Roman glory and his love for Sophonisba are incompatible. The tragedy ends in Masinissa’s send-
ing a letter and a cup of poison to the Queen: she gloriously consumes the poison in the aware-
ness that she has escaped Roman servitude and triumphed through her demonstration of
patriotism. Masinissa, by contrast, is devastated at his wife’s death. The conflict between public
and private love has been resolved in favour of public love: Sophonisba has turned her death into
a heroic spectacle and sacrifice while Masinissa has satisfied the demands of his honour and his
duty to both Sophonisba and Rome.
A ‘passionate appeal to the British people to assert their naval power against a Spanish
threat to their security’ (Sambrook 1991, p. 74), Thomson’s poem, Britannia (1729), was
directed against Walpole’s foreign policy and supportive of the Opposition in their calls for
action. It ‘was occasioned by the general public clamour for energetic retaliation against
Spain’s interference with British trade in the Spanish American colonies’ (Sambrook 1991,
p. 74). Thomson’s poem traced the progress of Britain and its enfeeblement through those
affected by luxury, a concern that he would expound at length in Liberty. The ‘publication
of Britannia on 21 January 1729 was timed to coincide exactly with the opening of a new
parliamentary session, when it was expected that the opposition attack on the government
would be pressed home with even greater vigour’ (Sambrook 1991, p. 74). Thomson was
optimistic that Britain’s corruption could be overcome and that this cleansing process would
not only boost the British people’s morale but also reassert their core qualities: liberty and
national pride.
While the tragedies that Thomson produced focus on the qualities of civic virtue and liberty,
his long-poem, Liberty, which was published in instalments by Millar from 1735 to 1736 –
utilised the translatio studii and translatio imperii themes to demonstrate that Britain was indeed
James Thomson 451
the culmination point of western civilisation. At the same time, it stressed that Britons needed
to strive to sustain civic liberty because it can be (and had in the past been) corrupted by usurpers
and abusers. The progress of liberty and happiness is traced from ‘the rank uncultivated Growth/
of rotting Ages’ (Thomson 1986, I.137–138) to a state when ‘savage Nature blooms’ and
‘infeebl’d’ and ‘infected’ (I.140) oppression can be overcome. The cornucopia of ‘buxom Plenty’
(I.175) is characteristic of the state of human existence depicted in Liberty Part II when human
progress, coupled with philosophical and scientific inquiry, culminates in a proto-enlightened
state of humanity. In Liberty, Thomson responded to the Opposition desire to produce an epic,
not only of the times, but containing a vision for the future of Britain. As an epic, Liberty was not
successful, however. Rather, it continued the line of early eighteenth-century writings on cul-
tural progress and its origins in the cultures of the Mediterranean. The poem was, nevertheless,
widely praised by the Opposition, not primarily for its poetic qualities but for its ideological
conformity to notions of Whig progress. As a result, Frederick Prince of Wales, ‘under Lyttelton’s
guidance, rewarded Thomson’s overtly loyal poems, Liberty and the Ode to His Royal Highness,
with a pension of £100’ (Gerrard 1994, pp. 63–4).
In his poem To the Memory of the Right Honourable the Lord Talbot (completed by the end of May
and published by Millar on 17 June 1737), Thomson relates the virtues and qualities praised in
Liberty to an individual, his former patron, Charles first Baron Talbot, the Lord Chancellor.
Talbot had been a constant patron since 1730, when Thomson served as travelling companion to
his son, Charles Richard, while he was making the Grand Tour of Italy and France. Thomson
offers his poem to Lord Talbot’s eldest son, William, as ‘cordial Verse sincere’ (Thomson 1986,
p. 7) and declares his aim to celebrate the father’s ‘matchless Virtues’ (9). Talbot not only was an
enlightened and benevolent law-maker but he also exercised wisdom and compassion.
Sophonisba was followed by the more ambitious and more overtly political play, Agamemnon
(Thomson 1987, vol. 1, pp. 121–188). The latter was censored by the Lord Chamberlain through
the mechanisms of the 1737 Licencing Act which Walpole’s party had passed as an effective
means to cutting down opportunities for the Opposition under Lyttelton and Chesterfield to
articulate their critiques of court corruption. As Pope declined writing the prologue for
Thomson’s play, Mallet provided the prologue, part of which was censored and removed before
the acting of the play. It was, however, included in the published version issued by Millar.
Although begun in 1736, Agamemnon was performed only at the beginning of 1738. It opened
on 6 April at Drury Lane Theatre and ran for nine nights.
The tragedy was based on Aeschylus’s Oresteia and centred on the tragic conflict of Clytemnestra,
Agamnenon’s wife, who has been unfaithful to her husband and who in her guilt-haunted
speeches contrasts the dutiful role that she should have played as public figure and queen with
the personal feelings of neglect during her husband’s 10-year absence. Manipulated by Egisthus,
her lover and the king’s cousin and betrayer, she implicitly reproaches Agamemnon for her
daughter’s death. While characters of the tragedy can be identified with historical figures of the
Hanoverian royal family and the ministry, it is more important to understand Agamemnon as a
contribution to the debate of public and private honour. When Agamemnon returns to
Clytemnestra, she confronts her guilt and the betrayal of her husband. She laments her sex’s
weakness, which is characterised by the ‘unequal Conflict,/Between slow Reason and impetuous
Passion’ (1.1.69–70) and wishes that she had the counsel of the guide, Melisander, whom
Agamemnon had left behind to assist and advise the queen in his absence but who was then
removed at Egisthus’s command: ‘With Melisander, Reason, Honour, Pride,/Truth, sound
Advice, my better Genius fled’ (1.1.98–99). Melisander is presented as a sage – temporarily
transplanted onto a desert island where he becomes a hermit poet and worshipper of the harmony
of nature and the creator’s power – and an advocate of ‘social Life’, its ‘pleasing Bounds’ (3.1.13),
‘Comforts’ and ‘protected Joys’ (3.1.16).
Melisander still represents a spirituality that Thomson associated with the poet of Winter: A
Poem and a poetry of the sublimity of nature. By contrast, the patriotic concerns of Britannia and
Liberty, the imminent threat of court corruption in Britain at the time, and the highlighting of
platonic ideas and the importance of love, integrity and honour, testify to the politicisation of
Thomson’s works as the direct result of his association with the ‘Boy Patriots’. This group of young
politicians and writers included Lyttelton, Richard Grenville, Thomas and William Pitt, as well as
Gilbert West. In The Seasons, Thomson had already hailed a number of patriotic British worthies
and compared these with the expansionist and trade motivations of Walpole as well as his incon-
stant attempts at keeping peace with France and Spain; the later works responded less clearly to
specific occasions than they engage with ideas of British virtue as opposed to corruption.
From 1739 to 1745 Thomson produced two tragedies and one (co-written) masque. With
Edward and Eleonora (1739) the poet sought to follow up on the success of Agamemnon, whereas
the masque, Alfred (1740), was conceived of as a direct tribute to Frederick Prince of Wales.
Both dramatic productions fashioned the figure of a patriot prince/king capable of combating
factional division, ministerial corruption, and the harmful influence of enemies both within
Britain and from abroad. Within the five years that intervened between the writing of the
masque and Thomson’s penultimate tragedy, Tancred and Sigismunda, the political climate in
Britain had changed: Walpole had retired from office and the members of the earlier Opposition
now occupied government posts. Edward and Eleonora is an application play which offers a fic-
tionalised rendering of the political situation, specifically ministerial corruption, in late 1730s’
Britain. Thomson reworked historical sources to create a genealogical link between the kings
represented (Edward I and King Alfred) and Frederick Prince of Wales but moved beyond his-
torical and political drama with Tancred and Sigismunda. The central concern that links the three
productions is the insistence that man’s (and woman’s) private passion love should be made to
count in politics – even if the enlightened politics of Bolingbroke’s The Spirit of Patriotism advo-
cated the overriding importance of a king’s prioritising and channelling private passions for the
welfare of his country only.
Edward and Eleonora represents a significant development of Thomson’s earlier uses of heroic
themes. Edward, the prince and subsequently king of England, contrasts the corruption of the
ministerial court with the, to him, equally repelling heathens of Selim’s Muslim empire; he
stands for an openness of heart, honour and love for his country that distinguish him strikingly
from earlier royal characters of Thomson’s plays. Although Edward follows the tradition of
English crusaders, he moderates his clerical adviser’s zeal, noting that Britain is as much in need
as the Holy Land of assistance to overcome its ministerial and spiritual corruption. The play is
set in a camp of soldiers where Edward is attacked by an assassin with a poisoned dagger. A cap-
tive in the camp, Daraxa, the sultan’s wife and a model of virtue and sensibility, informs Eleonora
of a cure: she has to suck the poison from Edward’s wound, but in doing so will poison herself.
Convinced of the public need for her husband’s survival, she is prepared to sacrifice herself and
absorbs the poison while her husband is unconscious. He recovers, and Thomson presents a long
dialogue between the dying Eleonora and Edward (Act 3, Scene 5) in which she reminds him of
his duty to live for the sake of his country and children.
Unlike Sophonisba, private passions are not continuously controlled in Edward and Eleonora,
but a large – if not the central – part of the play dramatises the importance of love and its
James Thomson 453
paralysing effect once Edward realises that his wife will die. While Eleonora is reminding her
husband of his duty to his country and family, a dervish (Selim in disguise) arrives who intimates
that he can cure the poisoned princess. At the same time, a dispatch is received revealing Edward’s
father’s death and that he is now the new king of Britain. In the commotion of the camp, the
news of the old king’s death and the dying Eleonora spreading, Edward assumes that his wife has
died when he meets Selim, who vindicates his reputation by stating that the assassin was not
carrying out his orders. His good reputation is, in fact, restored when Eleonora, assumed dead,
appears, and defends him. The scene culminates in the recognition that virtue exists, even in
spite of religious difference: Thomson becomes an advocate for religious tolerance. Selim repre-
sents a version of honour that, despite its religious difference, is in tune with the type of patriot
and defender of true spirituality that Edward embodies.
Although Thomson foregrounds Edward’s love for Eleonora, there is sufficient political com-
mentary on court corruption and the weakness of a credulous king to justify the Lord Chamberlain’s
prohibition of the play.2 Also, the strained relationship of Thomson’s patron, Frederick Prince of
Wales, with his father (owing primarily to his choice of wife and repeated debates over his Civil
List allowance) reached a decisive point when an open breach between father and son occurred.
By relating his address to the Princess of Wales to the love between Edward and Eleonora,
Thomson also draws a parallel between their patriotism and the esteem in which the people held
them. In Edward and Eleonora (Thomson 1987, vol. 2, pp. 232–290), the king is exposed to ‘law-
less Power’ and needs to be ‘save[d] … from his Ministers’ ‘Who hold him captive in the worst
of Chains’ (1.1.55; 1.1.60–61). Rather than blaming the king, however, Gloster holds ‘His mild
and easy Temper’ responsible for the influence that ‘low corrupt insinuating Traitors’ (1.1.75–
76) have established over him.
The concern with family that Thomson introduces in Edward and Eleonora is also a central one
in Alfred, which was performed, at Cliefdon, on the occasion of the Prince of Wales’ birthday, on
1 August 1740. Thomson collaborated with Mallet on this play, and Alfred featured for the first
time the patriotic ode, ‘Rule Britannia’. The masque centres on the Anglo-Saxon king who has
found shelter with a couple of peasants while Britain and its people are suffering from the effects
of the Danish invasion. Rather than depicting action and battle, Thomson offers an extensive
characterisation of Alfred as the father of an enlightened British nation. The poet casts him in
three roles as father and husband, as disciple of the visionary hermit and as military leader. While
the description of the natural environment was of little importance in Thomson’s earlier plays, it
is here suffused with meaning, especially in its symbolic use of oaks to represent British strength.
Alfred is receptive to the spiritual essence of the landscape and witnesses a number of spirits
whose meaning and messages he learns to understand with a hermit’s assistance. Music serves an
ominous purpose in that the landscape becomes the foil on which visions of the past (the Black
Prince) and the future (Elizabeth I and William III) are projected.
The hermit of Alfred (Thomson 1987, vol. 2, pp. 316–346) possesses visionary qualities.
By reminding the king of his duty and faith, the hermit inspires Alfred to fulfil his ‘regal
task’ (1.5.90). What follows is strongly reminiscent of Bolingbroke’s treatise on the patriot
king. His role as a king entails that Alfred ‘be the common father of my people,/Patron of
honour, virtue and religion’, ‘to shelter industry, to guard/His honest portion from oppres-
sive pride,/From wastful riot, and the sons of rapine’ (1.5.91–92, 1.5.93–94). Following
Edward and Eleonora in the exploration of a conflict between public duty and familial love,
Thomson – through his mouthpiece, the hermit – reminds the king that ‘All private pas-
sions fall before that name [i.e. King]/Thy subjects claim the whole’ (2.3.14–15). More
overtly and thoughtfully than Edward in the earlier play, however, Alfred questions the
hermit why he should ‘destroy the softer ties/That twine around the parent’s yearning heart’
(2.3.17–18) to which the hermit can give no satisfactory answer. The hermit’s function is to
glorify Britain and its kings and queens and to advocate a notion of public love; his very
nature, however, detached as he is from the world, contrasts him strikingly with the social
king whose attachment to those he loves gives him strength.
While Thomson had been conceptualising his patriot prince/king in line with Bolingbrokean
Opposition ideology, he also stressed the sovereign’s moral responsibility to take carefully
weighed decisions regarding the welfare of his people. In his penultimate – and most success-
ful – play, Thomson, while still dealing with the politics of patriotism, explores the clashing and
often contradictory issues of individual desires and public duties. Performed at Drury Lane from
18 March 1745 and running for nine nights, Tancred and Sigismunda represented the culmination
of a number of ideological influences on Thomson’s dramatic art.
Drawing on historical sources and Le Sage’s Gil Blas (1715), Tancred and Sigismunda centres
on the tragic conflict between love and duty in which Tancred, descendent of the murdered
King Manfred, and Sigismunda, daughter of Siffredi, are embroiled. Siffredi, the contriving
late King’s adviser, reveals on the latter’s death Tancred’s true identity as heir to the throne.
Until then, Tancred had lived in Siffredi’s household as an adopted orphan, cherishing a pas-
sion for Sigismunda. The king’s will stipulates a political and diplomatic union of Tancred and
the monarch’s tyrannical sister, Constantia. To prevent Tancred’s counteracting of this condi-
tional marriage in favour of a rash and unpolitical union with Sigismunda, Siffredi exerts pres-
sure on Tancred, appealing to his sense of duty and his public love for his country rather than
to his indulging in a private (and, in Siffredi’s view, selfish) passion for Sigismunda. The
catastrophe unfolds as Sigismunda is deceived as to Tancred’s intention of marrying Constantia
and is then hastily given in marriage to a political opponent of Siffredi’s, Lord Osmond. While
Sigismunda accepts Osmond as her husband, she is unable to love him, leading to a fight
between Tancred and Osmond in which the latter and Sigismunda are killed, leaving Siffredi
distraught at having ruined three people’s lives through his misunderstood notions of love,
honour and duty.
Between the performances of Alfred and Tancred and Sigismunda, Thomson was working on his
full-scale revision of The Seasons, The Castle of Indolence and his final tragedy, the posthumously
performed Coriolanus (1748). He also contemplated a tragedy on Socrates (from which project
Lyttelton dissuaded him). In early 1748 he completed the imitation of Spenser, The Castle of
Indolence. Joseph Warton denominated the production an ‘exquisite piece of wild and romantic
imagery’ (Warton 1762, vol. 2, pp. 35–36). The poem is divided into two cantos: the first intro-
duces the Wizard Indolence who lures passers-by to his castle of sloth and indolence, providing
them with an Epicurean version of pleasure that is self-satisfying and corrupting. The second
canto resolves the vision of the first when the Knight of Arts and Industry, aided by the druidic
bard, Philomelus, unveils the corrupt reality of the seemingly happy life at the Castle of
Indolence. The poem represented a ‘serious, compelling, and self-revelatory piece of writing’
(Mitchell 2006, p. 330), for Thomson understood indolence as one of the most dangerous condi-
tions by which man could be afflicted: in a letter to Elizabeth Young, Thomson’s great love –
who did not accept his proposal for marriage – he invoked Indolence as ‘that most fatal Syren’
(McKillop 1958, p. 155). In the second canto, Thomson voices his ‘Lucretian’ conviction that no
true happiness and ease can be experienced without a prior struggle. The poem’s vision thus
relies on the poet’s faith that humanity can overcome sloth and strive for true happiness.
James Thomson 455
Thomson’s literary career drew to a close with the performance of Coriolanus. When Thomson
died on 27 August 1748, the tragedy – even though completed for the 1746–1747 season – had
still not been performed. Millar and Lyttelton negotiated the staging of the play to defray
Thomson’s debts and to make provision for the poet’s sisters. The play opened at Covent Garden
on 13 January and had a run of 10 nights. Millar issued an exceptionally large impression of the
play of 4500 copies. Thomson’s relatively free adaptation of the Shakespearean play minimises
the presence of the women advocating the cause of Rome but investigated the psychological
effects of male rage and envy. Coriolanus revisits the themes of heroic patriotism, personal desires
and public duty with which Thomson had dealt in his earlier plays. The tragedy is more ambigu-
ous than any previous dramatic production by Thomson. Among its characters, it numbers a
sage-figure, Galesus, the Volscian military leader, Attius Tullus, whose virtue is corrupted by
envy and jealousy, and Coriolanus (Caius Marcius). The latter is a Roman military leader who,
despite appearances, adheres to the highest dictates of honour, rethinking his ambition for
revenge when he questions his motivations.
The tragedy opens with a discussion of a possible peace between Rome and the Volscian peo-
ple. Rome rejects this proffered peace, and Tullus presses Galesus to call on the members of the
council to authorise him to proceed in battle against Rome. During Galesus’s absence, Tullus is
introduced to a stranger who has just arrived. It is Coriolanus who, following the Roman trib-
unes’ motion to expel him from the senate, has been exiled from Rome and is now seeking pro-
tection from Tullus, at the same time offering his military services to support the Volscian army
in conquering Rome. The Volscian leaders invite him to join their army, and Tullus decides to
give him half his command as a general. While Coriolanus is successful in battle against his
countrymen, the Romans appeal to him for the negotiation of a peace. He imposes conditions
that they cannot possibly accept and aims to pursue further military action. Realising that
Coriolanus eclipses him through his heroic actions in battle, Tullus decides to work his downfall.
He trusts to Coriolanus’s love for Rome and his wife, mother and children whom he left behind
when he went into exile, and he hopes that this love will conflict with his sense of gratitude for
and duty to the Volscians. Even while confronted with his supplicating mother and wife,
Coriolanus adheres to the dictates of his honour not to give in to their petition to grant a lasting
peace to Rome and cease his military action. Instead, he offers a diplomatic truce whereupon
Tullus confronts him with an accusation of ingratitude and the advice to leave the Volscian army
as soon as possible. Coriolanus refuses what he considers a dishonourable offer and is stabbed by
one of Tullus’s confederates. The tragedy concludes with Galesus’s lament of Coriolanus’s unde-
served death.
Even though they were repeatedly translated, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing into German in
1756, for instance, Thomson’s tragedies soon after their author’s death had become unfashionable
and dated, related as they were to the political Opposition culture of Britain in the 1730s. Their
political topicality thus limited their long-term appeal, although they represented Thomson’s
successful immersion in the theatre world of his day. Thomson’s occasional verse, likewise, has
only rarely been studied, rooted as it is in a temporally anchored relationship grounded in patron-
age or political conviction. His reputation in the late eighteenth century and beyond was to rest
on The Seasons, a work that was also, especially in the revision of the 1744 variant, affected by
patriot ideologies. Because of the polydiscursive character and ‘conflicting appeals’ of the poem
(Sitter 1982, p. 157), however, and especially because of how portions of it such as the tragic-
sentimental vignettes were popularised through anthologisation, The Seasons continued to hold
appeal, even as the poem (or parts of it) were appropriated to new occasions and practices of
consumption. The poem has proven a productive subject for generations of scholars who have
charted its formal genesis, genre hybridity, innovations in poetic language, imperial and national
inscription, conceptions of nature, landscape, and the environment, as well as the role of capital-
ism for the version of Britain Thomson develops in the poem and its numerous variants. Its
afterlife in the writings of the Romantics and Victorians testifies to the work’s mediated textual
presence while material culture iterations such as statues, paintings and furniture featuring
embellishments depicting Celadon and Amelia or Damon and Musidora have kept the poem
alive as a record of human experience.
Notes
1 London Evening Post, 5–7 March 1730. week and then the Daily Post stated on 28 March 1739
2 The London Evening Post (24 March 1739) reported that that ‘an Order came from the Lord Chamberlain forbid-
Edward and Eleonora would be performed in the following ding the Representation of the said Play’.
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London: The Cresset Press. Oldfather, E. (2015). “Snatch’d” into The Seasons: the cog-
Hammond, B.S. (2000). “O Sophonisba! Sophonisba o!”: nitive roots of loco-descriptive form. The Eighteenth
Thomson the tragedian. In: James Thomson: Essays for Century 56 (4): 445–465.
James Thomson 457
Potkay, A. (2011). Ear and eye: counteracting senses in Thomson, J. (1726). Preface. In: Winter: A Poem, 2edn,
loco-descriptive poetry. In: A Companion to Romantic 9–19. London: J. Millan.
Poetry (ed. C. Mahoney), 176–194. Oxford: Blackwell. Thomson, J. (1730 [1981]). The Seasons (ed. J. Sambrook).
Reid, D. (2003). Thomson’s poetry of reverie and Milton. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
SEL 43 (3): 667–682. Thomson, J. (1986). ‘Liberty’, ‘The Castle of Indolence’, and
Sambrook, J. (1991). James Thomson, 1700–1748: A Life. Other Poems (ed. J. Sambrook). Oxford: Clarendon
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36
Alexander MacDonald and Duncan
Ban Macintyre
Ronald Black
Univ. of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
I have been tasked with comparing the work of two Gaelic poets, Alexander MacDonald
(c. 1693–1770) and Duncan Ban Macintyre (1724–1812). A still more useful task would be to
compare the work of Alexander MacDonald and Robert Burns. No one is more universal and
accessible than Burns – ‘For a’ that, an’ a’ that, / It’s comin’ yet for a’ that, / That Man to Man
the world o’er / Shall brothers be for a’ that’. But MacDonald is superior to him in energy of
expression, in anger, passion, subtlety, the power of his imagery, the strength of his imagination
and the astonishing force of his metaphors.
This may have something to do with the two men’s biographies. To read MacDonald, it is as
if Burns, instead of sending four ship’s carronades to the French revolutionaries in 1792, had
gone to Paris to defend the barricades in person, and remained throughout the Terror. MacDonald
was a poet of both peace and war who knew the anguish of defeat. To this we may add the fact
that both he and Macintyre crowned their careers with long poems beside which ‘Tam o’ Shanter’
comes across as a thing very well done, but lacking in depth or purpose.
A recent volume of essays on MacDonald (Dressler and Stiùbhart 2012) bore the intriguing
subtitle ‘Bard of the Gaelic Enlightenment’. This will provide a philosophical framework against
which MacDonald and Macintyre may be measured. Curiously, the editors offered no definition
of ‘Gaelic Enlightenment’, so I will attempt one. If there was a ‘Gaelic Enlightenment’, it must
have been a set of ideas roughly similar to those expressed in that book by Meg Bateman and
William Gillies when discussing MacDonald’s verse – ideas which placed the Gaelic language
and those who spoke it at the heart of progress in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. (And
so implicitly in other places: if this was a philosophical system, the same must be true of
other minority languages.) What were at stake were the rights of the periphery and of the

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Alexander MacDonald and Duncan Ban Macintyre 459
disadvantaged, which were to be enhanced through education, the arts, and the assistance of
government. This was an alternative view to that of Enlightenment figures in Edinburgh, who
could not wait to rid themselves of Scotticisms in their speech, and who saw the advantages of
Union rather differently.
In the Gaelic Enlightenment there was a place for God, but none for a one-sided view of reli-
gion. The Gaelic Enlightenment was strongly opposed to the hegemony of the established pres-
byterian church of Scotland. Its proponents could see the advantage of setting upon the throne
of Britain a man (James VIII, the ‘Old Pretender’) who was tolerant of all religions, and whose
personal views, as a devout Catholic, were not in line with those of either the Church of Scotland
or the Church of England. This could already be seen, in the years before the ’45, to be working
well. One of James’s routine tasks was to approve the nomination of bishops for the non-juring
Episcopal Church of Scotland, a duty which he treated with great seriousness.
In the matter of religion, in fact, there was no philosophical difference between the values of
the Gaelic Enlightenment and the Enlightenment. Any difference was political, and in its sup-
port for religious freedom, the Gaelic Enlightenment anticipated developments that took place
in Britain as a whole during the nineteenth century, with one important exception which speaks
to the debate on the evils of sectarianism: to this day, it remains illegal for a Roman Catholic to
sit upon the British throne.
The Gaelic Enlightenment shared fully in Rousseau’s contrat social, while applying it to the
Gaelic situation. Down to the mid-eighteenth century, Highland society was pastoral, underde-
veloped, and informed by kinship and feudalism, curiously mixed. The great chiefs had the
power of kings in their own areas, and with the connivance of central government, the greatest
of them all (Argyll, Huntly, Seaforth) controlled the Highlands and Islands between them. The
older generation of 1745 could still remember how in the 1690s the earl of Argyll had gone to
war against MacLean of Duart, and taken from him the islands of Mull and Tiree. In 1738 the
duke of Argyll had gone further, and begun the process of removing the ‘tacksmen’, the middle
tier of Highland society, with the aim of increasing the rental value of his estates for his own
benefit. By later in the century this reactionary process was well under way. The fact that it was
being done is in itself evidence that there was such a thing as the Gaelic Enlightenment, and that
the great chiefs and landlords (who were by now mostly Englishmen by mother’s milk and edu-
cation, as indeed they are today) feared the tacksmen as representing the most progressive sector
of society – the people who held it together.
Combined with the fact that urban centres in the Highlands and Islands had always served as
Trojan horses for non-native interests, the refusal to countenance the emergence of a Gaelic mid-
dle class tended to stifle the development of the arts, be it visual art, music, dance, drama or
literature.
There was no surviving tradition of visual art, which means that the Gaelic society of the past
has literally disappeared from view. As we live now in an age in which the existence of an image
is seen as a mark of importance, this is a great disadvantage. We have contemporary portraits of
Adam Smith and Robert Burns, but none of MacDonald or Macintyre. (Even John Kay failed to
draw Macintyre.) As for the Gaelic tradition of manuscript illumination, instead of developing
organically into the modern world, it may be said to have come to an end in the fourteenth cen-
tury; likewise the Gaelic tradition of monumental sculpture in the sixteenth, and the Gaelic
tradition of calligraphy in the eighteenth.
In music, the Gaelic tradition of harping had come to an end by the beginning of the eight-
eenth century, but piping remained. Dance and drama, especially the latter, were falling victim
c36.indd 459 03/09/2024 07:23:51

to imported Presbyterian ideas of moral rectitude. With regard to the Gaelic novel, there was no
such thing until the early years of the twentieth. There was, however, an abundance of story, song
and poetry, practised through the medium of a vibrant oral tradition. An indication of the wealth
of story is provided by the collections made in the nineteenth century by J.F. Campbell of Islay
and John Dewar. Dewar’s stories, in particular, provide us with a portrait of the Highland people
as they had been since the fourteenth century, allowing us to sum up Highland society like this:
men were violent, often greedy; women at all levels of society were well respected, often brave;
chiefs were powerful; there was insufficient good land; kindreds were frequently at feud; cattle
theft was common, and the retrieval of stolen cattle was a major industry. The song tradition
reflected this society – many of the best songs were by women, many of the worst were in praise
of chiefs who scarcely deserved the respect given to them. As applied to verse, then, ‘Gaelic
Enlightenment’ may be used as a term to describe the transformation of this tradition into one
fit for the modern world: acceptance of the best foreign influences; adoption by men of the genu-
ine passion found in the women’s verse; willingness to criticise chiefs for their failings, perhaps
ceasing to praise them altogether; the elevation of certain motifs from the panegyric tradition,
notably those involving the natural world, into objects of praise in their own right; the down-
grading of other motifs into oblivion when no longer of relevance to art or society; the rejection
of artificiality; the search for truth.
It was a tenet of the general Enlightenment that man must pursue not only knowledge and
understanding but also freedom and happiness. Thus, too, if there were a Gaelic Enlightenment,
its objects must include the freedom and happiness of the Gaelic-speaking people. Naturally this
excluded slavery, compulsory servitude and clearance. The Gaelic Enlightenment thus consti-
tuted a challenge to the assumed right of landlords to do whatever they wished with the people
on their estates. If there was to be ‘improvement’, this was best carried out by the tacksmen,
certainly not by alien landlords and their lackeys. Sheep-farming, clearance and emigration had
no part to play in the Gaelic Enlightenment; rather, knowledge and reason must be applied to
developing natural resources to a point at which the people could live happily upon them with-
out having recourse to theft, feuds or violence.
We can see some of this happening in the form of the Highland Society of Scotland and its
first president, the 5th duke of Argyll (1723–1806). But despite being the best of all the
dukes of Argyll, the fact remains that he was a duke. As a young man he had fought
the Jacobites, and as an older one he made sure that enlightenment and improvement would
be tools in the hands of the ruling class – that there would, in fact, be no Gaelic Enlightenment,
merely an Enlightenment. His equally powerful cousin the 3rd earl of Breadalbane (1696–
1782) was little different, except that he was not so strongly opposed to clearance and
emigration.
Alexander MacDonald is generally known as Alastair, mac Mhaighstir Alastair (‘Alexander,
the son of Mr Alexander’, the title ‘Master’ or ‘Mister’ referring to his father’s university
degree). It has become conventional to refer to him simply as Alastair. Maighstir Alastair
(c. 1654–1724) was episcopal minister of the huge parish of Islandfinnan, which included
Ardnamurchan, Sunart, Moidart, Arisaig and Morar. From his chief, MacDonald of Clanranald,
Maighstir Alastair obtained a long-term tack (lease) of a farm called Dalilea on the shore of
Loch Shiel. (Dalilea is probably Dail Eilghe, meaning perhaps ‘Meadow of One Ploughing’.)
Maighstir Alastair was a son of MacDonald of Milton in South Uist, also Clanranald territory;
when he died in 1724 he was succeeded in the tack by his eldest son Angus, Aonghas Beag,
Alastair’s elder brother.
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It can be seen, then, that Alastair was very much a member of the tacksman class. Born in
Ardnamurchan or Morvern, he received an excellent education, not only in his father’s study and
the ceilidh-
houses of Moidart, Sunart, Ardnamurchan and Morvern, but also at Glasgow
University. He became a schoolmaster, then abandoned his school in 1745 to serve as a captain
in Prince Charles’s army of 1745–1746. He had two books published under his name, one a
Gaelic vocabulary, the other a collection of his poems. He had ‘aspiring middle class’ written all
over him.
The promotion of the Gaelic language was central to Alastair’s work. Introducing his poems
to the public, he wrote
We cannot however but testify our surprise, that … this language … should remain in a state, not
only of total abandon, but, which is more astonishing, in an age so happily distinguished from all
others, for freedom of thought, love of knowledge, and moderation, this people and this language
should be alone persecuted and intolerated.
(Mac-Dhonuill 1751, pp. vii–viii, cf. Black 2017, vol. 1, p. 61)
It is important to note whom or what Alastair praises in his poems: the Gaelic language,
a pet dove, certain women. Praise of men is forced upon him by the irony of circumstances.
In order to bring about the Gaelic Enlightenment, he appears to have taken paid employment
as the Gaelic voice of the Jacobite movement (Black 2017, vol 1, pp. 59–60), which obliged
him to praise Prince Charles and dispraise King George. His poem in praise of Ronald,
younger of Clanranald, is a curious performance (Black 2017, vol 2, pp. 191–194). ‘Moladh
don Ghàidhlig’, his ‘Praise of Gaelic’, is shot through with Enlightenment tropes, such as
Se ’n duine fhéin / As aon chreutair rèasant’ ann (Macdonald and Macdonald 1924, p. 2): ‘Man
himself is the only creature / That’s been endowed with reason’. On God and religion he has
little to say; for religious tropes we must look to ‘Ùrnaigh don Cheòlraidh’, his ‘Prayer to the
Muses’ (Macdonald and Macdonald 1924, p. 10). In ‘Am Breacan Uallach’, his ‘Proud Plaid’,
he tells us
Si ’n fhuil bha ’n cuisl’ ar sinnsridh

’S an innsginn a bha ’nan aigne
A dh’fhàg dhuinne mar dhìlib
Bhith rìoghail. O sin ar paidir!
It’s the blood in our forebears’ veins

And the independence of their spirit
That’s left us as our legacy
To be Jacobite. That’s our Lord’s Prayer!
(Campbell 1984, p. 160)
The constitutional question is central to the Gaelic Enlightenment. Alastair knew the troubled
history of Scotland since Bannockburn, and had himself been on the march to Derby. He per-
ceived that the return of the Stuart monarchy to the throne of Britain was the only way to
achieve a settled peace between England and Scotland with justice for all parts of the kingdom,
including the Highlands. Culloden was a battle to hold the Highlands; Prestonpans and Falkirk
had been battles to hold Scotland; none of these offered a solution to the chronic state of friction
that had existed between the two countries since 1286. The only battle that could have solved
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the problem for ever was the one that never took place, and which the Jacobites had an even
chance of winning, that of Finchley Common. Of the retreat from Derby, Alastair wrote:
How far this was the properest course has been much canvassd; some thinking the intelligence from
Scotland of the great numbers conveend in arms or landed from France was ane imposition and that
the P[rince] with great unwillingness consented to a retreat. One thing is certain, never was our
Highlanders in higher spirits notwithstanding their long and fatiguing march; they had indeed got
good quarters and plenty of provisions in their march and were well paid; so that we judged we were
able to fight double our numbers of any troops that could oppose us; and would to God we had
pushed on tho’ we had been all cutt to pieces, when we were in a condition for fighting and doing
honour to our noble P[rince] and the glorious cause we had taken in hand, rather than to have sur-
vived and seen that fatall day of Culloden when in want of provisions money and rest &c. we were
oblidged to turn our backs and lose all our glory.
(Aufrere 1817, p. 495)
Alastair was not a Scottish nationalist. His loyalty was to a people, the Gael, and to a fam-
ily, the Stuarts, whom he wished to see once again ruling over Britain (Campbell 1984, p. 56).
He mentions Britain far more often than any other country. As a Jacobite, he has a strong sense
of what binds Europe together. He mentions Europe frequently, and also Ireland. The symbi-
otic relationship in his mind between the Stuarts and the Gael is characterised in this stanza
of ‘Cuibheall an Fhortain’ (‘The Wheel of Fortune’), which he places in the mouth of Prince
Charles:
O tiormaichibh suas ur sùilean,
Chomainn rùnaich fhuair ur cràdh,
Bidh sibh fhathast maoineach mùirneach
’Nur geàrd dùbailt’ mu Whitehall;
Nuair a bhios na Reubail lùbach
Ri bog-chrùban feadh nan càrn,
Gum bi sibhs’ an caithream cùirte,
Lastail, lùthchleasach, làn àigh.
Beloved friends who’ve suffered anguish,

I beg you, please dry up your tears –
You’ll be affluent yet, and happy,
As a double guard around Whitehall;
While the double-dealing rebels
Cringe in fear among the rocks,
You will live in courtly triumph,
Lordly, sportive, full of joy.
(Campbell 1984, p. 92)
By speaking of a ‘double guard’ he reveals full awareness that the House of Stuart might be no
more loved in its own capital city than the House of Hanover had been; in fact, he seems to see
the prosperity of the Gael as depending on their status as a favoured warrior caste. A further
element in his equation, however, is provided by Ireland. He is quite clear that James must be
king of Ireland as well as Britain (Campbell 1935, p. 168), and there is enough in his poetry to
convince us that he saw the Gael of Ireland and Scotland acting together as a powerful force in a
future Stuart kingdom.
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Where Does This Leave Scotland? Dismembered?

There is never any doubting Alastair’s sense of Scottish nationhood:
Sin éiridh leibh Alba

Gu h-uile ’s gu calma
’S gheibh sibh tàbhachd air n-ais gu fìor chliùiteach
Anns gach sgannail fìor dhosgach

A fhuair sibh ’n Cùil Lodair
O choltas breun-phoca de Dhùitseach.
With you Scotland will rise then,

Bravely, entirely,
And you’ll have requital back very nobly
For each most calamitous dishonour

That you received at Culloden
From a German resembling a shitbag.
(Campbell 1984, p. 140)
But elsewhere, as in ‘A Ghaidhealtachd, mas Cadal Dhuit’ (‘If You’re Asleep, O Gaidhealtachd’),
it is clear that he feels saddened, disappointed and let down by Scotland, much as the Stuarts
themselves did:
Nach nàr dhuit fhéin mar thachair dhuit,

O Albainn bhochd tha truagh,
Gann làn an dùirn de Ghaidhealaibh
Fhàgail ri h-uchd buailt’?
Look at what’s become of you,

Poor Scotland, aren’t you ashamed
That scarce a handful of Highlanders
Were left to face the fight alone?
(Campbell 1984, p. 118)
His opinion of the Lowlands and their people could hardly be better expressed than in ‘Clò Mhic
Gille Mhìcheil’ (‘Carmichael’s Cloth’), in which he gives a couplet to each of 24 territories or
clans which will support Prince Charles in the next rising, such as Sleat or the MacGregors: the
Lowlands are one of the 24 (Campbell 1981, p. 136). This is not a major endorsement of Lowland
power, influence or relevance. Alastair’s studied ambiguity on this issue is underlined by his
report of Prince Charles’s speech before Prestonpans, which reads simply: ‘Follow me, Gentlemen;
by the assistance of God I will this day make you a free and happy people’. (Aufrere 1817, p. 490)
No mention of Scotland there, nor of her parliament. To Alastair, as to the Stuarts, parlia-
ments were gatherings of self-seeking noblemen who intruded themselves between king and
people, while democracy expressed itself only by force of arms.
I have noted above those aspects of Gaelic cultural tradition which had fallen away, and those
which had continued most vibrant into Alastair’s lifetime. Among the latter were piping,
c36.indd 463 03/09/2024 07:23:52

storytelling and women’s songs. Alastair seized upon these strengths and celebrated them. His
poems are shot through with piping images and metaphors, sometimes in the most unexpected
places. His ‘Moladh air Pìob Mhòir MhicCruimein’ (‘Praise of MacCrimmon’s Bagpipe’, Macdonald
and Macdonald 1924, pp. 56–67) is an astonishing tour de force. His perception of the value of
traditional tales such as ‘Cath Fionntràgha’, which he carefully wrote out in Gaelic script
(MacDonald, Adv. MS 72.2.11, n.d.), foreshadowed the folklore movement of the following cen-
tury. In the 1730s he possessed a Gaelic version of ‘The Seven Wise Masters’, which I believe he
wished to see published by his then employers, the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of
Christian Knowledge (Black 1997, p. 409). Above all, as William Gillies has noted (Dressler and
Stiùbhart 2012, pp. 119–121), we should note his transformation of women’s waulking-songs into
a vehicle for personal and public verse of a most passionate kind, as seen in poems such as ‘D’a Chéile
Nua-Phòsta’ (‘To his Newly-Married Spouse’, Macdonald and Macdonald 1924, pp. 238–243) and
‘Òran Luaidh no Fùcaidh’ (‘A Fulling or Waulking Song’, Campbell 1984, pp. 144–153).
We may also point to Alastair’s reassessment of the panegyric tradition. When he praises his
pet dove, he explicitly rejects the use of poetic formulae:
Chan e gun chiste no anart bhith comhdach do chré

Fo lic anns an ùir
Tha mise, ge cruaidh e, an-diugh ’g acain gu léir –
Ach do thuiteam le cù.
It’s not that no coffin or linen covers your clay

Under slab in the soil
That I, though it’s hard, mourn so sadly today,
But your slaying by a dog.
(Thomson 1993, p. 18)
Death is what counts, not the nonsense that surrounds it. This is the Enlightenment speaking.
It is of course ironic that as the Jacobites’ Gaelic propagandist, Alastair was obliged to set aside
his artistic principles by praising famous men. But there are only two poems that completely
contravert these principles. One is ‘An Caimbeulach Dubh’ (‘The Black Campbell’), his eulogy
to Father Colin Campbell, who died of wounds suffered at Culloden (Black 2017, vol. 2,
pp. 141–181). The other is his elegy on Lord Lovat, who went to the scaffold in 1747. These two
poems have many things in common. Both men, like Alastair, were born Protestants but died
Catholics. Both were controversial figures. Both gave their lives for King James. And both were
clearly good friends to Alastair. Of Lovat he says:
Mo chion an ùrla bhlàthmhaiseach

Bha cruaidh is tlàth sna tìomaibh –
A réir ’s mar bhiodh an t-adhbhar ann,
Bu stàillinn bu phrìomh-mhèinn dhuit;
Bu bhras ri h-uchd do nàmhaid thu
Nuair thàirnte na lainn lìomhtha,
Bu bhàidheil caoin ri d’ chàirdibh thu,
Gun àrdan, ach irìosal.
I loved the handsome countenance

That was by turns stern and gentle –
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In line with what was needed, steel

Was your fundamental metal;
Against your enemy you were brash
In time of drawing polished swordblades,
To your friends you were soft and kind,
Humble, and never haughty.
(Campbell 1984, p. 106)
There was no insincerity here.

Finally there is the upgrading or downgrading of motifs. Before Alastair, for example, natural
description in Gaelic verse took the form of tropes which served other purposes, but in his ‘Òran
an t-Samhraidh’ (‘Summer Song’, Thomson 1993, p. 20), ‘Òran a’ Gheamhraidh’ (‘Winter Song’,
Thomson 1993, p. 27) and ‘Allt an t-Siùcair’ (‘Sugar Burn’, Macdonald and Macdonald 1924,
p. 44), nature celebrates nothing except itself. We may also point to frequent anthropomorphic
touches in his descriptions of animal behaviour. Animals may now be praised equally for doing
what men do, or for not doing what men do. This is not new in Gaelic, but it is pressed home
with great enthusiasm, as in ‘Marbhrann do Pheata Coluim’ (‘An Elegy on a Pet Dove’,
Thomson 1993, pp. 15–19). So the lives of men are put to use to celebrate nature rather than vice
versa. The impact of Thomson’s ‘Seasons’ on Gaelic verse should be seen, however, as part of a
process. Having established itself as a major theme rather than a minor one, it comes to be put
to other uses, notably in ‘Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill’, of which more anon.
We may turn now to Duncan Ban Macintyre. Donnchadh Bàn, as we will call him, was not a
member of the tacksman class. He was born in the farm township of Drumliart in upper Glen
Orchy, Argyll, on 20 March 1724. There is a monument to him there today, amongst the ruins of
the houses. He may or may not have enjoyed a year or two of formal teaching in a charity school,
but the bulk of his education was of the oral Gaelic kind, in the ceilidh-houses and work-places of
the district. In mid-life he depended on the clergy for writing down his songs; later on he prob-
ably learned to read and write in classes provided by the Breadalbane Regiment (Black 2010,
p. 18). There is no doubting his intelligence, or that he subscribed to the values of the Gaelic
Enlightenment. He bursts on to the stage at the battle of Falkirk, 17 January 1746, where, as a
member of Glenorchy’s company of the Argyllshire Militia, he found himself not only on the
wrong side but on the losing one (Black 2017, vol. 2, pp. 425–427). Alastair was at the battle too,
and describes it in detail in English prose (Aufrere 1817, pp. 500–503). Donnchadh Bàn deserted
along with most of his comrades, and made a very fine song about the whole debacle. Next year,
like many others, he expressed fury over the Disarming/Disclothing Acts, which penalised
Highlanders who had risen for King George along with those who had risen for King James:
Nan tigeadh oirnne Tearlach

’S gun éireamaid ’na champa,
Gheibhte breacain charnaid
’S bhiodh aird air na gunnachan.
If Charles were to descend on us

And we rose to take the field with him,
Red-tinted tartans could be got
And the guns would be forthcoming.
(MacLeod 1952, p. 14; Black 2017,
vol 1, p. 43)
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This was pro-Jacobite defiance with regard to both disarming and disclothing. But when
Glenure (a Breadalbane Campbell) was assassinated in 1752, perhaps as a result of Alastair’s
efforts to provoke another rising, Donnchadh Bàn threw his weight behind the murdered man,
portraying him as an Enlightenment figure (MacLeod 1952, pp. 68–77; Black 2017, vol 1,
pp. 389–391). He was still only 28 years old, yet his verses display great political and artistic
maturity. The moderate nature of his position is even more to the fore in his praise of another
member of the Breadalbane family, John Campbell, diarist, family historian and cashier of the
Royal Bank of Scotland, a closet Jacobite who had daringly provided Prince Charles with funds
in 1745 (MacLeod 1952, pp. 46–57). This was one of his big songs; in one of his little ones,
‘Òran Sùgraidh’ (‘A Song of Dalliance’), he acknowledges that the world is changing, promising
a country girl:
Bheir mis’ thu Dhùn Éideann

A dh’ionnsachadh Beurla
’S chan fhàg mi thu ’d éiginn
Ri spréidh an fhir mhóir.
I’ll take you to Edinburgh

To learn to speak English
And won’t leave you stuck, tending
Cows and sheep for the great man.
(MacLeod 1952, p. 104)
He continued to miss the Stuarts as far as the Highlands were concerned, however.
A-nis on rinn iad falbh uainn,

Tha Alba gun an crùn –
Se sin a dh’fhàg na Garbhchriochan
San aimsir seo á cùirt.
Now that they have gone from us,

Scotland lacks the crown –
That’s what has put the Highlands
These days out of court.
(MacLeod 1952, p. 342)
Donnchadh Bàn’s captain on the day of Falkirk, Duncan Campbell, became his captain
once again when he joined the Edinburgh City Guard in the 1760s, and he duly praised
Captain Duncan as a figure of moderation (MacLeod 1952, pp. 58–67). Over and over in his
work he demonstrates his belief in the Union project (MacLeod 1952, pp. 254, 260, 272,
etc.), and is every bit as aware of Ireland and Europe as is Alastair. He nowhere appeals for
the restoration of the Scots parliament, even when praising Parliament House as the seat of
our law-courts (MacLeod 1952, p. 344). He is clearly desperate to find evidence that King
George subscribes to the Gaelic Enlightenment in return for the sacrifice of the Gael in the
Seven Years War; he finds it in 1782 with the restoration of the Highland Dress (MacLeod 1952,
p. 238), and in 1785 with the restitution of the Forfeited Estates (MacLeod 1952, p. 244).
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Like Alastair, who praised Wade’s roads (Black 1997, p. 404), Donnchadh Bàn showed his
approval of the overall Enlightenment in the form of its physical manifestations. In describing
Edinburgh, he singles out the Abbey, Parliament House, the Infirmary and the Bank
(MacLeod 1952, pp. 342–345). He is conscious of the pursuit of happiness, and finds it, unsur-
prisingly, in the Highlands: of the people of his native glen he says:
Cha b’e fasan nan daoin’ ud

Bhith ’n conas, no ’n caonnag,
Ach sonas an t-saoghail
’S bhith gaolach mar bhràithrean.
It wasn’t in their nature

To argue, or to fight,
But to take pleasure in life
And love each other like brothers.
(MacLeod 1952, p. 232)
In the end he makes it very clear that his ideal leader is not King George, King James or the earl
of Breadalbane, but John Campbell of the Bank, a member of the tacksman class:
Sgeul éibhinn a b’ ait leam

Nam faicinn a-màireach
Le àbhachd ’s le muirn
Bhith ’d chàradh fon chrùn
An àite Rìgh Deòrs’.
What great news it would be

If tomorrow I saw you
With rejoicing and glee
Receiving the crown
Instead of King George.
(MacLeod 1952, p. 56)
There is a veneer of naivety over Donnchadh Bàn’s verse that makes us lower our guard, and we
may fail to notice that this was in fact a revolutionary statement.
Donnchadh Bàn follows Alastair in praising nature for his own sake. He makes a Song to
Summer (MacLeod 1952, p. 184). But his relationship to nature is more personal than that of
almost any Gaelic poet since Domhnall mac Fhionnlaigh nan Dàn, who made ‘Òran na
Comhachaig’ (‘The Owl’s Song’, Menzies 2012), for nature is the trade to which he was born
(MacLeod 1952, pp. 156, 164, 174, 386).
The annual prizes offered by the Highland Society of Scotland gave Donnchadh Bàn free reign
to celebrate the twin cultural strengths of Gaelic and piping, and to rejoice that these were no
longer persecuted: Ceòl is Gàidhlig Alba … Gam foghlam! ‘The music and Gaelic of
Scotland … being taught!’ (MacLeod 1952, p. 274). These had been Alastair’s aims. Donnchadh
Bàn picks up on Alastair’s use of waulking metres too (MacLeod 1952, pp. 146, 346, 378, cf. also
106), and on his praise of animals rather than men – a ewe, a cock, a dog (MacLeod 1952,
pp. 132, 150, 406), reaching similarly rationalistic conclusions:
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Beannachd leis an rud a dh’fhalbhas,

Chan è as fhearr dhuinn, ach na dh’fhanas.
’S fhearr bhith cridheil leis na dh’fhuirgheas

Na bhith tuirseach mu na chailleas.
Farewell to the thing that goes away,

It’s not what serves us best, but what stays.
Better to be happy with what remains

Than to be sad for what is lost.
(MacLeod 1952, p. 144;
Black 2001, p. 233)
He is conventionally pious, without scattering this piety around his work. His religious feeling
is genuine (MacLeod 1952, pp. 336–339, 392–395), and notably unsectarian. He finds the
cultural aims of the Gaelic Enlightenment being fulfilled through Protestantism (MacLeod 1952,
pp. 282, 332–335), but is careful to give Catholics a look-in at the same time (MacLeod 1952,
pp. 286, 404). He is entirely willing to praise famous men, but in a sense not so different from
Alastair: where Alastair praised the Stuarts, Donnchadh Bàn praised the Breadalbane family,
who were his patrons throughout his life. Certainly, he also praises George III, but this praise
is couched in standard Enlightenment terms, with a little push towards the Gaelic
Enlightenment:
Chuir e sgoil sa h-uile gleann

A los gum faigheadh ar clann foghlam,
’S gheibh sinn airm is aodach Gaidhealach
O’s è ’s fhearr leinn gu bhith spòrsail.
He’s placed a school in every glen

For the education of our children,
And we’ll have arms and Highland dress
As we prefer them for being sportive.
(MacLeod 1952, p. 32)
There is in fact a fulfilling of the social contract here. Donnchadh Bàn cannot be blamed philo-
sophically for acquiescing in the triumph of King George and the Whigs, because when the
social contract begins to unravel, it is for a reason which would also have applied under King
James and the Jacobites, and which may be defined in one word, landlordism. The difference is
geopolitical. Under the Jacobites, France would have been an ally rather than a foe, the French
would probably not have lost Canada; it may even be speculated that the French Revolution
might not have taken place. As it was, landlords such as Breadalbane began to clear their lands
for sheep, men took to fighting in foreign wars for a living, and after the fall of Quebec in
1759 many families emigrated to Canada, beginning a trend which cannot be said to have ceased
today. It is these changes on the land which anger Donnchadh Bàn. He praises Achallader, a
member of the tacksman class, for nurturing his tenants (MacLeod 1952, p. 82); he cannot
dispraise Breadalbane, his own patron, so instead he praises the foxes, in waulking metre, for
their excellent work with the sheep (MacLeod 1952, pp. 346–349).
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This brings us to our two poets’ crowning achievements, the long poems ‘Birlinn Chlann
Raghnaill’ (‘Clanranald’s Galley’, Macdonald and Macdonald 1924, pp. 370–401; Black 2001,
pp. 469–475; Riach 2015) and ‘Moladh Beinn Dobhrain’ (‘The Praise of Beinn Dobhrain’,
MacLeod 1952, pp. 196–225; Black 2001, pp. 490–493). Of these, the ‘Moladh’ is the more
original, but the ‘Birlinn’ has been called by William Gillies ‘the most ambitious, challenging,
visionary poem in the Gaelic language’ (Dressler and Stiùbhart 2012, p. 122). It consists of
569 lines in 17 sections – the blessing of the ship, the blessing of the arms, the incitement to the
crew, the incitement to row to the sailing place, the rowing-chant, then the description of rowing
to the sailing-place, followed by 10 sections describing particular members of the crew in terms
of their tasks, and finally the voyage itself, including an amazing description of a storm and the
damage it does to the ship; this last section occupies 190 lines, a third of the total. The poem is
simultaneously an allegory of the ’45, making it a work of Jacobitism, and a paean to the dignity
of labour, making it a work of Socialism. Clanranald, the chief, is a shadowy figure; the real objects
of praise are his clansmen. Culloden, another battle at which Alastair was present, is described
according to his chosen metaphor as Fàileadh is deathach na riofa / Gar glan thachdadh (‘The smell
and smoke of the reefing sail / Completely choking us’) and Talamh, teine, uisge ’s sian-ghaoth /
Ruinn air togail (‘Earth, fire, rain and windstorm / Raised against us’). He also speaks of peileirean
beithrich (‘bullets of fire’, ‘thunderbolts’), of cogadh (‘war’), and sìth (‘peace’). The galley’s destina-
tion, duly reached, is Ireland, pointing the political way forward (cf. Black 2017, vol 2, p. 193).
Of the 17 sections, none is fully original – it is possible to point to models for them, however
slight, in pre-existing Gaelic literature and tradition. This is exactly the point. The poet is
attempting to set up something new and relevant which is nevertheless inspired by a broad
sweep of Gaelic literary tradition. There is only one sense in which it may have been suggested
by anything alien, and that is if his fundamental inspiration was James Macpherson’s idea of
transforming Gaelic Ossianic ballads into English epic prose. Each in its own way was a
manifestation of the Gaelic Enlightenment. It is equally possible, however, that it was

Macpherson, the younger man, who was inspired by Alastair – it depends on dating, which is
uncertain. Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ is the product of the years 1760–1765; all we can say about the
dating of the ‘Birlinn’ is that it was composed between 1751 and Alastair’s death c. 1770. It
would be the opinion of many today, however, that the big difference between Macpherson’s
work and Alastair’s is that the former – no real poet, but a keen observer of English literary
trends – transformed his materials for the worse, while the latter transformed his for the better.
The ‘Birlinn’ is a hugely satisfying piece of work.
It would equally be a mistake to claim without evidence that the ‘Moladh’ was inspired by the
‘Birlinn’. The ‘Moladh’ was first published in 1768. The ‘Birlinn’ was first published in 1776,
and even then, its nature as an epic poem was confused by its being printed as 16 different items
(the incitement to the crew was missing), with no overall title. If we are to hypothesise that the
‘Birlinn’ inspired the ‘Moladh’, we must first establish that by the early 1760s the ‘Birlinn’
already existed in manuscript, or was being passed orally around the Highlands, or that Alastair
and Donnchadh Bàn knew each other well enough to converse about poetics. In fact, there is
some evidence for all of these, but it is circumstantial, and has yet to be brought together and
assessed. In the end, it may be best to see this issue through the lens of the Gaelic Enlightenment:
if there was such a thing, Alastair and Donnchadh Bàn were surely its leading figures, and both
of them could perceive, without prompting, the need for the motifs of the past to be downgraded
or upgraded, and for the best of them to be reshaped into some great work expressive of the
times.
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A case can certainly be made, then, for the ‘Moladh’ being an even more original work than the
‘Birlinn’. Unfortunately, it is difficult to describe the ‘Moladh’ in such a way as to make it seem
as exciting as the ‘Birlinn’, or indeed as ‘Tam O’Shanter’. It has a climax, but is generally non-
linear. Its eight-part structure of urlar, siubhal, urlar, siubhal, urlar, siubhal, urlar, crùnludh (ground,
variation, ground, variation, ground, variation, ground, crown-movement) is a careful nod to
pipe-music. The first part lays out the essential ingredients: mountain, deer, gun, Gillean is coin
sheang’ (‘Servants and slim hounds’), fear a bhiodh mar cheàird / Riutha sònraichte (‘a man whose
profession / Was devoted to these’), and, at the top of the poem’s hierarchy, a certain Patrick who
may be identified as a son of Lord Ormelie, the Jacobite eldest son of the 1st earl of Breadalbane.
The second part introduces the hind, the stag and their habitat. The third part goes into more
detail on the the deer’s habits and diet, with some anthropomorphic touches, ending pointedly:
cha b’i ’n airc am miann / Ach Beinn Dobhrain (‘they desired not poverty / But Beinn Dobhrain’). The
fourth describes the mountain, the buck and the doe in terms reminiscent of the character studies
of the crew members of the ‘Birlinn’; the maoisleach bheag bhrangach (‘wee snarling doe’) is particu-
larly feisty, and resists the attempts of redcoats to bring her down with lead and flame, just as she
had once resisted the attempts of Ossianic heroes to bring her down with their hounds.
Ged thig ...

Na tha dhaoine ’s a dh’eachaibh
Air fastadh Rìgh Deòrsa,
Nan tèarnadh a craiceann
O luaidhe ’s o lasair,
Cha chual’ is chan fhac’ i
Na ghlacadh r’a beò i.
Should there come ...

All the horses and men
In King George’s employment,
If her skin could escape
From lead and from flame,
She has heard and seen no one
Who could catch her alive.
(MacLeod 1952, p. 210)
Is this a Political Comment?

The fifth part is devoted to a different doe, a young wandering one it seems. The sixth begins
with the deer, but is devoted to the mountain and her streams, with the greatest density of place-
names in the poem – four corries, four hills, two mountains, a rock, a plateau, a pass and a burn.
Again, there is anthropomorphism: the water is wine, the deer-forest is air a busgadh / San trusgan
bu chòir dhi, ‘wearing/the mantle that suits her’. The seventh is devoted to Coire an Fhraoich ‘the
Heathery Corrie’ – the hind who lives there, her attraction to the hunter, then something a little
different, how trout are fished by torchlight with a fishing-spear. The eighth part (92 lines out
of 554) brings us back to the ingredients of the first: the deer, the gun, the dogs, the hunt, the
kill. As in the ‘Birlinn’, there is no conclusion in any philosophical sense. In the ‘Birlinn’,
Carrickfergus is safely reached, the storm is over. In the ‘Moladh’, the hounds are depicted with
the dying deer: na cuileanan gu fulasgach / Gan cumail air na muinealaibh ‘the whelps are being
tossed around / while hanging on to their necks’. The poet then ends by saying,
c36.indd 470 03/09/2024 07:23:52

’S ged a thuirt mi beagan riu,

Mun innsinn uil’ an dleasdnas orr’
Chuireadh iad am’ bhreislich mi
Le deisimireachd chòmhraidh.
Though I’ve lightly touched on them,

Before I did them all full justice
They’d drive me to distraction
By complexity of discourse.
(MacLeod 1952, p. 224)
Who are ‘they’? The hounds? The deer? Both? The mountain too? Yes, everything, probably. It
is a brilliant ending metrically, but a loose one semantically. Lesser Gaelic poets routinely inform
us in their last stanza that they are stopping because they have run out of things to say; Donnchadh
Bàn’s claim that he is stopping because the subject is too difficult is not very different.
As in the ‘Birlinn’, then, the poet leaves it to us to work out whether he has said anything
important. What we can say with certainty is that Donnchadh Bàn assumes that, like his
eighteenth-century audience, we will know ‘Òran na Comhachaig’ (Menzies 2012). This helps us
to understand that the ‘Moladh’ is a praise motif on a gigantic scale, torn strangely free of its
addressee. Ossianic heroes appear and disappear, Patrick the assumed Jacobite appears and disap-
pears, King George’s men appear and disappear, the ‘man whose profession / Was devoted to
these’ appears and disappears. The actual proprietor of Beinn Dobhrain, the earl of Breadalbane,
Donnchadh Bàn’s patron, fails to appear at all. As the poet repeatedly assigns human qualities to
the deer, it is not difficult to see the poem as a metaphor for the human condition, and the final
section as a metaphor for death, a routine part of that condition. We may read it as biographical:
the lack of human presence reflects the poet’s exile from the mountain. Or literary: Gaelic verse
no longer has patrons. Or societal: there is no longer a contrat social between the Highland chiefs
and their people (Rousseau’s Du contrat social had appeared in 1762). Or political: the people have
their own destiny in their hands. Or universal: the world is entirely ours to destroy, or to live
with it in harmony, as do the deer of Beinn Dobhrain.
The term ‘Gaelic Enlightenment’ has come to be used since 2012, notably by Prof. Nigel
Leask and Dr Sìm Innes, to describe the cultural and literary endeavours of Highland Presbyterian
ministers in the age of Johnson and Pennant. This is not the ‘Gaelic Enlightenment’ described
above, which had Alastair at its heart, and could also lay claim to Donnchadh Bàn. The point is
well made by Michael Foxley when he describes Alastair as ‘truly the Man of a – thwarted –
Gaelic Enlightenment’ (Dressler and Stiùbhart 2012, p. xiii).
All translations above are by the present author. All works cited include translations, except
Campbell (1935) and Mac-Dhonuill (1751).
References
Aufrere, A. (1817). The Lockhart Papers, vol. II. London. Black, R. (ed.) (2001). An Lasair: Anthology of 18th
Black, R. (1997). Mac Mhaighstir Alastair in Rannoch: a Century Scottish Gaelic Verse. Edinburgh: Birlinn.
reconstruction. In: Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Black, R. (2010). A forgotten song by Duncan Ban
Inverness, vol. 59, 341–419. Macintyre. In: Bile ós Chrannaibh: A Festschrift for
c36.indd 471 03/09/2024 07:23:52

William Gillies (ed. W. McLeod, A. Burnyeat, D.U. Macdonald, A. (n.d.). Cath Fionntràgha, National Library
Stiùbhart, et al.), 5–28. Ceann Drochaid: Clann Tuirc. of Scotland, Adv. MS 72.2.11, 40 pp.
Black, R. (2017). The Campbells of the Ark: Men of Argyll in Macdonald, A. and Macdonald, A. (ed.) (1924). The Poems
1745, 2 vols. Edinburgh: John Donald. of Alexander Macdonald. Inverness: The Northern
Campbell, J.L. (1935). Gaelic MS. 63 of the National Library Counties Newspaper and Printing and Publishing
(continued). Scottish Gaelic Studies 4 (2): 153–204. Company, Limited.
Campbell, J.L. (ed.) (1981). Hebridean Folksongs, vol. III. MacLeod, A. (ed.) (1952). The Songs of Duncan Ban
Oxford: Clarendon Press. Macintyre. Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society.
Campbell, J.L. (ed.) (1984 [1933]). Highland Songs of the Menzies, P. (ed.) (2012). Òran na Comhachaig: A Critical
Forty-Five. Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society. Edition. Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society.
Dressler, C. and Stiùbhart, D.U. (ed.) (2012). Alexander Riach, A. (2015). The Birlinn of Clanranald. Newtyle:
MacDonald, Bard of the Gaelic Enlightenment. Kershader: Kettillonia.
The Islands Book Trust. Thomson, D.S. (ed.) (1993). Gaelic Poetry in the Eighteenth
Mac-Dhonuill, A. (1751). Ais- Eiridh na Sean Chánoin Century. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary
Albannaich. Duneidiunn. Studies.
c36.indd 472 03/09/2024 07:23:52

37
Walter Scott
Ian Duncan
Department of English, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
At the height of his literary career, from 1805 until his death in 1832, Walter Scott enjoyed an
unprecedented combination of international popularity, immense sales profits, official honours,
and critical prestige. Scott’s narrative poems were a new phenomenon, international best-sellers
during the Napoleonic wars, while ‘the “Author of Waverley” sold more novels than all the other
novelists of the time put together’ (St Clair 2004, p. 221). Reissued in cheap editions, the
Waverley Novels (as they came to be called) remained the best-selling novels across the English-
speaking world throughout the nineteenth century and were translated into all the European
literary languages. Reviewers praised Scott for raising the dignity of the novel to a classical
standard, and for a Shakespearean fertility of invention and truth to nature. His international
impact on nineteenth-century fiction can scarcely be overstated. Waverley and its successors
reshaped the novel as such, making it the exemplary literary genre of modernity, able to narrate
the historical formation of a whole national society, encompassing a hitherto unrepresented
demographic and stylistic range. Awarded a baronetcy by George IV, Scott dedicated the revised
edition of his works to the king. Working at the center of networks of patronage, he became, in
effect, the Tory regime’s cultural viceroy in pre-Reform Scotland. Commemorated in placenames,
statues and other civic monuments, ‘Sir Walter’ cast a long shadow across Victorian culture, not
least in Scotland itself.
By the mid-twentieth century that reputation had suffered a catastrophe collapse. The aes-
thetic revolutions of Modernism cast Scott as the epitome of bourgeois Victorian taste, a heavy
literary forefather to be rebelled against. The backlash in Scotland, led by Edwin Muir and other
figures of the modern ‘Renaissance’, was notably fierce, so much so that the debunking of Scott

as Tory Unionist ideologue, manufacturer of a nostalgic, retro-Jacobite idea of Scotland, remains

