The Home-ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland

In his broad survey, Modern Scottish Literature, Alan Bold warns against quick dismissals of the popular late nineteenth-century “Kailyard School” of fiction: “we should be wary of categorizing the kailyarders as sentimental fools; they were men who had a shrewd judgment for public taste and the public responded by adoring the intellectually undemanding entertainment the kailyarders produced.” ¹ Bold’s evaluation of the Kailyard (literally, cabbage patch) and its unavoidable presence in Scottish literary and cultural history illustrate the tension between “public taste” and high art, “entertainment” and serious intellect, that still gathers around these national tales. The Kailyard’s national and international appeal has been explained primarily, by critics such as Bold, through a tautology that depends on a self-evident and static “public taste” that has very little to do with history or culture. We are told, in other words, that the Kailyard was popular because it reflected popular, and we are to assume vulgar, tastes. The cantankerous modernist Scots poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, certainly had this in mind when in his 1923 poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, he mourned this “preposterous presbyterian breed” of popular fiction which had tossed real Scottish artists “owre the kailyard-wa.’” ² Bold echoes this argument at another moment in describing the less lofty Scottish verse of the 1920s as “a homemade product cultivated in the kailyard and handled by amateurs.” ³ George Blake’s 1951 study of the Kailyard school condemned the prose as a “mass of sludge,” told by a “small fry” caste of bard who strolled “through the heather with a claymore at his belt, or he lingered round the bonnie brier bush, telling sweet, amusing little stories of bucolic intrigue through the windows of the Presbyterian manse.” ⁴

The Kailyard’s mass audience forced those wanting to defend high cultural standards into an uncomfortable position because an impressive number of middle-class readers demonstrated more interest in the morally affirmative and conservative sensibilities of these national tales than in high art and aesthetic criteria. ⁵ Characterized by its simple versions of pastoral Scotland rather than serious historical representation, Kailyard fiction arranges its exotic scenes of caricatured backwards folk figures around interchangeable conventional tropes and themes of love, covenantry, and sentimentalized rural life to contribute to a mythic depiction of Scottish history. Its authors were journalists and Kirk ministers rather than trained artists and their stories appeared in Rev. Will Robertson Nicoll’s religious periodical the British Weekly (subtitled A Journal of Social and Christian Progress) and William Howie Wylie’s Christian Leader rather than in high culture literary journals. It was no secret that Kailyard fiction stood outside the walls of acclaimed literature, but this did not prevent its authors from enjoying prolific success. Ian Maclaren’s Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1896), for example, drew such a wide readership, including Queen Victoria and W. E. Gladstone, that by 1908 it had sold 256,000 copies in Great Britain and 485,000 in the U. S. A. ⁶ The British Weekly reported in 1894 that S. R. Crockett’s The Lilac Sunbonnet had sold 10,000 copies in the first day of publication and promised the quick printing of a second (“making 18,000”). ⁷ Kailyard novels continued to be bestsellers in Britain throughout the period of 1888 to 1901, and, for a six-year period from 1891 until 1897, Kailyard authors ranked in the top ten annually in the American best-seller lists. ⁸ Kailyard prose was indeed popular, but it also gained the reputation of representing the real Scotland—authentic literature peering into the heart of Scottish nation, culture, and life.

I am primarily concerned in this essay with the ideological work the Kailyard performs in constructing its Scottish Highland nation. I use Mary Poovey’s definition of ideological work which doubly emphasizes that narratives are the “work of ideology” within a system of representations that function in concert to bring meanings, like nation, to individuals. At the same time, representations like the Kailyard contribute to “the work of making...