Aftermaths: Walter Scott and Imagining Collective Memory in the Transatlantic World

The first chapter examines the phenomenal rise to popularity of Walter Scott’s historical fiction throughout the transatlantic world, in the context of its evocation of collective memory, which was particularly suited to the anxieties of emergent national cultures. In Waverley, Scott employs mnemonic tropes to install a particular mode of modern historical consciousness: the ‘aftermath’, in which the present time is shaped in terms of its proximate relation (measured out in one or two human lifespans) to a moment of historical crux. The time of the Forty-Five is imagined as the catalyst for abrupt and transformational social and cultural change, which not only determined the nation’s present but altered the very pace of history. This chapter shows how Waverley’s example of the ‘aftermath’ provided tropes, models and theoretical frameworks for North American writers for their own expression of national memory. Examples include Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’, John Neal’s Seventy-Six, and Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens. The chapter also traces the literary development of the ‘aftermath’ in the Scottish ‘memorial’ writing of Robert Chambers and Henry Cockburn.

Memory on the Margins: Anne Grant’s Atlantic World

Chapter 2 takes up the retrospective writing of Anne Grant, in which she imagines the peripheral spaces of the British Atlantic as the unique enclave of a particular mode of human society and of intercultural exchange. In both the US and Britain, Grant acquired a reputation as a keen observer of so-called primitive peoples. She wrote widely on her life in the Scottish Highlands, and her published letters, poetry and essays were deemed important accounts of Highland culture. In addition, Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady relates her childhood experiences growing up in colonial New York, where her British army officer father was posted. Taken as a whole, Grant’s writing provides a unique account of the transperipheral circuits of movement and exchange in the Atlantic world. She reveals a complex inter-play of national, ethnic and regional identities that are ultimately at odds with her reputation for providing nostalgic renditions of a ‘lost world’ for discrete readerships on either side of the Atlantic.

‘So complete a change’ (in So Short a Time) – Scottish Romanticism, Modernity and Collective Memory

This chapter provides an overview of the themes of the book. Largely in response to their own national predicament in post-Union imperial Britain, Scottish writers of the Romantic period brought to the British Atlantic a historiography of collective or cultural memory, which imagined an unprecedented fissure within the flow of time that had rent the present from the past. This sense of an immense gulf between past and present – measured in only one or two generations and imagined to be within reach of, or just beyond, living memory – was attended by deep national anxieties but also by a renewed optimism, of social and cultural reinvention. As it circulated along the routes of the British empire, Scottish history writing of the period made a fundamental contribution to the culture of modernity in the Atlantic world.

Indigenous Elsewhere: Lord Selkirk and Native Memory and Resettlement

The third chapter explores reconceptualisations of the ‘aborigine’ in the writing of a pivotal figure in British immigration and settlement history, Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk. Selkirk’s proposals to solve the problem of dispossession in the Highlands through planned Highland settlements in the New World brought about a radical transformation in British attitudes to Highland emigration and, in the process, helped reshape a national and imperial geography, in large part through a reimagining of ‘native’ folk memory. This chapter examines Selkirk’s published and unpublished writing, in which he lays claim to the value of an ‘aboriginal’ people, arguing for the preservation of a Highland way of life in ethnically pristine ‘National Settlements’ that would serve as a bulwark for British interest in the New World. Selkirk’s schemes for wholesale transatlantic resettlement of dispossessed Highlanders reset the terms for the Clearance debate in Scotland; at the same time, these ideas – and those on the future of indigenous people in North America – also helped to set the parameters of state policy on native removals and resettlement in the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century.

John Galt and Circum-Atlantic Memory

The last chapter is devoted to the transatlantic Scottish writer John Galt. An important contributor to Blackwood’s and a key figure in the early settlement of what is now Ontario, Galt’s writing underscores the complex and often conflicted elements of Scottish post-Enlightenment thinking on the relation between the past and present – and the future – in the modern world. On the one hand, much of Galt’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, partakes of an empirically based ‘statistical account’ mode of regional and national enquiry, adopting the assumptions and speculative stance of a Scottish political economy. On the other hand, Annals of the Parish and his Canadian emigrant novels Lawrie Todd and Bogle Corbet inscribe a complex, and ultimately profoundly unsettling, cultural memory of the circum-Atlantic world. In the ‘annalist’ fiction that recounts the proximate past of the parish of Dalmailing, the ‘theoretical biographies’ of Todd and Corbet, and in other writing, Galt charts the development of a melancholy world-view inspired by a circum-Atlantic memory of constant upheaval and psychic trauma.

Memory, Identity and the Scottish Remembrance of Slavery

Chapter 4 undertakes a twofold exploration of the contributions of Scottish writing in shaping transatlantic identities through retrospective testimonial accounts of slavery. It first examines the work of John Gabriel Stedman and Thomas Pringle, both associated with prominent first-hand descriptions of the horrors of transatlantic slavery. These works include Stedman’s account of his mercenary experiences in the Dutch plantation colony of Surinam, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition and The History of Mary Prince, which Pringle edited and supplemented with his own material. These writings have received much critical attention as retrospective accounts of enslavement, yet the Scottish dimension of these writings consistently has been overlooked. This chapter also explores how the memory of transatlantic slavery informed a Scottish national past that was itself imagined as ‘cultural trauma’. Donald Macleod’s Gloomy Memories was an acrimonious response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s travel memoir Sunny Memories, which had lauded the abolitionist sympathies of the Duchess of Sutherland, while dismissing out-of-hand Macleod’s remembrances of Sutherland cruelty and injustice during the Clearances of the 1810s. Gloomy Memories represents a key cultural-memory text that continues to shape an understanding of historical trauma in Scotland – for both Clearance and slavery.