Three Scottish Cousins in East India Company Service, 1792–1804

This article studies three first cousins, James Thomas Grant, George Cumming, and Henry Mackenzie, who arrived in India in 1792, 1793, and 1797, respectively. Born in the 1770s, the same decade as Scott, none of the cousins reached their thirtieth birthday, and though none of them died in battle, Cumming left behind huge debts, Mackenzie owed money to a Calcutta lender, and Grant chose not to return to Scotland, where, in due course, he would have succeeded to a considerable estate and become the head of his clan. Their history is used to examine Walter Scott's idea of India as a corn chest, a fabulously rich society whose wealth could be squeezed

Developments in Sentimental Fiction

The sentimental strain in English fiction, which represents men of feeling and women of sensibility engaging in acts of sympathy and benevolence, became prominent in the 1760s through the novels of Charlotte Lennox, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, and others, building primarily on the work of Samuel Richardson and Henry and Sarah Fielding. The reformation of male manners, the feminization of taste and consumption, the grounding of ethics in human nature rather than rationalism or faith, and the emergence of a theory of moral sensibility all contributed to the popular reception of sentimental fiction. Frances Burney’s first two novels, Evelina and Cecilia, successfully combined sentiment with the comedy of Fielding and the moral sententiousness of Richardson, but in the third, Camilla, Burney felt the pressure of an increasing taste for realism, which eventually lessened the predominance, though it did not entirely eliminate, the sentimental form.

Shakespearean Poetry and the Romantics

The response of the major Romantic poets to Shakespeare is multifaceted. But recognition of Shakespearean vitality and suggestiveness is pervasive. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Blake’s colour-print ‘Pity’ and an account of pre-Romantic responses to Shakespeare (notably in the criticism of Henry Mackenzie and Samuel Johnson, and the poetry of Thomas Gray). It then explores, in turn, the responses of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats to Shakespeare, discussing how the Romantics use Shakespearean resonances in their poetry: Wordsworth, for example, echoing a number of plays to suggestive effect in the concluding movement of Tintern Abbey; Coleridge alluding to Twelfth Night at the close of ‘The Nightingale’; Keats drawing on various texts in shaping the mingling of romance and anti-romance in The Eve of St. Agnes. The essay seeks to intimate the range and depth of Romantic poetry’s orchestration of the Shakespearean bequest.