Scottish Fiction

Abstract

In an essay of 1896 the quixotic Scottish writer R. B. Cunninghame Graham railed against contemporary trends in Scottish fiction, arguing that, because of their pernicious influence, “to‐day a Scotchman stands confessed a sentimental fool … oppressed with the tremendous difficulties of the jargon he is bound to speak, and above all weighted down with the responsibility of being Scotch” (Nash 45). Many of the Scottish writers who followed him in the next century were very conscious of this “responsibility of being Scotch” and the need to answer to its particular demands. For some it was a source of pride, and a duty of care they took on willingly; for others it was an unwelcome historical burden that impeded the free travel of their minds. But whether they liked it or not, they shared in Scotland an often problematic common ground. At the beginning of the twentieth century Scotland was a small nation on the periphery of Europe; a nation without statehood, locked as it was into a political union dominated by a partner, England, that was almost 10 times its size. It was weak as a political entity but strong economically, having gained enormously from the British imperial project for which it had provided much of the heavy engineering as well as merchants, administrators, and soldiers. Added to this, it was a country that had difficulty in coming to a settled view of itself: a country of three languages (English, Scots, and Gaelic) and two distinct cultures (Lowland and Highland); a nation renowned for its beautiful landscapes that had some of the most heavily industrialized and squalid cities on the planet; a place that set a high value on education, with more ancient universities than England, but which lost many of its best minds to London.