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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Joseph McLaughlin. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. xii + 234 pages.
There is a much-cited passage from Sir Walter Scott's Waverley that might serve as a general epigraph to Joseph McLaughlin's engaging and extremely thoughtful study Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot. The moment that occupies Scott's attention is earlier than any McLaughlin examines, and the events Scott describes take place some distance from London. But Scott's image of imperial trouble, his vision of an outbreak of the imperial uncanny, is almost exactly that which McLaughlin finds doubled and redoubled in the fantasmatic London chorographies of the late Victorian and modernist periods. Scott has reached the point in his narrative at which he finds himself obliged to describe the invasion of the Scottish Lowlands (and, eventually, England) by the Highlands armies of the Jacobite Pretender. This is what his narrator sees (and imagines both the comparatively urbane mid-eighteenth-century inhabitants of England and the Lowlands and the novel's yet-more cosmopolitan nineteenth-century readers to see):
The grim, uncombed, and wild appearance of these men, most of whom gazed with all the admiration of ignorance upon the most ordinary productions of domestic art, created surprise in the Lowlands, but it also created terror. So little was the condition of the Highlands known at that late period, that the character and appearance of their population, while thus sallying forth as military adventurers, conveyed to the south country Lowlanders as much surprise as if an invasion of African negroes, or Esquimaux Indians, had issued forth from the northern mountains of their own native country. (214)
The 1745 Jacobite rising--depicted here, to be sure, less as a "rising" than as a return of the imperial repressed--was, of course, to prove an utter military and political failure. After some initial experiences of success, the Stuart "Chevalier" and his Highland allies were turned aside well before they could advance to London. In the aftermath of their defeat, the English state was to extend its sovereignty ever more fully over Scotland. Defeated on the battlefield, however, the Highlanders were to stage an enormously successful literary and commercial return in the pages of Scott's historical romances, thus rendering themselves the doubly uncanny inhabitants of the metropolitan world they had failed militarily to occupy. Fantasmatically present at the time of their rising as the domestic doubles of an imperial subaltern class (the "negroes" and "Esquimaux" in whose guise, to Scott's eyes at least, they stage their invasion), they return again, three quarters of a century later,...
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