The Story of John Galt’s Scottish Novels

This chapter unearths a sweeping account of the Age of Improvement in John Galt’s brand of non-fictional fiction (‘theoretical history’). It finds Galt exploring the capacity of a modernising society to cope with localised, historically rooted and distinctive cultural forms. His narrative of improvement draws on the first Statistical Account of Scotland in both formal and thematic terms. In Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Entail (1823), local and national cultures can function as cohesive agents that remedy the destabilising effects of rapid change, yet they can also be perverted into a dark influence working to misdirect the effect of global market forces. Galt presents history as a contest over the volatile substance of ‘story’, which his novels rhetorically disavow. His analysis of the law of unintended consequences is permeated by a dry sense of humour. Yet by The Entail, Scottish history has become a catalogue of tragic failures, as the changes wrought by improvement fracture the nation into incompatible alternatives.

Short Fictions of Improvement by James Hogg and Walter Scott

This chapter reads James Hogg and Walter Scott within a new, revisionist history of short fiction that is particularly interested in the genre of the ‘tale’. Focusing on the half-decade between 1827 and 1831, the chapter highlights a selection of Hogg’s mature contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine alongside Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate (first series). These years were marked by literary experimentation, when a confident improving persuasion in Scottish culture was threatening to unravel. The formal logic of these short fictions, defined by a curiously focused spontaneity, exacerbates a pluralistic handling of the collision between improvement and tradition. Different models of time (progress, renewal, disruption) and belief (suspension, scepticism, credulity) serve to interrogate improvement in a wide range of contexts around commercial modernisation. The chapter unpacks two specific literary innovations in this context. The first looks to acts of transmission in the literary marketplace which by turns sustain, contain and defer the dialectics of improvement. The second sees the emergence of a fully fledged aesthetic vocabulary of culture in Scott’s writing.

Introduction

This introduction clarifies the book’s contribution to the study of Scottish Romanticism, Enlightenment and improvement. Improvement, it argues, was sufficiently important as a modality, trope and environmental condition to be viewed plausibly as a defining feature of literary production in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland. The introduction includes a working genealogy of improvement and a survey of the motley field of scholarship on the topic. A section on the national implications of improvement in the Scottish context is next, followed by more detail on the book’s dialectical approach. There is then an analysis of the category of Scottish Romanticism as it has been treated elsewhere and as it is modified by the book’s own case studies, summaries of which form the final section.

Coda: ‘There is no end to machinery’

Following a brief summary of the preceding arguments in the book, the coda turns to a trilogy of essays by Thomas Carlyle written in the final years of the 1820s – ‘State of German Literature’ (1827), ‘Burns’ (1828) and ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829). These works postulate a Britain riven between the inhuman mores of Enlightenment and a degraded popular culture, looking to ideal truth (‘pure light’) and its secular expression in poetry as a means of salvation. ‘Signs of the Times’, notably, was published in the last issue of the Edinburgh Review edited by Francis Jeffrey and provides a subversive counterpoint to and unravelling of the journal’s Whig ideology. Taking up a critique of the Scottish Enlightenment that had been made by John Gibson Lockhart in Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819) and in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Carlyle attempts to recover a sense of ideal truth from what he viewed as a culture of dry rationalism. Improvement, in this account, had suffocated Scotland. Carlyle’s analysis of what he calls the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘dynamical’ in opposition to one another (rather than dialectical tension) effectively performs an elision of Enlightenment and Romanticism. This provides a counterpoint for the book’s very different reading of literary texts that are adapting cultures of improvement within a set of changing historical circumstances.

Robert Burns and ‘Circling Time’

Featuring an extended reading of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, this chapter finds new parallels between Robert Burns’s handling of the religious and socio-economic dimensions of improvement. It argues that the poem maps a model of spiritual renewal rooted in New Licht Presbyterianism on to the crisis of laissez-faire modernisation. That vision of improvement is signalled in the work by a complex overlaying of linear and cyclical models of time, a dialectical vision of history in which – finally – poetry ascends to a powerful role as a medium of secular belonging. ‘The Cotter’ thus instantiates a complex cultural politics, rather than being a conservative outlier in Burns’s oeuvre. It is contextualised here within the poet’s wider negotiation of improvement in his 1786 Poems, which develops a carefully managed ‘simple’ aesthetics. Burns emerges as a transitional figure between the improving civic activity of the Scottish Enlightenment (‘cultivating’) and an aesthetic vocabulary of nationhood driven by the consumption of canonical literature (‘culture’).

‘The Great Moral Object’ in Joanna Baillie’s Drama

This chapter offers a new reading of Joanna Baillie’s path-breaking drama and dramatic theory, suggesting that it is working through the dialectical logic of improvement. Baillie attempts to counter what she finds to be pernicious aspects of commercial modernisation and politeness with an alternative vision of moral improvement. She presents the drama as uniquely placed to engender moral growth because of its capacity to invoke ‘sympathetick curiosity’ in reader or audience. This volatile force is explored in Count Basil (1798), read as a model example of historical dialectic; in The Family Legend (1810), an important approach to the ‘primitive’ past; and in The Alienated Manor (finally published in 1836), a satire of improvement’s pitfalls. With roots in the Enlightenment science of man, Baillie’s writings sustain a powerful sense of the individual’s contribution to networks of social power and the involvement of this contribution in grand narratives of improvement. Yet, while Baillie seeks to repurpose the enlarged patent theatres into instruments of moral improvement, the pessimism of her social diagnosis threatens to infect her didactic project.