Inspiration and Spectacle: The Case of Fingal's Cave in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature

Abstract

Fingal's Cave is one of at least twelve sea caves on tiny Scottish island of Staffa. It is, without doubt, most famous and was depicted in countless written and visual records of visits to island in nineteenth century. As Jennifer Davis Michael observes, perhaps no other British site in [Romantic] period was rendered in so many different arts (2), and, as Marianne Sommer and others have shown, Fingal's Cave was a key site in rave (Sommer 197) that began with Romantics and lasted throughout Victorian period. Staffa, to Viking travelers as isle of staves for its basalt columns (Dean 194), and iconic Fingal's Cave were, story goes, discovered by Sir Joseph Banks in 1772 and were first made to when his journal of travel appeared in Thomas Pennant's 1774–76 multi-volume, A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to Hebrides, 1772 . Banks, who was on his way to or returning from an excursion to Iceland (twentieth and twenty-first-century histories are inconsistent on this point), stopped off at Staffa to visit cave and wrote first—and most influential—study of its geological features and experience of looking upon them. Banks, in his detailed description of Fingal's Cave published within Pennant's book, pronounced it the most magnificent... that has ever been described by travellers (301). This publication, story continues, made Staffa known to outside world (Michael 2; see also Dean 194, Gordon 69, Shortland 5–6) and thus initiated a flurry of tourism to island by some of most eminent writers and artists of Romantic period and beyond. Michael Shortland writes that Banks set in motion a tide of enthusiasm and research in caves which lasted for over half a century (6). Banks's account also encouraged connection between Fingal's Cave and poems of Ossian, son of Fingal, as Michael discusses in Ocean meets Ossian: Staffa as Romantic Symbol. The repetition and consistency of this narrative in studies of Fingal's Cave is remarkable both for what it reveals about significance of this extraordinary site in British cultural history and because narrative is, to a surprising degree, an illusory one.