A young girl, dressed in swathes of various tartans, implores her father, ‘But dinna fash yourself sic a muckle deal: come, come, and I will be your elfin female page.’ But this is not in Scotland, nor the past: the girl, Alice, lives in contemporary London and is the heroine of Sarah Green’s wickedly satirical novel of 1824, Scotch Novel Reading or Modern Quackery, a Novel really founded on facts. Alice is devoted to the work of Scott, down to imitating speech and costume. Her father laments that she ‘has read them all, or rather skimmed them over, merely to say that she has read them; without understanding one half of what she has perused, and scarce comprehending one word of a dialect with which they abound, but which she affects to use on all occasions, generally misapplying every word, as far as my little knowledge of the Scottish dialect goes: but she tells her companions, with an air of consequence, that she never reads any other novels than Walter Scott’s’. Alice is a caricature, but the caricature is not untethered from reality. Mary Clarke Mohl, a great friend of Florence Nightingale’s, in a letter of 3 April 1822, wrote, ‘you must read all the works of Scott, my dearest, but not till I return, because I adore them, as I do the whole Scotch nation’.
In the course of the novel, Alice’s Don Quixote style infatuation is gradually disenchanted; by meeting a genuine Scots woman who mostly complains about the poverty of Scotland and tells her, sharply, ‘Ken ye not weel that ’Tis aw a fable?’; and by falling in love with a Scots soldier. The soldier, who has only a single eye, hand and foot, is actually a disguised Englishman – which raises the curious prospect that to be Scottish is to be a mythical English Nasnas, a half-thing, a cleft-whole. Alice’s obsession is, however, far more revealing. This kind of literary monomania is not a new phenomenon – Alice’s father notes that they went through a similar phase with her elder sister and Byron – and the current popularity of the Waverley Novels is compared to the fads for Fanny Burney, Anne Radcliffe and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis. But the voluminous Scott is a more worrying fashion. Readers are ‘inundated with showers of Scotch novels, thicker than the snow you see falling’, with works ‘pouring on us like a torrent from one fertile pen’. It seems to him as if ‘there was no another country under the sun worth hearing of than poor, miserable, little Scotland’. Worse, Alice’s own mimicry is sanctioned and paralleled by the fact that novelists are already imitating Scott – and these imitators are more blameworthy than the original. Likewise, both the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine (which Alice reads between Waverley Novels) are censured for ‘puffing’ Scott, and artificially sustaining the hype around his works. Throughout Scotch Novel Reading there are attacks on the ‘cabals’, ‘quacks’ and ‘Scotch Monopoly’. The anxiety is palpable. The worry is not that Scott is a passing fashion, but that he is not a passing fashion.
Under such circumstances, it is almost understandable that poor Alice falls so wholeheartedly under the influence of Scott. Alice’s impersonation of Scottishness takes two distinct forms: language and costume. These are both derived from the novels, which use multiple linguistic registers and frequently adopt disguises to characterise the difference between the Scots and the English – and indeed, both accent and dress are staples of Scottish caricature to this day. To lampoon the Scots, all you need is a kilt and a distinctive pronunciation of the ‘ch’ in ‘loch’. What is remarkable about such heightened versions is that they frequently began in Scotland. Sir Harry Lauder predates Russ Abbot; and William McGonagall comes before Monty Python’s Ewan McTeagle.
Stereotype derives from two Greek words – stereos, meaning firm or solid, and tupos, an impression, blow or incised mark. Although such depictions can be felt as physical assaults or aggressive blows, the Scottish stereotype seems more like the oxymoronic etymology, a firm impression, both clear and nebulous at the same time. Other groups have advocated the cultural appropriation of former terms of abuse (reclaiming words such as ‘queer’ or ‘nigga’, or through dramatising the speaker-specific usage of a word like ‘Paki’ in Gautum Malkani’s Londonstani). Scots cannot enact a similar transformative adoption. Local newspapers in Scotland will happily refer to ‘tartan tat’ or ‘kitsch kilts’ or ‘hoots mon’ attitudes, but these stereotypes cannot be reclaimed as they were always ours in the first place. Alasdair Gray rails about the ‘music hall songs and a few bad novels’, but the exportation of a Scottish cliché is not solely about outdated media and aesthetic inferiority: many of the greatest and most successful cultural embodiments of Scottishness willingly embrace the cliché. Sir Walter is at the forefront of both the creation of that myth and the subsequent fulminating furores around it.
