‘The Faery Ground for Romance and Poetry’
This chapter proposes that Scott’s romances appropriated elements of the Pennantian travel account, the exhaustion of which he had himself proclaimed in a devastating review of Sir John Carr’s Caledonian Sketches in 1809. At the same moment, he was busy inventing the textual conditions for the next wave of Highland tourism, based on the massive success of The Lady of the Lake and The Lord of the Isles, and his Highland novels Waverley and Rob Roy. The chapter explores the relations between Scott’s travel writing on the Highlands (especially his 1814 Pharos cruise) and the development of these verse romances and novels: his romantic ‘Highlandism’ cast a long shadow over the nineteenth century, especially his successful stage-managing of King George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822. This coincided with public controversy about sheep clearances on the Sutherland estates and elsewhere, and Scott’s own cautious refusal to be drawn into the political fray.