Tending to the (National) Household: Walter Scott's The Antiquary and "that happy commerce" of the Enlightenment

This essay explores the question of commercialism in Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816), particularly as it reflects Enlightenment debates about the place of ethics in a modern commercial society. I examine the challenge—and, for Enlightenment thinkers, the urgency—of living morally in a commercialized, modern Britain, where communal ties were replaced by self-interestc and monetary gain. In The Antiquary, Scott follows the thinking of Adam Smith and David Hume, who strove to define an aggregate of self-interested men as a principled community with well-developed social and ethical norms that would allow for what Smith called a "happy commerce" of socialization. Set during the French Revolution, the community anxiously anticipating a supposed French invasion cannot afford to give in to self-interested impulses that threaten to pull its members away from a unified polity. Rather than valorizing the feudal community and its social relationships, Scott historicizes the moment when sentiment as an affective communal glue is remediated from its feudal model into a force of sociability that would fit a society governed by a system of moral economy that is contingent upon the rules of contemporary, post-feudal commercial order.