London called. Scottish writers headed there as never before or since. At the age of thirty-one Walter Scott’s son-in-law, the lawyer, novelist and journalist John Gibson Lockhart, went to the British capital in 1825 to edit John Murray’s Quarterly Review; later it was feared that even the Edinburgh Review might ‘go, and die, in London’.1 Approaching forty, the Borderer Thomas Carlyle headed for London in 1834; he developed into the Sage of Chelsea. Born on the Isle of Arran and in Irvine in Ayrshire, the Scottish brothers Daniel and Alexander Macmillan in the early 1840s established in London and Cambridge their great publishing house whose list would include English authors from Lewis Carroll to Tennyson and Hardy, as well as such new journals as Macmillan’s Magazine (founded in 1859) and Nature (founded in 1869); thanks to these Scottish entrepreneurs, both Scott and Burns would be written up in London’s famous Macmillan monographs as ‘English Men of Letters’. Born in Midlothian in 1828, Margaret Oliphant, most productive of the major Scottish Victorian novelists, was taken to England by her businessman father when she was ten, and published her first novel in London in 1849. A decade later the Aberdeenshire man of letters and children’s writer George MacDonald accepted a London professorship. The greatest English-language urban poem of the nineteenth century, The City of Dreadful Night (1874), is set in a nameless, hallucinatory city, but one that owes much to the London where the poem’s author, Scottish-born James Thomson, had grown up in the Royal Caledonian Asylum. Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson’s splendid Highland tale, was penned in Bournemouth; The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde may be underpinned by the geography of Edinburgh, but unfolds entirely in the metropolis of London. 221B Baker Street is late nineteenth-century London’s most famous fictional address. Sherlock Holmes, who lived there, was based on an Edinburgh pioneer of forensic medicine, and created by Edinburgh’s Arthur Conan Doyle. Yet Holmes is as much a London icon as the Peter Pan of Kensington Gardens.
Fortunately for Scotland, there was some movement in the opposite direction. The English man of letters Thomas De Quincey moved permanently to Edinburgh in 1830. Like George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant sent a good number of her works north to be published by William Blackwood. Edinburgh magazines remained influential in the Victorian age, even if the publishing house of Chambers found it expedient to drop the word ‘Edinburgh’ from the masthead of its leading periodical. Parts of Scotland, Scott-land, most strikingly the royal retreat at Balmoral, became popular tourist destinations. In 1848 an English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, published one of the finest Highland poems, The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich. Though he may have been distantly related to the Gaelic poet William Ross (whose beloved cousin Marion married a Liverpool Clough), A. H. Clough knew little or no Gaelic; he felt obliged to change his poem’s title when he discovered it referred to the female genitalia.2 Dealing with a reading-party of Oxford students in the north, his Bothie associates the Highlands with democratic ideals and energies.
English, American and other authors could find imaginative stimulus in Scotland, sometimes by misreading it. In 1841 Dickens mistook the wording on a memorial slab in Edinburgh’s Canongate Kirkyard. He thought he saw the words ‘Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie – mean man’, and went on to create the Ebenezer Scrooge of A Christmas Carol (1843); actually the Scroggie slab memorialized a ‘meal man’.3 While English writers from Clough to Queen Victoria certainly visited, in an age when so many Scots wrote about London not one major English novelist set a novel north of the Border. As today, so in most of the previous two centuries Scotland was at best part of England’s peripheral vision. In contrast, Scots such as Barrie and Conan Doyle produced work which helped define London for the international imagination.
Not all Scottish writers who left Scotland set up house in London. Some, like David Livingstone, simply passed through, en route to mission and empire. Robert Louis Stevenson travelled for his health, and because foreignness excited his imagination. Most of the Scottish writers who worked outside Scotland came back for long or short periods. J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan’s creator, delighted in returning to his native Kirriemuir in what was then Forfarshire; R. L. Stevenson’s boyhood author-hero, R. M. Ballantyne, who wrote ripping imperial yarns devoured by British lads, worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, then returned to Edinburgh in 1848 and stayed there for over a quarter of a century before moving to France, then England. Stevenson himself, after spells in France and America, worked on Treasure Island in Braemar in the summer of 1881, but by October he was in Zurich; his sense of mobility is part of his restless modernity. Margaret Oliphant, modern not least in her conception of what it means to be a working woman writer financially reliant on her own ability, worked for short spells in Edinburgh, Elie and St Andrews. Most of her time, though, was spent in southern England with excursions to the continent. David Masson, an Aberdeen stonecutter’s son and influential literary critic, took up a Chair of English at London’s young University College in 1853; six years later he became the first editor of Macmillan’s Magazine before moving back from London to the Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh.
Empire and technologies of travel encouraged a sense of cosmopolitan mobility whose hub was imperial London. Still, some Scots stayed put and did well. Publisher William Chambers wrote observant memoirs of Edinburgh, all ‘honest-like bakers, in pepper-and-salt coats’ and ‘dainty-looking youths, in white neck-cloths and black silk eye-glass ribbons’ at the ageing James Hogg’s parties.4 William’s brother Robert Chambers, author and publisher, collected the world’s first book of urban folklore, Traditions of Edinburgh (1824), then edited reference books in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition, and became a pioneer of evolutionary theory. His contemporary, the stonemason Hugh Miller, a courageous, Scottish-based writer, fared less happily. On the whole, in this era of Lowland mass industrialization and rapidly developing modes of locomotion, the more ambitious and adventurous writers left Scotland, for a time if not for good. As with the Latinists of the seventeenth century, these Victorian writers in the imperial language of English were scattered across several countries, though still part of a Scottish network with links to Scotland itself. At home there were pockets of local strength – dialect novels in newspapers, working-class poets and storytellers struggling to articulate a new urban consciousness or remarket an older, rural one. There were collectors of Gaelic songs, and Edinburgh bookmen. But among Scottish-based authors it is hard not to sense a diminution of energy after the era of Byron, Scott, Galt and Hogg. ‘Old Scotland’, for Robert Chambers, ‘now seems to be passing away.’5
Scottish literature had been written outside Scotland before. Both 1603 and 1707 had triggered southward authorial migrations. In the eighteenth century Thomson, Smollett, Boswell, Macpherson and others had negotiated between Scotland and the British capital. Burns had avoided London; Scott and Galt had tried their fortunes there. Yet among nineteenth-century Scots a conviction developed that Scotland was somehow on the wane. It was fading, and the financial and cultural dominance of London was to blame. Even the ageing Scott felt this. In 1829 he wrote in his Journal about how ‘London licks the butter of[f] our bread.’6 He knew ambitious Scots were attracted south, but, shrewdly, he realized also that Scotland’s distinctive Church, educational and legal systems did keep some talented men north of the Border.
For authors writing in English, however, London offered an incomparably vast marketplace. Despite the power of the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s Magazine and Scottish publishers, the imperial capital’s literary infrastructure was growing ever larger. In 1852, looking back to the early nineteenth-century heyday of Francis Jeffrey, his biographer Lord Cockburn wrote with astonished resentment of how
all this was still a Scotch scene. The whole country had not begun to be absorbed in the ocean of London. There were still little great places, – places with attractions quite sufficient to retain men of talent or learning in their comfortable and respectable provincial positions; and which were dignified by the tastes and institutions which learning and talent naturally rear. The operation of the commercial principle which tempts all superiority to try its fortune in the greatest accessible market, is perhaps irresistible; but anything is surely to be lamented which annihilates local intellect, and degrades the provincial spheres which intellect and its consequences can alone adorn… From about 1800, everything purely Scotch has been fading.7
Nowadays we distrust searches for national or ethnic ‘purity’. Yet Cockburn’s language is revealing in its sense of ‘a Scotch scene’ linked to the ‘provincial’ and apparently destined to be submerged under those values represented by ‘the ocean of London’.
As Lord Advocate and an MP, Francis Jeffrey spent much of the 1830s in London, but that decade’s most notable Scottish literary emigrants to the English metropolis were Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Thomas, the more important though often less appealing of these two writers, was by no means ‘purely Scotch’. His authorial manner owed much to German Romantic writing, particularly that of Goethe and the stylistically contorted Jean-Paul Richter; Carlyle translated both men’s works. He was a polemical pamphleteer, reforming author, and English-language historian; in all these capacities, despite his Germanism, he does display a strong Scottish streak which may remind some readers of one of his own declared heroes, John Knox.
Carlyle’s strict Presbyterian father would ‘not tolerate anything fictitious in books’.8 Carlyle as an adult denounced modern ‘Novel-garbage’.9 Still, he enjoyed fiction from Smollett to the Arabian Nights as he grew up in the village of Annandale, Dumfries-shire. In late 1809, aged fourteen, he made a three-day-long slow cart ride to the city of Edinburgh, carrying his mother’s gift of a two-volume bible. He was expected to train for the ministry, and did so, but mathematics and the chance to read widely were what he enjoyed most at Edinburgh University. Carlyle preached his first sermon at the Divinity Hall of the National Church in Edinburgh in 1814, but soon lost his sense of full Christian belief. He spent some years working as a teacher in Kirkcaldy and elsewhere. There was a sense, though, in which Carlyle remained a preacher all his life. He relished using the vocabulary of Christianity, and came to believe that ‘the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the real working effective Church of a modern country’, while ‘a Collection of Books’ was modernity’s ‘true University’.10 His sometimes messianic authorial career began in the Edinburgh milieu of encyclopedia-making and book reviewing. One of the first books he received for review was Joanna Baillie’s 1821 Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters. Throughout his life Carlyle would be attracted by those whom he saw as exalted characters – Goethe, Burns, Cromwell, Frederick the Great of Prussia. He built up a pantheon of heroic males and came to advocate what he termed ‘hero-worship’ as a form of noble human devotion. By 1832 he saw Johnson’s biographer James Boswell as a ‘wonderful martyr’ to this new faith, a shining example ‘that Loyalty, Discipleship, all that was ever meant by Hero-worship, lives perennially in the human bosom’.11
Sartor Resartus, Carlyle’s first authored book, was serialized in Fraser’s Magazine in 1833–4, then published in book form in America in 1836 before publication in London two years later. Its Latin title means ‘the tailor retailored’, and its protagonist is in part comical, not quite a hero to be worshipped. With this protagonist Carlyle followed in the wake of John Arbuthnot’s eighteenth-century pedantic German Martin Scriblerus, and established one of English-language culture’s enduring stereotypes: the earnest German professor. Scottish Enlightenment thought had been so influential in Germany and there were so many translations between Scotland and Germany in the early nineteenth century that for Carlyle to choose to adopt a Germanic guise is understandable. To some extent, the eccentric Professor Teufelsdröckh of the University of Weissnichtwo (a German translation of Scott’s Kennaquhair – ‘Don’t Know Where’) is a version of Carlyle himself. With his learned work Der Kleider, Ihr Werden und Wirken (On Clothes: Their Origin and Influence), the Professor emerged from the young Scot’s experiences writing encyclopedia articles, reviewing, and translating German. At one point Carlyle even began to write a history of German literature, but he never completed it. Instead, after Englishing Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1824) and four volumes of German Romance (1827), Carlyle, as he knew Scott had done, made German Romantic writings a springboard for his own work. Where Jean-Paul Richter had appointed himself ‘ “Professor of his own History” ’ and written prose crammed with the ‘grotesque’ and ‘ludicrous’, overflowing with a ‘boundless uproar’ of stylistic excess, Carlyle sought to emulate him.12 Carlyle’s was a European rather than an insular view of literature. In 1827, in his early thirties, he argued that ‘so closely are all European communities connected, that the phases of mind in any one country, so far as these represent its general circumstances and intellectual position, are but modified repetitions of its phases in every other’.13 A true Europhile, he drew attention to parallels between German and Scottish literature.
Wildly eclectic, and supposedly pieced together by an English editor working from the voluminous texts of a biblioholic German academic, Sartor Resartus is a hybrid work that draws on the genres of novel, sermon and polemical philosophical or theological treatise. Often in absurdist guise, it is precociously Victorian in preaching a doctrine of ‘Self-help’.14 Confused and confusing, it flaunts a calculatedly barbarous Germano-unEnglish style. Sartor emphasizes the need to face down despair and negativity – ‘The Everlasting No’ – and seek instead what is positively worth believing in. This may be a gospel of ‘work’ or ‘a new Mythus’ taken over from Christianity, or the ‘Fragments of a genuine Church-Homiletic’ that ‘lie scattered’ in ‘this immeasurable froth-ocean we name LITERATURE’.15 Carlyle’s trumpet-blast idea that literature would replace religion would be sounded again in a more muted fashion by the less volatile Victorian Englishman Matthew Arnold. The notion persists sometimes in our own day, though for many ‘the media’ and media celebrities rather than literature and its heroes have come to occupy the position of Carlyle’s ‘working effective Church’ to which a society offers devotion.
Sartor Resartus grew out of Carlyle’s crisis of religious belief. Urging the need to search for values that were not outdated, he quixotically imagined both a nude House of Lords and a ‘dandiacal body’ as part of his quest for appropriately modern spiritual and intellectual garb.16 Praising what he calls ‘Natural Supernaturalism’, he presents the Book of Nature ‘With its Words, Sentences, and grand descriptive Pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out through Solar Systems, and Thousands of Years’ as ‘a Volume written in celestial hieroglyphs’.17 Many readers have found Carlyle’s own book equally amazing, arresting and baffling. Its restlessness struck a chord with Victorian contemporaries and its exclamatory style remains oratorically exciting. Yet, for all its brilliance, Sartor Resartus can sound windy and needlessly, heedlessly exhausting. Carlyle wrote the book towards the end of six years when he and his young wife Jane Welsh lived a demanding life in the remote Craigenputtoch farmhouse on the bleak Dumfries-shire moors. Jane hated the cold there, and Thomas was increasingly attracted by the resources and conversation of London. In 1834 they took up residence at 5 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea.
Carlyle was a driven, compulsive writer. After his death, a controversial biography by J. A. Froude hinted at his sexual inadequacy, and more recent work by Rosemary Ashton scrutinizes the Carlyles’ often uneasy marriage. The Great Man’s literary tasks dominated the Carlyle household. Shrewd Jane was subjected to claustrophobic pressure. When John Stuart Mill lost much of the manuscript of The French Revolution, Carlyle doggedly rewrote the lot. His work was published to acclaim and amazement in 1837. Running to over 900 pages, it plays fast and loose with history in search of rhetorical effect, but also draws on eye-witness accounts. It seems less written than blared – filled with John-Knoxian din and scorn, though Knox might have had more sympathy than Carlyle with the Revolution’s democratic ideals. Carlyle sees the Revolution as a secular apocalypse. It ends an old way of life but leaves confusion and carnage in its wake: ‘the Death-Birth of a World!’18
Ten years earlier Scott had surveyed this terrain in the opening volumes of his Life of Napoleon. Carlyle went further in scope and vehemence. He shows some sympathy for the common people who ‘pine stagnantly in thick obscuration’, but, almost as much as Robert Bisset forty years earlier, he despises the ‘Spectre of DEMOCRACY’.19 Carlyle’s scorn extends not just to the French Revolution but also, despite a strong friendship with his Massachusetts admirer Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the American Revolution. He hears ‘on Bunker Hill, DEMOCRACY announcing, in rifle-volleys death-winged, under her Star Banner, to the tune of Yankee-doodle-doo, that she is born, and, whirl-wind-like, will envelop the whole world!’20 Carlyle’s French Revolution is volcanically catastrophic, and that sense of catastrophe excites his scalding prose. His Carlylese mocks the Revolution’s ‘great game’.21 Sometimes he revoices Old Testament prophecies (‘Ye and your fathers have sown the wind, ye shall reap the whirlwind’) or borrows the tones of an epic bard; his prose is crammed with clashing dictions as foreign phrases, slang and neologisms (‘Strumpetocracies’) do battle among exclamation marks and a forest of actual and satirical names – ‘Astraea Redux without Cash’ is a characteristic chapter title.22
For Carlyle the horrific Revolution must never be repeated. Writing of such horrors as ‘a Tannery of Human Skins’, he perceives that like Original Sin, an appalling ‘Madness… dwells in the hearts of man’. He views civilization as a mere veneer: ‘Alas then, is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?’23 That rhetorical question carries as much force in the twenty-first century as it did in the twentieth or the nineteenth, but The French Revolution offers more prolonged stylistic convulsions than many modern readers find acceptable.
Carlyle’s influence on Victorian Britain was immense. Not least, his own work shaped the Tory party. As others of his countrymen from Gilbert Burnet to David Hume, James Boswell to Walter Scott had done before him, this charismatic and ambitious Scot scripted a version of Englishness. In his state-of-the-nation book, Past and Present (1843), Carlyle invokes on the first page the spectre of the Bastille, and seeks a remedy for industrial England’s social ills. His work spurred several explorations of the ‘condition of England’ by novelist (and later British Prime Minister) Benjamin Disraeli, by Elizabeth Gaskell, and by Charles Dickens; Engels, Marx, Nietzsche and others reacted to Carlyle’s analyses. Highly influential on English, American and continental writing, Carlyle, for all his Scottishness, presented himself and his country as, in a qualified way, English:
A heroic Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot hinder that his Scotland become, one day, a part of England: but he does hinder that it become, on unfair terms, a part of it; commands still, as with a god’s voice, from his old Valhalla and Temple of the Brave, that there be a just real union as of brother and brother, not a false and merely semblant one as of slave and master. If the union with England be in fact one of Scotland’s chief blessings, we thank Wallace withal that it was not the chief curse. Scotland is not Ireland…24
Carlyle’s anti-Irish admiration for the ‘brave true heart’ of Wallace in Valhalla with his ‘god’s voice’ is, like his devotion to Oliver Cromwell whose memory ‘is or yet shall be as that of a god’, a form of that masculine adulation outlined in his 1841 lectures On Heroes and Hero-Worship. There, in an anthropological sweep, the heroes range from pagan gods through Mahomet, Dante, Shakespeare and Luther to Knox, Johnson, Burns, Cromwell and Napoleon. Writing as one of ‘We English’ in Past and Present, and mixing fiction with polemical philosophizing, Carlyle juxtaposes an idealized, medieval pastoral England with modern industrial society subservient to its ‘Gospel of Mammonism’. He lam-basts the England which seems to have forgotten that ‘Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.’ Yet, writing in the age of Samuel Smiles, Carlyle exalts the idea of hard work as something which might unite the old, masculine Catholic medieval England he admires with the modern world he inhabits.25 Carlyle coined phrases such as ‘Captains of industry’, and Past and Present came to be offered to early twentieth-century students as a work articulating ‘authentic manliness’ with its ‘battle-music’ and work ethic: ‘All true Work is Religion… Admirable was that of the old Monks, “Laborare est Orare, Work is Worship.” ’26 So a re-imagined medieval English Catholicism is fused with Carlyle’s Scottish Protestant work ethic.
Work was Carlyle’s refuge and strength. The fun and play present in Sartor Resartus turn to scorn and savage irony in his later writings. Dismissive of the idle, titled rich, Carlyle grew convinced that ‘Europe requires a real Aristocracy, a real Priesthood’, and his hero-worshipping tendencies led him towards Cromwell (whom he saw as ‘authored’ by John Knox) and towards Prussia’s Frederick II as unflinchingly strong rulers, ironclads of the spirit. Though Engels and others saw in Carlyle a compelling arguer against social ills, his own ideology with its worship of supermannish heroes, ‘the select of the earth’, takes its bearings from a secularization of the Calvinist idea of the elect, and points towards both Nietzsche and fascism.27 Perceptively, H. J. C. Grierson identified this proto-Fascist tendency in his 1933 study Carlyle and Hitler; a dozen years later, one of the last books with which the Führer was consoled in his Berlin bunker was Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858–65). Carlyle’s hero-worship is a dangerous religion.
This Scottish writer’s bitterness against the ‘swarmeries’ of modern democracy increased with age.28 His racism, which may not have been unusual in nineteenth-century Scotland or England, is evident in essays like ‘The Nigger Question’, with its horror of turning ‘the West Indies into a Black Ireland’. In ‘Shooting Niagara: And After?’ the growth of full democracy is likened to plunging over Niagara Falls.29 Just as Scottish writings for and against slavery should be better known, so Scottish literary racism needs to be more openly discussed. Scots too readily hymn their literature as straightforwardly ‘democratic’. It is salutary to hear the patrician tones of ‘Shooting Niagara’, a piece composed during Carlyle’s term of office as democratically elected Rector of Edinburgh University:
One always rather likes the Nigger; evidently a poor blockhead with good dispositions, with affections, attachments, – with a turn for Nigger Melodies, and the like: – he is the only Savage of all the coloured races that doesn’t die out on sight of the White Man; but can actually live beside him, and work and increase and be merry. The Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a Servant.30
More palatable, and less exhaustingly written than much of the rest of Carlyle’s oeuvre, are his posthumously published Reminiscences (1881) in which he recalls his father, his friends, and his late wife, Jane. When he writes lovingly about his peasant father, trying to identify with him, yet cut off from him by milieu and religious doubt, Carlyle hints at how readily he moved from the ‘elect’ of Calvinism to the ‘Happy few’ who may follow the wisdom of Sartor, and from the ‘old excessive Edinburgh hero-worship’ of his youth to the proto-Fascist devotion to strong men in his later works.31 His hurt, grieving account of Jane should be supplemented by her own often tart published letters and accounts of their relationship. Clearly written and moving, the Reminiscences show a Carlyle who has shifted from the volcanic to the melancholy. Not for nothing did the young, Scots-descended American artist James McNeill Whistler paint him in 1873 as an ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black’.
