Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (review)

Evan Gottlieb argues for the centrality of discourses of sympathy to new definitions of an inclusive national identity in the eighteenth century. In chapters on novelists Tobias Smollett and Walter Scott, on the Scottish travel-writing of James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, and on the poetry of William Collins, William Wordsworth, and Scott, Gottlieb traces the attempt to develop a newly unified nationalist sentiment, a sense of “Britishness” that would incorporate (or assimilate) Scottish identity. Though the book notes the significance of the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England, as well as the upheaval of the ’45, it reads primarily the aftermath of this moment from midcentury to the early nineteenth century. Gottlieb opens with a chapter on sympathy and the Scottish Enlightenment, setting up his discussion of the literature with an outline of the major Scottish philosophers on sympathy, David Hume and Adam Smith, as well as Adam Ferguson, the only highland-born figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Gottlieb argues that “the Scots used their unique position as a stateless nation within a nationless state to propose that sympathy, understood in its politico-historical contexts, could help bring into being a new national identity for the English and the Scots to share” (101). He describes the trajectory of this shift towards a shared Britishness in the work of Scottish and English writers, who move from an assimilationist emphasis (Smollett’s Scottish characters deliberately lose the marks of their Scottish identity as they seek a new British identity) to a celebration of the specificity of Scots culture (Walter Scott’s novels, though they eventually come down on the side of the Union and the Hanoverian succession, nonetheless romanticize Highland history as a foundational history for Britain).

Plausibly taking the fascination of the Scottish Enlightenment with the workings of sympathy to be an indication of its utility for a new nationalism, Gottlieb begins, in chapter 1, “‘That Propensity We Have’: Sympathy, National Identity, and the Scottish Enlightenment,” by outlining the ways in which sympathy could be deployed in the service of national connection and unification. This is the best part of the book. Gottlieb’s astute argument for the possibilities of sympathy is compelling. He explains how sympathy functions to naturalize the Union: it supports the claims of Scots to an affinity with England and asserts the naturalness of an English sympathy with the Scots. Though skilfully argued otherwise, chapters 2 to 5, which engage literature, are somewhat less convincing about how sympathy functions centrally as a nationalist discourse. The evidence for sympathy’s discursive significance is not sufficiently brought forward in Gottlieb’s readings, though he clearly reveals in the literature a deep commitment to a new British identity. Gottlieb’s work on Wordsworth is the exception here: Wordsworth’s “Poems Written during a Tour in Scotland” are convincingly read in the context of his important claims about sympathy in the Preface. Gottlieb argues that Wordsworth uses ideas about sympathy to appropriate Scottish identity, simultaneously expressing a genuine sympathetic connection to his subject-matter, and, in his poetical pilferings, translations, and displacements, performing what Gottlieb calls an “imaginative colonization” (148).

Gottlieb’s third chapter on Boswell and Johnson, “‘We Are Now One People’: Boswell, Johnson, and the Renegotiation of Anglo-Scottish Relations,” stands out as one of the best chapters in the book. His account of Boswell’s intervention between Johnson and Scotland is both entertaining and clever. Gottlieb argues that Boswell’s vision of himself as mediator between the profoundly (and xenophobically) English Johnson and the Scottish Highlanders effectively demonstrates a new hybrid British identity in the person of Boswell himself. It is thus the Scottish Boswell, not the English Johnson, who functions most effectively as ambassador and as embodiment of a true Britishness. Aside from a tendency to want to rescue Johnson from his richly deserved reputation for bigotry about the...