a critical routine, if no longer the default setting it once was (see Muir 1936; Nairn 1981,
pp. 118–123). While Scott’s broader impact on British, European and ‘world literature’ would
be widely acknowledged, the works themselves had almost all fallen out of print by the 1960s.
The past half-century has seen a scholarly revival, boosted by critical editions of the novels and
now the poetry, with the Scottish historical fiction, especially, garnering serious attention. It
looks unlikely however that Scott’s novels (let alone the poems) will regain anything like their
former popularity – in contrast to the ongoing enthusiasm for Scott’s contemporary, Jane Austen.
The cultural phenomenon of Scott as celebrity, his impact and legacy in popular fiction and
across other genres, media, sites and institutions of nineteenth-century public life, has occupied
recent scholarship (see, e.g., Hill 2010; Rigney 2012; Mayer 2017; Goode 2020). The present
essay returns to what mattered at first, and still matters: Scott’s fiction.
The collection, adaptation, and composition of ballads, a ‘national’ poetic genre of early European
Romanticism, occupied the first phase of Scott’s career. A young Edinburgh advocate, he broke
into print with The Chase, and William and Helen (1796), a free English version of German Gothic
ballads by Gottfried August Bürger. Five years later he developed a fragment by Goethe into
another ballad, ‘Frederick and Alice’, for Matthew Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1801), along with
some pastiches of his own, including two imitations of traditional Scottish ballads, ‘Glenfinlas’
and ‘The Eve of St John’. Scott reprinted these in the book in which he formally laid claim to his
native ground: Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, first published in two volumes of ‘Historical
Ballads’ and ‘Romantic Ballads’ in 1802 and reissued the following year with a third volume and
a set of modern ‘Imitations of the Ancient Ballad’. Minstrelsy was translated twice into German
and selections from it adapted by German authors, including Wilhelm Grimm; it provided the
impetus for Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s monumental anthology Des Knaben
Wunderhorn (1805–1808). Scott’s early writings, in short, illustrate the circulation of putatively
indigenous – national and traditional – literatures across the cosmopolitan networks of northern
European Romanticism, inaugurated with Johann Gottfried Herder’s foundation of the idea of
‘folk’ literature upon James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian in 1773. Now, with far greater delibera-
tion than in the case of ‘Ossian’, Scott’s practice of authorship shifted fluidly between scholarly
acts of collection and translation and poetic acts of imitation and invention.
In 1805 Scott amplified what was originally conceived as a contribution to the ‘Imitations’
section of Minstrelsy into his first stand-alone, book-length work of fiction, The Lay of the Last
Minstrel, a poem in six cantos combining themes of ancient ‘Border chivalry and enchantment’.
The critical and commercial success of The Lay was overtopped by its successors, Marmion: A Tale
of Flodden Field (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). Scott had invented a new genre of ballad-
based modern metrical romance, which would not survive its immense nineteenth-century pop-
ularity. The Lay of the Last Minstrel charges its Chinese-box structure of nested scenarios with
typical moods and affects, from the elegiac Ossianism of the late-seventeenth-century frame (the
eponymous minstrel, ‘the last of his race’, sings for a noble patron) to the vigorous central narra-
tive of sixteenth-century clan intrigue and, enclosed within that, the shape-shifting sorcery
unleashed from the ‘Black Book’ of the undead ancestral wizard Michael Scott. All these are
framed, in turn, by a modern scholarly apparatus, in the form of Scott’s copious endnotes – 122
closely-printed pages of them, following 191 pages of verse, in the first edition. Scott presents
Walter Scott 475
his poem as a heavily mediated historical artefact, in which an extinct – or perhaps only d ormant –
black magic constitutes the modern fiction’s inner, secret source, enclosed (like a radioactive core
wrapped in lead) in successively disenchanted textual layers.
Not much read today, the three metrical romances established much of what would be
characteristic of the next, major phase of their author’s career – the great series of historical nov-
els begun with Waverley in 1814. This is the case formally as well as thematically, notably in the
provision of a paratextual apparatus (prefatory and introductory chapters, notes, citations, epi-
graphs, authorial asides) that underscores the mixed, multilayered makeup of these modern
romantic inventions. The Lay of the Last Minstrel secures Scott’s claim upon the history and tradi-
tions of his ancestral Borders. The Lady of the Lake undertakes a romantic invasion of the
Highlands, soon to be reprised in Waverley and Rob Roy (1817); its fable, in which the wild world
of the Gaelic clans succumbs to the authority of a grace-bestowing Scottish king, looks forward
to those novels’ historical topic of failed Jacobite insurgency and the triumph of the imperial
nation state.
Marmion foreshadows the major turn within Scott’s novelistic career, from the five-year
sequence of novels of the making of modern Scotland, begun in Waverley, to Ivanhoe (1820), a
romance of Medieval English origins. Marmion ostensibly revives the spirit of the old chivalric
romance as an imaginative resource for the nation in time of war; Scott’s stanzas dwell on splen-
did descriptions of costume and pageantry, attached to scenes of journey and arrival. This aes-
thetic pomp is undercut by the story’s moral substance, as well as by its historical topic, Scotland’s
worst military defeat. The English knight Marmion has seduced and abandoned a nun and forged
letters framing a rival for treason, so as to marry the latter’s betrothed and seize her property.
(The forgery motif winks at the vexed status of modern antique romance, from Elizabeth
Wardlaw’s Hardyknute to Ossian.) Marmion also bears the most elaborate framing apparatus of the
poems, consisting of introductory stanzas to each canto addressed to the author’s friends, reflect-
ing on his early life, his sources of inspiration, and the present wartime crisis, along with the
voluminous historical endnotes.
Although Scott wrote four more long narrative poems after The Lady of the Lake, he devoted
his creative energy increasingly to the anonymous authorship of novels – 26 of them, from
Waverley to Castle Dangerous (1832). His signature verse form – irregular tetrameter lines, varied
with inset songs – proved limiting; prose was more flexible, better suited to the omnivorous,
synthetic drive of Scott’s art, encompassing multifarious literary and historical sources, genres
and styles. And where the ballad is an oral-traditional, antique or primitive (in the terms of the
day) story-telling form, prose narrative, both historical and novelistic, belongs to modernity and
to print. Thus, Scott’s literary career, with its three-part sequence of stages, updates the ancient
classical model of the poetic career (from pastoral through georgic to epic) to rehearse a progress
of genres, and the compositional roles associated with them, according to an Enlightenment
philosophical history of successive cultural formations: from antiquarian curator of traditional
ballads, to celebrated national minstrel, to impersonal historical novelist.
The historiographic plan of developmental stages provides a blueprint for Waverley, in which
history provides the novel’s theme as well as a period setting. The 1745 Jacobite rising, the last
armed conflict on British soil, issues in the military and political repression of the Highland
clans, their relegation to an obsolete, archaic past, and their sentimental transmutation into aes-
thetic trophies of the modern liberal imagination (see Lincoln 2007, pp. 51–63). Scott’s novel
synchronises this national history with the personal history of his protagonist’s moral formation,
as Edward Waverley awakens from youthful dreams of romantic adventure (enacted in his
transitory attachment to the rebel cause) to a sober acceptance of ordinary domestic reality. With
these two histories Waverley combines a third, a literary history of the rise of the novel itself
through a dialectical contest between pre-modern narrative forms of epic and romance, expres-
sive of the feudal and absolutist ideologies mustered in the Jacobite attempt, and history, the
militantly empirical genre of an ascendant modern culture. Waverley’s subjective, submissive
turn, from ‘the romance of his life’ to ‘its real history’ (Scott 2007, p. 301), is overwritten by a
third, synthetic stage, materialised in the novel that contains him as a historical fiction: the genre
of a modernity now so firmly established that it can digest its past states, rather than crudely
rejecting them, into aesthetic styles and moods. Making Highland romance available to readers
for imaginative play, metabolising not only prior narrative forms but a totality of genres and
styles – poetic and scientific, dramatic and lyrical, literary and vernacular – Waverley makes its
claim on the novel as the national form of modern civil society. This literary evolution informs
the aesthetic attitudes of Waverley’s successive love interests. Fanatical Jacobite Flora Mac-Ivor,
seeking to attach Waverley to the cause, recites her translation (Gaelic to English) of a bardic
war-song; the Ossianic allusion exposes the project of ancestral heroic revival as anachronistic
and deluded. In contrast, Waverley’s eventual wife Rose Bradwardine collects local ballads for
polite drawing-room entertainment – much as the novel offers itself as a (greater, encyclopaedic)
national museum of traditions, styles and forms.
Scott’s authorial rehearsal of a succession of genres and roles outflanked, meanwhile, the
contemporaneous English generation of the so-called ‘greater Romantic lyric’, embedded in an
individual history, a ‘growth of a poet’s mind’, from Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads
(1798) to Keats’s odes (1819) (Abrams 1971). Scott’s career exemplifies instead a Scottish
Romanticism, routinely sidelined in Anglocentric accounts of literary history and aesthetics, in
which literary work is bound to public history and to a collective, social, distributed mode of
cultural production. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is thus a poetic analogue of Enlightenment
scientific-antiquarian research projects, overseen by author-grandees and reliant on expert (often
artisanal or laboring-class) collaborators, which generated lavish sets of volumes on subjects from
Classical antiquity to Pacific ethnology (Heringman 2017). Minstrelsy combines anonymous,
traditional, putatively ancient ballads with modern imitations by Scott’s informants and collabo-
rators as well as by Scott himself. The ballads, introductions and notes present the reader with a
plethora of historical languages and knowledges – the reverse of unmediated access to a pure
national tradition (see Millgate 1984, p. 10). As for the metrical romances, Scott’s framing mat-
ter is integral to the book that contains them, and resonates critically with the stories they tell –
highlighting the romance’s invented status, prompting the reader to a comparative and sceptical
as well as sentimental engagement with the core narrative: ‘his lays are both romances and read-
ings of romance, his minstrelsy both enmeshed in tradition (literary and oral) and a meditation
on tradition’, writes Maureen McLane (2008, pp. 140–160); see also Lumsden (2021, pp. 109–
123). Waverley addresses its reader via a protean, garrulous, often intrusive narrator-editor, who
shifts roles from Johnsonian moralist through Enlightenment historian and ethnographer to
exuberantly playful tale-teller.
In subsequent novels (from the first series of Tales of My Landlord, 1816) the author-figure
splinters into a host of fictive informants, compilers, editors and interlocutors, who debate –
sometimes fractiously, as in the preface to Tales of the Crusaders (1825) – the condition and func-
tion of the narratives they jostle over. These avatars refract the novels’ real conditions of
production, in which Scott worked closely with his printers, John and James Ballantyne, his
chief publisher, Archibald Constable, and other collaborators and informants. The novels’ prose
Walter Scott 477
medium allows, meanwhile, for the ingestion of what was editorial matter in the verse romances
into the body of the fiction, in the form of asides, citations, allusions and digressions. (The appa-
ratus of notes and introductions explodes again in Scott’s last, revised edition of the novels,
1829–1834.) Rather than an original authorial voice, the novels transmit a polyphony of voices –
or rather, they subdue the illusion of speaking voice to an insistence upon the work’s written
medium. The heavy, ostentatiously literary manner of Scott’s English style, alienating to many
readers now, is intrinsic to the novel’s task. The Scottish author, whose vernacular tongue was not
English, refuses the naturalisation of style, aligning writing with speech and language with
consciousness, that we find perfected in the novels of Jane Austen and bequeathed to later realist
fiction. In a radical technical experiment, muffled for modern readers by its subsequent stand-
ardisation as an antique period style, Scott extends that estranging, critical stance to English
itself, in Ivanhoe – casting English readers now as outsiders to their own language and history.
Scott signals two key innovations on the title page of his first novel. The title itself – Waverley;
or’,Tis Sixty Years Since – identifies the recent past, a generation ago, as the historical threshold of
modernity, ‘the necessary prehistory of the present’ which shapes our own life and times (Lukács 1983,
p. 61). Secondly, the novel’s Shakespearean epigraph, from Henry IV Part 2 (‘Under which king,
Bezonian? Speak, or die!’), designates civil war as the historical occasion and theme of the new
kind of novel. With its violent disruption of the continuities of everyday life, civil war brings
history home to individuals, precipitating a complex, long-durational process into concrete
events and immediate, often traumatic, personal experience.
Civil war links three topics – revolution, sovereignty, and empire – which remain central to
the political imagination of Scott’s fiction; they organise the remainder of this essay. Revolution
is the spectre that haunts the great series of novels on the making of modern Scotland, from the
mid-seventeenth-century civil wars to world war with revolutionary France, that make up the
first phase of Scott’s career as a novelist. After Edmund Burke, Scott held that the British
Revolution, meaning the Williamite coup of 1688 and the ensuing constitutional settlements,
including the 1707 Treaty of Union, was a singular event: ending the religious and dynastic
conflicts of the seventeenth century, securing the peace and future prosperity of the multina-
tional British state. The French Revolution, the defining political event of Scott’s generation,
posed the threat of a further – sudden, radical, wholesale – transformation not only of political
regimes but of whole ways of life, of manners and values and beliefs. Scott’s novels conjure up the
spectre of radical revolution in order to exorcise it, dispelling or absorbing its existential threat,
at the same time as they reflect melancholically on the loss of traditional cultures in the passage
to modernity (Hamilton 1994). In Waverley, the Jacobite counterrevolutionary attempt acceler-
ates the imperial project of nation-making critics have called ‘internal colonialism’, through
which the state subdues its ethnic and cultural peripheries into a unified political body
(Hechter 1975; Trumpener 1997, pp. 130–151; Makdisi 1998, pp. 70–99). Scott himself char-
acterised his first three novels as ‘a series of fictitious narratives, intended to illustrate the man-
ners of Scotland at three different periods’ (Scott 2002, p. 3): from the 1745 rising (Waverley),
through Scotland’s integration into a globalising Great Britain in the ‘Age of Enlightenment’
(Guy Mannering), to the 1790s and war with France (The Antiquary). Already these novels weave
together the domestic arena of national formation through civil war with the broad reach of
imperial and international geopolitics.
Waverley is often taken to be paradigmatic of Scott’s historical fiction, by virtue of its coming
first, as though the novels that followed were merely repetitions of a formula – instead of an
extended, experimental recombination and reimagining of the genre’s thematic and formal
capacities. Two later novels, Rob Roy and Redgauntlet (1824), resume the signature topic of
Jacobite insurrection, counterpointing the national theme – the clash between ancient (residual)
and modern (ascendant) social orders – with the Bildungsroman plot of a young man’s entry into
the world. Rob Roy (set around the 1715 rising) reshuffles the philosophical history of develop-
mental stages that framed Waverley. Now Scott separates the political and historical theme of
Jacobite absolutism from the anthropological theme of Gaelic primitivism, embodied in the
Highland outlaw Rob Roy himself, whose irrepressible vitality escapes and exceeds the linear
chronology of national history. Modern economic forces (overpopulation, a credit collapse) drive
the rebellion, overriding its official ideology of old-regime restoration. The Jacobites fade away
into the archive of lost causes, while Rob Roy flourishes in the fringes and crevices of the new
commercial order – expert in its dark arts, a disavowed double of economic man. The spokesman
for commercial modernity, Glasgow businessman and magistrate Nicol Jarvie, is linked by the
organic bond of kinship to the outlaw whose ways he vehemently repudiates; Jarvie’s authority,
decisive in Glasgow, falters once he leaves his civic habitat for the Highlands. The novel registers
ways in which the globalisation of British history across Atlantic networks of trade, plantation,
colonisation and imperial warfare scrambles the stadial scheme that is its alibi (Duncan 2007,
pp. 101–115). Scott compounds the experiment by having his protagonist narrate the novel in
the first person – underscoring Frank’s failure to control or understand, even in retrospect, the
history through which he has moved (Millgate 1984, pp. 131–150).
Where Rob Roy visits the prequel to 1745, Redgauntlet brings Charles Edward Stuart back to
Scotland 20 years later, for a final counterrevolutionary attempt. This last Jacobite rising is liter-
ally a historical fiction, since it never took place – it is Scott’s invention. Scott writes the rising’s
political failure as a failure to enter the historical record which consigns it, instead, to the domain
of fiction, marking the triumph of a modern civil society in which nothing happens: political
change, whether revolutionary or reactionary, belongs to the past. A stadial literary history dis-
solves into an anthology of period genres (the novel is subtitled A Tale of the Eighteenth Century):
epistolary exchange, captivity journal, impersonal narration, inset folktale, law case, and styles
of sentimental, military and criminal memoir – all suspended within the neutralising medium
of the fictive.
The political topic recurrent across the three novels, Jacobite counterrevolution, constitutes a
theme-and-variations sequence. Among Scott’s other novels on the making of modern Scotland,
two of the series of Tales of My Landlord – Old Mortality (1816) and The Heart of Mid-Lothian
(1819) – address (instead) the legacy of the seventeenth-century Covenanting movement in the
radical, dissenting tradition of Scottish politics (see Lincoln 2007, pp. 151–187). Old Mortality
tracks the escalation of a regional insurgency (the ‘Killing Time’ in the southwest Lowlands)
towards full-scale civil war, with, as its near horizon, the Williamite revolution – and stages
Scott’s most concentrated, intense engagement with the political themes of contract, resistance,
rebellion and enthusiasm. The protagonist’s ordeal in the white heat of revolutionary conflict is
accordingly harrowing. The Heart of Mid-Lothian posits the pacification and domestication of
Covenanter enthusiasm through its feminization, in the person – uniquely in Scott’s novels – of
a laboring-class heroine, Jeanie Deans. Her father’s principled intransigence (admirable, but also
ludicrous and futile), a relic of the civil wars, is regenerated by Jeanie’s translation of it into pri-
vate moral agency, enacted in the heartfelt plea from woman to woman and presided over by a
Walter Scott 479
managerial rather than sovereign patron. In this novel, which ranges geographically from
Edinburgh to London to Argyll and features dairy-farmers, merchants, lawyers, lairds, criminal
gangs, courtiers and royalty among its cast, Scott assembles the comprehensive form of the great
multi-plotted novels of the Victorian era, by Charles Dickens and George Eliot, which encom-
pass a sweeping totality of national life.
In a recent study (2017), Nasser Mufti analyses the formative role of civil war in the nineteenth-
century British understanding of national history and colonial settlement. Civil war is the cruci-
ble in which the future unity of the modern nation-state is forged, tempered in the fire of
internecine struggle. Scott’s Scottish novels of 1814–1819 (with their retrospective supplement,
Redgauntlet) established the theme, casting civil war as the country’s rite of passage into British
Union. The theme becomes a formula in the 1840s in the ‘Condition of England’ writings of
Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Disraeli, whose debt to Scott Mufti notes (2017, pp. 72–75):
above all to Ivanhoe, where Scott coins the phrase, ‘The condition of the English nation was at this
time sufficiently miserable’ (Scott 1996, p. 86). Scott’s departure from modern Scottish history
for a romance of English origins, set 600 years rather than 60 years since, marks a second major
turning point in his career, after the shift from metrical to prose fiction. Ivanhoe proved by far
Scott’s most popular novel, not only in international readership but in the quantity and variety
of media adaptations, including plays, paintings, operas, movies, comic-books, and private and
public pageantry. In it, the Scottish author invented the popular idea of medieval England that
remains prevalent today.
Set 130 years after the Norman Conquest, England is a colony of foreign warlords who have
dispossessed the old Saxon gentry. Scott’s novel imagines a prehistory of the English present
which subsumes civil war into a deeper past of invasion and colonial settlement. Eventually this
history will issue in a blending of the two races, Saxon and Norman, and their separate cultures
and languages into one greater English. That synthetic English is manifest in the novel we are
reading, with its rich pastiche of English literary-historical styles, from Chaucer through Spenser,
Shakespeare, and the King James Bible to Dryden and Pope. The England of Ivanhoe, like the
novel itself, is a postcolonial artefact, the product of a multi-layered colonial history. In this
Scottish novel of English origins, no-one is a native: the opening pages, alluding to Druidical
remains and an earlier, Roman conquest, remind us that the Saxons too were alien invaders. The
Crusades provide an explicitly imperial frame for the novel’s action: the Christian invasion of
Palestine, homeland of the West’s world religions, unites Norman and Saxon warriors under the
code of chivalry. Scott’s representation is bracingly sceptical. A reckless adventure, fueled by
ideological bigotry, the conquest of Jerusalem wastes precious lives and resources, and brings
back home ‘oriental’ bad habits of luxury, despotism and fanaticism.
This not-yet England is populated by more than just two peoples or races. As well as Saxons
and Normans, Ivanhoe features African slaves, brought from Palestine by the Templars, and the
Jewish community of York. The exclusion of these others from the future national society trou-
bles the progressive history of ethnic reconciliation and assimilation which the novel is often
taken to be promoting. The Jews play a familiar, sacrificial role, whereby their rejection from the
national body underwrites its future integrity, recapitulating, it seems, a providential history in
which Christianity digests its Judaic heritage, to leave the Jews themselves as an unassimilable
archaic residue. The formula is complicated by the novel’s de facto heroine, the Jewess Rebecca,
who personifies Christian and chivalric virtues more compellingly than any of the other charac-
ters. Channelling modern liberal values, Rebecca embodies a transcendent human spirit defined
ethically rather than by religious creed. She, not the novel’s official protagonist Wilfred of
Ivanhoe, speaks for a future ideal of Englishness: ‘I am of England, Sir Knight, and speak the
English tongue, although my dress and my lineage belong to another climate’ (Scott 1996,
p. 235; see Cagidimetrio 1989). At the close of the novel Rebecca and her father leave inhospi-
table England to seek refuge in the Emirate of Granada, on the eve of the Catholic Reconquista of
1492 and the final expulsion of Spain’s Jewish and Muslim populations. The flagrant anachro-
nism – Rebecca and Isaac are exiled in time as well as in space – reminds readers that further
cycles of persecution and displacement await Rebecca’s people. In stark contrast to the official
English destiny of national unification, we glimpse a chronically unsettled history of worldwide
dispossession and migration, which is at the same time a story of humanist aspiration and hope –
empire’s moral jetsam, the byproducts, it seems, of dispossession and migration.
Ivanhoe explores the imperial matrix of national cultural formation, in a prehistory of colonial
violence shot through with world-scale movements of invasion, settlement, enslavement, exile
and migration. The imperial theme is extended in the two later Tales of the Crusaders. The Betrothed
explores unrest across a domestic colonial frontier (England and Wales), while The Talisman fol-
lows the action to Palestine, where the Sultan Saladin plays the role of magical potentate, com-
manding arts of healing as well as violence, effortlessly circumventing the corrupt, stymied
cohort of Western Crusaders (see Watt 2004; McCracken-Flesher 2005, pp. 118–127). Count
Robert of Paris (published as a fourth ‘Tale of My Landlord’, 1831) supplies a bizarre coda: Scott
makes eleventh-century Constantinople the arena for a centrifugal world history in which
national, confessional and cultural differences cascade into racial and biological differences,
according to the logic of Lamarckian evolutionism (which found its early British reception in
Scott’s Edinburgh) (Duncan 2019, pp. 100–113). Elsewhere, we may track other series and
sequences, some on the micro-scale of paired novels, such as the Scottish Reformation doublet of
The Monastery and its sequel The Abbot (both 1820), or the continental romances of feudalism’s
breakup, Quentin Durward (1823) and Anne of Geierstein (1829). The French novelist Honoré de
Balzac, acknowledging his great precursor in the preface to The Human Comedy, criticised Scott
for an insufficiently scientific approach to his oeuvre. Any attempt to arrange the Waverley
Novels into a taxonomy – or for that matter along an ‘organic’ developmental path – is bound to
omit more than it includes.
Ivanhoe, nevertheless, marks a watershed in the sequence of Scott’s historical novels. Another of
its topical innovations, besides the postcolonial rendering of English history, signals a change of
direction in the novels’ political thematic. This is the entry of the historical monarch, up until
now an absent or marginal figure in Scott’s fiction, into the narrative scene.
Waverley established the convention of casting a fictitious rather than a historical personage as
the historical novel’s protagonist. ‘A “middling,” merely correct and never heroic “hero” ’, whose
milieu is private life rather than public action, occupies the narrative foreground, while the
Hegelian figure of the ‘world-historical individual’ is kept at the edges or left out altogether
(Lukács 1983, pp. 32–33, 39). The arrangement expresses the constitutional weakness of the
monarch in the modern British state, following the redistribution of sovereignty between king
and parliament after the 1688 Revolution, framed, in Scotland, by the removal of king and
Walter Scott 481
parliament to England at the successive Acts of Union. In Scott’s novels before Ivanhoe, the king
is substituted by a pretender (Waverley) or by a female proxy (The Heart of Mid-Lothian), when not
absent altogether. Sovereign agency is claimed, instead, by the wild figure of a lost leader or
fanatic, who cannot be allowed to survive into modern civil society. Napoleon Bonaparte, the
subject of an 1829 biography by Scott, is the contemporary archetype of the sublime pretender –
Hegel’s ‘world-soul’ on horseback – whose imperial power-grab poses an existential threat to the
political order. Scott shares the liberal-conservative view of government proposed by David
Hume in his 1748 political essay ‘Of the Original Contract’: all regimes are established by vio-
lence – ‘usurpation or conquest, or both’ – and the only real basis of their legitimacy is customary
consent, the outgrowth of the passage of time, as that original violence fades from collective
memory (Hume 1987, pp. 471–475). Darsie Latimer invokes the principle against the renewal
of Jacobite insurrection in Redgauntlet: ‘A dynasty now established for three reigns’ has become
naturalised in national life; ‘I look around me, and I see a settled government – an established
authority – a born Briton on the throne’ (Scott 1985, pp. 338–339).
The trauma of recent conquest overcasts Ivanhoe, in which Richard Coeur-de-Lion, returning
from the Crusades, must evolve from the role of Norman overlord to that of English king.
‘Kings – so weak or remote in Waverley – are now truly sovereign presences in [Scott’s] fiction’,
writes John Sutherland (1995, p. 250). Except that they are not: the king’s failure to assume
sovereign presence is a recurrent motif. The only monarchs who wield unconditional power in
Scott’s novels are the ‘oriental despots’, Saladin in The Talisman and Hayder Ali in The Surgeon’s
Daughter, fabulous Sultans out of legend and romance. Scott’s European monarchs, especially his
British monarchs, are demystified, compromised figures who must strive to legitimate their rule
following usurpation, revolution, or some other breach of constitutional continuity. Far from
being the sublime source of law, the king must submit to it – caught, like his subjects, in law’s
trammels, in the modern condition of mixed and divided sovereignty. The monarch turns out to
be a figure that cannot coincide with itself – a historical person unable fully to realise the institu-
tion he or she represents. Scott plays upon the doctrine, installed in medieval political theology,
of the ‘king’s two bodies’, which sought to secure sovereignty by doubling it between the mon-
arch’s mortal, fallible ‘body natural’ and the transcendental ‘body politic’ he or she temporarily
inhabits (see Wallace 2012).
Tara Ghoshal Wallace (2012) discusses Scott’s sustained meditation on the travails of sover-
eignty in a series of novels on early modern British history, written in the wake of Ivanhoe. The
Abbot and Kenilworth (1821) offer contrasting figures of the female monarch, whose gender makes
radical the division between body natural and body politic. Mary of Scotland, in The Abbot,
exemplifies a stereotypically feminine frailty and caprice, hence, an incapacity to rule; whereas
Elizabeth of England, in Scott’s brilliant Tudor romance, commands virtuoso political skill,
deploying her femininity to manage the gangster-like cohort of ambitious nobles and courtiers
vying for her favour. The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) features James VI of Scotland and I of England,
first, self-styled ‘King of Great Britain’ following the Union of Crowns, as the most vivid, mem-
orable, and at the same time disenchanted of Scott’s depictions of royalty. The flaws and foibles
that hobble his claims to patriarchal supremacy make him the most entertaining character in the
novel; the modern monarch inhabits the comic and domestic realm of everyday life, rather than
a superseded heroic regime of epic or tragedy.
King Jamie’s Scottishness, the index of his comic unfitness for mystical kingship, is also
attached to the future Charles II in Woodstock (1826), set in the immediate aftermath of civil war
and that most disastrous of constitutional ruptures, the literal severing of the royal head from the
royal body – an epochal undoing of the bond between mortal and transcendental sovereignty.
The division is played out in the novel’s doubling of the role of sovereign between the slaugh-
tered king’s fugitive, scapegrace heir and the usurper and regicide who has taken his place,
Oliver Cromwell – the closest figure to a world-historical individual in Scott’s fiction. Fallen out
of mystical kingship into the base condition of an ill-regulated natural body, Charles must be
schooled in the modern discipline of ethical performance through which the king is to reclaim
his role; while Cromwell, tormented by the memory of the ‘parricide’ (his word) he has wrought,
dispenses sovereign grace unwittingly, pardoning the principal characters on the grounds that he
has forgotten he condemned them in the first place.
Doubling is the trick, it seems, that might preserve the monarch’s transcendental aspect by
sequestering him outside the law or hiding him in its interstices. Ivanhoe establishes the tem-
plate, with Scott’s invention of an occult, divided figure, the ‘outlaw king’, at the center of his
imaginative universe: the disguised King Richard, lurking among outlaws in the greenwood,
and his secret sharer, the outlaw chief Robin Hood. Their complicity reclaims a vanishing sover-
eignty through techniques of management, available in an outlaw commonwealth that bides its
time in the woods (for an important discussion, see Wilt 1985, pp. 19–20, 32–45). While the
king puts on outlawry as a game, a holiday frolic, the outlaw practices kingship out of necessity,
as a professional duty. Their division of labor models the modern conjunction of ceremonial
monarchy, its mystic aura distilled into pageants and national holidays, with the administrative
grind of daily government.
Richard unmasks his royal presence late in Ivanhoe. Robin Hood and his band pledge alle-
giance, while Richard, saluting Robin as ‘King of Outlaws, and Prince of good fellows’
(Scott 1996, p. 452) recognises a rival sovereignty that sustains his own. Their collaboration
proves short-lived, however, since Richard will soon take off again on his crusading adventure
and meet a wasteful premature death. The narrator reminds us that the doubled sovereignty of
the outlaw king is a provisional, fragile, ultimately illusory arrangement:
In the lion-hearted King, the brilliant, but useless character, of a knight of romance, was in a great
measure realized and revived … His reign was like the course of a brilliant and rapid meteor, which
shoots along the face of Heaven, shedding around an unnecessary and portentous light, which is
instantly swallowed up by universal darkness; his feats of chivalry furnishing themes for bards and
minstrels, but affording none of those solid benefits to his country on which history loves to pause,
and hold up as an example to posterity.
(Scott 1996, p. 458)
‘Brilliant, but useless’, is the defining quality of the aesthetic object or work of art according to
Scott’s contemporary, the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Richard’s legacy belongs more to romance
than to history; Robin Hood too recedes into the archives of ballad and popular fiction. Kingly
outlaw and outlaw king disappear from the historical record, along with their compact of popular
sovereignty, and are preserved for our imagination in the medium of romance – in Ivanhoe itself.
Ivanhoe’s scenario of national foundation looks forward to the modern British constitution of
mixed sovereignty at the core of a multinational imperial polity. Scott’s insistence on the
scenario’s fictional status draws his readers’ attention to the speculative lightness – the

Walter Scott 483
playfulness – with which he imagines this remote prehistory of the English present. While
Ivanhoe was the first of Scott’s novels to advertise itself on the title page as ‘A Romance’, poised
at an oblique angle to the historical record, his novels and poems had always been poised thus.
Volume Two of Waverley opens with a review of the formal relation between author and reader:
Shall this be a short or a long chapter? – This is a question in which you, gentle reader, have no vote,
however much you may be interested in the consequences; just as probably you may (like myself)
have nothing to do with the imposing a new tax, excepting the trifling circumstance of being
obliged to pay it. More happy surely in the present case, since, though it lies within my arbitrary
power to extend my materials as I think proper, I cannot call you into Exchequer if you do not think
proper to read my narrative. Let me therefore consider….
(Scott 2007, p. 121)
Scott charges his reflection with the political principles that are at stake in the 1745 rising,
which he is about to bring to the foreground of his story. The author may assert ‘arbitrary power’
over the transaction of storytelling, like an absolute prince – but then the reader may depose him
by shutting the book. The relation between novelist and reader is ultimately a commercial and
contractual one, since readers, who have paid for the privilege, are always free to stop reading.
The novel, a democratic art form, is only real – it only exists – so long as a public consents to
read it. That consent is invested in the customary medium of literary convention, of which the
length of a chapter is a comically reductive example. A novel’s constituents – plot, characters,
setting, mood, style, pacing, comic or tragic resolution – are shaped by the expectations of its
readers, by what they find interesting and what they are prepared to put up with, as well as by
the creative intentions of the author.
The mutual recognition of king and outlaw in Ivanhoe takes place in the greenwood, the
archetypal setting of romance: an imaginary social as well as natural space set apart from, but not
disconnected from, historical and political reality. With that distance or difference, written into
its status as a work of fiction, the novel keeps open its relation to potential historical futures as
well as to imagined pasts: as though it is up to us, its readers, to figure out the kind of polity we
want to live in – just as it is left to us to think critically about the limits of an English nation
from which a Rebecca is excluded, or of a Great Britain built upon the extinction of ‘old Scottish
faith, hospitality, worth, and honour’ (Scott 2007, p. 363). Scott’s historical fiction accommo-
dates a more outward-reaching, forward-thinking, utopian drive than many of his critics have
been ready to grant – perhaps because it has been so difficult to read these novels unencumbered
by association with their Victorian popularity. That popularity is long gone: ‘People don’t read
Scott any more’, a character sneers in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), nearly a century
ago (Woolf 2000, p. 95). The loss of Scott’s nineteenth-century reputation frees us to discover
these novels anew, to read them for ourselves – and to be surprised and moved by what we may
find in them.
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Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Scott, W. (2007). Waverley (ed. P.D. Garside). Edinburgh:
Illustrated Novel. Farnham: Ashgate. Edinburgh University Press.
Hume, D. (1987). Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (ed. St Clair, W. (2004). The Reading Nation in the Romantic
E.F. Miller). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lincoln, A. (2007). Walter Scott and Modernity. Edinburgh: Sutherland, J. (1995). The Life of Sir Walter Scott. Oxford:
Edinburgh University Press. Blackwell.
Lukács, G. (1983). The Historical Novel, (trans. H. Mitchell Trumpener, K. (1997). Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic
and S. Mitchell). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton
Lumsden, A. (2021). Scott and the arts of surplusage: excess University Press.
in the narrative poems. In: Walter Scott at 250: Looking Wallace, T.G. (2012). Monarchy and the middle-period
Forward (ed. C. McCracken-Flasher and M. Wickman), novels. In: The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott
109–123. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (ed. F. Robertson), 106–117. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Makdisi, S. (1998). Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire University Press.
and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge Watt, J. (2004). Scott, the Scottish enlightenment,
University Press. and romantic orientalism. In: Scotland and the Borders
Mayer, R. (2017). Walter Scott and Fame: Authors and Readers of Romanticism (ed. L. Davis, I. Duncan and J.
in the Romantic Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sorensen), 94–112. Cambridge: Cambridge
McCracken-Flesher, C. (2005). Possible Scotlands: Walter University Press.
Scott and the Story of Tomorrow. New York: Oxford Wilt, J. (1985). Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott.
University Press. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McLane, M.N. (2008). Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and British Woolf, V. (2000). To the Lighthouse (ed. D. Bradshaw).
Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further Reading
Campbell, T. (2016). Historical Style: Fashion and the New Chandler, J. (1998). England in 1819: The Politics of
Mode of History, 1740–1830. Philadelphia: University Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism.
of Pennsylvania Press. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Walter Scott 485
Cook, D. (2021). Walter Scott and Short Fiction. Edinburgh: Lumsden, A. (2010). Walter Scott and the Limits of Language.
Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ferris, I. (1991). The Achievement of Literary Authority: Oliver, S. (2021). Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland:
Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels. Ithaca, NY: Emergent Ecologies of a Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge
Cornell University Press. University Press.
Jackson-Houlston, C.M. (2017). Gendering Walter Scott; Sex, Robertson, F. (1995). Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and
Violence and Romantic-Period Writing. London: Routledge. the Authorities of Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Jones, C. (2003). Literary Memory: Scott’s Waverley Novels Welsh, A. (1992). The Hero of the Waverley Novels: With
and the Psychology of Narrative. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell New Essays on Scott. Princeton: Princeton University
University Press. Press.
38
Thomas Carlyle and His Ideas
Joanna Malecka
The Open University School of Modern Languages and Cultures,
The University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Despite being arguably one of the most linguistically and textually innovative nineteenth
century Scottish writers, Thomas Carlyle (1798–1881) has often been for various reasons out of
favour with Scottish criticism. As happened to many writers who emigrated to London in the
nineteenth century in search for better career prospects, he became a persona non grata in Scottish
literature histories and anthologies (Carruthers and McIlvanney 2012, p. 7, Carruthers 2009,
pp. 110–111). Additionally, a long overdue critical recognition of Carlyle’s full-fledged racism
in his later writings has made for an uneasy reading of some of the critical acclamations of his
later texts and threw a shadow over his earlier Romantic literary productions. This pattern has
been effectively challenged in recent decades, yet much remains to be done to reclaim the posi-
tion of Carlyle’s early Romantic writings in Scottish Literature.1
In his early fantastic texts with their experimentative narrative style and linguistic innovation
Carlyle draws from a long tradition of writers who purveyed Scotland’s Presbyterian past such as
Robert Burns (1759–1796), James Hogg (1770–1835), Walter Scott (1771–1832), and John
Galt (1779–1839), and points towards the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) and
some of the twentieth century Scottish writers invested in re-examining the Calvinist mentality,
such as Muriel Spark (1918–2006) and James Robertson (1958–-). Along with Hogg and Galt,
Carlyle interrogates and re-imagines the language of Presbyterianism and forges it into a
Romantic cosmopolitan idiom of international appeal. Deeply involved in European Romantic
literary debates in his early translations from German Romantic literature and in the articles on
French and German Romantics, such as Goethe (with whom he held a friendly correspondence)
and Mme de Staël, in his writing Carlyle engages Scotland in a literary dialogue with Europe.

Thomas Carlyle and His Ideas 487
Tapping into the Romantic appeal to the local, he transforms his native religious culture of
Burgher Seceders, an Old Licht branch of Presbyterian faith, into a cosmopolitan spiritual idiom
capable of engaging with and throwing light on contemporary culture and politics.
Born in Ecclefechan, a small village located in Dumfries and Galloway in the south of
Scotland, and educated in Edinburgh, Carlyle’s strict Presbyterian upbringing and his working-
class origins (his father was a stonemason) translate into his life-long spiritual curiosity, and an
unwavering focus on the fate of the poor in Britain and Europe coupled with a Calvinist suspi-
cion of the civilisation and its powers to answer humanity’s deepest spiritual needs. Despite
being a chief purveyor of the Scottish Calvinist landscape, Carlyle’s spiritual quest has rarely
been recognised as a literary asset in his writings. Similarly to other Scottish writers in the
twentieth century, he arguably fell victim to the attempts at exorcising Calvinism from Scottish
literature in the wake of Edwin Muir’s and Hugh MacDiarmid’s literary agendas which saw the
Scottish Reformation as a radical break with the supposedly more authentic literary tradition
located in the Medieval times (Gribben 2006, pp. 65–67). Whereas Carlyle’s first major
nineteenth century biographer, James Anthony Froude (1979) had no difficulty in recognising
the Scottish roots of Carlyle’s religious and literary ideas, later criticism was often less eager to
acknowledge the Scottishness in Carlyle’s thought, sometimes echoing Frederick Roe in
Thomas Carlyle as a Critic of Literature:
[Carlyle’s] birth in this village of southern Scotland; his descent from Covenanter stock; his boyhood
among a sternly moral but narrow-minded peasantry, in the midst of a rigid, if not a harsh, domestic
economy, all had their part in fashioning a character fairly steeped in racial and religious prejudice.
These early surroundings left upon him an impress that education and contact with the world never
effaced. Into all his writings, from essay to history, there went something of the narrowness and
austerity, together with something of the harshness, of the Scottish peasant.
(Roe 1910, p. 1)
This disparaging early-twentieth century portrayal of Scottish peasantry draws from some of the
earlier English Whig depictions of Scotland as a country estranged from the modern world and
steeped in religious prejudice propagated by Henry Thomas Buckle in On Scotland and the Scotch
Intellect (1970).2 Carlyle’s own nationalist discourse can be glanced in his review-essay of J.G.
Lockhart’s Life of Burns (1828, printed in Carlyle 1888, I, pp. 195–240) published in The
Edinburgh Review, which also contains an early statement of his own literary agenda. In it, Carlyle
positions himself as a follower of Walter Scott and Burns in the line of Scottish writers who
examined Scottish cultural, historical and religious landscapes. He lauds Burns as a truly Scottish
bard who earned the title through his ‘fearless adaptation of domestic subjects’:
[I]n no heart did the love of country ever burn with a warmer glow that in that of Burns: ‘a tide of
Scottish prejudice,’ as he modestly calls this deep and generous feeling, ‘had been poured along his
veins; and he felt that it would boil there till the flood-gates shut in eternal rest’.
(Carlyle 1888, I, p. 219).
The true creative source of Burns’s poetry, we are told, is his Romantic focus on the life of
Scottish peasantry: ‘A Scottish peasant’s life was the meanest and rudest of all lives till Burns
became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it a man’s life, and therefore significant to men’.
(Carlyle 1888, I, p. 207) The ‘rugged sterling worth’ of Burns’s poetry derives from its portrayal
of Scottish landscapes and of Scottish peasantry: ‘it is redolent of natural life and hardy natural
men’ (Carlyle 1888, I, p. 207). The gist of Carlyle’s argument comes when he presents Burns’s
poetry as a case of cosmopolitan nationalism, capable of appealing to all nations at all times.
Against Lockhart’s contention that Scottish literature is split between the rational cosmopolitan-
ism and the more homely but unreflexive ‘true voice of feeling’ (Leask 2010, p. 9), Carlyle argues
that the universal appeal of Burns’s poetry comes from his sympathy with all human feelings:
‘He has a resonance in his bosom for every note of human feeling: the high and the low, the sad,
the ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns’. (Carlyle 1888, I, p. 207) Anticipating his
own linguistic experimentation in Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) (which has been read as another
example of a Romantic appeal to creative Scottishness (Duncan 2016, p. 309) Carlyle is also
deeply interested in Burns’s linguistic mastery and praises his ‘rough dialect’ and ‘rude, often
awkward metre’ (Carlyle 1888, I, p. 207). Carlyle is also one of the first to fully recognise the
value of Burns’s songs as his most accomplished poetic achievement (McCue 2009, pp. 74–75).
The message of a universal brotherhood of all humanity and even of all sentient beings, and
of the creation’s mysterious unity are some of the ideas that Carlyle singles out in Burns:
Not man only, but all that environs man in the material and moral universe, is lovely in his sight:
‘the hoary hawthorn,’ the ‘troop of gray plover,’ the ‘solitary curlew,’ all are dear to him; all live in
this Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious brotherhood.
(Carlyle 1888, I, p. 211)
Much has been made of Goethe’s Romantic influence on Carlyle’s spirituality,3 yet it is Burns’s
strong sense of an intimate spiritual communion with all creation anchored in the Enlightened
concept of sympathy (profoundly at odds with orthodox Calvinist depiction of creation as
irredeemably damaged) that guides Carlyle’s early Romantic texts. Carlyle’s ‘Natural

Supernaturalism’, a sense of union between matter and spirit which cannot be expressed in any
other than poetic language (as exposed in Sartor Resartus) is a direct inheritance of Burns’s
intimate portrayal of creation (in a much truer sense than it is indebted to his German Romantic
readings).
One other moment in Carlyle’s reading of Burns deserves special attention – Burns’s interpre-
tation of the Book of Job in ‘Address to the Deil’ (1786) which Carlyle recognises as the centre-
piece of a Romantic, sympathetic reading of Calvinism:
This is worth several homilies on Mercy; for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in
sympathy; his soul rushes forth into all realms of being; nothing that has existence can be indifferent
to him. The very Devil he cannot hate with right orthodoxy!
(Carlyle 1888, I, p. 212)
Following Burns’s reading, Carlyle rejects Calvin’s interpretation of the Book of Job as a story
about divine punishment.4 Described by Carlyle as ‘the oldest statement of the never-ending
Problem’,5 the Book of Job will figure large in The French Revolution (1837) with its central ques-
tion about human suffering on earth. By presenting the French nation as a figure of the suffering
Job, Carlyle will implicitly agree with Mirabeau that ‘the people which complains is always in
the right’ (Carlyle 1888, IV, p. 113) and that all attempts at dismissing or rationally explaining
human suffering are somehow devilish. Compassion, to the radical point of incarnation, are
divine prerogatives which, in Carlyle’s vision, we are invited to partake in.
Burns channels to Carlyle not only the Scottish Enlightenment understanding of sympathy,
but also its definitions of religious prejudice and hypocrisy (Carlyle will later revisit Burns’s
‘Address of Belzebub’ (1786) in ‘The Diamond Necklace’ (1837), printed in Carlyle 1888, vol
IV, pp. 1–60 where Cagliostro, the devil of the story, ministers on a gothic black Mass that the
reader is invited to attend).6 In the second half of the article, Carlyle distances himself from
Burns’s New Licht religion, overly sympathetic, he claims, to human weakness and unjust in its
‘liberal ridicule of fanaticism’ (Carlyle 1888, I, p. 223). Nevertheless, Burns’s sympathetic read-
ing of human nature is a distinct chord recognisable in the published a year later ‘Signs of the
Times’ (1829, printed in Carlyle 1888, vol II, pp. 98–118), arguably Carlyle’s most successful
early article. Carlyle begins in a distinctly Old Licht Presbyterian tone by stating that ‘sympathy
has been so rarely the Aaron’s-rod of Truth and Virtue, and so often the Enchanter’s-rod of
Wickedness and Folly!’ (Carlyle 1888, II, p. 98). The preaching style here can be attributed
directly to the influence of another Scotsman, Rev. Edward Irving (1792–1834), a clergyman in
the Church of Scotland until his excommunication in 1830, and then the founder of The Holy
Catholic Apostolic Church (the Irvingites). Irving’s subsequent mental and physical deteriora-
tion led to his premature death in 1834. Irving was an early teacher and close friend of the
Carlyles. In a letter to his brother written in 1830, Carlyle recognises his debt to Irving in ‘Signs
of the Times’: ‘I have written to Irving, explaining his share in that “Signs of the Times,” and
saying all manner of mystic things’. (Thomas Carlyle to John A. Carlyle, 19th March 1830, CLO
10.1215/lt-18 300 319-TC-JAC-01). Carlyle’s article followed Irving’s 1829 sermon of the same
title which Irving borrowed from Matthew 16 : 3: ‘O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the
sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?’. In case the reader misses the reference, Irving
provides additional cross-references to Luke 12 : 56 and Luke 19 : 42–44. Here then we have
another biblical source of the examination of religious and political hypocrisy in Carlyle’s ‘Signs
of the Times’. After the initial title and opening biblical quotes, though, similarities apparently
finish, and it is difficult to see the debt to Irving which Carlyle refers to in his letter (n.d.).
Carlyle’s exaggerated style satirises Irving’s apocalyptic prophecies of the imminent doom (not
unlike Burns’s ‘Holly Willie’s Prayer’, or ‘To a Louse’) while guiding the reader to a more rational
viewpoint. It is also difficult to see a link between Irving’s sectarian condemnation of Catholicism
and Carlyle’s article which openly denounces anti-Catholic prejudice and other conservative foi-
bles, such as the fear of political reform. Yet, Carlyle does take from Irving’s article some radical
ideas which will become crucial for his own literary agenda, such as that the deplorable condition
of the poor in Britain and Europe is a sign of moral and spiritual imbalance which cries for a
revenge from heaven. Carlyle is also influenced by the idea that the French Revolutionaries were
justified in their rage (according to Irving, they embodied God’s wrath against their oppressors)
and, finally, that a similar fate awaits Britain if it chooses to ignore the example of the French
Revolution and continues to treat its poor in a less than humane way. These ideas will feed
directly into Carlyle’s masterpiece, The French Revolution (2019 [1837]) – a book which Charles
Dickens re-visited in his Tale of Two Cities (1859) (Easson 1993, p. 24).
In many ways ‘Signs of the Times’ is a decisive moment in Carlyle’s oeuvre as an expression of
the ideas that will shape his later fiction. Crucially, Carlyle is critical of what he sees as two
equally fatalistic (or ‘mechanistic’, as he terms them) readings of reality in the early nineteenth
century: Irving’s Millenarian prophecies of the coming apocalypse funded by an overly literal and
bitterly sectarian interpretation of contemporary events through the lens of the Scripture on the
one hand; and Bentham’s utilitarianism which justifies means by the end result, apparently dis-
pensing with a more nuanced moral and spiritual reflection. Carlyle argues that both narratives,
by simplifying the messy reality, entrap us in narrow- minded and deeply unimaginative
ideological constructs of our own making. These shallow, ghostly systems then haunt us, ulti-
mately leading us to question our own ability to function as free individuals. He goes on to ridi-
cule the unreflective British conservative attachment to the past which forecloses any religious
or political change on the one hand, and on the other – a similarly short-sighted radical rejection
of the past which awakens an equally demonic part of human nature:
Our worthy friends mistook the slumbering Leviathan for an island; often as they had been assured, that
Intolerance was, and could be nothing but a Monster; and so, mooring under the lee, they had anchored
comfortably in his scaly rind, thinking to take good cheer; as for some space they did. But now their
Leviathan has suddenly dived under; and they can no longer be fastened in the stream of time.
(Carlyle 1888, II, p. 99)
Anticipating the linguistic playfulness and creativity in Sartor Resartus (subtitled ‘A Treaty on
Clothes’) where the industrial cloth production provides fabric for thoughts on spirituality and
radical politics, Carlyle puns on the machinery – in the context of the Industrial Revolution – as
means of replacement of human work. Applying the metaphor to his reading of the state of
British culture in general, he suggests that by substituting imaginative and sympathetic thought
with deeply inhuman systems we effectively deprive ourselves of free will – often with tragic
consequences: ‘Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost
faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind’. (Carlyle 1888, II, p. 103) The
article lampoons the nineteenthcentury British insecurities sublimated into moral uprightness
and narrow insularity:
Our true Deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external Nature for us, and we think it will do all
other things. We are Giants in physical power: in a deeper than metaphorical sense, we are Titans,
that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer Heaven also.
(Carlyle 1888, II, p. 111)
Carlyle’s imagery here inhabits the biblical story of Babel from Genesis 11 : 1–9, in which
humanity’s excessive pride in our civilisational accomplishment leads to a linguistic confusion
that renders both communication and cooperation between nations impossible. Again then we
are confronted with a dark premonition of our civilisational achievements working towards evil,
instead of the anticipated common good. Rather than any unproblematic rejection of progressive
thought, though, Carlyle anticipates John Henry Newman’s (1801–1890) vision by arguing that
there is another reality that we need to address along civilisational progress: ‘Institutions are
much; but they are not all’. (Carlyle 1888, II, p. 110). A change in spiritual optics and a more
enlightened view of human nature are needed before any meaningful political or social change
can follow (and even perhaps if civilisation as such is to survive).
At the same time, Carlyle’s article remains light-hearted and makes fun of the preachers of
national and spiritual doom who are opposed to all change and reform:
The King has virtually abdicated; the Church is a widow, without jointure; public principle is gone;
private honesty is going; society, in short, is fast falling in pieces; and a time of unmixed evil is come
on us.
(Carlyle 1888, II, p. 100).
Carlyle sees human nature in orthodox Christian terms as largely unchanging and has little time
for British conservative panic over moral degradation. These ‘ghostly’ political and religious nar-
ratives that pry on people’s fears and insecurities, Carlyle says, will disappear as soon as we rec-
ognise them as empty noises (‘echoes’) and stop paying them attention. Carlyle’s ending is
perhaps uncharacteristically optimistic given his later more openly pessimistic worldview: a
mere linguistic change is all that is needed to liberate us from the spiritual traps of our own
creation:
[I]t is the ‘force of circumstances’ that does everything; the force of one man can do nothing. Now
all this is grounded on little more than a metaphor. We figure Society as a ‘Machine’ … if Mechanism,
like some glass bell, encircles and imprisons us; if the soul looks forth on a fair heavenly country
which it cannot reach, and pines, and in its scanty atmosphere is ready to perish, – yet the bell is but
of glass, ‘one bold stroke to break the bell in pieces, and thou art delivered!’
(Carlyle 1888, II, pp. 112–117).
Carlyle strikes here a postmodern note in paying due attention to language and its creative
potential. Since we are the authors of the ideological constructs that imprison us and deprive us
of the capacity to act as individuals, we should not be afraid to shatter them and invent a new –
more life-giving and less restrictive idiom.
Carlyle continues his search for a new spiritual idiom in his writings in the 1830s. ‘Signs of
the Times’, which was highly praised by Francis Jeffrey for its balanced tone, would soon be fol-
lowed by Carlyle’s most fantastic fiction, written in a style which, in Carlyle’s own description of
The Fraser’s Magazine, ‘out-Blackwoods Blackwood’ (Carlyle 1898, p. 170). Foreign masquerade
and biblical tone used for satirical purposes were some of the trademarks of Blackwood’s Magazine,
typically directed at British Whigs who are commonly represented as narrow-minded, unimagi-
native, and irreligious (Anon 1821, p. 665).7 One of Blackwood’s critiques of the Whigs with
which Carlyle would have sympathised is that they had betrayed the Scottish Presbyterian tradi-
tion by devoting themselves utterly to secular interests (ibid.). Yet it is Blackwood’s ‘Translation
from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript’ (Hogg et al. 1817), a satire on the Whigs written in the
style of the Old Testament, which has rightly been linked to Sartor’s outlandish satirical style
(Tennyson 1965, p. 135, Duncan 2016, p. 308). Drawing from Blackwood’s political satire, Sartor
stages a literary joke which is apparent to everyone except the British translator of the supposed
German philosophical ‘Treaty on Clothes’ (or customs, as Carlyle obligingly explains). This radi-
cal treatise on German/French political theory (Carlyle changes the title of Montesquieu’s De
l’espirit des lois to De l’espirit des cotumes, close enough to his own invention, ‘The Spirit of
Costumes’) is delivered as part of a wider Calvinist conversion plot thinly disguised as a foreign
biography of a German ‘Professor of Things in General’. The joke is on the British reader who,
dazzled by the array of foreign names and linguistic buffoonery, fails to recognise it as a far more
domestic invention of Scottish origin. The narrative is delivered via two distinct voices: that of
a German Philosopher who bears an encrypted Scottish Calvinist surname (the Scots version of
‘Teufelsdröckh’ is ‘Deil’s dirt’, a medicinal herb also known as asafoetida) and his British transla-
tor/editor who fails to recognise in the transcendental philosopher from Weissnichtwo (a version
of Walter Scott’s Kennawhere) a much more homely persona of a Scottish Calvinist obsessed with
the role of evil in this world. Unknowingly to the Editor, even the slippery, deceptive textual
landscape of Sartor mirrors an unmistakeably dense biblical Calvinist theological terrain – suspi-
cious of all symbolical imagery.
Stressing on numerous occasions the foreign (overseas) provenience of the work, Carlyle may
also be rehearsing another Scottish Enlightenment satire, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
(1771), by one of his favourite authors, Tobias Smollett (1721–1771),8 where a family journey-
ing to Scotland from England fears the imminent crossing of the sea – such is their poor
knowledge of Scotland’s geography. In Sartor, arguably, we witness a similar attempt by Carlyle
to reinscribe Scotland on the cultural map of Britain (and Europe), by appealing to the Scottish
Presbyterian heritage, disregarded or simplified in the facile narratives of national progress prop-
agated by Whig historiographers. At the same time that the latter portrayed Scottish
Presbyterianism as a matter of superseded past,9 the fanatical discourses of Edward Irving gath-
ered the crème-de-la-crème of fascinated intellectual elites in London. Carlyle was a witness to
the rejected past staging an uncanny come-back.
Carlyle’s own historical agenda, largely derived from the writings of Walter Scott, highlights
and problematises all forms of cutting, recycling and amending the fabric of the past in line with
contemporary political ideologies (Sartor being the Latin word for ‘a tailor’). As Carlyle helpfully
explains, Teufelsdröckh’s surname provides the key to the textual masquerade:
In a very plain sense the Proverb says, Call one a thief and he will steal; in an almost similar sense, may
we not perhaps say, Call one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh and he will open the Philosophy of Clothes.
(Carlyle 2000, p. 68).
The ‘devil’s dust’ in the nineteenth century jargon referred to the leftovers of the materials used for
sewing clothes (Stowell 1988, pp. 31–33) and so, indirectly, we are provided with an insight into
Carlyle’s orthodox Calvinist and distinctly Scottish antiquarian agenda. The eponymous tailor col-
lects pieces of old wisdom rejected by the society at large as pre-modern unfashionable ‘old clothes’,
or even unusable scraps and snippets of material (devil’s dust) and presents them to the readers as
integrally interwoven into the fabric of modern society. This is a recognisable Scottish ploy devel-
oped by Walter Scott perhaps most recognisably in Old Mortality (1816), where upon being asked
why he keeps collecting bits and pieces of old coffins, Old Mortality manages to convince his terri-
fied audience, that they will be sold in order to be remade into spoons and cutlery they all use on a
daily basis (the red hue of the cutlery coming from the blood of their ancestors). The joke is at the
expense of Old Mortality’s naïve public eager to fall for his macabre story, yet the Gothic metaphor
holds for his genuine attempts at the preservation of a tradition which his contemporaries regard as
long dead and buried. Old truths and customs are the cornerstone of society and are not to be dis-
missed lightly, we are told. Carlyle strikes a similar antiquarian note with Teufelsdröckh’s first name,
Diogenes, which refers to the biblical Book of Genesis (Latin for ‘origins’), thereby inviting the
reader to re-examine our cultural narratives even to their very (historical and theological) origins.
The most direct source of Sartor’s imagery, though, is without doubt the fiercely anti-European
Anti-Jacobin Review which played on the conservative fear of the French revolutionaries by link-
ing it to German philosophy, depicting both as a threat to the established religious and political
orders. In the 1800 issue of The Anti-Jacobin German philosophers are presented as dangerous
revolutionaries detached from the rest of the society, and concocting their poisonous theories
under the excessive influence of tobacco fumes – which prevents them not only from seeing the
reality but also from thinking clearly:
It would be abundantly ridiculous (if it were not more dangerous than risible) to observe these self-
constituted reformers enveloped in their little rooms in fumes of tobacco, and surrounded with all
the Jacobin prints and pamphlets of every nation in Europe, extracting their injurious poison with
as much assiduity, and from as many different sources, as the Bee extracts her honey.
(Anon. 1800, pp. 573–574)
Teufelsdröckh as a literary character can be read as a direct answer to the conservative hysteria of
The Anti-Jacobin. Carlyle portrays Teufelsdröckh locked in his solitary room in a lonely tower
perusing the landscape beneath him through unmistakably devilish optics, while unleashing his
fierce philosophy on the sleeping city. His voyeuristic penetration into the interiors of houses
transforms the city into a giant hellish beehive, in which humans are perceived as swarming in
their earthly appetites, while the Professor’s surgeon-like imagination un-skins them, revealing
their naked souls:
I look down into all that wasp-nest or bee-hive … and witness their wax-laying and honey-making,
and poison-brewing, and choking by sulphur. … All these heaped and huddled together, with noth-
ing but a little carpentry and masonry between them; -crammed in, like salted fish, in their bar-
rel … But I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I am alone with the Stars.
(Carlyle 2000, pp. 16–18)
The dangerous solitary removal from this world and from his fellow citizens coupled with a
voyeuristic gaze which threatens to consume them like a can of salted fish – are Anti-Jacobin
inventions, as is the description of Teufelsdröckh’s apartment:
[M]ost commonly he spoke in monosyllables, or sat altogether silent and smoked … It was a strange
apartment; full of books and tattered papers and miscellaneous shreds of all conceivable
substances.
(Carlyle 2000, p. 18)
In the end Teufelsdröckh is revealed as a revolutionary leader who abandons his high philosophi-
cal tower in order to echo Burns in that ‘Man is still Man’ (‘A man’s a man for a’ that’). He also
provocatively drinks the health of the poor in a nearby tavern: ‘Die Sache der Armen in Gottes und
Teufels Namen (The Cause of the Poor, in Heaven’s name and –‘s)!’ (Carlyle 2000, p. 13), and
eventually joins in the uprising of the eponymous tailors staged in London.
In contrast to the playful tone assumed in Sartor, ‘The Diamond Necklace’ and The French
Revolution: A History examine a darker side of the British gaze upon the Continent. The recently
published new edition of The French Revolution (Carlyle 2020) not only brushed the dust from
Thomas Carlyle’s masterpiece, but it also revealed the extent of his use of biblical imagery on the
one hand, and of his profound engagement with his French historical and literary sources on the
other. As with his previous texts, Carlyle’s reading of these sources is channelled via his
Presbyterian and Scottish Romantic aesthetics with a view to challenging British cultural agenda
and its attitudes towards the Continent. Not unlike Carlyle’s earlier writings, it is also a clever
hoax which misleads through false appearances: it is presented as a serious work of nineteenth-
century historiography in three volumes, rather than as what it really is – a complex multi-
layered work of Romantic historical fiction designed to satirise the smug conservative
post-Burkean attitudes towards France in Britain and the equally pompous nineteenthcentury
Whig historiography of France (which held British civilisation as a superior model to France). It
has even been suggested that it might be the only example of a non-Whig British historiography
in the nineteenth century at least in its classical understanding (Bentley 1997, p. 438). The vital
clue about Carlyle’s literary agenda lies, as with Sartor, in the title itself which pronounces the
work to be no more than a history of the Revolution, that is, one amongst many possible accounts
of the historical events. Self-reflexivity and a truly postmodern epistemological awareness of the
constructiveness of historical accounts characterise Carlyle’s text. The famous definition of histo-
riography as ‘ever, more or less, the written epitomised synopsis of Rumour’ (Carlyle 2019,
p. 31) paves the way towards John Henry Newman’s thoughts on our highly personalised ways
of interpreting history expressed in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870).10 Carlyle’s
description of historiography as an almost accidental account of gossip foregrounds the role of
personal beliefs in the process of making sense of the world.
In a move designed to provoke all political fractions in Britain Carlyle applies the biblical
imagery of the suffering Job, a symbolic prefiguration of Christ’s undeserved suffering, in turns
to the revolutionary mob, to the dying king, and finally even to guillotined Robespierre. The
point is that all human suffering is ultimately underserved: the angry mob that guillotines
Robespierre in The French Revolution, even if justified in its rage, partakes in his demonic imagery
(as do the British audiences who applaud). By making the French Sans-culottes the most direct
bearers of the Christ-like imagery linked to the figure of Job, Carlyle casts British historians by
implication in the role of Job’s good-for-nothing friends, who patronisingly offer to explain the
recent French history to the French (but instead propagate false narratives). Human suffering, we
are told, is a mystery that cannot be explained in any other way than through a sympathetic com-
munion (rather than through a predatory voyeuristic propaganda such as was often perpetrated
by British periodicals in the wake of the French Revolution). Inviting the reader in The French
Revolution to take an ‘Asmodeus’s Flight’ over the ‘City of all The Devils’, Carlyle implicates us
in the twisted optics that we saw displayed in Teufelsdröckh’s voyeuristic gaze. By craving the
unsavoury details of history (which are ironically ultimately deeply unrevealing), the reader fails
to grasp the true sense of history, which can only be revealed via a more charitable glance.
Charity is the last word of The French Revolution – delivered via a reference to St Paul’s letter to
Corinthians: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am
become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal’ (1 Corinthians, 13 : 1). Carlyle reflects on the
post-revolutionary scenery:
The Images all run into amorphous Corinthian brass; all Dwellings of men destroyed; the very
mountains peeled and riven, the valleys black and dead: it is an empty World! Wo to them that shall
be born then! –
(Carlyle 2019, p. 719)
Ironically, the passage comes in the form of a self-quotation from ‘The Diamond Necklace’ where
it is delivered by Count Cagliostro who – far from ‘speaking in the tongues of men or of angels’ –
babbles incoherently in ‘a Tower-of-Babel jargon’, mixing all European dialects with a pretence
to religious fervour but without any ‘articulate utterance’ (Carlyle 1888, III, p. 276). Carlyle’s
reading of St Paul’s message that in this world ‘we see through a glass, darkly’ (1 Corinthians,
13 : 12) is that our attempts at charity often turn into their grotesque opposite.
We glance Carlyle’s method at work in one the most famous passages of The French Revolution,
the taking of the Bastille, where the reader is invited – in place of passive observing – to partake
in the confusion and darkness of the scene. Instead of a straightforward description, Carlyle cre-
ates a confused imagery which is difficult to follow without a prior knowledge of the events, as
some contemporary commentators were right to noticed.11 Carlyle sets out to confound the smug
British sense of superiority by shattering the received historical and political accounts of the
pivotal event in contemporary French history. Not only the narrative, but even the Bastille itself
in its complex physical form is impossible to decipher:
a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, of all ages from twenty years to four hundred and twenty;—
beleaguered, in this its last hour, as we said, by mere Chaos come again!
(Carlyle 2019, p. 157)
The personified Bastille reflects the description of the revolutionary masses who also partake of its
chaotic, labyrinthine, and inexplicable nature.
Along with the narrator and the characters, the reader also becomes a member of the attacking
crowd thanks to Carlyle’s linguistic experimentation. Carlyle employs the second person plural
voice thereby associating the reader directly with the revolutionaries: ‘We fall, shot; and make
no impression!’ (Carlyle 2019, p. 158). Through the use of the active present tense, broken nar-
ration, and short or unfinished sentences the reader is invited to share in the doubts, questions,
and insights of the attackers:
Blood flows, the aliment of new madness. The wounded are carried into houses of the Rue Cerisaie;
the dying leave their last mandate not to yield till the accursed Stronghold fall. And yet, alas, how
fall? The walls are so thick!
(Carlyle 2019, p. 158)
This deeply personal, physical, and contemporary perspective of the attacking crowd is in turn
embedded in a timeless spiritual view, of which the old Bastille clock serves as a reminder. In the
midst of the revolutionary chaos, Carlyle pauses in order to eavesdrop on the sound of the great
clock located at the very heart of the events, within the tower of the Bastille. A symbol of the
precarious union of the divine and human perspectives, the Bastille clock both measures the
actual time in which the events take place and mediates a divine perspective beyond time:
How the great Bastille Clock ticks (inaudible) in its Inner Court there, at its ease, hour after hour;
as if nothing special, for it or the world, were passing! It tolled One when the firing began; and is
now pointing towards Five, and still the firing slakes not.—
(Carlyle 2019, p. 159)
In this moment of contemplative pause, the spiritual and the physical world for a second become
one in a scene which replays Sartor’s perennial search for ‘natural supernaturalism’ a point of
poised balance between the body and the spirit. Contrary to Calvin’s predestined view of history,
Carlyle situates the eternal at the very heart of human struggle in a dynamic meeting point
which is easily missed amongst the revolutionary commotion. Participating in this sublime
divine perspective, removed in time from the revolutionary events and yet meditatively present,
the reader is privy to the ticking of the Bastille’s clock – inaudible to the crowd and almost
missed in the messy narrative.
A great Romantic purveyor of Scottish and European histories, suspect of all accounts of real-
ity that dispense with its symbolic dimension, Carlyle deserves a place among Scottish nine-
teenthcentury writers concerned with humanity’s deepest existential problems. His re-invention
of the Scottish Presbyterian tradition places him along Hogg and Stevenson as one of the chief
examiners of the Calvinist mentality, while his forging of the Calvinist idiom into a
contemporary spiritual language capable of producing a new ‘epic poem’ (in John Stuart Mill’s
words) of the French Revolution and of engaging in a creative literary dialogue with contempo-
rary German writers renders him a truly cosmopolitan writer, undeterred by the nineteenth-
century British political and cultural insularity. Moreover, Carlyle’s portrayal of human nature as
frequently irrational and of human behaviour as largely accidental and unpredictable challenges
the Whig historical method which aimed to describe larger patterns of the causes and conse-
quences of human behaviour. Carlyle’s sympathetic and humble reading of history teaches us that
we repeat the same mistakes over and over again, and so, for all our civilisational progress, will
always be able to recognise our own image in the mirror that the historical narrative offers.
Notes
1 Some studies worth mentioning are: Ian Campbell’s Problem, – man’s destiny, and God’s ways with him
introduction to Carlyle’s Reminiscences (London: Dent, here in this earth. … So true every way; … the Horse, –
1972); Campbell, Thomas Carlyle (London: “hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?” – he
Hamilton, 1974; New York: Scribner, 1974); “laughs at the shaking of the spear!” … Sublime sor-
Campbell, ‘Carlyle’s Religion: the Scottish row, sublime reconciliation; oldest choral melody as of
Background’, in John Clubbe, ed., Carlyle and his the heart of mankind; … There is nothing writ-
Contemporaries: Essays in Honour of Charles Richard ten … in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit. –
Sanders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ’ (Carlyle 2013, p. 59).
1976): 3–20; Campbell, ‘The Carlyles and the 6 For a discussion of the Gothic inversion of the
Church’, Carlyle Studies Annual, 32 (2017), 133– Catholic Mass in The French Revolution see:
154; Barton Swaim, ‘“Our own periodical pulpit”: Desaulniers (1995), Mary. Carlyle and the Economics
Thomas Carlyle’s Sermons’, Christianity and of Terror: A Study of Revisionary Gothicism in The
Literature, 52.2 (2003): 137–158; discussions of French Revolution, McGill-Queen’s Press, 1995.
Carlyle’s religion, by Campbell and many others, 7 In a letter to Christopher North, ‘Whigs of the
from various perspectives, in Paul E. Kerry and Jesse Covenant’, published in Blackwood’s in 1821, p. 665,
S. Crisler, eds, Literature and Belief (Provo, UT: the author (possibly Thomas Gillespie) casts the
Brigham Young University Press, 2005); Gerard political Whigs as modern-day secularists (and per-
Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney, eds, The Cambridge haps even atheists) uninterested in Presbyterian reli-
Companion to Scottish Literature (Cambridge: gion: ‘Nothing, indeed, can be more opposite than
Cambridge University Press, 2012). the Presbyterian and Political Whigs – the Whigs of
2 Critics such as Suzy Anger, Ian Campbell, Ian the country, and those of the town, of the Covenant,
Duncan, Ralph Jessop (1979) and others have done and of the Parliament House. The former regard the
much to rechart the intimately Scottish landscape of state of religious sentiment, as the chief and main
Carlyle’s literary oeuvre, yet further efforts are object of their solicitude; the latter have not been
needed to reclaim Carlyle for Scotland. uniformly distinguished for any particular respect
3 Most famously by Charles Frederick Harrold in towards those hallowed prejudices and affections
Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–1834 (New which enter so deeply into the genuine Scottish
Haven: Yale University Press, 1934). character; on the contrary, their talents and specula-
4 See Pieter C Potgieter, ‘Perspectives on the doctrine tions have been, in a great measure, entirely devoted
of providence in some of Calvin’s sermons on Job’, to secular interests’.
Hervormde Teologiese Studies 54 : 1–2 (1998). 8 Cf. ‘Reminiscences of Carlyle’, Placer Herald 29 : 42,
5 Compare Carlyle’s description of the Book of Job in On 21 May 1881: ‘To this day I know of few writers
Heroes and Hero Worship: ‘A noble Book; all men’s Book! equal to Smollett. Humphry Clinker is as precious to
It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending me now as he was in those years’.
9 For further discussion of the Whig historiography his own way, and does not know that perhaps it is
see Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish characteristically his own’.
Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British 11 See reactions to The French Revolution in Trela, D. J.,
Identity 1689-c.1830 (Cambridge University Press, Tarr, Rodger L., eds. The Critical Response to Thomas
1993). Carlyle’s Major Works (Greenwood Press, 1997). One
10 Compare: John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a disappointed reviewer from the Literary Gazette
Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green, and (p. 50) complained: ‘There is nothing like a history of
Co., 1903), p. 373: ‘The aspect under which we view the events which took place; but, instead, there is a
things is often intensely personal; nay, even awfully series of rhapsodical snatches, which may remind
so, considering that, from the nature of the case, it readers acquainted with the facts, from previous his-
does not bring home its idiosyncrasy either to our- tories and memoirs, what it is that the author is really
selves or to others. Each of us looks at the world in writing about. By itself, his book is unintelligible’.
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39
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert P. Irvine
Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Robert Louis Stevenson’s life is characterised by a geographical restlessness which marks him as
a creature of the modern age, of swift and reliable transport by rail and sea, of global empires and
the communication networks they created. The first work for which he was paid (an essay called
‘Roads’) appeared in print just a month after his arrival at Mentone in the South of France for the
sake of his health, in time to celebrate his 23rd birthday there, in November 1873; and for
the next five years, as he established himself as the author of brilliant essays and short stories in
the periodical press, he typically made two, sometimes three trips to France each year, for periods
ranging from one to four months on each occasion, with ever briefer residences at home in
Edinburgh between them. The first great turning-point in his life was a journey across the
Atlantic on an emigrant ship, then across North America by train to California, to marry his
lover Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, in 1879; the second was a longer odyssey, to New York in
August 1887, then again to California, and on to Hawaii before settling with his family in
Samoa in the South Pacific in December 1889. In between these two trans-oceanic journeys, a
few years return to alternating periods in Scotland and London and on the continent produced
Scottish tales (‘The Pavilion on the Links’ of 1880, ‘Thrawn Janet’ of 1881 and ‘The Merry Men’
of 1882) and the adventure story that made him famous, Treasure Island (1881–1882); then in
three years settlement in Bournemouth on the South coast of England Stevenson wrote his other
smash hit, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and another juvenile adventure story, Kidnapped,
set mostly in the Highlands in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion (both 1886).
Stevenson worked on more full-length fictions of Scottish history only after he had left Britain
for good: The Master of Ballantrae (1888–1889) was written in up-state New York, Catriona
(1892–1893), a sequel to Kidnapped, in Samoa, and at his death in December 1894 Stevenson left
unfinished two novels which open in early nineteenth century Edinburgh, Weir of Hermiston and
St Ives (1896, 1897). But the South Pacific also gave Stevenson material for some of his most