As well as keeping in touch with their relations and literary friends hundreds of miles to the north, the Carlyles in London knew and corresponded with Tennyson, Browning, and many other English and continental luminaries. To them, to her husband, and to such personal friends as the English novelist Geraldine Jewsbury, Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–66), a doctor’s daughter from Haddington, wrote strikingly witty, detailed and sometimes bitter letters which often mentioned her husband:
In virtue of his being the least unlikable man in the place, I let him dance attendance on my young person, till I came to need him – all the same as my slippers, to go to a ball in, or my bonnet to go out to walk. When I finally agreed to marry him, I cried excessively and felt excessively shocked – but if I had said no he would have left me and how could I dispense with what was equivalent to my slippers or my bonnet?32
The sheer bulk of the ongoing scholarly edition of the Carlyles’ correspondence may be offputting, but often the individual letters, especially Jane’s, shine out.
Women feature little in Thomas Carlyle’s writings. He hymned heroes. Only after Jane’s death did he realize that he might have lost if not a heroine, then certainly a woman so important to him that without her his own work faltered. Throughout her married life the well-read, intelligent Jane kept house and tried to mollify her husband’s bouts of angry despair; but she and other Scottish women were thinking and writing about their treatment. Continuing that interest in female education which had been so strong in the work of Susan Ferrier, Mary Brunton and Elizabeth Hamilton, Catherine Sinclair (1800–64), daughter and secretary to Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, embarked on a considerable career as a published author just after her father’s death in 1835. Her Modern Accomplishments, or the March of the Intellect (1836) is an examination of female education, while the popular and often lively Holiday House (1839) was a series of Scottish tales aimed specifically at children. Whether they thought to win greater social freedom for women or to defend the status quo, all writers about women agreed about their influence over children. Often women encouraged other women to read and educate themselves. In 1831 in a manuscript written for a female friend, the elderly Joanna Baillie recalled how seventy years earlier in Bothwell ‘My mother took pains to teach me’ and how when she was ill her sister ‘came to me with Ocean’s [Ossian’s] poems in her hand and coaxed me in a very persuasive soothing manner to open the book and read some of the stories to myself: I did so and was delighted with them (as far as I can recollect) the first book which I had read willingly and with pleasure.’33
An article dealing with ‘Woman’s Rights and Duties’ in the 1841 Edinburgh Review appears to have helped incite A Plea for Woman, published by William Tait in Edinburgh in 1843 and written by Marion Reid, a Glasgow merchant’s daughter living as a married woman in Liverpool. Demonstrating a taste for poetry that ranges from ‘the old ballad of the Wife of Auchtermuchty’ to William Cowper, and a strong gift for reasoned argument, Reid produced a work ‘designed to show, that social equality with man is necessary for the free growth and development of woman’s nature’, and that it ‘belongs of right to woman’. Countering ‘female depression’ (‘subjection’ would be J. S. Mill’s word in 1869), Reid considers not just education – ‘no public care, in short, is taken to provide means for the education of girls, as is done for that of boys’ – but also parliamentary voting rights: ‘We have no wish whatever to see women sitting as representatives; but, in saying this, we must not be misunderstood; for neither do we think it just to prevent them by law from doing so.’34 Introducing a modern reprint of Reid’s work, Susanne Ferguson argues that
A Plea For Woman is a landmark book as the first to be written by a woman, for women, specifically arguing that possession of the vote is crucial in ending the discrimination against their gender in education and employment, showing that women’s condition can improve only when they have a voice in choosing those who make laws.35
Certainly the book was several times reprinted and was read on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1844 the Scottish novelist and journalist Christian Johnstone (who may have had some influence over the work’s first publication) reviewed the Plea with interest in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, revealing her own knowledge of feminist thinking and her wish for women to acquire greater financial and intellectual ‘self-reliance’.36 Writers such as Reid were beginning to realize that there was now a significant body of work written by modern female authors, some of them Scottish, so that ‘woman’ might take pride in ‘the very respectable figure she has made in modern literature. De Stael, Hemans, Edgeworth, Baillie, Morgan, Martineau, More, Somerville, are names taken almost at random from a host of female writers who have certainly been much above mediocrity, even of manly talent.’37
More reassuring to conventional readers would have been the writings of Reid’s near contemporary, the little-girl author from Kirkcaldy, Marjory Fleming (1803–11), whose three-volume diary was several times published decades after her death. In an age with a fondness for Little Nells, Fleming’s accounts of her dolls and her reading captivated audiences. They remain charming and vivid, especially when shorn of the prettifications introduced by Victorian editors like Dr John Brown (1810–82) who, in a gesture which Marion Reid would not have appreciated, called the dead girl ‘Pet Marjorie’. Brown’s own pets were dogs and this Edinburgh physician wrote stories about them in such stories as Rab and his Friends (1859) and Our Dogs (1862). Henryson had written beast fables; Burns and other poets had given voices to dogs; now Brown published some of the first extended and artistically crafted adult prose fictions to have animals as protagonists. From Black Beauty and Lassie to John Muir’s Stickeen, Jack London’s Call of the Wild, Virginia Woolf’s Flush and Kipling’s Jungle Book, we take this genre for granted in fiction and in cinema, but Brown’s work is important in its development, and should be remembered with his other essays. It was not only Charles Darwin whose Victorian prose investigated the links between humans and other species.
Brown’s dog books appealed to the same Victorian taste that relished William Chambers’s Kindness to Animals (1877). Alert to human suffering and decay, William’s brother Robert felt a need to conserve a vanishing Scotland. In his twenties Robert Chambers (1802–71) collected Traditions of Edinburgh (1824) and The Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826) as well as editing or writing other folkloric and historical works. With William he ran the publishing house of W. and R. Chambers, producing from 1832 their Journal which survived until 1956 and contained popular writing – essays, anecdotes, stories, articles – in Scots and English for a mass readership of over 30,000. The Chambers publishing house also brought out celebrated reference works such as Robert’s four-volume Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen (1832–4) and Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (1859–68). Authoring books on topics from America to gypsies, the Peebles-born Chambers brothers were great Edinburgh educators whose work fuelled the kind of ‘self-culture’ encouraged in different ways by Carlyle, Marion Reid and Samuel Smiles. Robert Chambers’s pioneering, controversial, and widely-read The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (published anonymously in 1844) also argued for evolutionary theory. This book was of great importance to the thinking of the Edinburgh-educated Charles Darwin and, looking out along the West Sands at St Andrews from his seafront villa, Robert Chambers went on to ponder the significance of Ancient Sea-Margins (1848).
Evolutionary thought developed alongside Carlyle’s search for new systems of belief that might replace or reroute Christianity. The 1840s brought, too, not just growing political and industrial unrest, but also the ecclesiastical Disruption of 1843 which saw a breakaway from the Church of Scotland. Over 450 of its ministers refused to accept that landowners and influential patrons had a right to choose clergy for a parish. This choice, the breakaway group insisted, was the democratic entitlement of a congregation. These ecclesiastical democrats formed the Free Church of Scotland under the leadership of Thomas Chalmers, and this division in Scotland’s Established Kirk had wide repercussions throughout society. The literary figure in Scotland who best exemplifies many of the upheavals of the time is the largely self-taught polymath Hugh Miller (1802–56), a Cromarty stonemason whose The Old Red Sandstone (1841) was partly published in The Witness, the periodical most closely identified with supporters of the Disruption. Here and in other geological studies like Footsteps of the Creator (1849), Miller eloquently articulated evolutionary thought and pondered the significance of fossils. Reading the biblical Book of Genesis allegorically, he argued that there must have been several stages of divine creation, the last of which produced humans. His works were very widely read, popular with those who struggled to reconcile Christian teaching with modern scientific discoveries. Robert Chambers was one of Miller’s supporters, and the two men shared a passion for education. Miller’s autobiography, My Schools and Schoolmasters, or the Story of my Education (1854), was admired by Carlyle and others for its emphasis on the need for working people to educate themselves, rather than engaging in social revolution.
Many of Miller’s contemporaries showed more restless anger. The working-class Aberdeenshire weaver poet William Thom (1798–1848), author of a Disruption poem ‘Chants for Churls’ as well as of the urban ‘Whisperings of the Unwashed’, published his Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver in London in 1844 and complained in prose that ‘Starvation to death is not uncommon amongst us; yet we are in the nineteenth century – the pearl age of benevolent societies, charity-schools, and “useful knowledge”.’38 Others, like Thomas Chalmers and the Free Church minister Thomas Guthrie (1803–73) in his A Plea for Ragged Schools (1847) and The City: Its Sins and Sorrows (1857) were all too aware of such problems, but none wrote of a working man’s quest for education more engagingly than Hugh Miller.
Growing up poor in Cromarty, Miller was lucky to be born into rural rather than urban Scotland. ‘It seems to be very much the fashion of the time’, he wrote, ‘to draw dolorous pictures of the condition of the labouring classes’, but he knew what it was to struggle. Noting how the dust from stoneworking ‘had begun to affect my lungs’, Miller mentions almost casually that ‘few of our Edinburgh stone-cutters pass their fortieth year unscathed, and not one out of every fifty of their number ever reaches his forty-fifth year.’39 His title My Schools and Schoolmasters is largely ironic. Miller’s is not a book about academics, but shows ‘that life itself is a school, and Nature always a fresh study’. Whether he writes about the Highland Clearances or about Scottish colliers who had the status of ‘born slaves’, the well-read Miller, steeped in Burns, presents what is probably the nineteenth century’s best autobiography by a British working man.40 Its readers should bear in mind that serfdom ended in Scotland only in 1799 and that the eighteenth century associated with the Scottish Enlightenment was also the century which inscribed on a housebreaker’s penitential brass collar (now one of the most eloquent pieces of material culture in Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland) the words ‘A PERPETUAL SERVENT’.
Miller’s book shows how different were the several Scotlands of his day. Growing up on the edge of a northern, Gaelic-speaking community, the young Miller knew Edinburgh only from books and anecdotes. He came to it as to ‘a great magical city’ and was ‘as entirely unacquainted with great towns at this time as the shepherd in Virgil’. Edinburgh, with its Old Town and New Town, came to impress him as ‘not one, but two cities – a city of the past and a city of the present – set down side by side as if for purposes of comparison’.41 Drawing in part on the doppelgänger motif of German Romanticism, this conscious imaging of division, notable in Hogg and Stevenson, was not uncommon in nineteenth-century Scottish writing; it would be held up by Hugh MacDiarmid in the twentieth century as characterizing a peculiarly Scottish aesthetic. Division, though, belongs to no one nation. Just as much as Hugh Miller’s Scotland, nineteenth-century England was seen as just as divided between haves and have-nots, while, later, Laforgue, Yeats, Eliot and other non-Scottish modernist authors would write in ways that hardly suggest that the divided consciousness was uniquely Caledonian. Hugh Miller, stonemason and man of letters, geologist and defender of the Bible, his prose winding from local anecdotes to elaborate descriptions of fossils, might seem a divided personality. Yet his prose is not just based on binaries. It is convincing because it sets out the way in which he is a complex, nuanced person who cannot simply be pigeonholed as ‘working-class autodidact’ or ‘split self’. He discovered in writing the way to articulate his manifest interests and beliefs but, prone to despair, he took his own life. He shot himself in 1856, only two years after completing his autobiography. He was a stonemason who had passed the age of fifty.
Though it is often characterized as an age of stifling respectability, Victorian Scotland, like Carlyle’s prose, seethed and veered between excitement and despair. Readers rightly despair when they encounter the work of Dundee’s seething and veering celebrant William McGonagall (c. 1825–1902), author of such metrical atrocities as the ‘Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay’. No one has ever proved that the Tay rail bridge tragically collapsed in 1879 simply because McGonagall sang its praises, but the thought is allowable. Still in print and much translated, his verse is so earnestly and elaborately bad that deservedly, despite all naysaying, it has ensured his immortality. Just across the Tay from the jute mills of Dundee, but otherwise far removed, the St Andrews philosopher James Frederick Ferrier in his 1854 Institutes of Metaphysics coined the word ‘epistemology’ – the science of the foundations of knowledge – but he also invented another, more negative-sounding term which failed to catch on: ‘agnoiology’, the philosophy of ignorance. The chill of abnegation felt in Carlyle’s ‘Everlasting No’ is also heard in the journalist–poet William Anderson’s ‘I’m Naebody Noo’, and resounds most appallingly in James Thomson’s later Victorian poem The City of Dreadful Night.42 Despair as well as faith is a marked note in Scottish Victorian writing. The Kelso minister Horatius Bonar (1808–89) wrote some of Scotland’s finest nineteenth-century hymns, sometimes showing a tender eroticism (‘Beloved, let us love: love is of God’). He also redirected some of the language taken over by Carlyle for his gospel of work, and brought it back into the fold of a Christian hymn:
Go, labour on while it is day:
The world’s dark night is hastening on;
Speed, speed thy work; cast sloth away;
It is not thus that souls are won.43
Some of this might seem in tune with a drive for greater industrial productivity, but there were times when, even for Carlyle himself, all the hard work could appear pointless:
What is man? A foolish baby,
Vainly strives, and fights, and frets;
Demanding all, deserving nothing; –
One small grave is what he gets.44
Revealingly, Carlyle has no time for babies. A sense of doomladen struggle is heard often in the religious verse and hymn-writing of the time. ‘Courage, brother! do not stumble/ Though thy path be dark as night’, urges Glaswegian evangelist Norman Macleod in a popular hymn, while in Edinburgh the professor–poet William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813–65), teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (soon renamed English Literature) at the University, wrote of how the Calvinist ‘cold Geneva ban’ on older Catholic festivities had long since turned ‘The ancient Scottish Christmas’ into ‘A cheerless day! – A gloomy time!’ ‘Let us all be unhappy on Sunday,’ urged Charles, Lord Neaves (1800–76), mockingly rhyming ‘frigid’ with ‘over-rigid’.45
Harshness in mid-nineteenth-century Scotland was registered not only by titled after-dinner wits like the stylish Neaves, but also by hard-pressed working-class poets like Glasgow’s poverty-stricken James Macfarlan who, before his death at the age of thirty in 1862, had won the attention of Dickens and Thackeray. Working close to the Lanarkshire coalfields, Macfarlan wrote in ‘The Lords of Labour’ of how ‘Through the mists of commerce… /… souls flash out, like stars of God,/ From the midnight of the mine’.46 Contrasts between illumination and pitch-blackness, riches and poverty, high culture and destitution characterize the general culture of the time and the specific literary productions of a host of significant, often little-researched minor writers. Sir William Stirling Maxwell (1818–78), whose family had grown rich from the horrors of Caribbean slavery, produced his groundbreaking art-historical work Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848). The poet–painter William Bell Scott published in 1869 his monograph on Albrecht Dürer, and painted in Northumbria a large-scale industrial scene, Iron and Coal (1861). Yet Scott’s unoriginal verse is in flight from such a sense of modernity, and his finest paintings are small, luminous landcapes such as the painting of Ailsa Craig now in the Yale Center for British Art.
Scottish writers contributing to the world of European high-art connoisseurship seem far removed from the urban poor depicted in Alexander Brown’s documentary prose in ‘Shadow’’s 1858 Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs: Being Sketches of Life in the Streets, Wynds, and Dens of the City. Originally written for a newspaper, Brown’s ‘sketches’ reveal in convincing detail Glaswegian slum life with its ‘Rags, poverty, disease and death’ – and pubs:
One can scarcely realize the enormous number of these houses, with their flaring gas lights in frosted globes, and brightly gilded spirit casks, lettered by the number of gallons, under the cognomen of ‘Old Tom’ or ‘Young Tom’, as the case may be, with the occasional mirror at the extreme end of the shop reflecting at once in fine perspective the waters of a granite fountain fronting the door, and the entrance of poor broken-down victims, who stand in pitiful burlesque in their dirty rags, amid all this pomp and mocking grandeur.47
South of the Border, such scenes were the stuff of fiction for Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and others. Industrialization and city squalor certainly inform some of Carlyle’s writings, but in the mid-nineteenth century these issues feature surprisingly little in the imaginative prose from a Scotland whose Central Belt was one of the world’s most rapidly industrializing zones. After the heyday of Scott, Hogg and Galt, Scottish fiction was rather in the doldrums and seldom engaged with the greatest challenges facing the surrounding society.
For all that a series of Whistle-binkie anthologies of generally sub-Burnsian verse attracted popular praise, the most convincing attempts to deal imaginatively with the modern city came not in mid-nineteenth-century Scottish fiction, but in poetry. In 1857 Alexander Smith, a twenty-seven-year-old West of Scotland tradesman who eventually became Secretary to Edinburgh University, published City Poems. One of these was ‘Glasgow’ in which Smith rather determinedly discovered ‘Another beauty, sad and stern’ in the ‘streams of blinding ore’ of local steelworks, in ‘smoky sunsets’ and in ‘rainy nights, when street and square/ Lie empty to the stars’. This city of flaring lights and darkness is hailed apocalyptically as ‘Terror!’ and ‘Dream!’ It is also where the speaker lives, veering between excitement and exhaustion, and where his dead are buried: ‘A sacredness of love and death/ Dwells in thy noise and smoky breath.’48 Accused of plagiarisms from Romantic and other poets, Smith is an uneasy writer of verse. There were great arguments about the way his poetry evolved, but these may tell us more about Victorian anxieties over evolution than they tell us about Smith. Often his poems sound as if they have pinched images from James Macfarlan (or perhaps vice versa). Smith is associated with the ‘Spasmodic’ school of the 1850s with its liking for rather melodramatic emotionalism, tellingly mocked in W. E. Aytoun’s ‘spasmodic tragedy’ of 1854, Firmilian. Nevertheless, contemporaries recognized in City Poems and its predecessor, A Life Drama (1853), the possibilities of a new urban poetry. Writing about A Life Drama in the 1853 North American Review, the Oxonian Scoto-phile Arthur Hugh Clough speculated a little grandly that ‘in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city… there walks the discrowned Apollo, with unstrung lyre’.49
Smith, though, moved east to a different city. ‘Edina, high in heaven wan,/ Towered, templed, metropolitan’, begins his ‘Edinburgh’. Scotland’s capital is ‘a Cyclops’ dream’.50 Hugh MacDiarmid would rework this in the following century as ‘a mad god’s dream’.51 Smith, however, headed more and more towards the rural picturesque. The prose of Dreamthorp (1863) idealizes unchanging village life. Yet his charming travel book A Summer in Skye (1865) is hard-headed enough to picture a community ‘encouraged’ to emigrate to Canada by a landlord who sees his land as unproductively ‘over-populated’:
When we got to Skeabost there were the emigrants, to the number perhaps of fifty or sixty, seated on the lawn. They were dressed as was their wont on Sundays, when prepared for church. The men wore suits of blue or gray felt, the women were wrapped for the most part in tartan plaids. They were decent, orderly, intelligent and on the faces of most was a certain resolved look, as if they had carefully considered the matter and made up their minds to go through with it.52
This understated prose about Gaelic emigrants is at least as eloquent as Smith’s spasmodic urban exclamations.
Among Gaelic poets, whether emigrants or not, there was resentment against what was happening to their communities. Sometimes this had a political dimension. Eóghan MacColla from Argyll emigrated to Canada in 1849, thirteen years after publishing his first collection of poetry in Gaelic and English. His ‘Fóghnan na h-Alba’ (Thistle of Scotland) may have a nationalist resonance that attunes it to some of the notes heard in the later ‘Na Croitearan Sgitheanach’ (The Skye Crofters) by Niall MacLeòid (1843–1924). Now considered too sickly-sweet, but once the nineteenth century’s most popular Gaelic poet, MacLeòid looked forward to a time when ‘An end will come to oppression’.53 A similar nationalist strain is detectable in the work of the autodidact Uilleam MacDhun-léibhe (William Livingstone, 1808–70) who was born on the Inner Hebridean island of Islay, worked as a tailor, and emigrated not to Canada but to the Scottish Lowlands. Livingstone spent his latter years in Tradeston, Glasgow, a city that was increasingly a destination for Gaelic speakers seeking work. Absorbing or reabsorbing the epic scale and sustained narrative of Macpherson’s Ossianic materials into Gaelic poetic tradition, Livingstone celebrates Bannockburn and battles between Gaels and Norsemen. Sometimes virulently anti-English, he sympathizes with an oppressed Ireland and writes of the Highlands with bleak images of depopulation and resentment – ‘nettles sprouting through stones’.54
Livingstone began a history of Scotland, and translated from French, Latin and other tongues. If his nationalism can have a bitter streak, he was not small-minded. Perhaps his finest poem, ‘Fios thun a’ Bhàird’ (A Message to the Poet) offers at the start of its fourteen eight-line stanzas an idyllic picture of Islay on a sunny, breezy day. Yet, as the poem develops, it becomes obvious that Livingstone’s native island ‘has lost her people,/ the sheep have emptied homes.’ A refrain,
Mar a fhuar ’s a chunnaic mise:
Thoir am fios so chun a’ Bhàird.
will you carry this clear message,
as I see it, to the Bard.
gives the poem a sense of insistent urgency, yet also makes the hearer or reader aware that the Bard, the poet to whom the message is addressed, is elsewhere, not on Islay. More than that, if the poem repeatedly insists on the conveyance of a bleakly lyrical message, it is never clear that the message reaches the Bard. Livingstone’s figure of the Bard might be taken to represent not just a past or contemporary poet, but also the Gaelic poets of the future who must make something of this poem’s message.
