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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
IN DECEMBER 1819, WALTER SCOTT WROTE TO LORD MELVILLE AND LORD Montagu outlining plans for a militia of local smallholders and laborers to counter the approach of radical insurrection in Scotland and "civil war" in Britain.(1) The letters made two in a series Scott sent to his neighbors and colleagues, in which, in identical language, he preached the modern uses of a reinvented feudal loyalty and clothed himself romantically as the quasi-Highland chief of a "clan regiment" (L 6: 113). In seeking the support of his neighbors, Scott catalogued the benefits the militias would bestow:
the influence on the morale of the common people by the display of such a force ... will make loyalty the fashion with the young and able bodied check the progress of discontent and intimidate the radicals who will thus see enemies among those on whom they reckond as secret well wishers....(L 6: 71) [W]e should give them a jacket & pantaloons of Galashiels grey cloth which would aid the manufacturers of the place--highland bonnets with a short feather their own grey plaids in case of sleeping out black crossbelts and musquets.(L 6: 61)
Scott's Scotland is caught between a past framed as Jacobite and a threatening Jacobin future. In response, he levels a Jacobite vernacular of belted plaids and tenant-soldiers against Jacobin aggression. What is apparent in his letters, as in his Waverley novels, is the insignificance of military force when compared with the mediated power of "fashion" and "display." The best defense against "national crisis" is for Scotland's "common people" to parade their "loyalty" to their British king and country, marshalled by cultural producers who orchestrate the cohesive processes of sympathy and emulation (L 6: 63). Thus in drawing up plans for his corps of volunteers Scott offers more details of the nostalgic uniforms he has invented than of recruitment, arming, or command. His plans demand that laboring-class militiamen and their gentlemen-sponsors alike buy into the cultural producer's fictions, conspicuously consuming the signs he authorizes, from the "paper pellets" of a literary "battery" to the theatrically traditional costume and weaponry of his projected Highland soldiers (L 6: 58). In this way Scott forges a cultural route out of the distinctive stalemate of his romantic Scotland and into a British modernity where Scotland's distinctness and history thrive precisely in their cosmopolitan consumption.
Scott was to realize his prescription for social order two years later, during the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. He planned a weeklong pageant, which he marketed to the intended participants in broadside poems and pamphlets that translated into popular, practical, reproducible terms the historical processes of reconciliation his novels depict.(2) The king paraded through streets lined by ordered rows of soldiers, Highland militiamen, gentlemen-volunteers, and dignitaries.(3) The sartorial distinction and spatial distribution of the players according to rank, class, trade, and place of origin emblematized both their loyalty to the British crown and their ethnic and class diversity.(4) Scott's staging of this festival of Britain iconographically confirmed the inclusive Hanoverian Britishness of Scotland while setting rigorous limits to protest and disruption.(5) Like the volunteers' riposte to radical dissent proposed in Scott's letters, these limits were simultaneously performative and economic. Rooted in production and consumption of avowedly historical costume and artifact, they stimulated the local economy and took part in the circulation of Scottish national sentiments throughout Britain in printed form.
This essay addresses the mix of tradition with economic and cultural production that characterizes Scott's practices of national identity. It brings together two turns in the cultural history of romantic Scotland. One is the moment at which economic production gives way to the cultural production it enables. But it is also here that the local performance of Scottish tradition begins to conduct the insertion of Scotland into an explicitly modern, inclusive conception of Britain. The practice that guides Scotland across both these intersections is antiquarianism, which I discuss in terms specific to Scott's thinking about the encounter of history with modernity, of economies with culture--about Scotland within Britain. As Scott theorizes it in his 1816 novel The Antiquary, antiquarianism is elegiacally national in its relation to the material fragments of the past, as Katie Trumpener and Yoon Sun Lee have noted.(6) Responding in pageantry to the Radical War of 1819-20, and in The Antiquary, as we will see, to the precursor threat of French invasion in the 1790s, antiquarianism pits what it declares is Scotland's traditional strength against a radicalism it invariably construes as foreign. But, in Scott's hands, antiquarianism is also cosmopolitan in its reconstruction and circulation of the fragments of the past, and commercial and literary in practice. As the historically self-conscious man of letters moves between the fields of commerce and letters, his antiquarianism bridges cultural preservation and cultural production, erasing the lines between them.
As a practice of cultural production, I will suggest, Scott's distinctive mix of the outward-, inward-, and backward-looking, and of commerce, letters, and antiquarian discovery, proved powerful, but not irresistible. Literary and commercial production worked together to shape a body of consumers of the past. These consumers, in turn, were required to appear in public as citizens, a...
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