Robert Louis Stevenson 499
accomplished and interesting work in both fiction and non-fiction, in the former category most
notably ‘The Beach of Falesá’ (1892) and The Ebb-Tide (1893).
The range of genres in prose fiction in which Stevenson wrote, suggested by this summary of
his career, was also made possible by recent technological and social developments, namely in the
print culture of the English-speaking world: by the rapidly expanding reading public of the
second half of the nineteenth century and the changes in the publishing industry that catered for
it. Alongside the multi-volume novel that dominated fiction at mid-century appeared a new
type of monthly magazine: reasonably priced at one shilling, including a high proportion of fic-
tion alongside other prose and verse, and eschewing the party-political affiliations that marked
the previous, pricier magazines like Blackwood’s or Fraser’s. First Macmillan’s Magazine (from
1859) then the Cornhill and Temple Bar (both from 1860) serialised novels by well-known authors
to secure a profitable mass of subscribers, which underwrote a degree of risk-taking in the accept-
ance of shorter pieces from less well-known writers for the remaining pages and a degree of
experimentation in what was written. All of Stevenson’s completed book-length fiction, except
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Dynamiter (1885: co-written with Fanny) and The
Wrong Box (1889: co-written with his step-son Lloyd Osbourne), was published first in periodi-
cals of one kind or another (unless otherwise stated the dates given for texts in this chapter are
for the first, periodical publication): the serialisation of a novel would usually earn the author
more money than the stand-alone volume. But the monthly magazines were also the stage upon
which Stevenson established his reputation as a writer, first as a contributor of non-fiction essays
and then of short stories, and enabled him to try out new topics and genres in the manner that
he continued throughout his career as a published author.
That career was relatively short (only 21 years) but its output was so varied that providing a
compact summary presents a challenge. This chapter will attempt to do so by omitting discus-
sion of Stevenson’s verse (which is interesting) and his drama (not so much) and instead trace
some concerns which recur throughout his work in prose, themes whose persistence becomes
rather clearer if we include some of his non-fiction in our overview. That these are moral concerns
might seem surprising. As well as taking advantage of the new modes of publication of his time,
the young Stevenson, a self-styled ‘Bohemian’, also reacted against the mid-Victorian tendency
to justify prose fiction in terms of its truth to life and its salutary moral effect upon the reader.
In one of his best-known reflections on the art of fiction, ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (which appeared
in the inaugural issue of Longman’s Magazine in November 1882), Stevenson valorises instead the
capacity of fiction to give the reader a particular sort of pleasure. By ‘romance’ Stevenson means
the sort of fiction, and the element in all fiction, that affords us pleasure by its difference from our
experience of everyday life, rather than its convincing representation of it.1 Of ‘the great creative
writer’ Stevenson says, ‘His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark
is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The
right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should
follow’ (Stevenson 1999a, p. 56). This sort of reading, ‘absorbing and voluptuous’, thus contin-
ues the pleasure we have in stories as children, when, brushing aside ‘[e]loquence, thought,
character and conversation’, we ‘dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles’
(pp. 52, 53). Thus defined, ‘romance’ might seem to preclude attention to the difficult choices
between right and wrong experienced by the adult reader:
Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. […] Conduct is three parts of
life, they say; but I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not
immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not regard the human will at all, or deals with it in
obvious and healthy relations; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but
how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the
problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of
arms or the diplomacy of life. (p. 54)
It would be a mistake to conclude from this, however, that Stevenson is not interested in moral
questions. On the contrary, the relation between ‘conduct’ (how we choose to behave) and ‘cir-
cumstance’ (over which we have no control) is central to a great deal of his work.
Treasure Island was first published as a serial in a periodical for juvenile readers called Young
Folks (The Black Arrow of 1883 and Kidnapped would run there too), and Stevenson wrote ‘A
Gossip on Romance’ while revising his pirate story for publication as a book. The novel clearly
exemplifies the features of ‘romance’ that Stevenson describes in the essay: the arrival of the
pirate at the remote inn with which the story abruptly begins, Jim’s overhearing Long John
Silver’s plot while hiding in the apple barrel, Jim’s escape from the stockade on the island, his
shooting of Israel Hands, all provide the sort of ‘brute incident’ relished by Stevenson’s child
reader (Stevenson 1999a, p. 53); that the book version (1883) was so popular among adult read-
ers confirmed Stevenson’s suggestion that the reading practices of childhood are never simply
outgrown. Treasure Island certainly looks ‘a-moral’ in contrast to the most successful boy’s adven-
ture stories that precede it, such as the work of two of the writers hymned in prefatory verses
added for the book, W.H.G. Kingston and R.M. Ballantyne (Stevenson 1985, p. xxx). Kingston’s
and Ballantyne’s books use their exciting narratives to teach moral, religious and patriotic les-
sons, but Treasure Island scrupulously avoids any such overtly didactic purpose: here is no celebra-
tion of British imperial glory, and, although the book version, at the suggestion of Stevenson’s
father, makes the castaway Ben Gunn a Christian convert in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, the
island contains no natives to be converted as in, for example, Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858)
(Stevenson 1985, p. 80 and note, p. 206). Stevenson’s adventure story ‘obey[s] the ideal laws of
the day-dream’, not the imperatives of nineteenth century imperial culture; rather than learning
anything from his experience on the island, Jim tells us in his narrative’s closing lines that its
memory haunts him as a nightmare: ‘the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf
booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ring-
ing in my ears: “Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!” ’ (Stevenson 1985, p. 191).
However, if we read Treasure Island alongside another piece of Stevenson’s non-fiction, written
two years earlier, we can find an ethics even here. In the spring of 1879 Stevenson began an essay
of moral reflection which, though it was never completed and only published (as ‘Lay Morals’)
after his death, provides a useful perspective on his fiction. In this essay we find Stevenson in a
high flight of rebellion against the complacent bourgeois piety of his parents (his father belonged
to a dynasty of famous lighthouse engineers), and their tendency to understand their commercial
prosperity as a sign of God’s grace (a temptation to which wealthy Calvinists have historically
been very prone), and thus to confuse morality with the social norms of ‘respectable’ middle-class
society. Stevenson’s rejection of ‘Respectability’ as a guide to conduct is radically individualist:
‘If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him […] you must discredit in
his eyes the one authoritative voice of his own soul’ (Stevenson 1924, pp. 31, 33). And the soul
is at its most morally authoritative when it speaks, not in opposition to the desires and the senses
(which social norms are typically designed to discipline and contain), but in harmony with them.
‘It demands that we shall not live alternately with our opposing tendencies in continual see-saw
of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but
serve each other to a common end […] in which soul and body may unite like notes in a harmo-
nious chord’ (pp. 27–28). The impulse to repress or renounce our desires and pleasures is not a
guide to right conduct. But neither is any set of rules (such as the Ten Commandments), since
right conduct in any particular set of circumstances will depend on those circumstances, which
are infinitely various. ‘[N]o definite precept can be more than an illustration. […] [L]ife is so
intricate and changing, that perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in all the ages, shall
we find that nice consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply’ (pp. 20–21). Nor, in
deciding how to act, can we be guided by the estimation of distant consequences, of eventual
benefit either to ourselves or to society, since this is to gamble the rightness of our action on yet
more circumstances beyond our foresight, let alone control. Instead, our attention must be ‘on
the act itself: not on the approval of others, but on the rightness of that act. […] The profit of
every act should be this, that it was right for us to do it’ (p. 33).
The echoes and coincidences between these unpublished moral reflections and Stevenson’s
theory and practice as a writer of ‘romance’ demand our attention whenever we are inclined to
imagine the latter as affording and celebrating a sort of aesthetic pleasure purified from any dis-
tracting moral meaning. If the right act is one dictated by the soul in harmony with the senses
and desires, then the moral and the aesthetic can no longer be so clearly distinguished. In any
particular fiction, the ‘poetry of conduct’ must always be interwoven with the ‘poetry of circum-
stance’ (‘romance’), because right conduct is always defined by the infinitely variable circumstances
in which it must be chosen. In giving us the aesthetic pleasure of witnessing ‘the right kind of
thing […] falling out in the right kind of place’, ‘romance’ offers us at least an analogy, if not a
model, of moral ‘rightness’, not an escape from moral thinking altogether: the ‘nameless longings
of the reader’ which ‘romance’ satisfies might include a longing for a sort of moral integrity for
which we strive but struggle to attain in real life. In Treasure Island, when Jim decides to absent
himself without leave from the representatives of law and order in the besieged stockade, he
‘slips out when nobody was watching; and that was so bad a way of doing it as made the thing
wrong in itself. But I was only a boy, and I had made my mind up’ (Stevenson 1985, p. 117). But
if this act is ‘wrong in itself’ by the standards of the moral law policed by Captain Smollett,
Doctor Livesey, and Squire Trelawney, it is the right thing to do in the circumstances, and Jim
knows this because, as a boy, ‘making his mind up’ is shaped by physical impulses that Jim does
not consciously include in his calculus of right and wrong.
If at such moments Jim Hawkins represents the ideal of moral conduct described in ‘Lay
Morals’, ‘in which the soul and all the faculties and senses pursue a common route and share in
one desire’ (Stevenson 1924, p. 27), Dr. Henry Jekyll represents the opposite case. There are
many ways of reading Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde grounded in contemporary (late
nineteenth century) discourses of race, sexuality, psychology and evolutionary science.2 In ‘A
Chapter on Dreams’ (1888), Stevenson describes how his famous parable emerged from his
effort ‘to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being, which must at times
come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature’ (Stevenson 1999b, p. 136).
But reading this story alongside ‘Lay Morals’ suggests an alternative interpretation, that Jekyll’s
wilful self-division is not an allegory for some universal truth about human nature, but an effect
of the very obsession with outward ‘Respectability’ of a specific class, the Victorian professional
middle class into which Stevenson was born, that he attacks in that essay. There, the renuncia-
tion of ‘the lesser and less harmonious affections’ for the sake of appearances results in a life
lived ‘with our opposing tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and disgust’. Dr. Henry
Jekyll, ‘fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow men’, has made just this
renunciation, with just this effect (Stevenson 2006, p. 52); but neither side of a life lived in two
parts is a truly moral one, according to ‘Lay Morals’, for ‘The soul demands unity of purpose,
not the dismemberment of man’ (Stevenson 1924, pp. 27–28). Jekyll’s is not originally a ‘double
being’: he chooses self-division for the sake of ‘my imperious desire to carry my head high’
among his fellows, because maintaining a unified self comes at a cost (Stevenson 2006, p. 52);
‘My point is the identity with difficulty preserved’ as Stevenson put it in a private letter
(Stevenson 1995a, p. 158). The shocking discovery made by the first readers of Strange Case was
not that, as Jekyll himself puts it, ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’ (a formulation that
allows one of those two to evade responsibility for the actions of the ‘other’ one); but rather that
these two, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, are truly one; not a homosexual and his lower-class lover,
nor a blackmailer and his victim, but the same man (Stevenson 2006, p. 52).3 If, as Stephen
Arata has suggested, Hyde is learning to behave like a gentleman in the course of the story, then
we can, with an effort, imagine an alternative ending, in which Hyde (if he could avoid arrest
for murder) would grow into a happier and more truly moral version of Henry Jekyll, in which
this ‘man now lives as a whole’ (p. 27), even at the price of his professional status and respect-
able friends (Arata 1996, pp. 33–43). But Jekyll/Hyde kills himself before this can happen.
With Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Stevenson was experimenting in a new genre and
type of publication: the ‘Shilling Shocker’, a sensational story published in soft covers at a low
price, designed to sell through another recent innovation, the railway station bookstall
(Ashley 2006, pp. 5–6). But it revisits themes prominent in his writing from the start of his
career: the moral cost of social privilege in a class society, the choice between respectability and
freedom presented to a middle-class man, and the disjunction between virtue and material pros-
perity. On this last point, ‘Lay Morals’ includes a very revealing reminiscence (in the third per-
son, but transparently autobiographical) of an epiphany Stevenson experienced as a Law student
at Edinburgh University:
At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who followed the plough in summer-time
to pay their college fees in winter; and this inequality struck him with some force. […] He began to
tremble that he himself had been unjustly favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth and
power and comfort closed against so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly open
before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself. […] If one of these could take my place,
he thought; and the thought tore the bandage from his eyes. He was eaten by the shame of his dis-
coveries, and despised himself as an unworthy favourite and a creature of the back-stairs of Fortune.
He could no longer see without confusion one of these brave young fellows battling up hill against
adversity. Had he not filched that fellow’s birthright?
(Stevenson 1924, pp. 14–15)
When his next essay, ‘Some Aspects of Robert Burns’, first appeared in the Cornhill in 1879 it
caused upset among partisans of the Bard by blaming his decline not on his drinking (a vice
indulged by his defenders), nor even on his sexual profligacy (to which it was thought Stevenson
had paid a distasteful degree of attention), but on his noble attempt to redeem his seduction of
one of his lovers, Jean Armour, by marrying her, which Stevenson argued had been a disastrous
mistake. In introducing this essay for the collection Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882),
Stevenson identified the source of this upset in ‘that low morality so greatly more distressing
than the better sort of vice’ which objects whenever writers ‘represent an act that was virtuous in
itself, as attended by any other consequences than a large family and fortune. […] [T]he
common, trashy mind of our generation is still aghast […] at any word of an unsuccessful virtue’
(Stevenson 1923, p. xvi). As Stevenson had realised as a student, what society calls ‘success’ is
more often the effect of circumstance than of conduct. Indeed, in seeing him as one who does the
right thing, but a thing which ‘presumed too far upon his strength’ (p. xvi), Stevenson is assimi-
lating Burns to a type who turns up in several places in his writing. In Strange Case, Utterson, a
lawyer who provides the point-of-view for much of the narrative, is a paradigm of respectability
and self-denial; but tolerant of those very unlike himself, ‘sometimes wondering, almost with
envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds. […] In this character, it was
frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the
lives of down-going men’ (Stevenson 2006, p. 5). Such ‘down-going men’ had already appeared
in Stevenson’s fiction in the middle-class but mediocre protagonists of the story cycles ‘The
Suicide Club’ and ‘The Rajah’s Diamond’ (in London magazine in 1878 and collected in the vol-
ume New Arabian Nights in 1882) and The Dynamiter, young men as ‘idle, desultory and disso-
lute’ as the young Stevenson. Clearly, this type represents the life that Stevenson might have
lived had he obeyed his youthful urge, recalled in ‘Lay Morals’, to run away from home and at a
stroke ‘free himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his’ (Stevenson 1924,
p. 15). But they, like Burns, also represent a kind of moral integrity missing from the successful
hypocrite Henry Jekyll.
Stevenson’s very first published fiction imagines just such a youthful running away, but as an
example of the very impulse to renunciation that ‘Lay Morals’ condemns. This is a story called
‘An Old Song’, which appeared in London in four instalments in the Spring of 1877. Two
orphaned boys are adopted by their uncle, a successful soldier in India turned Evangelical
Christian, in a spirit of moral self-abnegation: ‘An unpleasant duty was to him what stolen
pleasure was to others: […] and the more unpleasant it was, the higher his pride as he performed
it’ (Stevenson 1982, p. 31). Col. Falconer raises John and Malcolm on their paternal Scottish
country estate, Grangehead; as young men they are rivals for the love of Margaret, the daughter
and heir of a neighbouring landowner. John gains her affection, but on the slightest pretext
resolves on a heroic resignation of his claims to both the girl and the estate to Malcolm, from the
same ‘wish to play the martyr’ that motivated his uncle: ‘The blood of the wrong-headed old
Covenanters, the blood of the Colonel was working darkly in his heart’ (pp. 42, 44). John leaves,
imagining romantic adventures on the road: instead, he becomes a journalist in London on a suc-
cession of the same sort of short-lived periodicals (‘I don’t think he ever was connected with one
that kept alive above a year’, p. 61) as that in which this story was serialised (London lasted three
and a half years, folding in April 1879). Running short of money, he returns to disrupt the pros-
perous home life of Malcolm and Margaret at Grangehead, the Colonel having died after devolv-
ing responsibility for forgiving John onto Malcolm, a duty Malcolm cannot, in the event, fulfil.
An Old Song revisits the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke’s Gospel, but only to refuse its happy
ending; the ‘old song’ of the title most obviously refers to the ‘hereditary gusto’ (p. 42) with
which John indulges the ‘Black Happiness’ of ‘self-sacrifice’ (pp. 32, 42), the impulse to renun-
ciation criticised in ‘Lay Morals’ understood here as a kind of national curse passed down from
generation to generation.
However, certainly the most striking thing about ‘An Old Song’ for later readers of Stevenson
is the repetition of its basic scenario (one young man leaves, the other stays and gets the property
and the girl, then the first comes back, and there is trouble) in his masterpiece, The Master of
Ballantrae.4 At the outbreak of the rebellion in 1745, a landed family, the Duries of Durrisdeer
and Ballantrae, hedges its bets by sending one son to join the Jacobites, while another stays at
home and declares for the government. But which son should go, and which stay? If the elder,
James, joins the rebellion, and it fails, the younger, Henry, will inherit title and estate, but ‘be
left in such a situation as no man of sense and honour could endure’, objects Henry (Stevenson 1983,
pp. 11, 12). But this is what happens, decided by the toss of a coin. James Durie, ‘popular and
wild’ and ‘an unco5 man for the lasses’ in his youth, is remembered fondly by the district once in
exile; Henry, ‘neither very bad nor very able, but an honest, solid sort of lad’, who marries James’s
sweetheart Alison, is held in contempt (pp. 10, 11). In this situation, Henry finds it impossible
to refuse the banished man’s extortionate demands for funds; when these are finally cut off, James
returns to Durrisdeer, using the apparent threat of his arrest by the government to force his
brother’s assistance, while turning Alison against her husband: this ends in a duel (equivalent to
the scuffle that ends ‘An Old Song’), from which James, who had seemed fatally wounded,
escapes back to France. His second return, years later, drives the family to Alison’s paternal estate
in New York; but James follows them there. This persecution begins to drive Henry mad: ‘noth-
ing can kill that man. He is not mortal. He is bound upon my back to all eternity—to all God’s
eternity! […] Wherever I am, there will he be’ he rages to the story’s narrator, his loyal steward,
Mackeller (p. 135). What Mackeller calls ‘Mr. Henry’s martyrdom’ is not the result of his own
perverse impulse to renunciation, as is John’s in ‘An Old Song’: his situation is the effect of his-
tory and chance. Yet that situation tends to generate a moral perversity in him. Sending the
money to James, ‘[…] he gave what was asked of him in a kind of noble rage. Perhaps because
he knew he was by nature inclining to the parsimonious, he took a backforemost pleasure in
the recklessness with which he supplied his brother’s exigence. Perhaps the falsity of the position
would have spurred a humbler man into the same excess’ (p. 75). In New York, his response to
James’s own passive-aggressive posture of martyrdom, performing the demeaning trade of a tai-
lor in a shop window, is to defy the shame this is intended to cast on him by every day sitting on
a bench beside the window. Challenged by Mackeller on this ‘indulgency of evil feeling’, he
replies, ‘ “I grow fat upon it,” […] and not merely the words, which were strange enough, but
the whole character of his expression, shocked me’ (p. 201).
As well as a historical romance, The Master of Ballantrae is a probing study in moral psychol-
ogy. If we tend to miss this, it is perhaps because it does not represent its characters’ ‘passionate
slips and hesitations of the conscience’ (Stevenson 1999a, p. 54) from the inside, by an omnisci-
ent narrator’s representing their minds through, for example, the free indirect discourse used to
such effect by Stevenson’s contemporary and friend Henry James. Stevenson understands the
moral life of an individual not in terms of their self-consciousness but in terms of their situa-
tion, the specific position in relation to others in which they find themselves (perhaps through
no choice of their own), and to which they must extemporise a response without a rule or law
to guide them. But the situation in which Henry Durie finds himself in relation to his brother
is especially interesting to Stevenson because it seems to be one in which there is no right line
of conduct. As Henry observes on James’s first return, ‘I am easily put in the wrong’ (p. 88); to
be ‘put in the wrong’ is not to choose wrong, but to be placed in a position where it is impos-
sible to do right, and the charismatic, manipulative James Durie, Master of Ballantrae, is a
genius at doing this. I suggested in my discussion of Treasure Island that the pleasure afforded
by a story in which ‘the right kind of thing’ happens ‘in the right kind of place’ offers us an
analogy for right conduct, which consists in doing the right thing in particular circumstances.
But the master of improvisation in The Master of Ballantrae is the villain, used not to do the
right thing, but to pursue power, to revenge himself on others for a situation created by his
own choice.
This story of eighteenth century gentlemen, like Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is
haunted by the contemporary social situation described by Stevenson in ‘Lay Morals’. Henry
Durie, ‘neither very bad nor very able’ as a boy, gains, not through any achievement of his own
but by the toss of a coin and the chance of history, wealth, privilege and a wife who might be
thought to belong rightfully to another, more charming and capable than he. Henry might ask
himself (as his neighbours ask, and answer too), as Stevenson had asked himself of his fellow
students, ‘Had he not filched that fellow’s birthright?’ That question in ‘Lay Morals’ evokes the
story of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 25–33; James repeatedly evokes this story of rival brothers on
his first return to Durrisdeer in The Master of Ballantrae. Once we have made this connection, we
might see both this novel and Strange Case as romances which, as such, advertise their difference
from contemporary reality (by historical distance or scientific fantasy) precisely in order to pro-
cess a problem in contemporary reality (the moral effects of class privilege) in displaced or dis-
guised, and thus pleasurable, form. These texts would then correspond to the suggestion of the
great Marxist theorist of ‘romance’ Fredric Jameson (drawing on the work of anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss) that ‘cultural artefacts are to be read as symbolic resolutions of real political
and social contradictions’ (Jameson 1981, p. 80). But it is hard to see how either of these texts
provide resolutions of the social contradiction they represent in symbolic form. Both tales are nar-
rated from several points of view and indeed by several voices, but all of them implicated in the
conflict they narrate; closure comes, not with any triumph of ‘right’ over ‘wrong’, not from any
process of learning or conciliation, but in the death, merely, of both parties to the conflict. This
chapter began by pointing to the characteristically modern technological and institutional
circumstances in which Stevenson wrote; but we might also see in this refusal of resolution, in
the openness of these texts, a characteristically modern literary mode.6
When Robert and Fanny Stevenson set up home on the island of Upolu in Samoa in September
1890 they were taking up residence at once in a tropical idyll, at a regular stop on the mail-boat
route from Sydney to San Francisco, and in an intermittent but prolonged civil war between rival
kings, exacerbated by the meddling of rival imperial powers: the British and German empires
and the United States.7 Stevenson soon found himself ‘swallowed up in politics for the first – I
hope for the last time in my sublunary career’ (Stevenson 1995b, p. 168), protesting against the
venality and brutal incompetence of the colonial administration imposed on the islands by
the three powers, in a series of long letters to the London Times newspaper, and in a narrative of
the war, A Footnote to History (1892). Stevenson loved the people of Samoa and tried to use the
platform he enjoyed as an internationally-famous author in their defence, and while he could not
write in their language himself, ‘The Bottle Imp’, one of the two stories he wrote with native
Hawaiian protagonists, was published first in Samoan as ‘O Le Tala I Le Faga Aitu’ in the mis-
sionary magazine O le sulu Samoa, translated by its editor, Revd. Arthur E. Claxton.
Yet despite this immersion in the politics and culture of his new home, the major fictions set
in the Pacific, ‘The Beach of Falesá’ and The Ebb-Tide, revisit the concerns whose persistence this
chapter has traced in Stevenson’s prior work. ‘The Beach of Falesá’ is narrated by John Wiltshire,
an English trader in the South Pacific, ‘a common, low, God-damned white man and British
subject, the sort you would like to wipe your boots on’ as he introduces himself to a missionary,
Tarleton; Wiltshire dislikes the missionaries because ‘they’re partly Kanakaised’ – that is, inte-
grated in the indigenous culture – ‘and suck up with the natives instead of with other white men
like themselves’ (Stevenson 1996, pp. 34, 35). However, Wiltshire’s problems do not stem from
his relation to the natives, but from his commercial rivalry with other white men: on his arrival
in Falesá an established trader on the island, Case, tricks Wiltshire into ‘marrying’ a girl from
another island who is tabooed on this one, and as a result none of the local people will trade with
him. The taboo puts Wiltshire in one of those situations that Stevenson finds so interesting:
what is the correct line of conduct in these very particular circumstances? Wiltshire, as he tells
Tarleton, ‘don’t set up to be a gentleman’ (p. 35), and one element of his response to the taboo
confirms this: he makes copra (the commodity in which he trades) from coconuts with his own
hands. But his other response is straightforwardly noble, which is to regularise his marriage to
Uma instead of casting her off as an obstacle to his pursuit of profit. ‘The Beach of Falesá’ is a
story of a working-class white man in the tropics who is invested in the notion of his racial supe-
riority precisely because, unlike the missionaries, he has little else on which to base his ‘self-
respect’ (p. 35). In practice, driven by his love for Uma, his ‘practical intelligence’ and the
‘diplomacy of life’, among the defining interests of ‘romance’ for Stevenson, he abandons that
superiority and reconciles himself to a happy life with his native wife on this island (the ‘shock
of arms’ also plays a role: Wiltshire stabs Case to death in a show-down in the jungle)
(Stevenson 1999a, p. 54): in practice, love and work redeem John Wiltshire. Yet his consciousness
remains racist. He has ‘half-caste’ daughters with Uma, and the story ends with his worry about
their marriage prospects: ‘I can’t reconcile my mind to their taking up with Kanakas, and I’d like
to know where I’m to find the whites?’ (Stevenson 1996, p. 71). ‘The Beach of Falesá’ is a mas-
terpiece of irony, teaching a moral lesson that its narrator has himself failed to draw from his own
experience.
That a story set in a distant colony should be as concerned with social hierarchy among the
whites as with relations between the settlers and the indigenous people reminds us that, as David
Cannadine has demonstrated, the British understood the colonial project at least as much in
terms of hierarchies of rank, assumed to be common to metropolitan society and those it ruled
overseas, as in terms of hierarchies of race that differentiated them. A king was still a king, what-
ever the colour of his skin, and therefore deserving of more respect in metropolitan eyes than the
typical white settler, drawn from ‘the dross and detritus of the British metropolis […] rootless,
marginal people, unable to find or take or keep their place in the metropolitan social order, or
cast out from it’ (Cannadine 2001, p. 125). And so Stevenson finds in the South Pacific another
stage on which he can explore the moral situation of the ‘down-going man’. The Ebb-Tide
(Stevenson’s third collaboration with his step-son Lloyd after The Wrong Box and The Wrecker of
1891–1892) gives us three of these, a degraded version of the trio of boys or men who are often
the heroes of imperial adventure stories (The Coral Island again, or Henry Rider Haggard’s King
Solomon Mines, 1885). Hired to sail a smallpox-ravaged ship full of California champagne from
Tahiti to Sydney, they steal it instead, only to discover that the ‘champagne’ is water: the ship set
sail as part of an insurance fraud. They land on an island where a pearl fishery is run at rifle-point
by a missionary-turned-tyrant, Attwater. In ‘Lay Morals’, Stevenson commented of the reduction
of ‘respectability’ to obedience to the law, ‘surely we wish […] to live rightly in the eye of some
more exacting potentate than a policeman’ (Stevenson 1924, p. 13). In ‘Lay Morals’ this neces-
sary authority is the individual’s own soul; but in the fiction, where the soul is weak or degraded,
some more literal potentate sometimes steps forward to fill this role. In ‘The Suicide Club’ and
‘The Rajah’s Diamond’, at the beginning of Stevenson’s career, ‘down-going’ young men on the
streets of London and Paris are rescued and redeemed by the intervention of the under-cover
Prince Florizel of Bohemia. In The Ebb-Tide, Stevenson’s last completed fiction, on a tiny atoll in
the Pacific, a dark version of this scenario is played out at the hands of Attwater: for the university-
educated Herrick, recognition as a class equal; for the alcoholic American sea-captain Davis,
conversion to evangelical religion; and for Huish, the Cockney clerk, death by fire and bullet.
We have seen in this chapter that the situation of the individual in a class society lies behind
the concerns of much of Stevenson’s fiction, from first to last; but this is understood as presenting
a moral question rather than a political one: not, ‘What can I do to change this situation for
everyone in future?’ but, ‘Given this situation, how should I live now?’ The answer to this ques-
tion is at least one the individual can act on independently, and the chosen course of action is
independent of the vagaries of history for its success. But it also, perhaps, makes far greater
demands on the individual’s integrity: ‘At every instant, at every step in life, the point has to be
decided, our souls have to be saved, heaven has to be gained or lost’ (Stevenson 1924, p. 33). The
life of the ‘true Bohemian’, thus defined, seems much more morally arduous than that of either
the self-righteous bourgeois or the social reformer: ‘Lay Morals’, in its antinomianism (its rejec-
tion of salvation by adherence to a set of moral laws) and confrontation with unearned election
(social here rather than spiritual) is profoundly shaped by the Calvinism from which it ostensibly
turns away. Robert Louis Stevenson was a lucky man, not only in the support of his parents that
made possible the first part of his literary career, but also that he lived in a period when literary
writing could be both experimental and popular: the popularity of a mid-century novelist like
Dickens was maintained by working brilliantly within a small number of well-defined genres,
while the experiments of the twentieth century avant-garde would abandon a mass readership
altogether. Treasure Island and the tale of Jekyll and Hyde belong to a small number of stories
from this period of English Literature that have long since proliferated through the culture in
multiple iterations quite independently of their originating texts. But when we return these and
his other well-known novels to the context of Stevenson’s oeuvre we find that their use of the
resources of popular genres is informed by the same ethical concerns that we find throughout his
writing. The matter of going away and coming back, or not going away, or not coming back,
provides not only the pattern of Stevenson’s biography, but the narrative framework in which his
fiction thinks, and thinks profoundly, about human life.
Notes
1 On Stevenson’s theory of literature see Norquay 5 ‘Unco’ translates as something like ‘terrible’ or
(2007); on his participation in a tradition of ‘awful’ in this context.
‘romance’ story-telling which includes Walter Scott 6 On Stevenson’s relationship to Modernism as a liter-
see Eigner (1966). ary mode see Sandison (1996).
2 See, for example, Arata (1996), Davis (2006), Reid 7 On the trans-oceanic literary networks that made
(2006), and Shaw (1992). possible Stevenson’s career see Norquay (2020). On
3 Something like this point is made in Frayling (1996, his Pacific writing see Colley (2004), Jolly (2009),
p. 121). Kucich (2007) and Phillips (2012).
4 As noted by Swearingen, who first identified this
uncollected story as Stevenson’s (1982, p. 16).
References
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Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880–1950. London and Their Empire. London: Penguin.
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Familiar Studies of Men and Books. The Works of Robert
40
Sorley MacLean
Máire Ní Annracháin
Emerita, School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore, University College Dublin, Ireland
This chapter argues that Sorley Maclean’s debt to earlier Gaelic literary traditions is a defining
feature of his poetry. The argument is based on an analysis of various encounters with the
feminine that underlie a large swathe of his work. The obvious starting point, familiar to many
readers, is the love poetry, in which the face of the beloved recurs pervasively. The face also relates
to encounters with the feminine in poems of other types. Those encounters can be seen to shift
the poetry inwards to themes of sexual awakening, and outwards to reflect a broken relationship
with the wider world.
His most recent co-editor, Christopher Whyte, lays considerable stress on the importance of
Maclean’s break with tradition in the introduction to the collected poems Caoir Gheal Leumraich /
White Leaping Flame and wonders whether contemporaneous readers would have heard the e choes
of Shakespeare, Marvell, Horace, Baudelaire, Yeats, or Pound (Whyte and Dymock 2011,
p. xxxi).1 While that is beyond dispute (and Whyte is by no means the first or only critic to hold
that view), the most far-reaching innovation in the poetry is, I hope to show, Maclean’s expansion
of Gaelic tradition while remaining within it. As arguably the foremost Gaelic poet of the
modern era, his work does not represent a submission to tradition, but a subtler form of mod-
ernisation, which does not constitute a break with the past.
Wounded by Love
Maclean’s poetry flared into Scottish literature in 1943 with the publication of his first full-
length collection, Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile (Poems to Eimhir and Other Poems), a collection of
intense, anguished, short poems of lost love. He did not reveal the identity of the two women
who were their principal subject and often their addressees. No clear distinction is made between

the pieces inspired by the ‘fair-haired woman’ and the ‘red-haired woman’. They are deliberately
interwoven and conflated into the eponymous Eimhear, wife of the mythical Irish hero Cú
Chulainn. This silence in itself echoes the reticence of the early modern Dàin Ghràdha, a body of
traditional, formal, mainly Early Modern love poems, often described as ‘courtly’, and on which,
along with various other traditional Gaelic genres, his poems draw freely, in what Peter McKay
(2011, p. 41) has termed a ‘complex engagement with the amour courtois’.
The heartbreak of lost love is repeatedly expressed in terms that would not be out of place in
the Dàin Ghràdha or later Gaelic love songs known as òrain gaoil. A veritable litany of anguish
pervades the entire Dàin do Eimhir sequence: ‘You have left me a dead living thing’; he felt
‘emptier, weaker, devoid of hope’; ‘bitterness, sorrow and woe’ were the fruit of his attempt to
capture the beloved’s face in words; his heart was dumb and ached for her music; her smile and
golden hair caused ‘turmoil … vehement trouble … in my flesh’; from the ‘red-headed girl’
came a ‘heavy the burden than depleted my vigour and … hard the affliction that cleaved my
heart’; ‘you mutilated my strength … your beauty wounds me with gloom-laden sorrow’:
‘Dh’fhàg thu mi nam mharbhan beò’ (p. 11); ‘nas failbhe, fainne ’s eugmhais dòchais’ (p. 51); ‘searbh
achd, bròn is iargain’ (p. 51); ‘mo chridhe gu balbh, cràiteach an dèidh do chiùil’ (p. 97);
‘buaireadh … no thrioblaid dhian ’nam chrè’ (p. 99); ‘’s trom an èire rinn an lèireadh ’nam
chlì / … cruaidh an t-àmhghar / rinn an sgàineadh ’nam chrìdh (p. 101); ‘rinn thu màbadh air
treòir / … tha do bhòidhchead gam chiùrradh / ann an dùiseal is bròn’. (p. 103)
By her rejection, if rejection it was, she caused ‘a fever of the turning’ and set him ‘reeling with
longing’; he charges her that she gave him only the ‘sharp arrows of your beauty … and piercing
sorrow’; he charges her further with causing such distress that she ignited his poetry: ‘you made
a poet of me through sorrow’; his experience with her seems as ‘the ebb of death with no floodtide
after it’; his ‘spirit, bruised and decrepit, lay in the loneliness of its pain’; the ‘grey stake of mis-
fortune is thrust through the breast of my young morning’; and she ‘thrust the bitter white love
through me’. His anguish, though eased with the passage of time, was liable to be reawakened.
The final poem in the Dàin do Eimhir sequence ends with the line: ‘I saw the red hair and an old
wound wakened anew in my flesh’:
‘breisleach an tionndaidh / … air mo ruidhleadh le ionndrain’ (p. 113); ‘Cha tug ach saighdean geura
do bhòidhchid /… is treaghaid na dòrainn’ (p. 121); ‘rinn thu bàrd dhìom le dòrainn’ (p.123); ‘’s e
tràigh a’ bhàis i gun mhuir-làn ’na dèidh’ (p. 139); ‘Laigh mo spiorad breòite ann an ònrachd a phèin’
(p. 155); ‘tha bior glas an dòlais / tro chliabh m’ òg-mhaidne sàthte’ (p. 157); ‘shàth thu ’n searbh-
ghaol tromham’ (p. 11); ‘Chunna mi ’n cùl ruadh is dhùisg seann roinneadh ùr nam fheòil-sa’
(p. 171)
Maclean avoided one salient conclusion often found in the Dàin Ghràdha, namely regret that he
had ever met the beloved. He reserved that cry for his distress at the social plight, historical and
contemporary, of the suffering people of the Isle of Skye in the final couplet of ‘An t-Eilean’ (‘The
Island’): ‘Pity the eye that sees on the ocean / the great dead bird of Scotland’ (‘Mairg an t-sùil a
chì air fairge/eun mòr marbh na h-Albann’ [p. 21]). By contrast, his repeated lamentations tend
to be followed by assertions confirming that it was all worth it.
The abjection of a traditional courtly poet before his unattainable lady is manifest in a steady
stream of self-flagellation, berating himself for having followed ‘a way that was small, mean, low,
dry, lukewarm’, for being neither hero nor great poet, and for being impoverished in spirit. His
Sorley MacLean 511
metaphoric croft is despised for being harsh, small, and incompatible with joy; his metaphoric
cows could never reach good pasture; and even his prayers are flawed:
‘Cha do lean mi ach an t-slighe chrìon / bheag ìosal thioram thlàth (p. 125); ’a chionn’s nach mise
aon diubh’ (p. 109); ‘thuig mi … / gu robh ball eadar aoibhneas / agus mo chroit bhig
neo-chaomhail … nach ruigeadh mo chrodh air an fheurach / a tha air taobh eile na crìche’ (p. 25);
‘’S e ’n ùrnaigh seo guidhe na duilghe, / an guidhe toibheumach neo-iomlan’ (p. 119)
Such self-denigration of the speaking voice, however recognisable within the courtly love tradi-
tion, is at odds with the heroic spirit of the traditional folktales from Gaelic and wider interna-
tional literature, which tell of a young man sallying forth to perform extraordinary tasks, to face
manly challenges and endure hardship and danger, in order to prove himself worthy of the hand
of a princess or other desirable young woman. Maclean’s self-abasement represents an ironic con-
firmation of such tales. He blames his failure to win his lady love on what he explicitly describes
as his failure to take heroic action, specifically to fight in the Spanish civil war, in which many
other writers took part. More broadly, he laments his failure to be a man who would perform
glorious deeds at all, in action or in spirit.
The Face
The blazon, or cataloguing of the parts of a woman’s body or raiment to be singled out for praise,
was a core feature of Dàin Ghràdha and popular love songs, of which Scottish Gaelic has a vast
store. The face and the hair were a common synecdoche and had the merit of being simultane-
ously literal and figurative. If a poet praised a beautiful face, the face can generally be taken as
praised for its own sake but also as a metonymy for the whole woman. Maclean’s praise of Eimhir
frequently refers to her hair, but it was the face above all that stands out as the object of praise
and adoration.
His earlier pieces are replete with examples, although these taper off after the Second World
War. Occasionally, praise of the face amounts to a straightforward assertion of the woman’s
beauty, as in, for instance, ‘Joyful … the fair serenity of the beautiful face’ (‘Èibhneach … /
suaimhneas geal an aodainn àlainn’ [p. 45]). Almost always, however, praise for the face of the
beloved is accompanied by one of three elaborations. The first is a tendency to veer off towards
the anguish that was sparked by the conflict between the woman’s transcendent beauty and the
catastrophic politics of nineteen-thirties Europe, later expanded in ‘An Cuilithionn’ to include
the long history of human misery and oppression on a global scale. Like a torn soul, the speaking
voice oscillates between two poles, one of which is the certainty, which is sometimes though not
always accompanied by feelings of guilt that he ‘preferred a woman to crescent history’; that her
beauty cast a cloud not only over Lenin’s rationality and vehemence but even over poverty and ‘a
bitter wound’; and in poem VI of the Dàin do Eimhir sequence that in spite of slaughter in Europe
he will remember luminous moments with both women:
‘gum b’ fheàrr leam boireannach na ’n Eachdraidh fhàsmhor’ (p. 117); ‘chuir a h-àilleachd sgleò / air
bochdainn ’s air creuchd sheirbh / agus air saoghal tuigse Lenin, / air fhoighidinn ’s air fheirg’
(p. 99); ‘A dh’ aindeoin ùpraid marbhaidh / anns a’ Ghearmailt no san Fhraing / bidh mo chuimhne
air bòrd san taigh seo / dà oidhche ’s mi ann. / ’s… an nighean ruadh, clàr na grèine; / ’s … an
nighean bhàn, / roghainn àlainn na h-Èireann’ (p. 103)
Several poems express something of an opposite view, however, with a sad recognition of hav-
ing failed to take up the challenge of heroic action in the political arena. An iconic example of
this is Dàin do Eimhir XXII. Having failed to take death by crucifixion fighting against Franco
in Spain, which implies having failed to live up to Christ’s heroic standard, he renounces any
claim to meet ‘the thunderbolt of love’ (‘Cha d’ ghabh mise bàs croinn-ceusaidh / … is cia-
mar … a choinnichinn / ri beither-theine ghràidh’ [p. 125]). Contrary to the fate of heroes in
folktales, he could not expect to win the hand of the beloved.
Between those two poles – the certainty of the primacy of love over politics, and the certainty
that failure in one will lead inevitably to failure in the other – there emerges an attempt to weigh
up the respective claims of love and politics. This takes place through a process of frantic self-
interrogation, plainly expressed in Dàin do Eimhir IV. The first stanza asserts that the beloved’s
kiss would trump the threat of fascism, but that certainty is unravelled in subsequent stanzas by
an agonised series of unanswered questions overflowing with doubt about that very question. It is
also expressed succinctly in the incredulous and unusually explicit single-stanza poem that asks
Is it your desire to be between a girl's thighs

your mouth on the bloom of her breasts
and the Red Army in the throes of battle
harassed and harried?
‘’N e d’ mhiann bhith eadar slèistean nighne / ’s do bheul air blàth a cìochan / ’s am t-Arm
Dearg an èiginn àraich / air a shàrachadh ’s a riasladh?’ (p. 49)
The matter is not resolved, but must be endured. The realisation comes in the ‘Beethoven poem’
that no integration is possible:
No synthesis will be made of fortune,

the glory and the distress of the universe,
the feverish wasting and Patrick Mòr, [MacCruimein, illustrious piper]
slavery, Beethoven and you.
‘Cha dèanar an co-chur dhen chàs, / glòir agus ànradh na cruinne, / an èitig fhiabhrais ’s
Pàdraig Mòr, / daorsa, Beethoven is thusa’ (p. 129)
The second, very pronounced, pattern of elaboration in poems that speak of the face, is its
juxtaposition, or close association, with less tangible qualities and traits. These are frequently
spiritual: her generous heart, the beauty of her soul, her gracious spirit, intelligence and joy;
her frankness; her kindliness; her music and singing. Poem XXXVII goes so far as to deny
that what counts is beauty of face, however ravishing, for it is eclipsed by beauty of soul and
spirit:
It is not the beauty of your body,

The beauty shaped in your face,
the beauty blinding my eyes
though it has gone beyond thought;
but the beauty of the spirit
that took form in your face,
the beauty of the spirit,
the heart marrow of my love.
Sorley MacLean 513
‘Chan e àilleachd do dhealbha, / àilleachtd cruth t’ aodainn, / àilleachd mo dhallabhrat /

ged a dh’fhalbh i thar smaointean; / ach àilleachd an anama / bha dealbhach na t’ aodann, /
àilleachd an spioraid, / smior cridhe mo ghaoil-sa’ (p. 139)
The philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas is probably the most influential philosopher whose work
emphasises the primacy of the face (1984). He argues that while the face of another is, indubita-
bly, the individual countenance of another human being, it is also the site of absolute alterity and
the source of an ethical demand on the beholder. This is not typical of the Gaelic tradition, in
which praise for the face is usually interpreted as praise for physical beauty. In immediately asso-
ciating the face with so many other character traits, Maclean extends the boundaries of Gaelic
tradition. He does appear to acknowledge the beloved’s personhood and mystery, while remain-
ing bewitched by her beauty. This should not be overstated, however. It does not seem to me that
the encounter with the face of the beloved generates any immediate ethical demand viz-à-vis
either the woman herself or the wider world, other than a wish to have acted differently.
A separate question arises regarding the Gaelic practice of referring to the whole person by
means of the face, hair, or occasionally other features. Recent decades of feminist literary analysis
have enabled us to see its function as a form of reification, but in the case of Maclean’s poetry it
is appropriate to give due recognition to his juxtaposition of the face with character traits in
almost every case. Moreover, within the Gaelic languages, to refer to anyone, man, woman or
child, by, the colour of their hair, was never as offensive as ‘a blonde’, say, or ‘a brunette’ in
English.
The face also has darker associations. These constitute its third elaboration, and will lead, I
will argue, into less personal, and on occasion terrifying encounters with the feminine. Death
and the corruption of time are one aspect of the darkness. The face triggers a reflection on the
inevitability of time’s destruction, which leads to a despairing lament that the woman’s beauty
cannot be captured and removed from the ravages of the passing years: ‘If the face of my love
could be / beautiful and lasting forever / I would defy Time with its powers’ (‘Nam b’ urrainn
aodann mo luaidhe / bhith àlainn is buan gu bràth / bheirinn dùbhlan do Thìm le bhuadhan’
[p. 153]). The long poem LVIII apostrophises the face with a forlorn wish that it could be freed
from all ‘crassness, decline and evil’ (‘bho chumhachd gach baothalachd / aomaidh is dò-bheairt’
[p. 169]). Certain troubled juxtapositions of the beautiful face are with a mutilated body, which
is undoubtedly biographical, but others seem to transcend a specific personal experience.
Something close to a mutilation of the speaker himself is caused by his association with the
beloved: a ‘vehement trouble in my flesh’ (‘trioblaid dhian ’nam chrè’ [p. 99]). A mounting pat-
tern of threat underlies the radiance of the love affairs and even in the earliest pieces a sense of
menace associated with the feminine is discernible. I refer, for example, to the gendering of the
eponymous bird as feminine in the very early poem ‘The Heron’ (‘A’ Chorra-ghritheach’).
Naming herons by women’s names is a feature of the Gaelic languages, but nonetheless the heron
is the bird chosen by Maclean initially to represent a part of himself, but subsequently to mark
sexual difference and pain. First the comparison is made:
What is my thought above the heron's?

The loveliness of the moon and the restless sea
Food and sleep and dream
Brain and flesh and temptation.
‘Ciod mo smuain-sa thar a smuain-se: / àilleachd gealaich is cuain luainich, / biadh is

cadal agus bruadar, / eanchainn, feòil agus buaireadh?’ (p. 5)
The final two stanza, however, culminate in a split, leaving the heron’s dream to mirror but
invert that of the speaker. The bird’s ‘dream of rapture’ is fulfilled, and she is true to her some-
what impersonal nature; his dream is ruined apart from one sparkle and he is left in turmoil,
‘brain, heart and love troubled’ (‘eanchainn, cridhe ’s gaol neo-shuaimhneach’ [p. 5]).
There is darkness, too, in the accusation and blame that break forth in angry poems but are
then retracted, as is clear in poem Dàin do Eimhir XIX, where anger cedes to an acknowledge-
ment that the beloved was the source of the poetry: ‘I gave you immortality / and what did you
give me? / Only the sharp arrows of your beauty / … but … / you are the fire of my lyric— / you
made a poet of me through sorrow.’ (‘Thug mise dhut biothbhuantachd / is dè thug thu dhòmhsa?
/ Cha tug ach saighdean / geura do bhòichid / … ach …/ ’s tu grìosach an dàin dhomh, / rinn thu
bàrd dhìom le dòrainn’, [pp. 121, 123]). Elsewhere, what appears to be a peremptory order to
‘[g]et out of my poetry’ (‘Gabh amach às mo bhàrdachd’ [p. 49]) seems to me unconvincing,
ending with what amounts to a retraction by means of an address to her as ‘my delirium, lovely
face!’ (‘ ’s tu mo bhreisleach, aodainn àlainn!’ [p. 51]).
Venturing into the Otherworld
Delirium can express depth of passion through high lyric rapture, but can also mark a more
general turn towards something Otherworldly, dreamlike, or visionary. This turn is not unex-
pected, given the association between the face and the concept of haunting, particularly in Dàin
do Eimhir LVII, a long, anguished poem starting with ‘A face haunts me’ (‘Tha aodann gam
thathaich’ (p. 159). It takes on a rhapsodic tone, with wild lurches of metaphor and enigmatic
orations in ‘Ùrnaigh’ (‘Prayer’ 114–121), which is too long to engage with here. Several shorter
poems of delirium are more accessible. They tend to be tinged with nightmarish horror, and
typically relate to an encounter with the feminine. They bear witness to a certain dark ambiva-
lence towards the beloved and more widely, to the feminine in general.
To describe having fallen in love as a form of delirium or madness is quite within the bounds
of the courtly love tradition, and on a wider scale within human experience in general, regardless
of history, culture or class (see Dronke 1968). In Dàin do Eimhir LI, a work of great abjection and
distress, the final stanza is an address to the beloved whose face ‘put the change of death on r eason’
(‘d’ aodann / chur caochlaidh air conn’ [p. 155]). Elsewhere, the turning of the wheel of fortune in
love in sent him into a ‘fever’, in Gàidhlig ‘breisleach’ (p. 113), a word freighted with resonance
in Gaelic literature as a type of magical enveloping mist that leads humans astray. Religious ter-
minology too can represent an altered state of consciousness, externalising experience and project-
ing it onto the world. The metaphor of the ‘mìorbhail’, or miracle, has become domesticated and
should not be over-interpreted as a term of praise, but strictly speaking it is a religious term to
describe an event that transcends the possible and appears to break the laws of Nature. The word
‘mìorbhail’ occurs in at least three poems, each referring to the face (pp. 115, 165, 157). A quite
different religious comparison is in the penultimate poem of the Dàin do Eimhir sequence (p. 169),
where a comparison is made between his own ecstasy of love to the mesmeric, incantatory but
certainly not dark or terrifying ‘Ora nam Buadh’ from oral tradition, usually translated as ‘The
Invocation of the Graces’ (see McLeod and Newton 2019, pp. 541–545).
Sorley MacLean 515
The Otherworld is not confined to formal religion, but can take the form of dreams or visions,
most which are bound up with horror or terror. Sometimes dreams and visions reveal the more
horrifying aspects of doomed love. A nightmare recounted in one poem involved a kiss inter-
rupted by the aggressive appearance of a monster (p. 183). In another, the speaker’s reason made
an apocalyptic prediction to his heart that the skies would burst and stream with terror while he
lay shuddering before ’the monster of the sharp cold floods’ (‘a’ plosgartaich ro uilebheist / nan
tuiltean fuaraidh geur’ [p. 155]). The image he made of his love troubled him, and would expand
in the desert ‘where blood would be water’ (‘far am biodh an fhuil ’na bùrn’ [p. 181]), which
suggests the last moments of Christ’s life, during which blood and water flowed from his side
when pierced by a soldier’s spear. In yet another poem he relates that he ascended the ‘mountain
of horror’ for love. (‘Dhìrich mi beinn an uabhais / nuair a shaoil mi gu b’ e t’ fheum’ [p. 177]).
Three Long Iconic Poems
The three most nightmarish instances of an encounter with a female being are arguably in ‘An
Cuilithionn’ (‘The Cuillin’), ‘Coilltean Ratharsair’ (‘The Woods of Raasay’) and ‘Uamh’ an Òir’
(‘The Cave of Gold’). None is discernibly connected with any specific woman, nor are they
immediately connected with the anguish of lost love. They play out in their respective ways a
shocking and violent encounter with the feminine, projected onto aspects of the land, whether
mountain, wood or cave. In ‘The Cuillin’ and ‘The woods of Raasay’ the violent encounter is both
initiatory and sexual. ‘The cave of gold’ investigates the effect of powerful forces of desire that
seem to defy reason. All three poems merit particular attention.
‘The Cuillin’ is a long, complex, incantatory poem, published in two versions, in 1939 and
1989 respectively. (For a more detailed discussion of the following remarks see Ní
Annracháin 1997.) I refer here to the latter version, which Maclean endorsed when he revisited
it after a space of fifty years. His poetry frequently praises aspects of Skye’s majestic mountain
range, even preferring it to Paradise in an early piece (p. 21). In marked contrast, Part II of ‘The
Cuillin’ starts with an apostrophic address to the mountain, which is personified as terrifyingly
female. She is reminiscent of the Gaelic ‘cailleach’ or hag-woman, who was a version of the
sovereignty goddess of the land. The speaking subject of the poem encounters the mountain in
what appears like a terrifying sexual initiation, and is afflicted with a shocking vision-like
experience of a destructive supernatural woman:
Rocky terrible Cuillin,

You are with me in spite of life's horror.
The first day I ascended your black wall
I thought the judgement was descending;
The first day I kissed your mouth
Hell opened its two jaws;
The first day I lay on your breast
I thought I saw the loading
Of the heavy swift skies
For the destructive shaking of the earth.
‘A Chuilithinn chreagaich an uabhais, / tha thusa mar rium dh’aindeoin fuathais. / A’ chiad
là dhìrich mi do mhùr dubh / shaoil leam am Breitheanas bhith tùirling; / a’ chiad là phòg
mi do ghruaidh / b’ e choimeas fiamh an Tuile Ruaidh; / a’ chiad là phòg mi do bheul /
dh'fhosgail Iutharn a dhà ghiall; / a’ chiad là laigh mi air t’ uchd-sa / ar leam gum faca mi
an luchdadh / aig na speuran troma, falbhaidh / gu crith sgriosail na talmhainn.’ (p.357).
‘The Woods of Raasay’ amplifies the suggestion first seen in ‘The Heron’ that a female creature
will not suffer from remorse or turmoil after sexual rapture, whereas a man may be destroyed by
it. I have discussed this poem at length in an article I summarise here. (Ní Annracháin 2011).
The initial section of the poem describes a paradisiacal wood near the speaker’s home, with a
combination of Gaelic and biblical references in full regular rhythm. The woods are figured as a
great Gaelic house, with music, heraldic banners, battle armour; they are in bloom, full of bird-
song and flora, reflecting the Gaelic belief that Nature will respond and affirm a wise and just
leader; and they can be read as a biblical Garden of Eden in which a serpent appears, and which
eventually leads to banishment.
The banishment was not imposed by an external deity, but took place in response to what
appears to be a sexual awakening, a disruption caused by a face: ‘A face troubled the woodland’
(‘Bhuair aodann sàmhchair choille’, [p. 61]). The irruption of the face coincides with a sharp
change of rhythm and provokes a journey that is dark, even catastrophic, starting with a night
journey across the kyle to the Cuillin in Skye. A terrifying vision of surreal creatures takes over
the Cuillin: ‘Sgurr nan Gillean is the fire-dragon, / warlike, terrible / … from another sky’ (‘’s e
Sgurr nan Gillean a’ bheithir / cholgarra gharbh /… bho speur eile’ [p. 61]). The language is of
a highly charged, violent experience, with thrustings, spears, woundings and a unicorn. It speaks
of a shocking sexual initiation, but is also full of love. This is reminiscent of the complex of terror
and a burgeoning, violent sexual feeling that as we saw projected onto the landscape in ‘The
Cuillin’, but in ‘The woods of Raasay’ the landscape has mutated into violent male sexuality,
which is encountered in response to the face that troubled the woodland.
Following that journey to the heart of darkness, the return to Raasay leads to a place no longer
bearing a resemblance to Paradise. It has been replaced unambiguously with death, specifically
the death of the men of Raasay, and by extension his own death, as one of their number:
Graveyard on each south slope of the hill-side

The two rich graveyards of half my people.
Two still graveyards by the sea sound,
The two graveyards of the men of Raasay returned.
‘Cladh air dà shlios dheas an fhirich, / dà chladh saidhbhir leth mo chinnidh, / dà chladh
sàmhach air bruaich na linne, / dà chladh fir Ratharsair air tilleadh’ (p. 63).
The sexual and biblical image of the serpent emerges now, increasing the spiral of violence and
destruction as the speaker recognises himself as Acteon, who was killed by his own hounds as a
punishment for the sexual sin of gazing at the goddess Diana. The poem ends with further
images that project male sexuality onto the landscape. The rising sap of the trees is obviously
phallic but more saliently is reminiscent of a common trope within the classical Gaelic tradition,
which often figured young heroes as saplings; biblically, too, the menacing serpent clearly echoes
the biblical expulsion from the garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis. At the same time, by
intruding their maleness, already associated with death, they disturb the predominantly femi-
nine image of the land, and find their equivalent in the rambling, anxiety-filled incoherence
with which the poem ends.
Sorley MacLean 517
In sum, therefore, ‘The woods of Raasay’ interprets the eruption of terror, wounding and
death as the result of an initial encounter with the feminine and a subsequent experience of male
sexuality as both violent and, if defeated by a woman, a morass of incoherence.
Maclean initially published sections of ‘The Cave of Gold’ as an unfinished poem. He told me
he intended it as an investigation into why people behave irrationally, engage in hopeless exploits
and jeopardise their settled life. The poem certainly poses the question explicitly several times,
as in, for instance, when the narrating voice asks why the pipers, who were the subject of the
poem, abandoned the paradisiacal land of MacLeod. Maclean’s ‘The Cave of Gold’ forms the most
recent (to my knowledge) version of the mythological tale of a piper who ventures into a cave in
search of treasure, which is found in various sources and forms in Scotland and Ireland. (See
Melia 1967; Blankenhorn 1978.) Hoping vainly for protection by his music from the monster
guarding the treasure, he finds he is no match for it and has been forced to remain in the cave
ever since, constantly playing to protect himself. Scottish versions, including Maclean’s, often
have the piper lament his lack of a third hand, that he might have two for the pipes and one for
the sword.
‘The Cave of Gold’, like ‘The Woods of Raasay’, starts with a departure from an Edenic land.
The land – on this occasion the piper’s home in the land of MacLeod – is yet again figured as
an amalgam of at least three ways of imagining paradise. It is natural, with lochs, headlands,
islands; it is biblical, with honey and spices reminiscent of the Song of Songs, and with
Eucharistic bread and wine; and it is Gaelic, with its suggestion of the great house, with
music, feasting, and poetry, the last of which is implied, in a Gaelic context, by ‘rewards’ and
‘soft eloquent words’:
Why did he leave the Land of MacLeod,

the green braes and the lochs,
the headlands, the islands and the shores,
the bread, the flesh and wine
...
Why did he leave the Land of MacLeod,

When the honey and spices were on this lips,
And the bees in his ears,
The love-making, the praise and the music,
The sweet promises and the rewards,
And the soft eloquent words of the drink?
‘Carson a dh’fhàg e Dùis MhicLeòid, / na bruthaichean gorma 's na lochan, / na rubhannan,
na h-eileanan ’s na tràighean, / an t-aran, an fheòil 's am f ìon // ...
Carson a dh’fhàg e Dùis MhicLeòid / ’s a’ mhil ’s an spìosraidh air a bhilean / agus na
seilleanan ’na chluasan, / an sùgradh ’s am moladh ’s an ceòl / na geallaidhean binne ’s na
duaisean / is brìodal labhar an òil?’ (p. 297).
For the purposes of this chapter, the most salient aspect of the departure is the encounter with
the monster, which takes place when the piper has entered the cave. He discovers that his weap-
onry, in this case his sword, is useless, as are his body and his music, the latter often a source
of magical protection. They are defeated by a gendered monster, a ‘gala’ ‘bitch’, designated
t hroughout by the feminine pronous ‘tè’, a female one. She was terrifying, a ‘green eerie troglo-
dyte without mercy’ (‘an tè uaine uamhalta gun iochd’ [p. 315])
He did not put off his music

for the freeing of his hands,
the bitch went into his head
and into his heart and put a band
and tight prohibition on the blood
as he went on in his perplexity.
‘Cha do chuir e dhe a cheòl / airson saoradh nan làmh / ’s ann chaidh a’ ghalla ’na
cheann / ’s na chridhe, agus chuir i bann / is bacadh air an fhuil gu teann / ’s e dol air
adhart ’na phràmh.’ (p. 309]).
The piper is roundly defeated and his dog – a ‘cù’, or hound – is brought down in a proxy fight,
tortured, and finally emerges, scarified and hairless, to a postlapsarian world of ‘the hard lot of
the poor / who are ruled and yoked / and who must reach the pits / quagmire of the wretched
and the poor’ (‘gun ròine gaoisid air a chlèibh, / a chuibhreann-san càs nam bochd / air a’ bheil
an smachd ’s a’ chuing / ’s dhan èiginn ruigheachd nan sloc, / sùil-chruthaich thruaghan is
bhochd’ [p. 315]). Just as the returnee to Raasay in ‘The woods of Raasay’ found death before
him in the two graveyards, having been moved to leave by the presumably female face that trou-
bled the peace of his Edenic home, so the monster in the current poem is identified as female and
associated with death, ‘gal uaine a’ bhàis’ (‘the green bitch of death’).
The Wider World
The loss of innocence and the terror it engendered in those three long, iconic poems by an
encounter with a female presence, are projected onto mountain, wood and cave respectively. This
has implications for relations between the speaking voice and the wider world. These are played
out in several poems.
First, having renounced any pretensions to be an action hero or a poet of the first rank (a judge-
ment which many of his readers, including myself, strongly disagree), readjustment is to be expected
in the type of relationship traditionally ascribed to great men with the natural world. That can be
summarised simply in the term ‘co-fhaireachdainn an Nàdair’, or sympathy of Nature, a foundation
trope of Gaelic belief and Gaelic literature, somewhat similar to the pathetic fallacy. It holds that
Nature flourishes in response to the right actions and happy life events of a leader, and withers when
he dies, acts unjustly, or experiences tragedy, including military defeat. Within that purview, the
calamitous loss of love and the catastrophic political fortunes of a community would certainly qualify
as reasons for Nature to grieve, wither or cry out in sympathy. Many of Maclean’s poems that lament
love’s failure also express a broken relationship with the natural world. Their speaker’s distress is
frequently expressed in terms that, to Gaelic ears, clearly echo the sympathy of Nature. Dàin do
Eimhir XL is unambiguous: the disaster that has befallen him with the beloved makes the apple tree,
so often fruitful in response to heroes, here infertile, and disrupts the very tides:
I am not striving with the tree that will not bend for me
and the apples will not grow an any branch;
it is not farewell to you; you have not left me.
It is the ebb of death with no floodtide after it.
Sorley MacLean 519
‘Chan eil mi strì ris a’ chraoibh nach lùb rium / ’s cha chinn na h-ùbhlan air gèig seach
gèig; / cha shoraidh slàn leat, cha d’rinn thu m’ fhàgail: / ’s e tràigh a' bhàis i gun mhuir-
làn ’n dèidh’ (p. 139)
Besides echoing Gaelic belief, that particular description of personal catastrophe is Biblical
in tone, with its withered apple suggesting an anti-Eden. The same idea is taken up in
‘Gleann Aoighre’, where desire is ‘a ripe, red, fragrant apple’ (‘an t-ubhal dearg, abaich,
cùbhraidh’ [p. 25]) which, ironically, is the source of his distress precisely because it will not
fall into the hand.
A particularly arresting image of affliction speaks of a time when ‘the very stars were being
spoilt’ (‘àm milleadh nan reul’ [p. 153]) in a poem that speaks of a future ‘when the skies burst
and stream with terror’ (‘le maoim-shruth nan speur’ [p. 153]). ‘Fuaran’ (‘A Spring’), too,
recounts two visits to a remote mountain edge, lyrically described as a place where deer eat
water-cress, with ‘a shapely, jewel-like spring’ (‘fuaran leugach cuimir’ [p. 7]). During the first
visit, the presence of the beloved transformed the whole spot: ‘it did not look the same again’
(‘cha robh a thuar fhèin tuilleadh air’ [p. 9]). During a subsequent visit, after she had left, all that
could be seen was her reflection in the water. She had, as it were, overwhelmed the natural world,
which had, in turn, or at least in his mind, abandoned both the place and the speaker himself:
‘But the glens were going away / and the pillared mountains were not waiting for me’ (‘bha na
glinn is iad a’ falbh / is calbh nam beann gun fhuireach rium’ [p. 9]) These are exceptionally
strong Gaelic expressions of upheaval and chaos, deriving as they do from a deeply rooted con-
vention that Nature supports a leader. Gaelic ears will also here an echo of one of the great Gaelic
love songs, ‘Mairead Òg’, in which the speaker arrives at a loch to find his young wife, whom he
had shot inadvertently, ‘a’ strùladh’ in it. Maclean’s poem clearly signals his identification with
a major heartbroken personage from the tradition by his use of ‘san t-srùlaich’ (p. 9) to express
‘in the swirling water’, and by the image of seeing the beloved’s lost face in the water.
It is surely a mark of particular distress when one who had been completely entranced and
beguiled by the beauty of his native region, turns at the end of a long and desolate poem entitled
‘Urnaigh’ (‘Prayer’) to a recitation of a litany of global and personal catastrophes in the absence
of God, culminating in the repudiation of Nature for having tortured him, he says, by giving
him clarity of understanding along with a divided heart. The line ‘I do not feel kindly toward
Nature’ (‘chan eil mo chaomhachd ris an Nàdar’ [p. 121]) is an understated but bleakly ironic
renunciation of an entire worldview. As previously noted, the traditional role of Nature in Gaelic
ideology was to express sympathy with a man or a hero; a man’s feelings towards Nature were not
at issue. Maclean’s withdrawal is also clear in poem Dàin do Eimhir L, arguing first that grief is
as nothing compared to the millions of the stars and the millions of years the earth has moved,
but subsequently disdaining to take an interest in them, for they will not restore his love:
What do I care for its circuits, [ie the earth's]

for its distant ancient course,
since it will not give with its sunlight
any kind of permanence to my love!
‘Dè dhòmhsa a mhillean iadhadh, / dè dhòmhsa a chian chùrs’ aost / a chionn nach toir e
le ghrian-leus / gnè shìorraidheachd do mo ghaol!’ (p. 153).
For Maclean, the breakdown of Nature’s nurturing support is not confined to situations of
personal heartbreak but extends to catastrophic events in the community. What is meant here by
community is a widening gyre of groups, starting with the people of his native Raasay and his
‘beloved island’ Skye, but gradually expanding to include the misery and despair of the whole
world. The poem that most clearly assembles his communities of concern is ‘The Cuillin’, which
Maclean intended to be a poem that radiated out from Skye to the whole world. Space constraints
permit only a short excerpt to give a taste of the poem’s often declamatory style, in which the
beloved mountains have descended into a morass:
O greedy morasses,
You swallowed the great French Revolution
You swallowed Germany and Italy
Long ago you swallowed Scotland and Britain
You swallowed America and India,
Africa and the great plain of China.
And, great One, that is the anguish,
That you swallowed the heroism of Spain.
‘Och a bhoglaichean sanntach / shluig sibh an t-Ar-a-mach Frangach / shluig sibh a’
Ghearmailt ’s an Eadailt / Is fhad’ on shluig Alba ’s Breatainn / shluig sibh Ameireaga
’s na h-Innsean, / an Aifric is magh mòr na Sìne / ’s a Thì mhòir, b’e siud an t-àmhghar /
Gun do shluig sibh gaisge na Spàinne’ (p. 369)
A paradisiacal picture of Maclean’s native Raasay is presented in two of his most resonant poems,
‘The Woods of Raasay’ and ‘Hallaig’. We noted earlier that in the former, the woods, which had ini-
tially been a source of abundance and supportive of the speaker, eventually transformed into a land of
death. ‘Hallaig’ differs, describing a visionary experience that is redemptive and also shocking.
The dead and the cleared population of a former clachan in Skye (some men, but mostly young
women) are seen alive, taking the form of the wild trees – birch, hazel, rowan – that spread of
their own accord to fill the space previously occupied by the people:
... my love is at the Burn of Hallaig

... she is a birch, a hazel,
a straight, slender young rowan.
...
the dead have been seen alive.
‘... ’s tha mo ghaol aig Allt Hallaig... / tha i ’na beithe, ’na calltainn, / ’na caorann
dhìreach sheang ùir /... chunnacas na mairbh beò’ (p. 231, 233)
Two pervasive Gaelic tropes form the bedrock of ‘Hallaig’. One is that of the female personifica-
tion of the land, which is here inverted. An Otherworldly woman or goddess traditionally repre-
sented the land, but here the land, in the form of trees, represents the people. Despite that ironic
inversion, traditional personification is clearly audible, elevating what might otherwise have
been a simple metaphor (i.e. ‘my love is a birch/hazel/rowan’) into an evocation of an ancient
belief, which is, notably, shown to be ineffectual by the end of the poem. The second salient trope
is the idea that Nature responds to the plight of the leader, or in this case of the people. This too
is ironically subverted. To see the people in the very trees that replaced them is, in an obvious
sense, a shocking image, as is the flourishing of the trees in the people’s absence. Where is the
Sorley MacLean 521
shock? ‘Hallaig’ takes up the image of the land flourishing in the absence of the cleared people,
presented in ‘Fios chun a’ Bhàird’ (‘A Message to the Poet’) by Uilleam MacDhun-lèibhe
(William Livingston) (See McLeod and Newton 2019: 409-505) But where ‘Fios chun a’ Bhàird’
describes the emptied landscape as a source of sorrow, in accordance with Gaelic belief and more
importantly with immediate circumstances, Maclean transforms it into an Otherworldly redemp-
tive vision which, however, he admits will not outlast himself.
The title of a late poem, ‘An t-Ascalon’, refers to the garden shrub Escallonia, often used in
suburban hedging. As a title and a subject it certainly lacks the grandeur of most of Maclean’s
poetry. It represents the sheer banality of Nature’s indifference in this poem, which, in a Gaelic
context is a mark of disintegration. The unassuming Escallonia is centre stage, with its ‘polite red
flowers’ (‘a bhlàthan modhail dearga’ [’p. 335]). The native willow, pine trees, broom and birches,
not to speak of the great mountain Glàmaig, are all sidelined. The Escallonia is strong but comes
from a weak, faint land of drugs, murder, poverty, and the unspeakable. The plant is thus asked to
bear a heavy burden of guilt, representing an unspecified provenance that could be suburbia, or
some reviled country or region. The accusation of indifference to suffering may be read as a politi-
cal criticism of any or all invading oppressors. In a Gaelic context, that same accusation goes to
the heart of the sympathy of Nature, whose indifference is tantamount to a world in turmoil:
There is no care about death

nor care about sickness
nor care about misery
in the silent escallonia,
in the indifferent escallonia.
‘Chan eil cùram mun bhàs / no cùram mun tinneas / no cùram mun truaighe / air an
ascalon shàmhach, / air an ascalon choma.’ (p. 335)
Conclusion
In choosing to emphasise the depth of Gaelic tradition in Sorley Maclean’s poetry, no undervaluing
of alternative approaches is intended. It may be assumed that the readership of this English-
language publication is less likely to be familiar with the core tropes of Gaelic literature that
Maclean takes up and expands: the lover’s illness onto death, a young man’s heroic quest to prove
himself as a precondition for love, the blazon, the personification of the land, the sympathy of
Nature, the struggle with monsters. Taking the face of the beloved as a starting point, I have
sought to unearth a pervasive pattern that spans the entirety of Maclean’s work and that under-
pins his poetry’s courageous encounter with himself, the beloved, and the wider world.
Note
1 Where poems from the Dàin do Eimhir sequence are do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile (1943) and in Whyte and
referred to by name they are denoted by their number Dymock (2011). All page references to Maclean’s
in Roman numerals. As they appeared initially in Dàin poetry are from Whyte and Dymock.
References
Blankenhorn, V. (1978). Traditional and bogus elements Melia, D. (1967). The Lughnasa musician in Ireland and
in ‘MacCrimmon’s lament’. Scottish Studies 22: 45–67. Scotland. Journal of American Folklore 80: 365–373.
Dronke, P. (1968). Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Ní Annracháin, M. (1997). Vision and quest in Sorley
Love-Lyric. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Maclean’s “An Cuilithionn”’. Lines Review 141: 5–11.
Lévinas, E. (1984). Ethics and infinity. CrossCurrents 34 Ní Annracháin, M. (2011). Sorley MacLean’s “The Woods of
(2): 191–203. Raasay”. In: Lainnir a’ Bhùirn – the Gleaming Water: Essays
McKay, P. (2011). “Coilltean Ratharsair”: temptation in on Modern Gaelic Literature (ed. E. Dimmock and W.
the woods. In: Ainmeil Thar Cheudan: Essays in Memory McLeod), 71–86. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press.
of Sorley Maclean (ed. R. Rentin and B. Robertson), Whyte, C. and Dymock, E. (ed.) (2011). Somhairle
41–53. Isle of Skye: Clò Ostaig. MacGill-Eain/Sorley MacLean Caoir Gheal Leumraich /
McLeod, W. and Newton, M. (ed.) (2019). The Highest White Leaping Flame: Collected Poems in Gaelic with
Apple/an Ubhal as Airde: an Anthology of Scottish Gaelic English Translations. Edinburgh: Polygon, an imprint
Literature. London: Francis Boutle. of Birlinn.
41
W.S. Graham
Andrew McNeillie
Professor of English (Emeritus), Exeter University
Night-Snow
wee song for Sydney Graham
The real poem never ends.
The blizzard beneath its last footprint
is where we search in its memory,
the blizzard that is also night
as fresh on your face as snow.
Night-snow the ultimate
a body must weather, body I say,
but I mean soul
out on the manhole sea
where the littoral-minded sail
beyond Cape Metaphor to be.
And Sydney Coastguard keeps his watch
ticking on course for Greenock,
with Alfred Wallis at the wheel
aboard the good wreck Alba.
For who but a blind one cannot see
Scotland from Cornwall? –
every small hour of the year
with the heart in the right direction
and a glass to his eye.
(McNeillie 2010, p. 47)

Life and Contacts
One of the most original of Scottish poets, and a brilliant letter-writer, Sydney Graham, as he
was generally known (a.k.a. Joke [Jock] Grim [Graham]) was born in a set-in bed at No. 1
Hope Street, in Greenock, on the sea-going shipbuilding Firth of Clyde. His father Alexander
was an engineer, his Irish mother Margaret (née McDermid) came from Galway and was a shop-
keeper (Snow and Snow 1999, pp. ix–xiv, and passim below for biographical facts in this sec-
tion). There was music in the family and Graham seems to have inherited from his father a fine
singing voice. It was good enough to be thought to reward training, which he undertook for a
while. He would become a great pub singer, with superior renditions from both the classical
and folk repertoires. No landlord could call time on talk as well as he. A bar would stop in the
tracks of its gannet-rock cacophony to hear him. The Grahams kept a convivial even boisterous
household, ‘full of Scotch and Irish songs’ (Snow and Snow 1999, p. 98). The poet’s origin
and the tenor of his Clydeside voice are written through his work, no matter how far from
Scotland it finds or appears to find its subject matter and eventually surreal metaphysics and
abstractions.
Graham took little, and less and less, to formal schooling. He loved nothing more than to
wander in the neighbouring hills into the seaborne landscape of the Firth. The family flat occu-
pied a top floor. It offered spectacular views beyond the neighbouring sugar dock. There young
Graham might gaze out in clear weather as far away beyond Renfrewshire as the Isle of Arran.
These are the vital, pelagic and archipelagic circumstances that schooled the poet in his early
seedtime. He left school aged 14 and took up an apprenticeship in engineering. His training in
draughtsmanship included having to transcribe ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ onto a postage stamp.
Otherwise engineering was unlikely to be literary enough for him. His heart wasn’t really in it
and rather than follow the course of study required, he moonlighted to attend Glasgow University
evening classes on literature and art. He began to devour books with a passion and to write
poems. As he put it:
... in a welding flash