Tha’n nathair bhreac ’na lùban
Air na h-ùrlair far an d’ fhàs
Na fir mhòra chunnaic mise:
Thoir am fios so chun a’ Bhàird.
The spotted adder’s coiling
on the floors whereon there grew
the great men that I saw here:
take this message to the Bard.55
Such a message would be a heavy burden for Gaels of the future to bear. In the school system, Gaelic was generally banned; none of the Scottish universities had a Chair in the subject. A note of resentful protest against the dwindling of their often oppressed culture can be heard in the work of many of the best Gaelic poets who followed Livingstone. It was, however, not the only note. The international popularity of the English version of a Gaelic carol by Mary MacDonald (1817–c. 1890) of Ardtun on the island of Mull indicated that Gaelic religious song, for instance, could have a powerful appeal outside Gaeldom, albeit through the reshaping medium of translation:
Leanabh an àigh, an leanabh aig Màiri,
Rugadh san stàball, Righ nan Dùl…
Child in the manger,
Infant of Mary;
Outcast and stranger,
Lord of all!56
The translation is not quite a literal one, yet that English phrase ‘Outcast and stranger’ might refer not just to Christ but also to many an estranged and dispossessed nineteenth-century Gael.
Among such people might be numbered crofters from Skye, Islay and elsewhere; also, on occasion, lairds. By 1847 the Laird of Islay was forced by his creditors to sell the island where his son John Francis Campbell (1821–85) had grown up mixing with the locals and speaking Gaelic. Well connected, Campbell later worked in London as a leading civil servant who maintained a strong interest in science. A polymathic inventor and traveller with a knowledge of more than two dozen languages, he went on to publish in 1865 his Short American Tramp and other travel books including My Circular Notes (1876), perhaps the first artistically crafted Scottish literary account of a world tour. A good deal of Campbell’s work lies unpublished in over a hundred manuscript volumes in the National Library of Scotland. Whether singing Gaelic songs in Tokyo with local resident Colin MacVean, son of a Mull Free Church minister and head of the Japanese Ordnance Survey, or taking part in a Faroese whale hunt, Campbell emblematizes that internationalism and sensitivity to other cultures which is strong in several of the most fascinating Scottish Victorian writers: from Daniel Wilson whose 1851 survey of Scottish archaeology and prehistory preceded a distinguished educational career in Canada and a study of The Present State and Future Prospects of the Indians of British North America (1874) to the much better-known Robert Louis Stevenson, writing with intelligent sympathy about Samoa as well as Scotland. Like these other authors, Campbell had a deep concern for threatened cultures and environments. He was in the Yosemite Valley at the same time as the Scottish-born conservationist John Muir, who would publish his own accounts of life there much later, and who promoted the idea of American National Parks. Where Muir’s greatest service was to America, though, Campbell’s was to Gaelic Scotland. He was encouraged to collect Gaelic material by the advice of the Reverend Norman MacLeod, the hymn-writer and essayist whose Leabhar nan Cnoc (Book of the Hills) (1834) included traditional Gaelic stories, and who published sermons and general prose as editor of the pioneering magazines Teachdaire Gae’lach (Gaelic Messenger) (1829–31) and Cuairtear nan Gleann (Pilgrim of the Glens) (1840–43). Work by his English friend George Dasent in Popular Tales from the Norse (1859) also spurred Campbell and several assistants to collect Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860–62), a four-volume selection from a greater body of work which, the Islayman maintained, had been ‘hitherto despised by natives and unknown to strangers’.57
Here, almost at a stroke, was the prose tradition Gaelic literature appeared to lack. Prose tales which had circulated orally were translated into English and bound between the covers of a book. Campbell urged helpers such as his old Islay tutor Hector MacLean to collect the stories without attempting to embellish them:
Choose rather the least educated parts of the Highlands… where Gaelic only is spoken… Do not trouble yourself to go to ministers and schoolmasters except for information as to the people. The educated generally know nothing of the amusements of the people and the Highland Ministers sometimes strive to put them down. I think they are wrong…58
Here the highly educated Campbell, writing to a tutor, recognizes the dangers of the largely Anglocentric education system for Gaelic culture. Like many translators from minority into majority languages, Campbell may at times appear a double agent, an imperial civil servant with primitivist tastes and sometimes suspect aversions. Yet there is a sense in which, wanting Gaelic and English materials ‘side by side’, Campbell performed a great service to the knowledge of Gaelic literature.59 He corresponded with Gaelic poets like William Livingstone, and encouraged younger collectors including Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912). He brought Gaelic stories to a wider, non-Gaelic audience increasingly alert to comparative folklore and traditional tales. In 1872 Campbell published his Leabhar na Féinne, a major work on Gaelic heroic ballads that had been linked to Ossian. Whether at Balmoral or on the grouse-moors, Queen Victoria and others made sure the Highlands held a place in the Victorian imagination. Although there were important Scottish Celtic and Gaelic scholars such as William Forbes Skene in his co-translation of the medieval Gaelic Book of the Dean of Lismore (1862) and in Celtic Scotland (1876–80), Campbell was none too sympathetic towards the attempts in 1870 of Archibald Clerk to publish Poems of Ossian in the original Gaelic with a parallel English text. Ossianic enthusiasm remained strong in Victorian Scotland, sometimes frustrating Campbell’s more scholarly projects; on reading P. Hately Waddell’s Ossian and the Clyde, Campbell rewrote the author’s name as ‘Hateful Twaddle’. However, conscious that there was now in Norway a professor of the Lapp language, Campbell joined in campaigning against the ‘extraordinary and culpable neglect’ of Gaelic studies in Scotland.60
Such vehemence led eventually to the establishment of a Chair of Celtic Language and Literature at Edinburgh University, and the appointment of a professor of that subject in 1882. Better late than never, but by this time there were clear indications that Gaelic was in serious decline. Its heritage was being archived – as in the Reverend Alexander Nicolson’s 1881 Collection of Gaelic Proverbs and Familiar Phrases – but when Campbell had been a boy on Islay there had been over a quarter of a million Gaelic speakers in a Scotland of around two million people; by the end of the nineteenth century the total number of Gaelic speakers had declined only slightly, but it now represented only about 7 per cent of a Scottish population nearly five million in number. In 1800 there were not far off 300,000 monolingual Gaels; by 1901 there were fewer than 30,000.61 If the power of London made some Scottish commentators worry that a distinctive Scottish culture was being lost, then in the Highlands and Islands Gaelic was acutely threatened. In the early years of the twentieth century my English-speaking maternal grandfather, a MacLean of Duart, went with his friend Lachie Macintyre to Skye and stayed in the house of an old Gaelic-speaking woman who had no English. A few decades later there were almost no monolingual Gaelic speakers left in the whole country. Even in the nineteenth century it became evident that Gaelic was imperilled.
Often employment prospects and the chance of industrial work drew Gaelic speakers southwards, and even to the ends of the earth. Descended from Gaels on the island of Ulva, the young David Livingstone famously read his way out of a cotton mill in Blantyre in industrial Lanarkshire, trained as a medical missionary, then headed for Africa where the town of Blantyre, Malawi, is one of several tributes to his mission. An evangelist and explorer who campaigned against African slavery, he published vivid English-language accounts of his travels. Livingstone wrote about having to drink water swarming with insects, putrid with rhinoceros urine and buffalo dung. His narratives dealt with wrestling with a lion, and with the horrors of chained slave gangs. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), which chronicled his journeys across Angola, Zambia and Mozambique, found an eager Victorian public for whom Livingstone embodied courage and muscular Christianity. ‘Discoverer’ of the Zambesi River, he relished Africa and his fame was far from confined to Britain. When Livingstone, ill at Tobora, lost contact with the outside world in 1871, it was the New York Herald which sent its correspondent, Welsh-born H. M. Stanley, to find him. Stanley and his heavily armed team took four months to locate their man. Their success brought about a decorously amazing, half-embarrassed meeting – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – which gave Stanley an international scoop and became one of the great tales of Victorian exploration. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness relies for some of its darkly ironic power on readers knowing of this hunt for the great lost liberator, missionary and educator.
Livingstone delighted in his discoveries: a pencil drawing of ‘the sanjika’, a fish found in Lake Nyasa, swims diagonally across a crammed page of his journal (now in the National Library of Scotland’s John Murray archive), surrounded on all sides by a crammed, black-ink account of a kind of potato found in the African ‘highlands’.62 Though they surely convey hardship, there is at times in Livingstone’s several published books a sense of heroic gusto which can have a ripping-yarn quality. He communicates not only faith, but also a zest and danger shared by many other Victorian explorers, mountaineers and travellers – usually, but not exclusively, male:
The mere animal pleasure of travelling in wild unexplored country is very great. When on lands of a couple of thousand feet elevation, brisk exercise imparts elasticity to the muscles, fresh and healthy blood circulates through the brain, the mind works well, the eye is clear, the step firm, and a day’s exercise always makes the evening’s repose thoroughly enjoyable.
We have usually the stimulus of remote chances of danger either from beasts or men. Our sympathies are drawn out towards our humble hardy companions by a community of interests, and, it may be, of perils, which make us all friends.63
Although he seems to have had little taste for novels, Livingstone was well read. Stanley found him quoting long passages of Burns and Byron, as well as more recent British and American poets. His prose is some of the best nineteenth-century Scottish travel writing. Rich in anecdotes, it might be set beside other Scottish Victorian travellers’ tales such as Walk Across Africa (1864) by Captain James Augustus Grant, a son of the manse from Nairn, or the many writings of the English-born, Scottish-domiciled Isabella Bird Bishop (1831–1904), whose books dealt with her remarkable travels to America, Persia, China, Japan and Tibet.
Empire, evangelism and emigration provided opportunities for Scots with literary talents. If, early in the nineteenth century, the one-time editor of what became Blackwood’s Magazine, Thomas Pringle (1789–1834), had written sometimes fascinatingly in his African Sketches (1834) effortful poems about the landscapes of South Africa, in the mid-century going abroad was often good for Scottish writers and writing. The international experience recorded in My Circular Notes and elsewhere by John Francis Campbell enhanced his awareness of comparative folklore and strengthened his work with Gaelic. Before emigrating, Fife’s Thomas Carstairs Latto may have been the minor versifier of The Minister’s Kailyard (a parish cabbage-patch title that heralds the later nineteenth-century so-called ‘Scottish Kailyard’ school), but across the Atlantic he grew more ambitious and set up in New York the Scottish-American Journal which published material in English, Scots and Gaelic. In Canada, where Scottish fiction would have a strong influence, Scottish-born Margaret Robertson, in Shenac’s Work at Home (1866), wrote of the struggles and religious turmoils of a determined woman and her Highland family. Descended from Highland Scots, the great John Ross, Chief of the Cherokee Nation, supported his Native American people in developing their own newspaper and educational system while attempting with significant but only partial success to stand against the ethnic-cleansing policy of the Ulster-Scots US President Andrew Jackson.64 Sometimes internationalization in nineteenth-century Scottish culture has been viewed too simply as a depletion of native talent. In the long run, it may have had a positive side, widening literary horizons and preparing the way for that more sophisticatedly stylish Scottish internationalism articulated by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Certainly an international outlook was opportunistically important to one of Stevenson’s boyhood heroes, the novelist Robert Michael Ballantyne, nephew of James Ballantyne, Walter Scott’s printer. Born in Edinburgh in 1825, R. M. Ballantyne left for Canada aged sixteen. For seven years he worked as a clerk for the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company, then returned to Edinburgh to work for the publisher Thomas Constable. Ballantyne began his authorial career as a travel writer, publishing his journal as Hudson’s Bay in 1848, but from 1855 until his death in Rome in 1894 he spiritedly manufactured a series of adventure stories for boys. Among his many books are Snowflakes and Sunbeams; or The Young Fur-Traders (1855), The Coral Island (1857), The Gorilla Hunters (1862) and The Pirate City (1874). These tales remained hugely popular well into the twentieth century, and girls read them too. My father was awarded two as school prizes in 1920s Aberdeenshire; one was part of the ambitious Glasgow publisher John Blackie’s Library for Boys and Girls, the other published by Oxford University Press for Herbert Strang’s Empire Library; my own copy of The Coral Island was published in 1968 in the Bancroft Classics children’s series. These books’ appeal is evident from the summary preceding the start of chapter XIV of Martin Rattler, or A Boy’s Adventures in the Forests of Brazil (1858):
Cogitations and canoeing on the Amazon – Barney’s exploit with an alligator – Stubborn facts – Remarkable mode of sleeping.65
Mixing strange facts and explorers’ lore with death-defying adventures, Ballantyne’s yarns with their boy heroes were competently written and offered their young readers a diet of curious foods, lots of smoking, and high-octane, exotic excitement:
Barney groaned again, and the hermit went on to enumerate the wicked deeds of the vampire-bats, while he applied poultices of certain herbs to Martin’s toe, in order to check the bleeding, and then bandaged it up; after which he sat down to relate to his visitors the manner in which the bat carries on its bloody operations.66
Interestingly, the young hero Martin Rattler is English rather than Scottish. Charles (fifteen) and Kate (fourteen) in The Young Fur-Traders are Scots-Canadians, but frequently Ballantyne chooses English protagonists, probably with an eye on likely buyers of his books. Although the English naval author Captain Frederick Marryat had written land-based stories for children such as The Settlers in Canada (1844) and The Children of the New Forest (1847), the work of the man whom Stevenson in prefatory verses to Treasure Island called ‘Ballantyne the Brave’ is more exciting. The range and speed of Ballantyne’s fiction both fed and were fuelled by the Scottish experience of empire. More than anyone else, he helped open up the market for boys’ imperial tales that would be exploited by such periodicals as the London-based Boy’s Own Paper, and by such chaps as Banffshire-born William Stables whose more than a hundred ripping yarns included Wild Adventures in Wild Places (1881). This trend reached its apogee, though not its culmination, in Treasure Island (1883) where Stevenson’s ‘Mr Arrow, a brown old sailor with earrings in his ears and a squint’ probably owes his unusual name to that of the ship in The Coral Island.67
Several of the greatest children’s classics – Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Peter Pan – were written by Victorian Scots at the forefront of developments in this genre. Although its title was appropriated in the twentieth century by Enid Blyton, Holiday House (1839) by Catherine Sinclair moved Victorian children’s fiction away from mere moralizing towards lively adventure, even if Sinclair’s tales have a pious conclusion. Some of the most atmospheric children’s writing was produced by authors who also wrote for an adult audience. Like Thomas Carlyle, George MacDonald (1824–1905) steeped himself in German literature – translating works such as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fantasy The Golden Pot – and studied for the ministry. Born in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, then educated at King’s College, Aberdeen, he trained at London’s Highbury Theological College where many of his friends and mentors came from the Scottish community. Doctrinal problems and serious illness meant that MacDonald’s career as a Congregational minister was a short one, though he went on to work as a Professor of English at the recently founded Bedford College for Ladies in London. He also lectured in America and elsewhere, eventually going to live in Italy with his large family. Literature for MacDonald could be a surrogate church from whose pulpit he might sometimes attack Calvinism and at other times offer long, improving homilies. Even a contemporary reviewer used to Victorian moralizing could complain of MacDonald’s novels that ‘Each succeeding volume has been increasingly didactic… there is a lamentable falling off in artistic method and purpose.’68
Alongside didacticism in many of MacDonald’s more than thirty novels runs a strange, often sensationalist, horrified fascination with sexuality. A naked young wife in Paul Faber, Surgeon (1879) urges her husband to ‘Whip me and take me again’, while the narrator imagines seeing ‘the purple streak rise in the snow’; emblems of incest, bestiality and voyeurism contribute to an often claustrophobically dark eroticism that sits very uneasily with the didactic tone.69 There is a strong sense of barely repressed urges in MacDonald’s work, and fantasy – in the sexual as well as in other senses of that word – is bound up with some of his most ‘realistic’ fictions.
Critics may praise passages in MacDonald’s David Elginbrod (1863), Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865) and Robert Falconer (1868) with their strong, sometimes autobiographical north-east Scottish settings and often lively Scots dialogue, but the books are damagingly uneven and their characters can be two-dimensional. MacDonald is at his best when he goes more fully into quite another dimension, as in his early and late fictions Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895). Neither book is aimed at children, but the ‘Faerie Romance for Men and Women’, Phantastes, a quest tale that draws on Novalis and German Romantic forms, offers adults a sense of magical fairytale transformations. One such moment is when the book’s twenty-one-year-old protagonist Anodos, part fairy, part human, wakes in his bedroom:
I… became aware of the sound of running water near me; and, looking out of bed, I saw that a large green marble basin, in which I was wont to wash, and which stood on a low pedestal of the same material in a corner of my room, was overflowing like a spring; and that a stream of clean water was running over the carpet, all the length of the room, finding its outlet I knew not where. And, stranger still, where this carpet, which I had myself designed to imitate a field of grass and daisies, bordered the course of the little stream, the grass-blades and daisies seemed to wave in a tiny breeze that followed the water’s flow…70
This sense of the domestic becoming the fantastic would appeal to such later fantasy writers as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. It also powers MacDonald’s fairy stories for children such as ‘The Golden Key’, At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872) which helped to establish this author as one of greatest fantasy writers of nineteenth-century Britain, much admired by his friend Lewis Carroll.
With Lilith MacDonald’s taste for strange sexuality is again apparent alongside his ability to trip the reader into an engulfing otherworld that intersects with the everyday. In that otherworld the bookish Vane finds the leopardess-leech-cat-vampire-princess Lilith, whose name is that of the biblical Adam’s legendary first lover. ‘Queen of Hell… Vilest of God’s creatures’, Lilith represents ‘Life in Death’ and ‘lives by the blood and lives and souls of men’.71 Like Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Lilith is an exploration of the darker side of sexuality. Unlike those works, though, its centre of gravity lies in semi-allegorical fantasy, a genre which MacDonald did so much to develop in English prose. His fondness for fairies in books like Dealings with the Fairies (1867) would be continued in Scottish writing by the man of letters and anthropologist Andrew Lang (1844–1912), some of whose tales and edited collections such as The Blue Fairy Book (1889) were more innocently aimed at children. In softer, more folkloric form, the ‘adult fairytale’ would be part of the phenomenon of the Celtic Twilight. There its presence may have been encouraged by a sometimes soft-focus attitude to the collecting of folklorists such as John Francis Campbell and Alexander Carmichael, but also by writings like MacDonald’s. MacDonald, like Lang and several of the Celtic Twilight writers, began as a poet, and the verse he produced throughout his writing life has its occasional but relatively rare successes.
Given the amount of time that MacDonald spent out of Scotland, it may seem surprising how many of his novels are set there. Yet memory is a strong theme in his work. His use of remembered scenes, events and dialogue from his youth in Aberdeen, Cullen and other parts of the north-east was often admired. A contributor to the genres of the sensation novel and, like Lewis Carroll, to children’s fantasy fiction, MacDonald along with his fellow Victorian Scots should be seen against a British as well as a Scottish background. In this imperial era it was not unusual for Scots (including at times such luminaries as Carlyle) to describe themselves as English. If Scotland and Scottish cities gained wealth from the power of the British Empire, they did so as ‘provincial’ places. Some Scots might write ‘N. B.’ (North Britain) as part of their addresses, emphasizing a Britishness, but the term ‘S. B.’ for England was a non-starter. England, especially London, called the shots where Britain was concerned, not least when it came to novels published in book form.
