United Islands?: The Languages of Resistance (Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution) ed. by Michael Brown, John Kirk, and Andrew Noble, and: Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press by Rhona Brown, and: The Correspondence of Samuel Thomson (1766–1816) ed. by Jennifer Orr (review)

Book Reviews Michael Brown, John Kirk, and Andrew Noble, eds. United Islands?: The Languages ofResistance (Poetry and Song in the Age ofRevolution). No. I. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Pp. 272. $99. Rhona Brown. Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. 280. $134.95. Jennifer Orr, ed. The Correspondence of Samuel Thomson (1766—1816). Dub­ lin: Four Courts Press, 2012. Pp. 242. $70. Over the last two decades there has been been a serious readjustment of “British” Romantic studies away from anglo-centrism towards a more archipelagic view of relations between England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. This “archipelagic turn,” if I may add another methodological twist to recent scholarly tergiversations, has been propelled by a growing aware­ ness about varieties of nationalism in our own time. Among the landmarks in this process are Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1998), Ina Ferris’s The Romantic National Tale and the Question ofIreland (2002), Ian Duncan’s Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2007), and Murray Pittock’s Scottish and Irish Romanti­ cism (2008); the list could go on. All these books are important contribu­ tions in different ways, but each of them has wrestled with the recognition that if the Romantic period saw the idea of “nation” emerging into a rec­ ognizable modern sense, that sense does not map easily onto the complica­ tions and irregularities of the cultural experience of the time. Pittock, for instance, is committed to the idea of Irish and Scottish traditions as distinct from an English Romanticism identified with literary London and its pro­ vincial others (most obviously in the Lake District), but he is also commit­ ted to a sense of irreducible relatedness in Irish and Scottish traditions. The term archipelagic, first drafted into use in Renaissance studies, usefully sig­ nals the interculturalism ofwhat otherwise might too readily be constituted as “national” traditions, acknowledging also that the very word “tradition” may too readily imply an originally evolving autonomous entity. It might be added, ofcourse, that the roles ofthe Irish, Scots, and Welsh, not to mention the “regional” English, for instance, in literary London warrant further study. Going to the “great wen” was not always an act of disaffiliation. It is instructive, for instance, how many Scots were involved SiR, 52 (Winter 2013) 611 612 BOOK REVIEWS in the London radical movement of the 1790s, as the historian Bob Harris has shown. They include Robert Watson (some-time secretary to Lord George Gordon), Robert Thomson (radical songwriter and brother to the eminently respectable George Thomson, editor of Burns), both of whom fled to France in the 1790s, and the founder of the London Corresponding Society itself, Thomas Hardy. None of these abandoned their Scottish in­ terests in order to concentrate on London or even global radicalism. Indeed after the LCS had been driven underground, Hardy became a major figure in the setting up of the William Wallace Society, while Watson, by this time styling himself the “Chevalier” Watson, brought the Stuart papers back to Britain from Rome. Hardy played a major role in helping Thom­ son and Watson set themselves up when they returned to London after the defeat of Napoleon, visiting Watson to see the Stuart papers, and helping Thomson with the application to the Literary Fund and with the publica­ tion of a sadly execrable poem on Wallace. A sense ofthe complexity of these literary relations between the four na­ tions characterizes each of the three volumes covered by this review. Rhona Brown’s excellent study of Robert Fergusson aims to rescue him from being seen simply as John the Baptist to the Christ of Robert Burns (to use a formulation of Robert Crawford’s). Previous studies have tended to discount Fergusson’s English poetry in favor of the presumed authentic­ ity of the Scottish vernacular poetry. Brown does valuable work in show­ ing the diversity of resources on which Fergusson drew for the volume he produced before his death at the early age of 24. Not only was Fergusson aware of a Scottish tradition in which he takes a place between Allan Ramsay and Burns, but his poetry also creatively engages...