Scott, India and Australia

Abstract

From early in his life Walter Scott had strong personal relations with India but his contacts with Australia came much later in his life and were fewer in number. However, even though India was not, like New South Wales, a penal colony, and the British had been in India for centuries whereas they had colonized Australia within Scott's own life time, Scott's personal relations with India and Australia are remarkably similar in kind, though not in quantity. They take place in a well-defined context of imperial patronage which Scott used with skill and success to support a number of young Scots including, in the case of Australia, convicts. On the other hand Scott's imaginative involvement with the two countries differs considerably: India figures quite prominently in his fiction, but in all his published writing there is only one passage on Australia and it deals with quite different issues from those concerning India. This article considers a number of individual cases of Scott's patronage in India and Australia and examines the similar ways in which he was able to further the careers of his protégés. It also compares his writing about India and Australia and suggests that, though the themes in his writing about each country are quite different, in each case the dominant theme is one that was taken up by Scott in his early years.