Interestingly, William Donaldson argues that ‘Book-fiction had never sold particularly well in Scotland and by 1900 it probably comprised about 3 per cent of the British market.’72 There were ways round this, however. Some quite impressive novels appeared as serializations in popular Scottish newspapers. Notable here is the fiction of the Liberal Aberdeen journalist William Alexander (1826–1894), especially Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk (1871), with its strong sense of vernacular voice and its sharp examination of capitalism at work. Alexander wrote, sometimes bitingly, of urban as well as rural Scotland. His work demonstrates a journalist’s nose for political corruption. Born in Dundee in 1828, Alexander’s fellow newspaperman David Pae published in the North Briton and other papers often melodramatic fictions such as Lucy, the Factory Girl (1860), taking beautiful heroines through urban slums. Pae’s widely syndicated work may have enjoyed a broad Scottish readership, but most fiction in newspapers, then as now, was writing to be thrown away. While there was cash in this market, and journalism could be a useful training ground for writers, those with literary ambitions usually hankered after book publication, and the most powerful book-publishing houses were increasingly based in London. To write for them meant producing work which, while it might have a Scottish tang, had to appeal to an Anglocentric market. In a Scottish newspaper William Alexander might be able to present speech in the vernacular grain without apology (though his narrator uses standard English), but George MacDonald, publishing Alec Forbes of Howglen in London in 1865, is more self-consciously defensive when he wants to use Scots language:
I do not allow however that the Scotch is a patois in the ordinary sense of the word. For had not Scotland a living literature, and that a high one, when England could produce none, or next to none – I mean in the fifteenth century? But old age, and the introduction of a more polished form of utterance, have given to the Scotch all the other advantages of a patois, in addition to its own directness and simplicity.73
MacDonald’s awareness that Scottish literature had flowered during a fallow period in the literature of England might prompt reflection not just on the position of Scots language versus imperial Victorian English, but also on the way in which in the heyday of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and others – the greatest period of English fiction – the novel in Scotland is comparatively disappointing. There is no single explanation for this, but one should be wary about expecting a small culture to ‘compete’ with its much larger neighbour on quite the same terms, especially at a time when the high summer of the British Empire and the remarkable financial and cultural glow of London were alike attracting Scottish talent. Not so long before, Walter Scott had triumphantly sold Scottish cultural distinction to literary audiences around the globe. In Victorian times, though, the ideology of Britishness which Scott had championed led inevitably to kinds of cultural and economic assimilation. London’s magnetic pull may have horrified Cockburn, and there might be attempts to resist it, but even those tended to be muted. The Edinburgh imperial soldier James Grant (1822–87) wrote Scottish-accented historical novels, a large-scale history of Old and New Edinburgh (1880), and chronicled imperial British Battles on Land and Sea (1873–5). He also founded the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights in 1852, serving as its secretary. However, though it may be seen as an indication of concerns about asserting Scottish political and cultural distinctiveness, the Association did not envisage separation from the British state, monarchy or Empire. Among Grant’s late works were studies of clans, tartans and Scottish soldiers. Symptomatically, he died in London.
So did Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant, whose work became for three-quarters of a century a lost continent in Scottish literature. In recent years a small international band of scholars has explored her prodigious oeuvre, but almost all of her 125 or so books are out of print. At the very least, Oliphant is a missing link in Scottish literary history; at her best, she is a brave and hauntingly powerful writer. Born in 1828 in Wallyford, Midlothian, she lived as a child at Lasswade near Edinburgh, then in Glasgow before her family moved to Liverpool when she was ten. Though she later enjoyed sojourns in continental Europe, in Scotland and in the Middle East, most of her life was spent in south-eastern England; she died in Wimbledon in 1897. Margaret Oliphant once wrote of how England had swallowed up her principal publisher, Edinburgh’s William Blackwood, ‘like a husband with his wife’.74 England would become her own principal residence, and the setting for many of her novels. But it never swallowed her up.
Oliphant’s first published novel, Passages in the Life of Mrs Margaret Maitland, of Sunnyside, Written by Herself (1849) is set in Scotland and has a heroine who ‘in her firm voice’ stands up to her exploitative father: ‘I will not go with you.’ The Scots-tongued first-person narrator lives her life unwed, much to the consternation of an insistent suitor:
‘Eh me!’ cried out the body, mostly like to fall down with wonder and astonishment, ‘but I thought a’ womenfolk wanted to be marriet!’75
Oliphant is far from opposed to marriage; it is simply not for her the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life. Her views and several of her future fictional preoccupations are clear in Margaret Maitland, published three years before her own marriage to her artist cousin Frank Oliphant in 1852. When Frank died of tuberculosis in Rome seven years later, Margaret was left there in debt, heavily pregnant, and with several young children to support. She never remarried. With the exception of the Queen (whose biography she wrote), she became the Victorian age’s most successful single mother, her work read across several continents. For the rest of her life she made enough money from her writing to educate her large family (all of whom predeceased her) and to support an array of male and female relations. Although women were still excluded from the universities, Oliphant wrote pioneering non-fiction in fields as different as modern literary and publishing history, the aesthetics of dress, and Dante. Often working at night while her children slept, she was a biographer, a frequent reviewer (especially for Blackwood’s Magazine), but most of all a writer of fiction. She may be seen as a feminist heroine; yet she was unsure if she wanted the vote, and often appears to champion quiet, rather conventional feminine manners against outspokenly feminist ones. As a result, male critics have tended to ignore her, while some feminists have found her politically and aesthetically incorrect. Having read many of Oliphant’s works, Virginia Woolf, who was financially secure and had no dependants, asked if anyone could avoid deploring ‘the fact that Mrs Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children?’76
There may be some truth in Woolf’s stinging, self-interested question; but Oliphant, who had written ten books by the age of twenty-five, was a prolific, fast worker before she needed to earn money or provide for children. Although she later joined the Church of England, she grew up as a staunch supporter of the Free Kirk whose values of independent refusal of patronage are championed in Margaret Maitland and elsewhere. Like her friend Thomas Carlyle, Oliphant seems to have had a powerful sense of the Gospel of Work; her obsessive literary work ethic was reinforced, rather than initiated, by her later circumstances. However, where Carlyle gravitates towards heroic, masculine public life, Oliphant is attracted to removed, often feminine spaces. What can sound at times embarrassingly over-sweet or restricted in some of her titles – Sunnyside, Lilliesleaf, The Minister’s Wife – is bound up with what spurs her imagination. Great events of history (such as the Disruption in Margaret Maitland or slavery in Kirsteen) are sensed in her work, but are not the focal point. This gives much of Oliphant’s writing a displaced, provincial feeling. Her ‘Chronicles of Carlingford’ series, popular in her lifetime, is set not in London but in an English provincial town. Its ‘pinched’ and ‘little’ Salem Chapel, based on Oliphant’s memories of Liverpool’s Free Church of Scotland, is set ‘on the shabby side of the street… in a narrow strip of ground… [so that] The big houses opposite, which turned their backs and staircase windows to the street, took little notice of the humble Dissenting community.’77 Salem Chapel (1863), its minister protagonist based partly on her friend George MacDonald and partly on the Carlyles’ Scottish evangelical friend Edward Irving (whose biography Oliphant wrote), relies, like her other Chronicles of Carlingford, on the precedent of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, as critics have noted. Yet aspects of Oliphant’s place in Scottish literary tradition have been misunderstood.
The wording of Oliphant’s 1849 title, Passages in the Life of Mrs Margaret Maitland, of Sunnyside, Written by Herself, echoes the titles of two earlier works. One is the resolutely provincial The Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith, Written by Himself (1828) by D. M. Moir, who had been Oliphant’s childhood doctor and, later, her literary mentor; the other is J. G. Lockhart’s 1822 Some Passages in the Life of Mr Adam Blair, Minister of the Gospel at Cross-Meikle. Like Lockhart’s, Oliphant’s book is in part a story about a minister, though where Lockhart concentrates on a man’s adultery, Oliphant (who tackled such topics elsewhere) is interested in female attempts at self-definition. Her book’s concern with the improvement of the rundown community of cottages at Cruive End, and the setting up of a new working-class ‘colony’ nearby, develops the interest in improvement in Elizabeth Hamilton’s The Cottagers of Glenburnie. There are also references to Scott. As a strong female protagonist, Scott’s Jeanie Deans is a model for several Oliphant heroines, including that of Kirsteen (1890), while the bereaved Oliphant identified strongly with the struggling widowed Scott of the Journal. However, Oliphant’s work also points forward in Scottish literary history. Towards the end of Margaret Maitland we hear of ‘the inhabitants of the town of Thrums’ who are seeking to call a new Free Kirk minister.78
About four decades later in fictions by Oliphant’s literary admirer the London Scot J. M. Barrie, such as Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889) and The Little Minister (1891), the fictional Thrums would become the quintessential location for what came to be called ‘Kailyard’ (cabbage-patch) fiction. Barrie’s provincial, small-town, restricted, minister-centred, sometimes feminine life of Thrums so enraged later (almost exclusively male) critics in part, surely, because Barrie, like his fellow Kailyarders, was working, sometimes with an element of ironic play, in a feminine genre. Galt and Moir had sketched small-town presbyterian Scottish life, but by Oliphant’s time novels of this type had largely passed into the hands of female authors and audiences. Oliphant delighted in small-town stories, though she might write of Glasgow tenements and English life as well. Among her contemporaries was the prolific, best-selling Henrietta Keddie (1827–1914), a Cupar schoolmistress who later moved to London and often wrote as ‘Sarah Tytler’. Keddie’s novels include the lively depiction of small-town Cupar life in Logie Town (1887) as well as the Glasgow industrial fiction St Mungo’s City (1884) and a sharp-eyed autobiography. When the mature Oliphant was uneasy about the writing of another younger best-selling Scottish author, Annie S. Swan (1859–1943), Swan admitted that her first great success, Aldersyde (1883), considered by Prime Minister Gladstone ‘beautiful as a work of art’ for its ‘truly living sketches of Scottish character’, was derived from Oliphant’s work: ‘The story was frankly modelled on the Border stories of Mrs Oliphant, for whom I had passionate admiration, amounting to worship.’79 The Aberdeen-born London Scot and Free Church minister the Reverend William Robertson Nicoll (1851–1923), one of Oliphant’s editors, also edited Swan (principal writer for his magazine The Woman at Home) and published the young J. M. Barrie as well as other ‘Kailyard’ writers in his journal The British Weekly. Barrie corresponded with Oliphant, edited a collection of her stories, and spoke at the unveiling of a memorial tablet to her in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh. His taking the place name of Thrums (meaning loose ends of thread in a loom) from Oliphant’s first published novel represents both a wink and an act of covert homage. For Barrie and the male ‘Kailyarders’ with whom later critics connected him, to move into Oliphant’s feminized territory was partly an act of shrewd commercialism – and partly a piece of gender-bending that over many decades has revealingly enraged many male Scottish writers and critics.
Oliphant, though, is much more than a bridge to the Kailyard. Her Autobiography, published in bowdlerized form in 1899, and in full by her biographer Elisabeth Jay in 1990, is the finest nineteenth-century Scottish work in that genre. Written between the mid-1860s and 1890s, its fragmentary form only enhances its power. It has a radiant sense of damage, often quickened by its author’s grief over the deaths of her children, and by her sense of the pressures of her work. A number of its most memorable vignettes involve windows: the window of the all-male Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St Andrews through which Oliphant peers in a vain attempt to see her son; in Elie, Fife, in 1860, ‘a deeply bowed window in which I worked, and where I remember people spoke of seeing my white cap always bending over the table’; a window in Normandy in 1864 where, after the death of a daughter, she was visited by her Free Kirk close friend Robert Story (whose proposal of marriage Oliphant seems to have refused):
… we went to see Bayeux and the tapestry, jogging along in a country shandrydan [rickety conveyance] with a huge red umbrella… and a wonderful thunderstorm there was – which he and I sat at an open window to watch, much to the annoyance and terror of our hosts, who would have liked to shut it out with bolted shutters –80
Oliphant is well aware that windows can shut out as well as admit a wider world. ‘The Library Window’, the finest of her impressive supernatural short stories ‘of the seen and the unseen’, features a girl who looks through a drawing-room window and sees, through another window across the street, an old scholar working in a room with books and papers in ‘the old College Library’ opposite.81 Some see the window across the street as blocked off; to a few it is transparent. Set in a very identifiable St Andrews (‘St Rule’s’) where, as Oliphant knew, there had been much debate about the admission of women to the university, this first-person narrative can be read in terms of a girl’s longing for closed-off, male-controlled knowledge and literary power – the old scholar is associated at one point with Oliphant’s admired Walter Scott; yet the tale is also about female sexuality, isolation and loss. What makes it perhaps the best Scottish short story about a ghost is its nuanced refusal of any one interpretation, and its fusion of precise local detail with barely discerned supernatural presence. This narrative is in many ways deep-rooted in Oliphant’s psyche. Its strange old Lady Carnbee, who eventually wills to the protagonist her fascinating but threatening ring, takes her name from a hamlet between St Andrews and Kellie, old Oliphant family territory; Oliphants lie buried in Carnbee kirkyard.
Oliphant’s best short fictions often involve encounters with representatives of the recent and the long-gone dead. From the first, she had felt an impulse to write in ways other than the straightforwardly realistic. Margaret Maitland contains a long inset allegorical piece in which the figure of Hope retreats further and further inside a sunlit fortress surrounded by ‘a beleaguering army’.82 Offering a critique of materialism and making subtle use of multiple narrators, her splendid 1879 tale, ‘A Beleaguered City’, hints at women’s spiritual strengths as it tells how, after the men in French Semur maintain that ‘There is no bon Dieu but money’, the town is taken over by the spirits of the dead.83 Others among those ‘stories of the seen and the unseen’ which Oliphant felt compelled to write over a number of years, and with which she took particular stylistic care, engage with hope, despair, longing and scepticism. They also indicate the impact of Dante on her work. The Italian poet is alluded to directly in both ‘Earthbound’ and ‘The Land of Darkness’.
Even as Christianity came under attack, Dante fascinated the Victorians. Carlyle had supplied corrections to the 1844 edition of Englishman Henry Cary’s early nineteenth-century translation of The Divine Comedy, and regarded Dante as a ‘world-voice’ in his lecture on ‘The Hero as Poet’.84 In Dundee the poet James Young Geddes (1850–1913), an admirer of Whitman who wrote bitingly about industrial capitalism, invoked Dante in The New Inferno (1879). Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Margaret Oliphant and others published studies and translations of the Italian poet, but no writer made more compelling imaginative use of Dante than the poet James Thomson (1834–82) who, though an atheist, came to agree with Ruskin that Dante was ‘the central intellect of all this world’.85 Born in Port Glasgow on Clydeside, Thomson had little time for the Scot who had ‘no national fervour’, though his mother (a follower of the charismatic Scottish preacher Edward Irving) had removed him to London when he was eight after his father, a seaman, suffered a stroke.86 Brought up in London’s Royal Caledonian Asylum, Thomson recalled obtaining a copy of Ivanhoe ‘for an heroic sacrifice of fruit or sweeties’, and poring over it.87 Entering the army, then, as alcohol and depression took their toll, living eventually as a struggling freelance writer, he added to his love of Burns and ballads a remarkable knowledge of literature that extended from Heine and Leopardi (whose poems he translated) to Baudelaire and Whitman, subjects of some of his many essays and reviews. Perhaps Thomson’s happiest time was spent as secretary to a mining company in Colorado. He wrote vividly of his time in the American West, relishing hailstones in a canyon, ‘quite as big as goodsized walnuts’.88 Better known and more characteristic, however, are his hallucinatory visions of urban life.
With epigraphs from Dante’s Inferno and from Leopardi, Thomson’s masterpiece, the long poem The City of Dreadful Night (1874), presents a nameless phantasmal cityscape. An exhausted speaker treks through it, encountering figures such as a vast statue of Albrecht Dürer’s Melancolia whose significance brings ‘confirmation of the old despair’. In this greatest Victorian urban poem, there is a chilling, steely nihilism:
As whom his one intense thought overpowers,
He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours,
Detach the hands, remove the dial-face:
The works proceed until run down; although
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.89
At its often hallucinatory best, Thomson’s work helped propel T. S. Eliot’s Dantescan vision of London in The Waste Land; Eliot’s famous phrase ‘memory and desire’ comes from Thomson.90 The City of Dreadful Night has also mattered to poets from the Greek Cavafy to the modern Scots Edwin Morgan and Tom Leonard, Thomson’s most recent biographer. Among the poets Thomson himself admired were Shelley, another atheist who sought to redeploy Dante in English, and the German Novalis, whose Hymns to the Night Thomson translated. Sometimes, in homage to these poetic exemplars Thomson styled himself ‘Bysshe Vanolis’, or ‘B. V.’ In 1873, while suffering from an eye infection, he wrote to his sister-in-law from a rented room at 230 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, and imaged himself, half-jokingly, as tramping the city streets, ‘an inverted sleep-walker – eyes shut awake instead of eyes open asleep’.91 In Thomson’s diaries (now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford) his neat black-ink nib-writing every so often becomes jagged and hard to decypher as alcohol overcomes the writer. It is hard not to view this diarist as the suicidal author in Thomson’s remarkable poem ‘In the Room’ where dusty, beetle-ridden household objects discuss the behaviour of the late occupant:
The table said, He wrote so long
That I grew weary of his weight;
The pen kept up a cricket song,
It ran and ran at such a rate:
And in the longer pauses he
With both his folded arms downpressed,
And stared as one who does not see,
Or sank his head upon his breast.92
Strictly schooled in religion, Thomson recalled as a young child reading for their imagery Edward Irving’s apocalyptic volumes among his mother’s books in Port Glasgow. Though Thomson can reveal a sense of humour, doom-laden imagery seldom leaves his poetry. Its intensity is more aesthetically convincing than the uplift of a plethora of minor Scottish Victorian hymn-writers. The City of Dreadful Night sits impressively beside such powerful tales as Oliphant’s ‘A Beleaguered City’ and ‘The Land of Darkness’.
Thomson very seldom wrote about Scotland. Like Oliphant, he had in England a writerly network in which several Scots were prominent. This is exemplified by the reviews and essays which he wrote for an unusual journal, Cope’s Tobacco Plant. Edited from Liverpool by John Fraser, this heady mix of nicotine and literature sold through tobacconists, newsagents and railway bookstalls, as well as direct to subscribers. Cope’s was one of Thomson’s most regular literary employers. A London-Scottish bookman friend, William Maccall, put Thomson in touch with Fraser, who also gave work to other England-based Scots such as Gordon Stables (like Fraser, an ex-seaman). The Tobacco Plant was by no means exclusively Scottish, but Thomson (who kept his copies, now in Glasgow University Library, marked up with meticulous authorial corrections) wrote there about Hogg and Burns as well as about Rabelais and Meredith. He always tried to find a smoker’s angle, reviewing books on his ‘smoke-room table’ or discussing ‘The Tobacco Duties’ or ‘Charles Baudelaire on Hasheesh’. Such a masculine, ‘smoke-room table’ milieu was part of the fug of the age. The same era produced the tobacco-ash expert Sherlock Holmes. It led Stevenson in An Inland Voyage (1878) to write about a canoe called Cigarette. A few years later J. M. Barrie wrote for the St James’s Gazette ironically playful pieces with titles like ‘My Smoking-Table’ and ‘How Heroes Smoke’ which he collected in 1890 as My Lady Nicotine.
Barrie’s playfulness is alien to much of Thomson’s work, though both men were London freelance authors. Scots were responsible for some of the best-known, most durably dangerous versions of London in the later nineteenth century, whether the capital was metamorphosed into the city of dreadful night, or the ‘city in a nightmare’ of Stevenson’s 1886 Jekyll and Hyde, or that other murderscape with its ‘ghost-like… procession of faces’ in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes.93 As Lord Cockburn had sensed in 1852, London was irresistible. That city, not Glasgow or Edinburgh, was the great metropolis of the late Victorian and Edwardian Scottish literary imagination. The cityscape through which Jekyll and Hyde pass bears the name of the British capital. The Edinburgh surgeon, Joseph Bell, may have been Conan Doyle’s model for Sherlock Holmes, but London is where he operates. However much Peter Pan owes to Barrie’s Scottish childhood, if he belongs anywhere on earth it is to London’s Kensington Gardens. The height of Britain’s global power made London the pre-eminent world city. The nation-building impetus in Scottish fiction, so long geared to Britishness, now fed (and fed off) the commercial, political and literary dominance of the British capital.
If James Thomson in London was a kind of flâneur of hell, then Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), playing truant as a teenage student in the open streets of Edinburgh, sought to be more buoyantly Parisian. Like Thomson, Stevenson admired Walt Whitman, and Whitman’s ‘loafer’ in part underlies Stevenson’s early praise of the ‘idler’, a flâneur like figure developed later by England’s Jerome K. Jerome. Raised in a remarkable Scottish family of often sternly Calvinist lighthouse-builders, the sickly Edinburgh child Stevenson delighted in his heroic heritage, but, in an era shaped by Carlyle’s gospel of work as popularized by Samuel Smiles, Stevenson made it clear that he had had enough: ‘Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.’94 Stevenson’s use of the word ‘kirk’ in that sentence from his essay ‘An Apology for Idlers’ (not to mention his provocative use of the word ‘catholic’) hints at the Knoxian solemnity he was reacting against. ‘Child’s Play’, another of the slightly mannered essays from his early book ‘for girls and boys’, Virginibus Puerisque (1881), invoked Paris’s Théophile Gautier (who had used the phrase ‘Art for art’s sake’) and said of children at play that ‘“Art for art” is their motto.’95 The rarefied Oxford don Walter Pater had controversially championed ‘the love of art for its own sake’ in the conclusion of his 1873 Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Stevenson, writing of ‘ “Art for art” ’ in the context of ‘nursery education’, made it seem natural and good for all. One of Stevenson’s supporters, the St Andrews educationalist and pioneering translator of Turgenev Professor John Meiklejohn, was an enthusiast for the German movement then known in Britain and America as ‘Children’s Gardens’ – kindergarten, as we now say – which emphasized the importance of parent-and-child play. The poems of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) revel in playing, though sometimes the child’s play separates offspring from parents, as in ‘The Land of Story-Books’:
At evening when the lamp is lit,
Around the fire my parents sit;
They sit at home and talk and sing,
And do not play at anything.
