"Hame Content": Globalization and a Scottish Poet of the Eighteenth Century

Edinburgh in the later eighteenth century had an international reputation as a center of polite learning and living. The poet Robert Fergusson (1750- 74) took a lively but not uncritical part in its cosmopolitan culture. He feared that the newly energized British and international communications that nourished this culture would deprive Scotland of its identity. Against this prospect, he formulated a philosophy and a poetics of local survival, and I hope to show that his response is not merely of literary-historical interest. Fergusson identified values that remain essential to the healthy diversity of life-forms (some of which he himself could not imagine would be threatened), and he continues to show by his example how poetry in particular may be used to give those values currency. Today's opponents of globalization are saying things that Fergusson had sketched in the 1770s; and his voice, never out of date, is more pertinent now than ever before.

Travel, Trade, and Food

In his short life Fergusson travelled little. ¹ Born and brought up mainly in Edinburgh, he spent his last two school years in Dundee and then for four years made the annual student journey to St Andrews University. Immediately after that he made a painfully unproductive visit as a poor relation to his uncle's farm in Aberdeenshire. Settled again in Edinburgh, he took a convivial jaunt to Dumfries: this he celebrated in a poem, for his infrequent and often laborious journeys were accordingly memorable. Another small jaunt, this time back into Fife, was celebrated in mock-heroics and portentously entitled "An Expedition to Fife and the Island of May, on board the Blessed Endeavour of Dunbar, Captain Roxburgh Commander" (2:179-82). As for far-off Berwick-on-Tweed, where one J.S., a writer to Edinburgh's Weekly Magazine, had offered him hospitality:

it wou'd be news indeed,
War I to ride to bonny Tweed,
Wha ne'er laid gamon o'er a steed         who never put leg
Beyont Lusterrick ²

Whether in experience or in imagination, then, Fergusson felt such distances in full.

Most of Fergusson's countrymen were living similarly circumscribed lives, but an important minority of them was moving about more ambitiously, as participants in European culture or in the growing international trade and the nascent British Empire that was the consequence of that trade. Fergusson's brother Hary had joined the navy, and Fergusson records in a brief verse that he himself might be forced to "try his fate at sea." ³ That did not happen, but his poetry shows that he felt the effects, on his country if not on himself, of international mobility. Its European variety appears, for instance, when the fashion-conscious "daft chiel" [silly fellow] of "Hame Content" drives off

like huntit de'il,         devil
And scarce tholes time to cool his wheel,         tolerates
Till he's Lord kens how far away,
At Italy, or Well o' Spaw,
Or to Montpelier's safter air.         softer

(p. 158)

Its further reaches appear in "Tea. A Poem" (written not in Scots but in neo-classical English, as are about half of Fergusson's surviving poems). Here the journeying is done for trade, to carry luxury goods "from China's coast to Britain's colder clime" (p. 175).

Even those Scots who were more-or-less stationary were being made increasingly aware of distant places. The idea of travelling comes to the "daft chiel," we are told, when he "reads, and takes advice": it is then that "The chaise is yokit [yoked] in a trice." It seemed, in fact, a time of globalization. The University of St Andrews was taking a conscious part in the development, not only by encouraging its students to become assimilated to English culture, but also by collecting and exhibiting trophies of the foreign travels and avocations of its alumni. ⁴ The locus classicus of...