These cross-currents are seen most clearly in the inaugural Donald Dewar Memorial Lecture given by the former Labour Minister for Culture, Tourism and Sport, Mike Watson, in 2002. Entitled ‘Scotland: A Place for Culture and Culture in Place’, with unfortunate undertones of ‘keeping’ culture in its place, Watson located Scott at the interface between tourism and culture: ‘Scott’s success’ was ‘in putting Scotland on the international map’; but, Watson continued, ‘I do recognise too, however, that the cultural images and identity created by Scott have, in a sense, been too successful.’ What does ‘too successful’ actually mean? On one hand, it may just be an admission of the failure of tourism promotions to provide a counter-image as beguiling and ubiquitous as Scott’s. In the same year, VisitScotland, the Government body tasked to promote tourism, attempted to ‘rebrand’ away from its former mottoes (including ‘Discover the Real Scotland’) with some ill-advised adverts promoting the benefits of Scotland’s rain and mist (‘The Scottish weather is perfect for a romantic break. You won’t go out much. In the Scottish Highlands you may have to stay in and make your own entertainment. Want to come?’ – all puns intended). Stalling critics, VisitScotland assured reporters that the ‘land of the mountain and flood’ had not become a ‘wet weather knocking shop’. Worse, the chief executive Philip Riddle, on being asked what united the diverse aspects of contemporary Scotland in a single television advert, was reduced to replying, ‘A strong element of authenticity. It’s not staged, it’s not Disneyland.’
On the other hand, Watson and others’ comments may indicate a barely suppressed anxiety that Scott’s Scotland has, in some vague world-consciousness, replaced the real Scotland. It is akin to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum: ‘the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth: it is the truth which conceals that there is none’. Watson is not concerned with Scott as a superior spin-doctor, but with the notion that there is no ‘real Scotland’ at all. Disneyland is, after all, as ‘real’ as Auchtermuchty.
Watson’s stumbling-block was developed in two works by the former First Minister, Henry McLeish, who after leaving office wrote Global Scots: Making it in the Modern World (2006) and Wherever the Saltire Flies, with Nationalist MSP Kenny McAskill (also 2006). In their interviews with expatriate Scots and those of Scots ancestry, a tentative accommodation was reached with the international stereotype of Scottishness. Particularly in Wherever the Saltire Flies, there was a sense that, if the Caledonian Club of Boulder, Colorado wanted to wear kilts, drink whisky, toss cabers, play bagpipes and eat haggis then indigenous Scots had little or no right to consider their behaviour ersatz. This approach towards the marketing of Scottishness reached a kind of culmination in 2009’s Homecoming event. Targeting expat, ‘diaspora’ and ‘affinity’ Scots, the year-long programme had five principal themes: Ancestry (with special reference to genealogy and by extension, clan tartan); Enlightenment; Golf; Whisky; and, to coincide with the 250th anniversary of his birth, Robert Burns. Although the wheel may have come nearly full circle, with Scots apparently revelling in the very stereotypes that had seemed claustrophobic seven years ago, the significant change from Scott to Burns is central. Burns is (or was) vital, democratic, musical, sexual and inspired, while Scott was (or is) moribund, aristocratic, theatrical, romantic and bookish. It is not a comparison without some truth. I can only blush at Scott’s jingoistic parody of the Burns song that was used to open the Scottish Parliament, ‘A Man’s A Man For A’ That’.
For a’ that, an a’ that,
Guns, guillotines, and a’ that,
The Fleur-de-lis, that lost her right,
Is Queen again for a’ that!
We’ll twine her in a friendly knot
With England’s Rose and a’ that;
The Shamrock shall not be forgot,
For Wellington made braw that.
The Thistle, though her leaf be rude,
Yet faith we’ll no misca’ that,
She shelter’d in her solitude
The Fleur-de-lis, for a’ that.
The culmination of the entire programme was an event called ‘The Gathering’, billed as ‘a celebration of the culture and history of Scotland. Thousands of people from around the globe will come together for the greatest international clan and family gathering the world has ever seen’. Around 140 clans, led by their pipe bands, would parade from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to Edinburgh Castle, where a national pageant would be staged. ‘Be a Part of History!’ proclaims the advert.
What is unusual is that in all the accompanying bumf and flannel, there is no mention of the previous clan gathering: that masterminded by Sir Walter Scott for the visit of George IV in 1822. When discussing their 2002 ‘rebranding’, VisitScotland pointed the finger directly at Scott. The traditional image was a ‘touch bogus’, having been ‘stamped’ on Scotland by him, with the so-called ‘King’s Jaunt’ the crowning vulgarity. When Mrs Sarah Green was satirising the Scotch Novel-obsessed Alice, it is important to bear in mind that she was writing in the immediate aftermath of Scott’s incredibly successful public intervention on behalf of the reigning monarch. Questions of Scottish dress, customs, manners, culture and history had become the political issues of the day. Alice’s quixotry was not simple a naive confusion between art and life, since life itself had been imitating art. The Waverley Novels continued until 1832, but in some senses their climax was in the ‘novel made reality’ of the King’s visit. But the state visit was not Scott’s only such extra-literary intervention: there was also the house that the Waverley Novels built.