Now, with my little gun, I crawl
All in the dark along the wall,
And follow round the forest track
Away behind the sofa back.96
Such a transformation of the domestic into imaginative wilderness is of a piece not just with George MacDonald’s best work but also with what happens in the ‘boys’ stories’, Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886). Stevenson, however, did not begin as a children’s writer, but more as an energetic ‘idler’.
Written with studied insouciance, An Inland Voyage (1878) follows in the wake of John MacGregor’s highly popular A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe (1866) which established its author as a European celebrity and made canoeing a popular pastime. As his manuscripts (now in the Beinecke Library at Yale) record, MacGregor canoed solo to France and back in 1867. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1878 book lovingly details a canoe trip made by Stevenson and his pal Walter Simpson through Belgium and Northern France. Often ordered south for his health, Louis (he pronounced it ‘Lewis’) was a Francophile as well as one of the mainstays of modern travel writing. Going furth of Scotland brought him far less a sense of cultural diminution than a delight in travel for travel’s sake that matches his stylish sense of art for art’s sake. As he puts it, on the road in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879),
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.97
Curiously, as it moves among French Catholic and Protestant communities, Travels with a Donkey is one of the best Scottish books about sectarianism. Those cutting flints may have appealed to a sensibility shaped by Calvinism, but they also spark and speak of the energetic relish for the physical outdoor world on the part of an ‘idle’ man often bedridden. On and off the road, Treasure Island and Kidnapped are full of energetic running and jumping, chases, hide and seek. ‘Hide and seek’, Stevenson wrote in ‘Child’s Play’, ‘is the well-spring of romance.’98 The playfulness of Stevenson’s style often manifests itself in a mixture of sympathetic engagement and ironic humour – a simultaneous involvement and independence that retains a companionable warmth. J. M. Barrie would sometimes attempt something similar.
Stevenson’s relations with his father were strained by his liaison with a married older woman, the American Fanny Osbourne, whom the writer met in France and pursued to California. The two married there in 1880. Savouring ‘the smack of Californian earth’, they lived for a time on the American west coast: ‘These long beaches are enticing to the idle man.’99 The Amateur Emigrant (1895) and The Silverado Squatters (1883) were written then, though published later. They vividly record Stevenson’s interactions with the human and non-human aspects of the American environment. He was happy as a squatter in the high-altitude mining village of Silverado, breathing the resinous forest air. As the first major Scottish writer to be influenced by American literature, Stevenson in his ‘healthy’ Californian ‘glen’ draws on impulses in Thoreau and Whitman; his sensuous love of the American wilderness, however, also links him to his literary contemporary John Muir (1838–1914), the pioneering ecological thinker and ‘self-styled poetico-trampo-geologist-bot’ who had left Scotland as a boy and whose own love of Californian landscape led him to promote the concept of America’s National Parks, and to publish his wilderness discovery books such as The Mountains of California (1894), Our National Parks (1901) and My First Summer in the Sierra (1911).100 The Muir of Our National Parks who encouraged tourists to ‘Camp out among the grass’ so that ‘Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees’ would have appealed to Stevenson the energetic outdoor idler.101
1880–81 was a crucial time in Stevenson’s life. Marriage brought him an eleven-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. Becoming a father, Stevenson began both A Child’s Garden of Verses and Treasure Island. Father and son made little books together; Lloyd began ‘A Pirate story’ about ‘five… villinous [sic] looking men’ who are engaged by a Captain and put to sea for a distant island.102 With Lloyd, Stevenson, the one-time enthusiast for R. M. Ballantyne, re-entered his boyhood world as a participant, not simply as an observer. His stepson recalled how, when the family moved to Braemar in the summer of 1881, he tried to school Stevenson’s belletristic literary tastes:
The thing that puzzled me was that he was as fond as I of Mayne Reid, Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, and Marryat; it was not as though he didn’t appreciate good books; and certainly none of the seven hundred and fifty readers of An Inland Voyage could possibly have recognized in him the Indian, or Frontiersman, or Explorer, or Naval Officer (with accompanying Midshipman) landing with Secret Despatches on a Hostile Coast – embellishments which served to give such delight to our walks together, and always brought me home in such a glow of romance. That idolized step-father of mine was the most inspiring playfellow in the world – which made it seem all the sadder that he was unable to write a book worth reading.103
Lloyd was able to gain access to the boys’ story enthusiast Stevenson which underlay the belletristic littérateur. More than anyone else, his stepson released in Stevenson the man who could play as distinct from the man who simply wrote about play. This was acknowledged by Stevenson in his eventual dedication of Treasure Island
To
LLOYD OSBOURNE
An American Gentleman
in accordance with whose classic taste
the following narrative has been designed
it is now, in return for numerous delightful hours
and with the kindest wishes, dedicated
by his affectionate friend
THE AUTHOR
Treasure Island is the product of father-and-son play, play of the kind that returned Stevenson to his own childhood world of ‘Skeltery’ – cut-out pirates – and of fantastic geographies such as those described in the essay ‘Child’s Play’. The pace and audience of Treasure Island demanded a curbing of Stevenson’s ‘fine writing’, and in that curbing lay liberation. What is sometimes wrong with Stevenson’s early work is that it strives too hard for a sophisticated ‘Man of Letters’ tone. His prose, like his best poetry, is often strongest when its language is both nuanced and most direct. That directness is linked to the author’s deepest preoccupations, as in Stevenson’s most famous poem, ‘Requiem’, which dates from early 1880:
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.104
So it is with Stevenson’s prose that around 1880–81 a shift takes place that rescues his writing from an excess of poise, and turns him towards purposeful play.
As a child, Stevenson had loved drawing maps; not to mention painting, dressing up, and playing with pirate figures. As an adult confined indoors by bad weather at Braemar in 1881, he joined Lloyd Osbourne in playing with ‘pen and ink and a shilling box of water-colours’ and on one occasion drew a map of an island.105 Treasure Island began to emerge. Vital to its emergence was the nurturing collaboration of Stevenson’s stepson as playmate, but also the presence of Stevenson’s father, Thomas. For Treasure Island was not just a way of entertaining Lloyd; it was also a book to cement the reconciliation of Louis with his father, a reconciliation to be achieved through a literary game that made boys of three generations, and in which Stevenson’s father ‘set himself actively to collaborate’.106
Through adventure narrative, Stevenson returns to that bedtime story ‘land of counterpane’ where exciting tales of voyaging had been crucial to him as a sickly child.107 He also makes contact with the ‘childishness’ of his father’s ‘original nature’.108 In a sentence that precedes that phrase in his account of the genesis of Treasure Island, Stevenson said of the tale, ‘It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye.’ There are hints of darkness here, as there were in Stevenson’s father’s character, and in Stevenson’s own, but the story, for all its violence, turns those to collaborative play. In Treasure Island sin – murder, maiming – is present, yet is kept at bay through playful proteanness as the pirate Long John Silver changes sides, roles and nature, as magistrate becomes tropical hero, or as the protagonist Jim Hawkins (exact age unspecified) is at one stage a boy to be ordered around, and at another a being mature enough to take charge of a ship. Authority becomes playful. Man rescues boy, boy rescues man. While we are closest to the principal narrator, the story’s only boy, the narrative itself is passed between generations, being delivered at one time by Jim, at another by Dr Livesey. So adult readers must see at times from a boy’s point of view, and young readers at other times must look on as an adult. It is a book told by different generations of characters and designed to bring together different generations of audience. Pace and stylish constant movement yield a common denominator of excitement which releases playfulness and childishness in child and adult alike, while its speed allows the narrative to avoid lingering moralizing or worry. Treasure Island is about a fatherless boy surrounded by many potential fathers who are often grotesque, yet enjoyably grotesque. The adult world may be amoral but that makes it all the more like a romance or a game.
Treasure Island is a book not just to read but to play at. It is full of an energy that comes from play; from hide and seek, from boys’ toys such as swords and boats, from fancy dress, from chases. Part of its fun and power comes from a knowledge that exoticism and violent voyaging are safely earthed in the domestic and that, equally, the domestic is spiced with danger. The young first-person narrator, Jim Hawkins, finds his home, an English inn, taken over by pirates; he sails to a tropical Treasure Island which turns out to be populated with the local worthies of his home ground. The book’s first sentence reassures us that Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey and Jim all survive the adventure; its last sentence leaves us with the enjoyable frisson of fear that even at home in bed the piratical world can get at us:
Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and 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 ringing in my ears: ‘Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!’
A related movement between domesticity and safety, and a shifting collaboration between child and adult are crucial to Kidnapped (1886), a novel set in Scotland where in 1751 the young Lowlander David Balfour, having lost a father and having been betrayed by his own flesh and blood, finds a surrogate father in Highlander Alan Breck Stewart. The roles of adult and child are reversed in this coming-of-age novel, and again rapidity of pace and the adventure story format govern fine writing to the benefit of the book. The familial circumstances which, out of ‘childish’ collaboration and play, produced both A Child’s Garden of Verses and Treasure Island, marked Stevenson’s stylistic maturing. With these works, reconciling generations through imaginative play, he achieves a greatness all the more striking for being founded on accessibility.
All good books kidnap their readers. Kidnapped does so with unusual aplomb. When you start reading a novel, you remove yourself a little from your life. David Balfour, the book’s first-person narrator, does something similar in the very first sentence when, as he says, ‘I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house.’ David and the reader put their pasts behind them at exactly the same time. They are bonded from the start.
David sets out on a journey through a reality underpinned by folktale and fairytale. Stevenson based Alan on the historical Jacobite Allan Breck Stuart, and carefully marked passages about actual Highland emigration in his copy of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (now at Yale); Kidnapped offers a realistic vignette of Highland emigration. It starts, too, by sending its hero to an actual place, to Cramond, near Edinburgh. But with his bundle on his staff’s end, David is also a fairytale hero off to undergo his trials. He thinks of himself as being in ‘a story like some ballad I had heard folk singing, of a poor lad that was a rightful heir and a wicked kinsman that tried to keep him from his own.’109 David’s story is not just the story of that ballad. He is also like Pilgrim in The Pilgrim’s Progress, trekking towards his kingdom; having been kidnapped, David is shipwrecked and marooned à la Crusoe; he wanders over the eighteenth-century Highlands like Scott’s Waverley. Stevenson has written a novel that steals the best bits from his own favourites. They succeed one another at an accelerated pace that points towards John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, and catapults eighteen-year-old David Balfour into the world of myth. Sometimes he seems much younger than eighteen, a Lowland naif, an innocent abroad in that foreign country north of the Highland line, where he learns about the decencies of community; at other times he is disconcertingly grown up, gunning down enemies, dictating terms to his miserly, slightly Dickensian Uncle Ebenezer, transacting business with lawyers.
If Lowland David is a man-boy, so is his companion, Alan Breck. A Jacobite go-between, Alan has eyes ‘as bright as a five-year-old child’s’.110 He looks after David as they flee through the Highlands, but David, at significant moments, has to look after Alan. This is a rite-of-passage novel, about maturing from boy to man. But it is also a novel of reclamation which allows an older reader and protagonist to plug into their own childhoods that seemed left behind. So, clambering and hiding, we join David at night climbing the pitch-black stairs of his uncle’s house and seeing by a flash of lightning that he is about to plunge to his doom when the stairs run out; we hide with David and Alan on top of a great boulder, broiling in the noon-day sun while a hostile redcoat soldier stands below, unaware.
David is happy and eager to mature. Yet neither he nor Alan renounces childishness. This makes them immortal, companions of the imagination. There are few women in the book, but it is as much a tale of male parting as of male bonding. Latent differences between David and Alan eventually separate them after David glimpses Catriona, the woman who will become his sweetheart in the admittedly less impressive sequel, Catriona (1893). Male bonding plays its part, but not oppressively. David has a gender, but little sex, so that girls as well as boys can identify with him. He is more of a tomboy than a boy.
Muriel Spark, Jorge Luis Borges, Alasdair Gray and Henry James – Stevenson fans all – may have found different things in Kidnapped, but an ability to combine magic with mundanity is surely one of them. The book works like a poem. It feeds the reader the accurate surface of the world – place names, recipes, jokes – yet also grants access to a more wildly imaginative realm where men play cards in a house built of living trees, where prince and pauper, adult and child share the same bodies, mercurially shifting in a story which moves with the speed of entrancement through the island of Mull, by Loch Rannoch, and across the Firth of Forth.
The prose may be plain, but it can be subtly parenthetical. Lots of colons help keep up the deftly punctuated hurry. Loyalty matters, and weather – sunlight, singing wind, ‘the clearness and sweetness of the night, the shapes of the hills like things asleep’.111 This is a lyrical as well as an artfully playful book. Its last chapter is called ‘Good-bye’, and David, who exits a door in the novel’s first sentence, enters one in its last, when, a canny Lowland Scot, he goes to the bank. A combination of unobtrusive elegance and pacy excitement makes Kidnapped one of the world’s most re-readable books, a yarn especially for adults to read to children, or simply to the child in yourself.
Some of Stevenson’s sense of stylish play also informs The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) which is, as one of its multiple narrators, ‘the dry lawyer’ Mr Utterson, puts it, a story of ‘Hyde’ and ‘Seek’.112 In 1880 with his friend W. E. Henley Stevenson had co-authored Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life: A Melodrama, Founded on Facts which told the true story of Edinburgh’s William Brodie who had managed to be both a respectable town official and a flamboyant criminal. The play failed, but the theme of a man whose ‘life was double’ (as a cancelled line of Jekyll and Hyde has it) continued to preoccupy Stevenson.113 His later Strange Case is a work with a complex textual history, but surviving pages of manuscript in New York and New Haven show that it was carefully revised. Stevenson had grown up reading Poe’s ‘analytical’ sleuth Dupin, as well as knowing that American writer’s story of doubles, ‘William Wilson’. Like Conan Doyle after him, the author of the Strange Case also had a taste for recent French crime fiction. Glancing towards the embryonic detective story and towards Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Stevenson’s Strange Case has a darker hue than his ‘boys’ stories’.114 He was ‘haunted’ by Hogg’s Confessions, which he read around 1881; his own tale, with its multiple narrators, concludes with a sealed ‘confession’.115 Walter Scott’s Saint Ronan’s Well (1824) has a Scottish character called ‘Henry Jekyl’ and touches on ‘fiendish possession’, but Stevenson’s Dr Henry Jekyll is a London scientist, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who experiments on himself in his laboratory with a consciousness-changing drug.116 In Edinburgh the obstetrician Dr James Young Simpson, founder of modern gynaecology and father of Stevenson’s canoeing friend Walter Simpson, had experimented on himself while researching the properties of chloroform, developing anaesthetics in the face of medical and religious opposition. Jekyll, however, is not just a doctor and scientist, but, long before he discovers his new ‘drug’, a man ‘already committed to a profound duplicity of life’ and troubled by the sense of good and evil that ‘lies at the root of religion’.117 Jekyll and Hyde can be read as a cautionary tale about scientific intervention in human development and the ‘womb of consciousness’. It can be read as an exploration of the bounds and bonds of male homosocial society, and as a book about what Stevenson terms the ‘psychological’. But it is also a Calvinist-inflected book about the ‘polar twins’ of good and evil and the unleashing of original sin.118 This inherent evil underlies the lab work. His drug releases in Henry Jekyll the libidinous killer Edward Hyde who stalks the streets and ‘fogs of London’, a city of dreadful night and horror that anticipates the city not just of Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes and modern detective fiction, but also the London of Conrad’s The Secret Agent.
As Jekyll starts to be taken over by Hyde (‘This, too, was myself… He, I say – I cannot say, I’), personal pronouns buckle. Stevenson, while writing as a Victorian, anticipates, as he often does, the vertiginous modernist consciousness formulated in Rimbaud’s famous phrase of 1871, ‘Je est un autre’.119 Stevenson’s masterpiece sits interestingly as a tale of urban crime and punishment beside Dostoevsky’s great St Petersburg novel about an experiment in murder; Stevenson enthused about that work around the time he was working on his Strange Case. Jekyll and Hyde also looks to the explorations of self and other in the French poet Jules Laforgue and in the Irishman Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), but, for all its sheer style, it retains a sense of pained alarm and Victorian post-Darwinian fear of moral and social degeneration as it concludes with Jekyll taken over by the ‘wonderful selfishness’ and ‘ape-like’ spite of Hyde.120
This novella which is so confined to the voices, deeds and writings of men, is dedicated to a woman with a writerly interest in extreme psychological states, Katharine de Mattos, sister of Stevenson’s bohemian cousin, Bob. The first line of the dedication, ‘It’s ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind’, suggests Jekyll’s tampering with the human mind, but the three lines that follow imply far more a sense of Stevenson’s determination to stay true to his own culture, however estranged from it he seems:
Still will we be the children of the heather and the wind;
Far away from home, O it’s still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.
This may seem a strange poem to place at the beginning of The Strange Case, and its presence may signal all the more strongly the text’s Scottish filiations – a Calvinist dualism and sense of Simpson’s Edinburgh underlying the modern, secular London. Certainly the verse is in tune with some of Stevenson’s finest poems such as ‘To S. C.’ in which the exiled Stevenson speaks with a marvellous tonal precision from the South Sea island world of ‘The king, my neighbour, with his host of wives’ to the faraway British Museum where Stevenson’s friend Sidney Colvin worked among statues of ‘island gods’:
So far, so foreign, your divided friends
Wander, estranged in body, not in mind.121
Division was an obsession for this author – whether in the Scottish historical novels Kidnapped or The Master of Ballantrae (1888), the modern-day Jekyll and Hyde, or such late works as the impressive unfinished Scottish historical tale of father-and-son conflict, Weir of Hermiston (1896), and Stevenson’s South Sea narratives. Yet division is far from the be-all and end-all of Stevenson’s art. With their stories of missionaries and devil-work in the tropics, where Stevenson had sailed to Samoa in search of a healthy climate, such late fictions as the masterly novella The Beach of Falesá (1892) lend themselves to postcolonial interpretation and show a remarkably sympathetic understanding of aspects of the Samoan clans. Stevenson the ‘Tusitala’ (Teller of Tales) lived for the last six years of his life at Vailima on the Samoan island of Upolu, where he died and was buried in 1894. He has been seen as a forerunner of the Conrad whose early fictions are set in the Malay archipelago. Yet this academic repositioning of the complex Scottish novelist hides his often sprightly light under Conrad’s more bituminous shadow. Conrad could never have written Treasure Island; nor could he have dashed off Stevenson’s captivating letters, a full edition of which appeared in 1994–5. It is Stevenson’s sense of play, as well as the consciousness of psychological and even theological darkness in such tales as ‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘Markheim’, that contributes to his stylish, mobile vitality.
In part the complexity of Stevenson is bound up with the variety of his work – essays, travel books, novels, tales, poetry, drama aimed variously at child and adult audiences. He was admired alike by ‘Kailyard’ novelists and by the labyrinthine Henry James. Inevitably, as a writer of historical romances, he looked back to Scott whom the young Stevenson linked to ‘the birth of Romance’; like Scott, Stevenson restated in his work the internationalism as well as the ‘Scottishness’ of Scottish literature.122
Dealing with, and sometimes juxtaposing, a great range of societies, Stevenson’s imagination, ranging across ‘many years and countries… the sea and the land, savagery and civilization’, is in some ways akin to that of his admirer and fellow literary descendant of Scott, the anthropologist J. G. Frazer.123 Scott’s fascination with folklore and cultural comparisons, nurtured by Enlightenment Scotland, had helped spur such diverse works as Hugh Miller’s Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland (1835) and Andrew Lang’s 1873 essay ‘Mythology and Fairy Tales’. Scottish Enlightenment energies encouraged other anthropological studies including Primitive Marriage (1865) by the Inverness-born John Ferguson McLennan, a friend of the poet Alexander Smith, and fuelled works of biblical and anthropological scholarship by McLennan’s Aberdeenshire admirer William Robertson Smith (1846–94).
Controversial author of The Religion of the Semites (1889), Smith joined the St Andrews Professor Thomas Spencer Baynes as editor of the great ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica whose scientific editor was the famous Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell was one of a galaxy of distinguished Scottish Victorian scientists and scientific writers including the Glasgow-based Irishman William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and the topologist Peter Guthrie Tait. While Kelvin and others developed in Scotland a new physics of energy, it was Maxwell’s work in Cambridge (published in such epoch-making works as his 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism) which made possible Einstein’s research into relativity. In an age when some Scottish scientists stayed in Scotland and others headed south by choice, Robertson Smith was compelled to leave. He was accused of heresy while a professor at Aberdeen’s Free Church College, and moved to a Chair of Arabic at Cambridge where he became a mentor of his fellow Scot, J. G. Frazer.
