Civic Virtues in the Restless Polity: Sir Walter Scott’s Fergusonian Vision of British Civil Society in Redgauntlet (1824)

Abstract

Civic Virtues in the Restless Polity: Sir Walter Scott’s Fergusonian Vision of British Civil Society in Redgauntlet (1824)1 Katrin Berndt (bio) What model of civil society did Sir Walter Scott base Redgauntlet (1824) upon? Did he promote moral progress as an end in itself? Which civic virtues did he consider as essential for the well-being of the polity? In this article I explore how Scott’s novel can be understood anew as an allegorical representation of Adam Ferguson’s philosophy as articulated in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). In my discussion of the novel, I will identify Ferguson’s rejection of the idea of moral progress; his consideration of the good polity as an “imperfect reality”2 rather than as an anticipated, perfect future; and his veneration of civic virtues such as friendship, courage, civic passion and eloquence. I will challenge some of the conventional mainstays in Scott scholarship, particularly those that characterize his depiction of the Scottish nation as imbued with romanticized nostalgia. My analysis will show that Scott’s conceptualization of the future of Scotland was pragmatic, sober, and inclusive, because it relied on the continuous engagement of her citizens. Most critics position Sir Walter Scott as a writer who, in spite of his sympathies for Scottish passions and traditions, ultimately promoted the 1707 Union between Scotland and England as Great Britain rather than hewing to unilateral Scottish nationalism. As Duncan Forbes pointed out, Hanoverian Britain embodied the commercial, rational model of society that [End Page 115] Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith valorized—as did Walter Scott. This critical approach, introduced by Forbes’s seminal essay on “The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott” (1953), has been taken up by scholars who view Scott as accepting “the leading principle of conjectural history,” based on the “law of the necessary progress of society through successive stages.”3 That is, Forbes and others situate Scott as belonging to what would later be called the Whig view of history, a positivist ideology that emphasized society’s growing moral improvement, civility and tranquillity. This scholarly view has also emphasized the dualism in Scott’s fiction between “sentimental Jacobitism and pragmatic Hanoverianism in which the former ultimately succumbs to the latter”4 in a process referred to as the “cathartic assimilation”5 of Scottish heritage into Hanoverian Britain. For most of the twentieth century, Scott was also viewed as a novelist whose tales deliberately idealized Scottish history in order to provide both fictional reconciliation with, and nostalgic escapism to, a people who felt marginalized by the dominance of English culture. James Kerr described the use of romance as one of Walter Scott’s “favorite tricks,” which allowed him to “assimilate a violent past [by] transforming a bloody episode of British history into a series of sentimentalized pictures.”6 It is because of Scott’s (successful) attempt to integrate fabulously amplified versions of Scotland’s times of yore into Great Britain’s national narrative that “cultural critics often have been simultaneously fascinated and appalled by the author’s constructions of his native land,” as they felt that his fictions have “trapped Scotland in its past.”7 In the past two decades, literary criticism has begun to reappraise Scott’s novels, particularly from a new historicist angle, which has stressed the impact of romance on the recreation of history.8 Here, scholars have canvassed whether his fiction actually depicts (romanticized versions of) historical events, or merely renders the past and its fictional (re)invention useful for the present with recourse to the heightened imagery of the romance. According to Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Scott deserves to be reconsidered not only because he was more concerned about the future than the past, but also because his vision of Scotland was “not limited to any story of past or present, [but was] gesturing toward its realization in the ever opening tomorrow that is history.”9 In contrast to her positivistic recognition of Scott’s formative embrace of Great Britain, Julian Meldon D’Arcy identifies a subversive agenda in his writing when he claims that Scott, in fact, promoted Scottish nationalism through an array of hidden subtexts.10...