He found his poetry arm
And turned the coat of his trade.
‘Letter II’ (Graham 1955, p. 39)
As his apprenticeship reached full term, he was awarded a bursary to attend Newbattle Abbey
College (1938–1939). Key for him, obviously, among the several courses he was required to take
was English Literature. Now he read even more widely than before and with applied focus. Both
Anglo-Saxon and Early Scottish Poetry were for Graham key elements in the curriculum. It ran
otherwise through the canon from Coleridge and Wordsworth, and on to Yeats and Eliot, Pound
and Joyce (the ‘semi-colonial’ Irishman, who flew the nets to Trieste and Paris, was a most
important presence for him). This was an advanced approach to the subject for its time, reaching
as it did to embrace the near contemporary. It was invaluable to Graham that it did so. He stud-
ied some Pre-Socratic philosophy, notably Heraclitus, philosopher of flux, or continuous change.
The writings of Martin Heidegger, the obscure luminary of being and time, and phenomenologi-
cal method also attracted him.
It was at Newbattle too that this highly intelligent, and shrewd, yet somehow increasingly
awry, young man met his future wife, and another poet, Nessie Dunsmuir. She is the subject of
tender love poems across Graham’s output (Berlin 1949), beginning with ‘To ND’ written at
W.S. Graham 525
Newbattle. The title of his book 2ND Poems (1945) barely conceals a punning dedication.
Graham was much given to puns.
At the outbreak of World War II, he was found unfit for military service. He had a hitherto
undiscovered ulcer. Aggravated by his eventual lifestyle, this condition would plague him and
lead to several hospitalisations down the years. It was like a limpet gnawing at his innards that
just would not let go of the rock it grazed on. He returned to engineering for the duration of
the war, commonly working nights and writing at his machine in downtime. He had already
met Edwin Morgan in 1937. This marked the start of his most important single poetic friend-
ship. His letters to Morgan offer vital insight into the development of both poets. They show
Graham to be a serious critic, who valued Morgan’s ‘good seriousness’, and could not and
would not spare his friend’s feelings (see his response to Morgan’s ‘Dies Irae’ [Snow and
Snow 1999, pp. 94–96]).
An astute close reader, he was deeply passionate, highly disciplined and self-critical about the
craft that had chosen him. Yet at the same time he could appear slow to note strong echoes of
other voices in his own work, even in some of his best and most celebrated poems. Note the
momentary parenthetical presence in ‘The Nightfishing’ of Eliot: ‘I’m come to this place/(Come
to this place)’ and of Dylan Thomas: ‘I, in Time’s grace’ (Graham 1955, pp. 15, 18), though
Graham makes the idea of grace entirely his own, as a significant theme in the poem. The more
sweeping inclusions in the earlier poem ‘The White Threshold’ strike this reader to be of a
different order, as suggested below.
During the war Graham got to know David Archer, an emigré from London to Glasgow, a
patron of the arts and a publisher. Archer’s Parton Press published Dylan Thomas’s first book, as
well as those of George Barker and David Gascoyne. It would publish what was Graham’s second
collection but first book Cage Without Grievance in 1942. His first collection to be written,
The Seven Journeys appeared two years later (Graham 1944). A bohemian circle of artists and
writers gathered in Glasgow, notably at Archer’s Scott Street Arts Centre, provided an ideal
milieu for Graham to rub around in and seek to be himself or selves. It would lead him to meet
Dylan Thomas, and to London and a kind of parallel universe in Soho (here among others he
encountered the poet David Wright, the painter John Minton, and most notably in terms of
compatibility the painter and teacher Bryan Wynter).
To these names also, including George Barker, should be added the American-born Burns
Singer, brought up in Glasgow, first employed in Aberdeen, and then in London where he
worked on the Times Literary Supplement. Ever rather a thrawn character, as a young man Singer
idolised Graham and for a time camped on his doorstep in Cornwall. He addressed a number of
poems to his hero (see for example, Singer 2001, ‘The Hill of Names’, ‘Dear Sydney, Now the
time has come and gone’, pp. 31–32 and 185–186).
All this London/Soho scene found connection in artistic communities or networks in Cornwall
too, where Graham would settle for the greater part of his life. While he missed intensely, to the
end, his native land and the sound of Scottish voices, he would make only rare visits to Scotland
and never settle back there. There came a point, and quite early, when what he’d known was no
longer there. ‘Scotland,’ he wrote to William Montgomerie in December 1946, ‘(and I’m often
homesick to be there) seems so empty of alive people. If I lived in Glasgow and wanted to go out
to the pub one night I can’t think of anyone I could ring up’ (Snow and Snow 1999, p. 70). He
would often feel intensely isolated in Cornwall but he did have vital friends there he could ‘ring
up’ or write to and line up for the craic. ‘SZVEN BEARLIN WE’LL BE DRUNK THIS NIGHT’
he would declare to the man for whose 1949 book on Alfred Wallis, Graham would write his
remarkable poem ‘The Voyages of Alfred Wallis’ (Berlin 1994, p. 138).
Scottish he certainly was, but never a nationalist. This was one of several significant out-
looks on life he held in common with Dylan Thomas, the poet, pacifist, dramatic and story-
telling celebrant of sea-going Aber Tawe (Swansea) and of estuarine Laugharne who was
influential upon him, as he set foot and set forth in his imagined journeys. Thomas very early
on found a highly original dialect of his own more competently than did the young Graham.
Elements in it caught Graham’s ear and took some considerable time to exorcise. The preci-
sian Hopkins performed similar work, as did Anglo-Saxon poetry in translation. On the other
hand, Graham had no time for Hugh MacDiarmid’s Synthetic Scots, a commodity he found
embarrassing and dismissed humorously as ‘the Plastic’ (Snow and Snow 1999, p. 97).
Aesthetic nationalism was not for him.
But the Scots he found in Burns, on the other hand, resonated with him naturally. He heard
in Burns words and expressions he knew from his cradle. They inflected his poetic voice as they
did his speech without contrivance (Snow and Snow 1999, p. 97). On the other side of the tradi-
tion, Celtic/Gaelic myth and legend had powerful attraction for him, which Cornwall helped
stimulate. He was fascinated by Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948). But if he was wary of
‘the plastic’ he was no less disposed ‘to shoo the twilicht awa!’ (Berlin 1994 p. 142). From the
start he seemed to know the kind of poetry he wanted and the integrity he must maintain to
achieve it. Finding it would take him to the North Pole and many another remote corner.
As to MacDiarmid and Graham there were other matters of significance in play. If MacDiarmid
was unenthusiastic about Graham’s early poetry, he wasn’t alone in that. The later work was
another kettle of fish (sometimes literally) and MacDiarmid recognised its importance, with one
or two inevitable caveats (see below). The two men were on genial terms and for all the differ-
ences between their views on poetry and their practices, they had more than is generally acknowl-
edged in common, and more than being Scottish. They were both of the working class.
Class is a term nowadays generally not admitted to polite company. But it would be a travesty
of Graham’s life-story not to foreground it. It’s what made it possible for him to fit in so well among
the Cornish fishermen of his acquaintance and the pub culture they enjoyed. Surely, too, no other
background fits a person better for the bohemian life, for hardship and hand-to-mouth, lack of
affectation and social vanity. Both poets endured gruelling hardship on the brink of want in pursuit
of their art, and they were both drawn to the peripheries of what the present author prefers to call
‘the unnameable archipelago’ of Britain and Ireland (McNeillie 2007, p. vii). They were truly archi-
pelagic writers, living at the edge and on the edge of necessity, mainly concerned, in MacDiarmid’s
assertion, ‘with spiritual matters’ (MacDiarmid 1939, p. 24), for which read poetic matters.
The sculptor, painter and writer Sven Berlin’s ‘autosvenography’ provides unique glimpses of
Graham and Dunsmuir and of their way of life at Germoe, site of Graham’s ‘Wheelhouse’ cara-
van, ‘like Scottish tinkers in a waggon’, Graham himself ‘this rough man from Greenock … sur-
prisingly thin and fragile under his too large clothes’, and both of them with ‘a fierce love’ of
everything around them (Berlin 1994, pp. 136–140). Graham would say, in his sole theoretical
essay ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ that he was not ‘the victim’ of his environment. He did not
wallow in or even lean towards ressentiment in his work, though it could surface in him socially
(Snow and Snow 1999, p. 379). For Graham, poetry must celebrate and discover not argue about
‘fictional problems of Morality (involving Politics and our each illusion of a Liberty)’ (ibid.). The
poet’s job for Graham was always ‘Love/Imagined into words’ (Graham 1970, p. 25).
He and Dunsmuir would lead fairly peripatetic lives within Cornwell and part company, on
occasion briefly, at points of domestic stress; then lengthily, as they agreed to separate and
W.S. Graham 527
Dunsmuir went off to teach English in Paris, via a stint in Italy 1947–1953. But what held them
together proved greater than anything that parted them. They married in 1954.
Graham could be as hard to live with as his circumstances were themselves hard to live in.
But for all that he might be surly and irascible, he could also be extraordinarily buoyant,
humorously self-deprecating and self-aware, convivial and kindly. His letters are full of wonder-
ful humour, as well as being littered with requests to friends for money, and for the cost of fares
so that he might escape to visit them. While all the time he has just one thing on his mind, the
writing, making or indeed constructing of poems, and sending them out to the hit-or-miss
world of poetry magazines and their gate-keeper editors. Serious, and more or less constant,
want of money and the intensities of isolation, the psychological pressures of maintaining the
integrity of his poetic vigil, the backwash of excessive drinking, its consequences for his health –
including an incident in which he miraculously survived falling 40 ft off a roof in St Ives –
could and regularly did all conspire to push things closer and closer to the edge of what anyone
might cope with.
In all this it is perhaps easy to overlook the fact that Graham enjoyed considerable recognition
quite early on. He was well-received in Britain in the small-press coteries of the time, and still
better on both coasts of America. His poems were published in magazines there and he was
reviewed and admired, most tellingly by Vivienne Koch, a Yeats enthusiast, whom he’d meet
when in 1948 he spent some nine months in New York backed by a Rockefeller grant. He spent
time at Yaddo, the artists’ community, at Saratoga Springs, and also gave lectures in the New York
University system on ‘Forces in Contemporary British Literature’. It was a mixed experience that
even managed to make him ‘homesick for England’ (Snow and Snow 1999, p. 77). Graham
would meet Koch again, when she came to London. For a time this ‘powerful American lady’
seems to have taken him over, to have kitted him out in new clothes, and to have ‘policed’ him
about the world (Berlin 1994, p. 141). Initially her support was important for his morale and so
for his development, though, inevitably perhaps, her subsequent attentions soon became
intolerable.
The true sea-change for Graham came when his work caught the attention of T.S. Eliot. Dylan
Thomas used to refer to Eliot as the Pope. Now Graham would have audiences with his emi-
nence, and discussions regarding all manner of poetic matters, including the challenges of the
‘long’ poem. What would not you give to have been at the next table listening in for the three
hours they spent together, the talk being ‘all about poetry, Scottish Renais (which he’s agin for
right reasons), fishing, publishing, drinking …’? (Snow and Snow 1999, p. 113).
Sometimes Graham became truly desperate to get away to London, to enjoy such things as
lunch with Eliot, and really did not want ‘to go back to Mevagissey’ as he told Edwin Morgan,
late in 1949 after a period of hospitalisation (Snow and Snow 1999, p. 103). It’s a long letter that
offers vital insights into his poetry and poetics at the time. But it also comes tinged with poign-
ancy when he observes, ‘I feel that me always living in the country has in some ways been an
evasion for certain personal social problems in my relation to people generally’ (ibid.). This
remark should help correct any temptation to romanticise Graham’s circumstances and isolated
way of life. He spoke of being maimed for poetry but he was also psychologically maimed for life.
Eventually he would become what in 1979 he called ‘an expert in aloneness’ (Snow and
Snow 1999, p. 356). At one point, early in 1950, he took a job with an advertising agency where
he worked away ‘writing great and enduring/copy about soap furcoats airoengines chanelle/et
cetera’ (Snow and Snow 1999, p. 114). It could not last, and it did not. He walked out on it and
by summer 1950 was staying at Carn Cottage, Zennor.
Finding an affordable roof over their heads was a more or less constant problem for the Grahams.
In the spring of 1956 they made a telling move to a remote coastguard cottage, near Gurnard’s
Head. What more appropriate address for the nightfishing poet? Or what better thought of him
than as an auxiliary coastguard keeping watch from a small lookout high on headland itself? But it
was cold comfort in the extreme and took a heavy toll. The Grahams were eventually rescued by
the Welsh painter Nancy Wynne-Jones who for a time provided them with accommodation at
Trevaylor, near Penzance, before she bought the terrace house at Madron where the Grahams lived
for the rest of their lives rent-free. Wynne-Jones also paid for Graham to visit Iceland, not quite the
North Pole, but it chimed with the poet’s growing interest in the frozen North and polar travel.
The publication dates of his last two books might suggest some kind of uncertainty or block-
age. But in reality the poems they contain were being written all along, and finding periodical
publication. When first Malcolm Mooney’s Land (1970) appeared and then the astonishingly var-
ied and achieved Implements in Their Places (1977), Graham won new admirers among a younger
generation. Harold Pinter also rallied to his cause.
The Poetry
Graham’s ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ first appeared in Poetry Scotland (No. 3) in July 1946 (see
Snow and Snow 1999, pp. 379–383). Much of what it has to say finds echoes in his letters, and
both should be consulted together. They are vital sources for seeing into Graham’s distinctive
poetics. One of the key things about ‘Notes’ is that it is a relatively early statement, yet lastingly
telling, in the wake of his first three small-press collections, and three years before the step-up
in achievement represented by The White Threshold (1949).
Graham once observed that critics of poetry generally manage only to talk about anything but
those matters that poets themselves are concerned with most. His ‘Notes’ provides a vital start-
ing point for avoiding such a charge. Like Mallarmé before him, and in his different way Dylan
Thomas too, Graham recognised, what seems naïve to declare, that poetry is made of words (and
important to add, ‘not of the expanding heart, the overflowing soul, or the sensitive observer’).
Apart from being comprised of letters, words for Graham are made of sounds (‘You cannot twice
bring the same word into sound,’ he would say), and not simply sense. They are half-way houses
between their appearance and their sense or senses.
Some practitioners of so-called ‘Language Poetry’ like to recruit Graham to their curious
cause. Insofar as it’s possible to generalise about them, they seem to question whether ‘meaning’,
as understood by everyday principles of common sense, has any place in poetry. One of the more
prominent disciples of this purism is the ingenious Cambridge-based Scottish-born poet Drew
Milne. His is a form of acute hermeticism and by definition a practice that cannot reach much if
anywhere beyond its confines. However complicated the matter, Graham lived and knew he
lived on a two-way street. The materiality of words is involved for him, no doubt. It informs his
appreciation of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), to cite a key example, ‘a commodius vicus of recir-
culation’, but not one without two-way thoroughfares either (Joyce 1939, p. 3). There is a host
of meaning and meanings in the Wake.
The different exercises in ‘Concrete Poetry’ by both Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan
are worth weighing in this context too. ‘The meaning of a word in a poem,’ says Graham, ‘is
never more than its position’. Graham had a habit of making ‘towers of words’ (Berlin 1994,
p. 145) and of writing down lines that he pinned on his wall, so he might live with them, and
W.S. Graham 529
they with him, rather as is the way with any visual work of art. (Berlin did the same and so
incidentally Graham invented what he called ‘The Berlin Wall’ well before the Cold War thought
of it.) It was a method of testing materials and testing himself by a species of osmosis and vigi-
lance. That he wrote his poems on a typewriter seems germane here too. The typed word at once
stands apart from the handwritten and stands out to the eye. Tap, tap, tap goes the typewriter.
Upon it Graham developed many striking ways of figuring his curiosity about the materiality of
words and the elusive character of intention. As to which his is a fractal approach of infinite
recession. It expresses in many examples a profound effect of alienation.
Graham also pinned up photos on his wall, as for example, cut from Berlin’s book on Alfred
Wallis, ‘one at a time’ of Wallis’s wife, and his ‘Schooner at Night’, keeping them on the wall ‘for
a few days, then sticking them back neatly with tape – the best way to get to know them’ (ibid.)
He could feel a kind of awkward-squad kinship with Wallis and found inspiration in the ‘primi-
tive’ originality of his art. He created visual artworks himself, including installations as settings
for reading his poems. Berlin made what seems an acute observation when he wrote: ‘Graham’s
obscurity is sometimes due to his sculptural vision – a need to get behind images and words see-
ing them all round and through to the other side – which is unusual in a poet and is the result
of living near visual artists and stone cutters’ (Berlin 1994, p. 144). Although ‘obscurity’ is not
quite the right word here.
What’s surely central, in any discussion of Graham’s work, is the fact that words are halfway
houses, if that, on the intention-communication axis, between the poet and the reader. Readers
do not know the poet’s intention, and need it concern them that they do not? Nor can they know
their own too well either, once exposed to a poem. Nor can the poet know as the poem finds its
own dynamic. For in Graham’s Heraclitan view intentions are always breaking into others.
Therefore the poem cannot be ‘a handing out of the same packet to everyone’. For Graham it’s in
this manner that poetry, like history, continually arrives. There is another binary involved here
too, on the Graham spectrum, concerning history and the individual. ‘History does not repeat
itself,’ he asserts, echoing Marx’s 18th Brumaire which in fact makes no such claim to the contrary
and was uttered topically in response to a specific event, the farcical arrival on the scene of Louis
Bonaparte. ‘History does not repeat itself,’ says Graham:
I am the bearer of that outcome. History continually arrives as differently as our most recent minute
on earth. The labourer going home in the dusk shouts his goodnight across the road and History has
a new score on its track. The shape is changed a little. History as a crowd divides and divides into
its population where I am a member and at last I am left to say my history has my eyes and mouth
and a little likeness to my father. Time and again I am scored by the others and their words and the
diseases and cures war and change in their part of me.
For a poem to be ‘a successful construction of words’, he must push back against these things and
work to set them aside, knowing that they will act on the work, anyway, ‘whether the poem is
about a pinhead or Lanarkshire’. Critics in this field are divided between ‘anti-intentionalist’ and
‘intentionalist’ schools of thought. It was a species of anti-intentionalist drummer Graham
marched to, and one that speaks a profound truth.
Let the poem be a still thing, a mountain constructed in addition to the world. It will have its own
special function and purpose, to be that certain mountain. And there is the reader going on to it
with his never-before exploration after his perfect hunger’s daily bread. A poem is a mountain made
of the containing, almost physical language, and with the power to release a man into its own com-
pletely responsible world larger than that outward solid geography.
In something of this spirit he would later write in his elegy for Peter Lanyon ‘The Thermal Stair’
(Graham 1970, pp. 25–27) that the poet and the painter’s task is ‘to make/An object that will
stand and will not move’.
The Sea, the Sea
Least solid in its geography is the sea, however contained by varied, permeable and erodible, but
generally solid enough coastlines. The sea for Graham, the poet of ‘The Nightfishing’, becomes
a metaphor of itself, a gnomic notion that would carry all before it in its moment, accounting for
one of those ‘poetic licences by the dozen’ the poet referred to in his letter to Sven Berlin.
(Graham 1955, p. 19; Snow and Snow 1999, p. 89). We drowning readers, in peril on the deep
of language, look on his application kindly, but can only guess at its apparently tautological
meaning. The sea is certainly metaphorical otherwise in the western tradition, from earliest
times, antique and Biblical, from Homer to Melville, to Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, and beyond. It
comes truly into its own in The White Threshold, a book at a double threshold, one where the
waves break on the shores of metaphor, the other that signals also a new tide in the affairs of
Graham’s poetry.
‘What is the language using us for?’ asks the later poem (Graham 1977, p. 11). We may from
the other side of the street or the firth also ask what is Graham using language for, and how is he
using it? For without him and his part in it all, there is no release, no poem, no mountain, no
‘object that will stand and will not move’, no reader, no words. Our question is legitimate.
Language is a vessel at mooring. Someone has to get it under weigh if there is to be a poem, and
that person is not the reader. The reader gets the poem under weigh for herself but does not make
the stand-alone object itself and must navigate her way round its fixed points, as signed off on
by the poet and no one else. The poet might hear ‘voices within/The empty lines and tenses’
(‘Letter V’, Graham 1955, p. 52). But without the poet’s thought and hearing in the first place,
we must all go dumbly on our way with nothing in our pockets, no change to exchange, nothing
but ourselves to meet us when we travel and our skies change but not our souls, as Derek Mahon,
after the poet Horace, once said, in his poem ‘Homecoming’ – Mahon another, and an important,
poet of the exiled spirit and the margins (Mahon 1972, p. 1), though one with both existential
and political concerns.
In The White Threshold (1949) Graham’s use and uses of language centre on one word more
than any other, and it is: ‘sea’. There is scarcely a poem between its covers in which the sea does
not figure tellingly, conceptually as much as materially or literally, from [all italics mine] ‘The
released nightwatching sea’ (‘My Final Bread’, p. 13) to: ‘the sea’s raging bridges of exchange’, ‘All
arriving seas drift me, at each heartbreak, home’ (‘Three Poems of Drowning’, pp. 44–45);
‘that old testament sea’ (‘The Voyages of Alfred Wallis’, p. 47); ‘wastefarers/O exchanging sea
imperilling … braes’, ‘seachanged lifetime’, ‘the twelve-discipled seas’, ‘the selfseas for ever/Fed
by the blinding air’ (‘The White Threshold’, p. 59); ‘The flowing strongheld Clyde/Rests me
my earliest word/That has ever matchlessly/Changed me towards the sea’ … [‘That deep invest-
ment’] (‘To My Mother’, pp. 69–70). This is only a fraction of such examples, and without
any account of the other numerous instances that imply the sea. The intensity is extraordinary,
W.S. Graham 531
whelming in but not overwhelming the poems, as no less extraordinary is the emphasis on
change, exchange, flowing and arrival. It is a landmark or, better say, a seamark volume.
Edwin Morgan felt this and noticed too a ‘new clarity’ in the work, when addressing the pref-
erence of a younger generation of readers for only the later Graham (Morgan 2004,
pp. 186–194).
A claim can fairly be made that by the time he’s embarked on these poems, Graham has com-
bined or wrought together all notable influences or presences into a method, and so a voice, of
his own. We may choose to put a finger on examples that might suggest otherwise, noticeably
gestures at Anglo- Saxon and Hopkinsian ‘kennings’ and similar compound formulations
(‘foamthatch’, ‘sprayricks’, ‘flecked rhinns’ and so on in the title poem). But another way of look-
ing at them is to see them as part of Graham’s wider celebratory embrace of the tradition, that
such usages as ‘What vast is here?’ affirm and confirm. (Here the archaism sounds like something
in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) – Melville whom Graham called ‘a strange great man’
(Snow and Snow 1999, p. 56) on reading a biography of him.)
‘The White Threshold’ itself is a form of pocket epic, celebrating Clydeside in all its sea-
going resonance, through the lens of Graham’s telescopic memory and his immediate five senses.
The embrace of the poetry is remarkably measured in its periods, which are felt profoundly in
refrain: ‘I walk towards you and you may not walk away’ and also in returning rhythm, marked
by peculiarly telling emphases or inflexions of unconventional word-choice, word order and cae-
surae, all of which speak to process not convention, and are what the craft of making poems is
about. This sense of process over convention is something that distinguishes Graham’s use of
ballad and other ‘traditional’ forms (see for example the brilliant ‘Sgurr Na Guillean Macleod’
[Graham 1977, pp. 42–43]).
We find Graham’s ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ embodied in The White Threshold, as already
implied, in references to change and arrival (Snow and Snow 1999: pp. 379–383). But see also
‘My Final Bread’ (for ‘My continual farewell. I am continual arrival’) and one of the book’s finest
poems: ‘Listen. Put on Morning’, for the lines ‘A man’s imagining/Suddenly may inherit/The
handclapping centuries/Of his one minute on earth’ (Graham 1949, pp. 10–11).
There are important poems of place and of people here in this volume that will be returned to
below.
So are there in The Nightfishing. The volume’s seven-part title poem, that ‘sea monster with
poetic licences by the dozen’, is largely unpeopled and unlocated in place, with the exception of
the short balladic second section, with its quatrain refrain, that draws us away to Greenock:
When I fell down into this place

My father drew his whole day's pay,
My mother lay in a set-in bed,
The midwife threw my bundle away.
(Graham 1955, p. 18)
The first line of the second iteration of the refrain altering to ‘When I fell from the hot to the
cold’, a kind of verse Graham could always find the right words for and best words for uttering
his theory of the word, as in ‘The Broad Close’ and ‘Baldy Bane’ which close The Nightfishing.
Place is a keyword in the poem, however, and as telling as, or more than, ‘sea’. It surfaces early
in the first section. We hear it in part II, where it is the world we enter at birth. But more tell-
ingly, the ‘place’ is the poem itself, not a location in the world, not a fishing village or anything
so taken from geography. Where supposed topographical features are mentioned in passing, such
as the ‘Black Rosses’ and ‘Skeer’ in section III (Graham 1955, p. 27), the expressions are generic.
(‘Rosses’ is a term widely applied to areas of sea-marsh or similar shoreline. ‘Skeer’ in Scots means
‘scare’. But in this instance Graham’s usage surely derives from Old Norse (sker)/Gaelic origin
(sgair) a rugged insulated sea-rock, as in ‘skerry’. Either way the references are not place-specific.)1
Place in this poem ‘finds’ the poet, who will ask at the end of part IV ‘What one place remains/
Home as darkness quickens?’ The answer is not Mevagissey. It is the poem:
At this place
The eye reads forward as the memory reads back.
At this last word all words change.
All words change in acknowledgement of the last.
Here is their mingling element.
(Graham 1955, p. 29)
And it is the fisher-poet’s metaphysical being in time. He returns, ‘a stranger’ brought to pass by
himself, ‘Who sits here in his place’ where everything is provisional.
Here is the place no more

Certain though the steep streets
And High Street form again and the sea
Swing shut on hinges and the doors all open wide.
(Graham 1955, p. 30)
Note the play on ‘Certain’ in a type of caesura that will become more and more a trademark
characteristic of Graham’s later work. Play between the poet’s voyaging on a fishing trip in pur-
suit of ‘the bright chirpers’ (a.k.a. ‘silver darlings’) (Graham 1955, p. 24) and his mind’s voyage
towards both a seeming existential grace, and the continually arriving poem, preoccupies the
extended section III. The imagery of ‘keeled over’ progress on the ‘streaming sea’, of nets and the
shooting and hauling of nets, of gannets and gear, of darkness visible, of mist and fog, and lights
is forcefully evocative, and recognisable as authentic to anyone who has been on such a trip, or
seen a documentary of ring-net fishing for herring (Graham 1955, p. 26).2 The poet is at sea but
his poem is not, in that it is grounded in brilliantly transformed observation derived from actual
fishing trips, during which Graham acquitted himself as if born to it. ‘I really love being on the
sea,’ he told Morgan, ‘There I have feeling of freedom and cleanness and being part of a great
energy which has nothing to do with any morality and is completely unhuman’ (Graham 1955,
pp. 92–93). Graham spoke of his poem as ‘the most definite sea poem in the language since
[Hopkins’s] “The Wreck of the Deutschland”’ than which it was ‘seaier’ whatever that term
might ‘bring up’.3 Otherwise it was ‘a sea monster with poetic licences by the dozen’
(Graham 1955, p. 89).
More exacting to grasp is the way the poem moves between the actual and the metaphori-
cal, the outer and inner, with a sleight of voice, so to speak, that can never quite be pinned
to externals, or to intention, except as an open-ended effect that must be intended, as the
poet signs off on it, and effectively cuts us adrift, in the cases of Richard Murphy and
MacDiarmid feeling let down, though this reader for one always feels raised up by the poem.4
Poetry is a mystery, said Nadezhda Mandelstam, meaning in the way it comes about and in
W.S. Graham 533
itself. We forget that at our peril. Though it is true to say that poets must not seek to mystify
and there is a fine balance here going on in ‘The Nightfishing’ among the various poetic
licences.
A helpful way to ponder the poem is to skip forward to Malcolm Mooney’s Land and read in
its wake Graham’s ‘The Dark Dialogues’ (Graham 1970, pp. 29–37) – one of his most
achieved pieces of autobiographical resonance – in the second verse paragraph of which the
poet returns us to familiar territory, an uncommon place ‘Wanton with riding lights/And
staring eyes’:
Language swings away

Before me as I go
With again the night rising
Up to accompany me
And that other fond
Metaphor, the sea.
Images of night
And the sea changing
Should know me well enough.
(Graham 1970, p. 29)
Knowledge-transfer of this kind is a form of exchange we are by now readily familiar with as a
key trope in Graham’s repertoire and the fluid geographies of his voice and voicings:
And who are you and by

What right do I waylay
You where you go there
Happily enough striking
Your hobnail in the dark?
Believe me I would ask
Forgiveness but who
Would I ask forgiveness from?
(Graham 1970, p. 29)
The poem takes us to memories of No. 1 Hope Street, by means of what elsewhere he called his
‘child brain’ (Graham 1977, p. 77), to touchstone names, ‘Cartsburn’ and ‘Otter’s Burn/aroar in
the dark’ but the place itself, as in ‘The Nightfishing’ is the poem: ‘no other place/Than where
I am, between/This word and the next’ (Graham 1970, p. 36).
Places and People
Amid all that is abstract, internalised, and cerebral if not abstruse in Graham’s poetics, it is
possible to lose sight of certain other great strengths characteristic of his poetry. We might be
forgiven for thinking he is not so much a poet with something to say as a poet about the pro-
cess of saying, a poet too of solipsis. But this is not so. He is a superb poet of places and of folk
and a profoundly moving elegist. Eye, ear, and word can be brought into play to brilliant
effect, without overmuch self-conscious preoccupation with the means by which ‘ends’ are
reached. Such poems occur across his work, in a variety of forms and genres. We might expect
Graham’s Seven Journeys to draw on place and to be specific with local reference. But these
poems are journeys through words, in a sonorous, free-associative progress that barely keeps a
foot on the ground. They are more the offspring of ‘the expanding heart, the overflowing soul,
or the sensitive observer’ that in his ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, he ruled out of play. They
are rhapsodic. It is to The White Threshold readers must turn for the other Graham and such
poems of place as ‘Shian Bay’ and ‘Gigha’, and of folk and place: ‘The Children of Greenock’,
‘The Children of Lanarkshire’, ‘The Voyages of Alfred Wallis’, ‘To My Brother’, ‘To My Father’,
‘To My Mother’. But they are also to be found, in variety, across the subsequent collections.
Read: ‘Seven Letters’ (Graham 1955); ‘The Thermal Stair. For the painter Peter Lanyon …’, ‘I
Leave This at Your Ear (For Nessie Dunsmuir)’, ‘Hilton Abstract’, the extraordinarily original
‘Wynter and the Grammarsow’ (Graham 1970); ‘Two Poems on Zennor Hill’, ‘Ten Shots of Mr
Simpson’, ‘Greenock at Night I Find You’, the classic ‘Loch Thom’, ‘To Alexander Graham’,
the profound elegy ‘Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch’, being far from all of the kind (in
Graham 1977).
Words, Words, Words, and Spaces
We encounter Malcom Mooney and his bar in the remarkably sustained lyricism of ‘Seven Letters’
in The Nightfishing. Here Graham’s sleight of voice, of agency (‘The tiller takes my hand’
[Graham 1955, p. 52]), as well as of hand swims us round and through the spaces between words
and lines so we feel we might have had one too many, having manned ‘the bottled barque’
(Graham 1955, p. 60), encouraged by the poet who declares:
My tongue is Opening Time

And my ear is in its prime.
Ahoy Mooney. Draw back
The ancient bacchus bolts.
(Graham 1955, p. 60)
What is it to open time? It is to move into a different space. There’s something seemingly hal-
lucinatory about it all. Mesmerising and seeming hallucinatory linguistic and poetic effects
abound in Malcolm Mooney’s Land in a poetry that is leaner, made of fewer words, and bigger
spaces. His quest here is not at all dissimilar from that in ‘The Nightfishing’ but the means are
distinctly different and highly inventive. It is a dazzling move into a heightened interiority, sur-
reality, and wit, where elements of fiction figure which, later, find extraordinary clarity in the
group of gothic scene-setting poems ‘The Gobbled Child’, ‘The Lost Miss Conn’, ‘The Murdered
Drinker’ (Graham 1977, pp. 52–53).
The sense of alienation, never far off in Graham, intensifies here, from the title poem’s cryptic
Polar diary entries and surreal figures: ‘Yesterday/I heard the telephone ringing deep/Down in a
blue crevasse’ (Graham 1977, p. 12) or:
Tell him a story.

Tell him I came across
W.S. Graham 535
An old sulphur bear

Sawing his log of sleep
Loud beneath the snow.
(Graham 1977, p. 15)
– where that ‘sulphur’ of hibernation’s litter resonates as if directly observed – to the closing
‘Clusters Travelling Out’, where our prisoner of language taps out his message ‘Along the plumb-
ing of the world’. Here alienation is the mot juste. This is a poem full of sinister Kafka-like evoca-
tions, hinting at totalitarian worlds, the poet or speaker in the poem marvellously paranoid,
‘Surrounded by howls’ next door to the slaughterhouse in Madron, urging his imagined ‘reader’
or hearer to ‘Destroy this’ and adding that ‘They are very strict’. Just as Graham at times, for his
part, is very realistic, and equally comical:
But first I must empty my shit-bucket

And hope my case (if it can be found)
Will come up soon. I thought I heard
My name whispered on the vine.
(Graham 1977, p. 64)
Between these two book-end poems, from behind ‘The Art barrier of ice’ (p. 18) – a ‘doubtful
god’ (p. 44) – Graham (‘With a thought or two up his sleeve’, p. 47) threads his anti-intentionalist
theme through a series of brilliantly, and in a key sense sorrowfully, perceived metaphorical
opportunities, from love-making, to kite-flying, mountaineering, flute-playing (of which more
to come), cat-keeping, a pen-pal, and, in ‘The Fifteen Devices’, a badger in a Madron wood ‘a
creature of words’
Waiting to be asked to help me

In my impure, too human purpose.
(Graham 1977, p. 49)
He is no naturalist (or exponent of Naturalism) but a psychological realist, with solipsistical

tendencies. He wants us to know he knows that ‘The words are mine. The thoughts are all/Yours’
(p. 47). Though we know that he has just uttered a thought that is undeniably his and not ‘all’
ours, even as he gifts it to us. He is in fact not a thought-less writer and there is the rub, the
allure of Graham’s work in the borderlands of language. Again he tells us in ‘Private Poem to
Norman Macleod’:
The spaces in the poem are yours.

They are the place where you
Can enter as yourself alone
And think anything in.
(Graham 1977, p. 47)
While we know it is up to us when we have the poem before us to enter its spirit and make
from – rather than of – it what we can, we know we cannot just think anything in to the spaces.
We need the words above, below and on either side of them. It is on this ground that it sometimes
feels reasonable to object that Graham has beaten his metal too thin, and played that one string
on his bow a song too far, too often. When a poem comes to tell words (‘The beasts!’) that the
poet has the upper hand over them – ‘The dear upstarts’ – we can only agree, and perhaps ask
him, what kept you? None the less in Implements in Their Places (1977) Graham’s mastery of his
method is as achieved as it’s reasonably possible to imagine it being, and still remain compatible
with the poet’s continuous departure and arrival. From the master-class in metaphor or allegory
that is ‘Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons’ to the elegy ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’ and the extended
title sequence, Graham’s art in this collection has a fascinatingly seamless quality to its
transitions, moving between figure and evocation, between realities, that is virtuosic and daz-
zling, as he hammers himself ‘on to the other side of the paper’, a man ‘getting on’ in years, and
elsewhere visited by lust, and ‘punching the sexual clock’ (Graham 1977, pp. 19, 63). Poem as
implement, implement in its place. The very word comes at us from left field. Among the things
the OED tells us about it is that it derives from the Latin implementum a filling up, taken as ‘that
which serves to fill up or stock (a house, etc.)’ Sometimes referred to EMPLOY v., and taken as
‘thing employed or used’. ‘Things that serve as equipment or outfit’. ‘The apparatus, instru-
ments, etc. employed in any trade or in executing any piece of work’. This is ‘late’ work of
extraordinary skill and force. ‘Poem as implement, implement in its place’ – the title sequence
is packed with short poems. They are placed between ‘1’ ‘Somewhere our belonging particles/
Believe in us. If we could only find them’ and ‘74’ where the lines are repeated. The ‘implements’
offer frank surprises, tender love, biting angularities, lyric poignancies, gnomic one-liners. It is
a kind of catchall short-hand of all we might have learnt to expect from Graham: which is to say,
the unexpectable, including incidents from Scottish history and, hardly unfamiliar, autobio-
graphical recollection. It is ‘late’ work par excellence. Not to suggest for a moment anything of
influence, there is none the less an achieved air to this last volume similar to that to be found in
the Louis MacNeice of The Burning Perch (1963) and of the seeming random qualities of John
Berryman’s Dream Songs (1969).
Critical Reception
This essay has deliberately avoided using the terms ‘Neo-Romantic’ or ‘New Apocalyptic’ with
which both parti-pris poets and critical busy-bodies of the 1940s and 1950s (and ever since) have
done their worst to burden Graham, largely in the supposed cause of a largely university edu-
cated grouping referred to as ‘The Movement’. None of this has anything to do with poems and
their making. It has also declined to depend on the criticism that has accumulated over the years.
Readers can engage with that at their leisure.
T.S. Eliot afforded Graham, and his readers, the key critical moment of recognition when he
took on The White Threshold. What he had to say of The Nightfishing was a crucial seamark: ‘some
of these poems – by their sustained power, their emotional depth and maturity and their superb
technical skill – may well be among the more important achievements of our time’ (Snow and
Snow 1999, pp. ix–x).
In want of the individual collections used in this essay, those coming to Graham for the first
time should arm themselves with W. S. Graham, New Collected Poems (Faber 2004) edited by
Matthew Francis (with a characteristically perceptive ‘Foreword’ by Douglas Dunn) and The
Nightfisherman. A selected bibliography of Graham scholarship, excluding work referenced
above, is provided below.
W.S. Graham 537
Notes
1 I am indebted to Dr. Richard Dance of the Department muddle of the poet when he tries to go beyond the
of Anglo- Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge appearance of the sea to an unknown meaning … the
University, for guidance and reassurance here. poet has tried to say things about himself and life in
2 For a thorough grounding in ring-net fishing, see general which are not worked out well either in lan-
Angus Martin (1981, 2001). guage or experience’ (MacDiarmid 2001, p. 310).
3 In the Scottish tradition, we should also consider here That anonymous review (anonymity was the rule at
George Campbell Hay’s magnificent sea/fishing poem the TLS in those days) was by none other than the
‘Seeker, Reaper’ (Hay 1948). Irish poet Richard Murphy (Murphy 1955), another
4 As he told Edwin Morgan (26 July 1955), MacDiarmid poet of fishing and nightfishing too (see ‘The Cleggan
chose, to agree with the TLS reviewer of The Disaster’ [Murphy 1963]). Both poets miss the point
Nightfishing when he remarked on ‘the intellectual of Graham’s voyaging and theories of continual arrival.
References
Berlin, S. (1949). Alfred Wallis Primitive. Bristol: Redcliffe MacDiarmid, H. (1939). The Islands of Scotland. London:
Press. Batsford.
Berlin, S. (1994). The Coat of Many Colours. Autosvenography. MacDiarmid, H. (2001). New Selected Letters (ed.
Bristol: Redcliffe Press. D. Grieve, O.D. Edwards and A. Riach). Manchester:
Berryman, J. (1969). The Dream Songs. London: Faber & Carcanet.
Faber. MacNeice, L. (1963). The Burning Perch. London: Faber &
Graham, W.S. (1942). Cage Without Grievance. Glasgow: Faber.
Parton Press. Mahon, D. (1972). Lives. Oxford: Oxford University
Graham, W.S. (1944). The Seven Journeys. Glasgow: Press.
William MacLellan. Martin, A. (1981). The Ring-Net Fishermen. Edinburgh:
Graham, W.S. (1945). 2ND Poems. London: Nicholson John Donald Publishers.
and Watson. Martin, A. (2001). The North Herring Fishing. Colonsay:
Graham, W.S. (1949). The White Threshold. London: Faber House of Lochar.
& Faber. McNeillie, A. (2007). Editorial. Archipelago 1, Summer,
Graham, W.S. (1955). The Nightfishing. London: Faber & vii-viii, Clutag Press.
Faber. McNeillie, A. (2010). Night-snow. In: In Mortal Memory.
Graham, W.S. (1970). Malcolm Mooney’s Land. London: Manchester: Carcanet.
Faber & Faber. Morgan, E. (2004). The poetry of W. S. Graham. In:
Graham, W.S. (1977). Implements in Their Places. London: W. S. Graham: Speaking Towards You (ed. R. Pite and
Faber & Faber. H. Jones), 186–194. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Graham, W.S. (2004). New Collected Poems. London: Faber Murphy, R. (1955). The Continual Sea. Times Literary
& Faber. Supplement, 8 July.
Hay, G.C. (1948). Wind on Loch Fyne. Edinburgh: Oliver Murphy, R. (1963). Sailing to an Island. London: Faber.
and Boyd. Singer, B. (2001). Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet.
Joyce, J. 1960 [(1939]). Finnegans Wake, 3e. London: Snow, M. and Snow, M. (ed.) (1999). The Nightfisherman:
Faber. Selected Letters of W. S. Graham. Manchester: Carcanet.
42
Kelman, Gray, Welsh and the New
Urban Writing
Anthony Jarrells
Department of English, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA
As many have noted, the Scottish Literary Renaissance of the early twentieth century took as one
of its main targets the so-called ‘kailyard’ literature that was popular at the end of the nineteenth
century (see e.g. Gardiner 2005, p. 155). Looking to establish a more credible notion of Scottish
identity, and in keeping with European Modernism’s sense of rigour, writers such as Edwin Muir,
William Soutar, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and Hugh MacDairmid rejected the sentimentalised
images and figures of rural Scotland that featured in the work of kailyard writers such as
J.M. Barrie, S.R. Crockett, and Ian Maclaren. Like Highland tartanry before it, kailyard was an
invented tradition – a kind of fake Scottish brand, albeit a hugely popular one (especially abroad).
As Andrew Nash explains, in ignoring the realities that plagued industrial Scotland in the nine-
teenth century, kailyard writing transmitted a ‘false historical and cultural consciousness that
blighted the nation and impeded meaningful self-definition’ (Nash 2007, p. 322).
But in turning away from the sentimental regionalism that played to popular demand the
writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance did not turn towards the realities of industrial
Scotland or the urban settings – Glasgow in particular – that presented such realities in starkest
form. Glasgow’s synecdochic relation to industrial Scotland was indeed acknowledged. As Muir
himself wrote in 1935:
Glasgow is in every way the most important city in modern Scotland, since it is an epitome of the
virtues and vices of the industrial regions, which comprise the majority of the population. A descrip-
tion of Scotland which did not put Glasgow in the centre of the picture would not be a description
of Scotland at all.
(Muir 1985, p. 102)

Kelman, Gray, Welsh and the New Urban Writing 539
For the most part, however, it was not to the virtues and vices of industrial Scotland that Muir
and his fellow modernists looked for self-definition. As Sylvia Bryce-Wunder writes, the
‘Scottish Literary Renaissance was often antagonistic towards urban, working class Scotland’,
and Glasgow in particular seemed to represent everything that Scotland ‘should not be’
(Bryce-Wunder 2014, pp. 86, 87). For Muir, Glasgow was a ‘no man’s land of civilization’, a
place representative of all the evils of industrialism and therefore, in its generalised modern
character, not particularly Scottish at all (Muir 1985, p. 103). It might as well be Birmingham,
or Warsaw, or Hamburg.
The combined anti-kailyard and anti-urbanist stance of the Scottish Literary Renaissance
provides an interesting point of contrast for considering what is now often referred to as a second,
or ‘new’, Scottish Literary Renaissance, one that begins in the 1980s, following the publication
of Alasdair Gray’s novel, Lanark (1981), and which is very much rooted in the city, with James
Kelman’s Glasgow fiction representing the genuine heart of the movement. Contrasting the two
Renaissance moments brings to the fore an interesting literary and historical question: what
changed from the 1920–1930s to the 1980–1990s such that the city, Glasgow in particular,
could become the focal point for investigations of Scottish identity – and, following the arrival
of Irvine Welsh on the scene, for a new Scottish brand to rival the kailyard school in its global
popularity?
There are two major contexts usually introduced by literary scholars looking to account for this
late twentieth-century literary renaissance. The first is the failed devolution referendum of 1979,
where a slight majority of Scottish voters – though not enough – voted for home rule and the
reestablishment of a parliament in Edinburgh for the first time since the Act of Union in 1707.
The second is Margaret Thatcher, whose rise to power corresponded with a diminished Conservative
Party presence in Scotland and with the deindustrialisation that decimated working-class culture
in Scotland – Glasgow’s in particular. Scott Hames has written trenchantly about both contexts,
and especially the first, highlighting in the work of Gray, Kelman, Welsh, Janice Galloway, and
A.L. Kennedy ‘a conflation of fiction and democracy which figured the novel as the locus of
national self-representation and reinvention – as Scotland’s “real” parliament prior to, and in some
sense leading to, the establishment of Holyrood in 1999’ (Hames 2016, p. 495). Hames decon-
structs the idea of Scottish writers being the real, or authentic parliament of Scotland prior to the
successful devolution referendum of 1997 in his book, The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution
(2020), seeing in it, among other things, an exaggeration of ‘the social value of Scottish writing’
(Hames 2020, p. 4). But he, too, suggests that in the New Renaissance novels of the 1980s and
1990s the Scottish city is ‘transformed from a zone of cultural non-being to a privileged site of
national injury’ (Hames 2016, p. 499). Somehow the disappearance of those realities of industrial-
ism that failed to capture the sense of Scottishness that earlier Scottish Literary Renaissance writ-
ers were looking for becomes an occasion for such self-definition at the other end of the century.
Glasgow, representing for Muir and company everything that Scottish identity should not be, got
even worse. But in the process it became the very thing that ‘new’ Scottish Literary Renaissance
writers were looking to define.
Or sort of. ‘National injury’ is perhaps not quite right for thinking about how a new sense of
Scottish identity finds its grounding in the 1980s. To think in such terms is to suggest the kind
of nostalgic idealising that plagues the writing of the kailyard school and which arguably finds
its origins in the Romantic period starting in the late eighteenth century. Romanticism was
shaped in large part by reaction to the beginnings of the very industrialising thrust (the advent
of steam power, economic specialisation, what Wordsworth called the ‘increasing accumulation
of men in cities’) whose end is said to inspire the work of the New Renaissance writing of the
1980s. It is one thing to romanticise some imagined period just before the violent dislocations
of modernity, as Wordsworth is sometimes said to do; or to sentimentalise a violent political
uprising 60 years hence, as Walter Scott did; or to idealise the rural life that industrial realities
were putting an end to at that very moment, as kailyard writers are criticised for doing. But who
in their right mind could idealise the good old days of twentieth-century industrial capitalism,
even from the perspective of what Bertolt Brecht would call the bad new ones of neoliberalism?
This is not at any rate what happens in Gray’s Lanark, say, or in Kelman’s The Busconductor Hines
(1984), or Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) – the latter a novel in which, though set in Edinburgh,
the city, as Willy Maley has remarked, is made to look like Glasgow (Maley 2014, p. 66).
The two realist sections of Gray’s Lanark, for example, which focus on the character of Duncan
Thaw, are mostly set in a post-war Glasgow that is anything but idealised. When Thaw and his
family return from the Highland hostel where they have spent the years during the war the city
is described as ‘a gloomy huge labyrinth’ (Gray 1981, p. 146). Later in the novel, Thaw is again
in the Highlands, having returned to the hostel in which he sheltered, and he thinks to him-
self that ‘[t]wo or three hundred miles to the south was a groove in the earth with a gathering of
stone and metal in it – Glasgow’ (Gray 1981, p. 185). Later still, as Thaw lies in bed hoping to
put off starting his day he can hear ‘[h]undreds of thousands of men in dirty coats and heavy
boots…tramping along grey streets to the gates of forges and machine shops’, something his
artistic endeavours provide escape from (Gray 1981, p. 223). Thaw’s father is an intelligent and
hard-working man. But he has no chance to flourish in mid-century Glasgow and must accept a
job ‘pouring concrete between metal shuttering’ at the site of a new housing scheme (Gray 1981,
p. 147). The city in Lanark is dismal and depressing and its upside-down-world alternate iden-
tity, Unthank – the setting for the novel’s more science-fiction-oriented other two sections – is,
if anything, a magnified version of the industrial realities that have made it so. A social report
given to Lanark – Thaw’s alter-ego – explains that ‘no region our size has so much unemploy-
ment, uses so much corporal punishment in schools, has so many children cared for by the state,
so much alcoholism, so many adults in prison or such a shortage of housing’ (Gray 1981, p. 465).
The identification is made explicit in the epilogue to the novel, when Lanark meets his creator,
or author – Gray himself in postmodern disguise. Trying to explain that he still has to finish
writing the novel, and thus is not necessarily aware yet of everything Lanark himself has experi-
enced, he says, ‘[y]ou have come here from my city of destruction [Unthank], which is rather like
Glasgow, to plead before some sort of world parliament in an ideal city based on Edinburgh, or
London, or perhaps Paris if I can wrangle a grant from the Scottish Arts Council to go there’
(Gray 1981, p. 483).
Kelman’s first published novel, The Busconductor Hines, is set a little closer to the present. But
the Glasgow through which Rab Hines travels back and forth across what Cairns Craig calls the
‘meaningless spaces of the city’ is not in any meaningful sense an improvement on the Glasgow
that for Gray is ‘rather like’ Unthank (Craig 1999, p. 103). Nor, however, is it a place that
inspires a sense of longing for a past industrial glory. When Hines imagines teaching his son,
Paul, about the city’s history he describes it, mockingly, as ‘this grey but gold city, a once mighty
bastion of the Imperial Mejisteh’ and ‘centre of Worldly Enterprise’ (Kelman 1984, p. 90).
Tenements are described as looking like ‘depressed rectangles’ and in another scene in the book,
smell is added to sight to fill out Kelman’s account of historical rot. Feeling upset about his
relationship with his wife, Sandra, and having just left the pub, Hines muses on his surround-
ings: ‘Glasgow’s a big city, all the life etc. … . A myriad of things at your nostrils. The decayed
this and the decayed that. A patch of tenements set for the chop’ (Kelman 1984, pp. 167, 168).
But where Hines seems to dismiss the idea that Glasgow’s old days are in any sense worth
remembering, in this passage he goes further and suggests that the city’s history should be erased
all the way down to the molecular level, perhaps to afford the country a kind of do-over from the
starting point of some imagined, pre-industrial past:
Better off razing the lot to the ground. And renting a team of steamrollers to flatten the dump
properly, compressing the earth and what is upon and within, crushing every last pore to squeeze out
the remaining gaseous elements until at last that one rectangular mass is appearing, all set for sow-
ing. The past century is due a burial; it is always been being forgotten.
(Kelman 1984, p. 168)
‘Forgotten’ here sounds as much like neglect as it does amnesia.

Burial is not an actual possibility, however, especially in a world where decay can be repackaged
as change – or even progress. Hines is a bus conductor at a moment when the city is transitioning
to conductor- less buses. ‘1-man buses,’ says Hines, ‘are the vehicular items of the future’
(Kelman 1984, p. 80). That Hines has not done the retraining to be a driver means that his days
of employment are numbered: for as he cheekily states to the superintendent who is about to fire
him ‘[j]obs are scarce’ (Kelman 1984, p. 211). Employment precarity features in much of Kelman’s
Glasgow fiction – as the brother of Patrick Doyle, the protagonist of Kelman’s novel, A Disaffection
(1989), notes, ‘I think jobs are a thing of the past in this country’ – but in addition to being an
existential fact which Hines must contend with while out in the world of work, it also puts con-
siderable stress on his home life (Kelman 1989, p. 301). The scenes set in his ‘no-bedroomed flat’
(p. 96), where Hines plays games with Paul, makes pots of tea, and cuddles in bed with Sandra,
are among the most deeply felt in the novel. But the flat is also a claustrophobic space, somewhere
that Sandra in particular wants to escape from. And tense discussions between the couple about
finances and about Hines’s peculiar, practically nonchalant, way of addressing them keeps the
threat of separation lingering in the foreground of the novel’s domestic plotline.
Hines’s situation as a worker in a position that is being phased out of the new economy makes
for an interesting comparison with the figure at the centre of one of Robert Burns’s most famous
poems, ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’, published in 1786. As historians such as T.M. Devine
have pointed out, the cotter class was already being transitioned away from at the time when
Burns wrote his poem, something Burns himself might have known but which his cottar does
not seem to (Devine 2019, pp. 169, 170). Indeed, the virtuous cast that assembles itself around
the family supper table in the poem becomes for Burns exemplary of an authentically Scottish
lower-class morality, one that will keep the nation safe and establish its reputation across the
globe. Hines, who is well aware of his redundancy, may show a softer side in his home life, cook-
ing sausages and mashed potatoes for Sandra and making funny faces for his son. But there is
nothing timeless or especially virtuous about the working class in Kelman’s novel. ‘That’s the
problem with the lower orders’, thinks Hines as he is accosted by an angry pensioner complain-
ing about slow bus service: ‘they are a bunch of bastarn imbeciles’ (Kelman 1984, p. 122). Nor
is there even any real sense of community in the novel, something Hames suggests is a feature of
New Renaissance, city-set writing more generally (Hames 2016, p. 499). There is witty banter
and small-s solidarity between drivers and conductors. And there are evenings at the pub that
brim with comradery. But between, say, the transport workers and their customers, perhaps
especially those from poorer neighbourhoods, there is open hostility and barely concealed
contempt. And among the workers themselves there is competition for overtime and routes.
Even when his fellow workers vote to strike as a result of Hines being asked to put on his uni-
form and report to a superior while not on the clock, Hines thwarts the collective by resigning
before he can get fired and saying to everyone ‘[i]t’s my strike, yous can get your own’
(Kelman 1984, p. 205).
For Craig, earlier working-class, Glasgow-set fiction – by William McIlvanney, for example –
does look back favourably to the communitarian aspects that form out of working-class struggle.
But for Craig, Kelman’s work does not do this: his characters ‘are the leftovers of the collapse of
working-class life and of the languages which sustained it’ (Craig 1999, p. 100). Rather, Kelman
takes this collapse for what it is and crafts a brilliantly innovative style from the wreckage of it,
a style that erases distinctions between narration and speech, standard English and working
class, Scots-inflected, dialect, and that for Craig shows the alienation and fragmentation of his
characters as a mirror image of an always-already divided community. As he explains:
the working-class protagonists of Kelman’s novels are the site in which the community’s voices hap-
pen, and in their happening constitute the ‘I’ which it is the novel’s business to narrate. But in their
endless self-frustration, Kelman’s protagonists are images of a working-class for whom the future, as
traditionally envisaged by progressive politics, has been abolished.
(Craig 1999, p. 103)
We do not know what will become of Hines. At the end of the novel he is back on the bus, pos-
sibly because he is serving out his notice or maybe because he has returned to the job as he has
done once before. But the cycle, and the meaninglessness of going nowhere, continues, and that
is the future. ‘No Future’, incidentally, was what John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, wanted to call
the Sex Pistols’ song, God Save the Queen, released in 1977. And it can be difficult to say from the
lyrics whether it is the monarchy that has no future or the lives of the working classes that have
been put upon by ‘the Imperial Mejisteh’ mocked by Hines. Whatever the case, it seems that
Kelman, too, has a bit of punk in him.
As do the characters in Welsh’s novel, Trainspotting (indeed, with their heavy drug use and
absolute disdain for bourgeois society they could actually be in the Sex Pistols). These characters
live on the fringes of Edinburgh, not Glasgow. And for the most part they do not engage in even
meaningless traditional work (like bus conducting), though this is not to say that they are com-
pletely lacking in entrepreneurial spirit. In the story of his ‘first shag in ages’, Mark Renton, the
character who mostly holds the threads of Welsh’s narrative together, wakes up to find that the
woman he has gone home with the night before is in fact a young secondary school student. Her
parents are cooking breakfast and Renton has to think on his feet when greeted with their polite
but probing questions. Welsh has Renton shift between third-and first-person narration as he
explains what he does for a living, humourously highlighting the performative aspect of ‘work-
ing’ in Thatcherite Britain. ‘What he did, at least work-wise’, Welsh writes, ‘was nothing. He
was in a syndicate which operated a giro fraud system, and he claimed benefit at five different
addresses, one each in Edinburgh, Livingston and Glasgow, and two in London…’ (Welsh 1993,
p. 146). Renton feels like he deserves the money he makes ‘as the management skills employed
to maintain such a state of affairs were fairly extensive…’, but he does not say this (Welsh 1993,
p. 146). What he says instead is that he is ‘a curator at the museums section of the District
Council’s Recreation Department. Ah work wi the social history collection, based mainly at the
People’s Story in the High Street…’ (Welsh 1993, p. 146).
None of the characters in Trainspotting do proper work, not even Renton’s father, who hails
from more traditional, Glasgow working-class stock. But they, too, as Craig argues, are lefto-
vers of the collapse of working-class life. And as Renton’s extended answer to the employment
question suggests, such a life can easily be reassembled and repackaged for historical retelling,
however false the account. This, at a minimum, is what is required before any idealising of the
past can take place. In Welsh’s novel, the workless fringe characters and the more traditional
working class associated here, as elsewhere, with Glasgow, are more often defined by violence,
racism, sectarianism, and hypocrisy; authenticity is nothing more than a role to be played or not
as required. Renton and his friends claim to be ‘classic liberals’ (Welsh 1993, p. 53) when it
comes to drugs (the government should stay out of it) and often deal with each other more as
‘associates’ than friends (Welsh 1993, p. 6). As in the scene of the interview with the parents,
what you are and how you present yourself need not correspond. Claiming a degree from
Aberdeen University, Renton explains his work as follows: ‘Ah rake around in people’s rubbish
for things that’ve been discarded, and present them as authentic historical artefacts ay working
people’s everyday lives. Then ah make sure that they dinnae fall apart when they are on exhibi-
tion’ (Welsh 1993, pp. 146, 147). That the parents are impressed by his answer shows that
Renton is good at playing a part. But what the novel does not disguise is the contempt that
Mark and his fellow leftovers have for the traditions of community he claims to reconstruct.
They are nothing but ‘rubbish’ for bourgeois curation, like the fragments of ballads reassembled
by collectors in the eighteenth century which led among other things to the creation of one of
the great, original fake Scottish brands: Ossian.
For Welsh and his fellow urban novelists Scottishness is no longer synonymous with the
Highlands, as it was for James Macpherson and Walter Scott. But bringing it down to the
Lowlands has not made it any less fake (or violent) – at least not for Renton. Extending his
account of ‘rubbish’, albeit in a later story from the novel, Renton muses upon the petty gossip-
ing done by the neighbours and says to himself, ‘[f]uck the facts, these trivial things, they petty
jealousies become part of the mythology in a place like Leith’ (Welsh 1993, p. 190). This place,
Leith, he says is ‘ay dispossessed white trash in a trash country fill ay dispossessed white trash’
(Welsh 1993, p. 190). It is the Scots, not the Irish, who are the trash of Europe, Renton thinks:
the Irish actually won the battle for their country – or most of it. In the more famous riff on
Scottishness in the novel, interestingly re-set in the Highlands in Danny Boyle’s 1996 film adap-
tation, it is not petty jealousies that get Renton onto the subject, but rather petty discrimina-
tion – or people like his friend, Begbie, ‘that are intae baseball-batting every fucker that’s
different’ (Welsh 1993, p. 78). ‘It’s nae good blamin it on the English for colonising us’, he
continues, ‘[t]hey’re just wankers’. ‘We’ on the other hand, says Renton:
Are colonised by wankers. We cannot even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by.
No. We’re effete arseholes. What does this make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the
earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah do
not hate the English. They just git on wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.
(Welsh 1993, p. 78)
In Welsh’s novel, Scottishness is at best fake. At worst it is ignorant, complicit (the Scots, like
Renton’s brother, Billy, ‘make good soldiers’), and bigoted, with the working classes in particu-
lar, leftover and traditional, doing the majority of the nationalist and sectarian heavy lifting
(Welsh 1993, p. 190).
As Hames and others have pointed out, Welsh’s characters mimic the branding of the very
consumerist society they claim to despise, and the novel itself (along with the film), despite its
Scotland-bashing protagonist, ironically became its own profitable brand of punkish, hip
Scottishness. As with the brazenly manufactured rage of the Sex Pistols, however, this does not
make the target of such rage, and the feeling of helplessness behind it, any less real. Scotland may
be colonised by wankers, but for Renton it is still colonised. And reading certain books, having
a certain haircut, and listening to certain music may be the materials out of which identity is
fashioned in a consumerist, individualistic society like Thatcher’s Britain, but one can partici-
pate in such society, as Renton sometimes does, and still make the point that it is lifeless. For
Renton, heroin ‘fills the void’, but this is a symptom of a sick world, not a sick self (Welsh 1993,
p. 186). Therapy, he thinks, tries to pin things on the individual, pathologising his or her choice
to reject the world. But to accept this line of thinking is to become no longer your own self,
Renton concludes. ‘Choose us. Choose life’, he says mockingly, referring to the society that will
not let him remain ‘outside its mainstream’:
Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch
watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir
mouth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment
tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life.
(Welsh 1993, p. 187)
Renton chooses not to choose life, and in doing so, given his heroin addiction, is in a certain sense
choosing death. At the same time, however, when life becomes synonymous with meaningless
products, and consumer choice becomes synonymous with freedom, as it was thought to have done
under the Thatcher government, then life itself becomes a kind of death – the endless routine
which, for example, James Joyce’s character, Gabriel, in ‘The Dead’ (1914), must also somehow pass
beyond to arrive at something more vital. Joyce, like Muir, was a Modernist, and in his story the
suggestion is that this passing involves looking to the rural west of Ireland, where his wife, Gretta,
and Michael Furey come from. But as the ‘colonised by wankers’ scene in the film adaptation of
Welsh’s novel makes clear, this option is no longer available to Renton and his mates.
Some critics have worried that Welsh’s Trainspotting risks becoming a version of what the poet
and novelist, Robert Alan Jamieson, described – thinking of the influence Kelman’s work was
having on the world of letters – as ‘urban kailyard’, or a new kailyard school in which the values
of nineteenth-century rural Scotland are simply inverted and the figures and places associated
with it find their depraved, urban equivalents (Jamieson 1992, p. 5; cited in Hames 2016,
p. 505). This fear seems warranted, especially given the global success of Boyle’s film. But it
should be noted, too, that there is not any sense of looking back nostalgically or away hopefully
in Trainspotting, as there also is not in the examples of Gray and Kelman discussed above. In the
story from which the novel takes its title, ‘Trainspotting at Leith Central Station’, Renton walks
back from Waverley station towards Leith, feeling safer, ‘[p]erversely’, the farther towards the
violent fringes of the city he goes and the farther away from the tourists and shoppers that
Renton elsewhere in the novel describes as ‘the twin curses ay modern capitalism’ (Welsh 1993,
pp. 306, 228). Renton runs into Begbie and the two of them, after a round of drinking, duck into
the old central train station of Leith to relieve themselves. Renton reflects on the fact that the
station is soon to be torn down and made into a supermarket and swimming pool, and he says
that this ‘makes us sad, even though ah wis eywis too young tae mind ay trains ever being there’
(Welsh 1993, p. 308). But where does the sadness come from? The station, which is to be demol-
ished like the character of Hines in Kelman’s novel wishes the tenement blocks to be, is not
actually remembered by Renton, any more than the field made ready for sowing is by Hines. It
is a placeholder for something not yet experienced, an emptiness that proves more suitable for
urinating than for nostalgic remembering. The sadness, then, must be connected to a future of
swimming pools and upscale food markets – which is to say, a future that is not for Renton or for
Begbie, as it also is not for Hines.
Despite acknowledging real differences in the way he approaches working-class speech and in
the philosophical orientation of his protagonists, Craig, Hames, and Maley all see in Welsh’s
writing a debt to Kelman, especially in the shared focus on the city and on the ‘leftover’ figures
who populate it. What I have tried to suggest, in addition, is that this city and these figures do
not reflect a longing for an industrial past or regrets about some more genuine, collective experi-
ence made possible by the horrors of industrialism. Indeed, the same might be said of another
writer often described as influenced by Kelman’s fiction and style, Janice Galloway, whose novel,
The Trick is to keep Breathing (1989), highlights a different kind of precarity to that experienced
by Hines and whose protagonist, Joy Stone, tries to stay sane against sexism, physical assault,
malicious gossip, and a post-war Glasgow that Edwin Morgan describes as ‘perfectly designed to
be of least help to someone trying not to go mad’ (Morgan 1993, p. 91). A much more recent
novel, however, might be the exception that proves the rule: Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain
(2020), which won the Man Booker prize, and is the only Scottish novel to do so other than
Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late (1994). Stuart has acknowledged Kelman as a major influ-
ence. But the novel, set between 1981 and 1992 on the working-class fringes of Glasgow, is
almost romantic in its presentation of its characters, the city, and even misery itself. It reads very
differently than Kelman’s Glasgow-set fiction.
Stuart’s Glasgow, like the Glasgow of many Scottish novels of the past 40 years, is marked by
graffiti, violence, sectarian conflicts, alcoholism, and the ‘rusting cranes’ visible along the Clyde
(Stuart 2020, p. 416). Unlike much of Kelman’s fiction, however, Stuart’s novel explicitly names
and reflects upon that all important context for Glasgow fiction in the 1980s: Thatcher. And it does
so in ways that suggest both national injury and a falling off from a meaningful, industrial past. In
one scene, Shuggie’s father, Shug, a taxi driver, picks up an older woman who has just won at bingo.
Making small talk about the weather, the woman tells Shug that the money will come in handy
now that her husband is out of work after 25 years at the Dalmarnock Iron Works. While listening
politely, Stuart has Shug reflect to himself about the ironworks and shipbuilding coming to an end,
about government inaction, and about places like South Africa as a new employment destination:
The city was changing; he could see it in people’s faces. Glasgow was losing its purpose, and he
could see it all clearly from behind the glass. He could feel it in his takings. He had heard them say
that Thatcher did not want honest workers anymore; her future was technology and nuclear power
and private health. Industrial days were over, and the bones of the Clyde Shipworks and the
Springburn Railworks lay about the city like rotted dinosaurs. Whole housing estates of young men
who were promised the working trades of their fathers had no future now. Men were losing their
very masculinity.
(Stuart 2020, p. 43).
2020 is a long way from 1984, so it may be that Stuart needs to explicitly tell what Kelman
could simply show. And there are some brilliantly told sections in the novel. But the ‘no future’
of Shug’s reflection is one that has been destroyed precisely to the extent that it has been
dispossessed of the realities of the industrial past – the good old days of hard labour, long hours,
and bad pay. In this the passage reads like a parody of Kelman’s Glasgow fiction, a parody in
which scholarly notes about context are somehow woven into the story itself and in which the
realities of city life have not yet, as Craig has said of How Late it Was, How Late, been ‘absorbed’
into the language used to tell the story (Craig 2010, p. 85).
Such nostalgic longing for a disintegrating industrial past amounts to little more than the flip
side of the old kailyard coin, and in this respect at least Stuart’s novel departs significantly from
the New Renaissance writing of the 1980–1990s. I want to conclude this chapter by turning,
first, to what Scottish urban fiction of the 1980s and 1990s does differently – from kailyard
fiction, from Modernist rejections of such fiction (and the city), and from ‘urban kailyard’ writ-
ing like Shuggie Bain – and second, to how this difference amounts to a new figuring, or recon-
figuring, of identity from the realities of the Scottish city – Glasgow in particular. There is a
scene in Lanark that almost everyone writing about this period of Scottish writing quotes, and
which I am afraid will need to be quoted again here both to show how and why Gray’s novel gets
credit for inaugurating a new period in Scottish literature and because it directly engages the
image of the city that is Glasgow. In the scene, Thaw is sitting atop a hill with his art-school
classmate, McAlpin, and McAlpin, seeing the sunlight on the tenements and Royal Infirmary
and the Necropolis, exclaims that ‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ before asking, ‘Why do we
hardly ever notice that?’ (Gray 1981, p. 243). Thaw answers by saying ‘because nobody imagines
living here’. ‘[T]hink of Florence, Paris, London, New York’, he continues:
Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings,
novels, history books and films. But if a city has not been used by an artist not even the inhabitants
live there imaginatively … . Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels.
That’s all we have given to the world outside. It’s all we have given to ourselves.
(Gray 1981, p. 243)
Several very good novels would be published about the city of Glasgow between the moment in
time when Thaw is supposed to be speaking (the 1950s) and the publication of Lanark. But his
explanation for why nobody imagines living in Glasgow reads exactly like the kind of thing that
would launch a new period in writing: imagine away, Gray seems to be saying. But imagine it
how? Based on what?
Interestingly, as Thaw continues his explanation, he highlights the one source that in his
mind, at least initially, will not be featured in any new, imagined version of Glasgow: industry.
‘Oh, yes, we were once the world’s foremost makers of several useful things’, he says: ‘[w]hen this
century began we had the best organised labour force in the United States and Britain’ (Gray 1981,
pp. 243, 244). His account of Glasgow’s rich productive history includes one aspect of industrial
reality that might be looked back upon nostalgically from the perspective of the 1980s: worker
solidarity. Thaw mentions the rent strike and Red Clydeside and Lenin thinking a British revo-
lution would have to start in Glasgow. However, there is no real nostalgia in Thaw’s account. It
all came to nothing. ‘Nobody was killed’ he says, ‘except by bad pay, bad housing, and bad feed-
ing’ (Gray 1981, p. 244). But then something strange happens. After pointing to the industrial
character that for Muir was a reason to not make Glasgow a truly Scottish city, as its generalised
modern reality makes it seemingly interchangeable with that of any other city (Thaw says that
Glasgow production, were it to cease, would be reestablished immediate elsewhere, in England
or Germany or Japan), Thaw concludes by inadvertently redirecting his own line of thinking: ‘Of
course our industries still keep nearly half of Scotland living around here. They let us exist. But
who, nowadays, is glad just to exist’ (Gray 1981, p. 244)? McAlpin responds that he is, at least
at the moment, watching the light across the rooftops, and Thaw agrees that he is, too, ‘wonder-
ing what had happened to his argument’ (Gray 1981, p. 244). It sounds as if what could have
been a genuine Wordsworthian moment (we need art because city life is destroying common
life…) is averted at the last minute. Or rather, the elevation of the common is now the elevation
of the city. Industrial life – city life – is common life.
What is striking here is that it is not the realities of industrialism that are looked back upon
as a potential grounding for a newly imagined city but rather the interplay of light and rooftop,
rolling hills and the ‘gathering of stone and metal’ that is Glasgow. Glasgow, in this scene at
least, is naturalised; it is made common. Something about the city, its imaginative potential and
capacity to mean, has changed and this something seems to be tied up with the ongoing realities
of industrial life becoming synonymous with existence itself. Such a connection seemed possible
to imagine for Muir and his fellow modernists, but it was not something to be embraced in the
name of art. But perhaps ‘acceptance’ is more to the point than ‘embraced’? Glasgow might not
just as well be Birmingham or Warsaw or Hamburg, it is those places. As Kelman explains in his
essay, ‘The Importance of Glasgow in my Work’, ‘…Glasgow can be any other town or city in
Great Britain, including London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Cambridge, Newcastle or Ramsgate’
(Kelman 1992, p. 80). It can be Belfast, or Johannesburg, or Lahore, too, it seems; for as Kelman
continues to stress:
There is nothing about the language as used by the folk in and around Glasgow or London or
Ramsgate or Liverpool or Belfast or Swansea that makes it generally distinct from any other city in
the sense that it is a language composed of all sorts of particular influences, the usual industrial or
post industrial situation where different cultures have intermingled for a great number of years.
(Kelman 1992, p. 84)
The language of the folk is now urban language and this fact suggests that culture itself can be
celebrated, or at least rendered in artistic terms, for its generalised rather than its specific char-
acter. As Kelman writes in another essay, ‘Oppression and Solidarity’, Scotland can be described
as oppressed, but to say this is not to say that there is something like a ‘pure’ Scottishness being
put under threat. Such a thing has never existed, says Kelman, and ‘entities like “Scotsman,”
“German,” “Indian” or “American”; “Scottish culture,” “Jamaican culture,” “African culture” or
“Asian culture” are’, he states, ‘material absurdities’ (Kelman 1992, p. 72). Every struggle has a
culture specific to it, and Kelman attends in his writing to his own. But the crucial point for him
is that all of these cultures connect with one another because of the generalised struggle with
oppression that they all share. Glasgow is important in his work to the extent that it is more
representative of globalised power structures than it is of a virtuous sense of Scottishness that
will protect us from their contagion.
Post-industrial Scotland, then, for Kelman, is – as in the passage from Lanark quoted above –
synonymous with existence itself. Simon Kövesi, in his study of Busconductor Hines, suggests that
the city of Glasgow in the novel might not even be Glasgow at all. But if it is, he writes,
‘Kelman’s fictional Glasgow becomes any city, any town: a sprawling, confusing urban stage-set
for the studying of the human condition’ (Kövesi 2007, p. 57). The same might be said of the
Glasgow in How Late it Was, How Late and A Disaffection: in both novels the realities of rusting
cranes and shut-down shipyards, not to mention of ever-present systems of surveillance and
authority, are internalised and reflected back in the thinking and speaking that distinguish
Kelman’s protagonists but which themselves become indistinguishable in Kelman’s remarkable
prose. Indeed, the narrator of How Late it Was, How Late, Sammy, is beaten to the point of blind-
ness in the novel’s opening scenes, and he has to find his way back home, and into existence, in
a city whose realities are now not even visible. But what is he going to do, long for them? As he
tries to make his way back from the police station, he reflects:
It was fine but, it was alright, ye just took it easy. So ye take it easy. Fuck sake man come on. The
present situation, the one he was in right now, that was what he was to examine; nay mind wander-
ings, this isnay the poky this is yer fucking napper man this is yer head that’s where the nothing is,
so okay, ye just examine it.
(Kelman 1994, p. 35)
The ‘nothing’ that is in Sammy’s head is the nothing of ordinary life, of Glasgow life – the
‘present situation’, generalised – which although it can no longer be seen, must still be exam-
ined, negotiated, suffered. ‘You spend your life working such that you cannot say what the things
are’, muses Kelman’s earlier protagonist, Hines (Kelman 1984, pp. 202, 203). Language, in tak-
ing the place of a place like Glasgow, also takes the place of things.
For Kelman, this generalised condition of negation, in which you can no longer say what
things are, shares something with the art that reflects it. In ‘Artists and Value’, Kelman attempts
to define what he means by the word, ‘artist’, by saying what an artist is not, an argumentative
move similar to the one he makes in his Glasgow essay, which begins by enumerating all of the
ways that Glasgow is not important to his work. ‘When in doubt negate’, he says, and turns to
the writing of Franz Kafka, a writer whom Kelman himself often gets compared to, by way of an
example:
One thing you can notice in Franz Kafka’s work, most particularly in his use of third party narrative,
he does not necessarily detail a thing that exists. What he often does is refer to a space which he then
fills with a crowd of things that either do not exist, or maybe do not exist. He fills the page with
absences and possible absences, possible realities.
(Kelman 1992, p. 6)
This shift from reality to possible reality is on the one hand a description of the transformative
power of art. But it also works like those forces of power that have turned collapse into a gener-
alised condition and characters like Hines into a negation. ‘Being a negation’, Hines thinks to
himself, ‘is peculiar’ (Kelman 1984, p. 202). It is estranging even though the transition is hardly
sudden or dramatic.
Whether such forces are those related to employment, the police, the nation, empire, etc.,
they do their work silently – invisibly – like the authority figure one can never gain an audience
before in Kafka’s fiction. And in Kelman’s work they are synonymous with the city. They are
‘palpably unpalpable’, as Patrick Doyle concludes, musing on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915)
in a scene that starts with him wondering if the industrial pipes he has found behind a building
and now blows through as a means of expression are in fact ‘things’ and whether a pedestrian on
the street is an agent of the ‘Special Branch’ following his brother and sister-in-law on account
of his own thoughts being ‘a threat to the current rightwing government of the greatbritish-
ers…’ (Kelman 1989, pp. 163, 164). Gregor Samsa, the man transformed into a giant insect in
the Kafka story ‘was a poor unfortunate bastard’ Patrick thinks, ‘though having said that of
course it would take a Giant to squish him’ (Kelman 1989, p. 164). But giants are not a threat
to Patrick; as Kelman explains, ‘there were none of these lurking in this man’s Glasgow, all of
whose entities were so palpably impalpable’ (Kelman 1989, p. 164). Such is an apt description
of the city, Glasgow in particular, as it registers in the work of Kelman, Gray, Welsh and other
writers of the late twentieth-century ‘Renaissance’ in Scottish writing: it is a place where such
forces both converge and become ordinary, as they do in just about any other city in the world.
References
Bryce-Wunder, S. (2014). Glasgow, anti-urbanism and Kelman, J. (1989). A Disaffection. London: Vintage.
the Scottish literary renaissance. European Journal of Kelman, J. (1992). Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural &
English Studies 18 (1): 86–98. Political. Stirling: AK Press.
Craig, C. (1999). The Modern Scottish Novel. Edinburgh: Kelman, J. (1994). How Late it Was, How Late. London:
Edinburgh University Press. Minerva.
Craig, C. (2010). Kelman’s Glasgow sentence. In: The Kövesi, S. (2007). James Kelman. Manchester: Manchester
Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman (ed. S. Hames), University Press.
75–85. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Maley, W. (2014). Denizens, citizens, tourists, and others:
Devine, T.M. (2019). The Scottish Clearances: A History of marginality and mobility in the writings of James
the Dispossessed. London: Penguin. Kelman and Irvine Welsh. In: City Visions (ed. D. Bell
Galloway, J. (1989). The Trick Is to Keep Breathing. London: and A. Haddour), 60–72. London and New York:
Polygon. Routledge.
Gardiner, M. (2005). Modern Scottish Culture. Edinburgh: Morgan, E. (1993). Tradition and experiment in the
Edinburgh University Press. Glasgow novel. In: The Scottish Novel since the Seventies:
Gray, A. (1981). Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Edinburgh: New Visions, Old Dreams (ed. G. Wallace and R.
Canongate Books. Stevenson), 85–98. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Hames, S. (2016). The new Scottish renaissance? In: The Press.
Oxford History of the Novel in English: Vol. 7: British and Muir, E. (1985). Scottish Journey. London: Flamingo.
Irish Fiction since 1940 (ed. P. Boxall and B. Cheyette), Nash, A. (2007). The Kailyard: problem or illusion? In:
494–511. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Volume 2:
Hames, S. (2020). The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire, 1707–1918 (ed. S.
Voice, Class, Nation. Edinburgh. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Manning et al.), 317–323. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press. University Press.
Jamieson, R.A. (1992). MacDiarmid’s spirit burns on. Stuart, D. (2020). Shuggie Bain. New York: Grove Press.
Chapman 69–70: 3–9. Welsh, I. (1993). Trainspotting. New York: W.W. Norton
Kelman, J. (1984). The Busconductor Hines. London: Polygon. & Company.
43
Muriel Spark and the Invention
of Identity
David Goldie
School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
Muriel Spark is almost certainly the most entertaining and inventive Scottish writer of the twentieth
century. She is perhaps even the most consistently original and innovative Scottish writer ever. Her
work is readable, accessible, and admirably lucid in style, but also cryptic and elusive in its mean-
ings. It may be readily introduced to new readers, but is not so easily explained. More than most
writers, Spark willfully evades both predictability and explicability in her fiction, consistently
preferring the richness of the telling ambiguity to the relative poverty of the stated fact.
She is hard to place, and this difficulty might be said to have a number of sources. One is the
heterogeneity of her background and her affiliations. Born in Edinburgh to an English mother
and a father who was a first-generation Scot of Jewish Lithuanian parentage, Spark experienced
a partly-Jewish formation and a Scottish Presbyterian education before converting first to
Anglicanism and then Roman Catholicism. Although she remained a lifelong Scot by election
she left the country aged 19 and never settled there again, choosing instead to reside variously in
Southern Rhodesia, London, New York, Rome, and Tuscany. And there were considerable dislo-
cations too, in her personal and professional relationships: arenas in which passions were kindled
and dissipated, emotional bridges built and then burned, amities lost and enmities won. For an
individual of such notable personal attractiveness, liveliness, and outward sociability, she retained
throughout her life and writing career a formidable and brittle sense of amour propre and an unfor-
tunate habit of alienating collaborators and close friends.
This biographical heterogeneity and pervading sense of antisyzygy are not incidental to
Spark’s fiction but integral to it. She explores a Scottish Protestant education in The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie (1965 [1961]); the ambiguities of part-Jewish identity in ‘The Gentile Jewesses’ and