Born in Glasgow in 1854 and brought up in Helensburgh on the north bank of the Clyde, Frazer grew up an avid reader of Scott. The topographical Romanticism and comparative cultural method of The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Frazer’s great ‘anthropological epic’, owe a good deal to Scott. The Golden Bough was produced during Frazer’s long career as a don at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he, Robertson Smith and others were among the university’s ‘Scotch contingent’.124 Though most of his published letters are drily, obsessively bookish, Frazer’s long, Scottish-accented 1897 letter to John F. White in which he recalls Robertson Smith is, along with Tennyson’s In Memoriam, one of the great documents of Victorian male friendship.125
Revising and greatly expanding The Golden Bough, Frazer cites a precedent in Scott when, for aesthetic reasons, he leaves unchanged a telling detail which he knows to be factually incorrect. Nowadays Frazer’s work has as much literary as scientific value. A huge, kaleidoscopic catalogue of ‘savage’ practices, The Golden Bough would be raided by imaginative writers, including Yeats, Eliot and other modernists. Frazer’s work implied that Christianity too was part of a network of primitive belief systems which its author tended to dismiss as folly. In libraries, Frazer read till he dropped, but he was an ‘armchair anthropologist’. He never did any fieldwork; probably he had never seen a ‘savage’. Just as ironically, expanding his original two-volume Golden Bough of 1890 into the twelve volumes of the 1911–15 third edition, he brought to his labours as much of a Calvinist work ethic as that other rewriter of Christianity, Thomas Carlyle.126
If an anthropological impulse can be discerned in Scott and in the Carlyle fascinated by the worship of heroes, it is certainly discernible in a good deal of later nineteenth-century Scottish writing. It features not least in works produced outside Scotland by Robertson Smith, Frazer and others who, like them, owed much to the Scottish tradition of Classical education. Born in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, James Legge (1815–97) was an eager student of George Buchanan and of Classics before he became a Protestant missionary and educator for the London Missionary Society in Hong Kong. His seven-volume translated Chinese Classics (1861–75) is now recognized as ‘the greatest single achievement of Western Sinological scholarship during the nineteenth century’.127 True to the educational traditions of north-east Scotland, Legge translated Chinese in his Book of Poetry (1876) not only into English verse but also at times into Doric Scots and Latin. However, when he came back to Britain he returned not to his Aberdeen alma mater but to take up the new Chair of Chinese at Oxford where he produced further translations and studies that, like J. G. Frazer’s work, contributed to the comparative scientific study of religions. Among the many Scottish writers in London and Oxford Legge’s linguistic skills were matched by those of the lexicographer James A. H. Murray (1837–1915), whose 1873 study The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland is a milestone in dialectology, and whose later editorial labours made him not only the greatest ever gatherer of the English language but also the man behind one of the world’s most famous books, the Philological Society’s New English Dictionary, later retitled the Oxford English Dictionary; begun in 1879, its final volume appeared in 1928. Legge and Murray were older contemporaries of the Scottish anthropological writer and historian of religion, Andrew Lang (1844–1912). In Oxford, London and St Andrews, this influential man of letters produced work that ranged from Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887) to books of fairytales for children such as The Blue Fairy Book (1889). In his poem ‘Almae Matres’ Lang wrote nostalgically about ‘St Andrews by the northern sea’, but he made his mark in London.
In Europe, America and the South Seas, Lang’s friend R. L. Stevenson drew on the local customs and stories of three continents, writing sometimes longingly of Scotland. In Oxford Legge wrote in his unfinished autobiography (now in the Bodleian Library) about his delight in childhood reading in Aberdeenshire. J. G. Frazer might hanker after Scottish ‘shores how dear to me!’ but is regarded as a Cambridge scholar of exotic cults.128 It is as if the anthropological sensibility, nurtured by the Scottish Enlightenment impulse towards cultural comparison and spurred by the Scottish tradition of training in the Classics, was quickened at a time when so many Scottish writers were displaced. Some of the most popular fiction about Scotland in the late nineteenth century, even in protesting its Scottishness, also came to have a gently anthropological tinge. It displayed – often to a London audience – the quaint and curious customs of the Scots.
‘A work on folk-lore’ is one of the few books in the library of one of the inhabitants of ‘Thrums’ as portrayed by J. M. Barrie (1860–1937). Thrums’s Scottish village inhabitants are often presented by their London-based author as having their own comically folkloric, quasi-anthropological interest.129 If the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein censured Frazer for his basic assumption that the actions of ‘savages’ should be seen as folly, then Scottish critics from Hugh MacDiarmid to Cairns Craig have attacked Barrie for assuming that Scottish small-town life of the recent past existed to provide quaintly exotic entertainment for English and American audiences – and for Scottish readers happy to play along. As soon as Barrie discovered that such materials would make him money, he exploited them, beginning in the mid-1880s with journalistic vignettes written for English periodicals. ‘I liked that Scotch thing – any more of those?’ asked the editor of the St James’s Gazette in 1884, rejecting Barrie’s other submissions.130 In the sketches of Auld Licht Idylls (1888) and A Window in Thrums (1889), as well as in the Thrums-related novels The Little Minister (1891), Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900), Barrie drew on his experience of his mother’s Kirriemuir. He also applied his newer knowledge of modern London where hack journalism intersected uneasily with literary aspirations. At least as strongly, however, he maintained his couthy engagement with the small-town anecdotes of minister, dominie and characterful parishioners in a ‘Thrums’ of auld lang syne. By 1885 Barrie was already planning in his tiny notebooks a description of a ‘school near Kirrie’ where children were ‘conveyed in carts’ and there was ‘contempt for new things’. He sketched ideas for ‘Thrums gossip’ and even a ‘Thrums Odyssey’.131 To be fair to Barrie, his Thrums is not just a chocolate box. It has single parents in addition to charming infants. It is a location of alcoholism and suicide as well as a repository of homely tales and hearthside gossip. Barrie knew well that the sort of weavers’ community about which he wrote had a history of political radicalism and even rioting, but he played that down. The hostile male critic J. H. Millar came to see Thrums as the centre of what he called in the New Review in 1895 the ‘Literature of the Kailyard’ (Cabbage-patch) school, and this has been much denounced as provincializing the Scottish literary imagination. The term ‘Kailyard’ has become something of a lazy shorthand, and certainly obscures some of J. M. Barrie’s interest to modern readers. It also leads to simplifications of Barrie’s character and writing.
For his tenth birthday Barrie’s mother gave him an inscribed copy of Men Who Were Earnest, a collection of biographies of such figures as ‘Dr Arnold, the Earnest, Intrepid Teacher’ and ‘Dr Chalmers, the Religious and Social Leader’.132 This was a lot for a boy to live up to. The following year, though, Barrie’s sister gave him something more fun: Mayne Reid’s The Castaways: A Story of Adventure. Torn between earnestness and larking around, in his twenties the diminutive Barrie would plan stories which indicate an anxiety about heroic masculinity: about ‘Male Nursery Maids’ and a ‘Hero frightened at barmaids’; about a man who feels the ‘trial of his life is that he is always thought a boy’; about a man who ‘used to waken with horror from dreaming he was married’; about a ‘Third Sex’.133 In the era of the ‘New Woman’, Barrie was very interested in masculinity and femininity, but also in game-playing. The little boy who devoured The Castaways went on as an adult to obsessive, even criminal plotting in order to adopt boys of his own. For his young, upper-class Llewelyn Davies boys he assembled and published privately The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island (1901), a precursor of Peter Pan.
Denunciations of Barrie are often interestingly gendered. As indicated earlier, this writer took the name ‘Thrums’ from the work of Margaret Oliphant, whom he considered ‘the most distinguished Scotswoman of her time’, and who was ‘among women novelists’ a favourite author of himself and of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy. Barrie maintained that many of his Thrums stories were drawn from his mother’s memories of the old days in Kirriemuir, north of Dundee. His ‘loving mother’ wrote anxiously to her ‘dear beloved Jamie’ in London to tell him of ‘my love no words can say’.134 Barrie’s unique, sometimes cloying, but also revealing tribute to his ‘heroine’ mother, Margaret Ogilvy, by her Son (1896), is the only book-length account of a mother by a male Scottish writer.135 When Barrie was seven his older brother David had died in an accident; Barrie felt he could never live up to the dead boy’s example in the eyes of his mother, though the bereavement drew them closer. Barrie and his mother spoke Scots to each other, and, though his books are written in English they are spiced with ‘Doric’ words. ‘I am as Scotch as peat,’ wrote Barrie at the age of fifty-nine, ‘but with a mighty regard for England.’136 Schooled partly in Dumfries (where his ‘womanly touches’ helped him play female parts in plays), he wrote his first, unpublished novel there, getting ‘the best of my love scenes out of the novels by sparkling ladies’; sometimes acting as his mother’s ‘maid of all work’, he sent off his first novel to a publisher who rejected it, assuming its author was female.137
Early reviewers related Barrie’s Thrums to such works as Moir’s Mansie Wauch, but Thrums’s name and nature came from a substantially feminine tradition of domestic and romantic fiction. Mrs Oliphant praised A Window in Thrums for virtues that were ‘homely’, relishing its ‘fun and pathos and tenderness’.138 Fictionalizing his mother’s memories of earlier nineteenth-century small-town life, Barrie was a male writer operating in female territory. He joked about himself as ‘the first woman journalist’.139 For his early readers, Barrie’s Thrums tales, in newspapers then in book form, had the appeal of a soap-opera. Today his stories of the ‘Auld Licht’ Presbyterian sect, quaint even by the 1890s, may offer too much of the diminutively couthy and the restrictedly sectarian – Roman Catholicism in Thrums is the ultimate disgrace. The anecdotes, though, have an impact that goes beyond whimsical pawkiness:
Tammy, who died a bachelor, had been soured in his youth by a disappointment in love, of which he spoke but seldom. She lived far away in a town to which he had wandered in the days when his blood ran hot, and they became engaged. Unfortunately, however, Tammy forgot her name, and he never knew the address; so there the affair ended, to his silent grief.
Much of Barrie’s work is semi-autobiographical, and he retells various versions of that story; as a fiction it indicates a wish on the part of the author to subvert readers’ expectations about heroic masculinity and male desire. Calling his 1896 novel Sentimental Tommy or joking in When a Man’s Single (1888) about an article called ‘Man Frightened to Get Married’ has a similar effect.140
Although he sent A Window in Thrums ‘to Robert Louis Stevenson from his friend J. M. Barrie’, the ambitious younger writer from Kirrie-muir was jealous of Stevenson’s panache.141 Like Stevenson, Barrie, schooled in ‘Carlylese’, inherited Carlyle’s Protestant work ethic and carnivalized it by turning it to play.142 Barrie also feminized it, and reflected on an artist’s often narcissistic engagement with his own work. Where Carlyle welcomed repression of all sorts, Barrie subversively and wittily imagined Carlyle entertaining four-year-olds at a children’s party. In Barrie’s most successful novel, The Little Minister, the Auld Licht preacher Gavin Dishart is mocked for his John-Knoxian first and second sermons against women, then is made to fall in love with a mischievous, gipsy-like girl, though readers are aware too of male bonding ‘passing the love of woman’.143 Homosocial bonds, literary ambition, workaholism, repression and feminized play all dance round one another in Barrie’s prose, which repeatedly teases about what it is ‘to act the part of a man’, whether in lonely London or in snowbound Thrums.144
Barrie wrote too much, too quickly. Like Margaret Oliphant, he turned to the well-crafted supernatural tale late in life. One of his finest works is the pellucid novella Farewell Miss Julie Logan (1932), about a minister in love with a ghost-woman. In notebooks Barrie collected Scots locutions and in revising this novella he intensified the Scots accent of the text in a way that can be aligned with Scottish modernist ideals.145 Barrie’s oratorical 1922 rectorial address to St Andrews University students on the theme of ‘Courage’ offers another, more troubled examination of masculinity in the wake of World War I, and demonstrates his power as a rhetorical performer. It is hard not to suspect that his challenge to conventional masculinity, as much as his marketing of Scotland as provincial entertainment, is what has riled many of Barrie’s critics. A celebrated Scottish painting of the 1920s, William McCance’s ‘From another Window in Thrums’, shows a man and a woman energetically copulating, as if to reassert ‘normal’ sexual and gender relations in the face of Barrie’s subversions. McCance’s picture takes its title from a work by the masculinist Hugh MacDiarmid, who anxiously excoriated Barrie. Sadly, later critics have been insufficiently alert to the subversive genderings and regenderings of his texts.
The prose writer who once wrote, ‘Ah, if only it could have been a world of boys and girls!’ is the dramatist who authored Peter Pan.146 Other than a number of Shakespeare’s plays, Peter Pan is the only drama in English whose plot is known around the Western world. This fact is not explained away simply by the work’s undeniable whimsicality nor by its Disney adaptation. Written shortly before Freud’s work became familiar in English, Peter Pan, like Stevenson’s writing, engages with deep delights and desires. Peter Pan (1904) exists as both a novel and a drama. Like Kidnapped, it is a story about abduction: abducted from the adult world of work, urban life and responsibilities, its audience enters into the childhood world of play. Peter Pan as well as Treasure Island has its pirates and pirate ship – but that name ‘the Never Land’ shows how much Barrie’s art wears its impossibility on its sleeve.
Stevenson’s play world is where, temporarily at least, adults may become children and children act at grown-up pursuits; it is a world of protean fluidity. In Barrie’s early plays such as Quality Street (1902) and The Admirable Crichton (1902) time and the fluidity of identity are also recurring themes. Barrie owned a copy of Patrick Fraser Tytler’s 1823 Life of the Admirable Crichton which drew on Thomas Urquhart’s seventeenth-century account of that Renaissance Scottish hero, but the heroic male of Barrie’s play is not that of earlier hero-worshippers.147 Marooned on a desert island, an Edwardian household finds that Crichton, its butler, becomes its patriarch; when the household gets back home, though, the rules of polite English society are reasserted. The assumptions of the class system have been questioned, but only for a ludic interval. In Stevenson we delight in playing; with Barrie, though, there is more of an awareness of the pathos of fixed rules. Peter Pan will never grow up, but other children must. If Stevenson writes about how the play world is forever there to be discovered, Barrie knows it must always be lost.
Barrie’s most famous play drew on its author’s games with those young boys, the Llewelyn Davies family, whom Barrie, with some sleight of hand, adopted on their parents’ death. Peter Pan begins in Bloomsbury, where Barrie had lived. It sets the grown-up world of Mr Darling with his talk of ‘the office’ against the much richer imaginative world of Peter Pan, whose name fuses Christian and pagan. Peter spirits away the Darling children for adventures in Never Land where they do battle with the pirate Captain Hook, his boatswain Smee and their crew. ‘Yo ho, yo ho,’ sing the pirates. Their ‘pieces of eight’ and a mention of ‘Flint’ gesture towards Treasure Island; Smee’s favourite oath (‘you spalpeen’) comes from R. M. Ballantyne’s stage Irish; but Peter, with his pan pipes and his fairy companion Tinker Bell, is Barrie’s own.148 Peter refuses to return to the world of the Bloomsbury Darlings, despite his attachment to their daughter Wendy. He will not ‘be a man’ and go ‘to an office’, but stays instead true to his own ideal: ‘I just want always to be a little boy and to have fun.’149 In part, Peter, with his pipes, is an artist – a bohemian in capitalist London, like Stevenson, or the nascent Bloomsbury Group; this makes Peter emblematic of the imaginative life, and so adds to his appeal. Yet he is also a manifestation of a yearning for arrested development sensed elsewhere in Barrie – whether in Margaret Ogilvy or in the quaint Thrums that is islanded by history. Like most of us in some circumstances, but with a peculiar and lasting acuteness, Barrie wanted time to stop.
It is tempting to reduce Barrie’s literary achievement by seeing it all as the product of some psychic wound: a refusal to grow up, a mother fixation, some failure of masculinity. His marriage to the actress Mary Ansell was childless, and he later divorced her for adultery. Yet rather than trying to reduce all the writing to some putative original flaw, it is surely fairer to say that what Barrie’s psychology and imagination made possible was a remarkable range of work from largely successful fictions to captivating drama. In their hugely elaborate stage directions, Barrie’s published dramas show more than any how much the plays of this era were shaped by the dominance of the novel. Among other things, like so many of his contemporaries’ artistic productions, from George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895) to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Barrie’s writings explore gender and sexuality in new ways, yet do so within the safe parameters of middle-class art. Unlike Shaw, Barrie, who would receive a knighthood, never had a play banned by the Lord Chamberlain. Yet, while rather relishing the ‘Auld Licht’ Presbyterian sensibility of his mother’s Scotland, he helped free Scottish writing from the dour heaviness of Carlyle and Victorian manliness, letting it frolic in Thrums, in London, and, most of all, in Never Land.
Critics have sometimes berated Barrie for avoiding the realities of history, but he matters for his emphasis on the need for freedom of imagination in an age more and more preoccupied with the capitalist managerialism of ‘the office’. He also matters for his willingness to explore the flexibility and restrictiveness of gender. Though on stage he may do this with less assurance than Oscar Wilde, Barrie knew how to entertainingly unsettle his audience. In What Every Woman Knows (1908) he presents the boorishly masculine Scot John Shand, ‘The Ladies’ Champion’, whose wife types his speeches, secretly improving them to make them ‘so virile’.150 In Barrie’s superb one-act play The Twelve-Pound Look (1910), written just before he had divorced his wife, he presents an apparently successful man on the eve of getting a knighthood, whose success is shown as a complete sham by Kate, a typist who arrives at his home and turns out to be the man’s ex-wife. What terrifies ‘Sir Harry’ is that Kate left him not for another man but in order to achieve an independent life of her own: having earned twelve pounds, enough to leave Harry, she left him. This play, like a good number of Barrie’s writings, is about gender and ‘success’. Emblematically, Success became the title of a popular, Scottish-edited London magazine of the 1890s; authors in this period began to be agented, to be increasingly interviewed, to go on regular publicity tours, and to become part of what we would now call ‘celebrity culture’. Success, which Barrie moved to London to seek, and which he achieved – success which capitalist society demanded its workers strive for – is shown in Barrie’s work as hollow, a sham. So are conventional gender roles:
KATE.… If only you had been a man, Harry.
SIR HARRY. A man? What do you mean by a man?151
Barrie’s later plays like Dear Brutus (1917) and Mary Rose (1920) emphasize the grip of the past. Barrie’s Thrums fictions show a tendency on the part of the metropolitan sophisticate to consign Scotland to a past both smiled at and wept over. It is that persistent question, ‘What do you mean by a man?’ that hints why Barrie, from The Little Minister to Peter Pan, for all he may seem a ‘period piece’, retains an insistent modernity.
A good deal of Barrie’s best work is in marginal genres such as one-act plays and children’s writing. The wider world is right to remember him principally as a dramatist. Yet Scottish criticism is not entirely wrong to pay close attention to his Thrums fiction, since reactions to this kind of writing would be important for the twentieth-century Scottish novel. In Thrums Barrie had his imitators. One reason why Thrums and the ‘Kailyard’ fictions critics later linked to Thrums enjoyed a huge international success, yet have not worn well, is that they were manufactured rather than written. The young Barrie who reacted to a London editor’s liking for ‘that Scotch thing’ and produced his ‘Auld Licht Idylls’ was soon followed by John Watson. As ‘Ian Maclaren’ Watson wrote the idylls of Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush (1894) and dedicated to his mother The Days of Auld Lang Syne (1895). This latter work is set in the parish of Drumtochty, described somewhat patronizingly by the author as being ‘in its natural state’.152 Watson (1850–1907) had grown up in Perth-shire and was a Liverpool Free Church minister. His Drumtochty idylls were encouraged by William Robertson Nicoll, an Aberdonian in London who edited The British Weekly. In that journal’s pages Barrie, Maclaren, and another of Nicoll’s protégés, Samuel Rutherford Crockett (1859–1914), were encouraged to publish their sketches of quaint Scottish life. These became fashionable in a milieu more used to what Maclaren coyly called ‘Southern culture’.153
The Free Church and presbyterianism were prominent factors in Kail-yard fiction, not just because they encouraged wholesomeness but also, perhaps, because in an age preoccupied with material success they encouraged a sense of reflective otherworldliness. Church ministry provided writers with a position relatively uncircumscribed by the working routines of capitalist society; in a milieu where sermons were scrutinized by demanding congregations, an important part of a minister’s work was to write. S. R. Crockett was another Free Church minister, though he went on to leave his Galloway charge to concentrate on full-time authorship. Where Barrie had his ‘Auld Lichts’, Crockett had his tiny Presbyterian sect of the ‘Marrow Kirk’; where Barrie wrote of ‘The Little Minister’, Crockett’s first (1894) book of stories was The Stickit Minister. The title refers to a minister who has been trained but has ‘stuck’ and failed to progress to a charge. The Stickit Minister is dedicated to Stevenson, who wrote Crockett a fine poem and whose Scottish adventure stories the prolific Crockett aped in novels such as The Raiders (1894).
