Scott, Turner and the Vision of North Britain

Abstract

James Thomson, we may recall, produced two memorable images of the Scottish borders in The Seasons. There is the personal association of the Tweed, which allows him to make the traditional connection between himself as a pastoral poet and the river closest to his place of birth, ‘whose pastoral Banks first heard my Doric Reed’.1 The other image is of the remnant of an Iron Age hill fort, now a mound encircled by grazing sheep. These peaceable means of describing the landscape were well suited for viewing the united kingdom as an essentially harmonious place whose countryside, cultivated gardens and expanding industries could be brought by the poet’s unifying and proportionate eye into that happy prospect of the ‘ISLAND of Bliss! amid the subject Seas’.2 The encoding of a geo-political settlement in such imagery (ordered and balanced at home; torrid and sublime overseas) did not exclude the possibility of introducing a historical dimension into these national discussions in verse. And history, for Thomson, was essentially of the conceptual universal kind, with the cycle driven onwards by the opposing personal and national forces of industry and luxury; there were certainly both internal and external threats to modern Britain, but the balance of evidence probably still suggested that the nation was on an upward curve.KeywordsStone ColumnSuspension BridgeIronical RecuperationPoetical WorkSexual JealousyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.