Muriel Spark and the Invention of Identity 551
The Mandelbaum Gate (1963); émigré dislocation in Southern Rhodesia in stories from the 1950s
and early-1960 such as ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’, ‘Bang-Bang You’re Dead’ and ‘The
Go-Away Bird’; the vagaries of life at the margins in London in The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1963b
[1960]), The Girls of Slender Means (1966 [1963]), and A Far Cry from Kensington (1988); New York
in The Hothouse by the East River (1973); and Italy in The Public Image (1970 [1968]) and The
Takeover (1976). She ponders conversion in many novels from The Comforters (1963a [1957]) and
Robinson (1958) to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and aspects of Catholicism and faith in all: per-
haps most probingly in The Only Problem (1984) and sensationally in The Abbess of Crewe (1975
[1974]). She explores failing marriage in several books, including Not to Disturb (1974b [1971])
and The Only Problem (1984), and a combination of marital disharmony and homosexual attrac-
tion in her last novel The Finishing School (2005 [2004]). Spark is happy, too, to use her writing
to explore the brittleness and bitchiness of friendship, as in Symposium (1990), and unsatisfactory
parent–child relationships (for example, in Reality and Dreams, 1996), and even to settle old
scores from her private life, as she does in the characters of Hector Bartlett, the ‘pisseur de copie’,
of A Far Cry from Kensington, and the useless Leslie of Loitering with Intent (1981).
The question of how to create and maintain an identity in the face of this welter of influences
and forces, of how to individuate oneself, is a pressing one in Spark’s fiction.
It does not wholly characterise her work, which is too diverse to be so easily reduced, but it
offers a means of gaining an insight into the preoccupations that mark her fiction and set it apart.
This identity is not the kind that can be categorised and co-opted into an identity politics or a
national or a gender or even religious identity – notions at which Spark would almost certainly
blanch – but rather its opposite: identity as a quality of personal distinctiveness and originality,
the quiddity that makes us ourselves and distinguishes us from the social and intellectual forces
that have designs on us and seem intent on shaping us.
Such concerns are manifest in Spark’s longest, most self-reflective novel, The Mandelbaum Gate.
In an early episode in the novel, Barbara Vaughan, a visitor to the Holy Land who will later describe
herself as ‘a spinster of no fixed identity’ (Spark 1967 [1963], p. 47), finds herself being challenged
by her Jewish guide. ‘Who are you’? he asks (Spark 1967, p. 28). This is partly a question about
religious affiliation – Barbara, like her author, is a Catholic convert with a Jewish parent – but it is
also a philosophical question that cuts to the heart of Barbara’s sense of self. Her response is ‘I am
who I am’ (Spark 1967, p. 28). She realises immediately that this is a frustratingly inadequate
answer, but it is one that is, nonetheless, ‘indeed the final definition for her’ (Spark 1967, p. 28). In
this moment she knows ‘that the essential thing about herself remained unspoken, uncategorized
and unlocated’ (Spark 1967, p. 28). Returning to the same question she again asserts her claim to
a selfhood that is sui generis: ‘one doesn’t altogether know what one is. There’s always more to it than
Jew, Gentile, half-Jew, half-Gentile. There’s the human soul, the individual. Not “Jew, Gentile” as
one might say “autumn, winter.” Something unique and unrepeatable’ (Spark 1967, p. 37).
This sense of self as something unique and unrepeatable is constantly scrutinised, tested, and
occasionally celebrated in Spark’s fiction, from first novel to last. It is dramatised in her first
novel, The Comforters, with a characteristic originality that allows the novel to move seamlessly
between the metafictional and the metaphysical. The novel is, among other things, a book about
how we are shaped by the stories people tell about us, how our lives and thoughts are forced to
work ‘under the pressure of someone else’s necessity’ (Spark 1963a, p. 103). Its protagonist
Caroline Rose is, like her author at the time, a young woman of part-Jewish descent and a recent
convert to Catholicism who has lived abroad for a time. And like her author, she is undergoing
a process of renewal, attempting to piece herself together after a nervous breakdown. In the
course of her self-reconstruction Caroline begins to hear a typewriter and a voice that seems to
be placing her as a character in a novel, and which in fact repeats word for word the narrative
voice of the book we are reading. Caroline, it seems, is either deluded or has suddenly become
aware of her existence as a character in our novel. She tells her spiritual adviser Father Jerome, ‘it
is as if a writer on another plane of existence was writing a story about us’ (Spark 1963a, p. 63).
Her recovery, as she sees it, depends on her escaping the destiny that this story has mapped out
for her – that ‘it’s a matter of asserting free will’ (Spark 1963a, p. 97).
This questioning of narrative and ontological authority continues throughout the book, as it
would in Spark’s subsequent novels. In this case, Caroline’s resistance to the narrative – her
attempt to assert a sense of free-will – is manifested first in an unsuccessful attempt to thwart
and evade the novel’s plot and then in a potentially more successful scheme to exert an authority
over its events by incorporating them into her own narrative: a novel which contains the charac-
ters and events we have seen playing out in The Comforters. The resulting ambiguity is so well
established, that we are never quite sure whether the second half of The Comforters is not in fact
the text of the novel that Caroline is in the process of writing.
In The Comforters Caroline’s boyfriend Laurence becomes, by the end of the novel, ‘the charac-
ter called Laurence’ (Spark 1963a, p. 202), which reminds us not only of the fictionality of the
tale itself, but also of the fact that he has become subjected to Caroline’s co-option of the story,
her authorship and authority. He writes her a note to say ‘I dislike being a character in your
novel. How is it all going to end?’ (Spark 1963a, p. 203), and then rips the note into small pieces
and throws it away. As if to prove he can never efface himself and his actions from the narrative,
the letter reappears in its wholeness at the end of The Comforters – with the narrator confiding
that ‘he did not then foresee his later wonder, with a curious rejoicing, how the letter had got
into the book’ (Spark 1963a, p. 204).
A considerable number of Spark’s characters write about or record the lives of others. This is
sometimes for the purposes of biography – for example in the case of Dougal Douglas in The
Ballad of Peckham Rye, Jane Wright in The Girls of Slender Means, or Fleur Talbot in Loitering with
Intent (Spark had herself begun her prose-writing career as a biographer and editor, working on
William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and John Masefield). And sometimes it is
more openly for the purposes of surveillance and control – such as the filming and audio-taping
of Not to Disturb and The Abbess of Crewe. In all of these cases the act of recording the lives of others
enacts a form of containment – by developing an interest in another you may come to understand
them better, but by authoring their story you control them and open up the possibility of sub-
ordinating them to your will. One of Spark’s biographer characters, Fleur Talbot of Loitering with
Intent, understands this well as she blithely rewrites the lives of the members of the novel’s
Autobiographical Association. ‘These people’, she tells the reader, ‘were sheets of paper on which
I could write short stories, poems, anything I cared’ (Spark 1981, p. 99).
Given Spark’s interest in such ideas, it is hardly surprising to see how often in her fiction
biography translates into blackmail. Her works are notable for their disproportionately long list
of blackmailers, among them Georgina Hogg in The Comforters, Tom Wells in Robinson, Mabel
Pettigrew in Memento Mori, Patrick Seton in The Bachelors, Joe Ramdez in The Mandelbaum
Gate, Pierre Hazlett in The Hothouse by the East River, the Jesuits Gregory and Ambrose in The
Abbess of Crewe, Robert Leaver in Territorial Rights, Hector Bartlett in A Far Cry from Kensington,
all the way through to Robert Walker in Aiding and Abetting. All seek to use biographical knowl-
edge to gain improper moral or financial leverage. Martin Stannard (2009, p. 431) notes that
Robert Leaver’s ‘blackmailing letters suggest parody of the worst kind of biography’, and, indeed,
blackmail seems to be the sole raison d’être of the Autobiographical Association of Loitering with
Intent. Fleur Talbot may relish the power that rewriting other peoples’ autobiographies brings
her, but for her employer, Sir Quentin Oliver, the autobiographies are the means of furnishing
the necessary information for extortion.
To let others know too much about you, then, is a potential and persistent threat in Spark’s
fictional worlds. To share personal details with another is to give them a handle on you, for them
to have ways of controlling you and modifying your sense of self. So maintaining identity
becomes an issue of evading scrutiny or putting oneself – as Caroline attempts to do in The
Comforters – outside the narratives in which others attempt to place you. This awareness perhaps
explains the general prickliness of many of Spark’s characters: their wariness about one another
and their reluctance to commit to relationships which might expose them to damage. Those who
do not exhibit this necessary care, such as Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or The
Public Image’s Annabel Christopher, find themselves paying a heavy price.
Jean Brodie attempts to fix the identities of her favourite pupils by indoctrinating them with
her aesthetic and political preferences – with the idealised femininity of Sybil Thorndyke and
Dante’s Beatrice on the one hand, and the disciplined spectacle of Mussolini’s fascisti on the other.
She ascribes to each of her students a quality that will mark and identify them for the rest of their
lives, a ‘fame’. The blatancy of such attempts to invent identities for her pupils and to fix their
destinies leads one of them, Sandy Stranger, to see Brodie as a version of a providential Calvinist
God, and, like Caroline in The Comforters, to rebel against the world she creates and resist the
narrative in which she attempts to place her. Sandy does this through personal reinvention, by
converting to Catholicism and adopting a new identity as Sister Helena of the Transfiguration,
but also by acts of narrative reinvention. One part of this reinvention involves removing herself
from Brodie’s narrativizing, acting against Brodie’s expectations and the ‘fame’ she has created
for her by conducting a secret affair with the art master Teddy Lloyd – ‘probing the mind’, we
are told, ‘that invented Miss Brodie on canvas after canvas’ (Spark 1965, p. 123). But it can also
be seen in the way Sandy turns the tables on Brodie, placing her as a character in her own narra-
tives. Sandy is intrigued by Brodie’s fabulations and her ability in ‘making patterns with facts’
(Spark 1965, p. 72), and has already developed a habit of imagining herself into the stories of
others – engaging in fanciful interior dialogues with the likes of Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre,
Anna Pavlova, and Alan Breck from Stevenson’s Kidnapped. She realises she can extend this and
make her own patterns with the facts as she writes stories in which Jean Brodie herself figures:
specifically a novel, The Mountain Eyrie, written with Jenny Gray, in which the girls reimagine
Brodie’s tangled love life according to the generic conventions of romantic fiction. The results
are interesting not only for what they tell the reader about the ways in which adolescent girls
imagine adult sexuality (including the fictionalised Jean Brodie’s farewell to Gordon Lowther –
‘Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your
singing’ (Spark 1965, p. 74)), but also for the way they demonstrate the control that Sandy now
has over Brodie. These are the first steps towards the psychological work, The Transfiguration of
the Commonplace, that Sandy will go on to write, but also to the story of Brodie’s transgression that
Sandy will tell to the headmistress which will lead to Miss Brodie’s dismissal and death. Sandy
does not need to invent the facts that lead to Brodie’s demise, but by owning Brodie’s story and
retelling it artfully she is able to assert her own personal autonomy and – as she brutally puts
it – put ‘a stop to Miss Brodie’ (Spark 1965, p. 125).
Annabel Christopher in The Public Image also struggles with fame – this time the more tangi-
ble fame of a film star. Annabel has become ‘fixed in the public imagination as the English
Tiger-Lady’ of Italian cinema (Spark 1970, p. 22), a fanciful persona created by cinematic public
relations. This sits uneasily with her own self-estimation, and she finds herself working hard to
live up to her synthetic public image. A further cause for concern is her husband Frederick, a
writer who has attempted without success to shape her and write her into his own screen sce-
narios. Having failed to create a public persona for Annabel through his own storytelling he has
grown resentful at being subordinated to the story that has been spun around her, identified only
as her consort within the larger public narrative of her fame. His revenge, like Sandy Stranger’s,
is brutal. He kills himself, but in so doing attempts to craft a plot which will ruin his wife and
topple her public image – a story in suicide notes, which will finally define him by his own
actions and which will cast her in the role of a callous and reckless hedonist. As it develops, the
novel offers an early exploration of celebrity culture and news management, and particularly of a
concept now often voiced, of the need to control the narrative of a scandal played out in the
public eye. Annabel attempts to exert this control but fails, faced with the blackmail of another
man, Billy O’Brien, who has retained copies of her husband’s letters. Her response is to slip her
identity. She leaves the world of fame, and the novel’s narrative, behind, dissolving with her new
baby into the anonymity of an airport departure lounge, hollowed out by her past but also preg-
nant with an undetermined future:
Waiting for the order to board, she felt both free and unfree. The heavy weight of the bags was gone;
she felt as if she was still, curiously, pregnant with the baby, but not pregnant in fact. She was pale
as a shell. She did not wear her dark glasses. Nobody recognised her as she stood, having moved the
baby in a sense weightlessly and perpetually within her, as an empty shell contains by its very struc-
ture, the echo and harking image of former and former seas.
(Spark 1970, pp. 124–125)
This desire to escape the narratives of others, to assert absolute ownership over the events of
one’s life and to control the ways it is told, began with Caroline’s attempts to escape the narration
of The Comforters. It achieves its most extreme and disturbing exploration in The Driver’s Seat
(1974a), the novel that immediately followed The Public Image. In this novel Spark overturns the
conventions of the crime thriller, constructing a tale that is not so much a whodunnit as a kind
of story described in the novel as ‘a whydunnit in q-sharp major’ (Spark 1974a, p. 101). The
novel’s focus is Lise, a woman of indeterminate age who lives in an unspecified Northern European
city and who flies to an unnamed Southern European city where she plans and executes her own
murder. She arranges the crime scene meticulously in advance, selecting the location, her mur-
derer, the means and the method of her death, and even that she is wearing a dress that will
display adequately the blood she will shed in her final moments.
In one sense this book offers an inversion of The Public Image. The departure gate at the end of
The Public Image provides an opening through which Annabel as we know her might disappear,
her carefully-defined identity finally dispersed. In The Driver’s Seat the airport gate from which
Lise departs is the point at which her inchoate identity begins to narrow and take shape, m oving –
it seems inexorably – towards its final form:
She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk
scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the
foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.
(Spark 1974a, p. 25)
While all the other facts in the novel will remain unknown – the names of most of the other
characters, the places of its action, Lise’s past, her home, her nationality – the one single fact that
will be documented exhaustively is that of her death, the one image in the public mind that of
her dead body. All other meanings in the novel derive from this one fact, are functions of it and
are read and understood through it. And just as Frederick has become trapped within the story
of Annabel’s fame, so too Lise’s murderer finds himself defined in a role she creates for him and
from which he has tried unsuccessfully to escape.
In its representation of an extreme and almost wholly affectless attempt to own one’s narra-
tive, to fix an identity in the public mind that is entirely self-determined, the novel strains at the
limits of a humanistic interpretation. What possible explanation can there be, other than narra-
tive experiment, for an apparently human character to act in a way that is so palpably monstrous
to herself and others, to game life in such a way that you fix your identity at the cost of your
existence?
This challenge to humanism, with its attendant hints at monstrosity runs throughout Spark’s
fiction, not always so overtly as in the cases of Frederick and Lise, but more often as a kind of test
of moral and civil normativity. Each of her novels acts more as a form of sharp, playful provoca-
tion than an exercise in human empathy and feeling. There are very few characters in her fiction
who show a disinterested concern for each other, and even fewer who might be described as fun-
damentally empathetic. Even a novel such as The Girls of Slender Means (1963), which seems at
first glance to be a nostalgic backward look at the youthful camaraderie of wartime, to a time
when ‘all the nice people in England were poor’ (Spark 1966, p. 7), turns out to be a tale of how
careless we can be of one another – of how a girl can care more for a beautiful dress than her
imperilled friends. As the novel’s narrator tells us, ‘few people alive at the time were more
delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than
the girls of slender means’ (Spark 1966, p. 9).
Such portrayals have caused many to see Spark as uniquely cool writer, working at an emotional
distance from her characters. The people she creates may strive to individuate themselves, but they
are deluded and unsympathetic, functioning in all their selfishness as little more than playthings
in the hands of forces beyond their comprehension. In this view, Spark’s unwillingness fully to
empathise with her characters flattens her fiction, creating an art that is, for all its humour and
surface brilliance, heartless and chilling. In this sense, she might be seen as akin to the novelist
Kenneth Hope in her story ‘The Fathers’ Daughters’, who ‘wrote the ache out of his system in prose
of harsh merriment’ (Spark 1994, p. 229). This perception of a dispassionate, perhaps mocking,
distance from her characters is reinforced by her 1970 address to the American Academy of Arts
and Letters in which she rejected ‘the art of sentiment and emotion’ and advocated instead ‘the arts
of satire and ridicule’ (Stannard 2009, p. 369). ‘I think it’s bad manners to inflict a lot of emotional
involvement on the reader’, she said later in the same year, ‘much nicer to make them laugh and to
keep it short’ (Stannard 2009, p. 218). In this regard her human comedy resembles Balzac’s in its
ability to uncover the self-interest and venality in even the most apparently benevolent actions of
her characters: that in serving others we help ourselves. As Martin Stannard (2009, p. 70) puts it,
‘the barbarism of human behaviour intrigues her as the varieties of cancer might a surgeon’.
Her characters tend also to lack a sense of shame. What gives Dougal Douglas his particular
zest in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, is the remorselessly cheerful way in which he plays both sides
of every situation with no care for the human consequences – turning friends and lovers against
one another, working simultaneously for competitor companies, and gaily inventing episodes in
the life story of his hapless biographical subject, Maria Cheeseman. It may be that he is a
m
anifestation of the devil, which the novel hints at, but it might also be, more simply, that he
is an individual who is wholly careless of and fundamentally callous towards anyone who might
make an emotional demand on him. His ‘fatal flaw’ is, after all, and as he keeps reminding us,
his unwillingness to countenance illness or expressions of weakness in those around him. The
Abbess of Crewe, Alexandra, is a similarly brazen monster of disregard, based, as she is, loosely
on Richard Nixon. Her repeated admonitions to her sisters in Christ to exercise humility, to be
sober and vigilant, and to be aware (in a phrase from the First Epistle of Peter) that ‘thy enemy
the devil, as a raging lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour’, sit uneasily with her
haughty disregard for them as mere soeurs bourgeoises and daughters of ‘all the Toms, Dicks and
Harrys of the realm’, and the manner in which she subjects them to electronic surveillance and
feeds them a diet of cat and dog food (Spark 1975, p. 73).
If the communal life of factory, school, ladies’ club, nunnery is unsatisfactory in Spark’s fiction,
so too is the more intimate life of close relationship. Spark is no great friend of stable relationships
and happy families in her fiction. The central protagonists of her first novel, The Comforters, are
involved in an unfulfilling and endlessly deferred engagement. Those of her last, The Finishing
School, with the dissolution of their marriage. Between them lie a variety of characters wrestling
with unsatisfactory friendships, dysfunctional families, and failed marriages – sometimes, as in
the case of Maggie Radcliffe in The Takeover, with all these elements simultaneously. An example
both of uneasy friendship and failing marriage is found in the story ‘Bang-Bang You’re Dead’.
This treats not only with the unfulfilling relationship of the protagonist Sybil and her friend from
childhood, Desiree, but also with Desiree’s marriage to the older Barry. Desiree and Barry’s mar-
riage is ostensibly, and indeed performatively, a happy one, but the shrewd Sybil (like her shrewd
author) sees only discord in that very performance of contentment: ‘ “We’re very much in love
with each other,” Barry explains, squeezing his wife. And Sybil wonders what is wrong with their
marriage since obviously something is wrong’ (Spark 1994, p. 72). The degree of violence with
which the story ends is unusual in Spark, but what is wholly typical is the malfunctioning of the
marital relation. Spark is keenly aware of the power of jealousy in relationships and it is this qual-
ity, much more than passionate attachment, that tends to identify her characters and define the
relationships between them. ‘I sometimes think happiness is boring’, Spark told John Mortimer
in 1988, ‘Look at happy marriages, for instance’ (Stannard 2009, p. 479). Given such statements,
it might be said that the lifeblood of her fiction – what gives it its particular interest, its zest, and
mischievous sense of life – is the fundamental discontentment of its characters.
The issues of a writer’s responsibility towards her characters are dramatised amusingly (as always)
in her final novel, The Finishing School, as a contention between a writing tutor and his precociously
(and obnoxiously) gifted tutee. Rowland Mahler is a failed dramatist and failing novelist who
becomes increasingly disturbed and consumed by the seemingly innate and impeccable natural abil-
ity of his pupil Chris Wiley. According to the novelist manqué Rowland, the writer must create
characters that ‘are so real, so very real. They have souls. If you are writing a novel from the heart you
have to deal with hearts and souls. The people you create are people. You can’t control people just
like that’ (Spark 2005, p. 49). For the natural writer Chris, who will go on to ‘establish himself as a
readable novelist’ (Spark 2005, p. 154), however, characters simply ‘live the lives I give them’:
‘I’m in full control’, Chris said. ‘I never thought they could have another life but what I provide on
the typed page. Perhaps the readers, later on, will absorb them in an extended imagination, but I
don’t. Nobody in my book so far could cross the road unless I make them do it’.
(Spark 2005, pp. 48–49)
One of the most characteristic aspects of her literary technique is its boldness in the treatment
of narrative time. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie begins at a moment in 1936 which is neither at
the beginning of the story nor its end, offering a kind of hinge around which the narrative pivots,
swinging us first backwards and then forwards between Miss Brodie’s first meeting with her
pupils to her death and their afterlives in the 1960s. Along the way we are witness to some star-
tlingly bold prolepses, even within individual paragraphs, which serve to fix the future of char-
acters even before we fully get to know them. This is the case with the 10-year old Mary
Macgregor, who we learn, on first introduction, will die as a young woman in a hotel fire in the
Second World War (similar, perhaps, to the one that will kill Joanna Childe in Spark’s next
novel, The Girls of Slender Means).
She ran one way; then, turning, the other way: and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her.
She heard no screams, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no scream, for the fire
was choking her. She ran into somebody on the third turn, stumbled and died. But at the beginning
of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss
Brodie’s pupils. ‘Who has spilled the ink on the floor – was it you, Mary?’
(Spark 1965, p. 15)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye opens with the words ‘Get away from here, you dirty swine’ after
the novel’s main actions have occurred and its protagonist, the devilish Dougal Douglas, has
vanished – the narrative taking us through the steps that lead us forward, and thus back, to this
point (Spark 1963b, p. 7). Loitering with Intent, similarly begins proleptically in medias res, on
‘one day in the middle of the twentieth century’ (Spark 1981, p. 7). And not just any day, but
30 June 1950, which places the novel’s start rather playfully at the century’s very centre. The
plot then takes us back ten months to the story’s beginning, before eventually leading us to its
close in the distant future – an envoi in which the narrator Fleur Talbot muses on these events
from ‘a long time ago’ (Spark 1981, p. 220).
The effect in all these novels is of a kind of unfolding of the novel’s action in an eternal pre-
sent, a sense that everything we see happening in front of us has already been written, the desti-
nies of the characters fixed before both they and we can see what they can make of themselves.
Sandy Stranger fears this in herself and the other members of Brodie’s set: that they exist’ in
unified compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for that
purpose’ (Spark 1965, p. 30). And such ideas are present throughout much of Spark’s fiction,
often being raised explicitly as matters of either narrative or theological predestination. They
form a central concern of the four experimental novels that occupy the middle phase of Spark’s
career, The Public Image, The Driver’s Seat, Not to Disturb, and The Hothouse by the East River. Each
of these books is narrated in the present tense, even when they move, like The Hothouse by the East
River between events from long ago in the Second World War and the 1970s in which the novel
is being written. Indeed, it is never wholly clear whether the novel’s characters are actually alive
at all in the present or whether they died in a V2 Rocket attack in the war: whether their identi-
ties were fixed forever in death in 1944, or whether they are living an afterlife in the mind of a
whimsical or deranged narrator.
This provocative blending of past, present, and future, in a single moment of narration is also
apparent in Not to Disturb, a chilling comic novel that portrays the servants of a Swiss mansion
sitting up through the night in anticipation of the imminent deaths of their employers. Upstairs
and off-stage, in a locked library, the Baron and Baroness Klopstock act out a murder-suicide
with their private secretary, while downstairs their staff and assorted hangers-on finish off their
elaborate and long-held plans to exploit the gruesome events: one servant has already written an
account of the deaths and is in detailed negotiations for a film adaptation; another has contracted
with Stern and Paris-Match to provide feature stories on the event; meanwhile a documentary
crew of cinematographer and sound-recordist is also present, busily recording pre-emptive reac-
tions to the deaths and posthumous tributes to the still-living Klopstocks.
At one level this is a mordant satire on mediation and celebrity culture, issues recently
explored by Spark in The Public Image. At another it is a provocative fictive game, a challenge to
novelistic convention that proves much more playful and pleasurable than those found in many
of the book’s nouveau roman stable-mates. The novel is written in an unconventional simple pre-
sent tense, as though the action were taking place in real time before the reader. But as is made
clear from the outset, the events that unroll are already know to its characters as well as its
author. The servant characters appear to occupy the position normally taken by a novel’s narrator,
of knowing the outcome of its actions even as its first word is committed to paper. As such, they
quibble about whether it is better to talk of the forthcoming deaths of the Klopstocks in the
future or the past tense: about whether it is better to say the event around which the novel is
organised will cause a surprise or did cause a surprise. Such concerns are dismissed airily by their
leader, the butler Lister, who admonishes them that it is merely to ‘split hairs’, to distinguish
‘between the past, present and future tenses’ (Spark 1974b, p. 6). Lister returns to the theme a
little later talking of the deaths as ‘what is to come, or has already come, according as one’s phi-
losophy is temporal or eternal. To all intents and purposes, they’re already dead although as a
matter of banal fact, the night’s business has still to accomplish itself’. (Spark 1974b, p. 12). This
final phrase is a characteristic Sparkian touch, shifting the subject of the verb ‘accomplish’ from
the actors in the tragedy to the action itself, as though ‘the night’s business’ is little more than
the revelation of a course of events that have been long-determined.
But this playfulness and paradox might also be seen to have a kind of theological resonance that
echoes throughout Spark’s fiction. The insistence on the simultaneity of the action invites the
reader to put herself in the place of an omniscient and omnipresent creator viewing human life
omnitemporally, as though through the eye of eternity – an impression rather reinforced by Lister’s
bald statement that the Klopstocks, helpless in the face of their inevitable end, ‘have placed them-
selves, unfortunately, within the realms of predestination’. (Spark 1974b, p. 37). This may, as in
Sandy Stranger’s characterisation of Jean Brodie as a predestining Calvinist God be less a statement
of narrative fact than the opinion of a character’s hubris, but it ensures that the reader is always
being invited to entertain the possibility that there may, indeed, be a stronger metaphysical force
at work in the world of the novel than is conveyed by the characters and the unseen narrator.
The fact of Spark’s religious conversion and the range of allusion to sacred texts in her novels
persuade many readers that the questions about time and identity thrown up in her writing have
both a grounding in faith and an explanation in revealed religion (Spark 1961). This is the view
of James Wood in his suggestion that Spark is a writer who allows the verities of her religion to
trump the ambiguities of her literary art. According to Wood (2000, p. 12), ‘Spark is a theologi-
cal writer, for whom a true church (the Catholic Church) and a divine world exist, and are
believed in; the novel, on the other hand, does not really exist and is not really believed in’.
According to this view, the questions posed about identity in Spark’s writing are theological
more than they are existential, more to do with the working of faith than the play of narrative
technique. Which is to say that they are reminders that there is an Author wholly in control of
identity and life’s plots who is more than just the writer of this particular fiction.
There can be little doubt that her conversion was the foundational moment of her writing
career. She says as much in her essay ‘How I became a Novelist’ (Spark 1960, p. 683). But reli-
gion is the starting point for her fiction and not its end, its place of departure rather than arrival,
furnishing her novels with a doctrine to challenge rather than a dogma to propound. Caroline in
The Comforters finds herself plagued (as was Job by his comforters) by the glibness of the faithful.
A pair of recent converts she meets express the view that ‘the wonderful thing about being a
Catholic is that it makes life so easy’ (Spark 1963a, p. 40). But Caroline knows that the opposite
is true: that ‘the demands of the Christian religion are exorbitant, they are outrageous. Christians
who don’t realize that from the start are not faithful. They are dishonest’ (Spark 1963a, p. 39).
This sense of the outrageousness of faith might be said to be the fountainhead of Spark’s fiction
and the reason for her unwillingness to let it settle in facile resolutions.
It is this quality that makes her work so intractable beneath its surface glamour, and which
can make her seem an amused onlooker of her own fictions rather than an exacting moraliser
about them – a kind of New Testament rather than Old Testament God, more intrigued by the
ways her creation will turn out than exercised by the need to keep it strictly in line. For an osten-
sibly religious novelist she has a surprising weakness for, and tolerance towards, impiety and
amorality, seemingly allowing her characters freely to test their bounds. And in this she appears
to have more regard for the uniqueness and unrepeatability of her characters’ lives, in the manner
expressed by Barbara Vaughan in The Mandelbaum Gate, than she does in making them conform
to a single vision or in dousing them in the odour of sanctity.
It is noticeable that the characters who would impose their designs on others in her fiction
rarely fare well. Her many characters who attempt, like Jean Brodie, to assume the role of the
God of Calvin in their fictional universes are wont to find that their power of ordaining the
future is thwarted, and that even their best-laid schemes gang aft agley. Brodie herself not only
fails to predict her betrayal by Sandy (in spite of all her self-comparisons to Julius Caesar), but is
signally unable to shape the destinies of her set in the ways she intends. They remain intractable
to her fashioning and diverse beyond her conception. Lise in The Driver’s Seat attempts to micro-
manage the circumstances of her own death, but is then undone in the moment by the unantici-
pated sexual eagerness of her appointed assassin. Frederick fails in his attempt to write the script
of Annabel’s downfall, and she escapes him. The overfussy Lister, the kind of know-all Jeeves of
Not to Disturb, who has attempted to choreograph his employers’ deaths like a snooty steward
planning the PR for a state event, finds himself overtaken by events and has to organise an
impromptu wedding between his under-maid and the newly-discovered heir-apparent to his
employers’ estate. Even the dead Paul in The Hothouse by the East River (if he is indeed dead, or in
limbo) complains about the way his deceased wife Elsa continues to escape his imaginative
supervision in maintaining an afterlife independent of his creation: ‘She’s a development of an
idea, that’s all. She’s not my original conception any more. She took a life of her own. She’s gro-
tesque’ (Spark 1973, p. 129).
In Spark’s fiction it is grotesque to presume on another, to attempt to fix the identity of an
individual either in their past or their projected future. Her characters’ identities remain uniquely
and unrepeatably their own, persisting in a state of potential fictional becoming. ‘What has
yesterday got to do with me?’ asks Elsa in The Hothouse by the East River, and this is an attitude
that runs like a thread through Spark’s fiction (Spark 1973, p. 87). The past, and the real and
imaginary people who live there, are constantly being transfigured in her work, are being remade
in the act of writing, and exist in a fictional space outside of time. There they play out their lives
and their plots under their creator’s stern, indulgent eye. ‘Our life’s our own to do what we like
with’, says Elsa’s dead husband Paul and this is the fiction they continue to live by (Spark 1973,
p. 163). And there they remain, like the rest of us, unjudged, for the time being at least.
References
Spark, M. (1960). How I became a Novelist. John Spark, M. (1973). The Hothouse by the East River. London:
O’London’s Weekly 3 (61): 683. Macmillan.
Spark, M. (1961). My Conversion. The Twentieth Century Spark, M. (1974a). The Driver’s Seat. Harmondsworth:
170, Autumn: 58–63. Penguin.
Spark, M. (1963a). The Comforters. Harmondsworth: Spark, M. (1974b). Not to Disturb. London: Penguin.
Penguin. Spark, M. (1975). The Abbess of Crewe. London: Penguin.
Spark, M. (1963b). The Ballad of Peckham Rye. London: Spark, M. (1981). Loitering with Intent. London: Bodley
Penguin. Head.
Spark, M. (1965). The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. London: Spark, M. (1994). The Collected Stories. London: Penguin.
Penguin. Spark, M. (2005). The Finishing School. London: Penguin.
Spark, M. (1966). The Girls of Slender Means. Stannard, M. (2009). Muriel Spark: The Biography. London:
Harmondsworth: Penguin. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Spark, M. (1967). The Mandelbaum Gate. Harmondsworth: Wood, J. (2000). Can this be what happened to Lord
Penguin. Lucan after the night of 7 November 1974? In: London
Spark, M. (1970). The Public Image. Harmondsworth: Review of Books, vol. 22. (17).
Penguin.
Further Reading
Carruthers, G. (1997). The remarkable fictions of Muriel Cheyette, B. (2000). Muriel Spark. Tavistock: Northcote
Spark. In: A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (ed. House.
D. Gifford and D. McMillan), 514–525. Edinburgh: Gardiner, M. and Maley, W. (2010). The Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press. Companion to Muriel Spark. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Carruthers, G. and Stoddart, H. (ed.) (2022). The Crooked University Press.
Dividend: Essays on Muriel Spark. Glasgow: Association Massie, A. (1979). Muriel Spark. Edinburgh: Ramsay
for Scottish Literary Studies. Head.
44
Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig
and Iain Crichton Smith
Matt McGuire
School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia
There is a temptation to read twentieth century Scottish poetry as comprising twin peaks of
aesthetic achievement, both animated by questions of Scottish identity and issues of cultural/
political renewal. At one end, published in 1926, sits Hugh MacDiarmid’s epic ‘A Drunk Man
Looks at the Thistle’, an expansive examination of the state and stateless nature of modern
Scotland. At the other end sits Dream State: New Scottish Poets (1994), an anthology of contempo-
rary poetry. According to its editor, these poems played a decisive role in enabling the spirit of
national self-confidence that transformed the ‘no’ vote to the 1979 devolution referendum to an
emphatic ‘yes’, when the question was asked again by the British government in 1997. O’Rourke
(2002, p. 2) writes: ‘Scotland’s artists did more than its politicians to dream up a new
Scotland . . . Dream State wasn’t just a record of, or set of hopes for, a better Scotland but a con-
tribution to it’. While there is an undoubtedly a correlation between certain animating forces in
early and late twentieth century Scottish culture, one must be careful of overstating the role and
significance of these relationships. One reason, is that such critical dispositions fail to adequately
account for the scale, significance and range of interests that characterise other Scottish writers
and other periods within Scottish literary history. The three writers gathered together in this
chapter are a case in point. The work of Norman MacCaig (1910–1996), Edwin Morgan (1920–
2010) and Iain Crichton Smith (1928–1998) sits rather awkwardly within a critical paradigm
that anchors a Scottish poetic to a narrative of national renewal in either the cultural or political
sphere. While he was good friends with Hugh MacDiarmid, for example, Norman MacCaig had
little time for the crusading and outspoken politics his companion so emphatically and enthusi-
astically espoused. In his poem ‘Patriot’ from 1973, he writes:

My only country
is six feet high
and whether I love it or not
I'll die
for its independence.
(MacCaig 1990, p. 266)
Similarly, while 2004 would see Edwin Morgan crowned Scotland’s first Makar or Poet Laureate,
and his poem ‘Open the Doors!’ being read at the opening of the Scottish Parliament, his
early-mid career poetry was much more interested in outer space, or the impoverished and
marginalised spaces of Glasgow, than anything overtly national. For Iain Crichton Smith the
disjuncture is equally relevant. Raised on the Gaelic speaking island of Lewis, Crichton Smith’s
work is more concerned with the precarious fate of his own highland culture than the political
inequities of the Westminster system. Though arguably, of course, the two issues are indelibly
intertwined. Publishing from the 1940s to 2000s, the magnitude and multiplicity of historical
events that these three writers’ work bears witness to includes the rise of fascism, the Second
World War, the atomic age, the space race, the Cold War, the birth of pop culture, and the rise of
Thatcherism. Their poetry encourages us to expand our critical horizons, to trace other lines
of inquiry and look beyond the role of national identity within the Scottish literary imagination
of the twentieth century.
MacCaig, Morgan and Crichton Smith were all prolific writers, with each publishing consist-
ently for over half a century. The mission (impossible?) of the following chapter, then, is to do
justice to over 150 years of combined poetic output. By necessity, the following chapter is highly
selective in its attempt to introduce and survey the poetry of each author. It takes the poets in
order of birth, offering a brief biographical sketch followed by a commentary on the thematic
preoccupations of their work. Each overview is supplemented with examples from specific poems,
designed to illustrate the formal and linguistic styles that, at various points, characterise each
author’s writing.
Before starting, one must acknowledge that the selection of these three white men could be
criticised for re-inscribing the very forms of gender and racial bias that recent criticism has
sought to expunge from contemporary discourse. If there is a nod to diversity in this chapter,
then it is in regard to the different personal, geographical and cultural contexts that underpin
and animate each author’s work. The Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan, for example, was a gay
man, growing up in a Scotland in which homosexuality remained illegal until 1980 (13 years
after it was decriminalised in England and Wales by the Sexual Offences Act of 1967). Crichton
Smith was a bi-lingual Gael, located on a linguistic fault line and forced to watch his cultural
community stare down the threat of extinction. And MacCaig was different still; a minimalist at
heart, a writer striving for a form of ‘Zen Calvinism’ through which he might make sense of the
modern world.
Norman MacCaig
MacCaig was born in Edinburgh in 1910 and lived the majority of his life there, latterly splitting
his time between the city of his birth and Assynt in Sutherland, in the rural highlands. A student
of classics at the University of Edinburgh, MacCaig spent his early working life as a primary
Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig and Iain Crichton Smith 563
school teacher. In later years, he taught creative writing at the University of Edinburgh and also
at the University of Stirling, where he was made a Reader in Poetry in 1970. MacCaig was a paci-
fist and registered as a conscientious objector during World War II, earning himself a 93-day
stay at His Majesty’s leisure in Wormwood Scrubs. The author himself would probably decry the
inclusion of such biographical detail, regarding the life of the man as utterly irrelevant to the
meaning of the poetry. MacCaig was good friends with Hugh MacDiarmid, though polar oppo-
site in terms of both his temperament and political outlook. While the latter was a Communist,
a Nationalist and even, at times, a Fascist, the former was apolitical and possessed little of his
companion’s mercurial wildness.
Evoking the spirit of First World War poets Seigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Taylor
describes MaCaig as constitutionally, ‘suspicious of “big words” such as glory, liberty, patriotism
and democracy’ (p. xxviii).
MacCaig’s first two poetry collections were Far Cry (1943) and The Inward Eye (1946). He
would later dismiss both books and insist that Riding Lights (1955) was the moment when he
found his true poetic voice. Between these early collections and his death in 1996 MacCaig pub-
lished 16 volumes of poetry. He had a meticulous habit of numbering each poem that he wrote
and by the time he died, he had written 3900 individual poems. The magisterial Poems of Norman
MacCaig (2005) contains 792 individual works, including 99 that had previously been unpub-
lished. MacCaig received an O.B.E. in 1979 and in 1985 was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal
for Poetry.
The notion of scale offers a useful entry point into MacCaig’s writing. He tended to favour
both short poems, and a short line, over anything too extended, cascading or digressive. Scale
also mattered when it came to subject matter with MacCaig oscillating between the very
small and very large. He consistently used individuals, animals and everyday objects as
sources of inspiration. This can be seen in the titles of poems such as ‘Brooklyn Cop’, ‘Street
Preacher’ and ‘Country Postman’, and in ‘Caterpillar’, ‘Sparrow’ and ‘Porpoises’. MacCaig’s
other habit, as we shall see, was to look towards the mountainous, epic landscape of Assynt
in the highlands, as grist for his poetic mill. Underpinning both kinds of poems was a fierce
commitment to precision, both in observation and in the use of language. For MacCaig
poetry offered an antidote to the kind of indistinct, vague or grandiose rhetoric that often
accompanied Politics with a capital ‘P’. He argued that, ‘Poetry teaches [us] to have a shrewd
nose for the fake, the inflated, the imprecise and the dishonest . . . What proportion, I won-
der, of the misunderstandings and miseries of the world are due to no more that the stock use
of big words – liberty, patriotism, democracy and all their other dreary clan – and the stock
response to them’ (cited in Lindsay 1979, p. 8). The poem ‘Smuggler’, from the 1966 collec-
tion Surroundings, illustrates this scepticism towards such words and the lazy thinking that
underpins it:
Watch him when he opens

his bulging words – justice,
fraternity, freedom, internationalism, peace,
peace, peace. Make it your custom
to pay no heed
to his frank looks, his visas, his stamps
and signatures. Make it
your duty to spread out their contents
in a clear light.
Nobody with such luggage

has nothing to declare.
(MacCaig 2005, p. 165)
These lines are symptomatic of many of the defining characteristics of a MacCaig poem. There is
careful observation, an economy of expression, a clarity and accessibility of his own use of lan-
guage. There is also the sense of sudden surprise and revelation, indicative of Japanese haiku or
the Zen koan. A MacCaig poem is measured, deliberate, and finely honed. This is a poetics of
re-examination, whereby the poem becomes a lens through which the true nature of reality
might be sought out and momentarily glimpsed.
‘Half-built boat in a hayfield’ provides another fine example of the style and technique that
characterise many MacCaig poems. Here, a single image or experience is cause for careful atten-
tion, a meditative parsing that is the very opposite of stock words and stock responses to them.
Coming upon the shell of a half-built boat, the narrator in the poem declares:
A cradle, at a distance, of a kind:

Or, making midget its neat pastoral scene,
A carcass rotted and its bones picked clean.
(MacCaig 2005 p. 83)
The rhythm of the opening line, with its nine syllables and two pauses, embeds the mood of
deliberate and cautious exploration. The twinned images, the cradle and carcass, anticipate ques-
tions about birth and death that the half-made boat stirs in the poet. The surrounding fields are
dwarfed (made ‘midget’) by the universal inevitability of these two facts. When the narrator
notices the planks of wood scattered around (‘The litter of its own genesis lay around, / Sunk in
the bearded sea, or on the ground’) the Old Testament echoes, giving the poem a biblical under-
tone. Like Noah’s ark, the reference anticipates a moment when the boat will be finished and
ready to sail. The poem concludes:
And fit then, as such noticing reveals,

To split her first wave open and explore
The many ways that all lead to one shore.
(MacCaig 2005, p. 84)
Here, the end rhymes give a sense of finality and truth to the poem’s conclusion. The unspoken
end note is death, a landing point that recalls the dynamics of the opening verse, which begins
with a cradle and ends, as we all do, with the carcass.
While MacCaig lived the majority of his life in Edinburgh, his spiritual home was Assynt in
the highlands of Scotland. It was here that he was happiest and the lochs, mountains, and moors
of this landscape had a profound effect on him, imbuing his poetry with an important, though
characteristically understated, romanticism. In ‘A Man in Assynt’ MacCaig asks, ‘Who owns this
landscape? / Has owning anything to do with love? For it and I have a love-affair, so nearly
human / we even have quarrels’ (MacCaig 2005, p. 222). The poem extends the courtship anal-
ogy, exploring the metaphor’s potential to capture the intensity of the poet’s relationship to this
special place.
I can't pretend
It gets sick for me in my absence,
though I get
sick for it. Yet I love it
with special gratitude, since
it sends me no letters, is
never jealous and, expects nothing
from me, gets nothing but
cigarette packets and footprints.
(MacCaig 2005, pp. 222–223)
The landscape is indifferent to MacCaig’s overtures, it is also undemanding, reliable and con-
stant. Playing ‘hard to get’ serves only to heighten the poet’s fascination and affection for a place
that is ‘docile only to the weather’. Otherwise, it is ‘masterless / and intractable in any terms /
that are human’. Despite MacCaig’s felicity with language, and his remarkable powers of percep-
tion, the landscape remains beyond his reckoning. This, we feel, is as it should be. It signals not
a poetic failure, but a welcome form of wonder. Assynt is revealed as a pseudo-sacred site, a place
in which the universe expands and overcomes even the remarkable poetic power of master crafts-
men. Such observations help explain why for the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, ‘[Norman
MacCaig’s work] remained an ongoing education in the marvellous possibilities of lyric poetry’
(cited in MacCaig 2005, back cover).
There are two primary contexts in which critics have tended to read MacCaig’s poetry. The
first is as a Scottish offshoot of the English Movement of the 1950s. The neat, solid, rhyming
stanzas, along with the use of ordinary, everyday observations as source material for profound
poetic thinking, suggest both the discipline and orderliness extolled by Philip Larkin and others.
In contrast, for Angus Calder (1990, pp. 38–49) a sense of democratic humility pervades
MacCaig’s writing, placing him at a distance from the more condescending knowingness that,
for that critic at least, often characterised Movement poetics (pp. 38–49). For others, the classi-
cism and wordplay of MacCaig allows him to be read as a modern incarnation of the Metaphysical
poets of the seventeenth century such as Donne, Marvel and Herbert. Joy Hendry usefully points
out that while the latter poets often hid behind dramatic constructs, there is an important lyrical
‘I’ within much of MacCaig’s work that cannot be neglected (Hendry 1990, pp. 54–73).
Edwin Morgan
Edwin Morgan was born in 1920 in Hyndland, in the West End of Glasgow. His father was the
chief accountant at a firm of iron and steel merchants. Morgan was a bookish child and lived with
his parents to Pollockshields, then Rutherglen, where he attended Rutherglen Academy before
going on to Glasgow High School. In 1937 he entered Glasgow University to study English. In
1940 he was called up for war service and, rather than register as a conscientious objector, elected
to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. He served in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine before return-
ing to Glasgow to complete his studies. On the back a first class Honours degree, the English
Department offered Morgan a lectureship and he would remain employed by the university for
the remainder of his career, becoming a Professor in 1975 and retiring in 1980.
Morgan’s writing spans six decades, beginning in 1952 with two books: a poetry collection,
The Vision of Caithkin Braes, and a translation of Beowulf. The bibliography of The International
Companion to Edwin Morgan lists a staggering 77 stand alone works with Morgan as either sole
author or major contributor (Riach 2015, pp. 191–194). Variation applies in a double sense to
this oeuvre. Not only was Morgan a poet, a translator, a critic, and a playwright, in verse (the
focus of this chapter) he delighted in the creative possibilities of different poetic forms. This
includes, but is in no way limited to: concrete, sound, and instamatic poems; traditional forms
like the sonnet and the epic; blank verse, lyric poetry, as well as camp verse and ludic nonsense.
Nothing, it seems, was out of bounds when it came to Morgan’s poetic imagination. However,
Michael Schmidt comments that, ‘The case against [Morgan] is that he is too versatile. The real
Edwin Morgan never stands up’ (cited in Riach 2015, p. 13). Nevertheless for Schmidt, ‘[There
is] an “I,” autobiographical, candid, strong and vulnerable, who articulates those poems which
seem most durable’ (1999, pp. 911–912). In six decades worth of writing, these oxymoronic
qualities – strength and vulnerability; honesty and evasion; playfulness and commitment – per-
vade Morgan’s major collections, most notably The Second Life (1968), From Glasgow to Saturn
(1973) and Sonnets from Scotland (1984).
Two biographical aspects of Morgan’s life deserve comment before turning to his poetry: his
sexuality and his level of public recognition. Being a gay man in the culturally conservative
Scotland of the 1950s was incredibly difficult and Morgan had to carefully manage and police
the truth about his sexuality. Thus poetry provided a creative space in which some of these ten-
sions might be released. Most notably perhaps in a series of love poems, in which the gender
neutrality of the first person singular (‘you’) afforded Morgan the opportunity to be explicit and
secretive at the same time. ‘One Cigarette’, for example, opens with the clever and poignant line:
‘No smoke without you, my fire’ (Morgan 2000, p. 40). While ‘Strawberries’ evokes the sensuous
image of the poet and his lover sharing some (forbidden?) fruit – ‘There were never strawberries
/ like the ones we had / that sultry afternoon / sitting on the step / of the open french window /
facing each other’ (Morgan 2000, p. 39). Both poems gesture towards the poetic re-imagining,
the insistence on the ‘second life’ of both people and objects, that pervades the 1968 collection
of the same name. In 1990 Morgan turned 70 and celebrated his birthday by officially ‘coming
out’. In the following decades he would receive a level of public recognition that would have
been unimaginable in the 1950s. In 1999, the ‘No Mean City’ of Glasgow declared a gay man
its first Poet Laureate. And in 2004, the newly established Scottish Parliament declared him the
nation’s bard, a position he held until his death in 2010.
The multi-layered nature of Morgan’s early love poems, their combination of direct simplic-
ity with clever playfulness, anticipates the kind of disposition that characterises the poet’s for-
ays in more formally experimental verse. In his sound and concrete poems of the 1950s and
1960s Morgan sought to draw reader’s attention to the materiality of language, the raw sounds
of the voice and the shapes of words and letters on the page. While such techniques were pre-
sent in the poetics of Anglo-American moderism, John Corbett aligns Morgan’s work with the
avant-garde internationalism present in contemporary poetry from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Italy,
France and Spain (2015, p. 130). Morgan’s poem ‘Chinese Cat’ evokes the spirit of James Joyce’s
Ulyssess (1922) which also plays with non-human forms of language. Readers will recall the
early scene in the novel when Bloom’s cat greets him with the demand ‘Mrkgnao’, an utterance
that could well be taken as a request for his morning meal (‘milk now’). In Morgan’s hands, such
animal-human interactions play with concepts of politics and national identity. The full poem
reads:
pmrkgniaou
pmrkgniao
pmrkniao
pmrniao
pmriao
pmiao
miao
mao
(Morgan 2000, p. 17)
The reductive progress of the poem provokes a series of ludic questions. Are Chinese cats
secretly uttering the ‘Great Leader’s’ name? Are they all closet communists? Has the cultural
revolution been so successful that even Chinese animals are singing from the same political
hymn sheet? The answers are, of course, no. However, the intellectual journey the poem takes us
on asks a series of comedic questions about our political instincts and the indifference of the
natural world to the ideological manifestos of mankind.
If animals speak to us in Morgan’s poetic universe, inanimate objects also find their voice. In
the 1960s, long before Apple and Siri sought to answer our questions, Morgan imagined ‘The
Computer’s First Christmas Card’. The poem begins:
jollymerry
hollyberry
jollyberry
merryholly
happyjolly
jollyjelly
jellybelly
(Morgan 2000, p. 16)
The programmatic letter play of the machine’s imaginary code becomes the engine of a linguistic
journey that strives to delight and amuse readers. One pictures the computer trying to apply and
understand the rules which permit such concepts to come together in this annual celebration
enjoyed by millions. The soundscape of the poem alone is a cause for mirth – ‘jelly belly’ and
‘jolly jelly’! And, while jelly itself is not jolly, one cannot but smile at the ease of association –
wobbliness, happiness, and so on. This ethos of playful experiment prevades Morgan’s sound
poems. Our challenge and delight as audience lies in opening ourselves up to this, in being
attuned to the infinite vibrancy (in both senses) of the world. In the words of Colin Nicholson
(2004, p. 22): ‘To use [Morgan’s] own phrase, no matter where we look in the universe there is
“nothing not giving messages.” Everything in his imagined cosmos is capable of speech:
Rousseau’s ghost, the devil at Auschwitz and Percy Shelly. Mao’s cat speaks, so does a crack in
glass’.
Just as Morgan’s concrete and sound poetry looks beyond British shores and draws inspiration
from an international avant-garde, the American Beats are an equally important reference point.
‘I was no admirer of Larkin and his crew at all’, Morgan writes, ‘I was looking for something else
and when Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and Corso and others appeared in America, that was more
like the thing that would interest me. There was nothing like that in Scotland, or in England
either’ (cited in Campbell 2004 , n.p.). New forms and foci pervade The Second Life (1968) and
From Glasgow to Saturn (1973). In both collections Morgan’s imagination ranges over a vast ter-
rain, from pop culture and flower power, to space travel and the cold war. Elegies such as ‘The
Death of Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ (on the suicide of Hemingway), sit
alongside meditations on the space race and the philosophical metaphysics of boldly going where
no man had gone before. In this category, key poems included ‘In Sobieski’s Shield’, ‘Space Poem
3: Off Course’, ‘The Moons of Jupiter’ and ‘A Home in Space’. It is notable that the iconic televi-
sion series Star Trek debuted on the BBC television in 1969, the same year that Neil Armstrong
walked on the moon. In ‘The First Men on Mercury’ Morgan deploys the artistic possibilities of
sound poetry as a way of interrogating the ideologies that underpin mankind’s latest attempt to
explore strange, new worlds. Initially, the polite speech of the astronauts (‘We come in peace
from the third planet / Would you take us to your leader?’) is juxtaposed with the more combat-
ive nonsense of the mercurians (‘Bawr stretter! Bawr. Bawr. Stretterhawl?’) (Morgan 2000, p. 69).
As the poem proceeds, however, the linguistic and power balance starts to shift. The human’s
speech becomes more emotive and unclear, while the Mercurians emerge as cynical, wise and
perfectly comprehensible (‘You men we know bawrhossoptant. Bawr. We know yuleeda. Go
strawg backspetter quick’.) In Morgan’s hands such close encounters are underscored by an
unspoken postcolonial subtext. There is a deep irony as the humans are forced to confront about
their own vanity and motivation, learning more about themselves than anything extra-terrestrial
they encounter in outer space. Morgan’s interest in the poetic possibilities of space and science
fiction underline how different he was in terms of the broader culture of post-war British poetry
scene. Arguably, such writing places him in closer relation to pop artists like David Bowie and
Elton John, both of whom used mankind’s departure from planet earth as a rich source of artistic
inspiration, than any of his fellow poets. His space poems emphasise the immediacy and vitality
of his work, his commitment to a poetry that, in his own words, relies ‘less I think on earlier
literature . . . [and more on] what is happening . . . I am interested in what will happen, more
than I am interested in what has happened’ (cited in Whyte 1990, p. 33).
If being alive to the present meant poems about pop culture and inter-galactic space travel, it
also meant attending to the lived realities of the native city (Glasgow) and country (Scotland) in
which Morgan resided. His early Glasgow poems acts as a barometer, acutely taking the psycho-
logical temperature of the city’s inhabitants. The ‘Glasgow Sonnets’ are morose and mournful,
casting a cold eye on the grim realities of poverty in 1970s Glasgow – ‘A mean wind wanders
through the backcourt trash’; ‘A shilpit dog fucks grimly by the close’; ‘Coats keep the evil cold
out less and less’. The images pile up in an unremitting catalogue of despair – ‘the foul crum-
bling stairwell . . . the damp from the canal . . . packs of rats that never tired’ (Morgan 2000,
pp. 82–86). There is an anger and a bitterness to these poems, alongside a commitment to record
and testify to such harsh realities. If Morgan’s poetry mourns the poverty he witnessed in
Glasgow, it also marvels at the unequivocal vibrancy that characterised the inhabitants of his
birthplace. Notable poems include ‘In the Snack-bar’ (the tale of a blind man being helped to the
toilet), ‘Trio’ (a Christmas parody on Buchanan Street), and ‘The Second Life’ (a comparison of
Glasgow with New York, where a ‘black oar cuts a glitter [on the Clyde]’ and feels like ‘heaven
on earth’). In Sonnets from Scotland (1984) Glasgow features as a stopping off point for many
famous historical characters including Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Alan Poe, and Gerard Manley
Hopkins. Commenting on Alexander Moffat’s famous painting Poet’s Pub in which Morgan sits
at an angle to his fellow Scottish poets, Robyn Marsack suggests that it is Morgan’s relationship
to Glasgow, as opposed to a more rural or highland Scotland, that most differentiates him from
his peers. Such a view finds support in Hamish Whyte who aligns Morgan’s own protean nature
with the city’s constant metamorphosis: ‘[Morgan] made us look at the city in a different way,
always an oblique way, making the ordinary look extraordinary. Glasgow suits him. It is always
reinventing itself’ (cited in Campbell 2004).
When it came to his homeland, Morgan’s early poetry was highly critical of a Scottish culture
that made his adult life so difficult. ‘The Flowers of Scotland’ from 1969 is an acerbic reminder
of both this harsh reality and the staggering transformations that the poet would come to witness
in his own lifetime. It opens:
Yes, it is too cold in Scotland for flower people; in any case who
Would be handed a thistle?
What are our flowers? Locked swings and private rivers –
(Morgan 2000, p. 48)
In this poem Morgan takes aim at a plethora of targets: ‘a Scottish national party that refuses to
discuss Vietnam’; ‘the slow death of the Clyde estuary’; ‘monstrous installations [i.e. nuclear
submarines] of a foreign power and an acquiescent government’; and ‘the banning of [books]’ on
university campuses. Ironically invoking the national anthem with its promise of political
renewal, Morgan insists that ‘these are the flowers of Scotland’.
The above poem provides a useful reference point from which to chart the evolution in
Morgan’s thinking about the potential of Scottish culture to act as a wellspring for contemporary
poetry. Published in 1984, Sonnets from Scotland is the most comprehensive and extensive mani-
festation of these energies. While earlier poems would seek to travel vast distances into outer
space, the sonnets would see Morgan turn time traveller, exploring Scotland’s ancient, hidden
past as well as its unrealized, promissory future. In ‘The Ring of Brodgar’ Neolithic standing
stones speak of pagan sacrifice in Scotland’s deep past. In ‘Pilate at Fortingall’ the Roman gover-
nor crawls back to his mythic birthplace in Perthshire to symbolically wash his hands, over and
over, unable to atone for his mistake. We are in a land of forest (‘Silva Caledonia’) peopled by
‘The Picts’, while in Gleschu the early saints (Columba and Kentigern) announce the advent of
Christianity and the opening of yet another chapter in the life of the nation. Morgan’s disposition
towards Scotland, and its place within his poetry, changed markedly throughout his lifetime. For
Cairns Craig, written in the wake of the failed devolution referendum in 1979 and at a time
when Thatcherism was establishing its hegemonic role in British life, Sonnets from Scotland was
‘Morgan’s first statement of his refusal to submit to [these] political realities . . . an insistence
that there are alternatives, that there have been and will be alternative Scotlands than the one
produced in 1979’ (cited in Riach 2015, p. 76). The subsequent and ongoing transformation of
Scotland over the coming decades would begin to mirror this creative project, one that looked
beyond the narrow here and now, and embraced alterity and otherness as a source for national
self-renewal.
Iain Crichton Smith
Born in Glasgow in 1928, Iain Crichton Smith moved with his family to the Hebridean island
of Lewis when he was two years old. His father, a sailor, died of tuberculosis the previous year and
the family were raised by their mother, in the small village of Bayble, on the island’s east coast.
Crichton Smith had a bilingual upbringing with Gaelic the language of the family and home,
and English the language of education and school. The experience of living and moving between
two linguistic universes had a profound effect on Crichton Smith who once described English as
‘an alien medium’ through which the Gaelic islander was invited ‘to look upon his native land’
(Crichton Smith 1986, p. 13). The critic Stan Smith (2007, p. 41) describes Crichton Smith as a
‘double man in a double place’, pointing out that he is one of the few Scottish writers who strad-
dles the highland fault line, regularly publishing in both English and Gaelic. In 1945 Crichton
Smith left the island of Lewis for the University of Aberdeen and an honours degree in English
Literature. Following two years’ National Service he began work as an English teacher, first in
Clydebank (1952–1955) and then in Oban (1957–1977). In 1977 he retired from teaching to
concentrate full time on his writing. That same year he married Donalda Logan. Having received
an OBE in 1980, the poet moved with Donalda to the village of Taynuilt in Argyll where he
lived from 1982 until his death in 1998.
Between 1955 and 1998 Crichton Smith produced 27 volumes of poetry, 14 novels, 12 short
story collections and a number of plays for both radio and stage. His friend Norman MacCaig
once quipped, ‘[Iain] hasn’t published a new book . . . for days’ (cited in Crichton Smith 2011,
p. xix). Across his considerable poetic output, a number of preoccupations endure. These include:
the lived realities of island life; Calvinist religion; the role of art; the nature of exile; and the
precariousness of Gaelic language / culture in the second half of the twentieth century.
Like Edwin Morgan and Glasgow, Crichton Smith had a complex relationship with Lewis, the
place in which he was raised. On the one hand he would maintain that ‘To grow up on an island
is to grow up in a special world’ (Crichton Smith 1986, p. 14). On the other, he was critical of
those who would romanticise island life, viewing in as a pastoral idyll, a land of uncorrupted,
misty-eyed poesis. Both the visiting tourist and the ex-islander, now living in the city, are, for
different reasons, guilty of such misapprehension. In contrast, Crichton Smith insists that island-
ers are ‘real people in a real place’, as entangled as the rest of us are in the myths and machina-
tions of modernity (Crichton Smith 1986, p. 13). As such, his poetry offers an intimate portrait
of island life, while also critiquing particular aspects of his own experience, in particular the
conservative puritanism that pervaded the Lewis of his youth. In the early ‘Poem of Lewis’ from
1955, the landscape itself seems inhospitable to the aesthetic impulses that art affords.
They have no place for the fine graces

of poetry. The great forgiving spirit of the word
fanning its rainbow wing, like a shot bird
falls from the sky. The sea heaves
in visionless anger over the cramped graves
and the early daffodil, purer than a soul,
is gathered into the terrible mouth of a gale.
(Crichton Smith 2011, p. 3)
The islands are no enchanted, unreal world, where time stands still. The very climate and ter-
rain, it would seem, are hostile to the Wordsworthian daffodils and their Romantic promise of
poetic revery. The ‘spirit of the word’ evokes both a transcendental aesthetic while also signalling
the cultural burdens of religious puritanism. One of the strictest and most conservative offshoots
of the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation, the Free Presbyterian Church played a domi-
nant role in the Lewis of Crichton Smith’s childhood. Stained by original sin, it viewed mankind
as cast adrift in a world of ubiquitous temptation. Music and dancing were sinful indulgences,
storytelling a form of vanity. Written in the 1950s and 1960s, poems such as ‘The Dedicated
Spirits’, ‘Highland Sunday’ and ‘John Knox’ grapple with the constrictions of this inheritance.
Lewis becomes a ‘cold railed ground’ where ‘a thunderous God tolls from a Northern sky’
(Crichton Smith 2011, p. 25). In the title poem from the 1965 collection, The Law and the Grace,
Crichton Smith confronts a community that insists he discard the aesthetic impulse and ‘be what
we say you should be’ (Crichton Smith 2011, p. 59). The poem resists, depicting such puritans
as ‘black devils’ who seek to ‘cure life of itself’ and to ‘judge me to the core, till I am dumb’
(Crichton Smith 2011, p. 59). Against this harsh and unforgiving backdrop, it is what Stan
Smith (2007, p. 45) calls the dignity of ‘small lives, domestic interiors and parochial visions’ that
sustain Crichton Smith’s poetic spirit: individuals toiling with quiet determination; school
teachers striving for a useful life with pupils and poems; spinsters looking bravely upon their
lonely fate in eventless rooms, bare of ornament.
One of the most enduring aspects of island life for Crichton Smith was the experience of exile.
The poet’s own departure, for Aberdeen, then Glasgow, then Oban, provided a modern parallel
with the most enduring fact of highland history – emigration. The highland clearances of the nine-
teenth century profoundly remade the north of Scotland, casting large swathes of its population
into the furnace of the industrial Central Belt or further afield, to the New Worlds of Australia,
New Zealand, Canada and the United States. The titles of collections of poems attest to the pro-
found impact this dynamic had on Crichton Smith: The Permanent Island (1975), The Emigrants
(1983), The Exiles (1984). In these books, individual poems meditate on psychological pain of leav-
ing, the guilt of being away, and the sense of nostalgia for an imaginary homecoming that can never
be realised. This is exile as a purgatorial halfway house, unmoored in a foreign land yet unable to
return and recapture an original sense of belonging. The poem ‘Returning Exile’ begins with the
narrator sounding cold and defensive: ‘You who come home do not tell me / anything about your-
self, where you have come from, /why your coat is wet, why there is grass in your hair’ (Crichton
Smith 2011, p. 262). As the poem continues, however, such reticence is in fact revealed to be a
kinship bond, one that is deeper and more meaningful than anything words might capture:
Do not tell me where you have come from, beloved stranger.

It is enough that there is light still in your eyes,
that the dog rising on his pillar of black knows you.
The poem is infused with emotional empathy for those that had to leave. In ‘There is no sorrow’,
he writes, ‘There is no sorrow worse than this sorrow . . . the dumb grief of the exile’ (Crichton
Smith 2011, p. 263). The poem concludes with a look towards transformation and assimilation.
People change. Old identities fade, new ones take their place, and eventually the process serves
as a balm for the sorrow and grief with which the journey began.
Poor lost exile

For you there is nothing but endurance
till one miraculous day
you will wake up in the morning
and put on your foreign colthes
and know that they are at last yours.
For Michelle Macleod (2001, p. 105) one of the most common features in Crichton Smith’s
work is ‘poetry discussing language and how language issues effect identity’. One instance of this
is the issue of bilingualism and its relationship to both the author’s own psychology and the
broader cultural politics of modern Scotland. While Crichton Smith has been described as ‘a
linguistic double man’, there is no easy sense in which his felicity with two languages fosters an
enabling sense of cultural hybridity (Smith 2007, p. 41). As James Campbell (1998, p. 16) com-
ments, Crichton Smith is a ‘poet of question marks’ and this extends to his own graphical and
biographical relationship to both Gaelic and English. In a poem entitled ‘For Poets Writing in
English Over in Ireland’ he asks, ‘Do we walk in language, in a garment pure as water? Or as
earth just as impure?’ (Crichton Smith 2011, p. 275) And later, in ‘The Fool’ Crichton Smith
casts himself as the bilingual jester, made up in the motley suit of many tongues: ‘In the dress of
the fool, the two colours that have tormented me – English and Gaelic’ (Crichton Smith 2011,
p. 228). For Campbell (1998, p. 16) there remains an important ‘celtic undertow’ beneath the
majority of Crichton Smith’s English language verse, one that shadows the poet’s own sense of
displacement as he shuttled between two linguistic world views. In ‘The Deer on High Hills’
from 1962 he writes:
Deer on the high hills, in your halfway kingdom,

uneasy in this, uneasy in the other,
but all at ease when earth and sky together
are mixed...
While Crichton Smith wrestles with the gains and losses of his own bilingualism, he is unequivo-
cal in his commitment to the Gaelic language and in registering the existential threat it faced in
the late twentieth century. ‘Shall Gaelic Die?’ from 1969 he draws analogy with the Apollo space
missions in order to do justice to the enormity and irrevocability of the threat confronting Gaelic.
He who loses his language loses his world. The Highlander who loses
His languages loses his world.
The spaceship that goes astray among planets loses the world.
For Crichton Smith the death of the language would signal the death of a community.
Elswehere he writes: ‘I imagine those who lose their language dying in the same way as the lan-
guage dies, spiritless, without pride’. While only being able to speak English would render
Gaels ‘exiles . . . in their own land’ (Crichton Smith 1986, p. 70). For Crichton Smith, language
is more than a simply a cultural adornment or a way of communicating. It constitutes reality. It
is fundamental to the very existence of the Gaelic world. ‘Shall Gaelic Die?’ continues:
‘When you turn your back on the door, does the door exist?’ said
Berkeley, the Irishman who was alive in the soul.
When the Highlands loses its language, will there be a Highlands?
Given the intensity of this commitment to language, it is notable that Crichton Smith is also
alert to the silences of history, to times when words inevitably fail, when they are simply
incapable of communicating the unspeakable aspects of human experience. In his poem about
the First World War, ‘If You Are About To Die Now’, he writes:
If you are about to die now

there is nothing I can write for you.
History is silent about this.
Crichton Smith refuses to mytholigise such deaths, nor does he offer the consolations of poetry as a
recompense for real world loss. Remarkably, while his work is suffused with the possibilities of
poetry, it is also humble and alert to the limits of an art form to which the writer dedicated his life.
Having acknowledged the diversity of the three poet’s work, in both form and in content,
I would like to end with one aspect that all three had in common – education. As mentioned,
MacCaig and Crichton Smith were both school teachers, with the former taking on roles at the
University of Edinburgh and the University of Stirling in the latter part of his career. As for
Morgan, he would teach at the University of Glasgow from 1950 until his retirement as a
Professor in 1975. And, remarkably, all three poets’ work found its way onto the High School
English curriculum in Scotland during their lifetime.
References
Calder, A. (1990). Unmoved by the movement: 1950s MacCaig, N. (1990). Collected Poems. London: Chatto and
MacCaig. In: Norman MacCaig: Critical Essays (ed. Windus.
J. Hendry and R. Ross), 38–49. Edinburgh: Polygon. MacCaig, N. (2005). The Poems of Norman MacCaig.
Campbell, J (1998). Iain Crichton Smith 1928-1998: Edinburgh: Polygon.
A Celtic Undertow. Times Literary Supplement, 30 MacLeod, M. (2001). Language and bilingualism in the
October, 16. Gaelic language poetry of Iain Crichton Smith. Scottish
Campbell, J (2004). Northern Lights. The Guardian, Studies Review 2 (2): 105–113.
Saturday 28 Feb. https://www.theguardian.com/ Morgan, E. (1984). Sonnets from Scotland. Edinburgh:
books/2004/feb/28/featuresreviews.guardianreview5 Mariscat Press.
(accessed 9 August 2022). Morgan, E. (2000). New Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet.
Corbett, J. (2015). Concrete realities. In: The International Nicholson, C. (2004). Edwin Morgan: Inventions of
Companion to Edwin Morgan (ed. A. Riach), 130–144. Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Glasgow: Scottish Literature International. O’Rourke, D. (ed.) (2002). Dream State: The New Scottish
Crichton Smith, I. (1986). Towards the Human. Loanhead: Poets. Edinburgh: Polygon.
MacDonald Publishers. Riach, A. (ed.) (2015). The International Companion to
Crichton Smith, I. (2011). New Collected Poems. Edwin Morgan. Glasgow: Association for Scottish
Manchester: Carcanet. Literary Studies.
Hendry, J. (1990). The metaphysical and classical Schmidt, M. (1999). The Lives of Poets. London: Phoenix.
humours of Norman MacCaig. In: Norman MacCaig – Smith, S. (2007). Poetry and Displacement. Liverpool:
Critical Essays (ed. J. Hendry and R. Ross), 54–73. Liverpool University Press.
Edinburgh: Polygon. Whyte, H. (ed.) (1990). Nothing Not Giving Messages.
Lindsay, M. (1979). As I Remember. London: Hale. Edinburgh: Polygon.
45
Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay1
Carla Rodríguez González
Senior Lecturer, Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Francesa y Alemana, Facultad
de Filosofía y Letras, Oviedo, Asturias, Spain
In February 2004, the Scottish Parliament conferred the title of Scots Makar (Scotland’s Poet
Laureate) on Edwin Morgan (1920–2010), inaugurating a post that gives public recognition to
the holder’s contribution to Scottish literature and acknowledges their social responsibility
towards the culture of the nation.2 This initiative, A. MacGillivray (2005) explains, was the
result of the combined efforts of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) and the
Scottish Arts Council, whose submission to the Executive for the creation of the post specified
that ‘[t]he purpose of such appointments (. . .) would be to give recognition to the different
strands of poetic writing in Scotland, notably the languages of Gaelic, Scots and English, and the
various claims of localities, gender, and ethnic backgrounds’. Morgan’s first commission was a
poem for the opening of the Scottish Parliament in October 2004, ‘Open the Doors!’, which was
read by his friend Liz Lochhead on the day, given his advanced age and frail physical condition.
Morgan continued in the post until his death in 2010, and was succeeded by Lochhead (2011–
2015) and then by Jackie Kay in 2016. Indeed, the decision to appoint Lochhead and Kay as the
representative voices of the nation seems to have been aimed at making visible diversity within
Scotland. The voices of the two Makars studied in this chapter are situated at the axis of an inter-
sectional identity politics that crosses feminism, national identity, ethnicity and sexuality,
explored through several literary genres.

Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay 575
Liz Lochhead
Liz Lochhead (b. 1947, Motherwell) has become an essential reference in Scottish literature and an
inspiration for a younger generation of women writers, like Jackie Kay, who have found in her texts
the plural voices of Scottish working-class women that previously lacked representation. This
inspirational role is acknowledged, for instance, in Kay’s poem ‘Kail and Callaloo’, where she
declares ‘Liz was my teenage hero’ (Grewal et al. 1988, p. 196), a popularity that Lochhead achieved,
according to Anne Varty (1997, p. 641), because she is ‘capable of sounding an intimate, unpreten-
tious voice’, because ‘her work is that of one woman speaking to many, and one person speaking for
many’. Margery Palmer McCulloch (2000, p. 17) frames her as ‘a lone voice’ in 1970s Scotland, the
pioneer who paved the way for other women writers. Lochhead’s political alliances are distinguish-
ably situated within feminism and nationalism, as demonstrated by her engagement with the
activities of the pro-independence political and artistic organisation National Collective in the
early 2010s. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 1970, Lochhead worked as a
teacher and frequented Philip Hobsbaum’s literary gatherings, where she met, among others,
Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard. In 1978 she was awarded the first Scottish/Canadian Writers’
Exchange Fellowship, which allowed her to travel to the American continent, an experience that
permeates her early poetry. The publication of her first collection of poems Memo for Spring in 1972,
which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, shook the world of Scottish letters because of her
fresh and irreverent embracing of the Scottish vernacular in its various registers, a daring attitude
she has maintained throughout her career. Since then, she has been writer in residence at a number
of institutions, such as the University of Glasgow, The University of Edinburgh, and the Royal
Shakespeare Company, as well as Glasgow’s Poet Laureate (2005–2011), and has received the high-
est distinctions for her work, among them the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2015.
As Dorothy McMillan explains (2013, pp. 26, 27), early in her career, Lochhead was particu-
larly cautious about ‘the overwhelming maleness of Scottish Modernism’ and ‘of the danger and
attraction of the male poetic traditions available to her’. This stance is particularly notable in
Memo for Spring, mostly written while she was a student at The Glasgow School of Art. It opens
with the poem ‘Revelation’, which evokes a girl’s fragility in the transition from innocence to
experience by focusing on her symbolic encounter with a monstrous bull on a farm. The poem,
which delves into the dangers associated with sexual maturity and despotic masculinities, and
the collection itself, was a landmark that carved a space for her in this highly masculinised tradi-
tion. In Islands (1978), her second poetry collection, prompted by a stay on Skye, she captures
Scotland’s magnificent diversity – linguistic, geographical, human – and the alienation of the urban
subject in rural environments. This was, according to Lochhead, ‘a deliberate attempt at a quieter
voice, things that were not dramatic statements (…), the start of the splitting apart of the
dramatic and the more meditative or private aspect of my work’ (Nicholson 1992, p. 2010).
Lochhead’s negotiation of her own cultural tradition is addressed and twisted from within in
The Grimm Sisters (1981), which includes poems written during her stay in Canada and situates
her in a wider transnational wave of feminist writing aiming at rewriting the canon, deconstruct-
ing gendered archetypes, and finding new forms of self-representation. She revisits genres associ-
ated with women’s traditional role as transmitters of collective values to younger generations:
fairy tales, ballads and myths, all re-rendered with sharp irony. Her irreverent storytellers include
characters from both Classical and Scottish mythology, the Bible, the Anglophone tradition and
fairy tales. They are intentionally anachronistic, showing an ambivalent contemporary perspec-
tive that both shatters the mirror of patriarchy and is shattered by it. Yet, Lochhead has admit-
ted, the book was ‘an attempt to find the muse’ within (Nicholson 1992, p. 212).
The complexities of women’s inspiration and creativity also occupy a central space in her next
collection, Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems (1984). The intertextual connections with
Mary Shelley’s classic specifically investigate the internal fight of the poet in ‘having a male
muse, which is a part of yourself’ and with giving birth to a monstrous literary creature with
potential to annihilate the subject that creates it – particularly visible in ‘An Abortion’ and
‘Mirror’s Song’ (Nicholson 1992, p. 219). Like ‘Revelation’, the former text uses a highly
symbolic disturbing pastoral scene introducing us to a startled cow stubbornly licking the mal-
formed limbs of her aborted foetus, hoping to return it to life in a helpless effort that resembles
the woman poet’s obsession with her own barren creation. This pain and fragmentation are also
explored in ‘Mirror’s Song’, the closing poem of the collection, where a self-affirming voice dares
the power of the patriarchal mirror to destroy her, recalling the oppression of successive genera-
tions of women that she will revenge by ‘smashing back’ in a final act where we will witness her
new agency, ‘a woman giving birth to herself’ (1985a,b, p. 67). But the scope of Dreaming
Frankenstein goes beyond such considerations, and includes poems of love, nostalgia, and remem-
brance that interact with acute observations of life around the poet, like ‘Something I’m Not’, an
empathetic portrayal of Glasgow’s cultural diversity.
Lochhead combines her prolific career as a poet with intense activity in the performing arts.
In this early period, she works in the theatre, collaborating with Marcella Evaristi on their revue
Sugar and Spite (1978), a combination of songs, poems, and monologues focusing on female sub-
jectivities, where Lochhead develops her ‘unique performance trademark of rhythmic rap-like
speech’ (Smith 1993, p. 9). In the following decade, she works on revues, like Goodstyle (1980),
True Confessions (1981), Tickly Mince (1982), The Pie of Damocles (1983), and Nippy Sweeties: The
Complete Alternative History of the World Part I (1986), these last two in collaboration with Gray,
Kelman, and Leonard. True Confessions and New Clichés (1985b) and Bagpipe Muzak (1991) collect
some of her short theatre pieces, including monologues by her acclaimed character Verena, from
Quelques Fleurs (1991), as well as poems, which Lochhead has humorously defined as ‘agitprop’
(Todd 1995, p. 118). These powerful voices are constructed upon what Lochhead has defined as
the conflict ‘between what the person thinks they are saying and what the audience actually
hears’ (Clune 1993, p. 88), that is, by focusing on the unconscious traces of our personalities that
complement the meaning of our utterances. At this stage, she produces some of her early plays,
like Shanghaied (1982), about a group of children evacuated during World War II, published
years later together with its sequel Elizabeth (1998) as Britannia Rules (2003), and Rosaleen’s Baby
(1983), written for the Scottish Youth Theatre.
Her interest in reworking stories about monstrosity installed in our collective memories is also
present in her plays Blood and Ice (1982) – a revised version of her Mary and the Monster – (1981),
and Dracula (1985). Lochhead contributes with these to the Scottish gothic tradition epitomised
by James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Robert L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), warning us against who controls the representation of the abject.
Blood and Ice further elaborates on the feminist revision of the anxiety of influence analysed in
Dreaming Frankenstein by focalising the action through Mary Shelley and her development
towards agency. Mary struggles throughout the play with the haunting influence of her father
William Godwin’s enlightened notions of political justice and egalitarianism and her mother
Mary Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminist ideals, as well as with the ruptures with conventionalism
brought about by the libertarian values of Romanticism, by her husband Percy B. Shelley and
Lord Byron. Mary must negotiate the gap between the ideal sphere of reason defended by her
parents and her actual experience of gender inequality, which is revised by Lochhead from a con-
temporary perspective. Mary’s development culminates in an ambiguous yet hopeful final scene,
where she acknowledges her new empowerment: ‘now I see who I am in my book. I am Captain
Walton, explorer. Survivor. My own cool narrator’ (Lochhead 1985a, p. 115). Female sexuality is
tackled in her work in this period in relation to reproduction and allegorical – creative – abortion,
always keeping track of patriarchal impositions and the repressed feelings they summon. This is
precisely the focus in Dracula, where Lochhead revises the myth of the vampire using Stoker’s
novel as a counterpoint to the action, quoted literarily in the stage directions. Lochhead’s revision
offers a nuanced rendering of male and female sexual desire, where the monster capable of dis-
turbing Victorian values is a dual presence: both external – incarnated in the mythical figure of
the vampire whose influence is only effective if he is allowed in – and internal – related to
women’s supressed impulses. The power of the monster lies, then, in the conjunct action of the
external symbol enacting an already existing desire.
A landmark in Lochhead’s career is Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, written for
Communicado Theatre Company as part of the 1987 tributes to Mary Stuart on the fourth
centenary of her death. Lochhead’s iconoclastic revision of the life of the last queen of an inde-
pendent Scotland is in fact a complex rendering and denouncement of the strategies of discrimi-
nation – colonial, sexual, religious – that pervade the history of the nation. To achieve this, the
play interrogates the authority of canonical historical narratives by parodying them, as well as
considering the different political interpretations they generate. This is complicated further by
the inclusion of anachronistic, grotesque, and carnivalesque elements functioning as fundamen-
tal subtexts in the questioning of Scottish tradition. Lochhead’s particular rendering of
Scotland’s past is also disrupted through the control of the historical characters by a sardonic
mistress of ceremony, La Corbie, ‘an interesting, ragged ambiguous creature’, who involves the
audience in the creation of meaning from the very first scene, ‘Scotland, Whit Like?’: ‘Country:
Scotland. Whit like is it? (…) It depends. It depends … Ah dinna ken whit like your Scotland/
is. Here’s mine’ (Lochhead 1989, p. 11). The use of linguistic registers is exquisitely crafted in
this play, ranging from West of Scotland to English voices, and even including some interac-
tions in French. In the first scene, La Corbie introduces the audience to a gendered view of the
colonial relations between England and Scotland, using a fairy tale tone to equate the authority
of historical narratives with the overtly fictional nature of storytelling: ‘Once upon a time there
were twa queens on the wan green island, and the wan green island was split inty twa kingdoms.
But no equal kingdoms, naebody in their richt mind would insist on that’ (Lochhead 1989
p. 12, emphasis in original). As storyteller, La Corbie controls the pace of the story, and as mis-
tress of ceremonies the action too, with characters interchanging roles and reversing their
national, class or religious allegiances. Sisterhood, addressed critically, is a key theme in the
play, a failed means to cut across the constructed rivalry between the two queens, symbols of the
two countries. Lochhead’s representation focuses on their personal, rather than their public lives
though, showing us two women who must constantly navigate the monitoring of their political
female bodies. The play advances chronologically until the last scene, ‘Jock Tamson’s Bairns’,
where all the historical characters, ‘stripped of all dignity and historicity’, transform abruptly
into children playing the dangerous game of reproducing the role models offered them by past
generations. Despite their innocence, Lochhead uses these characters to address issues of respon-
sibility (both individual and collective) in eradicating the discriminatory structures inherent to
the pedagogy of the nation.
Lochhead’s dramatic work continues with Cuba (2001 [1997]), a play for young audiences, set
against the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis. Perfect Days (1998) and Good Things (2004) are
comedies about women’s middle-life issues, such as resisting the aesthetic impositions of con-
sumerist societies, reproduction and the heteropatriarchal family model. Thus, they have a clear
internationalist projection, but as always in Lochhead’s work, these issues are treated with very
local linguistic tones and references to the colour of Glasgow’s social strata, as well as to the
changing performance of gender identities at the turn of the twenty-first century. Adriene
Scullion (2013, p. 123) frames these works within ‘film rom-com and television sit-com (. . .),
variety theatre or cabaret’ that were also crucial influences in Lochhead’s 1980s theatre pieces.
Lochhead’s contribution to the theatre also includes very personal adaptations of classical
texts, like her acclaimed Tartuffe (1986), Medea (2000), Three Sisters (2000), Miseryguts (2002),
Thebans (2003), and Educating Agnes (2008), as well as a children’s version of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, The Magic Island (1993). These adaptations are translated not only into the Scottish
tongue in all its heteroglossic potential, but also into the contemporary situation of Scotland,
their interpretation thus reaching far beyond the original. She establishes a dialogue with the
original texts, mostly familiar to her audiences, and so pushes these out of their comfort zone,
demanding they decipher her new twists. Her most recent theatre piece is Edwin Morgan’s Dream’s
and Other Nightmares (2011), commissioned by the Glasgay! Festival as a tribute to the poet.
Although Lochhead’s plays always have a poetic component, a rhythm based on the clockwork
identification of the words and linguistic turns needed to create the theatrical effect she is seek-
ing, it is not until 2003a that she published another collection of poems, The Colour of Black and
White. The book includes several previously published texts, together with some new ones, with
which Lochhead draws a personal picture of the historical moments that have been crucial in her
life, but above all, she paints the interpersonal and artistic (mostly literary and pictorial) influ-
ences that have coloured the insipid Manichean black/white world into which she was born
(‘After the War’). The title of the collection and its constant elaboration on the power of these
colours playfully resonates with Lochhead’s famous denomination of the split between her 1980s
and early 1990s performance pieces (her ‘black book’ True Confessions) and her poetic work (her
‘white book’ Dreaming Frankenstein), based on the colour of their covers (Todd 1995, p. 118). Yet,
as has been pointed at, the boundaries between the two genres are difficult to distinguish in
Lochhead’s work and her poems are characterised by a latent performativity. In this collection,
black and white imagery is intricately exploited in multiple directions, beginning with the illus-
trations that accompany and complement the poems, by painter and printmaker Willie Rodger.
Colours, nevertheless, permeate her texts (in, for instance, her recollection of embodied affect
regarding her relatives and friends) but are also crucial in her exploration of linguistic plurality,
as in ‘Kidspoem/Bairnsang’. The poem denounces the hierarchies (‘posh, grown-up, male,
English, and dead’) that are intrinsic to the linguistic models imposed by formal education, jux-
taposing the cold atmosphere of the school attended by a small child and the warmth provided
by her mother’s local voice (Lochhead 2003b, p. 20). A connection with Jackie Kay appears in
one of the poems, ‘Black and White Allsorts’, which is dedicated to her, constructed upon a
heterogeneous list of black and white elements, both tangible and abstract, but all highly valu-
able to the poem’s voice. The Colour of Black and White closes with the playful and self-affirmative
‘My Way’, where Lochhead, like Frank Sinatra in his popular song, ‘states her case’, but she does
so by numbering the contradictory reasons that have driven her towards writing. This sort of
public confession (‘Mea absolutely culpa, me!’) is complemented by one of Rodger’s illustrations,
a Sisyphus-like figure that evokes the incessant struggles of the poet, always ready to roll the
rock back up the mountain of creativity (Lochhead 2003b, p. 128).
Her next collection, A Choosing: Selected Poems (2011), testifies to Lochhead’s development over
four decades, the evolution of a voice that becomes more mature, more intimate. This fact is
particularly perceptible in her latest collection Fugitive Colours (2016) – the title hinting at the
transience of life – which situates the poet as an experienced observer of the simultaneously excit-
ing and damaging shades tackled in her earlier works. It includes poems specifically dedicated to
loved ones and celebratory of special moments, but also poems of grief and nostalgia, epitomised
by the elegiac sequence dedicated to her late husband Tom Logan. ‘Persimmons’, also included
in A Choosing, is articulated through Lochhead’s observation of colour and introduces us to the
gap between the poet’s physical remembrance of the life she shared with her husband and her
present negotiation of his absence. The ‘still life’ he paints, using vigorous tones, is all that is left
of that sensorial moment, an inert object that nevertheless has the power to evoke, to bring back
to life, Lochhead’s dormant senses: ‘Now, looking, I can taste again’ (Lochhead 2016, p. 7). This
final statement connects with the following section of the book, where ‘The Light Comes Back’
appears to be even more of a resolution. The power of the visual arts is celebrated in ‘Ekphrasis,
Etcetera’, a section inspired by some old photographs, and where she also dialogues with the
legacy of consolidated Scottish artists Alastair Cook, Alan Davie, Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
Willie Rodgers but also with Jean Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, whom she uses to criticise both
class and sexual privileges in the art world and the power of representation. She also draws the
timeline of Art history with ‘Way Back in the Paleolithic’, where ‘the fugitive music and the
stories’ (Lochhead 2016, p. 60) of prehistoric people appear in stark contrast to ‘Their Immortal
Art!’, and ‘Labyrinth’, dedicated to the students of the Glasgow School of Art, who are encour-
aged to abandon elitist forms and abstractions in order to create a space of encounter between
people. ‘Kidspoems and Bairnsangs’, which clearly evokes her famous poem, is a transition sec-
tion with several poems addressed to children and leads to ‘Makar Songs’, among which is
included her first commission, to commemorate the opening of the fourth session of the Scottish
Parliament in 2011. In ‘Open’, she remembers Morgan’s legacy and appeals to ‘Justice, Wisdom,
Compassion, Integrity?’ (p. 79), calling for action so that the question mark that frames these
values disappears.
Jackie Kay
The contribution of Jackie Kay (b. 1961, Edinburgh) to literature has been widely acknowl-
edged through the many literary awards she has received, including The Guardian Fiction Prize
and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her novel Trumpet (1998), but also
through her successive appointments, as Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE)
in 2006 and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2020, for her services to
literature. She is a prolific writer who has combined her literary career and post as Scots Makar
with her job as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle and her honorary
position as Chancellor of the University of Salford. Kay studied at the Royal Scottish Academy
of Music and Drama and graduated in English at the University of Stirling, after which she
focused on writing, mostly plays and poems in the 1980s and 1990s, but also fiction and auto/
biographical books in later years. Jackie Kay’s work is characterised by a strong ethical commit-
ment that comprises Black feminist perspectives and what Kwame Anthony Appiah denomi-
nates ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (Appiah 2006: p. xviii. and passim), a belief in the power of
intercultural dialogue in the pursuit of equality. From her situated, albeit critical, local and
national attachments, Kay incorporates Scotland into a transnational net of cultural connections
through which she traces highly personal routes that cut across ethnic, social and gender bounda-
ries. Her multiple voices challenge fixed notions of identity, exploring the intersections of
Blackness and Scottishness from a gender perspective that often has biographical inspiration in
her adoption by white parents and her homosexuality. Her interest, as such, is in constructing
alternative genealogical lines in order to enquire into the narrative and performative side of
identity-building.
If Liz Lochhead pioneered the representation of female subjectivities in Scottish literature in
the late 1970s, Jackie Kay became the first multicultural writer to gain wide visibility in the
nation after the publication of her collection of poems The Adoption Papers in 1991. However, her
career in fact started in the 1980s, when she was involved in the cultural and political actions
carried out by Black British feminists, who faced the challenging task of building bridges
between racialised women of diverse backgrounds, while acknowledging their differences. This
had to be done by rejecting patriarchal norms, neoliberalism, and the impositions of white
Western feminism, as can be seen in Kay’s contribution to collective works such as A Dangerous
Knowing. Four Black Women Poets (Burford et al. 1988) and Charting the Journey. Writings by Black
and Third World Women (Grewal et al. 1988). Kay’s situated poems explore her difference (‘Whit
is an Afro-Scot anyway?’) and address the complicity of white women in the perpetuation of rac-
ism (Grewal et al. 1988, p. 197). One of the most popular poems of this period is ‘So You Think
I’m a Mule?’, which captures the miscommunication between a prejudiced old white woman and
a Black girl in a casual encounter in Glasgow (Burford et al. 1988, pp. 53, 54). The former’s
insistent enquiry into the ‘real’ origins of the latter reveal the white woman’s reluctance to accept
the girl in what is a predominantly white society, an experience Jackie Kay will denounce in
many of her other texts and interviews.
In this same decade, Kay was also actively engaged in the theatre. In 1986 she writes
Chiaroscuro for Theatre of Black Women, the first Black women’s company in Britain, founded
in 1982. It was revised and partially rewritten for publication in the collection Lesbian Plays
(Kay 1987) and restaged in 2018 at the Bush Theatre. The title of the play, Chiaroscuro, evokes
ethnic hybridity, a state of in-betweenness that is a source of both liberation and encounter for
its racialised women characters. Its initial title, The Meeting Place, reflects this idea more clearly,
hinting at the space of comradeship and empowerment created when racialised women collabo-
rate with each other. This very symbolic and poetic work also probes questions of ethnic and
sexual identity by focusing on and rendering the significance of the names of each of its charac-
ters. Her second play, Twice Over (1987), was produced by Gay Sweatshop, a theatre company
founded in 1975. The text was published in 1989 in the collection Gay Sweatshop. Four Plays and
a Company and presents a family mourning the death of one of its members, Cora. Love tran-
scends boundaries for these characters, who progressively uncover, through the diaries, letters,
and photographs they must decipher after she is gone, that Cora was a lesbian. The secrecy of her
life is weighed against the power of her spirit, which haunts the stage throughout the
performance.
The Adoption Papers is Kay’s first full collection of poems, which won her The Saltire Society
First Book Award and The Scottish Arts Council Award. It explores the power of genealogy on
several interrelated levels: physical, emotional, cultural, and political. As such, it is divided into
two complementary parts The Adoption Papers, freely inspired by her own adoption, yet far from
a faithful account of the process, as Kay has insisted in several interviews (e.g. Gish 2004); and
‘Severe Gale 8’, where she addresses the socio-political crisis of 1980s Britain and its effects on
the life of the population. The Adoption Papers is a choral text articulated on three interwoven
voices (the biological mother, the adoptive mother, and the child), whose perspectives on adoption
are differentiated typographically. This polyphonic poem delves into issues such as motherhood,
institutionalised racism and national identity; but above all, it vindicates the empowerment
provided by a caring environment where emotional attachments become much stronger than
blood ties. The identities of these three women are intrinsically relational and their embodied
experiences always imply a subjective reconstruction and fictionalisation of the others. The
daughter, who is the central voice in the text, embarks on a genealogical reconstruction that, in
the absence of a biological family narrative, will require the identification of the missing e lements
in her story by imagining possible realities. She feels her participation in the cultural genealogy
of her white adoptive parents is incomplete, given the lack of positive Black women models in
the Scotland where she grows up. Her pursuit thus incorporates the histories of strong Black
women from transnational contexts, with whom she can bond on an emotional level: Angela
Davis, Pearl Bailey and Bessie Smith.
This book marks a point of departure in Kay’s literary production in its examination of Black
women’s genealogies from a situated position as a Scottish writer, clearly developed further in her
next collection, Other Lovers (1993). It opens with a sequence on Bessie Smith, appearing as a coun-
terforce to the legacies of slavery, capable of enacting identification with her powerful voice to
prevent that ‘everything that’s happened once could happen again’ (Kay 1993, p. 9). The poems
progressively transition from the American context to Scotland, where homophobia and racism are
part of the emotional memories Kay’s poetic voices verbalise (for instance, a shorter and less belliger-
ent reworking of ‘So You Think I’m a Mule’ entitled ‘In My Country’), along with more positive
experiences like romantic and familial love. The potential of music as a bonding element applies not
only to the Black American tradition in the collection. In fact, the poet, who claims ‘the noises of the
past/float into my room at night’ uses Scottish popular songs in ‘Watching People Sing’ to celebrate
her belonging in a family gathering (Kay 1993, p. 19). Although the poem’s voice is an observer
rather than an active participant – ‘I cannot sing. All I can do is watch/and clap, and clap, and clap’
– she makes clear that she is part of this emotional community (Kay 1993, p. 16).
Her piece Bessie Smith (1997) pays tribute to ‘the people of the past’, by returning again to one
of the crucial figures in Kay’s constructed genealogy as a Black woman and a lesbian. In this hybrid
text (half fictionalised biography, half fictionalised autobiography), Kay’s voice is interwoven with a
subjective and reconstructed narration of the singer’s life that mixes actual information with testi-
monies, blues lyrics and fictional passages of intense symbolic power, such as the arrival on Scotland’s
shores of a trunk that had belonged to ‘the Empress of the Blues’. It contains random objects rep-
resentative of Kay’s interpretation of the singer’s life: photographs, letters, records, certificates,
wigs, pearls, and dresses, a pillow ‘with her smell still on it’, a piece of Route 66, as well as water
from the Tennessee River, on which ‘a backdrop of a bright full moon floats (. . .) along with sheets
of blues music that have been made into tiny boats’ (Kay 1997, p. 59). By placing this imaginary
trunk in Scotland, Jackie Kay becomes the inheritor of a tradition that she is now reclaiming. Her
intertextual understanding of identity is the essence of the book, patent in the poem that intro-
duces it, ‘The Red Graveyard’, also included in Other Lovers, where the poet wonders ‘why do I
remember her voice and not my mother’s?’ (Kay 1997, p. 7). This affective attachment with the
singer is stated in the first chapter of the book, ‘In the House of the Blues’, a declaration of intent
about the power of ethnic identification: ‘I am the same colour as she is, I thought to myself, electri-
fied. (…) The shock of not being like everyone else; the shock of my own reflection came with the
blues’ (Kay 1997, p. 13). Bessie Smith is a symbol of empowerment in Kay’s narrative, a light
guiding her out of the harm caused by embodied experiences of racism and homophobia.
The year 1998 is prolific for Kay. She published the poetry collection Off Colour, the novel
Trumpet and her poems for children The Frog who Dreamed she was an Opera Singer. As in other Kay
texts for young readers, Two’s Company (1992) and Three has Gone (1994), this playful publication
offers alternatives to counteract forms of discrimination, as well as pieces to boost children’s
imagination. Her fantasy novel Strawgirl (2002) recounts the struggles of a young girl who must
help her white mother maintain their farm in rural Scotland after her Nigerian father’s death.
Issues such as ethnic difference, isolation and bigotry are overcome by this character of ambiva-
lent name with the help of a magical strawgirl who has telluric links to the Highlands, and who
helps her gather the strength she needs to reconcile with her difference. Red, Cherry Red (2007),
another collection of poems for children, illustrated by Rob Ryan, revolves around the messages
inscribed on bodies. The beauty of insular Scotland is contrasted with the hard lives of its people,
whose life rhythms are marked by natural cycles and the force of the sea.
Kay’s imbrication of music and writing is particularly relevant in Trumpet (1998c), whose
structure follows the rhythms of jazz music. As she explains, ‘I was interested in how a story can
work like music and how one note can contain the essence of the whole’ (Bold Type 1999). The
novel has obvious connections with Twice Over, the plot being based on the reconstruction of the
life of a deceased protagonist, a transgender Black trumpeter called Joss Moody, from pieces of
information provided by the rest of the characters, including his son Coleman. Shocked at the
discovery of his father’s ‘secret’, Coleman struggles to find sense in not only his own life, but also
his father’s and, in a wider sense, in his genealogy as a Black adopted person. Kay has explained
that what attracted her to using this musical genre was its fluidity and its role as a form of Black
cultural history: ‘it has the past in it – work songs, slave songs, blues. Jazz is a process of reinvent-
ing itself. And race too, is less fixed, more fluid, in jazz. There’s a sense in jazz being a family’
(Jaggi 1998, p. 10). In the end, the only legacy that Coleman will receive is the possibility to
reinvent himself, of retelling the story in order to create a narrative of empowerment to sanction
his belonging in this culturally diasporic family.
The title of the collection Off Colour (1998b) suggests the focus will be on specific issues that
cause states of indisposition, but the immediate association triggered by the word ‘colour’ is that
such states are motivated by racism and other forms of discrimination. Indeed, these poems
continue the exploration of social relations already present in Kay’s previous collections. Her
celebration of her Scottishness is always tinted by the bitter taste of the inequities that she
observes both in Scotland and across Britain, chiefly related to the present consequences of their
shared colonial past and their treatment of racialised people. Poems like ‘Teeth’, inspired by the
detention and death of Jamaican migrant Joy Gardner in 1993, denounce police violence against
Black people, but this violence is contextualised within a historical line including the forced
transportation of Black people in colonial times and the poet’s present experience of racism.
Life Mask (2005) is her next collection of poems, a transitional work partially inspired by her
experience of meeting her biological Nigerian father on a demythologised ‘return to Africa’ that
she also retells in her memoire Red Dust Road (2010) and the collection of poems Fiere (2011).
Life Mask focuses on the scars left by the end of a romantic relationship, but also by the ultimate
confirmation that biological roots will never compare to the love and support she received along
her alternative genealogical routes. This book is a mature exploration of the many layers of iden-
tity suggested by its title: masks are removable representations of the self, artefacts for the inter-
pretation of others, used to play with referentiality. In her acknowledgments, Kay explains that
the focus on masks derives from her experience of being represented pictorially (when she was
drawn by Joyce Cairns) and sculpturally (Michael Snowdon’s bronze head of her is now ‘one of
the twelve herms in Edinburgh Business Park’). The masks in this collection represent fixations
of past selves that need to be surmounted, as in ‘Model’, but also of renovation, as in ‘Mid Life
Mask’, about personal growth from which emerges an empowered voice (‘a new woman is out
and about’ (Kay 2005, p. 30)). The connection with African masks is especially important in a
sequence of poems where Kay recalls her voyage of self-exploration into the continent. For
instance, in ‘Things Fall Apart’, we find her biological father, a new-born Christian, wearing ‘the
white mask of God on his handsome face’ (Kay 2005, p. 33). Unlike the role models offered by
Wole Soyinka or Chinua Achebe, with whom the poet finds a connection of sorts, the encounter
with her father demonstrates he and she are complete strangers. Indeed, Achebe is quoted,
together with Robert Burns, on the first page of Fiere, where we learn the etymology of the title
word, as well as its Scottish meaning: ‘Fere, feare, feer, fiere, or pheere (archaic) noun: a com-
panion, a mate, a spouse, an equal. Fere (Scot.) adj: able, sound’ (n.p.). This book is introduced
by a homonymous Scots poem about love and friendship recalled in older age. Kay uses it to
initiate this collection about overcoming the adversities of middle age, where markedly Scottish
poems supplement her further examination of her African experience and her in-betweeness,
ultimately celebrated in ‘Between the Dee and the Don’. Some poems are inspired by her family
and friends, including Edwin Morgan (‘Strawberry Meringue’), while others, like ‘from A Drunk
Woman Looks at her Nipple’, interrogate the Scottish masculinist tradition.
The Lamplighter (2008) is the most representative instance of Kay’s ethical commitment with
Black Atlantic literature and her African roots.3 It was written to commemorate the bicentenary
of the abolition of the Slave Trade Act and even its title, taken from one of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s poems, suggests the central role that Scotland will play in this rendering of the
forced transportation of African people. Kay denounces how the industrial revolution and the
flourishing of the British Empire also benefitted Scotland’s economy at the expense of millions of
Black lives. This text, which can be regarded as a long poem or a play, intertwines the voices of
four African women slaves with fragments of historical documents to create a polyphonic story
of the multiple atrocities committed against Black people, particularly Black women, in this
shameful period of Western history.
Kay excels also in the short story. She has published three collections so far, equally concerned
with offering alternative representations of Black women’s subjectivities, sexual difference and
love as the driving force that can transcend social barriers. Why don’t You Stop Talking? (2002), as
Matthew Brown argues, is where Kay ‘emphasises the continuing presence of racist violence in the
UK, caused mainly by (. . .) a general, large-scale regression to culture being apprehended as
racially defined and enclosed’ (Brown 2007, p. 226). This book includes stories about the Black
diaspora, like ‘Out of Hand’, whose protagonist, a Jamaican woman who arrived in the UK on the
Empire Windrush in 1948, reflects on her life in the country, but also others with a Scottish focus,
particularly in the section ‘Wha’s like us?’. Here, for instance, ‘The Oldest Woman in Scotland’
defiantly resists the insulting curiosity of her neighbours about her adopted black grandchildren.
The exploration of belonging and the need to track genealogical lines recurs in ‘Big Milk’, whose
protagonist’s efforts to trace her biological mother lead to a symbolic closed house, with two
empty milk bottles at the door. Her second short-story collection, Wish I was Here (2006), was
published the year after Life Mask and shares its overall melancholic tone, along with a focus on
broken relationships. Despite this, Kay often treats her characters’ solitude with a touch of humour
that mitigates the intensity of the conflicts explored. For instance, the protagonist of the title
story, a single woman in her mid-40s with no family attachments, regrets in a tragicomic inebri-
ated monologue her only friend’s happiness now she has a new lover, which has left the protagonist
even more alone. Her latest collection, Reality, Reality (2012), also shows Kay’s intelligent use of
humour. The stories cover various stages in the lives of women, who struggle with body monitoring
and strict dieting, addictions, solitude, or the desire to be loved, but are also ground breakers, like
‘Grace and Rose’, who have the first lesbian wedding in Shetland. The stories enquire into the
nature of truth by focusing on the many faces of reality, which is understood in relation to the
dreams, subjective memories, and fantasies of their characters.
Her most recent publication is another collection of poems, Bantam (2017), published after her
appointment as Scots Makar. It complements Kay’s previous examinations of her genealogical
lines by focusing, mostly, on four generations of her family (grandparents to son), thereby connect-
ing the past, present, and future of Scotland with the embodiment of these times through her
family in poems like ‘Diamond Colonsay’, about the love and political commitment of her adop-
tive parents, and ‘High Womb’, elucidating the physicality and the emotions of giving birth. This
imbrication of a general context into the rendering of intimate issues was particularly clear in the
differentiated parts of The Adoption Papers, as explained above, while now the complementarity is
more subtle, less sharply split. This collection continues Kay’s social and political criticism, very
directly in ‘Planet Farage’, which foresees the consequences of Brexit and denounces the discourses
that fostered it, but also in ‘Threshold’, written for the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 2016
(Kay 2017, p. 57). Here, Kay takes up Morgan’s and Lochhead’s baton, elaborating on the image
of opening doors, by focusing on the interstice that both separates and has the potential to unite
people in the country. In celebrating the richness of Scottish plurality, Kay vindicates democracy,
social justice and equity, as her predecessor Makars did before her, welcoming in a range of lan-
guages (as ‘it takes more than one language to tell a story’) both local people and newcomers alike
(Kay 2017, p. 19). Kay, like Liz Lochhead, embodies ‘Scotland’s changing faces’, the changing
values of a rich cultural tradition open to the world beyond (Kay 2017, p. 17).
Notes
1 This research was supported by the Spanish National purpose of ‘entertain[ing] and accompany[ing] people
R&D Programme, project RTI2018–097186-B-I00 in the era of social distancing’, and of helping artists
(Strangers and Cosmopolitans) financed by MCIU/ economically at such difficult times (www.scottishpo-
AEI/FEDER, EU, and by the R&D Programme of etrylibrary.org.uk/2020/05/makar-to-makar).
the Principado de Asturias, through the Research 3 This concept was coined by Paul Gilroy in The Black
Group Intersections (grant number GRUPIN Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), a
IDI/2018/000167). study of the effects of colonialism and the slave trade
2 The promotion of culture is one of the responsibilities on contemporary Black diasporic cultures. His empha-
of the post, as Kay’s initiative From Makar to Makar sis on routes, rather than roots, points at the importance
exemplifies. This online literary festival initiated on of understanding identities as fluid and selective in
14 May 2020, a few months after the Covid-19 crises contexts of translocation and displacement.
impacted dramatically on Europe, served the double
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46
Contemporary Poetry – Carol-Ann Duffy,
Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson
Danny O’Connor
Department of English, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, Merseyside, UK
‘I suspect you’d/hoped to impress me’, writes Kathleen Jamie in ‘The Stags’, ‘to lift to my sight/
our shared country’ (Jamie 2018, p. 172). So it is that the pre-eminent Scottish poets of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century are in many ways typical of the ‘broad church’ that
defines the poetry of the era. ‘Don Paterson asserts that “Scotland” isn’t a literary boundary, it’s
a political one’, adding that since his language is English his influences are taken from the
breadth of the language’s territory: ‘most of my own favourite poets are Irish or American’
(Paterson 2018, p. 5). All three poets are, in various ways, displaced from a certain idea of
Scotland evoked in Jamie’s ‘The Graduates’: ‘we emigrants of no farewell/who keep our bit of
language//in jokes and quotes/our working knowledge/of coal-pits’ (Jamie 2018, p. 97). This is
particularly the case for Carol Ann Duffy, who left Scotland at an early age. As such, the work of
all three poets is international as much as it is national. Whilst there are thematic connections
between the work of Duffy, Jamie and Paterson, in addition to their contemporaries, none of
these entrenches the poets into a narrow school or movement. Whilst they overlap in a tendency
towards the anecdotal mode that demarcates British poetry of the 1990s, they utilise it differ-
ently, and are equally likely to swerve it altogether. We may draw attention to the thematic
recurrence of gender in all three poets; or the frequent use of Scots in the work of Jamie and
Paterson; place Jamie’s nature poetry alongside Paterson’s occasional forays; or note the re-
evaluation of myth in Duffy and Paterson; however, these links are neither tenuous nor binding.
Instead, they are emblematic of a group firmly rooted in a poetics that is intellectual without
being avant-garde, popular without necessarily condescending to its audience, outward-looking
without losing sight of Scotland. Accordingly, this chapter will approach the work of these poets
and the breadth of their subjects – gender, nature, cities, sport, sexuality, music – with Jamie’s

Contemporary Poetry – Carol-Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson 587
aim in mind, to provide ‘a sort of connective tissue, where [oneself] meets the world’ allowing
their disparate themes and forms to blend into a patchwork of Scottish poetry (Jamie 2005).
Carol Ann Duffy
On being appointed Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes declared his intention to act as a voice for the
tribe at a time when he felt Britain was breaking apart into its home nations. When accepting
the offer to become Poet Laureate in 2009, Carol Ann Duffy was less mythically orientated: ‘The
decision was purely because they hadn’t had a woman’ (Duffy 2009). Nor a Scot, for that matter,
too. She preferred (as she did throughout her Laureateship – for instance, using her annual sti-
pend to establish the Ted Hughes Award to promote new poetry) to deflect some of the attention
elsewhere, adding that her appointment was ‘recognition of the great women poets we now have
writing, like Alice Oswald’ (ibid.) It is a gesture that corresponds to a great deal of Duffy’s
poetry, its feminism and polyphony. Undoubtedly one of the most popular poets of her genera-
tion, Duffy tends not to speak from a position of experiential authority, but through others
instead. Whilst she has written in something approaching an autobiographical mode, her poet-
ry’s strength comes from its multiplicity of voices, from a ‘Psychopath’ to ‘Frau Freud’ – the way
in which she weaves colloquial scraps into the nest of poetry. Little of her life intrudes overtly on
her poetry, but it undoubtedly leaves its trace. Born in Glasgow, Duffy moved to Stafford when
she was six years old. ‘Originally’, one of the few poems that deals more explicitly with bio-
graphical material, considers the after-effect of such a move:
Do I only think?
I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space
and the right place? Now, Where do you come from?
strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate.
(Duffy 2019, p. 127)
Counterintuitively, it is tempting to read Duffy’s dislocation into her ability to adopt other
voices, as though this one fact from her life allows her to inhabit so many others. Nonetheless,
‘Originally’ is spare with specific geographical detail – there is nothing, for instance, to explic-
itly root the poem to Glasgow or Stafford. Although her use of colloquialism and anecdote is
comparable to her contemporaries, such as Simon Armitage or in other ways Jamie and Paterson,
her tendency to avoid locating the universal in the local stands her apart. Duffy’s particulars are
recognisable, if deliberately generalised: ‘Corners, which seem familiar,/leading to unimagined,
pebble-dashed estates’(Duffy 2019, p. 127). However, one word stands apart from this tendency:
‘skelf’. Unlike the use of Scots or Scottish dialect in the work of Jamie and Paterson, where it is
often deployed for its musical qualities or to slip into a more local register, the effect here is
opposite. Unfamiliar, in a poem of otherwise plain language, the word performs its gesture, the
‘skelf of shame’ sticking in the throat at the sight of her ‘brother swallow[ing] a slug’ in an effort
to fit in (Duffy 2019, p. 127). This small word splinters from the loss of ‘river, culture, speech’,
drawing attention to its otherness.
This displacement or sense of being outside coincides with a left-wing political sensibility
that renders Duffy perhaps not so much of a surprising choice to be Poet Laureate in the current
political climate (certainly as far as the arts are concerned), but undoubtedly a revisionist one in
regard to the role’s national status. Uncomfortable with the notion of writing as a lone poetic
celebrant for the occasion of the marriage of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, Duffy
chose instead to publish her poem, ‘Rings’, alongside poems from figures such as Jackie Kay,
Imtiaz Dharker, the current National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke and Scottish Makar Liz
Lochhead. Her use of the occasion to highlight the work of so many female poets (there were
others on the list, and some male poets too) reflects her feminist ambition for the role, but the
refractory nature of this gesture also constructs an alternative idea of what it means to be repre-
sentative – not speaking from one centre, but recognising the multiplicity of centres and per-
spectives. Her interpretation of this role is more democratic when it is required to speak than
that of her forebears. On other occasions, however, as ‘Liverpool’ – a city where Duffy lived and
studied – demonstrates, she is unafraid to use the platform of the role to make political state-
ment. Collected in among her Laureate poems in Ritual Lighting (2014), ‘Liverpool’ reacts to the
Hillsborough Report into the stadium disaster that killed 96 fans, noting that there is ‘no lan-
guage for the slandered dead […] not the clock, slow handclapping the coroner’s deadline,/the
memo to Thatcher, or the tabloid headline…’ (Duffy 2019, p. 515). That she should include a
poem such as this in her laureate collection is an overtly political gesture, and speaks to her revi-
sionist occupancy of the role of Poet Laureate.
‘Liverpool’ is more respectful than excoriating, but the political charge of Duffy’s poetry has
not gone unnoticed. Although her work is regularly taught in schools and frequently appears on
exam syllabi, the dispute over the murderous monologue of ‘Education for Leisure’ (when exter-
nal examiner Pat Schofield complained that the poem glorified knife crime and it was conse-
quently removed from the AQA GCSE anthology) demonstrates a capacity to shock or outrage
that is in many ways a consequence of her propensity for voices. ‘Education for Leisure’ was
described by Schofield as ‘a bit weird. But having read her other poems I found they were all a
little bit weird. But that’s me’ (Addley 2008). It is by no means a new debate – Duffy’s forebear
Hughes was subject to similar objections decades earlier regarding the supposed glorification of
violence in ‘Hawk Roosting’ (another staple of school anthologies), a poem very similar in struc-
ture and tone to ‘Education for Leisure’. From this vantage it is impossible to say what Schofield
found ‘weird’ about this and Duffy’s other anthologised poems, but one might safely speculate
that it has something to do with the way in which the speaker is allowed to speak for himself,
without another voice interrupting or correcting, butting in with its moral authority. Duffy’s
response to the furore, ‘Mrs Schofield’s GCSE’, alights from the earlier poem’s allusion King Lear
(‘I squash a fly against the window with my thumb./We did that at school. Shakespeare’), using
the structure of GCSE questions to illustrate her point: violence, knife violence in particular, is
a frequent occurrence in revered texts (Duffy 2019, p. 13). But also that poetry has a positive
role to play in relation to such violence: ‘Explain how poetry/pursues the human like the smit-
ten moon/above the weeping, laughing earth; how we/make prayers of it’ (Duffy 2019, p. 445).
It would be hard to describe ‘Education for Leisure’ as a ‘smitten moon’, but prayer offers a use-
ful analogy for Duffy’s poetic monologues. Only what is so arresting about ‘Education for
Leisure’ is that rather than talking expectantly or hopefully to a distant, deified reader or lis-
tener, it reaches out alarmingly: ‘I touch your arm’ (Duffy 2019, p. 13). Perhaps unintention-
ally, ‘weird’ is an apposite word for the effect of the poem; it is weird in the older meaning of
the word, the idea of destiny, inscribing the reader’s fate with the implication of what comes
after this line, so clearly expressed in the poem’s opener: ‘I am going to kill something today’
(Duffy 2019, p. 13). ‘Education for Leisure’ invites us to empathise with the speaker, encourages
us to understand what lay behind his (let’s presume) violent impulses, then arrests us by making
their consequences ours – reasserting distinctions that have been blurred through our immer-
sion in his voice. Perhaps what Schofield found ‘weird’ about ‘Education for Leisure’ is the
uneasiness of this relationship: we are being asked to recognise the injustice of being educated
for the ‘leisure’ of a life on the dole, to empathise with the feeling of worthlessness that tacitly
underpins the speaker’s assertions of his ‘genius’, to consider that crimes such as the one he is
about to commit are not just instances of individual pathology, but also have a complex rela-
tionship with social conditions – we are being asked to comprehend all of these things whilst
being the victim of the crime.
For all of its menace, there are also comedic notes in ‘Education for Leisure’ (‘The cat avoids
me’), indicative of the way in which Duffy wields comedy and satire in the course of tracing the
scars left by the political cultures of her lifetime. The portrait of the nation in ‘Translating the
English, 1989’ finds its energy from the mock- paean to ‘Wheel- clamp. Dogs. Vagrants’
(Duffy 2019, p. 132). Its striking juxtapositions are delivered in a broken English that helps to
shock the familiar out of its cosy status: ‘The Fergie,/The Princess Di and the football hooligan,
truly you will/like it here, Squire’. For all of the references to ‘Much lead in petrol’ and ‘ten pints
and plenty rape’, perhaps the most cutting indictment comes in the bathos of the opening line:
‘Welcome to my country! We have here Edwina Currie’. Duffy’s wit takes centre-stage in the
feminist reappraisals of The World’s Wife (1999), as her penchant for flipping our apprehension of
familiar things is writ-large across history. Duffy has expressed discomfort at being pigeon-holed
as a feminist poet: ‘in her refusal to conform to any stereotypical notion of femininity, feminism
or women’s poetry, she has opened up many exciting and important possibilities for the range of
poetry and for its audience’ (Rees-Jones 2010, p. 3). ‘Little Red-Cap’ depicts the wolf ‘reading
his verse out loud/in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw/red wine staining his bearded
jaw’ (Duffy 2019, p. 229). It is a description redolent of her comment to Jeanette Winterson
regarding her early experiences on the poetry scene: ‘In the 1970s, when I started on the circuit,
I was called a poetess. Older male poets, the Larkin generation, were both incredible patronising
and incredibly randy. If they weren’t patting you on the head, they were patting you on the bum’
(Winterson 2005). The wolf of ‘Little Red-Cap’ offers an initiation into poetry, which the speaker
comes to realise is one-noted: ‘greying wolf/howls the same old song at the moon’ (Duffy 2019,
p. 230). Unlike the Grimm version, in which the Red Riding Hood is rescued by a male hunter
with an axe, Duffy’s ‘Little Red Cap’ frees herself, takes ‘an axe to the wolf’ and leaves the forest
with her ‘flowers, singing, all alone’ (Duffy 2019, p. 230). It is a moment indicative of the sub-
versive wit that colours the collection, from the observation of ‘Mrs Darwin’ to her husband that
‘Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you’ (Duffy 2019, p. 246). Then
there are the satisfying rhymes of ‘Mrs Sisysphus’ and ‘Mrs Icarus’, where the latter ‘is not the
first or last’ woman to find herself on a ‘hillock’ to see her husband demonstrating himself to be
a ‘total, utter, absolute, Grade A Pillock’ (Duffy 2019, p. 279). (The etymology of ‘pillock’, lest
we forget, traces us back to ‘penis’.) Most of the poems focus on the stultification and entrap-
ment, for women, of heterosexual marriage – a theme that emerges elsewhere in Duffy’s poetry,
in ‘The Literature Act’, for instance. While her husband is rolling his stone, ‘Mrs Sisyphus’ lies
‘awake in the dark,/feeling like Noah’s wife did/when he hammered away at the ark’ (Duffy 2019,
p. 247); ‘Mrs Midas’ concludes that ‘What gets me now is not the idiocy or greed/but the lack of
thought for me’ (Duffy 2019, p. 239). Not all of the relationships in The World’s Wife are stultify-
ing: given the opportunity to speak her own sonnet, Duffy’s ‘Anne Hathaway’ declares that she
holds Shakespeare ‘in the casket of my widow’s head/as he held me upon that next best bed’
(Duffy 2019, p. 256).
Love poetry is one of the richest areas of Duffy’s work. Nowhere is this more pronounced than
in Rapture (2005), which charts the course of a relationship, where ‘Falling in love/is glamorous
hell’ (Duffy 2019, p. 369). Rapture weaves the traditional notes of the love-poem sequence with
contemporary features, ‘Text’, for instance, finding the poet ‘tend[ing] the mobile now/like an
injured bird’ and re-reading her lover’s messages in search of ‘the small xx’ (Duffy 2019, p. 370).
This ‘small xx’ is both a pair of kisses and chromosomes, and a small reminder that the speaker
of these poems is a woman addressing another woman. Duffy is not only the first Scot and the
first woman to occupy the role of Poet Laureate, she is also the first lesbian. Rapture, with its
references to Shakespeare and Homer, among others, seeks to refashion to the tropes of the male
lover’s address, to trace – as she writes for her distant lover in ‘Venus’ – the ‘transit of Venus/over
the face of the sun’ (Duffy 2019, p. 412). ‘Rapture’, as the collection’s eponymous poem informs
us, not only evokes the ecstasy of love, but also the way in which thought of another can trans-
pose you elsewhere, from the sonnet’s initial assertion, ‘Thought of by you all day, I think of you’
to its concluding couplet: ‘Huge skies connect us, here to there. Desire and passion on the think-
ing air’ (Duffy 2019, p. 384). The ‘thinking air’ is a more fragile connection than physical con-
tact or presence, but it is the purest evocation of love in Duffy’s poetry, reflexively informing
sensual encounters. The kiss ‘recalled’ in ‘Rapture’, ‘unstrung, like pearls, this chain of words’,
in turn echoes one of her most anthologised poems, ‘Warming Her Pearls’. Here, the maid’s love
for her mistress, evoked through the conceit of her body heat bringing lustre to her mistress’s
pearls, is the one physical token of an affair that is otherwise conducted in the mind. She ‘think[s]
of her’, ‘dream[s] about her’, ‘see[s]/her every movement in [her] head’, the tension of this dis-
tance expressed in the disparity between the cooling pearls and the maid suffers in her own
‘glamorous hell’ of love: ‘All night/I feel their absence and burn’ (Duffy 2019, p. 120). As in
Rapture and elsewhere, she is confident in deploying the traditional tropes of love poetry – the
Petrarchan heat, for instance, or the metaphysical conceit in the shared pearls – in a context that
reinvigorates and rethinks their use. Attending delicately to her mistress, there is a moment
where they are apprehended together: ‘In her looking glass/my red lips part as though I want to
speak’. What she wants to say is, in context, unspeakable – but how often is this the case with
Duffy’s speakers? From a murder cut-off by a radio DJ, or a maid unable to publically express her
love for her mistress, this is the generosity of Duffy’s ventriloquism, using poetry to create space
for voices that may otherwise be silenced because they are deemed to be ‘weird’.
Kathleen Jamie
Where Duffy inhabits the voices of other humans, Jamie has a complex relationship in speaking
to and for flora and fauna. ‘Whit seek ye here?’ the poet asks in ‘Gale’ (Jamie 2018 p. 240), the
poem chosen to close Jamie’s Selected Poems. It is addressed to wind (and perhaps its long track
record of inspiring poetry), but could equally be addressed to the poet herself. In her poetry, as
in her nature writing, Jamie goes in search of questions than can lead us to a deeper understand-
ing of ourselves as (a sometimes problematic) part of nature; she reports back not with answers
or elucidations necessarily, but with things. ‘The Cliff’ invites us to ‘let space open/between word
and world/wind-strummed, trembling’, recalibrating the relationship between signifier and sig-
nified into something potentially more musical than linguistic (Jamie 2018, p. 221). It is in the
slipperiness of language and its target, the struggle to capture nature in language, that Jamie
locates poetry – and particularly the experience of being aware of ourselves as being in and of
nature. As a nature poet, she is careful not to speak uncomplicatedly for nature, but to it. When
she writes of the ‘undamnable song’ of ‘The Dipper’, for instance, ‘It isn’t mine to give’
(Jamie 2018, p. 160). Likewise, ‘Alder’, collected in The Tree House (2004), approaches the tree as
a pupil as well as an observer: ‘won’t you teach me/a way to live/on this damp ambiguous earth?’
(Jamie 2018, p. 134). As a dialogue, it is inevitably one-sided; her apostrophes to nature respond
to its hidden tongue by reframing it in language rather than trying to reproduce it. ‘Alder’ fin-
ishes with an image of the sun striking the tree after rainfall: ‘how you’ll sparkle –//like a foun-
tain in a wood/of untold fountains’. ‘Untold’, of course, as innumerable; but its other meaning – of
unreported – gestures to the unspeakableness of the whole. The use of simile rather than metaphor
is important in that it structures the relationship. The poet cannot be so assertive as to say that
the tree is ‘a fountain’ because the mode of address relies on ambiguity. As such, the rhapsodic
simile at the end of the poem is instructive: it is, in one sense, an answer to the earlier question
of how to live, but it is an inspired response rather than an informed response. The ‘untold foun-
tains’ recall the fountain of Peirine – inspiration of the poets – gently reminding us that this is
not the message of the tree, but an effort at meeting it halfway between its ineffability and our
desire to communicate. Fountains are, of course, often the centrepiece of gardens, but Jamie
pushes by against this disciplined idea of nature by transfiguring the fountain as something
naturally occurring and sublime. The tension in the interplay between the poet’s words and
nature’s muteness is registered precisely in this image, telling us about the tree whilst insisting
that it is beyond telling.
The reference to ‘receding glaciers’ in ‘Alder’ gestures to a geological outlook that becomes
more pronounced as Jamie’s career progresses. ‘Thon Stane’ personifies ‘Thon earthfast boulder
by the bothy door’, contrasting the permanence and enormity of the boulder with the tenuous-
ness of the shelter and its transitory inhabitants (Jamie 2018, p. 206). There’s a tension between
the undoubted stasis of the boulder and its personification as ‘a chapman pedalling bracken-
besoms’, seeming as though he has just arrived. But the stone only ‘proffers his mute wares/as
he has for long enough’. The colloquial expressions relating to time – ‘just this very forenoon
[…] has for long enough’ – are integral to the tension, these throwaway phrases brushing comi-
cally, awkwardly, with this taciturn presence looming at the door. Jamie is conscious of our
difficulty to find meaning in and perhaps inscribe onto something that will outlast us so con-
siderably. Here, even a passing stone (which, of course, it is, only very slowly), is passing in
what appears to be in complete stasis and silence. Similar predicaments are figured elsewhere,
in a Spring journey through ‘The Glen’, for instance, where the speaker enquires of a ‘small
invincible bird’ that if it doesn’t mind her ‘lean[ing] on this here boulder’ to ‘get my eye in,
lighting on this and that’:
‘It’s nothing to us’, you might shrug,

– and you’d be right.
(Jamie 2018, p. 213)
Again, the colloquialism registers the complexity of the situation, where ‘nothing’ is no problem – a
friendly invitation to sit – but also an acknowledgement that to the bird it is ‘nothing’ in the sense
that it is meaningless. Jamie’s canny use of colloquialisms frames the complexities of her nature
poetry, where the speaker performs that very human role of seeking some sense of companion-
ship in nature, a shared ontology or a sense of belonging, whilst simultaneously highlighting not
only the fragility of any such kinship, but also the ways in which it can be profoundly misguided.
The convolutions of our relationship with nature – whether and when, in particular, to
intervene – sharpen in Jamie’s work as her career progresses and the climate crisis looms larger.
Her essay, ‘Magpie Moth’ in Sightlines (2012) wrestles over whether to rescue a moth that has
found itself floating on a lochan, ‘held flat by the surface tensions of the water’ (Jamie 2012,
p. 173). The short essay follows her vacillations around a central question: ‘why intervene,
after all? It only leads to trouble, but I was crouched above a stricken moth with a spoon in
my hand’. It concludes with Jamie ruminating on how the moth, when on the water, ‘looked
to be in a state of bliss, but what do we know?’ (Jamie 2012, p. 176). The ache of indecision
is best captured by the ‘Ach’ that opens that penultimate paragraph, but the final sentence (a
paragraph of its own) is equally revelatory: ‘I shook myself, went back up to the car’. After all
of this fine, detailed attention to the small struggle of a moth on water and rock, it is a
reminder that they are also in a world of cars, a world of human civilisation – that these things
do not exist in isolation. We might not know how the creatures are feeling, but we are
undoubtedly part of it. Perhaps it is not as extreme as the woman of ‘The Creel’ fears – ‘that if
she ever put [her burden] down/the world would go out like a light’ – but there is no doubt
that Jamie’s vision of nature acknowledges the way in which it is intertwined with culture
(Jamie 2018, p. 158). This is inexplicable linked to gender, too. Being interviewed for The
Guardian, Jamie argues that nature writing has been ‘colonised – by middle-class white men’
(Barkham 2019). Land-ownership, which is a subject she has written about elsewhere, is tar-
geted as a particular cause of this cultural silo.
Part of Jamie’s response to this is not only to foreground herself as a woman in nature,
but also to construct her encounters as exchanges rather than invasions. ‘The Hinds’
alights on the tension between versions of belonging in view of nature, where in a ‘waking
dream’ the speaker views the titular creatures ‘alive/to lands held on long lease/in their
animal minds’ (Jamie 2018, p. 217). One of their number, ‘with a queenly air’, stares back
at the poet:
as though to say: ‘Aren’t we

the bonniest companie?
Come to me,
You’ll be happy, but never go home’.
(Jamie 2018, p. 217)
These final lines resituate our response to the creatures, which has hitherto been conducted
through isolated observation. Of course, this is not the deer speaking, but the poet (we are
reminded multiple times: through ‘as though’, in the inverted commas and in the italics) – like-
wise, the impression of the poet invoked in the eyes of the deer remains the poet’s impression,
albeit channelled through her sense of the deer. In ‘Why Look at Animals?’ John Berger writes
of a ‘narrow abyss of non-comprehension’ forming in the eye-contact between humans and
animals:
When he is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him. His
recognition of this is what makes the look of the animal familiar. And yet the animal is distinct and
can never be confused with man […] The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves,
mountains and seas, are specifically addressed to man.
(Berger 1980, p. 5)
It is this relationship that modules Jamie’s careful use of ‘home’ as the final word of the poem.
Attempting to intuit the secret of the deer’s look, whatever is welcoming is also touched by this
reminder of difference, re-alienating the poet. So that whilst being in what we have separated as
nature may form the ‘bonniest companie’, there is no way of overcoming that separation to ren-
der it as ‘home’.
The question of ‘home’ is complicated in Jamie’s work. As with Duffy and Paterson, her
poetry (although it is often rural) is far from provincial. Having used the prize money from her
Eric Gregory win as a young poet to travel the Himalayas, it is no surprise that journeying is a
prominent part of her poetry; whilst this is often further afield in her earlier work, motherhood
reconfigures what it means to travel in her more recent collections of poetry and essays. The
‘Karakoram Highway’ sequence of The Way We Live (1987) contemplates the interplay of people
and landscapes. Part IV considers a bridge as being ‘like a single written word/on a vast and
rumpled parchment’, which she concludes is ‘The statement of man in landscape’ (Jamie 2018,
p. 18). We might conclude that it is a statement of elision as well as connection, of conquest as
well as agreement. But we might also consider how this turns back into poetry, of metaphors as
bridges attempting this same relationship with the land – poetry establishing connections with
people and things as fragile as the bridges of the poem, ‘of construction/shouted over the canyon’
(Jamie 2018, p. 18).
One of the most salient features of Jamie’s travel writing (in prose and poetry) is the way
in which her experiences of elsewhere reach back to Scotland and vice-versa, collapsing the
distinction between the parochial and cosmopolitan. Nowhere is this cross-pollination more
celebrated that in ‘The Queen of Sheba’, Jamie’s lively riposte to the restraints placed on
(often younger) women by that refrain ‘invoked’ in Scotland’s ‘Presbyterian living rooms’:
‘whae do you think y’ur?’ (Jamie 2018, pp. 57–60). She comes ‘tae this dump’ by camel ‘from
her desert sands/to the peat and bracken/of the Pentland hills’ in an arrival redolent of Adrian
Henri’s ‘The Entry of Christ into Liverpool’ – which demonstrates Jamie’s range, from
closely-observed nature poems to social satire. Here the queen’s triumphant entry into
Scotland is inspiration against patriarchal restraints, just as Jamie’s lines unshackle them-
selves from the left-hand margin.
[...] we want
to help her
ask some Difficult Questions
(Jamie 2018, p. 60)
The cultural clash is emancipatory; for instance, Scots is used to reveal how she is breaking tradi-
tions, ‘lead[ing] those great soft camels/widdershins round the kirk-yaird’. The way in which the
Queen of Sheba ‘eats/avocados with apostle spoons’ is borderline sacrilege, but is also indicative of
the way Jamie brings new meaning to and uses for her heritage. (Again, this is equally true of the
way she deploys Scots in her poetry, intermingling it with English as a musical signifier in addi-
tion to the cultural connotations of its signification.) This sense of an international localism finds
an exclamatory form in the ‘AYE!’ of ‘The Republic of Fife’, which finishes with another image of
bridges, where the citizens of Fife are instructed to look outwards to ‘Europe, Africa, the Forth and
Tay bridges’ and to ‘wave to the waving citizens/of all those other countries’ (Jamie 2018,
pp. 84–85). But Jamie’s journeys are just as much about the return as they are the departure. ‘For
years I wandered hill and moor’ she writes in ‘The Tradition’, going in search of ‘the blacksmith’
who would be able to break ‘the dragging links/That bound me to the past’, only to conclude that
‘the wild ways we think we walk/Just bring us here again’ (Jamie 2018, p. 235).
Don Paterson
In his lengthy ars poetica, The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre, Paterson poses an often troubling
question: ‘what is a poem?’ (Paterson 2018, p. 1). The Poem offers plenty of useful insights
on its titular matters, but spending over 700 pages attempting to answer the question of
what a poem is, exactly, without ever really arriving a coherent and sustainable definition
suggests that even for a practitioner as studied as Paterson, the question is best accepted as
unanswerable. What a Don Paterson poem is, on the other hand, narrows the field consider-
ably. Whilst the best answer would undoubtedly be a tautology of sorts, mapping the
topography of his work can bring us closer to the spirit of his investigation into poetry.
Which is to say that Paterson’s poems bear the uncertainty of this question – not through
any demonstrable lack of confidence in the poetry, but through a curiosity regarding the
compulsion towards a linguistic response to the world. The question is framed (with per-
haps half-an-eye on the pun) in the epigraph to his debut collect, Nil Nil from Michael
Green’s Stage Noises and Effects (1958):
Slamming Door:
A real door slammed off-stage gives the best effect.
(Paterson 1993, epigraph)
The epigraph is not explicitly extended as a definition of poetry, but it certainly functions as
one – the slammed door is reminiscent of the real toads in Marianne Moore’s imaginary gar-
den. That Paterson should open his career directing us to noises and effects is telling; his
musical expertise no doubt contributes to his poetic modes. As an accomplished jazz guitar-
ist, Paterson is used to treading that fine, extemporised line between structure and collapse.
We can trace his jazz modes in poems such as ‘Song for Natalie “Tusja” Beridze’, which
stretches its couplets (mostly) out of metrical shape, just about holding together the tune of
rhymes such as ‘volume slider’ with ‘supercollider’ and ‘Pharell remix’ with ‘plays the house-
bricks’ (Paterson 2009, pp. 17–21). It is the anticipation of these nonetheless surprising con-
nections, reminiscent of Paul Muldoon, that manage to sustain the high-wire act of it all – a
testament to Paterson’s rhyming ability, on display elsewhere in his work. Not all of his
rhymes are as attention-seeking as those of ‘Song for Natalie “Tusja” Beridze’, but they are
often integral to the formal structure his poetry; ‘Requests’ mockingly rebukes the idea that
the technique has run its course:
expand on your idea that rhyme

is dead, or tell us of the time
you dropped your cellphone in the toilet
a joke, a bird call, please don’t spoil it,
go on with your brilliant proem!
Anything but read your poem.
(Paterson 2015, p. 30)
Surely Paterson cannot have been the first to rhyme ‘proem’ and ‘poem’, and yet it bears the
oddity of being obvious and original simultaneously.
The combination of registers is another element of Paterson’s musical influence, where the lyri-
cal mucks in with the colloquial, Scots with English (King’s or commoner’s). As his work pro-
gresses there is more frequent use of Scots and Scottish dialect. Generally his Scots poetry is
published with a glossary, as in ‘Form’, ‘Twinflooer’ and ‘Zen Sang at Dayligaun’ in Landing Light
(2003), though it is the use of Scottish dialect that is often the wilier presence in his work. For
instance, the way in which his musical companion addresses their Borneo audience ‘with a
Englishness that made me shiver’ in ‘The Last Waltz’ deftly alienates ‘Englishness’ from its stand-
ard grammar (Paterson 2003, p. 36). The closing image of ‘Morning Prayer’ has an inebriated and
joyous slip into dialect: ‘I pish gloriously into the dawn skies/while below me the ferns nod their
spattered assent’ (Paterson 1993, p. 2). Paterson’s Scots poems tend to be accompanied by a glos-
sary, but the use of dialect often brings a levity to the lyricism – as in his elegy for Michael Donaghy:
The voice paused; and when it had resumed

It had softened, and I heard the smile in it.
Donno, I can’t keep this bullshit up.
On other occasions, it acts as an entry into a voice in the opening line of the poem, such as in
‘Colophon’ from Landing Light or later in ‘The Rain at Sea’ from Rain, where the colloquial apos-
trophe grounds the lyricism: ‘Aye, maybe I did resent/your home in every element’ (Paterson 2009,
p. 12).
One of his fixations is water. The eponymous poem of Rain expresses the poet’s affection for
‘films that start with rain’ – no matter how bad they turn out to be (Paterson 2009, p. 60). The
opening image of ‘a starlit gutter, running gold/with the neon of a drugstore sign’ promises a
kind of absolution, biblical in the sense of being ‘washed clean with the flood’, but concluding
with a rapturous existentialism: ‘none of this, none of this matters’ (Paterson 2009, pp. 60–61).
The experience of ‘Sliding on Loch Ogil’ is one of intermission and balance, ‘that day spent cleav-
ing/nothing from nothing, like a thrown knife’ (Paterson 2003, p. 4). ‘Sunset, Visingsö’ figures
the Swedish water as a ‘fabulous animal,/I will flay for the colour/it’s skin grows when it dreams’
(Paterson 1993, p. 8). It’s a sentiment echoed in ‘Colophon’:
Anyway, I sank into that favourite dream where I somehow get my thumbnail under the skin of the loch,
and strip it off like cellophane, then wrap myself in it, head to foot: it’s a kind of icy chiffon, this impos-
sibly fine stuff of cold skies and thin sunrises, stitched with blurred motifs of gannet and puffin…
Part of the appeal is erasure, the wearable loch described as a ‘mirror-coat’, in a similar sentiment
to the effacement of ‘Rain’.
Paterson’s Scottish landscapes range from the urban to the wild. His sonnet ‘To Dundee City
Council’, a playful farewell to the city of his birth, finds the speaker having to walk the long
way to the library ‘via ringroad, bombsite, rape tunnel and skip’ (Paterson 2015, p. 28). The
council’s decision to ‘fence off’ the ‘baronial stair’ as a cost-cutting measure is brought into
relief by the (lively) closing couplet’s reference to the poet’s departure ‘for that fine country
called the fuck away./Farewell! Good luck with the V&A’. Making way for the new is here fig-
ured at the expense of the old. Waterscapes, Scottish ones in particular, inspire a response to
what Paterson refers to as his ‘Calvinist tristesse’ (Paterson 2003, p. 68). Perhaps it is this mood –
jocularly registered here with the reference to ‘sleep[ing] it off’ in a ‘stage-coffin’ he ought to
have bought at the ‘boot sale’ – that defines so much of his poetry. ‘The Ferryman’s Arms’, the
opening poem of Nil Nil, finds the mythic in a recognisably Scottish landscape, beating the
bounds of what will become a distinct Paterson territory over the course of his career. After
playing a game of pool against himself in the ‘darkened back room’ of a pub – won convincingly
with ‘an immaculate clearance’ – the speaker boards the hourly ferry, leaving behind his ‘losing
opponent […] stuck in his tent of light, sullenly/knocking the balls in, for practice, for next
time’ (Paterson 1993, p. 1). Paterson’s poems often broach liminal states, frequently using
islands and journeys by water as metaphors, often in relation to death. Like ‘The Ferryman’s
Arms’, the opening poem of Landing Light, ‘Luing’, with its journey to ‘our unsung/innermost
isle’, offers an ambiguous relationship between death and new life, ‘reborn into a secret candi-
dacy’ but also ‘hover[ing] on the threshold, knowing for certain/the first touch of light will
finish you’ (Paterson 2003, p. 1). The earlier poem foreshadows its division of selves in the
‘half-pint of Guinness’ of the opening line, not least in the use of light and shade. The ferry
arrives eerily without disturbing water:
black as my stout, from somewhere unspeakable

to here, where the foaming lip mussitates endlessly,
trying, with a nutter’s persistence, to read
and re-read the shoreline.
Leaving the light of his opponent for the dark of the water evokes a division of self, though the
poem leaves us in a murkier space between the two. Breaking the line at ‘unspeakable’ disrupts
the syntax sufficiently to surface the homonym of ‘hear’ in ‘here’, as if we might (should we listen
hard enough) hear the ‘unspeakable’ after all. It is a possibility extended in the ‘foaming lip’
of the water, the way it ‘mussitates’ – where the archaic, Latinate word for ‘murmuring’, along-
side the assonance of ‘endlessly’ and ‘nutter’s persistence’, contributes to an unknown that might,
in the Eliotic sense, communicate before it’s understood. It is a music that invites us to ‘read/and
re-read the shoreline’ through its sound, however misguided an effort that might be: the sound,
we might conclude, of a door slammed offstage. The poem doesn’t reveal itself through this
musical effect – it’s not as though the sound of it resolves the tension between the speaker wait-
ing to depart on the ferry and his imaginary self practicing his pool shots in the pub – but there
is an attempt at communicating here that defies linear sense. It is a tension between the poem as
the thing in itself and the poem as recreation of something else (a door slammed off-stage). It is
not one that is there to be resolved in Paterson’s poetry, but is instead embraced.
His most recent collection, Zonal, is sold to us by the cover copy’s assertion that ‘the crisis of
mid-life may be a permanent state of mind’; although the collection introduces plenty of new
themes in Paterson’s work, this one is nothing new. From ‘The Ferryman’s Arms’ onwards, his
poetry has one eye on the way in which death shapes the meaning of life. Although it is open to
numerous global influences, historical and contemporary, one of the most insistent is Dante,
whose midlife crisis provides the measure for Paterson’s encounters with death. Sometimes, this
is alleviated by fatherhood, as in ‘Walking with Russell’ where ‘Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin/
and the true path was lost to me as ever/when you cut in front and lit it as you ran’ (Paterson 2003,
p. 5). ‘Death’, though, in Zonal, has children of his own – or would have, at least, if it wasn’t
for the thought of his own inevitability:
but whenever he thought about them, or what they’d talk about around the big TV,
the kitchen table as he made his famous chilli, or the school gate after hockey practice,
all he could ever think of was him delivering the bad news as usual, the worst.
‘Daddy, what do you mean I must leave with you now?’
(Paterson 2020, pp. 8–9)
But for a poet who is so fixated by death, the essential conundrum of the epigraph to Nil Nil
remains: the door is inevitably slammed offstage. Part IV of ‘Phantom’ captures the art of
Paterson’s poetry with its invitation to ‘read these words/on a black moon, in a forest after mid-
night’ with the instruction to keep striking matches, ‘not to light these rooms […] but to see
the kind of dark I laid between them’ (Paterson 2009, p. 54). Part V contends that ‘We come
from nothing and return to it’, but in between are ‘the void in contemplation’ (Paterson 2009,
p. 55). It is the question asked in ‘Here’, where the poet imagines himself in the womb, his
mother’s heart ‘like a landlord at the door’, recalling Hamlet’s troubles and unknown country in
his ‘dear sea up in arms at the wrong shore’: ‘Where are we now?’ (Paterson 2015, p. 3). There is
no answer, but his poetry contends with moments that cannot be explicated, events to be traced
by their absences and outlines – not elucidatory, but interrogative. Perhaps the closest we might
get to defining a Don Paterson poem is the question posed in ‘Colophon’: ‘What’s the opposite
of an epiphany?’
References
Addley, E. (2008). Poet’s Rhyming Riposte Leaves Mrs Jamie, K. (2005). In the nature of things (interview). The
Schofield Gobsmacked. The Guardian. (6 September) Guardian (18 June). https://www.theguardian.com/
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/sep/06/ books/2005/jun/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview15
gcses.poetry.carol.ann.duffy (accessed 28 November (accessed 30 November 2020).
2020). Jamie, K. (2012). Sightlines. London: Sort Of Books.
Barkham, P. (2019). Interview: Kathleen Jamie: Nature Jamie, K. (2018). Selected Poems. London: Picador.
writing has been colonised by white men. The Paterson, D. (1993). Nil Nil. London: Faber and Faber.
Guardian, (17 October) https://www.theguardian.com/ Paterson, D. (2003). Landing Light. London: Faber and Faber.
books/2019/oct/17/kathleen-j amie-s urfacing- Paterson, D. (2009). Rain. London: Faber and Faber.
interview-n ature-w riting-c olonised-b y-w hite-m en Paterson, D. (2015). 40 Sonnets. London: Faber and Faber.
(accessed 27 November 2020). Paterson, D. (2018). The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. London:
Berger, J. (1980). Why Look at Animals. About Looking. Faber and Faber.
London: Bloomsbury. Paterson, D. (2020). Zonal. London: Faber and Faber.
Duffy, C.A. (2009). Interview on Woman’s Hour. Radio 4. Rees-Jones, D. (2010). Writers and Their Work: Carol Ann
Quoted in The Guardian, (1 May). https://www. Duffy, 3e. Devon: Northcote.
theguardian.com/books/2009/may/01/carol-a nn- Winterson, J. (2005). ‘Carol Ann Duffy’ (10 September)
duffy-poet-laureate (accessed 28 November 2020). http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/journalism/carol-
Duffy, C.A. (2019). Collected Poems. London: Picador. ann-duffy (accessed 24 November 2020)
47
Women’s Writing, 1900–2020
Fiona McCulloch
Independent scholar
An anonymous contemporaneous review of Dot Allan’s Hunger March (HM, 1934) in the Glasgow
Herald states, ‘The theme of Hunger March is one which has cried out to be tackled, and Miss
Allan is to be congratulated on having the imagination to see its possibilities for the art of fiction
and on being the first in the field’ (cited in Burgess 2010, p. 189). Despite being ‘congratulated’
as a trailblazer in fictionalising social class and poverty, Allan’s vital contribution to Scottish
Literature has often, like many other women writers, been overlooked, relegated, or received
scant critical attention. With critics favouring their male counterparts, issues like social class
became the preserve of masculinist gritty realism which, in turn, skewed and impoverished
Scotland’s literary landscape and misrepresented women writers’ thematic and aesthetic inter-
ests. Though women’s work has gained increasing attention, far more is required to fully com-
prehend its literary influence.
This essay, then, will offer an overview of a prolific period in Scottish women’s writing, cover-
ing 1900–2020’s considerable expanse. An epoch replete with names, a fraction of whom include
Nan Shepherd, Catherine Carswell, Lorna Moon, Willa Muir, Dot Allan, Nancy Brysson
Morrison, Dorothy Dunnett, Naomi Mitchison, Jane Duncan, Jessie Kesson, Eileen Dunlop,
Muriel Spark, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Margaret Elphinstone, Mollie Hunter, Emma Tennant,
Janice Galloway, Liz Lochhead, A.L. Kennedy, Jackie Kay, Carol Ann Duffy, Candia McWilliam,
Mairi Hedderwick, Val McDermid, Ali Smith, J.K. Rowling, Julie Bertagna, Theresa Breslin,
Cathy MacPhail, Catherine Forde, Claire McFall, Lisa O’Donnell, Anne Donovan, Kerry Hudson,
Jenni Fagan, Denise Mina, Zoe Strachan, and Louise Welsh, several only received due recogni-
tion relatively recently. Glenda Norquay notes, ‘While women such as Margaret Oliphant or
Naomi Mitchison may have felt marginalised from the literary societies of their time, and writers
such as Catherine Carswell and Willa Muir may have searched for new ways to articulate female
desire, they also forged ways of writing that challenged – and were often misunderstood, therefore