Crockett also wrote about Stevenson and Barrie, but where Barrie, on the make, might mock success, Crockett simply craved it. Busy with his several typewriters and his dictaphone, Crockett was professionally represented by Glasgow-born A. P. Watt, the man substantially responsible for the development of modern literary agenting; as the market took more and more account of female readers, Crockett was able to publish in magazines such as the popular People’s Friend and Nicoll’s Woman at Home as well as in book form. Fittingly, in 1895 he was even written up by Robertson Nicoll in the journal Success. In a letter of the following year Barrie wrote of how ‘Crockett was with us for a weekend. “His terms are”–“he sells” – “Watt says”–“his publishers say” –“his terms” – “his sale” – ’.154 Crockett churned out too many books, often carelessly plotted and melodramatically inflected. Yet, writing of ‘common men’ in rural Scotland, he can show Hardyesque or proto-Lawrentian touches. The Lilac Sunbonnet (1894) sold out on publication day, and discernible through the purple prose is a sensuous feel for landscape that matches an erotic charge in the narrative:
The bees in the purple flowers beneath the window boomed a mellow bass, and the grasshoppers made love by millions in the couch grass, chirring in a thousand fleeting raptures.155
Crockett can deal with urban modernity too; like Barrie he writes about typists. Occasionally he even hints at more radical interests: a character in an early story speaks of how ‘there was no doubt that Jesus was a working-man and his followers socialists’.156 Along with Ian Maclaren, Crockett enjoyed most success as a purveyor of unthreatening ‘Kailyard’. J. H. Millar’s critical term ‘Kailyard’ was probably taken from an old Scots song which Maclaren used as an epigraph to Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush:
There grows a bonnie briar bush in our kailyard,
And white are the blossoms on’t in our kailyard.
‘Kailyard’ became a dismissive term used of sentimental rural Scottish tales, but we should not ignore the great international appeal of such work. In 1895 for the Philomathic Society at Canada’s Dalhousie University students wrote papers on the hugely admired fiction of Barrie, Crockett and Maclaren, and in 1897 there was a debate on Kailyard novels at the Oxford University Union. Maclaren died in 1907 on a lecture tour of America; Crockett had earlier turned down an offer of £6000 for such a tour. In Canada L. M. Montgomery admired the way Barrie’s A Window in Thrums showed an ability to touch ‘common places and they blossom out into beauty and pathos’.157 She was a fan, too, of Ian Maclaren’s work, reading or re-reading his Drumtochty novel Kate Carnegie (1896) about the time she wrote Anne of Green Gables (1908). Montgomery identified Maclaren’s Drumtochty with her own Prince Edward Island home: ‘The atmosphere of Kate is delightful. I seemed to be back in the Cavendish of my childhood. There was the same tang and charm and simplicity in people, place and religion. One had a sense of “time to grow”.’158 Montgomery’s enthusiasm sums up much of the nostalgic appeal of Kailyard. Yet where her own Anne books learn from it and address a childhood world, too often Kailyard fiction fails because it presents adults to an adult readership as if they were slightly comical children. Its doing so ensured that it was internationally successful – for a time.
Late nineteenth-century Scotland traded in kail, but also in twilight. From Ireland W. B. Yeats’s 1893 collection The Celtic Twilight had whispered in its final poem about ‘a time outworn’, even as it hoped for a national rebirth. In Scotland too some writers looked towards ancient Celtic lands and traditions as sources of nourishment for a distinctive cultural revival linked to the Highlands. For his lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) Matthew Arnold had chosen an epigraph from Ossian (‘They went forth to the war, but they always fell’), and had presented the Celtic as a kind of ethereal, feminized other to modern English literature.159 This view of the Celtic had some influence on Yeats, and much over William Sharp, foremost of the Scottish writers who contributed to what Yeats in an 1898 essay on Sharp’s work called ‘Le Mouvement Celtique’.
Born in Lowland industrial Paisley in 1855, Sharp went on to study at Glasgow University, then travelled widely and worked in London in the 1880s, writing poetry as a minor Pre-Raphaelite. In Rome in 1890 Sharp completely regendered himself as Arnold’s feminized Celt. He began to write poems and visionary prose fictions set in an ancient Celtic realm, publishing these works under the specially constructed identity of ‘Fiona Macleod’. Even more strikingly than the young J. M. Barrie, Sharp became a woman writer. Fiona’s first name was Ossianic and her second markedly Highland, perhaps encouraged by the often melodramatic work of best-selling Glasgow-born novelist William Black (1841–98) who exoticized the Highlands in works like Macleod of Dare and in a score of other novels with such titles as The Wise Women of Inverness. Sharp’s exploration of a feminine self, like Barrie’s, shows a willingness to play games with gender in line with international fin de siècle culture. Sharp gave Fiona Macleod her own entry in Who’s Who and ‘specially favoured enquirers were shown her portrait, but it never appeared in the Press’.
In a decade when Andrew Lang sold many copies of his charming children’s tales in The Red Fairy Book (1890), The Green Fairy Book (1892) and other volumes, Fiona Macleod was regarded by some as herself ‘a Fairy’.160 A friend of Yeats, Sharp was a considerable literary operator. His enterprises ranged from introducing Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry (1896) to serving as President of the London Stage Society. That Society produced Fiona Macleod’s ‘psychic dramas’, while Lyra Celtica contained a good dollop of her verse, in addition to poems by Ossian, Yeats, Bliss Carman, Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Arthur Quiller-Couch. With Scottish contributors playing a prominent part, Lyra Celtica attempts to claim a bewildering variety of writers from Milton to Stevenson as ‘Celtic’ in an effort to present a swelling international movement fuelled by Arnold, John Francis Campbell, Ernest Renan and others. The anthology’s introduction argues that ‘A strange melancholy characterizes the genius of the Celtic race’ and that a modern ‘Celtic Renascence… is, fundamentally, the outcome of “Ossian,” and, immediately, the rising of the sap in the Irish nation’.161 Sharp was a writer keen on Gaelic lore, the faery and the gipsy; his book The Gypsy Christ was published in America in 1895 and US publication of other works followed. Well read in Turgenev, Baudelaire and Whitman, he wrote ‘prose rhythms’ (he disliked the term ‘prose poems’) which seem modern descendants of the Ossianic Fragments. Typical of their emphasis on hypnotic, even druggy vagueness is ‘The Immortals’:
I saw the Weaver of Dream, an immortal shape of star-eyed Silence; and the Weaver of Death, a lovely Dusk with a heart of hidden flame: and each wove with the shuttles of Beauty and Wonder and Mystery.
I knew not which was the more fair: for Death seemed to me as Love, and in the eyes of Dream I saw Joy. Oh, come, come to me, Weaver of Dream! Come, come unto me, O Lovely Dusk, thou hast the heart of hidden flame!162
However kitschy this may sound, such work was influential. It presented ‘the Celtic fringe’ as mistily, cloudily and elegiacally alluring. With their absurdly overwritten Hebridean sunsets, William Black’s novels appeared in a twenty-six volume collected edition in 1894. Two years later and a century after James Macpherson’s death, Sharp introduced ‘the Centenary Ossian’, praising the Ossianic poems’ g‘cosmic imagination’.163 Also announced as part of Sharp’s ‘Celtic Library’ for that November was Fiona Macleod’s From the Hills of Dream: Mountain Songs and Island Runes. The 1896 Celtic tales in the Inveraray-born Glasgow journalist Neil Munro’s The Lost Pibroch led to his Gilian the Dreamer (1899). Munro could be hard-headed. He wrote enjoyable post-Stevensonian Highland historical novels such as John Splendid (1898) and The New Road, as well as gently observed modern comic tales about Para Handy, captain of a small Clyde ‘puffer’ steamboat, in The Vital Spark (1906). Yet figures of rather melancholy Highland dreamers recur in his fiction, leading it to be dismissed by the younger, demanding Scottish novelist George Douglas Brown as ‘damned sentimental filigree’.164
The early stories of Munro and the books of Sharp reinforced a perception of the Highlands and Islands as a noble, spiritualized otherworld. In 1899 the civil servant Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912) prefaces the first volume of his Carmina Gadelica with an introduction that mentions not only W. F. Skene’s Celtic Scotland: A History of Ancient Alba and John Francis Campbell but also the island of Atlantis and Renan’s notion of the ‘profound feeling and adorable delicacy’ of the Celts. Scholars argue about the Gaelic oral prayers, charms, hymns and invocations collected by Carmichael and later published over several decades in Gaelic with his verse translations. These works seem partly genuine, partly reshaped to fit modern notions of what an ancient Celtic sensibility ought to be like. Certainly their measured repetitions speak of a Catholic and sometimes pagan Scotland which has often been repressed, and which could entrance listeners from Fiona Macleod to T. S. Eliot.
Bi Bride bhithe, bhana, leinn
Bi Moire mhine mhathar, leinn.
Bi Micheal mil
Nan lanna liobh,
’S bi Righ nan righ,
’S bi Iosa Criosd
’S bith Spiorad sith
Nan grasa leinn,
Nan grasa leinn.
The calm fair Bride will be with us,
The gentle Mary mother will be with us.
Michael the chief
Of glancing glaves,
And the King of kings
And Jesus Christ,
And the Spirit of peace
And of grace will be with us,
Of grace will be with us.165
Such verses came to be far better known than the untranslated, often angry Gaelic poetry of Iain Mac a’ Ghobhain (John Smith, 1848–1880) who complained about the conditions of poor people in the Highlands and saw Scotland becoming a playground for imperial hunters, shooters and fishers. After Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica, later collectors such as Marjory Kennedy Fraser in The Songs of the Hebrides (1909) further blurred the seldom policed boundary between scholarship and romance. Where the Kailyard presented an often elegiac ideal of small-town community spirit, the Celtic Twilight offered something similar for Highland culture generally. Both sounded distinct Scottish notes that caught the international imagination. Implicitly or explicitly, they also defined Scot-tishness as other than urban modernity. This may have made urban readers all the more eager to turn to Kailyard and Celtic Twilight works for escape and consolation in what was now one of the world’s most industrialized countries.
Both these literary movements were encouraged by one of the pioneers of urban modernity. The polymathic Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes invented the word ‘conurbation’ and wrote Cities in Evolution (1915). He not only published the ‘Celtic Library’ but brought together the Kailyarder Crockett with William Sharp and Alexander Carmichael in his short-lived 1895 magazine, The Evergreen. This journal aimed ‘to pass through Decadence, towards Renascence’.166 At the Camera Obscura on Edinburgh’s Castlehill Geddes had set up his ‘Outlook Tower’, which has been called the world’s first sociological museum, and which had exhibitions on different floors linking the local to the universal, connecting Edinburgh to Scotland, Scotland to Europe and the world, while stressing language as a vital link.
In The Evergreen Geddes looks back to Allan Ramsay’s Ever Green anthology of older Scottish literature, and hopes that a new view of Scotland as ‘one of the European Powers of Culture’ may help quicken what he calls ‘The Scots Renascence’. Geddes censures what he saw as an anglicization of Scottish culture and society:
Never before indeed, not even in the interregnum of the War of Independence, not after the Union of the Crowns or Parliaments, not after Culloden, has there been so large a proportion of Scotsmen conscientiously educating their children outside every main element of that local and popular culture, that racial aptitude and national tradition, upon which full effectiveness at home, and even individual success elsewhere, have always depended, and must continue to depend. But to this spoiling of what might be good Scots to make indifferent Englishmen, natural selection will always continue to oppose some limit.167
Such talk of the ‘racial’ and of ‘natural selection’ is worrying to modern ears, but Geddes was far more interested in cultural productions than in the sort of eugenic ideas fashionable at the time. He emphasizes Scottish distinctiveness and internationalism. Longing for a synthesis of the arts and sciences, he brings together artists with writers working with English, Scots and Gaelic materials to develop a Scots Renascence. In 1895 this was a commendable failure. Yet in the longer term such ideas would be brought to fruition by Hugh MacDiarmid, an admirer of Geddes and a much more gifted writer. Though MacDiarmid, born in 1892, liked to adopt a hostile pose towards turn-of-the-century Scottish culture, he was undeniably nourished by it. A Scottish Renaissance may have been delayed, but it would come.
Meanwhile, though, nothing from the Kailyard or Celtic Twilight could compete for excitement or evergreen readability with the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Their author, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), was in some ways a product of the sort of upbringing Geddes had denounced. Born in Edinburgh, Doyle was sent south at the age of nine. He attended Stonyhurst, an English Jesuit public school, before returning to Edinburgh to train as a doctor at the University. There he encountered Joseph Bell, Consulting Surgeon to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, pioneer of forensic medicine, and the dedicatee of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). The character of Holmes is, as Doyle put it, ‘a bastard between Joe Bell and Poe’s Monsieur Dupin (much diluted)’. The Edinburgh connection was soon recognized by the writer Doyle most admired, Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘can this be my old friend Joe Bell?’ Stevenson wrote from Samoa praising Doyle’s ‘very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes’.168 Doyle had written a long article on ‘Mr Stevenson’s Methods in Fiction’ in 1890, and sought to follow Stevenson in such historical novels as The White Company (1891). Several of Doyle’s early fictions, including The Firm of Girdlestone (1890), are set in Edinburgh, while later, more popular novels like The Lost World (1912) draw on their author’s experiences as an imperial adventurer from the Arctic to Africa. Now several times filmed by Hollywood, The Lost World takes its hero Professor Challenger to a previously unknown jungle area where dinosaurs have survived and rule. Though Doyle was desperately eager to emulate Stevenson as a historical novelist, his true talent was for well-paced modern best-sellers. He knew Stevenson had written about London and the ‘detective’, and his favourite Stevenson story seems to have been ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ – a mystery tale about pursuit and murder. Stevenson had presented London criminal mysteries in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and stories like ‘The Adventures of the Hansom Cab’. Though Doyle failed as a historical novelist, the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, his strange cases, may still owe something to Stevenson.
Much to his chagrin, Doyle came to be known not as Stevenson’s successor in the historical novel, but as the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The first of these, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887, serialized in The Strand Magazine. All the Sherlock Holmes adventures are narrated by Dr John Watson, a well-travelled Empire medical man who graduated from the University of London around the same time as Dr Doyle finished his studies at Edinburgh. In the very first instalment, readers of The Strand entered a laboratory. There, meeting a man to whom Watson is a total stranger, they shared the good doctor’s surprise:
‘Dr Watson, Mr Sherlock Holmes,’ said Stamford introducing us.
‘How are you?’ he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’
‘How on earth did you know that?’ I asked in astonishment.169
So begins Watson’s career as the baffled ‘Boswell’ to Holmes’s ‘Bohemian soul’. The story soon progresses to ‘The Science of Deduction’ and to ‘No. 221B, Baker Street’, the great detective’s famous London address.170 Holmes later criticizes Watson’s ‘small brochure’, A Study in Scarlet, for making ‘Detection… an exact science’ and proceeding to ‘tinge it with romanticism’, yet this is exactly the appeal of these stories. They cloak minute observation and exaggerated reasoning with adventures among ‘all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of every-day life’.171 Holmes is at once artist and scientist, rebel and upholder of the law. In an era when willed decadence confronted defenders of morality, the drug-taking, zealous investigator might appeal to both sides at once: ‘I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul.’172 Later to become one of Scottish literature’s many legacies to the cinema, Holmes is the best-known fictional character in 1890s writing. He possesses a universal appeal. Among such classes of modern fiction as romances, ‘slum novels’ and ‘detective stories’, Andrew Lang felt that the last category were recognized as ‘ “not literature” ’, but could certainly be among the most readable.173 Conan Doyle’s stories have become classics, still eminently readable and a cornerstone of crime fiction, now the dominant fictional genre of our age.
In December 1893 when Doyle let Holmes plunge to his doom over the Reichenbach Falls along with his arch-enemy the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty, public outcry forced the author to resurrect his character. In The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904) the polymathic great detective reveals that he saved himself through his knowledge of ‘baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me’.174 From The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) to The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927), Holmes sleuthed his way into the world’s imagination, coming to occupy a place at least as secure as that of Peter Pan. Dr Jekyll’s London Strange Case had drawn on detective story elements, but Dr Watson followed Holmes to even stranger cases, bringing ‘savage’ poison darts to civilized modernity and solving riddle after riddle in the modern metropolis. Though unfazed by muddy fields, Holmes is predominantly the Theseus of the urban labyrinth. Where the Kailyarders and Celtic Twilight writers let readers escape from the evolving conurbations theorized by Patrick Geddes, Holmes confronted and solved the city’s riddles. He showed that the necessary counterpart to proliferating modernity was a precisely monitored flow of information. His answers remain alluring in our information age. Ultimately, Holmes’s solutions may be as absurdly constructed as the escapist fictions of Kailyard or Celtic Twilight, yet they are more consoling since they provide a sense of closure rather than merely the illusion of escape. Holmes’s fog-bound London may appear at times a city of dreadful night, even a heart of darkness, but it is one where hope, reason and security rather than despair win out.
London continued to attract Scottish writers, whether to success or ignominy. If Doyle’s first story had appeared in the Edinburgh Chambers’s Journal, his literary triumphs were in London periodicals and with London publishers. Part of the group of London Scots, Doyle co-wrote a book with Barrie in 1893. In Edinburgh Blackwood’s Magazine retained the prestige and editorial acumen to begin to publish in its thousandth issue Conrad’s masterwork Heart of Darkness in 1899, but, despite vigorous flourishes in Edinburgh and Glasgow, publishing was increasingly dominated by London houses. The newer firm of Thomas Nelson, for which John Buchan went to work in 1907, may have had its nominal headquarters in Edinburgh’s Dalkeith Road, but was effectively run from London. New and smaller Scottish imprints such as ‘Patrick Geddes & Colleagues’ might publish Ossian with art nouveau decoration, but ambitious modern writers like the Kailyarders, Doyle and Stevenson worked with larger London – and, increasingly, American – firms in an expanding, internationalizing mass market.
So, for example, the poet, novelist and dramatist John Davidson (1857–1909), a minister’s son who fled from ‘the Philistinism’ of his native Greenock, began his publishing career in Glasgow but, fed up with schoolteaching in Scotland, moved to London in 1888.175 There, in search of literary and journalistic success, Davidson attended the Sunday parties at William Sharp’s house in Hampstead. This led to Davidson’s meeting Yeats through the Celtic Rhymers’ Club. Although the young author from Greenock could appreciate ‘everything fairy like and romantic’, he developed a poetry often attuned to modern city life.176 Almost all the poems of In a Music Hall (1891) had been written in Scotland, but the Fleet Street Eclogues (1893) were new. Conflictedly articulate, Davidson put into verse more convincingly than anyone else the struggles of the urban clerk:
For like a mole I journey in the dark,
A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar’d Halls and broad Suburbean Park,
To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight,
A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.177
As here in ‘Thirty Bob a Week’, Davidson’s verse articulates not just the daily struggles of city workers to make a living, but also their inner anxieties and ennui, a wish to escape from a seemingly inane world since ‘It is better to lose one’s soul,/ Than never to stake it at all.’178 Such a tone and subject matter would attract the young T. S. Eliot to Davidson as an exemplary poet. In the 1890s he may have been valued most for his more conventional lyrics, but later poets including Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan have responded to his use of modern scientific ideas and terminology. Davidson had not only a muscular sense of rhythm, apparent in poems like ‘A Runnable Stag’, but also a liking for adventurous subjects, rhythms and diction, readily audible in ‘The Crystal Palace’:
Contraption, – that’s the bizarre, proper slang,
Eclectic word, for this portentous toy,
The flying machine, that gyrates stiffly, arms
A-kimbo, so to say, and baskets slung
From every elbow, skating in the air.179
Able to write about the crystal structure of snow, about suburban housing, and Fleet Street, Davidson admired Burns but rejected the language of post-Burnsian Scots, committing himself to English. Many of his ballads and lyrics are lingeringly Romantic, yet his poetry often draws on encyclopedia articles, dictionaries, and prose works of nonfiction – including his own. He was, in a term used of some Scottish poets a century later, an ‘informationist’.
