"To be at once another and the same": Walter Scott and the end(s) of sympathetic Britishness.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University

ON A MISERABLE DECEMBER DAY IN 1825, WALTER SCOTT RECORDED HIS resolve to fight his latest bout of depression "by letting both mind and body know that supposing one the House of Commons and the other the House of Peers, my will is sovereign over both." Three weeks later, only days before the collapse of the printing and publishing businesses on which he had staked his fortune, Scott mused in his journal on the significance of the new year:



A thought strikes me allied to this period of the year. People say that the whole human frame in all its parts and divisions is gradually in the act of decaying and renewing. What a curious time-piece it would be that could indicate to us the moment this gradual and insensible change had so completely taken place that no atom was left of the original person who had existed at a certain period but there existed in his stead another person having the same limbs thewes and sinews, the same face and lineaments, the same consciousness.... Singular--to be at once another and the same. (1)

Ruminating on the concurrent deterioration and renewal that paradoxically characterizes the body, Scott ponders the prospect, both eerie and exhilarating, that an individual might be "another and the same" simultaneously. His interest in the duality of bodies, moreover, seems intimately linked to his life-long investment in the fate of Britain, a compound state created by the 1707 Act of Union joining England and Scotland. Given Scott's evident familiarity with metaphors of the body politic, and bearing in mind his public role as the leading literary representative of Scotland to the world, we can fruitfully read the above passage as reflecting national as well as personal concerns. Do nations, like bodies, change so gradually that it is impossible to demarcate precisely when the transformation has created a new entity? If it seems paradoxical, even uncanny, "to be at once another and the same," what do Scott's writings reveal about the possibilities and pitfalls of attempting to retain one's original national identity while simultaneously learning to accept a new one?

Only a month after the financial crash that ruined him, Scott was hard at work on one of his most explicit interventions in national affairs: the Letters of Malachi Malagrowther (1826). Written in response to the British government's proposal to limit Scottish banks' powers of issuing small bills, the Letters defends such credit arrangements as the backbone of northern economic development. Scott was well aware of the irony of his situation, remarking in his journal that "It is ridiculous enough for me in a state of insolvency for the present to be battling about gold and paper currency" (120). Nevertheless, by vindicating Scotland's right to self-government on domestic issues, the Letters effectively proclaims the importance of retaining Scotland's institutions and, by extension, Scotland's national identity within the United Kingdom. On this point, Scott knew he had to tread carefully:

Spent the morning and till dinner on Malachi's Second Epistle to the Athenians. It is difficult to steer betwixt the natural impulse of one's National feelings setting in one direction and the prudent regard to the interests of the empire and its internal peace and quiet recommending less vehement expression. I will endeavour to keep sight of both. But were my own interest alone concerned, d--n me but I wa'd give it them hot. (115)

As in his novels, Scott aligns prudence with respect for the conjoined interests of civil society and the British state. (2) Following one's "natural impulse" would mean allowing one's "National feelings" to overrule such prudential, imperial concerns. Scott's compromise is to attempt to "keep sight of both" the national and the international by attempting to reconcile Scotland's interests with those of Britain as a whole.

Could such a merger be accomplished, and at what cost? Scott's first novel, Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, was published in 1814, more than a century after the Union, and just prior to the Allies' triumphant march into Paris. (3) Its closing chapters, which describe the reconstruction of Tully Veolan and the marriage of the English Waverley to the Scottish Lowlander Rose Bradwardine, reflect both Scott's and Britain's contemporary optimism that the national turmoil caused by the 1745 Rebellion, like that of the Napoleonic Wars, could be safely memorialized as history. Only a few years later, however, such confidence had evaporated. Bereft of the French Other against which to define itself, and suffering from an economic downturn that was fueling the fire of reform in both England and Scotland, post-Waterloo Britain faced yet another period of national insecurity. (4) Scott's vital intervention at this moment of national uncertainty was to provide the public with what it needed most: a sense of collective identity. In this essay, I argue that one of Scott's most ambitious novels, The Heart of Midlothian (1818), self-consciously deploys a vocabulary of sympathy, adapted from the Scottish Enlightenment, in order to encourage readers to think of themselves as British first, English or Scottish second. With a Waverley-esque national reconciliation achieved after three volumes, however, Scott adds an apparently superfluous fourth volume that uncomfortably complicates everything preceding it. While it is tempting to read Midlothian as merely a less successful version of Scott's first fiction, I want to consider the ways in which the later novel, especially its controversial final volume, ultimately demonstrates the limitations of the ideology of "sympathetic Britishness." (5) Finally, I will return to the Letters of Malachi Malagrowther to consider its surprisingly prescient resolution of the contradictions of Scott's British nation-building project.

I. Sympathy and Supplementarity in The Heart of Midlothian

In the time of national tension and transformation following Waterloo, it became newly essential to provide ways for the citizens of England and Scotland to imagine what they had in common. As Marlon Ross explains, "Looking out on a moment of revolutionary crisis and a horizon of territorial expansion, the British needed somehow to organize this experience of rapid change and rapid expansion, to justify their development into a modern nation-state while retaining the sense of inherently ordained order that characterized the then eroding socio-economic structure." (6) The unprecedented mass popularity of Scott's literary output was largely predicated on Britain's dire need for national unity. As some of the most widely read fiction in nineteenth-century Britain, the Waverley Novels helped interpolate a unified readership by virtue of being read simultaneously across the United Kingdom. (7) The very corporateness of their shared title presented readers with a powerful model of how a capacious designation (like "Britain") could function semantically to unite and represent various entities (like "England" and "Scotland") as a single unit. Small wonder that, by Scott's death in 1832, the Waverley Novels had become "the semi-official expression of the British nation." (8)

Scott made no secret of the fact that he purposefully set about writing fiction to encourage the formation of a shared British identity. In his "General Preface" (1829) to the magnum opus edition of the Waverley Novels, Scott describes how he was inspired by Maria Edgeworth, "whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union, than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up." While modern readers may find Scott's interpretation of Edgeworth's fiction naive, he seems sincere when insisting that

I felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland--something which might introduce her natives to those of her sister kingdom, in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto, and tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles [my emphasis]. (9)

Retrospectively, Scott claims for his fictions the same status that he attributes to Edgeworth's: they are meant to be literary bridges between the various nations comprising Great Britain.

It is no accident, moreover, that in discussing the political motivation of his novels Scott invokes a favorite term of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers whose ideas about history and culture helped shape his fiction throughout his career: sympathy. (10) In the previous century, David Hume and especially Adam Smith had popularized sympathy as a natural psychosocial mechanism that allows people to feel spontaneously each...

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