ignored by – the societies in which they worked’ (Norquay 2012, p. 6). Regularly ‘ignored’,
literary treasures remained undisclosed until Feminism and Scottish Studies unearthed them.
Despite significant critical inroads, much ground remains to be covered in ensuring women’s
contributions to a national body of work receive due recognition rather than be designated a
footnote. Norquay concurs there is ‘still work to be done in reshaping our understanding of
Scottish literary patterns through a cognizance of women’s role’ (Norquay 2012, p. 5), lest con-
tinued neglect deprive and distort a literary heritage indebted to women’s rich contribution. I
will showcase selected texts, including prominent literary figures Muriel Spark and Ali Smith,
alongside works by Mary Findlater, Dot Allan, and Sara Maitland. Word constraint favours nov-
els and a short story, but poetry, essays, Gaelic texts, drama, children’s and teenage literature’s
importance to the corpus of Scottish women’s writing invites critical interlocutions elsewhere,
many occurring within this volume. Logistics of mobility further complicates categorisation of
Scottish women’s writing: for instance, J.K. Rowling is English but lives in Scotland, and much
of Harry Potter is set in a Scottish fantasy space, whereas Ali Smith is Scottish but resides in
England, with Scotland often featuring in her work, such as Girl Meets Boy. Smith’s titular gen-
der fluidity, like Kay’s Trumpet, exemplify contemporary queering of hegemonic identities and
probe gender parameters. Evidently, my partial perspective of this vast literary panorama offers
a mere snapshot of a tantalisingly bigger picture.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Mary and Jane Findlater’s collaborations and indi-
vidual writings navigate fin de siècle anxieties and new era hesitations. Douglas Gifford deems
them ‘writers caught between two different worlds, between the nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries’, articulating ‘the tensions of their own dilemma’ to ‘exemplify the profound and
paralysing internal debate concerning sexual and gender freedoms more strongly than any
other woman writer in Scotland from the period of Margaret Oliphant to that of the modern
“Scottish Renaissance”’ (Gifford 1997, p. 291). Mary Findlater’s short story ‘Void of
Understanding’ (1987 [1901]) manifests Gifford’s ‘tensions’ and ‘paralysing’ gender concerns
in its depiction of familial instabilities, inserting new stepmother Elsie into disabled boy,
Berry’s life. After his widowed father remarries, Berry is side-lined from domestic comfort.
Gifford identifies Hardy- like tragedy in Findlaters’ female characters, but in ‘Void of
Understanding’ Berry sacrificially freezes to death naked in the snow to save his younger half-
brother, Johnny. Female tragedy emanates from Berry’s deceased mother, who haunts Elsie in
the semblance of her son.
Berry’s fate is plotted from the outset; his impending doom is anticipated from his dispensa-
ble outsider position, shifted from cosy fireside to the living-room’s cold outer regions: ‘though
the one thing that he liked best in the world was to stand at night between his father’s knees and
watch the fire blazing, and get warmed through and through, he never seemed to mind when
Johnny, as was often the case, occupied the coveted position’, whereupon he would ‘creep away
into a corner next to the door, where only a faint degree of heat could penetrate’ (Findlater 1987,
p. 99). The heat/cold binary symbolises Berry’s displacement from fatherly affection, and magni-
fies his susceptibility to cold: ‘As the nights drew on to frost he used to shiver almost continu-
ously’ (Findlater 1987, p. 99). To ‘creep away’ like a dehumanised creature mirrors Elsie’s
intolerance; ‘uncomfortable to look at’, she abhors ‘his ungainly head and cold, swollen hands’
(ibid). Berry’s abject alterity in Elsie’s eyes, lurking ‘next to the door’ places Findlater’s text
within a Scottish fantasy tradition of outliers, where non-realism coalesces with realism, just as,
for Colin Manlove, ‘Scottish fantasy is set in this world’ (Manlove 1996, p. 12). In Findlater’s
tale, Scottish fantasy’s cohabitation ensures a menacing uncertainty at the heart of home security.
Elsie’s uneasy revulsion is symptomatic of familial dis-ease: the uncanny imprint of his deceased
mother, Berry unwelcomely haunts her new abode. Similarly, Freud’s uncanny is unhomely or
unheimlich, its ominous presence negating the secure familiarity associated with home. Manlove
notes, ‘The central figures in Scottish fantasy are often outsiders, or people marked by some odd-
ity or even blight’ (Manlove 1996, p. 13); a changeling ‘oddity’, Berry unhinges Elsie’s desired
domestic bliss. Haunted by her deceased love rival, Elsie’s discomfort with Berry’s deformities
manifests the suppressed abjection lurking beneath family life’s romantic veneer: ‘Elsie tried very
hard to be kind to him at first. When she married, she held in her mind some idea of what a
step-mother ought to be’, but, following ‘the slow disintegration of the ideal’, she engineers
removing ‘the faded photograph’ (Findlater 1987, p. 97) of Berry’s mother. Once the deceased’s
photo is deleted, her blighted offspring inevitably follows. The female tragedy identified by
Gifford is displaced onto the phantom wife’s hideous progeny who, like Du Maurier’s Rebecca,
is a haunting residue.
Berry, then, is a monstrous revenant smothering Elsie until his expulsion. Although discuss-
ing the Findlaters’ novels, Gifford concurs: ‘their writing holds a strong and clear sense of the
suffocation of the personality and personal development of women through their subjection to
domestic hierarchies and duties’ (Gifford 1997, p. 291), and young wife Elsie is irrefutably
impeded in her new role. For Gifford, they convey women’s constraint through ‘recurrent and
powerful images and premonitions of the grave, of ghostliness, of ghastly dreariness, and of suf-
focation’ (ibid). Berry suffocatingly dogs Elsie’s footsteps, a reminder she is second choice, ter-
rorised by this spectral shadow of phantasmagoria’s domestic ideal. Her lack of household
experience matches her naivety about patriarchal ‘subjection’ within marriage, while her new-
born confines her further. Likewise, her new husband John never fully materialises as a character:
his shadowy minimal presence within the home emphasises men’s separate public existence,
further ensnaring women within domesticity’s diminished private sphere.
Findlater’s ambiguous title partially redeems its difficult portrayal of disability (which merits
further study), leaving the reader aware that, while judgemental characters regard Berry as ‘Void
of Understanding’, it is they who lack empathy towards others. Evidencing Scottish fantasy’s
disruption of realism, Findlater’s residual romantic discourses (fairy tales, gothic stories and
biblical narratives) invite ambiguity, destabilising dominant realism with overdetermined het-
eroglossia. This tale’s divergent discursive modes emphasise the metaphorical, ironic and multi-
farious intonations of signs. Even its opening scene undermines any reliance on straightforward
realism, depicting ‘a night that was clear, but without stars’ (Findlater 1987, p. 93). Elsie and
John’s wedding is occurring, and Berry, already excluded (presumably at the new bride’s behest),
remains outside. She epitomises a fairy-tale wicked stepmother, whose ‘very pretty young woman’
visage conceals a cold-blooded crone (Findlater 1987, p. 96). Berry’s exclusion and ultimate
demise are orchestrated by his ice-queen surrogate mother. The ‘clear’ night, then, anticipates
the cold comfort of Berry’s heartlessly transformed life which, ‘without stars’, iterates the hope-
less black hole of his altered circumstances. Starless nocturnality accentuates the unenlightened,
unimaginative insensitivity of a reconfigured homelife which disregards a child who anachronis-
tically belongs to a palimpsest family erased since his mother’s demise, becoming frozen in time.
Elsie’s enchanting façade radiates ideal family appearances, whereas Berry’s outward ugliness
conceals inner beauty that casts the stepmother, not he, in the role of beast. A shadow family’s
imprint dogging her steps, Elsie’s ‘grievances grow like Jack’s beanstalk when they are planted
in one’s own garden’ (ibid). This wicked stepmother’s deracination and intrusion to the
pre-existing home includes cursing its leftover child.
Berry, a sacrificial lamb whose lack of wits emphasise an unsuspecting innocent in a callous
world unwilling to shelter him, dies outside from exposure, saving half-brother Johnny by sac-
rificially swaddling him in his clothes. Victorian happy-ever-after endings inverted, Findlater
opens with a wedding and ends in death, favouring spiritual transcendence over convention. The
family shame finally laid to rest, a ‘large stone’ (Findlater 1987, p. 103) the brothers shelter
behind becomes Berry’s tombstone; his repetition of “It’s hame, hame we’re gaen […] It’s hame,
hame” signals an ethereal not earthly destination since the latter no longer succours him
(Findlater 1987, p. 102). Unlike Elsie’s judgementally averted gaze, the onlookers’ rebuke at
their initial response reverentially reframes the scene: ‘There was not a rag of clothing left to
cover the poor, misshapen body, and the men who stood around looked for a moment at the
unsightly limbs that death had not been kind to; then with one accord, as if ashamed, each man
turned his face away’ (Findlater 1987, p. 104). Their renewed outlook emphasises both the shift
in social perspective required for an extant Berry to avoid social crucifixion, and a messianic
awakening: ‘as their eyes fell again upon the […] snow-covered plain, they had perhaps some
vision also of that awful, unalterable Love, whose face we may not see’ (ibid). Berry, (buried
beneath snow), a fruit often associated with Christ’s shed blood, symbolises perfection and sweet-
ness of character, according to Victorian flower language (Alexander 2016, p. 3). This blog also
notes a Slovakian version of Cinderella, where the heroine is sent to gather strawberries in winter,
(her stepmother hoping she will die of exposure). In a critique of hegemonic preoccupations with
façade, Findlater resurrects residual narratives that enrich literary form and content with fantasy
elements, rendering ‘Void of Understanding’ a multifarious text that augments the contribution
of Scottish women writers.
Allan’s Makeshift (1928) is equally valuable. Margery Palmer McCulloch notes, ‘In the 1920s
and ’30s these women wrote alongside but outwith the predominantly male Scottish Renaissance
movement, in a way which reflected the marginalisation of women in a society still strongly
patriarchal’ (McCulloch 1997, p. 360). McCulloch includes Allan amongst these outsiders, as
‘new Scottish women writers [who] honestly depict the subordinate roles allotted to women in
personal and social life’ (ibid). To depict these ‘subordinate roles’, Allan’s novel delineates the
limitations imposed upon society’s so-called surplus women. The Glasgow Herald’s aforemen-
tioned anonymous review indicates a Glasgow readership, while McCulloch likewise identifies
Mary Cleland’s (Margot Wells) The Sure Traveller and Allan’s Makeshift as ‘good “Glasgow novels”
as well as challenging representations of women’s experience’ (McCulloch 1997, p. 363). Yet
Allan’s exclusion from patriarchal Scotland’s literary Renaissance ensures her Glasgow novels are
overshadowed, despite predating many, for instance, Kingsley Long and Alexander McArthur’s
No Mean City (1935) or George Blake’s The Shipbuilders (1935). Allan’s work invites a flaneuse to
re-tread Glasgow and ponder how neglecting women’s writing funnelled that locale’s imaginary
towards a masculinised gritty realism that denied its remaining demographic a navigational
guide. Though only receiving recognition after decades of relative invisibility, Moira Burgess
attests that her contemporary ‘CM Grieve recognised Dot Allan as belonging to the “new
Glasgow school”’ (Burgess 1998, p. 134). Her contribution to Glasgow’s literary landscape and
her capacity to extend and enrich how we view that heritage cannot be overstated.
Makeshift, as the title indicates, is concerned with having to make do’s detrimental impact
upon gender and social class. The Preface introduces the heroine, Jacqueline, a child about to
suffer the loss of her seamstress mother, who commits suicide, overwhelmed by the struggles of
a widowed single mother. Before gassing herself, she discloses her desperation: ‘“Second best!”
she raved. “That’s what my life has been made up of, Jacqueline; makeshift all the time”’
(Allan 2010, p. 10), imparting an indelible lesson that reverberates through the child’s development
into womanhood. A bildungsroman portrait of the woman artist, Makeshift charts Jacqueline’s
journey towards becoming a writer. Like any budding author, she is a keen observer: ‘From her
niche on the window seat Jacqueline watched the two – the minister’s wife […] with the soft
slithering sort of voice that makes you think of cheap ice cream, sweet-tasted on top, tainted
underneath; the dressmaker, tight-lipped, sharp-featured, agreeing in a singularly flat voice to
every suggestion’ (Allan 2010, p. 9). Reminiscent of Findlater’s audit of Elsie’s surface perfec-
tion, Allan’s critique exposes the minister’s wife’s concealed ‘tainted’ character. Deemed unim-
portant – ‘you seldom were seen’ – Jacqueline penetrates femininity’s façade, for ‘women reveal
themselves as they are only when they are divested of some of their outer garments’, so that ‘to
know a woman for what she is you must know her in her camisole […] stripped of the armour in
which she habitually confronts the world’ (Allan 2010, p. 14). This burgeoning author scruti-
nises women’s performative façade of patriarchy’s idealised femininity, ‘revealing glimpses of
soiled underwear’ that disrupt a superficial social gaze (Allan 2010, p. 13). Hegemonically inter-
nalising a feminine ideal when ‘dressed up’, such women ‘never seemed to see anything but their
stupid selves’ and ‘cooed to their own reflection’, the mirror reconfirming their face value
(Allan 2010, p. 14). Marketable commodities, these privileged ‘pantomine ladies’ exploit the
services of Jacqueline’s impoverished seamstress mother (ibid).
Reminiscent of Jane Eyre reading concealed in her window seat, ‘Jacqueline laid down her
picture book and gazed out across the street’ (Allan 2010, p. 10). Her gaze shifts between read-
ing, observing the minister’s wife and her mother, to ‘across the street’; as well as drawing on
immediate domestic surroundings, her writerly imagination is fuelled by literature and life
experiences beyond her window. Just as Jane Eyre utilises avian motifs to represent the heroine’s
creativity and intellect, Jacqueline’s artistic drive is ‘the little bird that lay caged beneath her
breast’ (Allan 2010, p. 15). Birds are common feminist symbols for woman writers who tran-
scend patriarchal society’s trappings and allow their imaginative intellect to soar free. Later in
the novel, her fiancé Owen Southwold concedes upon reading her manuscript, ‘This child whom
he had hoped to please with coloured ribbons was no child at all, but a woman of infinite reserves
[…] he had hitherto deemed the prerogative of man’ (Allan 2010, p. 96). Jacqueline’s work
unsettles women’s patriarchal infantilisation as Southwold belittlingly warns, ‘There’s a danger
in breaking loose’ (ibid). Rather than retorting, ‘She pondered his words in silence. Yes, the
caged bird was safe, secure. But, oh, the fun it missed not being free to flap its wings, to fend for
itself’ (Allan 2010, p. 97). Despite remaining unarticulated, her narrated thoughts warn against
the dangers, not of ‘breaking loose’, but remaining entrapped in patriarchy’s gilded cage.
Jacqueline’s writing allows her to envision alternative roles, rather than remain subject to
prescribed grand narratives. Southwold is murdered, so preventing Jacqueline retreating into
domesticity and relinquishing her writing. Her phantasmagorical Angel-in-the-House slain, she
can mature fully as a writer. McCulloch identifies in The Sure Traveller, ‘Cleland’s heroine
Catherine anticipates Virginia Woolf’s 1929 protest in A Room of One’s Own when she strikes the
keynote [… ] “A girl can’t break away unless she has money of her own” (McCulloch 1997,
p. 363), but Allan’s Makeshift equally does. Jacqueline epitomises the demand for a woman
writer’s economic and spatial independence: inheriting ‘five thousand pounds’ (Allan 2010,
p. 177) from merchant sailor, father-figure George Buchanan’s will, she evades an unhappy union
with second fiancé William, and the fate of her alcoholic typing pool co-worker, Miss Price (a
spinster or ‘surplus woman’). Born into poverty, it is incumbent upon Jacqueline to marry or
succeed as a writer. The emphasis on the plight of poor women is outlined from the opening
pages with her mother’s death, as well as the depiction of the ‘surplus woman’. The novel closes
with Jacqueline boarding ‘The midnight express for Euston’ with a small suitcase of belongings,
including her poetry (Allan 2010, p. 184). Her ‘midnight express’ departure to London allows
chronotopic mobility, relocating to the anonymity of a vaster metropolitan space. With her new-
found legacy, Jacqueline can inscribe an alternative outcome for herself with a writing career.
But it is not only in the text’s realism that depictions of financial hardship exist; as with
Findlater, Allan’s text emphasises Scottish fiction’s intermingling of fantasy and realism. When
Jacqueline moves to Aunt Ruth and Uncle Archie’s Lilac Villa in Kirkton, following her moth-
er’s suicide, the nearby castle is pervasive: ‘An old-time giant the fortress looked, towering above
the pigmy rows of red brick houses’, its fairy-tale-like unattainable wealth looming over those
living beneath its shadow (Allan 2010, p. 19). She envisages Lilac Villa ‘swallowed up by the
castle’s predatory crags. In those imaginings George Buchanan played a noble part’ (Allan 2010,
p. 21). Metaphorically, the castle accentuates poor people’s ‘predatory’ consumption by avari-
cious capitalism’s gargantuan wealth inequalities, particularly for women in this period, so
Jacqueline offsets her fear of poverty by casting Buchanan as ‘princely’ (Allan 2010, p. 21) hero
to her damsel-in-distress. A prescient vision, she later inherits enough wealth from him to release
her from an unsuitable engagement and pursue her writing. Yet, predominantly devoid of fairy-
tale interventions, the poor’s vulnerability mirrors the unstable houses beneath the impenetrable
castle: ‘Like dolls’ houses, tawdry and ill-constructed […] painted cock-shies seen against this
sublimity of rock […] that held vested in its stone something of the quality of eternity’ (ibid).
Flimsy ‘ill-constructed’ houses tremble beneath the castle’s ‘sublimity’, exposing dwellers to
external elements, whereas its impervious ‘quality of eternity’ generationally safeguards inher-
ited fortune. Rather than become a dispirited drudge like the majority of her peers, with her
creative ‘Words – words – words [… remaining tantalisingly elusive] will- o-
the-
wisps’
(Allan 2010, pp. 27–28), Buchanan enables Jacqueline to excavate and convert such alternative
treasure towards professional writing: ‘she sat plying her pencil, creating for herself a new heaven
and a new earth’ (Allan 2010, p. 28). Yet, her mercantile inheritance (like Jane Eyre’s) further
exposes the fault lines of capitalist exploitation, driven by British colonialism, just as she recog-
nises Glasgow is the ‘Second City’ of Empire (Allan 2010, p. 46).
McCulloch notes, ‘the heroines of Allan, Muir and Gavin all leave Scotland’, confirming
‘Nationalism […] is not a preoccupation of these women’, associating their rejection of country
with Woolf’s assertion, ‘“[as a woman I have no country,] as a woman my country is the whole
world”’ (McCulloch 1997, p. 369). Certainly, women’s mythological depiction and socio-political
confinement, particularly Scottish women doubly stymied by nation and gender, skews any
intervention in national debate at this period. However, Makeshift makes various geopolitical
inroads. Jacqueline’s author mentor, ‘R.F. Torrance had no liking, she knew well, for Scots peo-
ple. The women, he voted superior – sturdy, sincere creatures, worthy descendants of their
Highland ancestry’, but ‘The men […] he had been wont to declare possessed all the vices of a
polyglot people’ (Allan 2010, pp. 66–67). Allan understandably allocates this to a male perspec-
tive, given women’s historical lack of voice in reflecting the nation, but it nevertheless demon-
strates her authorial intervention in national debate. According to Torrance’s denigration,
Scotsmen lack an authenticity found in Scotswomen: ‘a tree upon which all the vices of the
nations had been grafted’ (Allan 2010, p. 67). Yet, ‘violently opposed to all forms of women’s
rights. The mind of woman was not that of a normal human being, he was wont to declare, but
of one warped by reason of her sex’, he ‘despised women’ (Allan 2010, pp. 59, 60). Torrance
regards Scots as mongrel aberrations, women ‘creatures’ considered slightly improved national
representatives. Is Allan reclaiming the nation from Scotsmen, who harbour ‘the cruel greed of
the Spaniard, the class-consciousness of the Teuton, the arrogance of the American, the brainless
conceit of the Cockney’ (Allan 2010, p. 67)? Jacqueline is confined by limitations of gender,
class, and nationhood, but Torrance’s skewed position condemns an entire nation rather than
criticise patriarchal hegemony’s impact upon a marginalised Scottish culture. While Torrance’s
misogyny and repeated abandonment of his wife for younger women renders his outlook tenu-
ous, Allan demonstrates women writers are preoccupied with nation.
Like Makeshift, Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) includes a typing pool, within
‘Meadows, Meade & Grindley, manufacturers of nylon textiles’ (Spark 1999 [1960], p. 15).
Spark’s novel – regarded as ‘an expression of those ballads that were ingrained in her in child-
hood’ – oscillates between realism and fantasy, evident from its titular reliance upon the residual
ballad form, ‘despite [her] exile’ (Christianson 2000, pp. 138, 136). Spark places Scot, Dougal
Douglas, into Peckham’s English environment, where he becomes a disruptive and, ultimately,
fatal influence upon its hitherto repressed inhabitants. Spark’s Scottish gothic antihero claims to
have had surgery to remove horns and ‘to be one of the wicked spirits that wander through the
world for the ruin of others’ (Spark 1999 [1960], p. 77). An alien outsider, his ineffable magnet-
ism simultaneously attracts and repels, depending on each character’s perspective. Dougal ‘is
presented throughout as a supreme manipulator of reality and illusion, until he finally manifests
as a novelist’ (Christianson 2000, p. 137), whereupon the ‘scrap ends of his profligate experience’
feed ‘into a lot of cockeyed books’ (Spark 1999 [1960], p. 142). A metafictional author-trickster
who extracts information to fuel his future novels, Dougal deceptively shapeshifts through a
series of performative poses: ‘Dougal changed his shape and became a professor’ and ‘Dougal
leaned forward and became a television interviewer’ (Spark 1999 [1960], p. 16).
Dougal Douglas (Douglas, an anagram of Dougals, suggests his mastery of multiple sem-
blances) is a rhythmically repetitive name, and Spark regarded novel-writing as elongated poetry,
so her interest in the sounds of signs is equal to their sense. Gaelic for dark stranger, Dougal’s
portentous arrival disrupts the pre-existing monotony of factory workers’ lives, where he pro-
ceeds to shake them out of their comfort zones, bending them to his will and out of shape:
‘You’ve unsettled me, Dougal, since you came to Peckham. I shall have a nervous breakdown’
(Spark 1999 [1960], p. 98). Typing pool head, Merle Coverdale, ominously anticipates her
doom, later murdered by her married lover/boss, Druce. Dougal authorises their fate: upon
informing him of Druce squeezing her neck, Dougal responds ‘It looks like a maniac’s delight,
your neck’ (Spark 1999 [1960], p. 101). When visiting Dougal, his landlady Frierne ‘left Miss
Coverdale [entombed] in that hall which was lined with wood like a coffin’ (Spark 1999 [1960],
p. 126), while he waits deity-like above in his attic. In Druce’s maniacal fear his homosexual
double-life has been revealed to her by Dougal and, thus, may become public, he stabs Coverdale
in the neck with a corkscrew. As surrogate author, Dougal moulds characters, even incorporating
several of their circumstances into his ghost-written autobiography of Maria Cheeseman, fash-
ioning himself as a ‘crooked’ rather than ‘straight ghost’ (Spark 1999 [1960], p. 76). His
shapeshifting capacity – ‘Dougal’s habitual poses’ (Spark 1999 [1960], p. 29) – and disruptive
influence upon characters reveals several ‘crooked’ traits: his disabled shoulder, his insincerity
and fraud, and his recasting of individuals’ lives, ultimately ghost-writing their narratives
through his ‘double-tongued’ (Spark 1999 [1960], p. 132) menacing influence. With a first
name and surname that sounds almost a dual repetition, shapeshifting Dougal, like Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Long John Silver, is theatrically ‘playing double’ (Stevenson (1985 [1883]), p. 165).
Associated with Scottish fiction’s doubling, particularly Jekyll and Hyde and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner (see Christianson 2000, p. 136; Gardiner 2010, p. 38), Dougal’s multiplicity
exceeds duality; the Dougals of Douglas are legion. Like his many theatrical poses – a talent
honed at University drama, where he played Mary, Queen of Scots’ private secretary, Rizzio, (a
Catholic foreigner who is murdered) – this stranger hosts several personalities: Dougal Douglas,
Douglas Dougal, the double-barrelled Dougal-Douglas, and Doug.
Hired as ‘an Arts man’, Douglas is tasked with conducting human research to ‘bring vision
into the lives of the workers’ and reduce absenteeism (Spark 1999 [1960], pp. 15, 16). Following
a Cambridge graduate’s ‘motion study’, improving output involving the ‘least loss of energy and
time’ Druce employs Douglas to enhance workers’ visionary rather than utilitarian potential
(Spark 1999 [1960], p. 16). Given established critical comparisons with Jekyll and Hyde, Spark’s
focus upon dissipated energy is crucial. Jekyll’s chemical transformation into Hyde is identified
by Allen MacDuffie (2006) as entropic decline (citing Stevenson’s engineering lineage), and
apparent in Hyde’s voracious ‘energy of life’: hitherto ebullient Jekyll, ‘eaten up and emptied’ is
consumed by his doppelganger’s ‘raging energies’ (Stevenson 1985, p. 95). Noting the ‘cost’ of
Jekyll’s metamorphosis, MacDuffie links this to entropy: ‘Because of its genesis in industrial
engineering and considerations of work and waste as they relate to profit and loss, thermody-
namic discourse has always been suffused with fiscal metaphors’ (MacDuffie 2006, p. 4). A
Hyde-like Edinburgh graduate, Douglas’s slacking and reinforcement of workforce idleness and
dissipation similarly rapidly dispels energy from his London employer. Cambridge’s measures ‘to
conserve energy and time in feeding the line’ unravel through accelerated absenteeism and lei-
sure, while Douglas’s personae avariciously consume multiple salaries (Spark 1999 [1960],
p. 16). Druce – whose homosexual attraction towards Douglas is itself wasted energy since it
remains unrequited, yet exploited by the latter for self-gain – ‘said with embarrassment, “I feel
I should just mention the fact that absenteeism has increased in the six weeks you’ve been with
us”’ (Spark 1999 [1960], p. 64). Published in 1960, Spark’s novel critiques the atomisation and
anomie of Britain’s factory-system utilitarianism and anticipates anti-corporate youth move-
ments, labelled ‘degenerate’ hippies. Spark’s Arts man’s disruption of capitalist output remains
relevant, given consistent devaluation of Arts degrees deemed wasteful by corporate-driven gov-
ernments. As with Stevenson’s dual interest in science and humanities, Spark’s art exposes the
dangers awaiting a society suppressing human needs to profit from dehumanised Hands. Into
this drudgery she inserts an Arts man whose critical inquiry identifies and amplifies pre-existing
undercurrents by accelerating absenteeism, causing workforce strife, and magnifying relation-
ship instabilities. Douglas’s malevolence necessitates a reminder of holistic mind/body harmony
lest humans be reduced to mechanistic cyphers. As Michael Gardiner notes, ‘Dougal comes to
London as a presence that is generalist, active and critical, where the Cambridge environment
was more associated with the specific, observational and technocratic’, (Gardiner 2010, p. 38).
An all-round Scottish education undermines this tightly-focussed manufacturing space where
industrialism’s negation of workers’ humanity unleashes a dangerous repression of self upon
Douglas’s arrival.
Likewise, Memento Mori (1959), scrutinises human’s fleeting energy expended by social preoc-
cupations despite their inevitable entropic decline. The intrusive stranger this time is a disem-
bodied voice/s, heard differently by each listener, who telephones elderly characters to proffer a
reminder of their finite mortality. A speaking clock, each call is an aide-memoire to spend their
time well before the bell tolls. Though, like Ballad, set outside Scotland, Memento Mori’s gothic
influence is equally palpable: Alec Warner responds to Jean Taylor’s interrogation of whether he
is the phone culprit, ‘I don’t know […] But I may be a Jekyll and Hyde’ (Spark 2010 [1959],
p. 64). Further, Henry Mortimer (whose surname carries Death and timer, while his first name
means home or ruler, presumably of mortality), the retired detective hired to investigate the
phone calls deduces, ‘in my opinion the offender is Death himself’ (Spark 2010 [1959], p. 144).
Like Douglas, Death has the ability to manifest multiple guises, altering its voice for a captive
audience. Mortimer encapsulates Spark’s titular reminder: ‘I would practise […] the remem-
brance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life […] It should be part of the
full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.’ (Spark 2010 [1959],
p. 153). Like Ballad, Memento Mori challenges social impositions, unfettering readers to live
vibrantly and recognise our fleeting mortality.
Spark’s Dougal-like ‘crooked’ Scottish strangeness invites spatiotemporal intrusion, offering
opportunity to rebalance an otherwise misaligned existence of soullessly clocking on. Similarly,
Marilyn Reizbaum deduces, ‘Spark beckons us to encounter the stranger’ (Reizbaum 2010,
p. 51). Antedating Smith, Spark’s stranger interrupts zombified characters, forcing them to
reconnect with their humanity. In Memento Mori Dame Lettie, a phone call recipient, feels uncom-
fortable visiting Jean Taylor’s nursing home: ‘It is too distressing’, yet, echoing Mortimer, Taylor
warns, ‘the author of the anonymous telephone calls is Death himself […] If you don’t remember
Death, Death reminds you to do so’ (Spark 2010 [1959], p. 179). Shortly afterwards a burglar
‘battered her to death. It was her eighty-first year’ (Spark 2010 [1959], p. 183): Dame Lettie’s
violent demise starkly outlines Britain’s class divides, while remembering death is the great
leveller. Her uncanny discomfort in the geriatric home discloses a phobia of ageing, and she
retreats to her own home’s familiar safety. Ironically, home’s fragility, mirroring Lettie’s increas-
ingly frail temporary bodily frame, generates an unheimlich home invasion resulting in deadly
corporeal eviction.
Like Spark, Maitland’s Home Truths (1993) is similarly influenced by the Scottish gothic tradi-
tion. Clare Kerslake returns to London minus her right hand and her lover, David, presumed
perished on Mount Nyangani while holidaying in Zimbabwe. Whether he falls victim to ban-
dits, bad weather enclosing the summit, or angers the mountain’s ancestors remains undisclosed
due to Clare’s post-traumatic amnesia. She feels unsettled while visiting Zimbabwe’s Highland
region, its earth ‘A really strange dark red colour’ (Maitland 1994, p. 163). Regarded as ‘cosmo-
politan’, Clare cannot fathom these surroundings: ‘I travel a lot’ and become ‘a competent guest –
anywhere, but here is too strange’ (Maitland 1994, p. 176). Devoid of her seasoned traveller role,
an uncanny displacement accentuates her hatred of David, whom she wishes dead. Formerly
Rhodesia under Cecil Rhode’s British colonial rule, David admits, ‘You were right, you know
[…]; I am like Rhodes […] I’d have claimed this country’, to which Clare retorts, ‘It didn’t
belong to him’ (Maitland 1994, p. 168). David’s masculinist territorial assertion echoes Britain’s
imperial control, rejected by Clare’s ‘cosmopolitan’ feminism. Zimbabwe a stark reminder of
Western masculinity’s will to power, her rising panic in this ‘strange’ land conflates a cosmofem-
inist realisation that she too is colonised by David: ‘I let him hurt me and maim me and limit
me. I wanted to be an amputee […] he was not good for me’ (Maitland 1994, p. 290). Later, her
amputated hand signifies release from this metaphorical maiming, having ousted his control
over her. Notably ‘The Victoria Falls had undone her; all the doubts and miseries about her life
had become focused there’ (Maitland 1994, p. 132). Instead of seeing it as a tourist spectacle for
affluent Western consumption, Clare recounts its colonial past and revisits it through a postco-
lonial prism: ‘These are the Victoria Falls, renamed after a fat little half-German queen who
painted watercolours of her children and sent her heroes out to possess the earth’ (Maitland 1994,
p. 133). Maternal painting of children dissonates with imperialism’s voracious desire ‘to possess
the earth’ concealed beneath its discourse of enlightening infantilised dark corners. Like Rhodes,
David confesses he too would ‘have invented some politics, some ideal that let me do it’, articu-
lating colonialism’s fraudulent verisimilitude (Maitland 1994, p. 168). Ironically, while utterly
overwhelmed with Zimbabwe’s strangeness, Clare is, in fact, most ‘cosmopolitan’, emphasised in
her empathetic outrage at colonial injustice. In turn, she recognises her own pain, numbingly
repressed by a protected, normative yet miserable life.
Until this pivotal moment, Clare has been afraid of her own feelings, abandoning her lover,
and settling for David: ‘She had run away from the wild and dangerous love that Julia had offered
her on the hill above Orvieto, because she wanted to keep the rules and be safe’ (Maitland 1994,
p. 219). To ‘keep the rules’, she is colonised by patriarchal authority, stifling her desires to
assimilate with heteronormative conventions. Clare’s epiphany is paralleled with the colonial
history of the Scottish Highlands, the family holiday home where she returns to spend the sum-
mer with her parents and siblings (who are really her aunt, uncle and cousins, since she was
adopted following her parent’s death from fireworks). Described as ‘beautiful’ yet ‘a sad country’,
Scotland’s Highlands are filled with ‘deserted fallen-in cottages’, palimpsestic tombs ‘of the
region’s long and desolate history; a history of violence and defeat that stood against the beauty
of the sea’ (Maitland 1994, p. 125). Maitland parallels Zimbabwean/Scottish Highlands, both
stunning landscapes scarred with violent colonial histories. State-condoned violence also erases a
nation’s identity, since an imposed colonised narrative expunges its heritage. After St Kilda’s
population is depleted, ‘they were betrayed’ by ‘the authorities (ibid). Rather than offering com-
munity cohesion, “they were split up […] and they all died. They were conned” (ibid). Similarly,
Peggy’s (Clare’s mother’s friend) Zimbabwean lesbian lover, Joyful, warns Clare against colonis-
ing others’ ‘stories’: ‘They are not your ancestors. Don’t try to put your reading on our stories.
Go home and find your own’ (Maitland 1994, p. 215). Clare learns both Scotland’s and
Zimbabwe’s heritage require reclamation from colonial discourses to tell their distinct stories.
Free of David, her return to Scotland retraces an ancestral past deleted by Anglocentricism: ‘The
rest of the winding road to Lochinver filled her with joy; the hills and bays and inlets were still
haunted by the ghosts of clansmen long dead, by the blood of the Forty-Five and by the sadness
of the Clearances, but they were lit with sunlight and promise’ (Maitland 1994, p. 128). Despite
turbulent haunting, revisiting Scotland’s ‘ghosts’ allows healing ‘sunlight and promise’ in an act
of remembrance rather than suppression. Correspondingly, unfettered Clare finds ‘joy’, echoing
Joyful’s interweaving of her nation’s past to remap its postcolonial future.
In her ancestral Scottish home with her prosthetic ‘Hand’ (the dissociative proper noun used
throughout positions it as a gothic monstrous entity), Clare ponders whether her right hand
severed after pushing David off the mountain. With amnesia obscuring her culpability or inno-
cence like Mount Nyangani’s obfuscating mist, the new Hand synecdochally points to her guilt
by her own hand: ‘The me that is here didn’t kill David, but that hand may well have done’
(Maitland 1994, p. 290). No longer capitalised, ‘hand’ connects it more directly to Clare. Like
Jane Eyre’s monstrous double, Bertha Mason, who enacts her unconscious desire to set Rochester
aflame, Clare’s Hand is a doppelganger of its original. Her resistance to David’s territorial author-
ity topples him from a mountain that rejects its colonial past in favour of postcolonialism’s
unwritten narrative inscribed in a new Hand. Orphaned as a child, Clare’s inhibition is conse-
quential of her parents’ pyrotechnical death: ‘so much beauty was dangerous, it could burn you
up’, yet ‘She had refused to learn that beauty and danger walk hand in hand and cannot be sepa-
rated’ (Maitland 1994, p. 291, my italics). Fear of living, akin to Spark’s fictional warning,
engenders joylessness: ‘You have to go out and risk it all. She had refused to do so; she had
wanted to stay in the place of safety which is death’ (ibid). To live fully, she embraces her parents’
legacy, ‘tightrope’ walking ‘the line between beauty and danger’ (Maitland 1994, p. 246). Finally
heeding Joyful’s advice, she acknowledges her own past: ‘these were the ancestors to whose voices
she must listen if she wanted to be whole and well’ (Maitland 1994, p. 291). Clare’s curative
journey allows her to discard the Hand (‘I don’t need it any more’); her remaining left hand sig-
nals a sinistral embrace of beauty/danger (Maitland 1994, p. 294).
Like Maitland, Smith disrupts Anglocentric dominance of others, including Scotland by dis-
mantling hegemonic narratives. Spring (2019), her penultimate instalment of Seasonal Quartet,
ponders the living conditions and systematic mistreatment of asylum seekers held in Britain’s
detention centres. From Quartet’s outset, Smith engages with contemporary concerns, including
those scraping a living amidst a precarious gig economy and the impact of Brexit’s divisive hos-
tilities within British society. As with Autumn (2016) and Winter (2017), Spring charts its trajec-
tory through this turbulence, finding areas of human connectivity and, like its seasonal title,
moments of restorative hope. Despite contemporary uncertainty, there is optimism “this too
shall pass”, swept aside with time’s relentless march: ‘I look at Trump now, I see them all, the
new world tyrants […], the racists, the white supremacists, […], the thugs all across the world,
and what I think is, all that too too solid flesh. It’ll melt away, like snow in May’ (Smith 2019,
p. 71). Divisive leaders emerge, but history inevitably overtakes and supersedes them like pass-
ing seasons. Florence, an ethereal child, reminiscent of Brooke in There But For The (2011),
articulates everyday prejudice: ‘I am invisible […]. Certain white people in particular can look
right through young people and also black and mixed race people like we aren’t here’ (Smith 2019,
pp. 192–193). Through Florence, Smith challenges social invisibility and prioritises cosmopoli-
tan connectivity as a means of dismantling hegemonic differences. With Britain marred by such
divisions, Spring positions characters within close proximity to others: Brittany/Brit, a detention
centre officer in an immigrant holding facility crosses paths with Florence and, in doing so,
learns to re-humanise others.
Brit’s occupation, like Anna Hardie’s in There But For The, has numbed her empathy towards
transnational citizens. Her partner Josh despairs, ‘You’ve taken a job that’s making you go even
more mad than the rest of us’ (Smith 2019, p. 158). Florence, also a ‘City in Italy’, notes Brit is
‘actually more than one place. You’re nearly two different places. Britain and Brittany’
(Smith 2019, p. 189). Florence puns on Brit’s dual British/European connections, encouraging
cosmopolitan empathy rather than post-Brexit isolationism. When Brit says ‘It’s my job’ in reply
to Florence’s charge of ‘Inhuman’, the child responds, ‘We can change your job’ (Smith 2019,
p. 197). Like spring’s regeneration, Florence hopes ‘We’ll begin again. We’ll revolve […] We’ll
turn it round […] We’ll do it all differently’ (Smith 2019, p. 198). For Smith’s strange child
(echoing Spark), inverted norms and reworked systems can prioritise human and environmental
connectivity over the status quo. Just as she identifies Brit’s hybrid geopolitical potential, she
queries dominant narratives: ‘What if the girl says. Instead of saying, this border divides these
places. We said, this border unites these places. This border holds together these two really inter-
esting different places’ (Smith 2019, p. 196). To ‘turn it round’ shifts normative perspectives.
Self/other dichotomies deconstructed, Florence’s playful ‘what if’ challenges Brit’s mindset to
incorporate hybridity, and enriches society’s heterogenous diversity: ‘What if we declared border
crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible’
(Smith 2019, p. 196), just as Brittany contains two coalescing rather than opposing identities.
Scotland is a key location in Spring, where characters arrive from England. In this restorative
space, Brit escapes her soul-destroying job, reconnecting with her zombified self and others.
She encounters prismatic British identities and, returning to work, her Highland colleague
recites a Gaelic poem: ‘It’s called Living Language […] Smior na canain’ (Smith 2019, p. 326).
Notably, this follows Brit learning about colonialism – ‘A practice of domination, which involves the
subjugation of one people to another’ (Smith 2019, p. 323) – as Smith conflates Britain’s imperial
practises within and outwith its borders. Historically suppressed, Scottish Gaelic remains a
‘Living Language’, and its strangeness angers Brit: ‘Different languages shouldn’t be allowed in
England. Britain. She meant Britain’ (Smith 2019, p. 327). Although Spring opts to ‘live in hope’
(Smith 2019, p. 325), resistance against cultural hegemonies requires maintenance, just as Brit’s
development remains a work-in-progress. By Summer (2020), Brexit tensions continued while
being overtaken by Covid-19’s impact. Meanwhile, ‘a clever and thoughtful young virologist
being held indefinitely’ explains ‘about the dangerous-sounding virus that was beginning to take
hold in various countries and had reached England’ (Smith 2020, p. 341). Sequestered in a deten-
tion centre, the virologist’s squandered intellect could have been used to safeguard the nation.
Instead, populist fuelling of social divisions and perpetuating jingoistic rhetoric is an ineffective
strategy as activist Iris protests, ‘I wish they’d stop using war language, war imagery. This isn’t a war.
The opposite of war is happening. The pandemic is making walls and borders and passports as meaningless
as nature knows they are’ (Smith 2020, p. 345). Smith’s political aesthetic challenges masculinist
hegemonies of divisive territorialised aggression, just as in the quartet’s final instalment, charac-
ters from the earlier novels reappear and converge in a literary world that fluidly intermingles to
become a stronger cosmopolitan counter-narrative.
References
Alexander, C. (2016 [2007]). Berries as Symbols and in M. Gardiner and W. Maley), 27–39. Edinburgh:
Folklore. New York Berry News, 6.1 (24 January) Edinburgh University Press.
reprinted at https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs. Gifford, D. (1997). Caught between worlds: the fiction of
cornell.edu/dist/0/7265/files/2016/12/berryfolklore- Jane and Mary Findlater. In: A History of Scottish
2ljzt0q.pdf (accessed 12 October 2020). Women’s Writing (ed. D. Gifford and D. McMillan),
Allan, D. (2010). Makeshift and Hunger March: Two Novels 291–308. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
by Dot Allan (ed. M. Burgess). Glasgow: ASLS. MacDuffie, A. (2006). Irreversible transformations:
Burgess, M. (1998). Imagine a City: Glasgow in Fiction. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and
Argyll: Argyll Publishing. Scottish Energy Science. Representations 96 (1): 1–20.
Burgess, M. (ed.) (2010). Makeshift and Hunger March: Maitland, S. (1994 [1993]). Home Truths. London: Sceptre.
Two Novels by Dot Allan. ASLS: Glasgow. Manlove, C. (1996). Introduction. In: An Anthology of
Christianson, A. (2000). Certainty and unease in Muriel Scottish Fantasy Literature (ed. C. Manlove), 7–18.
Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye. In: Scottish Women’s Edinburgh: Polygon.
Fiction 1920s to 1960s: Journeys into Being (ed. McCulloch, M.P. (1997). Fictions of development 1920-
A. Anderson and A. Christianson), 135–146. East 1970. In: A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (ed.
Linton: Tuckwell Press. D. Gifford and D. McMillan), 360–372. Edinburgh:
Findlater, M. (1987). Void of understanding. In: Edinburgh University Press.
The Other Voice: Scottish Women’s Writing Since Norquay, G. (ed.) (2012). The Edinburgh Companion to
1808 (ed. M. Burgess), 93–104. Edinburgh: Scottish Women’s Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Polygon. University Press.
Gardiner, M. (2010). Body and state in Spark’s early fiction. Reizbaum, M. (2010). The stranger Spark. In: The
In: The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark (ed. Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark (ed. M. Gardiner
and W. Maley), 40–51. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Spark, M. (2010 [1959]). Memento Mori. London: Virago.
University Press. Stevenson, R.L. (1979 [1886]). Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Smith, A. (2019). Spring. London: Hamish Hamilton. and Other Stories. London: Penguin.
Smith, A. (2020). Summer. London: Hamish Hamilton. Stevenson, R.L. (1985 [1883]). Treasure Island. Oxford:
Spark, M. (1999 [1960]). The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Oxford University Press.
London: Penguin.
Further Reading
Anderson, C. and Christianson, A. (ed.) (2000). Scottish Gifford, D. and McMillan, D. (ed.) (1997). A History of
Women’s Fiction 1920s to 1960s: Journeys into Being. East Scottish Women’s Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Linton: Tuckwell Press. Important study of the novels University Press. Significant survey study covering a
of several significant Scottish women writers. vast sociohistorical literary expanse of Scottish wom-
Christianson, A. and Lumsden, A. (ed.) (2000). en’s work.
Contemporary Scottish Women Writers. Edinburgh: Gonda, C. (ed.) (1992). Tea and Leg-Irons: New Feminist
Edinburgh University Press. Seminal study that Readings from Scotland. London: Open Letters. Key
remaps the topography of Scottish women’s literary, engagement with a variety of Scottish women writers.
cultural and geopolitical contribution. Norquay, G. (ed.) (2012). The Edinburgh Companion to
Freeman, A. (2005). Imagined Worlds: Fiction by Scottish Scottish Women’s Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Women 1900–1935. Oxford: Peter Lang. Useful study University Press. Important exploration, covering
of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century works. early modern to contemporary Scottish women’s
Germanà, M. (2013 [2010]). Scottish Women’s Gothic and writing.
Fantastic Writing: Fiction Since 1978. Edinburgh: Whyte, C. (1995). Gendering the Nation. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press. Useful study of the Edinburgh University Press. Seminal exploration of
occurrence of fantasy within late twentieth- and early Scottish nation, gender and sexuality.
twenty-first century works.
Useful Websites
https://asls.arts.gla.ac.uk. https://booksfromscotland.com.
https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2020/08/10/some-of-the-best- https://www.scottishwomenwritersontheweb.net/
female-novelists-working-today-are-scottish-youve- novelists. Includes information on the Findlater
just-never-heard-of-them. sisters.
48
Scottish Literature in Film
John Caughie
School of Creative Arts and Culture, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland
People say the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilisation, that everything has been
said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies.
They have never seen the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures. They have never sat themselves
in front of the screen and thought how, for all the clothes on their backs and the carpets at their feet, no great
distance separates them from those bright-eyed, naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in
that clangour a foretaste of the music of Mozart.
The bars in this case, of course, are so highly wrought and so covered over with accretions of alien matter that
it is extremely difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is hubble-bubble, swarm, and chaos. We are peering over
the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savours seem to simmer; now and again some vast
form heaves itself up, and seems about to haul itself out of the chaos. Yet, at first sight, the art of the cinema seems
simple, even stupid.
(Woolf, The cinema, 1926, p. 348)
On 17 October 1919, a ‘Round the Town’ report in the Montrose Review noted that the profits in
the municipally-run Burgh Hall cinema amounted to £293 for six weeks. ‘Incidentally’, says the
reporter,
the figures show how profitable a ‘spec’ is a picture house and they explain why new Cinemas are
being put up in spite of the cost, which is such a handicap on house building. And they further
explain why Jews (who never take up anything in which there is not money to be got with little risk
and less work) are so very largely in the movie business.
(‘Round the Town’, Montrose Review, 17 October 1919, p. 5)
Lest the point escape attention, it is repeated in February 1920.

Picture houses are in most cases more or less gold mines to their proprietors, hence no doubt why
the Jews are in the business with both hands.
(‘Round the Town’, Montrose Review, 13 Feb 1920, p. 5)
Now we know that C.M. Grieve, soon to be Hugh MacDiarmid, was a reporter on the Montrose
Review from sometime in the late summer of 1919 when he was resident in St Andrews after his
demob from the army, until his departure in October 1920 to be a private tutor in Ross and Cromarty.
On the offer of a higher salary, he returned to the Montrose Review in April 1921 and was reporter and
editor on the Review and resident in Montrose until September 1929, a period in which Montrose
was formative in the establishment of the Scottish Renaissance. As Robert Crawford indicates
If modernism is often associated with urban centres – Paris, London, Dublin, New York – then
Scottish modernism is strikingly eccentric. The Orkney and Shetland Islands and small coastal
towns like Montrose were more important to its nurturing than Glasgow and Edinburgh.
(Crawford 2009, p. 7)
According to Alan Bold, MacDiarmid’s biographer, being editor/reporter on the Review meant
that Grieve/MacDiarmid ‘wrote most of the contents’ (Bold 1988, p. 120). Because of the ano-
nymity of reports in local newspapers, exact attribution is impossible, but the dates coincide
with Grieve’s first period at the Montrose Review, and the views on the links between Jews and
world capitalism, somewhat shocking in a well-established and liberal local newspaper, sit easily
with MacDiarmid’s sometimes alarming and often contradictory political economy.
From its first appearance in Montrose in 1897, cinema had played a significant and distinc-
tive part in the culture and entertainment of the town. The Burgh Hall was a major and signifi-
cant venue throughout the period, and by 1910 the Skating Rink on Mill Street was converted
to permit cinematograph exhibitions. A Grand Opening was announced for 23 December,
‘Under the patronage of the Provost, Magistrates and Town Council’. In 1915, the Lord Provost
opened the King’s Theatre on Hume Street which is ‘justly described as the most artistic and
up-to-date picture house in the provinces’ with 1000 tip-up chairs in moquette and leather and
no wooden benches (‘Opening of New Picture House in Montrose’, Montrose Review, 1 October
1915, p. 8). These openings by the Lord Provost and the patronage of the Town Council are more
than formalities: they indicate that cinema had civic status as a marker of an ‘up-to-date’ and
modern town.
Distinctively, in 1919, Montrose joined a handful of other small towns and opened the Burgh
Hall as a Municipal Cinema. This was a growing idea which had been discussed by a number of
small towns from Stornoway to Huntly, and was taken up as a municipal venture in towns such
as Clydebank, Dunoon and Kirkintilloch. The principle was that Burgh Halls were a civic asset
which, rather than being leased out to external companies for travelling concert parties and cin-
ematograph exhibitions, could be managed by the Town Council for the benefit of the commu-
nity, returning any profits to the public purse. This benefit contributed both to the finances and
to the public morality of the town, improving the taste of the community rather than renting it
out to profit-makers, and keeping the customers off the street, away from fish and chip shops or
ice cream parlours and out of public houses. The idea was particularly attractive to the growing
number of Councillors who were affiliated to the Independent Labour Party, and is credited to
the idea of the Common Good promoted by Keir Hardie (another socialist not immune to anti-
semitism), a Common Good which was supported by a Common Good Fund, independent of the
core budget and dispersing income to the welfare of the community. Montrose already ran a
Scottish Literature in Film 613
Municipal Dairy, instituted during the war to ensure the provision of supply. On 14 March
1919, the Montrose Review reports on a Town Council meeting at which it was argued that
if there was profit to be made out of picture houses, there was no reason why the Town should not
have a share of it … With the present demand for harmless recreation, it was advisable for [the
Council] to provide it, and to prevent the people wandering about the streets, a prey to agitators.
Keep the people amused and enjoying themselves, and there would be far less trouble with them.
(‘A Municipal Cinema’, Montrose Review 14 March 1919, p. 4)
The Burgh Hall Municipal Cinema was opened in August 1919, again with full civic cere-
mony, and by July 1920 the Council was reporting a credit balance of £950 to be attributed to
the Common Good Fund. In February 1922, Bailie Davidson resigned from the Council to take
up the role as ‘independent’ manager of the Burgh Hall Municipal Cinema, and his place on the
Council was filled by the co-option of C.M. Grieve.
By the summer of 1922, there was a downturn in cinema audiences across the country, and by
1923 it was apparent that the Municipal Cinema was showing a deficit from the Common Good
Fund of £2170. It was agreed to end the municipal experiment and to lease the Burgh Hall out
to the best offer. Though it only ran for a little less than four years, the Montrose Burgh Hall
Municipal Cinema was part of a social experiment which appeared in Scotland, England, and
parts of Northern Europe which attempted to find a social role for cinema as a component of a
financial and cultural common good at a time when the place of cinema had not yet finally been
decided. The experiment was significant but short-lived and, as the cinema business grew, the
public purse could not compete with commercial enterprise and burgh halls could not compete
with the new super-cinemas, the demand for luxury and the arrival of sound.
The role of the editor and Town Councillor Grieve in this is interesting, and C.M. Grieve, the
editor, is not shy of quoting the opinions and interventions of C.M. Grieve, the Councillor. His
position seems to have been both pragmatic and principled. Pragmatically, he seems to have
shared the view that if profits were to be made from the Burgh Hall then the town should share
in the benefits. On principle, however, he took the view that the global business of cinema was
in conflict with local economies and with an active local culture and entertainment. The costly
business of building cinemas or converting buildings into cinemas, usually by entrepreneurs
from Glasgow or beyond, is carried out at the expense of local investment in social housing. Early
in the life of the Municipal Cinema, he is arguing that though the films may be good there are
too many of them, and the programme of films should be reduced to allow space for an orchestra,
‘possibly composed of ex-soldiers’, offering ‘good music’: ‘local singers might occasionally be
engaged to give variety to the entertainment. There is plenty of talent in the town’. (‘Passing
Thoughts: Municipal Cinema’, Montrose Review, 21 November 1919, p. 4) ‘Montrose’, argued
Councillor Grieve, ‘was practically the only town in Scotland where it was impossible to provide
philharmonic and amateur dramatic entertainments for it was not worth while getting up these
entertainments unless the organisers could have the Hall for two or three consecutive nights’.
(‘The Cinema Question’, Montrose Review, 18 May 1923, p. 6)
Aesthetically, MacDiarmid’s engagement with the art of cinema only begins to appear in the
1930s. It is brief (located mainly in and around 1934), intriguing but tantalising. In his poem,
‘Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa’ (1934), as Michael Whitworth has shown, he appropriates and
poeticizes the words of the American Marxist film critic, Harry Allan Potamkin, on the work of
the German director, G.W. Pabst. As Whitworth notes there is no evidence that MacDiarmid
has seen the films that Potamkin discusses, and his ‘borrowing’ from Potamkin’s text is highly
selectively in order to promote his own view of the tension between what Adorno calls ‘genuine
art’ and mass culture, or what Leavis calls ‘Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture’. In the poem,
Whitworth concludes
MacDiarmid’s survey of forms of cultural activity finds much cause for pessimism, and his selective
reading of his prose sources accentuates this impression. He suggests that in Pabst’s films, a glossy
technical facility has triumphed over more profound representations of class relations. He insinuates
that in the theatre sensationalism and vulgarity have debased a more subtle tradition. The rhythms
of culture are not ‘self-determined’: they have become mechanised, ‘goosestep measures’. Moreover,
by drawing on critical texts throughout, MacDiarmid may imply that the ‘interpreting class’ has
successfully interposed itself between aesthetic experience and the subject eager for knowledge.
(Whitworth 2009, p. 15)
More substantially and more directly, again in 1934, MacDiarmid writes an article, ‘Poetry and
Film’, for Cinema Quarterly, a relatively short-lived journal, published in Edinburgh under the
editorship of Forsyth Hardy, which, between 1932 and 1935, became something of a house-
journal for the British documentary movement. Here, MacDiarmid is much more positive about
the potential of cinema and he returns again to Potamkin and Pabst to address ‘the problem of
artistic integrity, and the whole question of the cinema realising its vast potentialities’
(MacDiarmid 1934, p. 149) He argues against the ‘verbal continuity’ which marks speech in
sound cinema, not only because it is ‘unlifelike’, but also because it is ‘unmodern – in other
words, anachronistic to the art of the cinema – since much of the experimentation in modern
literature has been due to a realisation of this disability and to cut out the dead wood of expres-
sion’ (MacDiarmid 1934, p. 147). Like Virginia Woolf in her article, ‘The Cinema’, which first
appeared in Arts (New York) in 1926, MacDiarmid is pessimistic about the cinema as it is but
alert to its potential – and for MacDiarmid its potential lies in poetry.
Poetry is a much more complex and concentrated form of expression than prose – the characteristic
of all great poetry is an economy in presenting experience which keeps us wondering that so much
can be said in so few words. It may be defined as the art of maximum statement in minimum space.
The consequence of this is its unrivalled quality of memorableness – and the desirability, even the
need, of associating this quality with the cinema by every means possible needs no stressing. But the
difference between poetry and mere verse (which are so generally confused) is that the latter simply
decorates the unelucidated fact with fancy while the former is endowed with the imagination which
penetrates to the reality of the fact. Realism … is mere actualism – the acceptance of the fact; the
cinema has not gone far beyond that yet and then only in superadding fancy; the future of the cin-
ema depends on the power to use the imagination.
MacDiarmid’s powerful statement on the future of cinema through the deployment of poetry
leads to a somewhat characteristic plea for the employment of poets: ‘It must be the cheapest
possible addition to film-making, probably. Most poets would jump at the opportunity for next
to nothing’ (MacDiarmid 1934, p. 148). This points to the most intriguing speculation on
MacDiarmid’s relation to cinema.
In a 1934 letter to his brother Andrew Graham Grieve, MacDiarmid says ‘I’ve taken on some
film work for the GPO Film Unit under John Grierson – to fit poetic libretti in versa libre to
three new films instead of prose captions: but they aren’t ready for me yet and I can’t get money
from that source until I’ve evolved these verse accompaniments’.1 (MacDiarmid 2001, p. 79).
This gives substance to the suggestion of Laura Marcus, promulgated by Grierson’s acolyte and
biographer, Forsyth Hardy, that ‘Grierson’s first choice for a poet to write the verse for Night
Mail was apparently Hugh MacDiarmid, but it seems his contribution was found unsuitable,
and Auden chosen instead’ (Marcus 2007, p. 436). Night Mail was released in London in January
1936 and became one of the most successful and popular of the documentaries made by the GPO
Film Unit, enshrining the much quoted and much parodied Auden verse. At the time of writing
‘Poetry and Film’ MacDiarmid may already have been in discussion with Grierson about writing
verse accompaniment to the film, and one can only speculate on whether his distinction between
poetry and verse pre-dated or post-dated the rejection of his script and the choice of Auden. Even
more intriguingly, one can only speculate on the terms on which MacDiarmid’s poetic submis-
sion was found ‘unsuitable’.
In his decade in Montrose, MacDiarmid/Grieve directed his suspicion not at films as enter-
tainment or at their claims to be a new form of art or popular culture, but at a cinema which had
become a global (and, implicitly, Jewish) business, standing in the way of locally-produced
entertainment, local talent and local politics. In place of the metropolitanism of the Bloomsbury
set in London and its patronization of the Film Society and of the journal Close Up, or the cosmo-
politanism of James Joyce (who initiated the Volta, the first purpose-built cinema in Dublin) in
Trieste, Paris and Dublin, MacDiarmid/Grieve insists on the local: a fierce, presbyterian parochi-
alism in perpetual tension with the mask of Leninist internationalism.2 His later brief engage-
ment with the aesthetics of cinema and the possibility of a poetic cinema seems expedient rather
than effectual. For the most part, the modernist literary community of the Scottish Renaissance
is silent on or hostile to popular cinema. Grassic Gibbons has a brief article, ‘A Novelist Looks
at the Cinema’, (for which he suggests a subtitle ‘A Philistine Looks at the Cinema’) also in
Cinema Quarterly in 1935: a somewhat condescending account of his visits to a local ‘bug house’
in Welwyn Garden City in which he displays a familiarity with cinema but little critical engage-
ment (Grassic Gibbon 1935, pp. 81–85). It is not until Edwin Morgan in the 1960s that one
begins to find an engagement with popular cinema and with what Francesco Casetti has called
‘the popularisation of modernity and the modernisation of popularity’ (Casetti 2009, p. 58). In
a period when cinema’s manipulation of time, space and subjectivity was insinuating itself into
literary style, Grieve’s participation as a journalist and a Councillor in debates about the role of
public cinema, and his brief engagement with the poetics of a possible cinema, coupled with the
silence or condescension of his contemporaries, give us a glimpse of the distance between Scottish
modernism and modern cinema in Scotland.
For anyone concerned with the projected image of Scotland, MacDiarmid’s antipathy towards
a popular cinema increasingly dominated by Hollywood and by the expectations of an audience
moulded by Hollywood may be justified. Perhaps uniquely, as a small country with a small
native population and a large diaspora, Scotland had the misfortune of having a ‘world literature’
in a major world language without having a large enough native population base to sustain an
indigenous film industry. Historically, this has been a problem for much English-language cin-
ema outside the dominance of the USA. Without its own population base, the business of cinema
becomes dependent on foreign sales, and Hollywood quickly developed mechanisms to defend
its own interests. English cinema struggled with this for much of the twentieth century, protect-
ing itself with quota systems and tax incentives. With an even smaller population base, Scotland
could not support a sustainable cinema industry with an ongoing programme of production.
Each unique production became a one-off risky speculation, and much more security could be
achieved by exhibitors than by producers. This meant that Scotland’s world literature was avail-
able for exploitation by producers, hungry for content, in the United States, England, and even
in Europe, where small industries were supported by the demand for films in native languages.
An imaginary Scotland became a commodity in the international market for images.
From the perspective of modernity, a further anomaly in early cinema and in much popular
cinema throughout the twentieth century is significant. What is striking in scanning the cinema
trade press in Britain and America is that while the cinema industry – its mode of production
and distribution, its appeal to the democratic audience – is modern, a great proportion of its
early films appeal to a society that is still imagined as pre-modern. Even in the United States
where modernity and the film industry seem to walk hand in hand, characters, themes and places
recur that belong to an earlier age or to no age in particular: the village, the forest, the West,
gipsies, smugglers, fisher-folk, light-house keepers, the church, and the gentry. Scotland fits
quite comfortably into this imaginary past. It is not singled out as a pre-modern state, isolated
from twentieth-century modernity, with an antique and romantic past. Rather, this imagined
Scotland is part of a pattern of representation in early popular cinema which, until the urban
realism of the 1930s, is still rooted in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature and culture.
The gipsies, fisher-folk and squires of early American cinema are as much a cultural anachronism
in the twentieth century as the kilts and glengarries of Scotland. The imaginary map of Scotland
is one in which cities, urban life and industry are barely visible behind the hills and glens, vil-
lages and castles, peasantry and nobility of a geographically and historically dislocated
‘Highlands’. At a time when Glasgow was one of the leading industrial cities in the world,
accounting for 20% of the world’s shipbuilding, and with a heavy industry infrastructure to sup-
port it, the city is almost invisible in twentieth-century Scottish settings.
In the English-speaking world and for much of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century, Sir Walter Scott is a world literary figure, rivalled only in English by Dickens and
Shakespeare: an influence on Hugo and Dumas; on Jules Verne, with three of his novels set in
Scotland; translated into opera in Italy; and for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scott was ‘the delight of
generous boys’ whose aristocratic sensibility was tempered by his democratic humanity (see
Rigney 2012, pp. 195–196). Notoriously, Mark Twain blamed Scott, and particularly Ivanhoe,
for the outbreak of the Civil War: ‘Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character,
as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war’ (Twain 1979,
pp. 422–423). Common readers in English, as part of their patrimony in the English-speaking
world, were familiar not only with Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, but also with The Lady of the Lake and
Marmion. Scott, along with Robert Burns, and later joined by R.L. Stevenson and J.M Barrie,
placed Scotland, small in size but disproportionately large in world literature, within an interna-
tionally shared reading culture. They provided a shared narrative heritage for the new generation
of cinema-goers, but also a repository of stories and settings and a romantic history, some of it
copyright-free, that could be adapted and filmed as easily in Rome, Los Angeles or London as in
Aberfoyle or Kirriemuir. Similarly, at a time when parlour music was an important domestic
entertainment, ‘Annie Laurie’ or ‘Auld Robin Gray’ were sung by people who had never set foot
in Scotland, and were repeatedly adapted for the cinema (three versions of ‘Auld Robin Gray’ and
four quite different versions of ‘Annie Laurie’ between 1913 and 1927).
Much has been made of the significance of Scott in forging Scotland in the international
imaginary, and his novels and poems are indeed widely adapted. Between 1909 and 2000, Ivanhoe
was adapted seven times, The Bride of Lammermoor and Young Lochinvar were adapted four times,
The Talisman, Rob Roy, and The Lady of the Lake were each adapted three times. A Woman’s
Triumph (1914), an adaptation of The Heart of Midlothian, was filmed in Cuba. Interestingly,
Waverley, the name which, as Anne Rigney has shown (Rigney 2012, pp. 1–2), is endlessly
appropriated for street and town names around the anglophone world, has never been adapted for
cinema. Numerically, however, R.L. Stevenson is more firmly implanted in world dreams and
nightmares. In the same period, there were 47 adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ranging
from classic adaptations to The Nutty Professor (1963 and 1996), Abbott and Costello meet Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde (1953), or Scooby Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf (1998). There were 25 versions of
Treasure Island, and eight adaptations of Kidnapped.
Many of the earlier adaptations are from play versions of the original novel. The Little Minister
of 1921, for example, was an attempt to exploit the success of the theatre adaptation at the
Haymarket Theatre in London and on Broadway. (The novel was adapted six times between 1913
and 1934). It was common for films to be adapted from stage plays rather than from the original
novel or short story. The 1911 Rob Roy, for example, one of the few films actually produced by a
Scottish company, was adapted not from Scott’s original but from the John Clyde theatre produc-
tion of Pocock’s adaptation.(see Merz 2018) As one might expect, production companies were
attracted to stories that had already demonstrated that they could attract popular audiences, and
that could quite easily, appropriately and economically be translated from a stage set to a studio
set. Aesthetically, this seems to return film to the theatrical tradition, the narrative turned from
the novelistic to the dramatic and the theatrical. For Scott, as for Dickens, this meant an empha-
sis on the dramatic or melodramatic action and on dramatic types like Meg Merrilees, Jeanie
Deans, Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Rob Roy himself, rather than on the voyages of discovery and
transformation of Frank Osbaldistone or young Edward Waverley.
Landscape forms the background to many of the spectacular adaptions of Scottish novels, and,
in a visual medium, this background becomes integral to content. The tours of Thomas Pennant
(1769 and 1772), Boswell and Johnson (1775), Robert Burns (1787), Elizabeth Diggle (1788),
J.M.W. Turner (1801 – in search of Scott’s landscapes), and, perhaps most importantly, Dorothy
and William Wordsworth, and for part of their tour, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walter Scott
(1803) established a scenic route map which would later be taken up by such tour guides as
Thomas Cook (1846) or Baedeker (1890). At a time when the grand tours of Europe might be
interrupted by war or revolution, these ‘domestic grand tours’ established the Scottish landscape
as a sublime land of mountains and waterfalls: ‘an outlandish scene’, said Dorothy Wordsworth
of Loch Lomond, ‘we might have believed ourselves in North America’ (Wordsworth 1874,
p. 87). The imagery is taken up in early cinema by scenics, a regular part of the cinema pro-
gramme, which follow many of the same routes or the imagined escape route of Bonnie Prince
Charlie, and inscribe Scotland as a frontier territory on the edge of Europe. This frontier territory,
like the Western, became the content of narratives of transformation and the Lost Cause. The
spectacle of landscape decorated, as MacDiarmid says, ‘the unelucidated fact with fancy’, or
established, as Andy McChuckemup says in the 7:84 production of John McGrath’s The Cheviot,
the Stag and the Black Black Oil, a land in which there is ‘hee-haw but scenery’. The hostility of
the Scottish modernists to the antique Scotland which the globalised cinema reproduced seems,
perhaps, inevitable.
Among literary adaptations, there are few anomalies. Worth noting, perhaps, and one of the
stranger and more unorthodox anomalies, is an Italian adaptation of Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s
Seat, directed in 1974 by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, produced by Franco Rosselini, Roberto
Rosselini’s nephew, starring Elizabeth Taylor and featuring Andy Warhol (intermittently and
with a dubbed voice) as an English Lord. Despite Elizabeth Taylor’s central performance, the film
has not entered the critical pantheon and has been largely invisible. In the downloaded version3
it has the appearance of a mix between an Andy Warhol ‘home movie’ and a giallo film, an Italian
genre derived from a series of yellow-covered popular crime novels. But it is a modern film, and
recognises the demanding eccentricity of Sparks’ writing: an unsettling eccentricity which in
Ronald Neame’s more famous adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) is absorbed into
the orthodoxies of caricature and the platitudes of the heritage genre. It is perhaps in anomalies
and eccentricities such as The Driver’s Seat that one might find an alternative to the weary tradi-
tions of a scotched landscape and a retrospective cinema.
In her 1926 essay, Virginia Woolf is severe on cinema’s appropriation of literature
All the famous novels of the world, with their well-known characters, and their famous scenes, only
asked, it seemed, to be put on the films. What could be easier and simpler? The cinema fell upon its prey
with immense rapacity, and to this moment largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But
the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as
they try vainly to work in couples. The eye says: ’Here is Anna Karenina’. A voluptuous lady in black
velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says: ’That is no more Anna Karenina than it is
Queen Victoria’. For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind --her charm, her
passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet.
(Woolf 1926, p. 350)
But Woolf also imagines a cinema that might be different: ‘If it ceased to be a parasite, how
would it walk erect?’ (Woolf 1926, p. 350) It may not be too melodramatic to say (and it is
consonant with Woolf4) that the glimpse of such a new British cinema began to appear on or
about November 1982. The inception of Channel 4 as a ‘publisher-broadcaster’, commissioning
broadcast material, including films which might be shown in cinemas produced by small inde-
pendent producers, changed the landscape of cinema in Britain in ways which it is now easy to
forget. Significantly the remit of Channel 4 as a public service broadcaster included an injunc-
tion that it should ‘encourage innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of
programmes’, and that it should ‘appeal to tastes and interests not generally catered for by ITV’
(Broadcasting Act 1980, paragraph 3, p. 3). Precisely the excitement of the early days was that
there was an attention to new voices, a space in which the local could be heard without the pres-
sure of the international market. Forty years later it is easy to be disenchanted with Channel 4,
as it has been absorbed into a much more complex broadcasting environment and its distinctive-
ness has been delegated to other national and local agencies, but it is important to recall the
impact it had on broadcasting and on filmmaking. Paradoxically, it was a classic Thatcherite
invention, establishing small and medium-sized enterprises which would compete with each
other for commissions in a self-regulating competitive environment. Instead of the protective,
nurturing environment of the BBC or the ITV companies, filmmakers and programme-makers
competed with each other to form the basis of what would come to be known as the creative
industries. As the creative industries consolidated, other agencies came on board to support
filmmaking and filmmakers in their own environment: Film Commissions, local agencies, the
National Lottery Fund, the BBC and ITV, seeking to diversify the production base, attract film
companies to their area, and promote the image and the images of their cities or regions. There
was increased recognition of the importance of film for tourism, and filmmaking in Scotland was
promoted nationally and internationally as part of a national economy. Screen Scotland offers
support in identifying locations and offers assistance in finding office space for visiting production
companies, and Visit Scotland, Scotland’s national tourist organisation, notes that since Scottish
Screen was successful in attracting Bollywood companies to film in Scotland, including the
iconic Kuch, Kuch, Hota Hai (1998) with scenes of Eilean Donan Castle, Glencoe, Inchnaholme
Abbey and the Bass Rock interspersed into a musical number which begins and ends in Mumbai,
the total spend by visitors from India has risen by 60% to £17.6 million. The Visit Scotland
website also offers location guides for Michael Fassbinder’s Macbeth (2015) on the Isle of Skye
(Mallet 2015) or a three-day tour of the locations of Outlander (2014–2020) (Visit Scotland n.d.).
On one level, then, the moment of Channel 4 and the promotion of the creative industries was
part of the business of cinema which MacDiarmid decried. And yet this same cynical business of
cinema may stumble on something new and creative. In funding local production companies as
part of an ‘enterprise culture’ or as a way of stimulating business growth, agencies may stray into
funding a local imagination and a local imaginary. Thinking only of facilities, services and capac-
ity for growth rather than the big, defining issues of culture and identity which preoccupy the
desire for a national cinema, agencies may end up – even if only occasionally – supporting the
creativity and individual talent through which difference leaks and on which an experimental art
cinema depends: the cinema which both Virginia Woolf and MacDiarmid began to imagine.
The challenge which Woolf threw down was this:
Something abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which
calls for the very slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them
subserviently – of such movements and abstractions the films may, in time to come, be composed.
(Woolf 1926, p. 351)
To explore the possibility of this experimental cinema which rethinks the relation between film and
literature, I want to return to Movern Callar, an adaptation of the 1995 novel by Alan Warner,
directed by Lynne Ramsay in 2001.5 Morvern Callar joins a small group of adaptations which, post-
Channel 4, began to look at modern writing, often writing which seemed difficult to adapt: Young
Adam (2003), for example, directed by David MacKenzie from Alexander Trocchi’s novel; or Under
the Skin (2013), directed by Jonathan Glazer from Michel Faber’s novel; or, most famously,
Trainspotting (1996) directed by Danny Boyle from Irvine Welsh’s novel. Of these, Lynne Ramsay’s
Morvern Callar seems to me to be the one which explores most experimentally the intricate relation-
ship between literary language and film language, not by translating but by a kind of recoding of
the verbal and the visual or of the literary and the cinematic. The interest is not in the fidelity of the
film to its origins but in the ways in which literary language is refigured in cinematic language.
Novel and film share the sense of a central character who does not grow, who is not worked
on by the narrative to achieve identity, carrying us with her on a voyage of self-discovery. Things
happen to Morvern; she acts without the narrative logic of motivation, quest or morality. In the
novel, however, Morvern is held together in a first-person narrative, a consistent voice which
does not tell us directly how her actions feel to her or how we should feel about them – how it
feels, for example to cut up her boyfriend’s body – but it does tell us indirectly, by recounting
what track she listened to on her Walkman while she was doing it. In the film, on the other
hand, without voiceover we are denied that consistent, guiding, interior monologue. In the
sequence in which she buries the remains of her boyfriend, her subsequent moment of release,
wheeling and running on the hillside, is explained in the novel by the fact that she is listening
to The Cocteau Twins on her Walkman (an explanation which may be amoral but is at least
interiorized). In the film, the music soundtrack which might accompany or explain her release is
withheld; the unaccompanied action is left in a limbo without motivation or interiority; the
moment resists our desire for interpretation or psychological meaning.
In terms of adaptation, the most surprising feature of the screenplay is the absence of the
voiceover which the first-person narrative of the novel seemed to demand. Without its help, we
see the image and hear the soundtrack of her Walkman, sound shifting between apparently
diegetic and apparently non-diegetic as we move from inside Morvern to outside, from Morvern
as a subject listening to Morvern as an object of the image. Subjectivity shifts, is left unstable,
unfixed by the narrative logic. The perversity of the adaptation is the withdrawal of the logos
from a narrative which, in the novel, is told by a logorrhaeic in whose verbal rush the suicide of
her boyfriend carries the same weight – or lack of it – as a Christmas Eve party or the subsequent
hangover. In the film, the withdrawal of the voiceover and interior monologue which might give
us an edge on motivation or affect, produces a kind of weightlessness, a flatness of significance
and signification. In a novel such as this which is so literary, so dependent on a writing whose
colloquialism masks its condensations and estrangements, what resources does visual narrative
have to match the experimental elusiveness of literary language?
There is a sequence in which Morvern enters the supermarket to a lanquid country soundtrack
by Lee Hazlewood, ‘Some Velvet Morning’. The camera shifts between expressionless subjectiv-
ity to expressive objectivity: in the first, the butcher waves directly to Morvern from behind his
counter, and, consequently, to the camera which is identified precisely and subjectively with her
point of view; in the second, the camera, shooting from waist level, projects Morvern from below,
representing her ‘walking tall’ against the ceiling and the hanging cutouts of fruit and vegeta-
bles. The shift from subjective to objective is marked and dramatic, and leaves us in no doubt
where we are looking from. At the same time, the ‘objectivity’ is not neutral, not really objective,
but is marked by a dramatic expressiveness through the angle of the shot: it does not just show
Morvern, it shows how it feels to be Morvern at this moment, with that soundtrack. The
soundtrack itself could have any of three sources: it could be extra-diegetic, the film’s soundtrack
simply the conventional accompaniment located nowhere in the narrative space; it could be
diegetic and objective, the musak of the supermarket (and this is indeed anticipated precisely by
the opening strings); it could be diegetic and subjective, the interior sound of Morvern’s
Walkman, the opening strings bridging smoothly into Lee Hazelewood’s country voice reverber-
ating inside her head, determining her mood, replicating and interiorising the feeling of walking
tall: ‘Some velvet morning when I’m straight/I’m going to open up your gate…’. The scene is
incidental in terms of plot or story, but it is exemplary in signalling the shifting points of view
and positionings which undermine any desire for fixed subjectivities and identifications. The
constant shifting between objectivity and subjectivity, expressiveness and flatness, stasis and
movement create an instability. The unstable perspective and point of view which deprive us of
the security of identification are properties of camera placement and camera movement: that is
to say, they are properties of the image and the cinematic. It is these which we have to analyse
and understand, if we are to understand the relationship between the literary and the cinematic
as a relationship of language systems rather than simply of plot elements.
Warner’s prose in this novel is characterised by a certain weightlessness. He gives to Morvern
a voice which describes every action from the same perspective, without seeming to inhabit any
of them or confer value on them. He follows precisely the rhythms and nuances of Morvern’s
speech, refusing the drama of events or the differentiation of moment. Nevertheless, the position
which the reader occupies is a consistent position, always shadowing Morvern’s distance from the
events which she describes. Throughout the film, on the other hand, there is a felt movement
between interiority, exteriority and points between; the spectator’s position, his or her identifica-
tion with character and camera, is constantly modulated; any stability of perception is unsettled;
the look and point of view themselves are put in play, mirroring the weightlessness in Warner’s
prose, but without the ‘guide’ of a first-person narrative. At the end of the sequence above, in the
movements of the soundtrack between non-diegetic and diegetic, subjective and objective, we
reread the narrative space retrospectively at the point at which Morvern switches off her
Walkman. It is only at that point that we properly know which space we have been occupying:
the space inside Morvern’s head. This constant play of retrospection and anticipation is the play
of subjectivities: our subjectivities as readers echoing the fluidity and weightlessness of Morvern’s
subjectivity as protagonist.
There is a scene towards the end of the film, and still in Spain, when Morvern, having posed
successfully as an author and having sold ‘her’ manuscript to the publishers over several glasses
of wine, takes them to a Spanish graveyard at dawn. In a single remarkable shot, starting from a
mid-shot of Morvern, with a red carnation, standing beside a memorial plaque set into the wall,
facing screen right, the camera tracks along the wall, past other memorial plaques, to find
Morvern at the other end of the same shot, beside another plaque set into the wall, now facing
screen left, still holding the red carnation which she finally places in a small memorial vase.
Within the conventions of narrative space, it is an impossible shot, placing Morvern in two
places at once within a single tracking shot, the red carnation marking out a narrative time
within the shot in which the end is the mirror image of the beginning. If Warner’s language
marks out the ‘literariness’ of his writing – in Jakobson’s sense of ‘literariness’ as ‘language call-
ing attention to itself’6 (Scholes 1982, p. 58) Lynne Ramsay’s camera marks, again and again, an
equivalent consciousness of cinematic language ‘calling attention to itself’.
Endings are always telling when one comes to compare films and the novels which provoke
them. In its closing lines, Warner’s novel brings with it the hint of a new life, a kind of renewal,
a promise of redemption which is unanticipated and out of the blue
I placed both hands on my tummy at the life there, the life growing right in there. The child of
the raves.
I put my head down and closed my mouth. I started the walking forwards into that night.
(Warner 1996, p. 229)
More open and ambiguous, Lynne Ramsay’s film tries out a number of endings. At the end of the
scenes in Spain, there is a two-shot sequence which seems to offer the possibility of a redemption,
a conventionally romantic transformation through encounter with the wilderness. In an almost
excessively bucolic image, Morvern is found sitting on arid earth, her back to a tree, a rustic
farmhouse behind her, goats feeding nearby, and the sea in the distance. The soundscape is not a
Walkman but goats’ bells. This idyll of rural tranquillity, however, is cut into by a close up of
her hand splayed out on the earth, with an ant crawling over it. Insect life is one of the motifs
which runs through the film, a perturbation in benign nature, threatening ripeness with corrup-
tion. There is a quick cut to the damp, dark streets of Oban, the goats’ bells segueing into the
mewling of gulls. The image of redemption is there only to be refused, the romance of renewal
held open in one image only to be closed off in the next. The Oban sequence ends with Morvern
sitting by an empty rail track as a dawn chorus of birds marks the soundtrack; the scene fades to
black and opens onto an extended, strobe-lit club scene, geographically unlocated and played out
to the non-diegetic and somewhat anachronistic soundtrack of The Mamas and the Papas from a
more innocent age: ‘This is Dedicated to the One I Love’. The escape is not to the stillness of the
Spanish wilderness in which a stable identity might be found, but to the flat ecstasy of clubbing,
the fragmentation of the image and the dissolution of identity. The closing credits roll. No
glimpse of easy resolution or achieved identity.
It would be absurd to suggest from this that the film Morvern Callar is somehow better than
the novel Morvern Callar because more open in its ending, a claim which would simply reverse
and refresh the wearisome claim that films can never be as good as novels, or adaptations can
never be as good as their originals. What is engaging is a certain experimental consistency in the
film which refuses to return the instabilities of perception to the possibility of stability and
renewal at the end. The novel follows the logic of speech: a first-person narrative which, however
weightless, disconnected, has a single sensibility and a speech behind it which in the end finds
some hint of stability and achieved identity, some possibility of renewal. The film follows the
logic of a camera which moves constantly between points of view and perspectives – now,
Morvern seeing; now, seeing Morvern – a play of subjectivities and objectives which need not or
cannot be brought back to a unified sensibility, to identity. These seem to me to be the experi-
mental logics which are at work. The particular ‘difficulty’ of an art cinema – the reason why this
film by Lynne Ramsay was much less favourably received than her previous film, Ratcatcher
(1999) – lies in its refusal to offer the footholds of identity in the play of subjectivity. In return,
its achievement – the achievement of the great European art cinemas – is to keep faith with
alienation.
It is not that, between novel and film, one closes down on meaning and the other does not,
but that each uses the resources of its language to hold open the ambiguities, experimenting
to the end with the play of subjectivities and identities and their uncertain realisation in lan-
guage. It is this possibility, which Virginia Woolf holds open in her very short article on cin-
ema, rather than the question of the fidelities or deformities of adaptation, which seems to
point the way to a more constructive understanding of the relationship between cinema and
literature.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Alex Linklater for pointing me to this 4 See Virginia Woolf (1924). ‘On or about December
letter in MacDiarmid’s published correspondence. 1910, human character changed’, p. 421.
2 See Marcus (2007), McCourt (2010) and Williams 5 A longer version of this analysis appears in Caughie,
(2020) in ‘Further Reading’ for more on Woolf, the ‘Morvern Callar, art cinema and the “monstrous
Film Society and Joyce. archive”’, Scottish Studies Review, vol. 8, no. 1 (2007),
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLVo8ISwojk and in Theorising World Cinema eds. Lucia Nagib, Chris
(accessed 29 March 2022). See also Alastair Braidwood, Perriam, Rajinder Dudrah (London: I.B. Tauris,
‘From page to screen: the strange case of “The Driver’s 2012), pp. 3–20.
Seat”’, The Bottle Imp, issue 22 (online), www. 6 For a discussion of the concept of ‘literariness’ and film
thebottleimp.org.uk/2017/11/page-screen-strange- adaptation, see Belen Vidal Villasur (2002).
case-drivers-seat (accessed 29 March 2022).
References
Bold, A. (1988). MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve: Merz, C. (2018). Rob Roy: Britain’s first feature film. In:
A Critical Biography. London: John Murray. Early Cinema in Scotland (ed. J. Caughie, T. Griffiths
Broadcasting Act (1980). London: HMSO. Chapter 64; and M. Velez Serna), 110–129. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
para 3:3. University Press.
Casetti, F. (2009). Filmic experience. Screen 50 (1): Rigney, A. (2012). The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on
56–66. the Move. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crawford, R. (2009). Country Lear: review of Margery Scholes, R. (1982). Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven
Palmer McCulloch, Scottish Modernism and its Contexts, and London: Yale University Press.
1918–1959. Times Literary Supplement, (6 November, 7–8). Twain, M. (1979). ‘Life on the Mississippi’ (1883). In:
Grassic Gibbon, L. (1935). A novelists looks at the cin- The Unabridged Mark Twain, vol. 2 (ed. L. Teacher),
ema. Cinema Quarterly 3 (2) (Winter): 81–85. https:// 422–423. Philadeplhia: Running Press.
archive.org/details/cinemaquarterly103gdro/page/ Villasur, B.V. (2002). Classic adaptations, modern rein-
n96/mode/1up (accessed 24 November 2020). ventions: reading the image in the contemporary liter-
MacDiarmid, H. (1934). Poetry and film. Cinema Quarterly ary film. Screen 43 (1) (Spring): 5–18.
2 (3) (Spring): 146–149. https://archive.org/details/ Visit Scotland (n.d.). Discover Outlander. Visit Scotland,
cinema02gdro/page/n159/mode/1up?q=MacDiarmid https://www.visitscotland.com/info/tours/discover-
(accessed 28 October 2020). outlander-8bfa62b6 (accessed 25 November 2020).
MacDiarmid, H. (2001). New Selected Letters (ed. Warner, A. (1996). Morvern Callar. London: Vintage.
D. Grieve, O.D. Edwards and A. Riach)). Manchester: Whitworth, M. (2009). Forms of culture in Hugh
Carcanet Press. MacDiarmid’s “Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa”.
Mallet, A.R. (2015). Lights, Camera, Adventure! Filming International Journal of Scottish Literature 5, (Autumn/
Macbeth on Isle of Skye. Visit Scotland, (14 Sept) Winter), http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue5/whitworth.
https://www.visitscotland.com/blog/films/michael- htm: (accessed 27 November 2020).
fassbender-filming-macbeth-isle-of-skye (accessed Wordsworth, D. 1997 [(1874]). Recollections of a Tour
25 November 2020). Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803 (ed. C.K. Walker). New
Marcus, L. (2007). The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in Haven: Yale University Press.
the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further Reading
Hardy, F. (1979). John Grierson: A Documentary Biography. Woolf, V. (1924). Character in fiction. In: The Essays of
London: Faber & Faber. Virginia Woolf, vol. 3 (ed. A. McNeillie), 420–422.
McCourt, J. (ed.) (2010). Roll Away the Reel World: James London: Hogarth Press.
Joyce and the Cinema. Cork: Cork University Press. Woolf, V. (1994). The cinema (1926). In: The Essays of
Montrose Review, National Library of Scotland and British Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 (ed. A. McNeillie), 348–352.
Newspaper Archive, www.britishnewspaperarchive. London: Hogarth Press.
co.uk (accessed, 29 March, 2022).
Williams, K. (2020). James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before
and After Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
49
Timeline and Further Resources
Moira Hansen
School of Arts and Humanities, The Open University, UK
Timeline
Through consideration of periods, themes and specific writers, this volume demonstrates the
scope and richness of the Scottish literary landscape across the past 2000 years. This timeline is
intended not as an exhaustive detailing of publications and developments within Scottish litera-
ture but as an overview of key moments and movements. These are placed alongside significant
points in history, both Scottish and beyond, to support the reader in understanding the contexts
in which writers have worked and responded in their output. In the interests of conciseness,
entries for some writers are restricted to the year of their first publication. Further contextualisa-
tion of individual works or writers can be found in the relevant chapters within the volume.
Year Scottish Literature Historical Events
563 Columba arrives from Ireland on Iona,

founding a monastery on the island
c. 700–713 Adomnán’s Vita Columbae, oldest known

manuscript to have been written in Scotland, is
produced. Written mainly in Latin but also
includes some Greek and Gaelic
Eighth The Dream of the Rood is carved on the Ruthwell

century Cross, the text’s first appearance, although it is
considered a mainstay of Old English literature
Early ninth Amrae Coluimb Chille, attributed to Dallán

century Forgaill, likely written

Timeline and Further Resources 625
Eleventh The Book of Deer written. Property records

century added in the twelfth century indicate the
established nature of written Gaelic
Late eleventh Duan Albanach, a Gaelic account of the kings

century of Scotland, written
1164 Scots defeat the forces of the king of Argyll

and the Isles in the Battle of Renfrew
Late twelfth Manuscript of Jocelin of Furness’s Life of

century Kentigern produced (BL Cotton Vitelius C viii),
significant in being a manuscript that can be
considered predominantly literary rather than
religious in nature
1263 Edward I defeats John Baliol’s Scottish

forces at the Battle of Dunbar and occupies
lowland Scotland
1266 The Treaty of Perth, between Scotland and

Norway, asserts Scottish sovereignty over
the Hebrides and the Isle of Man
1297 Scottish forces, led by William Wallace,

defeat English at the Battle of Stirling Bridge
1298 English forces defeat Scotland at the Battle

of Falkirk, leading to William Wallace
handing guardianship of Scotland to
Robert the Bruce and John Comyn
c. 1300 Scotland after Alexander, the earliest known

surviving Scots verse, is written
1305 William Wallace captured, hanged, drawn

and quartered
1314 The army of Robert the Bruce defeats

Edward II of England’s forces at the Battle
of Bannockburn
1320 The Declaration of Arbroath is signed,

asserting Scotland’s status as an independent
nation where the people are sovereign
1375/6 John Barbour writes The Brus
Early fifteenth James I of Scotland composes The Kingis Quair

century
1413 University of St Andrews founded
1437 James I of Scotland murdered; succeeded

to the throne by his son James II
(Continued )
(Continued)
1448 Richard Holland composes The Buke of the

Howlat
1451 University of Glasgow founded
1460 Gilbert Haye translates Life of Alexander the

Conqueror from French
1470s ‘Blind Hary’ writes The Wallace

Aithbhreac nighean Coirceadail writes her lament
for her husband, the earliest surviving poem by
an identifiable female poet in Gaelic tradition
The Taill of Rauf Coilyear composed (author
unknown)
1476 William Caxton sets up his printing press

in Westminster
1488 James III dies at the Battle of Sauchieburn.

