- Afterword
Students of eighteenth-century English literature have long tended to see the period as a series of specialized topics, doubtless in part because of the great diversity of the print and manuscript archives that have survived. Some scholars prefer to evaluate eighteenth-century culture from the viewpoint of commerce, others see it as a century of reason and politeness, still others as a century of progress, and yet another group as a century of conservatism reacting against radical change, indeed, against any sort of change. Since recent historical study of Jacobitism has urged us to study literature in terms of the complex politics of this extraordinary movement of political failure, it is perhaps inevitable that we now find a group of scholars who prefer to see eighteenth-century literature as the product of a Jacobite century. The foregoing essays in this issue, which formed the proceedings of a recent scholarly conference devoted entirely to “Jacobitism and Eighteenth-Century English Literature,” demonstrate that such a view can often be valid. 1 There were many English writers who were strong advocates of the Jacobite cause, however much the cause attracted official persecution and however great were the defects of its advocates in plotting to replace the established Protestant government and Church of England with a regime more welcoming to the Roman Catholicism of the exiled House of Stuart.
There are writers who, like Dryden, suffered financial and professional loss because of their support of the self-exiled James II, but we must from the outset note the paradox of such suffering: the decade of Dryden’s life after losing his state offices was the most productive of his entire literary career, and the persecutions he underwent did not prevent him from writing. There are dedicated Catholics and Jacobites like Jane Barker who, as Toni Bowers shows, followed James II and, after 1701, his son the so-called James III, or the Old Pretender, into exile, and sojourned with the Jacobite court at St. Germains. Barker comes close to being the poet laureate of the exiled Stuarts, and Bowers is certainly right to note that her voice, both in prose and verse, is one that we have largely ignored in mainstream eighteenth-century studies, for many scholars have been willing to see Jacobitism and the literature [End Page 1091] which it inspired as artifacts of a marginal group of writers, disappointed at their exclusion from what they often considered their rights to place and property and bitter at what they deemed the illegal presence in Britain of the House of Hanover and its governments. Yet, as Bowers shows, Barker eventually became somewhat disillusioned by the equivocation of the leaders of Jacobitism—throughout the sixty or so years that it was a political force, Jacobitism lacked both coherent political theory and continuity of leadership—and returned to England. Bowers notes a prevalent ambivalence and doubt about the Jacobite cause in her writing even though, during Barker’s lifetime (she died in 1731), the hopes of Jacobitism were at their highest.
Uncertainty about a political cause often attracts recruits suffused with a sense of romantic wrongs done to noble beliefs and, as Lawrence Lipking observes, not only did three successive generations of Jacobites plot to put their king on the throne of England, but a “Jacobite plot” takes over the lives of James Edward, the Old Pretender, and his son, Charles Edward. The generations beyond the military failure of the ‘45, as Lipking hints, carry the Jacobite plot even further. Thus we encounter the articulation of a richly nostalgic tradition about Hanoverian depredations against the Highlands, the discovery of the potential Jacobite implications of historical facts open to dispute, like the story of Mary Queen of the Scots, and romantic associations of places where Jacobites escaped, rested, or planned their abortive campaigns. It is not a long step from the romanticizing of Jacobite events and persons to shortbread-tin and whisky-label Jacobitism and the creations of the modern marketers of Britain’s national heritage industry. This nostalgic taste for the past we see, and will continue to see, in ambitious print and cinematic epics, battlefield re-enactments (like that of...