Scott, History, and the Augustan Public Sphere

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

IN DECEMBER 1819, WALTER SCOTT WROTE TO LORD MELVILLE AND LORD Montagu outlining plans for a militia of local smallholders and laborers to counter the approach of radical insurrection in Scotland and civil war in Britain.(1) The letters made two in a series Scott sent to his neighbors and colleagues, in which, in identical language, he preached the modern uses of a reinvented feudal and clothed himself romantically as the quasi-Highland chief of a clan regiment (L 6: 113). In seeking the support of his neighbors, Scott catalogued the benefits the militias would bestow: the influence on the morale of the by the display of such a force ... will make the with the young and able bodied check the progress of discontent and intimidate the radicals who will thus see enemies among those on whom they reckond as secret well wishers....(L 6: 71) [W]e should give them a jacket & pantaloons of Galashiels grey cloth which would aid the manufacturers of the place--highland bonnets with a short feather their own grey plaids in case of sleeping out black crossbelts and musquets.(L 6: 61) Scott's Scotland is caught between a past framed as Jacobite and a threatening Jacobin future. In response, he levels a Jacobite vernacular of belted plaids and tenant-soldiers against Jacobin aggression. What is apparent in his letters, as in his Waverley novels, is the insignificance of military force when compared with the mediated power of fashion and display. The best defense against crisis is for Scotland's common people to parade their loyalty to their British king and country, marshalled by cultural producers who orchestrate the cohesive processes of sympathy and emulation (L 6: 63). Thus in drawing up plans for his corps of volunteers Scott offers more details of the nostalgic uniforms he has invented than of recruitment, arming, or command. His plans demand that laboring-class militiamen and their gentlemen-sponsors alike buy into the cultural producer's fictions, conspicuously consuming the signs he authorizes, from the paper pellets of a literary battery to the theatrically traditional costume and weaponry of his projected Highland soldiers (L 6: 58). In this way Scott forges a cultural route out of the distinctive stalemate of his romantic Scotland and into a British modernity where Scotland's distinctness and history thrive precisely in their cosmopolitan consumption. Scott was to realize his prescription for social order two years later, during the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. He planned a weeklong pageant, which he marketed to the intended participants in broadside poems and pamphlets that translated into popular, practical, reproducible terms the historical processes of reconciliation his novels depict.(2) The king paraded through streets lined by ordered rows of soldiers, Highland militiamen, gentlemen-volunteers, and dignitaries.(3) The sartorial distinction and spatial distribution of the players according to rank, class, trade, and place of origin emblematized both their to the British crown and their ethnic and class diversity.(4) Scott's staging of this festival of Britain iconographically confirmed the inclusive Hanoverian Britishness of Scotland while setting rigorous limits to protest and disruption.(5) Like the volunteers' riposte to radical dissent proposed in Scott's letters, these limits were simultaneously performative and economic. Rooted in production and consumption of avowedly historical costume and artifact, they stimulated the local economy and took part in the circulation of Scottish national sentiments throughout Britain in printed form. This essay addresses the mix of tradition with economic and cultural production that characterizes Scott's practices of national identity. It brings together two turns in the cultural history of romantic Scotland. One is the moment at which economic production gives way to the cultural production it enables. …