He is succeeded by his son James IV
1495 University of Aberdeen founded
Early John Asloan compiles what is the oldest

sixteenth surviving manuscript miscellany of Older Scots
century texts (Edinburgh Adv. MS 16500)
Book of the Dean of Lismore compiled, collecting
Gaelic stories and ballads
1507 James IV awards a grant to Walter Chepman

and Andro Myllar to produce an edition of
Elphinstone’s Breviarium Aberdonense, marking
the beginning of the Scottish print trade,
although it would take another five decades for
it to become truly established and successful
1508 Chapman and Myllar print The Knightly Tale of

Golagros and Gawane (author unknown), a
Scottish contribution to Arthurian romances
1513 James IV dies at the Battle of Flodden. He

is succeeded by his son James V
1521 John Mair’s Historia Majoris Britanniae

published in Paris
1525 William Tyndale’s New Testament in

English printed in Europe, copies being
secretly imported via Scottish ports at
Leith and Dundee
1527 Hector Boece’s Historia gentis Scotorum

published in Paris; its real influence on
Scottish readers came through the 1536
translation by John Bellenden
1536 John Bellenden’s Hystory and Croniklis of

Scotland printed
1559–67 John Knox writes his Historie of the Reformation
1560s The sonnet form becomes popular in Scotland,

remaining so until c. 1630s
1560 The Reformation in Scotland culminates

in organised religion breaking with the
papacy to establish the protestant Church
of Scotland
1565 The Gude and Godlie Ballatis is compiled
1567 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots allegedly writes to Mary Stuart is forced to abdicate as Queen
the Earl of Bothwell the letters and poems now of Scotland in favour of her infant son
collectively known as the Casket Letters James VI
Eòin Carsuel’s translation of the Book of
Common Order is the first book ever printed in
Gaelic
1568 George Bannatyne compiles his manuscript of

Older Scots texts during a plague lockdown
(Edinburgh Adv. MS 1.1.6)
Accepted date for David Lindsay writing Ane
Satyre of the Thre Estaitis, although it may have
been written a little earlier. The first full
printed version appeared in 1602
c. 1570 Maitland folio manuscript compiled (Pepys

Library, Cambridge, MS2553)
1571 Robert Lekprevik prints Barbour’s The Brus,

the earliest major work in Older Scots and
clearly still in circulation two centuries after its
composition
First print edition of Robert Henryson’s Morall
Fabillis
1583 University of Edinburgh founded
1586 Maitland quarto manuscript compiled (Pepys

Library, Cambridge, MS1408)
Fifteenth Christ’s Kirk on the Grene composed (author

century unknown; survives by inclusion in the
Bannatyne MS and Maitland Folio)
1603 Elizabeth Melville publishes Ane Godlie Dream, Elizabeth I of England dies, succeeded to
the earliest known Scottish woman to appear in the throne by James VI of Scotland,
print. uniting the crowns of the two nations
(Continued )
(Continued)
1609 Statutes of Iona signed, requiring

Highland clan chiefs to send their sons to
lowland English-speaking protestant
schools
1615 Patrick Gordon’s The famous historie of Bruce is

printed in the Netherlands
1616 The Scottish Privy Council impose further

restrictions on the use of Gaelic in favour
of English
1617 William Drummond composes Forth Feasting

to commemorate James VI and I’s visit to
Scotland
1618 The Muses Welcome published, an anthology of

poetry produced to mark James VI and I’s
only visit to Scotland after the Union of the
Crowns
1622 Edward Raban publishes one of the earliest

known educational hornbooks intended for
children
1633 William Drummond composes Entertainment of

King Charles to commemorate Charles I’s visit
to Scotland
1638 National Covenant is signed, opposing

Charles I’s proposed changes to the Church
of Scotland
c. 1640 Robert Sempill writes The life and Death of the

Piper of Kilbarchan, the verse form used
becoming known as the ‘Standard Habbie’ in
honour of the poem’s subject
1644 Anna Hume published her verse translation of

three of Petrarch’s Trionfi
1649 Charles I is executed; England is under

republican government during the ensuing
interregnum period
1660 Thomas White publishes A Little Book for Little Charles II is restored to the throne of
Children England
1661 The Mercurius Caledonius is established,

generally agreed as being Scotland’s first
newspaper although there were a number of
papers of English origin already in circulation
at the time. It would be suppressed after only a
few issues on religious grounds
1662 Noble patronage of the Tennis Court Theatre, Solemn League and Covenant is signed
within the grounds of Holyroodhouse, protects between England and Scotland ensuring,
it from post-Restoration hostility of church among other things, the preservation of
and civil critics reformed religion in Scotland
1663 William Clark’s Marciano, or The Discovery, the

first post-Restoration play written in Scotland,
is performed
1667 Thomas Sydserf translates from Spanish the

comedy Tarrugo’s Wiles
1680 The Edinburgh Gazette, ‘the first genuine

Scottish newspaper’ is first printed. It
continues until 1708 when it becomes The Scots
Postman or New Edinburgh Gazette
1681 Samuel Colvil’s The Whiggs Supplication published
1682 The earliest known printing of a chapbook in

Scotland produced, Tom Thumb his life and death
1685 Charles II dies; succeeded by his brother

James VII and II
1688 James II deposed by William III and Mary

II in the Glorious Revolution
1689 Advocates Library opened in Edinburgh

by the Faculty of Advocates
1690 The term ‘Gàidhealtachd’ first appears, in

Robert Kirk’s edition of the New Testament
1691 Archibald Pitcairne’s The Phanatiks published
1694 Mary II dies; William III continues to rule

alone
1701 James VII and II dies in exile. His son,

James Francis Edward Stuart takes the
title James III. Opponents dub him The
Old Pretender
1702 William III dies. Succeeded by his sister-in-

law, Anne, daughter of James VII and II
1706 James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and

Serious Scots Poems published. Subsequent
volumes published in 1709 and 1711
1707 Act of Union unites the Parliaments of

Scotland and England
(Continued )
(Continued)
1710 Thomas Ruddiman publishes a new edition of Copyright Act passed, introducing
Gavin Douglas’s Eneados with Scots glossary regulation of copyright by the government
and judicial system, rather than private
parties. The Act also designates the
Advocates’ Library as a library of legal
deposit
1714 Queen Anne, last Stuart monarch, dies.

Succeeded by George I, beginning the rule
of Great Britain by the House of Hanover
1715 First Jacobite rising, led by the Earl of

Mar
1724 Allan Ramsay publishes The Ever Green, an

anthology of older Scots poetry, and The
Tea-Table Miscellany
1725 Allan Ramsay publishes an early version of his

Scots play The Gentle Shepherd
1726–30 James Thomson’s The Seasons published,

initially as individual instalments for each
season then as a complete volume in 1730
1727 George I dies. Succeeded by his son,

George II
1737 Theatre Licencing Act forbids presentation

of spoken drama without a Royal Patent,
resulting in the closure of several theatres
including Allan Ramsay’s. Reopening is
allowed by the exploitation of a loophole
where a musical performance, for which
entry is charged, is followed by a free
performance of spoken drama
1739 Scotland’s first literary magazine, The Scots

Magazine and General Intelligencer, is founded. It is
still printed today by DC Thomson of Dundee
David Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature
published
1741 Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair publishes a

Gaelic dictionary for the Scottish Society for the
Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK)
1745 The final significant Jacobite Rising, led

by Charles Edward Stuart, culminating in
defeat by British forces at the Battle of
Culloden on 16th April 1746
1747 The Aberdeen Journal launched as the first Act of Proscription is introduced,
substantial newspaper of the north-east. The disarming Highlanders and banning the
paper continues in production to this day, now wearing of ‘highland clothing’
titled the Aberdeen Press and Journal.
1748 Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random published
1751 Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair publishes

Ais-eiridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich, the first
book of secular verse published in Gaelic
1755 Short-lived periodical Edinburgh Review first

published. Last issue published in 1756
1756 John Home’s Douglas first performed, in

Edinburgh’s Canongate theatre
1759 Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments published
1760 James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry George II dies. Succeeded by his grandson,
collected in the Highlands of Scotland, first part of George III
the Ossian cycle, published
1761 John Gregory publishes A Father’s Legacy to his

Daughters
1762 Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism published
1763–5 High Blair’s Critical Dissertation on the Poems of

Ossian written
1766 Jean Marishall’s The History of Miss Clarinda

Cathcart published
1767–1801 SSPCK support translation of the Testaments

into Gaelic
1768 Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey

published
1769 William Robertson’s History of the Reign of the

Emperor Charles V published
1771 Henry Mackenzie publishes The Man of Feeling

Tobias Smollett’s final novel, The Expedition of
Humphry Clinker, published
Robert Fergusson begins publishing in Walter
Ruddiman’s Weekly Review. Ruddiman would
publish the 1773 edition of Fergusson’s works
1771–74 James Beattie writes The Minstrel: or the Progress

of Genius
1774 House of Lords ruling on Donaldson vs

Becket overturns London booksellers’ claims
to perpetual copyright of published works
1775 Revolutionary war breaks out following years

of rising tensions between the American
colonies and the British government
(Continued )
(Continued)
1776 Raghnall, son of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir The Continental Congress declares the
Alasdair, edits Comh-chruinneachidh Orannaigh independence of the American colonies
Gaidhealac (the Eigg collection), which from Great Britain, establishing a federal
includes the first instances of Gaelic poetry by republic
women in print
Angus and Archibald MacDonald produce
their Collection of Gaelic Poetry, the first print
collection of such work to appear. Unlike later
collections, it resists including Jacobite works
to any great extent
Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations published
1779 Henry Mackenzie launches short-lived

periodical The Mirror, lasting only a year. He
would launch The Lounger in 1785, again
short-lived but notable for carrying
Mackenzie’s review of Robert Burns’s Poems
Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, where the poet is
dubbed ‘the heaven-taught ploughman’
1783 Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres Royal Society of Edinburgh founded
published
1785 Elizabeth Rae Keir publishes Interesting

Memoirs, one of only 47 novels published that
year
1786 Robert Burns’s Poems Chiefly in the Scottish

Dialect published
1788 Charles Edward Stuart, The Young

Pretender, dies in Rome
1789 William Collins establishes his publishing firm Bastille prison in Paris is stormed,
in Glasgow, one of several Scottish firms which considered to mark the beginning of the
would see great success in the following French Revolution
century, alongside others such as Thomas
Nelson (Edinburgh, 1798), Oliver and Boyd
(Edinburgh, 1801) and William Blackwood
(Edinburgh, 1804)
1790 Robert Burns publishes ‘Tam o Shanter’
1791–99 Conceived by Sir John Sinclair, the first

Statistical Account of Scotland published
1792 Louis XVI of France arrested in August.

He would be executed by guillotine in
January 1793
1798 Joanna Baillie publishes the first of her Plays on

the Passions
1802–3 Publication of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,

edited by Walter Scott
1802 Periodical Edinburgh Review is relaunched
1803 An Rosroine, the first Gaelic periodical, is

published, with a number of further titles
being established in the following decades
1805 Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrelsy

published
1810 Kate Montalbion’s Caledonia, Honoria Scott’s

A Winter in Edinburgh and The Vale of the Clyde,
and Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs all
published
1811 Mary Brunton’s Self-Control published
1812 Archibald Constable buys the copyright to the

Encyclopaedia Britannica, publishing it from his
Edinburgh office to great success
1814 Walter Scott’s Waverley published
1817 Periodical Blackwood’s Magazine is first

published (initially as the Edinburgh Monthly
Magazine)
Walter Scott begins building his house at
Abbotsford in the Scottish Borders, including
what will become a significant working library
1818 Susan Ferrier’s Marriage published
1819 John Gibson Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to His

Kinsfolk published
Robert and William Chambers establish their
publishing company in Edinburgh. Focusing
on educational and reference works, their most
notable output is Chambers’s Encyclopaedia
and Dictionary
1820 George III dies. Succeeded by his son,

George IV
1821–24 The Scottish Minstrel published in six volumes,

collecting Scottish songs and airs, including
several by Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne
(Continued )
(Continued)
1821 John Galt’s Annals of the Parish published

Archibald Constable publishes Walter Scott’s
Kenilworth in three volumes for 31s 6d (one and
a half guineas). This would become the
standard publishing format and pricing for
novels across Britain until the end of the
century when circulating libraries increasingly
favoured single-volume formats
1822 James Hogg’s Three Perils of Man written Walter Scott choreographs George IV’s
visit to Edinburgh
1824 James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and

Confessions of a Justified Sinner published
Grace Kennedy’s Anna Ross: A Story for Children
published
1825 Stock market crash which almost brought

down the Bank of England results in the
loss of several publishing houses across the
UK, including Archibald Constable
1830 George IV dies. Succeeded by his brother

William IV
1837 William IV dies. Succeeded by his niece,

Victoria
1843 The Great Disruption which sees

450 ministers break away from the Church
of Scotland to form the Free Church of
Scotland
1850s Scottish publishing firm William Collins and

Sons become the first British publishers to
establish permanently in Australia
1854 Scottish publisher Thomas Nelson’s New York

office is the first permanent British publishing
firm in the US
1860 John Francis Campbell publishes Popular Tales

of the West Highlands, collecting a range of
stories from Highland folklore
1869 The People’s Friend first published in Dundee,

continuing in production to this day
1870 Education Act (England and Wales)

introduced, providing education for all
children aged 5–12 years old, although not
mandating attendance
1872 Education Act (Scotland) introduced,

mandating education for all children aged
5–12 years old but notably making no discrete
provision for education in Gaelic medium
1876 Royal Commission on Copyright convened

to examine matters of international
copyright and piracy
1880s Activism around rents, rights and

conditions in the Highlands leads to the
Napier Commission to examine the
condition of crofters and cottars
1880 Margaret Oliphant’s A Beleaguered City

published
1881 Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island published
1885 Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of

Verses published
1887 Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, the

first Sherlock Holmes story, published
1889 The Blue Fairy Book, the first of Andrew Lang’s

hugely successful collection for children, published
1890 Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen published
1891 J.M. Barrie’s The Little Minister published
1895 Ian McLaren’s Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush, first

published the previous year, is the bestselling
novel in America. Similar ‘kailyard’ works are
hugely popular with international reading
audiences around of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries
Patrick Geddes publishes the first issue of
Celtic Revival magazine The Evergreen
1896 Fiona Macleod’s Washer of the Ford published
1900 Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica

published
1901 George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Queen Victoria dies. Succeeded by her son,
Green Shutters published Edward VII
1902 J.M. Barrie’s creation Peter Pan first appears in

The Little White Bird. He would go onto appear
in several different creative forms for page and
stage in Barrie’s lifetime, and on screen in more
recent decades
(Continued )
(Continued)
1909 Alfred Wareing establishes the Glasgow

Repertory Theatre, providing a model for those
which would follow post-World War I
1910 Mary MacGregor’s Stories from the Ballads told to Edward VII dies. Succeeded by his son
the Children and Louie Chisholm’s Celtic Tales George V
Told to the Children, both gathering traditional
tales from oral culture, are published
1912 Ian MacCormaic’s Dùn-àluinn is published,

acknowledged as the first novel in Gaelic
Ruairidh Erskine of Marr begins publishing
Gaelic-language plays with Domhnall nan
Trioblaid by Domhnall Mac na Ceàrdaich
1913 Government of Scotland Bill (also called

the Scottish Home Rule bill) passes its
second reading in the House of Lords but
does not proceed any further due to the
outbreak of war
1914 Britain declares war on Germany
1915 John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps published
1916 Easter Rising takes place as challenge by

republicans to British rule in Ireland,
leading to increased popular support for
Irish independence, Sinn Fein success in
elections and the outbreak of the Irish War
of Independence in 1919
1918 After four years of conflict, Germany

surrenders, bringing war to an end
1919 G. Gregory Smith publishes Scottish Literature: The Treaty of Versailles formalises the end of
Character and Influence, where he coins the term war between Britain and Germany, laying
‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ out territorial changes, military restrictions
and reparations to be imposed on Germany
1920 The League of Nations founded
1925 Hugh MacDiarmid’s Sangschaw published National Library of Scotland constituted

by Act of Parliament, and takes over from
the Advocates’ Library as Scotland’s library
of legal deposit
1926 Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the

Thistle published
1927 Hugh MacDiarmid publishes Albyn: or Scotland

and the Future as a laying out of the aims of the
Scottish Renaissance
Scottish PEN founded by Hugh MacDiarmid,
Herbert Grierson and Neil Gunn
1928 The Scottish National Players stage The The National Party of Scotland is
Sunlight Sonata, the first full play by James established, the first political party to
Bridie to be performed campaign for Scottish self-determination.
In 1934, it would merge with the Scottish
Party to form the Scottish National Party
1931 First volume of the Scottish National Dictionary

published. The final, tenth, volume would be
published in 1976
1932 Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, the first

part of the Scots Quair trilogy, published
1934 Scottish Scene, co-authored by Hugh MacDiarmid

and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, published
1935 Edwin Muir’s Scottish Journey published
1936 Edwin Muir publishes Scott and Scotland: The George V dies. Succeeded by his son
Predicament of the Scottish Writer, arguing that Edward VIII. Edward abdicates in
only by writing in English could Scottish December 1936, the throne passing to his
literature continue. brother George VI
Saltire Society founded
1937 Neil M. Gunn’s Highland River published
1939 Outbreak of World War II
1943 Sorley Maclean’s first collection, Dàin do Eimhir

agus Dàin Eile (Poems to Eimhir and Other Poems),
published
Norman MacCaig’s first poetry collection, Far
Cry, published
1945 W.S. Graham’s first poetry collection, 2ND End of World War II
Poems, published
1947 Naomi Mitchison’s The Bull Calves published Edinburgh International Festival and
Edinburgh Fringe Festival first held
1950 The Stone of Scone (the Stone of Destiny)

stolen from Westminster Abbey
1952 Ruaraidh Mac Thòmais co-founds Gaelic George VI dies. Succeeded by his
magazine Gairm, continuing to edit it for the daughter, Elizabeth II
next 50 years
Edwin Morgan’s first publications appear,
poetry collection The Vision of Cathkin Braes
and a translation of Beowulf
1954 Edwin Muir’s first poetry collection, The Storm,

published
1955 Iain Crichton Smith’s first poetry collection,

The Long River, published
(Continued )
(Continued)
1957 Muriel Spark’s The Comforters published
1961 Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

published
1967 Scottish Arts Council established
1968 The Gaelic Books Council founded

Scottish arts magazine Scottish International Review,
launched. It would continue to publish until 1974
1969 Tom Leonard’s Six Glasgow Poems published
1970 Formation of the Association of Scottish

Literature
Literary magazine The Chapman (now just
Chapman) launched, co-edited by Joy Hendry, first
female editor of a literary magazine in Scotland
1971 Department of Scottish Literature established Project Gutenberg commences as a digital

at the University of Glasgow, the first and (at archive of texts
the time of publication) only such department
of its kind in the world
1972 Liz Lochhead’s first collection, Memo for Spring,

published
1973 John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag, and the

Black, Black Oil is first staged by the 7 : 84
theatre company
Edwin Morgan’s From Glasgow to Saturn
published
1974 Fo Sgàil a’ Swastika, Dòmhnall Iain

Dhonnchaidh’s account of his time as a German
POW, published posthumously
1976 The Scottish Office Education Department

(SOED) publishes Scottish Literature in the
Secondary School, promoting such material
as ‘essential’ in Scottish schools
1977 William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw published
1979 Literary magazine Cencrastus established by Referendum on Scottish devolution held.

postgraduate students at Edinburgh University, Although more than half of the votes cast
remaining in print until 2006 supported devolution, this failed to meet
the threshold of 40% of the total electorate
required to take the process forward
Margaret Thatcher wins UK General
Election, beginning 18 years of Conservative
government which would see dramatic social
and economic changes in Britain
1981 Alasdair Gray’s Lanark published
1982 Kathleen Jamie’s first collection, Black Spiders,

published
1984 James Kelman’s first novel, The Busconductor

Hines, published
Scottish Poetry Library opened in Edinburgh
1985 Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection, Standing

Female Nude, published
1987 Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses, the first Rebus

novel, published
1989 Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing

published
1990s Scottish schools introduce the new 5–14

curriculum, where writing by Scottish
writers and writing about Scotland should
run through all aspects of the language
curriculum
1990 Scottish International Children’s Festival

(now called Imaginate) launched, staging
theatre for the young
1991 Jackie Kay’s first poetry collection, The

Adoption Papers, published
1993 Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting published

Don Paterson’s first collection, Nil Nil, published
1994 James Kelman wins the Booker Prize for How

late it was, how late
Bibliography of Scottish Literature in
Translation (BoSLiT) founded
1997 Labour Party wins UK General Election,

with Tony Blair replacing Margaret
Thatcher as Prime Minister
1999 Scottish Parliament re-opens in Edinburgh,

taking charge of a range of devolved
responsibilities in the governance of Scotland.
The first elections see the Labour Party
win most seats but does not secure an
overall majority
2002 Itchy Coo founded by Matthew Fitt and James

Robertson, publishing both original and
translated works in Scots for children and
young people
(Continued )
(Continued)
2003 Anne Donovan’s Buddha Da published The Labour Party retains its position as
the largest party following Scottish
parliamentary elections, although again
without an overall majority
2004 Edwin Morgan appointed Makar, national poet

of Scotland, holding the post until his death in
2010
2006 National Theatre of Scotland founded
2007 Scottish Parliamentary elections see the

Scottish National Party become the largest
party and form a minority government
2009 Scotland celebrates the Year of

Homecoming, marking the 250th
anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns
Carol Ann Duffy appointed Poet Laureate,
the first Scot and first woman to hold the
role, remaining in post until 2019
2010 Scottish schools introduce the new

Curriculum for Excellence, with Scottish
literature, language and culture included
as key aspects of engaging children in
their cultural heritage. New national
qualifications for secondary school
students (launched in 2014 and 2015)
include compulsory sections on Scottish
texts within the English qualifications
2011 Liz Lochhead appointed Makar, holding the The Scottish National Party remains the
post until 2016 largest party following Scottish
Parliamentary elections, also securing
sufficient seats to have an overall majority
2014 Formation of the International Association for Referendum on Scottish independence

the Study of Scottish Literature held on 18th September; population votes
55% in favour of remaining in the United
Kingdom
2015 Literature Alliance Scotland formed
2016 Steall, Gaelic-language fiction journal, founded Scottish Parliamentary elections see the
Jackie Kay appointed Makar, holding the post Scottish National Party retain their
until 2021 position as largest party and overall
majority
2017 Denise Mina’s The Long Drop published
2018 Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari wins the

Orwell Prize for political writing
2018 Liam McIlvanney’s The Quaker published

2019 Hannah Lavery’s Lament for Sheku Bayoh

performed as a work-in-progress at the
Edinburgh International Festival, with a
completed staging taking place the following
year
2020 Douglas Stuart wins the Booker Prize for COVID-19 sweeps the world in global
Shuggie Bain pandemic. Scotland placed in strict
lockdowns between March and June 2020
then December 2020 and April 2021.
2021 Kathleen Jamie appointed Makar, holding the The Scottish National Party retain their
post at the time of publication position as largest party following Scottish
Parliamentary elections but lose their
overall majority
Glasgow hosts COP26, the United
Nations climate change summit
Additional Resources
Complementing the references provided in each chapter of the volume, this list points to further
valuable sources and resources for all aspects of Scottish literature. Many of these will point to
their own further resources.
Abbotsford House (www.scottsabbotsford.com)

Home of Walter Scott, Abbotsford House is home to Scott’s working library, an impressive col-
lections of texts on a huge range of subjects which informed various aspects of the writer’s works.
Association for Scottish Literature (http://asls.org.uk)

Charitable organisation that works to promote study, teaching and writing of Scottish literature.
ASL publishes Scottish Literary Review, Scottish Language, The Bottle Imp, New Writing Scotland and
a range of titles including ScotNotes study guides and the International Companion to Scottish
Literature series.
Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation (http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/boslit)

A database of Scottish literary works published in translation. Originally co-administered by the
National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, it is now being continued by
the University of Glasgow (https://blog.boslit.glasgow.ac.uk).
British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk)

Archive of digitised newspapers and periodicals from the 1700s onwards, including many of the
Scottish titles referenced throughout this volume.
Creative Scotland (www.creativescotland.com)

Public body responsible for distributing Scottish Government funding for arts and creative
industries in Scotland.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language (http://dsl.ac.uk)

Home of A Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue (pre-1700) and The Scottish National Dictionary
(post-1700), the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language.
International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures (www.iassl.org)
Promotes the study and teaching of Scottish literatures within higher education around the
world. Hosts the World Congress of Scottish Literature every three years.
Literature Alliance Scotland (http://literaturealliancescotland.co.uk)
Network for the advancement of Scottish literary and linguistic interests within Scotland and
beyond. Membership draws from across the literary landscape, including educators, writers,
publishers, libraries, other interested organisations and relevant national cultural bodies.
National Library of Scotland (www.nls.uk)
Scotland’s national library and library of legal deposit. Hosts an varied collection of online
Scottish literature resources (https://www.nls.uk/learning-zone/literature-and-language) as well
as an extensive resource of digitised editions of texts and manuscripts held withing their collec-
tions (http://www.nls.uk/digital-resources).
National Theatre of Scotland (http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com)
Showcasing Scottish dramatic writing and performance around Scotland, the UK and beyond.
National Trust for Scotland (www.nts.org.uk)
Membership organisation which cares for a range of buildings, collections and sites of historical
significance in Scotland, include the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum.
Northern Studies (www.ssns.org.uk/our-journal)
Journal of the Scottish Society for Northern Studies, with interdisciplinary content covering
periods from the medieval to the modern, including literature and language studies.
Robert Burns World Federation (http://rbwf.org.uk)
Organisation committed to the promotion of the life and works of Robert Burns, and Scottish
literature and language more widely. Home of the Burns Chronicle, longest continually running
Scottish literary journal, now published on behalf of RBWF by Edinburgh University Press.
Saltire Society (www.saltiresociety.org.uk)
Organisation promoting excellence in Scottish literature, publishing, housing and art, through
events, lectures, prizes, and funding.
Scottish Book Trust (http://scottishbooktrust.com)
Charitable organisation promoting reading the benefits of reading for all, with particular focus
on young readers and writers across Scotland.
Scottish PEN (http://scottishpen.org)
Not-for-profit organisation working with writers, campaigners and activists to promote free-
doms of expression and literature around the world. Part of the International PEN community.
Scottish Poetry Library (www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk)
Organisation promoting experiences of and engagement with poetry as beneficial for individuals
and communities. Alongside a physical space in Edinburgh, SPL hosts a wide range of online
resources and events through their website, supporting learners, readers and writers with inter-
ests in Scottish poetry.
Scottish Text Society (www.scottishtextsociety.org)

Organisation which promotes interest in the literatures and languages of Scotland prior to 1800,
particularly works in Scots not otherwise readily available. Regularly publishes editions of works
from a range of genres, with a focus on Older Scots from 1500 to 1700.
Storytelling Centre (www.scottishstorytellingcentre.com)
Organisation working to preserve and tell the stories of Scotland and beyond, drawing on works
past and present, and supporting current storytellers to ensure the tradition for the future.
Studies in Scottish Literature (https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl)
Peer-reviewed academic journal founded in 1963, publishing articles on all periods and genres
of Scottish literature.
Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches (www.tobarandualchais.co.uk)
Online resource of recordings of Scottish songs, stories, poems and history, aiming to preserve
Scotland’s oral cultural heritage and continue to make it available for future audiences.
Writers’ Museum (www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/venue/writers-museum)
Free museum which celebrates the lives of Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis
Stevenson. Also hosts a range of online events throughout the year, under the aegis of Edinburgh
City Council.

Index
Individual works are listed under the names of their authors. Where author is unknown, listed under commonly
known title. Writers who use both Gaelic and English names are listed by their Gaelic surname.
Aberdeen: 183, 265, 289 Bacach, Eachann: 154

Aboulela, Leila: 243, 318 Baillie, Joanna: 69, 292
Adomnán: 19–20, 79 ballads and folksong: 87, 147, 248, 249, 279, 474
Vita Sancti Columbae (Life of Columba): 23, 78, 81, 82 Ballantyne, R.M.: 276–7
Adtimchiol an chreidimh: 397–8 Banks, Iain (also as Iain M. Banks): 148, 363
Advisory Council for the Arts in Scotland (AdCAS): 330 Bannatyne Manuscript (Edinburgh Adv.MA.1.1.6): 27,
Ainslie, Douglas: 230 173–4, 390
Alexander, Sir William: Barbour, John: 28
Doomes‐Day: 57 The Bruce: 17, 18, 28–30, 32, 36, 171, 338
Allan, Dot: 598, 601 Barclay, John: 54, 61
Makeshift: 601–4 bards and bardic tradition: 85–6, 153–4
Allen, Robert: 55, 59 Barker, Elspeth: 145
Amrae Coluimb Chille: 78 Barnard, Anne: 227
An Clàrsair Dall: 154 Barrie, J.M.: 122, 123, 214–15, 294, 366
Anderson, Henry: 287 Peter Pan: 279
Anderson, Lin: 261 Tommy Sandys novels: 214–15
animal tales: see fables Bartholomew & Sons: 200
anthologies: 149, 156, 160–1, 269, 280, 354–5, 561 Bassandyne, John: 173, 390
antiquarianism: 254, 476 battle:
Arnold, Matthew: 9, 247 of Bannockburn: 17, 28, 324
Asloan manuscript (Edinburgh Adv.MS 16500): 27, of Falkirk: 29, 461, 465, 466
172, 390 Jacobite: 219
Association for Scottish Literature (formerly ASLS): of Renfrew: 20
25, 574 of Stirling Bridge: 29
Aytoun, Robert: 398–9 writing about: 59, 86

Index 645
Beaton, Mary: 410 The French Revolution: 493–5

Beattie, James: 74 and religion: 486, 487, 489
The Beautie of the Remarkable Yeare of Grace: 59 and Rev. Edward Irving (Irvingites): 489
Bellenden, John: 41, 42 and Robert Burns: 487–9
Bertagna, Julie: 281 Sartor Resartus: 491–3
Black, Adam: 194 ‘Sign of the Times’: 489–91
Blackadder, Elizabeth: 408, 415 Carruth, Jim: 145
Blackhall, Sheena: 149 Carswell, Catherine: 131
Blackie and Son: 200 Carstairs, Christian: 292
Black, Tony: 263 Carsuel, Seon (Bishop John Carswell): 154–5
Blackwood and Sons: 192, 193, 196–7, 200 Castalians: 60, 394
Blackwood, William (publisher): 109–11 celticism: 8, 21, 247
Blair, Hugh: 65, 73, 91–101, 423 Celtic Revival: 124–5, 128, 158, 279
Sermons: 97–101 censorship: 288–91
writing on Ossian: 91–7, 100–1 Chambers, Robert: 279–80
‘Blind’ Hary: 30, 171 Chapbooks and pamphlets: 276
The Wallace: 18, 28–30, 32, 36, 171, 172 Charles I: 56
Bochanan, Dughall (Dugald Buchanan): 155 Charles II: 56
Boece, Hector (Boethius): 40–1 Chambers (William and Robert; publishers): 194,
Book of Deer: 24, 78, 81–2, 168 197, 202
bookselling: see printing and production Chepman, Walter and Myllar, Andrew (printers): 28,
Boyd, Mark Alexander: 396 170, 172–3, 390
Boyd, Zachary: 59 see also printing and production
Brandane, John: 295 children – representations of: 274–5
Bridie, James: 295 children’s lit: 149, 200, 271–82
broadsides: 44 defining: 273
Brookmyre, Christopher: 264 educational: 274–6, 278
Bruce, Robert the: 28, 30 for boys: 276–7
see also Barbour, The Bruce for girls: 275–6, 278
Brunton, Mary: 108, 109 poetry: 279–80
Buchan, John: 229, 239–40 Christ’s Kirk on the Grene (medieval): 34
Witch Wood: 239–40 Chorùna, Dòmhnnall Ruadh (Donald
Buchanan, George: 43, 288, 393, 400 MacDonald): 160
burlesque: 33–4, 421 see also Ramsay, Allan
Burns, Robert: 6–7, 65–6, 70, 91–3, 187, 208, 225–6, church: see religion
240, 320, 339–41, 344, 372–3, 419–20, 426–8, Clapperton, Jane Hume: 124
458, 487–9 Clark, Thomas (publisher): 194, 201
‘Bess and Her Spinning Wheel’: 426 Clark, Thomas A.: 144
Burns Suppers: 341–3 class, social: 4–5, 40, 46, 47, 119–20, 211–12, 250,
‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’: 541 252–3, 278, 281–2, 287, 426, 526, 542
The Holy Fair: 426–7 clearances, highland: 8–9, 157, 343, 468
influence of Allan Ramsay: 419–20 Cleeves, Ann: 267
Burnside, John: 145 clubs and societies, literary and philosophical: 65, 68,
Byrne, John: 144 336–7, 341
Cockburne, James: 58
Caimbeul, Tormod (Norman Campbell): 160 A Collection of Loyal Songs (1748): 223–4
Caird, Mona: 123 A Collection of Loyal Songs, Poems, &c. (1750): 223–4
Caledonian antisyzygy: see Smith, G. Gregory Collins, William: 194, 200, 201
Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature: 22 colonisation and empire: 3–5, 62, 68, 201–2, 312, 314,
Campbell Hay, George (Deòrsa mac Iain Deòrsa): 159 315, 318, 320, 478, 606–8
Campbell, John Francis: 158, 256 Scotland as colonised: 5, 313, 477, 543, 608
Capildeo, Vahni: 146 Scotland as coloniser: 62, 336–8, 340, 344
Carlyle, Alexander: 66 Columba: 19, 78, 79, 82, 269
Carlyle, Thomas: 213, 486–96 texts to or about: 78–9, 81
646 Index
Columba (cont’d) Rapture: 590

see also Adomnán, Vita Sancti Columbae and Forgaill, ‘Translating the English, 1989’: 589
Dallán, Amrae Coluimb Chille The World’s Wife: 589
Complaynt of Scotland: 41–2 Dunbar, Lilias: 414
Conan Doyle, Arthur: 125 Dunbar, William: 18, 27, 379–83, 390, 391
Connolly, Rebecca: 265 ‘Apon the Midsummer Ewin, merriest of nichts’:
Constable, Archibald: 195, 196, 198–9 382–3
copyright: 192, 195, 367 The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie: 382
Corrie, Joe: 295 ‘Fredome, honour and nobilness’: 385–6
court culture: see patronage The Goldyn Targe: 386
Covenanters: 59, 478–9 ‘How Dunbar was desyrd to be ane freir’: 43
Craig of Rosecraig, Alexander: 399 Lament for the Makaris: 274
Craig, Cairns: 331 morality: 385–6
Craig, David: 6–7, 250 narrative voice: 388
Crawford, David: 289 ‘Quhen Merch was’: 381–2, 386
Crawford, Robert: 345 style: 381–3
Creech, William: 186, 195 The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Women and the Wedo:
Crichton Smith, Iain (Iain Crichton Mac a’ Ghobhainn): 382–3, 386
143, 160, 230, 343, 562, 569–73 Duncan, Bill: 143
‘The Deer on High Hills’: 572 Duncan, Jane: 149
‘The Law and the Grace’: 571 Dundas, Ever: 147
‘Poem from Lewis’: 570
religion: 570–1 ecclesiastical writing: see religious writing
‘Returning Exile’: 571 Edinburgh: 5, 54, 65, 66, 68, 73, 92, 93, 263–4,
‘Shall Gaelic Die?’: 572 290–2, 373, 542, 545
crime fiction: 259–69 festivals: 35, 143, 296–7
Crockett, S.R.: 122, 538 publishing in: 28, 53, 181–7, 195
Crumey, Andrew: 147 University of: 93
Cunningham, Alexander, Earl of Glencairn: 43 Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature: 22
Cunningham, Allan: 220 Edinburgh Monthly Magazine: see Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Cunningham Graham, Robert Bontine: 125 Magazine under magazines and periodicals
Elphinstone, Margaret: 148
Dabydeen, David: 320 Empire: see Colonisation and Empire
Daiches, David: 6 Encyclopaedia Britannica: 194–6
Dàin Ghràdha: 510–11 enlightenment: 64–76, 194, 466–8, 477
Davie, Elspeth: 145–6 Gaelic: 466–7, 468
Declaration of Arbroath: 17, 18, 29 improvement: 73, 97, 194, 423
De Luca, Christine: 142 role of the church in: 65
Devolution: 315, 319–20, 333, 345, 539 women in the: 67–8, 68–9
Dewar, John: 460 Erskine of Marr, Ruaraidh: 159, 296
Dharker, Imtiaz: 319 Este, Thomas: 291
Dhonnchaidh, Dòmhnall Iain (Donald J. Europe, influence and interaction: 83, 85, 396–7,
MacDonald): 160 399–400
diaspora and diasporic writing: 11, 20, 157, 336–46
diasporic nostalgia: 342–4 fables: 32, 274
Dixie, Lady Florence: 123–4, 441 Fagan, Jenni: 150, 309
Dolan, Chris: 320 fairy tales: 125, 278–9
Dòmhnallach, T.C.: 160 fantasy literature: 125, 279, 281, 600, 603
Donovan, Anne: 243 Ferguson, Adam: 65
Buddha Da: 242–3 Ferguson, Andrew: 202
Doubling: 304, 482, 605, 607 Fergusson, Robert: 185, 186, 423–5
Douglas, Elizabeth (Countess of Erroll): 410–11 ‘Caller Oysters’: 425
Duffy, Carol Ann: 586–90 ‘The Daft Days’: 423
‘Education for Leisure’: 588–9 ‘Dr. William Wilkie’: 424–5
politics: 588 ‘The Ghaists: A Kirk‐Yard Eclogue’: 424
Index 647
‘Ode to the Gowdspink’: 424 Revivalism: 124–5

‘On Seeing a Butterfly in the Street’: 424 Scottish literature in: 19, 77–90, 152–61, 272–3,
Fernaig MS: 397–8 397–8, 460–71
Ferrier, Susan: 69, 434 song: 160
feminism: 305, 575, 577, 580 women’s writing: 155, 407, 409, 410, 412
film, Scottish literature in: 611–22 see also entries for individual writers
adapting for screen: 620–2 Galloway, Janice: 145
Hugh MacDiarmid writing about cinema: 611–15 The Trick is to Keep Breathing: 306, 545
Morvern Caller (2001 film): 619–22 Galt, John: 71, 111, 340
popularity of cinema: 612–13 Geddes, Patrick: 124, 128, 247
representations of Scotland: 616 gender, sexuality, and queerness: 124, 136, 142–6, 281,
Screen Scotland: 618–19 299–309, 589, 592, 599, 602
television: 618, 619 definitions of: 300, 301
Walter Scott on screen: 616–17 female sexuality: 302–5, 307, 411, 577
Findlater, Jane: 599 gender fluidity and transgender: 308
Findlater, Mary: 599 gender identity: 302–3, 306–8
‘Void of Understanding’: 599–601 male gaze: 302, 305
Fionn Cycle: 80 male sexuality: 307, 515–18, 605
Fitt, Matthew: 148 masculinity: 307–8, 317
folk culture and folkways: 146–257 sexuality and race: 317
collecting: 251–6 Glasgow: 119–20, 183–4, 187, 195, 243, 259–63,
influence in literature: 255–7 316–17, 538–42, 545, 547–9, 568–9
post‐war revival: 252–3 University of: 372
Scottish Travellers: 253–4 Glover, Sue: 144
folk tales: 147, 158, 279 Goodsir Smith, Sydney: 148
Fordyce Mavor, William: 275 Gordon, Mary (Mrs Disney Leith): 278
Forgaill, Dallán: Gordon, Patrick: 55, 61
Amrae Coluimb Chille: 79–80 Gothic: 147, 605–6
form, poetic: 53, 60, 85 Graham, W.S.: 523–36
Habbie stanza: 62 biography: 523–8
rhyme royal: 382 class: 526
sonnet: 60 Implements in Their Places: 536
Forrest‐Thomson, Veronica: 144 influences: 525–6
Fowler, William: 396, 410–11 Malcolm Mooney’s Land: 533–5
French revolution: 187–8, 477 The Nightfishing: 531–3, 534
Friel, George: 141 ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’: 528
Freires of Berwik: 33–4 poetry: 528–36
Fullartoun of Carleton, John: reception: 536
The turtle‐dove: 58 The White Threshold: 530–1, 534
A Full Collection of All Poems Upon Charles, Prince of writing process: 528–9
Wales (1745): 223–4 Grahame, Simion: 399
Grant of Laggan, Anne: 227
Gaelic: Grassic Gibbon, Lewis (J. Leslie Mitchell): 128, 130–1,
culture: 73, 77–8, 152–3, 397, 459–60, 463, 467, 133–4
570, 573 Grey Granite: 136
diaspora: 157 Sunset Song: 130, 132, 392
drama: 148, 159, 161, 288–9, 296 Gray, Alasdair: 320, 326, 363
enlightenment: 458–60, 468 1982, Janine: 307
influence of religion: 158 Lanark: 540, 546–7
language: 152 Green, Sarah: 105
medieval manuscripts in: 23, 83–4 Gregory, John: 275
oral tradition: 81, 83, 87, 460 Gribben, Crawford: 234
poetry: 78–81, 84–7, 153, 154, 158–9, 219–20, Grieve, Christopher Murray: see MacDiarmid, Hugh
224–5, 227, 397–8, 510, 511, 513 The Gude and Godlie Ballatis: 48
prose: 81–4, 157, 159 Gunn, Neil M.: 128, 142, 343
648 Index
Hamilton, Elizabeth: 107, 275 independence: 2

Hamilton, Janet: 120–1 referendum of 1979: 539
Hamilton, Newburgh: 289 referendum of 2014: 3, 324
Hamilton of Bangour, William: 219, 222–3 industrialisation and representations of: 118–21, 605
Hamilton Finlay, Ian: 144 deindustrialisation of 1980s: 539, 542, 545–8
Hannay, Patrick: 61 Inglis, Esther: 36, 407
Hardy, Robina F.: 278 Internet Archive: 367
Haye, Gilbert: Iona, monastery at: 19–20
Life of Alexander the Conqueror: 30 Ireland:
Hedderwick, Mairi: 149 Irish influence and interaction: 19–21, 77–8, 82,
Henderson, Hamish: 249, 251–3, 255 84–5, 153–4, 159–60
Hendry, Joy: 328–30
Henryson, Robert: 18, 32, 379, 380, 383, 390 Jacob, Violet: 128, 129, 229–30, 279
morality: 387–8 Tales of My Own Country: 301
Morall Fabilis: 273–4, 384, 387–90 Jacobitism: 182, 218–30, 478
narrative voice: 389–90 Gaelic: 224–5, 459, 461, 464–5, 466
Orpheus and Eurydice: 384 neo‐Jacobitism: 125, 218–19, 229–30
style: 383–4 Romantic: 225–9
The Testament of Cresseid: 383–4, 389, 390 Jacobs, A.C.: 12
Herbert, W.N.: 345 James I of England: see James VI of Scotland
Herdman, John: 326, 327 James I of Scotland: 31–2, 34, 171, 177
Hind, Archie: 326 The Kingis Quair: 31–2, 36, 174, 176–7
Histories: 55 James II of England: see James VII of Scotland
Hogg, James: 112, 225, 234, 236 James IV: 287
‘The Cameronian Preacher’s Tale’: 235–6 James V: 288
Jacobite Relics of Scotland: 227–8 James VI of Scotland: 3, 53, 288, 289, 393–6, 398, 400–1
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Reulis and Cautelis: 393, 395
234–5 James VII of Scotland: 289
Holland, Richard: 32 Jamie, Kathleen: 145, 149, 324, 333, 586, 590–4
The Buke of the Howlat: 32 ‘Alder’: 591
Home, Rev. John: ‘The Hinds’: 592
Douglas: 66, 291–2 ‘Magpie Moth’: 592
Hudson, Kerry: 356–7 nature writing: 590–2
Hume, Alexander: ‘Thon Stane’: 591
A Day Estivall: 58 travel writing: 593–4
Hume, Anna: 60, 411 Jenkins, Robin: 142, 143
Hume, David: 64, 66, 72, 207, 312–13 Jocelin of Furness: 23
Hume of Godscroft, David: 400 Johnston, Arthur: 401
Hunter, Mollie: 279 Johnston: William: 194
Hutcheson, Francis: 66, 69, 207 Johnstone, Christian Isobel: 109, 197
Johnstone, Paul: 264
identity:
Celtic identity: 9 kailyard: 122–3, 212–13, 538, 539, 544, 546
community: 142–5, 147, 150, 243, 281–2, 314, Kay, Jackie: 146, 281, 313–16, 579–84
337, 341–2, 410, 542 The Adoption Papers: 314, 580–1
cultural: 326–7, 329–32, 343, 345, 421, 569, Bessie Smith: 581
572–3 ‘Chiaroscuro’: 314, 580
Gaelic: 18, 459–60, 463, 467, 570, 573 children’s literature: 581–2
gender: 302–3, 306–8 contributions to collections: 580
highland identity: 8–9, 570, 571 Life Mask: 582–3
national: 2–3, 6–7, 9–10, 17, 32, 54, 119, 121–2, Off Colour: 582
136, 140, 146–7, 149–50, 154, 194, 243, 249, Other Lovers: 581
252, 254–5, 293, 300, 337, 341–3, 426, 462–3, race: 579–83
538–40, 543, 544, 561, 579–90, 587, 603 short stories: 583–4
and race: 312, 313, 317, 318, 582–3 theatre: 580
within literature: 8, 18, 281–2, 551–5 Trumpet: 308, 315–16, 582
Index 649
Keir, Elizabeth Rae: 435–9 Curriculum for Excellence: 351

The History of Miss Greville: 435 literacy: 356–8
Interesting Memoirs: 435 Scottish literature in the school curriculum:
poetry: 437–9 349–61
Kelly, Muireann: 161 senior phase (national qualifications): 350–2, 356–7
Kelman, James: 4, 141, 320, 545–6, 547 literary criticism: 5–8, 10, 95–6, 122, 140–1, 196,
The Busconductor Hines: 540–2 247–51, 299
A Disaffection: 541 literary languages of Scotland: 18, 53, 144–5, 168–9,
How late it was, how late: 307–8, 548–9 296, 577
You have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free: 308 see also entries for individual languages
Kennedy, A.L.: 146 Lithgow, William: 54
Looking for the Possible Dance: 306 Lochhead, Liz: 345, 575–9
So I am Glad: 306–7 The Colour of Black and White: 578
Kennedy, Grace: 278 Dreaming Frankenstein: 576
Kennedy, John: 61 Fugitive Colours: 578–9
Kesson, Jessie: 142–3, 304–5 Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off: 577
Kincaid, Alexander: 186 theatre: 576–8
Kinloch, David: 345 Lockhart, John Gibson: 104–5
Kirk, J.D.: 265 Peters Letters to His Kinsfolk: 104
Kirk, Margaret: 266 Lom, Iain: 154
Kydd, Robbie: 320 lost literature: 24–5
Kyllour, John: 288 Lothian, Duncan: 156
Lamont Stewart, Ena: 296 Mac an t‐Saoir, Donnachadh Bàn (Duncan Macintyre):
landscape: 54, 116, 119–20, 125, 265–9, 302, 303, 155, 465–71
515–18, 530–1, 564–5, 595–6 ‘Moladh Beinn Dobhrain’: 469–71
on screen: 617 MacBride, Stuart: 265
see also nature MacCaig, Norman: 561–5
Lang, Alison: 161 approach to poetry: 563
Lang, Andrew: 279 ‘Half‐built boat in a hayfield’: 564
language: see literary languages of Scotland ‘A Man in Assynt’: 564–5
Latin, Scottish literature in: 19, 20, 23, 78, 81–2, ‘Smuggler’: 563–4
168–9, 288, 400–1 MacCoinnich, Coinneach (Kenneth MacKenzie): 156
Lauder, George: 54–7, 59, 60 Mac Colla, Fionn: 131, 133
Lavery, Hannah: 315 MacCormaic, Iain (John MacCormick): 159
Lament for Sheku Bayoh: 311, 312, 321 MacDhòmhnaill, Raghnall: 155, 156
Leech, John: 400 MacDhùnLeibhe, Uilleam (William Livingstone): 157
Leonard, Tom: 144 MacDiarmid, Hugh (Christopher Murray Grieve): 6,
Lekprivik, Robert (printer): 44, 173, 390 10, 127–32, 134–6, 526
see also printing and production A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle: 133, 134, 343, 561
libraries: 112, 169, 192, 440 writing about cinema: 611–15
Lindsay, Andrew O.: 320 Macdonald, George: 125, 278
Lindsay, David: 34, 45–7, 287, 288, 390 MacDonell, A.C.: 230
Ane Satyre of the Thre Estaitis: 34–6, 46–7, 288 MacDonnchaidh, Aonghas: 159
The Dreme: 45–6 MacDougall, Carl: 233
The Monarche: 46 Mac Eoghain, Athairne: 397
Squyer Meldrum MacGill‐Eain, Somhairle (Sorley MacLean): 157, 158,
‘Testament and complaint of oure soverane lordis 160, 509–21
papyngo’: 34, 46 ‘An Cuilithionn’ (‘The Cuillin’): 515
The Tragedie of the Cardinall: 44 ‘Ant‐Ascalon’: 521
Linklater, Eric: 131, 279 ‘Coilltean Ratharsair’ (‘The Woods of Raasay’):
literacy and education: 158, 195, 201, 202, 273–4, 516–17, 520
275, 281 Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile (Poems to Eimhir and
Broad General Education (early secondary school): Other Poems): 509–15, 518–20
353–5 ‘Hallaig’: 520–1
citizenship and engagement: 359–60 ‘Uamh’ an Òir’ (‘The Cave of Gold’): 517–18
650 Index
MacGillivray, William: 146 Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement: 184–5

Mackay, Barbara: 409 see also newspapers
Mackay, Malcolm: 260–1 Mair, John: 40
Mackay Brown, George: 22, 241–2, 279, 363 Màiri Mhòr nan Òran (Mary MacPherson): 124,
‘The Finished House’: 241 157, 158
Mackenzie, Compton: 143 Maitland manuscripts (Pepys Library, MMS 2553 and
Mackenzie, Sir George: 61 MSS 1408): 28, 390, 411
Mackenzie, Henry: 106, 187, 206, 208–10, 292 Maitland, Marie: 36–7, 396, 411
Julia de Roubigne: 209–10 Maitland, Richard: 47
The Man of Feeling: 69, 106, 206–9 Maitland, Sara:
Maclaren, Archibald: 292 Home Truths: 606–8
Maclaren, Ian (Rev. John Wilson): 122, 123, 212–13 makars: 170, 249, 313–14, 574
Maclean, Alasdair: 145 Mallet (Malloch), David: 291, 446
MacLean, John: 253 manuscripts: 23–4, 55, 396
MacLean, Sorley see MacGill‐Eain, Somhairle early modern production: 171–7
Macleod, Fiona (William Sharp): 124, 294 medieval production: 23, 168–70
MacLeod, Norman: 158, 296 survival: 23, 171
MacLeòid, Fionnlagh: 160 see also individual listings for significant manuscripts
MacLeòid, Iain N.: 159 Marishall, Jean: 106–7, 216
mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (MacDonald, Alexander): 155, Marney, Laura: 149
225, 458, 460–5, 469 Martin, Allan: 266
‘Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill’: 469 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots: 44, 288, 407, 409,
MacMhuirich family (bards): 154, 156, 398 413, 415
Mac na Ceàrdaich, Dòmhnall (Donald Sinclair): May, Peter: 268–9
159, 296 McDermid, Val: 264–5
Macpherson, James: 21, 66, 94–5, 155–6, 469 McGrath, John: 144, 297, 327
Ossian: 8, 21, 94–7, 340, 369–70 The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil: 327
Mac Raoiridh, Donnchadh: 398 McIlvanney, Liam: 262–3
Magazines and periodicals: 5, 68, 128, 196–7, McIlvanney, William: 260
324–33, 499 McWilliam, Candia: 146
The Anti‐Jacobin Review: 492–3 Melville, Elizabeth, Lady Culross: 36, 58, 396, 407–8
Bee: 188 Ane Godlie Dreame: 36, 58, 409, 415
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: 110, 196–7, 491 Melville, James: 58–9
Cencrastus: 331–3 Meston, William: 230
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal: 197 Meyrick, Denzil: 265–6
Chapman: 328–31 migration: 337, 338
Drumfries Mercury: 186 Miller, Hugh: 116–17
Dumfries Weekly Journal: 186 Mina, Denise: 262
Dumfries Weekly Magazine: 186 Mitchison, Naomi: 131, 133, 136, 230, 279
Edinburgh Magazine and Review: 185–6 modernism: 10, 128, 129, 131–2, 134–5
Edinburgh Magazine or Literary Miscellany: 187 Moffat, Graham: 294–5
Edinburgh Review: 111, 184, 196 Moireach, Iain: 160
The Evergreen: 128 monarchy and rule:
Gaelic: 156–7, 159–61 writing about: 59–60, 79–80, 82–3, 85
Lounger: 186, 187 writing for: 55–6
Mirror: 186, 187 Montgomerie, Alexander: 395–6
People’s Friend: 197 Montgomerie, William and Norah: 280
People’s Journal: 197 Moon, Lorna: 130, 132–3
Perth Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure: 186 Morgan, Edwin: 144, 363, 525, 562, 565–9, 574
political and radical engagement: 326, 331 ‘Chinese Cat’: 566–7
radical: 187–9 ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’: 567
Scots Magazine: 183 ‘The First Men on Mercury’: 568
Scottish International: 325–8, 344 ‘The Flowers of Scotland’: 569
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine: 197 ‘Glasgow Sonnets’: 568
Index 651
sexuality: 566 Oliphant, Caroline, Lady Nairne: 225, 226, 425

use of form: 566–7 ‘Caller Herrin”: 425–6
Muir, Edwin: 7–8, 10, 130–5, 240–1, 246, 329, 538–9 Oliphant, Margaret: 124, 236, 238, 440–1
Scottish Journey: 132 The Beleaguered City: 237–8
Muir, Willa: 123–4, 131 ‘The Open Door’: 236
Imagined Corners: 303–4 Oliver & Boyd (publishers): 111, 194, 200
Mukherjee, Abir: 344 oral culture and transmission: 24, 81, 83, 87, 154, 246,
Munro, Neil: 230 248, 254, 274–5, 408, 460
Munro, Rona: 144, 148, 355 Owen, Agnes: 141
Murdoch, John: 157
Mure, Sir William: pamphlets: see chapbooks and pamphlets
The True Crucifixe for True Catholickes: 57 Parks, Alan: 261
Murray, Les: 5 Parry, Ambrose (Chris Brookmyre and Marisa
Myllar, Andrew (printer): see Chepman, Walter and Haetzman): 264
Myllar, Andrew Paterson, Don: 586, 594–7
landscape: 595–6
Na Ceapaich, Sìleas (Sìleas MacDonald of Keppoch): Nil: 594, 597
220, 407, 409, 410, 413–14 The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre: 594
Napier Commission: 157 Rain: 595
National Covenant: see Covenant ‘Requests’: 594–5
National Drama: 293 rhyme: 594–5
National Theatre of Scotland: 143, 296, 330, 355 water: 595, 596
nature: 145, 465, 467, 518–21, 590–2 Zonal: 596–7
Nelson, Thomas: 194, 200–2 patronage: 53, 107, 156, 288, 438
new media: 363–73 church: 65
augmented and Virtual reality: 371–3 royal patronage and court culture: 53–6
computer games: 368–71 Perth: 186
defining: 364 Treaty of: 18
digital tools: 366 Philip (Philp) of Almerieclose, James: 219
e‐text: 367–8 Pitcairne, Archibald: 62, 289
Scottish literature online: 365–6 poetic form: see Form, poetic
social media: 366–7 popular literature: 117–18, 259
New Renaissance: 539–40, 546 Porter, Jane: 432, 440, 441
newspapers: 118, 180–90, 339 post‐colonialism: 313, 319–20, 606–7
Aberdeen Journal: 183 printing, publishing and bookselling 40, 53, 68, 84,
Caledonian Mercury: 182–3 105–6, 109–14, 149, 169–70, 172–3, 180–90,
Edinburgh Courant: 181 192–203, 275–8, 439–40, 502
Edinburgh Evening Courant: 182–3 Gaelic publishing: 154–5
Edinburgh Gazette: 181 international: 199–2, 338–9
Edinburgh Gazetteer: 188, 189 in London: 199, 202, 338
Glasgow Advertiser: 184, 187 Project Gutenberg: 367
Glasgow Courant: 183–4 prose writing:
Glasgow Journal: 184 comedy: 118
Mecurius Caledonius: 180–1 critical essays and literary criticism: 196
Weekly Diurnall: 183 fictional narrative: 61
Weekly Mercury: 185 historical novel: 147–8
see also magazines and periodicals novels: 104–14, 206, 477–80
nic a’ Bhruthain, Diorbhail (Dorothy Brown): 154 short stories: 150, 159
Nicholson, James: 119–21 publishing: see printing and production
nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, Mairi: 154, 409
nighean Coirceadail, Aithbhreac: 407 queerness: see gender, sexuality and queerness
nighean Lachlainn, Mairghread: 407, 409–10
Noel Paton, Mona: 278–9 race and ethnicity: 72–3, 146, 311–21, 344–5
Norse, Scottish literature in: 22 Asian writing: 316–18
652 Index
race and ethnicity (cont’d) Russell, Craig: 261

Black writing: 311–17, 579–83 Ruthwell Cross: 21, 167–8
identity: 312, 313, 317, 318, 579–83
racism: 311–14, 316–17 Saadi, Suhayl: 243, 313, 316–17
and religion: 318–19 Psychoraag: 317
and sexuality: 317, 318 satire: 43–5, 86–7
Ramaswamy, Chitra Saxby, Jessie: 271, 277
Ramsay, Allan: 221, 290, 420–5 schools, Scottish literature in: see Literacy and education
Christ’s Kirk on the Green: 421 science fiction: 147, 148, 568
The Evergreen: 221, 422 ‘Scotland after Alexander’: 18
The Gentle Shepherd: 290, 422, 423, 425 Scots (language): 4, 10–11, 129–31, 148–9, 273,
poems: 421 420–3, 395–6, 407, 587, 593, 595
and Scots language: 421 Older Scots: 27, 169–70, 176–7, 379, 381–5
Tea‐table Miscellany: 221, 422 Scott, Alexander: 47–9
Rankin, Ian: 263–4 Scott, Walter: 92, 104, 108–9, 198, 225, 228, 229,
Ransford, Tessa: 329 341, 473–83, 492
reading practices: 47, 48, 170, 206, 273, 276–8, 342 ballads: 474–5
realism: 125, 147, 242, 598, 600, 603, 616 The Heart of Mid‐Lothian: 478
Reformation: see Reformation, Protestant under Ivanhoe: 368–9, 479–83
religion Lay of the Last Minstrel: 475
regionality: 54, 141–5 Marmion: 475
urban: 141–2, 259–65, 540–1, 544–9 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border: 474
island: 142, 266–9, 570, 571 monarchy: 481–2
register, linguistic: 39–40, 62, 382, 577 Redgauntlet: 478
religion: 158, 213, 233–43, 288, 558–9 Rob Roy: 478
Buddhism: 242–3 on screen: 616–17
Calvinism: 233–5, 239–41, 486, 487, 489, 495–6 Tales of my Landlord: 478
Catholicism: 238 ‘The Two Drovers’: 71–2
Covenanters: 235, 239 Waverley: 71, 108, 228–9, 475–6, 477–8, 480
gothic and: 237–9 Scottish Arts Council: 325–8, 330
Islam: 243, 318–19 Scottish Literary Renaissance: 6, 127–37, 240–1, 301,
Presbyterianism: 65, 238, 240, 459, 486, 489, 492, 343–4, 473–4, 538–9
570–1 response to the Reformation: 133, 134
Reformation, Protestant: 39, 84, 234, 239, 287 communism and: 135–6, 344
Sikhism: 243 Scottish Literature:
religious writing: 18, 19, 21, 23, 40, 42, 57–8, 78, 82, defining: 1–12, 167–8
84, 86, 168, 197–8, 275, 278, 409, 413, 414 teaching: 1–2, 5, 22
Bible: 42, 154, 158, 200 Department of Scottish Literature, University of
Blair’s Sermons: 97–101 Glasgow: 5
psalms and hymnals: 56, 200 Scottishness: see identity, national
publishing: 197–8, 200–1 Scottish Poetry Library: 329
Restoration: 56, 289 Sempill, Robert: 44–5, 62, 288
Robertson, James: 147–8, 230, 320 sensibility: 98–100, 205
Robertson, Robin: 146 sentimental, sentimentalism and sentimentality: 69,
Robertson, William: 65, 72, 205–16
Robertson of Struan, Alexander: 221–2 defining: 205–6
Rocks, Kokumo: 314–15 sexuality: see gender, sexuality and queerness
Rodger, Callum: Shenstone, William: 422
Rabbie Burns Saves the World!: 371 Shepherd, Nan: 131–33, 145, 300–1, 303
Rolland, John: The Quarry Wood: 303
The Court of Venus: 47–8 Sinclair manuscripts: 174–7
romance and courtly love (medieval): 29–31, 83, 510, 514 Dalhousie manuscript: 176
Romanticism: 91–103, 476, 486–7, 495 Hay’s translations: 175–6
Ruddiman, Thomas: 182, 423 Selden manuscript: 174–5
Ruddiman, Jr., Walter: 182, 184–5 Skelton, Douglas: 265
Index 653
Skene, Lilias: 406, 409, 413–15 Venus as a Boy: 308

Smellie, William: 186, 195 Sydserf, Thomas: 289
Smith, Adam: 66–7, 70, 207, 366 sympathy: 67, 69–70, 98, 208, 211, 488–9
Theory of Moral Sentiments: 67
The Wealth of Nations: 66 The Taill of Rauf Coilyear: 33
Smith, Ali: 146, 329 Tait, Bob: 325–8
Girl meets Boy: 308–9 Tennant, Emma: 147
There But For The: 608 Taylor, Marsali: 267–8
Seasonal Quartet: 608–9 Tey, Josephine: 143
Smith, G. Gregory: 9–10, 248, 364 Thomson, George:
Caledonian antisyzygy: 10, 248, 300 A Select Collection of Scottish Airs: 423
Smollett, Tobias: 106, 223 Thomson, James: 8, 291, 445–56
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker: 69, 492 drama: 449–55
Roderick Random: 339 early writing: 445–6
societies: see Clubs and Societies, literary and philosophical poetry: 447–8, 450–1, 454
Solemn League and Covenant: see Covenant The Seasons: 8, 445, 447–9, 455–6
Soutar, William: 280 Winter: A poem: 446–7
Spark, Muriel: 216, 550–60 Thomson, James B.V.: 237
The Ballad of Peckham Rye: 555–7, 604–5 translation:
‘Bang‐Bang You’re Dead’: 556 into Scottish literary languages: 78, 83, 148, 149,
The Comforters: 551–2 158, 173, 281, 338, 344, 391, 410, 411, 578
The Driver’s Seat: 305–6, 554–5, 559, 617–18 Scottish literature translated: 109, 123, 340, 391, 474
The Finishing School: 556 Scottish translators: 60, 111, 118, 146, 173, 344,
The Hothouse by the East River: 559–60 387, 395–6, 410, 411, 474, 578
The Mandelbaum Gate: 55 travel writing: 53–4, 593–4
Memento Mori: 605 Treaty of Perth: see Perth, Treaty of
narrative use of time: 557–8 The Triumph Tree (Clancy et al.): 18–20, 22
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: 553, 557, 559 Trotter, Catherine: 289
The Public Image: 553–5, 558
writing identity: 552–5 union with Britain: 2–3, 9, 73, 300
writing religion: 558–9 union of Parliaments (1707): 3
Spiers, John: 249 union of the Crowns (1603): 3, 53, 54
Spottiswoode, Alicia Ann (Lady John Scott): 230 University: see specific locations
Statutes of Iona: 152
Stevenson, Robert Louis: 122, 125, 229, 237–8, 366, vernacular: 23, 40, 56, 81, 247, 248
498–507 revival: 250, 419–28
‘The Beach at Falesa’: 505–6
A Child’s Garden of Verses: 279 W. & A.K. Johnston (publishers): 200
The Ebb‐Tide: 506 Wallace, William: 29
The Master of Ballantrae: 503–5 see also ‘Blind’ Hary, The Wallace
morality and ‘Lay Morals’: 499–503, 505–7 Warner, Alan:
non‐fiction writing: 500 Morvern Callar (1995 novel and 2001 film): 619–22
‘An Old Song’: 503 Watson, J.:
periodicals: 499 A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems Both
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: 237–8, 370–1, Ancient and Modern: 420
501–2, 505, 605 Wedderburn, James: 288
Treasure Island: 277, 367–7, 369, 500, 501 Welsh, Irvine: 263, 320–1, 545
Stewart of Baldynneis, John: 173, 395–6 Filth: 321
Stiùbhart of Appin, Eòin: 397 Marabou Stork Nightmares: 321
Stuart, Douglas: 545 Trainspotting: 3, 542–5
Shuggie Bain: 545–6 Welsh, Louise: 261–2
Stuart, Gilbert: 186 William, Clerk of Glasgow:
Sulter, Maud: 314 ‘Song of the Death of Somerled’: 20
Sutherland, Luke: Williams, Gordon: 141
Jelly Roll: 316 Williamson, Peter: 186–7
654 Index
Wilson, John: 210–12 voices of: 36, 37, 262–3, 575–6, 579, 589, 592,
Lights and Shadows: 211 601, 603
Margaret Lyndsay: 210–12 Woolfson, Esther: 145
‘The Lily of Liddisdale’: 212 World War I: 127–8
‘The Rainbow’: 211 writing, archipelagic: 266–9
Winzet, Ninian: 42–3 writing, women’s: 36, 58, 60, 62, 67–9, 86, 107–8,
Wishart, William: 57 120–5, 142–3, 145–6, 155, 216, 261–2, 279,
Immanuel: or the Mistery of God, Revealed in the 326, 328–9, 406–16, 432–41, 588, 598–609
Flesh: 57 letter‐writing: 435
Witherspoon, John: 66, 275 literary networks: 435, 438
Wittig, Kurt: 249–50 New Woman writing: 123–4, 132–3
women: novels: 439
representation of: 36, 45, 123, 237, 261, 264–5, periodicals: 439–41
278, 299, 301–4, 306, 317, 386, 389, 513–18, pseudonyms and anonymity: 440
575, 576, 581, 602, 606–7 see also entries for individual writers

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10 The Victorian Period 116

Part II: Genres and Contexts 165

26 Magazines, Devolution and Makars – the Institutions of Scottish Literature 324

Part III: Writers 377

ftoc.indd 9 03/09/2024 07:25:34

42 Kelman, Gray, Welsh and the New Urban Writing 538

Gerard Carruthers is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of

Sarah M. Dunnigan is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Corey Gibson is Lecturer in twentieth-­century Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow.

Robert P. Irvine is Reader in Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in

Joe Jackson is Associate Professor in Twentieth-­Century and Contemporary English Literature at

Sandro Jung is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fudan

Ainsley McIntosh is a Daphne Jackson/AHRC Research Fellow and Lecturer in Romanticism

Dafydd Moore is Professor of Eighteenth-­Century Literature at the University of Plymouth. He

Steve Newman is Associate Professor of English at Temple University, where he specialises in

Duncan Sneddon is Lecturer in Celtic at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a PhD in

A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

southern neighbour, is a common piece of attitudinising in relation to England employed often

product (including James Macpherson’s faux-­Celtic ‘Ossian’ poetry, to be discussed a little

thereafter, even as it represented a by-­product of aggressive ‘progress’. ‘Highlandism’ or ‘Tartanry’

1 https://asls.org.uk 6 To say nothing of the large influx of Irish people to

Carruthers, G. and McIlvanney, L. (ed.) (2012). The james-­kelmans-­booker-­prize-­acceptance-­speech-­1994

A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

Delight I’d find in an island’s breast,

So the enemy host being driven off, deluded

Scotland in the first millennium, as we ought to be aware of this in relation to post-­medieval

A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

A, fredome is a noble thing,

Of Scotland’s King I haud my house, I pay him meat and fee,

Scottish Literature and the Reformation

A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

The Springtime of Scottish Prose

It is conventional to distinguish Bellenden’s and the Complayner’s kinds of eloquence from

Satire and Ventriloquism

Power and Plainness: Lindsay

Alas, I trimble for to tell

Middle Ground and Counter-­Readings

In the vyle schell is found the perle of price.

Recreation and Reinvention

Hay now the day dallis,

A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

To Hume, as to other eighteenth-­century commentators, Scotland was gaining recognition for

A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

Má ro-­m-­thoiccthi écc i ndhÍ

[If I be destined to die in Iona,

Olc a n[d]earna mac Mael Colaim

[It's bad, what Mael Coluim's son has done,

A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

neoclassicism distort a more complicated picture, concealing important continuities between

Compare with the departed Fingal’s call to the dying Ossian

A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

1 Longman Archives (University of Reading), Impression 3 NLS, MS 4008, fol. 278.

Child of the lake whose silv'ry gleam,

A Companion to Scottish Literature, First Edition. Edited by Gerard Carruthers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

10 The Victorian Period 116

Part II: Genres and Contexts 165

26 Magazines, Devolution and Makars – the Institutions of Scottish Literature 324

Part III: Writers 377

42 Kelman, Gray, Welsh and the New Urban Writing 538

Corey Gibson is Lecturer in twentieth-century Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow.

Joe Jackson is Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary English Literature at

Dafydd Moore is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Plymouth. He

product (including James Macpherson’s faux-Celtic ‘Ossian’ poetry, to be discussed a little

thereafter, even as it represented a by-product of aggressive ‘progress’. ‘Highlandism’ or ‘Tartanry’

Carruthers, G. and McIlvanney, L. (ed.) (2012). The james-kelmans-booker-prize-acceptance-speech-1994

Scotland in the first millennium, as we ought to be aware of this in relation to post-medieval

Middle Ground and Counter-Readings

To Hume, as to other eighteenth-century commentators, Scotland was gaining recognition for

Má ro-m-thoiccthi écc i ndhÍ

Shaw, M. (2020). The Fin- de-

The renaissance is generally understood as an inter-war movement prompted by a culturally

Cast-offs? – But wha mak’s life a means to ony end?

opportunities available to rural, working-class protagonists, especially women, in the Northeast,

(Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 18.2.6), and a thirteenth-century copy

Re-encountering the work 50 years later elicited a different response:

The Twentieth Century: ‘the Knox-ruined nation’?