“We wed not with the stranger”: Disjunctive Histories, Fluid Geographies, and Contested Nationalities in Romantic Fictions of Wales

Abstract

I. Perfect IN A STRIKING SCENE FROM JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART'S 1819 NOVEL PETER'S Letters to His Kinsfolk, the eponymous Welsh protagonist Peter Morris meets a fictionalized version of William Blackwood, who immediately attempts to recruit Morris as a correspondent. Dr. Morris! said he You must really be a contributor--we've a set of wild fellows about; we are much in want of a few sensible, intelligent writers, like you, sir, to counterbalance them--and then what a fine field you would have in Wales--quite untouched--a perfect (1) At first glance, Blackwood's casting of Wales as a new the silver mining town in modern Bolivia that furnished imperial Spain with much of its mineral wealth, reads as a straightforward commentary on Wales's colonial potential. For Blackwood, real-life proprietor of the arch-conservative and massively influential Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and doyen of the Scottish Tory literary scene, Wales's potential wealth is not mineral, but sociopolitical. Untouched by contemporary commentators, Wales offers the enterprising Tory cultural critic deep deposits of hitherto-untouched material. There is, however, another way to read Lockhart's metaphorical conception of Wales as a new Potosi. Although Potosi remained a powerful symbol of Spanish imperial wealth throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it also came to represent the corrupting influence of greed and the destabilizing potential of colonial mismanagement. In 1776, Adam Smith cited Potosi in his seminal The Wealth of Nations as a source of serious economic trouble, not only for the imperial Spanish government, but for the global economy as a whole. (2) Smith was hardly alone in his symbolic appropriation: later writers conceived of Potosi as a dire precedent for avarice and colonial disaster that Britain would do well to avoid, and the very name of the city itself became a shorthand for political waste and corruption. (3) Given his familiarity with the works of Smith, Lockhart and informed readers of the period would have been aware of this figural use for Potosi. When the fictional Blackwood advises that Wales is a potential Potosi, then, he is (perhaps unknowingly) calling attention not only to its rich stores of cultural and political wealth, but also to the frightening prospect that its wealth might be misappropriated and, as a result, destabilize an empire. This essay seeks to determine just what about Wales so threatened Lockhart and other writers like him, who figured the principality as both inviting and dangerous. Critics like Katie Trumpener and Ina Ferris have shown that the nationalist historical novel was the dominant fictional subgenre in Scotland and Ireland specifically, and the so-called Celtic periphery of Britain more generally, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By comparison, novels written or set in the third country of the Celtic fringe, Wales, have received little critical attention. (4) Whatever the reasons behind the relative lack of critical interest in the Welsh Romantic novel, I hope to demonstrate here that this neglect has obscured an important and original tradition of conceiving nationality and national history. Furthermore, this underexplored tradition disrupts extant critical models of the Romantic national novel that cast Celtic Romantic literature as somehow complied in or readily appropriated by an Anglocentric British nationalist and imperialist cultural initiative. As Trumpener and Saree Makdisi among others have argued, Romantic-era apologists for British nation-building and empire-building frequently invoked historical precedent (alongside economic pragmatism and other factual arguments) as empirical justification for or legitimation of the centralization and expansion of the British state. (5) In practice, as Trumpener shows, this justification often took the form of argument by way of historical literary analogy: for example, English critics repeatedly and explicitly compared the British literary tradition to the literary traditions of ancient Greece and/or Rome. …