Freelancing in London, doing all sorts of literary work from acting as a publisher’s reader to translating Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Davidson maintained a circle of friends which included Conan Doyle, but he remained intellectually lonely. In an age when Scottish translators such as Sir Theodore Martin and the Glasgow University translator of Kant and Hegel, the Reverend Professor William Hastie (1842–1903), as well as the Greenockian Edward Caird, a highly influential Hegelian philosopher who also taught at Glasgow University, championed German thought, Davidson responded with enthusiasm to Nietzsche. He saw his own father as ‘the last of the Christians’ and, sure that ‘All poets are fanatics’, wanted to ‘come out of Christendom into the Universe’. As a boy in Greenock, Davidson ‘on Sundays… generally made some blank verse about the universe’.180 Later, in his forties, he began to write ever-longer blank verse, materialist, anti-Christian ‘Testaments’ and grew increasingly isolated. ‘I never go anywhere. I never see anyone. I am not like other men,’ Davidson in London told a nonplussed visitor from Greenock, before closing the door in his face.181 ‘Be haughty, hard,/ Misunderstood’, he counsels the soul in ‘The Outcast’.182 Described by a friend as ‘a cross between Khubla Khan and a bank manager’, the depressive poet suffered mental health problems. Eventually, it appears, he killed himself. But Davidson would be looked back on as a brother in the muse by the Nietzschean Hugh MacDiarmid.183 MacDiarmid was seventeen when Davidson’s disappearance was widely discussed in the international press. Eventually the poet’s body was washed ashore at Mousehole in Cornwall, badly decomposed but still clad in a dark overcoat. Paying tribute to Davidson, MacDiarmid would later recall that ‘small black shape by the edge of the sea’ as ‘A bullet-hole through a great scene’s beauty,/ God through the wrong end of a telescope’.184
Today Davidson seems essential to modern Scottish verse. At the end of the nineteenth century, though, far more marketably Scottish were such poetic productions as the Scots language pastorals, Horace in Homespun (1885), by the Edinburgh schoolteacher James Logie Robertson (‘Hugh Haliburton’ (1846–1922)), or the newspaper verse of fellow schoolteacher Walter Wingate (1865–1918), writing not without irony about ‘The Dominie’s Happy Lot’. Quietly inturned were the poems of John Gray (1866–1934), but only when the modernity of Davidson would be linked to a fresh imaginative investigation of the Scots tongue would a ‘Scottish Renaissance’ truly arrive. Until then, there would be rows of books with titles like For Puir Auld Scotland’s Sake and Thistledown: A Book of Scotch Humour. More discerning readers might choose, perhaps, translations of Theocritean peasants into ‘Twae collier lads frae near Lasswade’.185
The aspiring poet who followed Andrew Lang’s advice to Scotticize Theocritean pastoral, and who kept up a marked interest in Scots verse, was John Buchan. Like Davidson (whom he met in London), Buchan was a minister’s son. Born in 1875, he grew up in a Free Church manse in Glasgow, but spent boyhood summers tramping and fishing near the Tweedside Borders homes of close relatives. At Glasgow University one of Buchan’s teachers was Andrew Lang’s friend ‘our Tweeddale neighbour’ Professor John Veitch, author of The History and Poetry of the Scottish Border (1878). Buchan too loved Border lore. He was ‘born and bred under the shadow of that great tradition’ of Walter Scott, whose biography he wrote.186 Although a good deal of his life would be spent serving the British government in England and Canada, when ennobled Buchan chose the Scottish title Lord Tweedsmuir. His first novel, Sir Quixote of the Moors (1895), written while he was a Glasgow student, is a historical fiction which opens in Galloway. Buchan’s first essay collection, Scholar Gipsies (1896), carries an Arnoldian title but includes overworked prose about the Vale of the Upper Tweed. Grey Weather: Moorland Tales of My Own People (1899) might hint in its title at a Kiplingesque or even a Kailyard filiation, but by that time Buchan was an Oxford student who had spoken at the University Union, supporting the motion that ‘this House condemns the Kailyard School of Novelists’.187 Buchan pronounced Kailyard narrow, parochial. Yet he too published in the magazine of one of its staunchest supporters, Nicoll’s British Weekly, when seeking to win a place in London literary life. Cannily, Buchan also contrived to write for the Decadents’ Yellow Book and for the folks back home who read the unyellowed Glasgow Herald.
At Glasgow University Buchan had been encouraged to go to Oxford by his Australian-born professor, Gilbert Murray. This sophisticated young Oxford-trained Classicist alerted his student to wide literary horizons. Driven by a Presbyterian work ethic, yet also attracted towards a Stevensonian freedom, Buchan was hugely ambitious. By the age of twenty-three he was already in Who’s Who where he stated his profession as ‘undergraduate’, and listed five book-length publications. Two years earlier he had written out a long ‘List of Things to be Done’. This occupied four columns designated ‘Literary, Academic, Prob. Income, Practical’. Another list from around that time is headed ‘HONOURS GAINED AND TO BE GAINED’. Buchan’s plans for his twenty-sixth year include mention of a job (‘Professorship of English at the University of Edinburgh’) and a planned book, The Borderers; he also lists the sums of money he has won for university literary prizes.188
The title of Buchan’s best-known book, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), suggests he had a head for figures. So does the title of his least-known, The Law of Tax relating to the Taxation of Foreign Income (1905). The author of the latter gave his name on the title page as ‘John Buchan, Esq.,… Barrister-at-Law’, but the younger Buchan also enjoyed several other careers: as secretary to the High Commission for South Africa in the Cape, as essayist for the Spectator, as London man-about-town, and as literary adviser to the publishing firm of Nelson. Workaholic, staunch imperialist and, in due course, MP, he published poetry, essays, journalism, histories, biographies and historical novels (like the fine Witch Wood (1927)), as well as the thrillers for which he is best remembered. As a Glasgow undergraduate Buchan had praised Stevenson as ‘one Admirable Crichton in days when narrowness is a virtue, and a man of many interests and capacities is thought to be in a fair way to destruction’.189 Stevenson’s example had a considerable influence on Buchan’s prose style and career. Though The Thirty-Nine Steps is presented by its author as a ‘ “dime novel” ’ or ‘ “shocker” ’, its theme of pursuit over rugged Scottish terrain harks back to Kidnapped, while the ability of its hero, Richard Hannay, to adopt a variety of disguises owes something to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.190 Again in Huntingtower (1922) the Scottish coastal setting with a house besieged by foreigners recalls Stevenson’s ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ while the working-class lads who help out the protagonist, the Gorbals Diehards, are a Glaswegian version of Conan Doyle’s Baker Street Irregulars. Buchan worked phenomenally hard, yet his best books seem imaginative sanctuaries, pacy escapes from the routines of careerist labour.
Ambitious for himself, Buchan, who would be cultivated by Hugh MacDiarmid and who would preface MacDiarmid’s work, was also ambitious for Scottish culture. In 1907 he tried to make the Scottish Review a sort of internationally-oriented Scottish magazine, the ‘centre of a Scottish school of letters such as Edinburgh had a hundred years ago’.191 Among his contributors were the elderly Andrew Lang, Edinburgh’s impressive literary professor George Saintsbury, and Neil Munro. Topics ranged from the future of the Scots tongue to Flaubert and the Ibsen whose work was translated and championed by an influential polylingual London-Scottish playwright and critic, the Perth-born William Archer (1856–1924) who campaigned from 1873 for a British National Theatre. Like Patrick Geddes a decade earlier, Buchan sought to use a magazine to encourage a Scottish-international literary renaissance, but the magazine failed and London, rather than Edinburgh, remained the powerhouse of Buchan’s world.
Still, the Scotland of his childhood, his parents and his siblings was as crucial to Buchan as to Barrie. It gave him his values and goals, as well as a presbyterian distrust of the very success he sought. Buchan disliked Barrie, but had a marked liking for the work of another exalter of childhood, Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932). That writer’s earliest years had been spent in Edinburgh and Inveraray before his father’s death occasioned a move to England. Grahame, another author with a head for figures, worked in London for the Bank of England. In Pagan Papers (1893) his work shows a clear debt to Stevenson’s essays. Grahame’s The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898) idealize early childhood. His fondness for Pan and childhood was scarcely unique, but surely encouraged Peter Pan, while his Arcadian visions enthused the Buchan whose Scholar Gipsies (1896) has Pan on its cover. Grahame’s appealing children’s book The Wind in the Willows (1908) again features Pan; its riverbank animal protagonists, Mole and Ratty, adventure in the Wild Wood where Badger’s den with its cigars and armchairs is rather like an Edwardian gentlemen’s club. Celebrated aspects of The Wind in the Willows, such as chases involving high-performance cars and the siege of a country house, would reappear in Buchan’s adult fiction. In books like The Thirty-Nine Steps, for all the cinema-friendly engagement with technologies of modernity, a vital sense of Arcadia persists. Grahame, whose novel would become a Disney film, helped give birth to that great set-piece of modern entertainment, the car chase. Buchan, whose most celebrated novel would inspire a Hitchcock masterpiece, was the first writer to sense how the car might make Scottish landscape more exciting, yet, for the moment, no less Arcadian. Less than forty years after Richard Hannay wrestled with a codebook, donned disguises, and drove ‘that 40 h.p. car for all she was worth over the crisp moor roads on that shining May morning’, Ian Fleming created his Scots-descended spy James Bond.192
Though he was instrumental in developing the spy-story ‘shocker’ whose pace, engagement with technology, and love of chases underpins so much modern popular entertainment, Buchan began his writing life with an attempted epic about hell. He patterned this on the minor Scottish poet Robert Pollok’s 1827 dourly sub-Miltonic epic The Course of Time. The book Buchan read most as a boy was The Pilgrim’s Progress, an equally pious if more exciting work. Like John Bunyan, John Buchan writes of conflict-filled journeys towards salvation, with fiendish enemies to be defeated along the way; in Buchan’s more secular world it is British imperial civilization that is saved at the end.
Whether the scene is the Middle East, Scotland or Europe, this is the pattern of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle (1916) and Buchan’s later spy stories. From the Glasgow grocer Dickson McCunn to the colonial Scot Richard Hannay and the cosmopolitan Sir Edward Leithen, this writer’s heroes draw on facets of their author’s own career. Each hero enjoys adventures in a separate series of novels. Buchan’s baddies are charismatic fiends. In 1895, questioning Kailyard values, Buchan had used an Old Testament phrase to denounce those who go seeking ‘after strange gods’.193 His villains are usually foreign false messiahs, whether the African chieftain in Prester John (1905) or the manipulated Muslim prophet in Greenmantle. Casual xenophobia, or at least an easily assumed imperial superiority, is present in the plotlines. There are antisemitic moments and a strain of period racism will offend some readers; it was part of the author’s world. Buchan was an imperialist. An admirer of Walter Scott, he was also the last major Scottish writer to articulate fully an ideology of that generally assured but sometimes anxious Britishness which also characterized the Scot Sir John Reith’s British Broadcasting Corporation. This ideological loading, along with the pace, plotting and relish for plain language, gives Buchan’s best adventure tales a compulsive period appeal. His is a lost world of jolly good and jolly bad chaps: ‘I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant’s telegram’, begins Greenmantle; the pipe-filling is essential to the milieu. As in most of Stevenson and Conan Doyle, female characters are marginal. They supply a soupçon of love interest or, like Holmes’s Mrs Hudson, domestic help. John Buchan’s work is as conventionally masculine as that of his sister Anna is conventionally feminine: anyone wanting a sense of the politely circumscribed world of middle-class Scottish female gentility should read works such as Anna Buchan’s The Setons (1917) or the semi-autobiographical Ann and Her Mother (1922), in which Ann aims to ‘become the writer for middle-aged women’.194
Anna Buchan (1877–1948) admired Barrie and wrote under the pen-name ‘O. Douglas’. She was a professional writer who travelled to India. She was also to some extent supported by John, who helped his sister place her work and gave her an allowance of £100 a year which, she wrote, ‘made all the difference in the world’ to her. There is some mockery of a fellow Scottish popular novelist when Anna Buchan has a book-carrying character announce, ‘I’ve brought you one of Annie Swan’s – she’s capital for a confinement.’ Yet Buchan was happy to know that her own novels had been chosen by pregnant women. She chose to address successfully a middlebrow audience, having one of her characters speak rather slightingly of ‘Virginia Woolf and other highbrows’.195 Authors admired in her work include Violet Jacob, Stevenson, and, of course, John Buchan. As a young woman, Anna too kept lists of achievements (‘Recited Barrie at Samaritan Hospital,/ Went to Band of Hope’), but though she was a seasoned public lecturer, her sphere is usually much more domestic and interior than that of her brother. She wrote, after all, at a time when many women still lacked the right to vote (a right extended to all British women only in 1928), and when a man such as her brother, as a graduate of a Scottish university, still enjoyed two votes. Women tried to sustain protective domestic spaces. ‘There is probably nothing a child values so much as a feeling of safety,’ Anna Buchan wrote in her 1945 autobiography, Unforgettable, Unforgotten. This daughter of the manse presents home as a feminized place of struggled-for safety, a domestic sanctuary.196
Her brother too writes of sanctuaries, but his are masculine spaces: safehouses rather than safe houses. His sanctuaries are all-male clubs and, most of all, rugged, generally masculine, wilderness areas. There, as to the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows or to the mountains of John Muir and Stevenson, men go to prove themselves in their journey towards some kind of salvation. Such an impulse is evident in some of Buchan’s early writings. It is certainly present in The Thirty-Nine Steps, John MacNab (1925) and many of his adventure fictions. In late books, like The Island of Sheep (1936) and the spiritually and ecologically alert Sick Heart River (1941), the quest for sanctuary is even acutely apparent. Sick Heart River is more a pilgrim’s progress than a thriller. Its ageing imperialist Sir Edward Leithen encounters in northern Canada both native peoples and a Christian mission where, dying, he senses ‘the rebirth of a soul’.197 Buchan’s last, unfinished book was called Pilgrim’s Rest.
A driven man, Buchan loved nothing better than to impress his very possessive mother with his respectable success. Yet, as with Barrie, essential to his imaginative life was a distrust of the conventional success he pursued. If London was the centre of power for Buchan, it is almost incidental to his best fictions. Most of their memorable scenes take place in wilderness zones. Whether in the ambitious Indian novels of Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929) or in children’s fiction such as The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899) by Helen Bannerman (one of the first Scottish women writers to graduate from a university), Empire loomed large in the Scottish imagination. It helped reshape what Scotland meant. Richard Hannay’s Scotland is a kind of ‘veld’, a place where the colonial feels at home:
… I got out an atlas and looked at a big map of the British Isles. My notion was to get off to some wild district, where my veldcraft would be of some use to me, for I would be like a trapped rat in a city. I considered that Scotland would be best, for my people were Scotch and I could pass anywhere as an ordinary Scotsman.198
Buchan himself was proudly Scottish and British. One can argue that his Scotland seems a mere imperial adventure playground, an internal colony, often a kind of Arcadia. Yet, though he took his orders from London, his interest in Scotland never ceased, and, as Kailyard and Twilight waned, he made it again a place for the modern imagination.
Buchan was not the only London Scot to do this. He recognized in George Douglas Brown (1869–1902) an impressive talent. From a very different background, Brown was the illegitimate son of an Ayrshire farm servant, and of a farmer who took little to do with him and whom Brown several times claimed was dead. However, like Buchan, Brown had studied Classics at Glasgow University, had been encouraged there by Gilbert Murray, then had gone to Oxford (which Brown disliked) before moving to London. Writing as ‘Kennedy King’, Brown tried his hand at imperial boys’ fiction. He shared with the Kailyarders an admiration for Burns and Galt, but he detested Kailyard sentimentality. In 1901, the year before Gilbert Murray’s first version of a Greek tragedy was performed on the London stage, Brown used Greek drama as a framework for his novel The House with the Green Shutters, set in the small fictitious Ayrshire town of Barbie.
Brown had produced a Scots glossary for the 1895–6 Blackwood Collected Edition of John Galt’s novels, introduced by S. R. Crockett. A careless reader, Crockett tries to map Galt’s fictions on to the Kailyard genre, finding in them ‘peace’, ‘restfulness’ and a sort of literary ‘oatmeal porridge – with cream’.199 John Buchan realized many readers might set Kailyard ‘Idylls… on our shelves not far distant from Galt’, but John Hepburn Millar, about to write a history of Scottish literature, perceived in Galt’s work a remarkable insight into historical change and a sense of village communities being ‘the nation in miniature’.200 George Douglas Brown came to view his native Ayrshire village of Ochiltree as ‘an epitome of all the world’, and read Galt attentively. In The House with the Green Shutters he presents a book which shows ‘antagonism’ towards the ‘sentimental slop of Barrie, and Crockett, and Maclaren’. Yet Brown’s work clearly evolved from a Kailyard milieu. In 1895 David Meldrum, the London Scottish editor of Success, encouraged him to submit ‘Scottish idylls of a more robust character than was the fashion’.201 Brown developed a style conscious of the world of ‘Auld Licht Idylls’, but also able to draw slyly not just on a careful reading of Turgenev’s studies of Russian peasant life in Sportsman’s Sketches and on Balzac, but also on his knowledge of Galt’s acute awareness of the coming of economic change to small-town Ayrshire.
Galt represented for Brown not just a Scottish precursor as a novelist but also the ‘type’ of the Scot richly endowed with ‘commercial imagination’.202 Set, like Barrie’s early fictions, in the Scotland of his mother’s youth, Brown’s novel is different from Barrie’s tales in its alertness to and interest in Scottish market forces. In Barbie, where the schoolmaster reads The Wealth of Nations, the ‘tyrant’ businessman John Gourlay fails to move with the times and loses out to an astute commercial rival who sees that money is to be made from the coming of the railway. If John Gourlay senior, exulting in his green-shuttered house, suffers from ‘insufficiency as a business man’, then his oppressed son John shows some signs of writerly talent. Sent to Edinburgh University, the boy uses his ‘uncanny gift of visualization’ to win an essay prize, but is warned that he needs a philosophy to sustain him.203 Instead, in a shocking departure from the ‘lad o’ pairts’ stereotype beloved of the Kailyarders, the depressive younger Gourlay takes to drink and ends up murdering his ruined father before taking his own life. This leads immediately to the suicide of his terminally ill mother and sister.
Brown’s sometimes melodramatic plot using motifs from Greek tragedy may owe something to his admired Thomas Hardy, who had essayed the use of a Greek tragic framework in The Mayor of Caster-bridge (1886), and had scandalized the public with the familial suicides of Jude the Obscure in 1896. What makes Brown’s writing remarkable, though, is its fusion of Scots vernacular with Classically-inflected English narrative – and its superb precision. A resourceful stylist, Brown planned a textbook on Rules for Writing whose strictures might have hinted at the Imagist-like emotive accuracy of his own prose.
The old-fashioned kitchen grate had been removed and the jambs had been widened on each side of the fireplace: it yawned, empty and cold. A little rubble of mortar, newly dried, lay about the bottom of the square recess. The sight of the crude, unfamiliar scraps of dropped lime in the gaping place where warmth should have been, increased the discomfort of the kitchen.204
Like the young John Gourlay, the embittered and depressive Brown has a remarkable ‘gift of visualization’. As a child he had been fascinated by such details as a baby’s toenails; at Ayr Academy his gifted teacher, the Irish Classicist William Maybin (to whom Brown dedicated The House with the Green Shutters, and who soon afterwards was a pallbearer at Brown’s funeral) taught the young writer to ‘prune’ and to concentrate on ‘clear’ pictures.205 The intensity of Brown’s vision is maintained through a minutely plotted narrative. Brown’s Classical sense of unity is very different from the meanderings preferred by the Kailyard writers whose world he sought to explode.
Like those writers, however, Brown had his centre of operations in London. If the Scottish-American industrialist-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie champions enlightened charity in The Gospel of Wealth (1900), Brown presents a community in thrall to money and where charity is dramatically lacking. Galt might have combined commercial and artistic imagination, but Brown, like Barrie, finds the two hard to reconcile. Again, like Barrie, Brown can write of ‘the Scots’ as if he were an outsider, even an anthropologist. At school, he thought Burns sometimes ‘an alien in his own land’, yet like Burns he could identify with peasant life ‘from the inner and the under side’.206 As a trained Classicist, Brown must have known the work of J. G. Frazer; his novel investigates the killing of a commercial king. While Brown the Oxonian Londoner can produce a distanced critique of the place he sprang from, Brown the Ayrshireman can write with sharp knowledge of the ‘democratic Scotland’ where old men’s ‘slaver slid unheeded along the cutties [clay pipes] which the left hand held to their toothless mouths’.207 As sometimes in Barrie, a mixing of Scots and English not just in the characters’ speeches but also in the narrative voice makes for a sense of shared acoustic between narrator and community. In themes, design and narrative style, The House with the Green Shutters, an antidote to the Kailyard mixed substantially from Kailyard ingredients, marked a direction for future Scottish fiction.
In the short term that direction would be taken by John Macdougall Hay (1879–1919) whose Gillespie Strang in Gillespie (1914) is a Gourlay filled with destructive ambition. But Hay’s novel suffers from melodramatic, impasto, expressionist over-writing: ‘The Sphinx face, smileless and bloodless, with cruelty in its stony flesh and a hawk-like craftiness in the single wild, wary eye, was devilish with its faint glitter of pleasure, and fed with the damnable fiery liquid, which he heard gurgling, gurgling.’208 Brown’s fiction would find more distinguished successors in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair in the 1930s and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark in 1981, both of which examine, among other things, how the sensitive imagination may come to terms with the commercial and technological changes endemic to capitalist society. Like many of Stevenson’s and Barrie’s stories, Brown’s is a historical novel. If his coalfield fiction anticipates D. H. Lawrence in its portrayal of claustrophobic relationships, it does so too in its determination to engage through strong emotion and imagistic style with the structures of industrial modernity. As would many works written by Scots living in nineteenth-century London, Brown’s fiction became a resource for writers in Scotland in the century that followed.
The contents page of the magazine The Modern Scot for October 1932. Published from Dundee and edited from St Andrews by the American Scottish nationalist James H. Whyte, the magazine championed Scottish nationalism along with Scottish-internationalism, a combination typical of the twentieth-century ‘Scottish Renaissance’ movement. Whyte developed a theory of Scottish nationalism which did not depend on ideas of race; in 1930s St Andrews his circle included Willa and Edwin Muir as well as other writers, composers and artists. To Whyte Hugh MacDiarmid dedicated his greatest extended poem in English, ‘On a Raised Beach’. (St Andrews University Library, StA AP4.M6S2)